That consciousness is real and not an illusion
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My BS, unprovable hypothesis: The Golden Age of Piracy was actually a successful Socialist movement, with Nassau being a disruptively successful enclave of Socialism in action. The pirates deeply threatened the budding power structures in the US (not conjecture) and the entrenched powers in Europe. While some powers, most notably royalty, were willing to use pirates as mercenaries (privateers), there was an excess of democracy and human concern (somewhat my conjecture) among the Nassau pirates. The Nassau pirates had pensions, a form of worker's comp, disability, democratic command structures at sea, and healthcare (such as it was given the era). According to the historical texts on the Nassau pirates, there were almost no written records, which strikes me as especially odd since they had so many long-running financial and governing processes.
Even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won't.
"Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most.
That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love... true love never dies.
You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn't matter if it's true or not.
You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in."
- Hub, Secondhand Lions (2003)
When people are left to enter deals and economic arrangements as they see fit, it produces the most overall wealth, both for those at the top and those at the bottom of the economic hierarchy.
You're right, but we don't care because wealth has diminishing marginal returns on utility.
Most of my moral convictions aren't provable because the most basic ideas are simply axioms. "You should be a good person" cannot be justified in a way that's non-circular, and defining "good" is also similarly arbitrary. The only true "evidence" is that people tend to agree on vague definitions in theory. Which is certainly a good thing, imo, but it's not actually provable that what we consider "good" is actually the correct way to act.
I have started creating a moral framework, though. I've been identifying and classifying particular behaviors and organizing them in a hierarchy. So far it's going pretty well. At least my arbitrariness can be well-defined!
I think it is easy enough to argue without making it circular. As for "good", I don't think an objective absolute and universal definition is necessary.
The argument would be to consider it an optimization problem, and the interesting part, what the fitness function is. If we want to maximise happiness and freedom, any pair of people is transient. If it matters that they be kind to you, it is the exact same reasoning for why you should be to kind to them. Kinda like the "do unto others", except less prone to a masochist going around hurting people.
If we want to maximise happiness and freedom
But that's what I'm saying, that choice is axiomatic. I think most people would agree, but it's a belief, not an unquestionable truth. You're choosing something to optimize and defining that to be good.
If it matters that they be kind to you, it is the exact same reasoning for why you should be to kind to them
Only if you believe that everyone fundamentally deserves the same treatment. It's easy to overlook an axiom like that because it seems so obvious, but it is something that we have chosen to believe.
But that's what I'm saying, that choice is axiomatic. I think most people would agree, but it's a belief, not an unquestionable truth. You're choosing something to optimize and defining that to be good.
I'm not really arguing against this tho (perhaps the choosing part, but I'll get to it). I'm saying that a goal post of "axiomaric universal good" isn't all that interesting, because, as you say, there is likely no such thing. The goal shouldn't therefore be to find the global maximum, but to have a heuristic that is "universal enough". That's what I tried to make a point of, in that the golden rule would, at face value, suggests that a masochistic should go around and inflict pain onto others.
It shouldn't be any particular person's understanding, but a collectively agreed understanding. Which is in a way how it works, as this understanding is a part of culture, and differs from one to the other. Some things considered polite in the US is rude in Scandinavia, and vice versa. But, regardless, there will be some fundamentals that are universal enough, and we can consider that the criteria for what to maximise.
That P != NP.
When we die, we're recycled. There's no Heaven, Hell, Rainbow Bridge, Valhalla .etc Because those are man-made constructs to give people a sense of belonging based on what you did in life. Someone talked to me about the Egg Theory and while I have a bit of skepticism towards it, I do understand a plausibility about it.
And if anything from the Egg Theory is true, then cool, I'd love nothing more than to be recycled and born into a life from the past to live it out again.
That I'd be a fool to strongly hold a belief without equally strong evidence.
Did this man just call himself a fool?
I'd argue we have lots of evidence that people who believe things strongly without evidence are dumb.
Everyones a fool and knows nothing :)
The Pizzagate conspiracy was created to cover up any media coverage of the police reports from the early 90s when Trump was hanging with Epstein and dumping 'used' underage girls at a pizza parlor the next morning.
Either greed or religion has killed the most people before their time. One of them has to go.
Can we get rid of both?
How about god complexes? Should those be on our radar?
That might be provable
I believe that life as we know it exists somewhere else in the universe .
Tied to this, I believe there is no intelligent life close enough to ever reach us physically (short of freezing themselves and traveling millions of years, but we really aren't worth that trip lol) I don't believe faster than light travel will ever exist.
I believe the opposite.
I think there’s so much evidence of intelligent alien life visiting us that it takes a massive act of denial and self-delusion to ignore it.
In fact, I think the idea that alien evidence is all faked is a massively unbelievable conspiracy theory. The alien hoax would require a level of secret conspiracy that puts chemtrails or CIA mind control conspiracy theories to shame.
The organization necessary to produce the constant stream of alien evidence would dwarf the Manhattan Project.
In the same respect the level of organization and silence required to hide such evidence is extraordinary. It's every government of every country that would have to keep what they know under wraps. The more people involved in a conspiracy the more likely it is for the silence to be broken. It's not that every bit of "evidence" is faked, it's that the majority of it that comes from a government source is misinterpreted from someone who wants it to be aliens as opposed to having an independent expert in whatever field study it.
As far as we can tell, other than people looking to sell books, all the "evidence" we have of visitations/technology has been disproven by either independent analysis of footage, or the eventual release of government documentation that shows it was an experiment "we" conducted. Those kinds of things are kept confidential for a certain amount of time in case they are connected to potential military research.
There is absolutely nothing from what we currently understand about physics that would allow for traveling the kinds of distances necessary. The vast majority of what is left to understand about how "physics" works is in relation to the types of energy/particles that don't interact with matter as we currently understand it so it couldn't carry anything "physical" with it, unless we're now talking about "dark matter" aliens, but if that were the case then we'd have no evidence of their existence because we can't observe that as it doesn't interact with the matter we have access to. A camera cant capture a "dark matter" substance.
I say all of this as someone who WANTS aliens to exist and be able to visit us. It's very upsetting to me to think it isn't possible lol
What "evidence"? Lmfao what the fuck are you talking about?
When I started working decades ago, we were taught how to use bent bits of fence wire to find underground pipes before digging
I literally found scores of pipes that way, and saw dozens of other people do it regularly. It was even taught at a local agricultural college as part of the horticulture course
Then someone told me it was a myth and doesn't work, so I set up a blind test with a hidden bucket of water and I utterly failed to find it
I simply cannot explain this
It's called Dowsing
Dowsing is a type of divination employed in attempts to locate ground water, buried metals or ores, gemstones, oil, claimed radiations (radiesthesia), gravesites, malign "earth vibrations" and many other objects and materials without the use of a scientific apparatus.
I believe that the reason why so many people are going crazy in America at least is because they are approaching the end of their life and they have been told the whole time they've been alive that they would be living through the end of times, and if it becomes true then their lives have not been wasted but if it is not true or if it doesn't happen until after they die then their lives have been wasted and it's driving them crazy.
"Christianity is a death cult," essentially. Why bother to make it better here when paradise is guaranteed?
That global democratic socialism can work. Currently the only states successful in implementing it are oil-rich nordic countries, and I want to believe it can work elsewhere but it'll be hard to prove.
I think the problem is that no system that gives equal weight to everyone's opinions can survive a population that does not have a majority of good opinions. And if the populace does agree on most things, then it doesn't matter much what system is being used. The best the system can do is incentivise certain behaviors.
No, Norway is social democracy.