Houston Rationalists August Meetup
- [Open in Google Maps] [Open in local app]
- 18 August 2019, 2:00 pm—5:00 pm
- Brasil, Brasil (cafe, Dunlavy Street, Houston, TX, USA
- Contact: houston-rationalists@googlegroups.com
Heya! Come hangout with ~rationalsphere folks (people interested in LW/SSC/EA/ similar things, etc.) in person, enjoy some good conversation, and have fun!
Please invite friends and others you think would be interested in attending, this is a social meetup where we enjoy discussing interesting topics we don’t often get to discuss IRL.
We are Houston Rationalists and we have social meetups on the third Sunday of each month (exception for holidays: we adjust our meetup day if the third Sunday is a holiday). Hope to see you there :)
Cheers,
Willa
Follow-up post for July meetup:
We made some musings on existence: this included discussing Aquinas’ conception of how to know we exist through knowing God exists, and then went into more materialistic and atheist metaphysics things and also we talked about a number of thinker’s thoughts on the topic; including Plato’s.
quantum mechanics uncertainty principle: https://www.gregegan.net/FOUNDATIONS/04/found04.html#s5;
the first color viewable in visible light spectrum was pink produced by some bacteria: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jul/09/scientists-discover-worlds-oldest-colour-bright-pink-sahara
We had some conversations about consciousness and its deterministic or lack there of qualities.
Marvin Minsky’s article “WHY PROGRAMMING IS A GOOD MEDIUM FOR EXPRESSING POORLY UNDERSTOOD AND SLOPPILYFORMULATED IDEAS”: https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Why programming is--.html
Mormon transhumanism: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/mormon-transhumanism-and-the-immortality-upgrade
block chain identity thing called keybase (https://keybase.io)
How to allow for deep and far reaching conversations in a social setting that often aren’t held elsewhere: see also https://boingboing.net/2017/05/04/the-sandwich-alignment-chart.html and intense discussions around categorizing things.
Discussed potential winter solstice celebration and bonfire thing we could do in Galveston, would be fun.
There were other things too, but these were the things I wrote down. Cheers, Willa
We’re here and have moved to the outside area.