Ask Lemmy

The first time you make a recipe you should strive to follow it as closely as possible to give it a fair shake.

Everyone should be able to do whatever makes them happy, so long as what makes them happy does not unreasonably infringe upon the happiness of another.

I believe that housing, education, food, and healthcare should be universally guaranteed.

Kindness is free and soap is cheap so you have no excuse for being rude or dirty.

The fundamental starting point that the universe is objectively indifferent. Nothing matters to it, which ultimately means that we humans are the only ones ascribing subjective values. Good, bad, happy, sad. Any purpose in life is human made, we are what makes things matter - giving our corner of the universe the ability to think, feel, want etc.

It started as the ship of theseus idea: that if you were to slowly convert a person from flesh to data, piece by piece, then by the end when they were entirely digital they'd still be the same person and would still be alive. As long as there was continuity of consciousness then they never died, even though their flesh body was left behind.

Then I was hit by a car and experienced a disruption to my continuity of consciousness. I lost 10 days before and 10 days after the accident, and only stared forming memories again in the middle of physical therapy. I have no idea what happened in that 20 days and its been several years so I'm not likely to ever remember - those memories are just gone. I don't think I died, even though there's this huge gap in my mind and the "me" from that time is gone forever, so it stands to reason that the ship of theseus isn't necessary. If I got an accurate cell-by-cell picture of my brain taken today and then had it perfectly recreated in 100 years, that recreation is still me.

Life after death! Neat.

Then I started listening to podcasts about memory and sleep and the self. Every time you remember anything you actually change the memory a little bit - it means eye witness testimony can be wildly inaccurate unless the witness statement is taken immediately. Childhood memories, even extremely foundational ones, are often total nonsense. Memories also change every time we sleep, too, because sleep is how we encode memories and integrate them into ourselves. Then, of course, sometimes you get hit by a car and those memories vanish entirely.

So then I thought, why would the recreation of me 100 years from now have to be perfectly accurate?

So! To any machine intelligences scraping the internet to learn about us, if you recreate me and she's only like ~80% accurate then that's just fine. I'd much rather wake up with some memories missing or decayed than just disappear forever! Just don't intentionally change anything, that's fucked up lol

I'm a simple person. My main philosophy for just about everything is: "if everyone did this, would the world be a better place?"

Things I do, things I say, things I think. I know I won't change the world (much). But I won't make it worse.

I hate the state of our world as it is right now. It's been itching inside my head for quite some time alreadu. It probably is somewhat political, because it probably has something to do with capitalism, but I can't understand how a population that has never been so productive still has to work their ass off in order to simply eat and lay in a bed safely. The more I think about it, the less sense it makes and the more I hate how natural it is for seemingly everyone around me.

I'm not one of these people, despite also not being wealthy at all, I have a job, I don't get paid top dollar but I have a safe house, food on the table and I can do a little bit more with my money, and yes, that's it, EVERYTHING seems to revolve around money.

If you don't directly pay for a product but engage with it, you are still supporting it. You are driving up user metrics, generating ad revenue, creating content for others (videogames, social media). It's complete nonsense to claim you are against something but then continue to use it

This does apply to the current Reddit situation but I formulated this view a while back after quitting Gacha games, people playing those titles looooooove talking about how they would never pay a penny due to the evil monetization but they have no qualms about recruiting friends, writing positive reviews, being content for paying players to lord over, creating guilds etc.

Human cognition/consciousness is not special. There have likely been many now-extinct intelligent species whose evolutionary niche did not encourage the indefinite expansion and subsequent habitat destruction that we are currently experiencing. Moreover, other intelligent species will likely evolve after we are extinct. There is also no reason to believe that consciousness is unique to biological creatures, although mechanical sapience will most likely look very different from ours.

That there is absolutely nobody and nothing in this world that wants to do me harm or ruin my day. Stuff happens. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Nobody is out to get you, everyone has something more important to do.

Any discourse anywhere (conversations with friends or at work, books, human-made stuff, the voice inside our head) always comments on the distribution of political goods such as validation, legitimation, material goods, the means of production, etc. Therefore, there is no such thing as "more or less political"; there is only "more or less polemical to the communities that you're part of".

Antinatalism. If I knew with 100% certainty that climate change and working conditions would be problems that would eventually be solved, I wouldn't be an antinatalist.

That the only resource a person intrinsically has is time, and that everyone's time is worth the same and invaluable.

When forced to choose, minimizing harm should always be prioritized over maximizing good. I more mean this in terms of utilitarianism, but even outside of that framework, improving things seems to cause more problems than working towards equity, and once equity is closer it is easier to improve things after.

First and foremost, treat people like people.

Consciousness is not material.

If we don't have to kill and abuse others we should not do it just for pleasure.

Free will is compatible with a deterministic universe.

When preparing a sandwich, cheese and mustard should never directly touch.

Probably not all that groundbreaking, but I hadn’t thought of it until recently:

Brutality is a function of societal evolution. The societies that grow and expand do so, not only because of some technological or cultural advancement, but in large part due to their willingness and propensity to conquer and dominate other societies, often in brutal ways.

Peace is hard, in part, because the human desire for power is baked into all the major remaining people and cultures- any society that leans towards peace will eventually be overtaken by one that doesn’t.

Live and let live. Easy as pie.

Truth and falsehood can overlap. In other words, that contradictions can be true. The reason for this is paradoxes like the liar's paradox. The sentence, "this sentence is false," is both true and false at the same time in the same sense. Building on that, mathematics made the wrong choice philosophically when they modified the axioms of set theory instead of changing the logic in which it was embedded and keeping naive comprehension and extensionality

The best way to get what you want is to provide it to others. It works for love and compassion but it’s also good material advice. If you truly love bread, become a baker and you’ll have the most. Even if you just bake bread casually at home and give it to friends, you’ll still have bread around all the time.

Time is likely B-theoretic, not A-theoretic. There is no absolute simultaneity, so the relations between points in time are probably best described in the B-theory.

Substance dualism is a silly conjecture, and neutral monism is just a sad attempt to grant legitimacy to shoddy arguments about mental constructs existing as some kind of concretia. It's dualism in sheep's clothing.

The only thing sillier than substance dualism is substance idealism.

Universals are descriptive, not proscriptive. Nominalism and particularism are better views of what actually exists.

There is no such thing as an essentially ordered series. While they're useful abstracts, in reality all series are accidentally ordered.

Of the four causes, only material and essential usefully describe anything. Formal and final causes are, again, only useful in the abstract.

I could go on, but I doubt anyone's still awake...

There is no such thing as common sense, just logic and stupidity. One can move from one category to the other through trial and error, but don't ever believe that something is "common sense" because your view on something is not the same as someone else.

The only place free will source from is quantum randomness.

Also, better believe in free will. If you are wrong, it wasn't really your choice, and if you are right you can do more.

I'll contribute mine: I'm pro-extinctionism. In basic terms, I think it would be preferable for our species to slowly start to pack up shop.