What sort of professional do you see if you want to do some minor self-help thing like improve social skills?
BlindIdiotPoster
One thing that bothers me about this community is that we all clearly have political views and regularly express them, but for some reason explicit discussion and debate is discouraged. The end result here is that lots of people casually assert extremely controversial opinions as fact and people are expected to approve via silence.
I would accept the offer even if I knew for sure that I would be the one to die, mostly because the alternative seems to be living in a nightmare world.
No.
Evidence would be the existence of Dementors, which are personifications of death and may or may not be semi-sentient.
My intuition was that since a hypothetical immortal soul doesn’t pass on the owner’s genes and therefore doesn’t contribute to genetic fitness, it should have little if any direct influence on evolutionary incentives.
It’s true that an animal that somehow evolved a soul would look drastically different neurologically from a human, but we know empirically that wizards are mostly the same as muggles psychologically/neurologically, so it seems this doesn’t happen to be the case. By the way, I agree with Draco’s hypothesis that if souls do exist, muggles probably don’t have them, since they don’t seem to have gotten any other benefits from the magic patch.
I don’t consider myself a particularly competent practitioner of counterfactual evopsych, so if you do, and still disagree, I suppose I’ll have to update my beliefs.
Even if souls exist and everyone knows this, evolution would probably still select for humans who feel grief after their loved ones die.
I used to think like this, but recently I’ve updated into seeing everything as potential foreshadowing.
Be aware you’re playing a zero-sum game at best here.
I find it interesting that you think there is no reason to believe that a financial incentive would change your behavior.
I think It’s a bad thing to the extent that it could lead to opinions propagating without debate.
In the wider world, even things like atheism are “extremely controversial,” but I don’t think we need to make dramatic shows of uncertainty and humility every time someone brings it up; most all of us here are atheists and we need to move on and discuss the more difficult questions. What I worry about is that a community norm of being vocal about our opinions but not discussing them rationally or even at all most of the time then we may wind up deciding what to think via memetic exposure and perhaps evaporative cooling instead of rationality. This sort of effect would also be a danger if we had a norm of being verbally abusive to anyone with an unpopular opinion, of course.
Note that I can’t offer evidence that this is a real risk or a phenomenon that actually happens in online communities, but it worries me.
That would be my answer if we were talking about, say, a billion cushions. With 3^^^3, most of them aren’t even in your future light cone, so they might as well not even exist.
What I mean by “immortal soul” in this case is just the Source of Magic backing up the brain state of wizards when they die. If the soul were capable of cognitive function independently of the brain then of course you’ and Xachariah would be right.
Harry has just promised to tear apart the very stars to bring back Hermione. I seriously doubt he would give up an important, possibly necessary resource just because the alternative was lying.
In GoF they had to set up an apparition-is-allowed-zone at the end of the maze in order for the portkey to work, which is why Crouch had to wait until Harry had won the cup instead of just turning a piece of silverware into a portkey or something.
I mildly disapprove of posts with no purpose other than to state the posters unqualified opinion. Public yea/nea voting is imo not needed or desirable, especially on a forum with a karma system.
Richard Kennaway’s post below yours is just as bad for exactly the same reason, of course.
- 8 Aug 2013 11:58 UTC; -2 points) 's comment on Open thread, July 29-August 4, 2013 by (
Honestly so would I.
I would much rather have an indefinitely long Fun life than sit with frank in a white room for a few days until we both starve to death. I would be absolutely horrified if frank chose to reject the offer in my place, so I don’t really consider this preference selfish.
The problem with your “white room” scenario is that one human can’t actually have Large amounts of utility. The value of the 3^^^3th seat cushion is actually, truly zero.
That’s how the conversation goes if the Soul Evangelist is trying to convert non believer into a believer. All she has to do is point out the existence of ghosts, the veil in the departments of mysteries, or maybe the legends of the resurrection stone. Most people would take this as sufficient evidence.
In the proposed scenario, she is faced with the much more difficult task of converting a believer-in-belief.
Does anyone here think a Phoenix Wright style game could be useful as a medium for Rationalist fiction?