I also had that same experience on the higher levels of Rock Band. I am not talented with any real-life musical instruments, but you say you feel that with guitar; for you personally, is that an episodic thing, or does that consistently happen when playing serious guitar? Is that something that most musicians know about, because it was exquisitely bizarre—is that the secret allure of musicians? Or does one build up a tolerance that drives one toward excellence in the hopes of catching the “high of accomplishment”?
MaoShan
Karma: 422
What is it that makes consciousness, or the thing that it points to (if such a thing is not ephemeral), important? You already said that knowing the exact quantities negates the need for categorization.
Well, now it sounds like you found a useful definition of life; at what point on this spectrum, then, would you consider something conscious? Since it’s processes you are looking for, there is probably a process that, without which, you could clearly classify as un-conscious.
It seems to me, though, that there are quite a few axes on which it would be hard to disturb a star’s equilibrium. That still keeps it included in your definition. Also, since tungsten is not disruptive to the star’s homeostasis, it has no reason to expel it. I appreciate your rational answers, because I’m actually helping you steel-man your theory, it only looks like I’m being a dork.
I agree with your correlation, but I think your definition would make stars and black holes apex predators.
Which is basically the same phrase, but without spaces between words.
You’re trying to ad-hom me as a fuzzy-minded irratiolanist. Please don’t.
No need, you’re doing a fine job of that all by yourself.
I take it that you’re nitpicking my grammar because you disagree with my views.
As for what topic I am talking about, it is this: In the most practical sense, what you did yesterday has already happened. What will you do five minutes from now? Let’s call it Z.. Yes, as a human agent the body and brain running the program you call yourself is the one who appears to make those decisions five minutes from now, but six minutes from now Z has already happened. In this practical universe there is only one Z, and you can imagine all you like that Z could have been otherwise, but six minutes from now, IT WASN’T OTHERWISE. There may be queeftillions of other universes where a probability bubble in one of your neurons flipped a different way, but those make absolutely no practical difference in your own life. You’re not enslaved to physics, you still made the decisions you made, you’re still accountable according to all historical models of accountability (except for some obscure example you’re about to look up on Wikipedia just to prove me wrong), and you still have no way of knowing the exact outcomes of your decisions, so you’ve got to do the best you can on limited resources, just like the rest of us. “Free Will” is just a place-holder until we can replace that concept with “actual understanding”, and I’m okay with that. I understand that the concept of free-will gives you comfort and meaning in your life, but “I have no need of that hypothesis.”
I will answer your question, but I do not understand your last statement; it looks like you retyped it several times and left all the old parts in.
I meant that with a sufficiently detailed understanding of physics, it would be meaningless to even posit the existence of (strong) free will. By meaningless here I mean a pointless waste of one’s time. I was willing to clarify, but deep down I suspect that you already knew that.
Now that you mention it, a fable, by definition, requires bullshit.
Thank you!
and then it’s obvious that the ass can be “stuck.”
...seriously?
I think you have a good pattern going here when you classify things as “things you’d say to a...” Maybe, outside of the ritual itself, people could volunteer to be one of those positions for others without those services. Like, the Moombah would be the guy that listens to the things you’d say to a priest, without being a priest. He would listen under an oath of secrecy, to anyone who wanted to confess something. The High Glombix would listen to all the things you’d say to a therapist, without being a therapist, again under secrecy. The Vemerev would listen to all the things you’re afraid to tell your friends about yourself, without judging you. It would be an accepted support group without relying on the traditional avenues, and it would also serve the purpose of getting you used to evaluating yourself and to verbally admitting your problems.
It was a property dispute, not a measurement of righteousness. The story served to illustrate Solomon’s wisdom; spiritual judgment of the women was not an issue. As for my opinion, I see both of them as stupid, and only evil to the degree that stupidity influences evil.
In that case the question is less interesting, since it’s just a matter of how well you can think yourself into the hypothetical in which you have to choose between, say, increasing your child’s odds of surviving by 1% and the cost of, say, increasing your guilt-if-the-child-does-die by 200%.
I guess, but in real life I don’t sit down with a calculator to figure that out; I’d settle for some definitive research.
Your second-order desires are fixed by your desires as a whole, trivially. But they aren’t fixed by your first-order desires. So it makes sense for me to ask whether you harbor a second-order desire to change your first-order desires in this case, or whether you are reflectively satisfied with your first-order desires.
[all that quote], trivially. What I am saying is that even my “own” desires and the goals that I think are right are only what they are because of my biology and upbringing. If I seek to “debug” myself, it’s still only according to a value system that is adapted to perpetuate our DNA. So to answer truthfully, I am NOT satisfied with my first-order desires, in fact I am not satisfied with being trapped in a human body, from which the first-order desires are spawned.
Then I still blame the mother in the story for not building one of those!
That is pretty neat, I wholeheartedly endorse using those, just in case. In the unlikely event that I produce more biological offspring, I will make use of that knowledge.
My desires concerning what my desires should be are also determined by my desires, so your question is not valid, it’s a recursive loop. You are first assuming that I care about anything at all, secondly assuming that I experience guilt at all, and thirdly that I would care about my children. As it turns out, you are correct on all three assumptions, just keep in mind that those are not always givens among humans.
What I was saying was that in the two situations (my child dies due to SIDS), and (my child dies due to me rolling over onto him), in the first situation not only could I trick myself into believing it wasn’t my fault, it’s also completely possible that it really wasn’t my fault, and that it had some other cause; in the second situation, there’s really no question, and a very concrete way to prevent it.
To answer your unasked question, I still do not alieve that keeping my child a safe distance away while sleeping but showing love and care at all other times increases her chance of SIDS. If I was to be shown conclusive research of cause and effect between them, I would reverse my current opinion, mos’ def.
I expected that. My own opinion is that if it is necessary for some reason, it’s a good idea, but personally I’d rather be possibly, indirectly, and one instance of a poorly understood syndrome responsible for my baby’s death than actually being the one that crushed him.
It seems that sleeping separately very drastically decreases your chances of personally killing your baby in your sleep.
No, as you can see by the amount of objections, you are not too cynical. It’s closer to a sort of Proto-Bayes, stories like this show that that kind of thinking can turn out wise solutions; Bayesian thinking as it is understood now is more refined.
I was kind of going off on a speculative tangent on that last sentence. I was wondering if that feeling was somehow reward-system related, and would fuel a musician’s drive to excel. Like they try to play better and better to achieve that euphoria which only comes on when they do better than they ever have, with diminishing (dopamine?) returns, but, as a side-effect, increasing their practical talent to ever higher levels. So the musical prodigy over time becomes motivated more by the tangible rewards (fame, increased income), which will never compare to the feelings that made him choose that path in the first place. It would apply to many careers if it was a valid theory.