Japan’s ‘killing stone’ splits in two
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Hard to tell which one is more likely considering recent global events.
Like a time when there was no crazy ruler.
A friend of mine said at the end of 2020 that his prediction was that "2020 will be the best year of the decade" and it's scary watching that cynicism come true.
edit - book is the fouth turning, pretty accurate given it was written in 1997:
https://www.businessinsider.com/protests-coronavirus-crisis-...
I am a bit worried that we are loosing quickly the last people remembering the atrocities of ww1+2.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saeculum
> A saeculum is a length of time roughly equal to the potential lifetime of a person or, equivalently, the complete renewal of a human population.[1] Originally it meant the time from the moment that something happened (for example the founding of a city) until the point in time that all people who had lived at the first moment had died. At that point a new saeculum would start. According to legend, the gods had allotted a certain number of saecula to every people or civilization; the Etruscans, for example, had been given ten saecula.[2
If books and newspapers made a as difference when they were new, I don’t know. But now I want to know.
I wish that was just a pithy remark - link rot is really, and it's rapid. Add to that that modern paper is deteriorating at a rapid pace, and the memory of humankind is starting to look shaky.
2021 imo was worse due to pandemic being worse than 2020(delta), and now you have shelves bare, ships backed up off the coast of California. Inflation going very high, housing skyrocketing.
2022 was omicron wave(worse than delta) inflation getting worse than 2021, now war with Russia and gas spiking(prices at pump at levels never seen before)
In 2021, that question was answered with a pretty decisive 'No'.
Between America not turning into a president-for-life sort of country, 8 billion doses of the 'rona vaccine getting administered around the world, and the second variant of note turning out to be a lot less dangerous than the first, there were quite a few metrics by which the trend of things got better.
2022 is off to a rough start, but there's still hope that it won't come to an early end, courtesy of a joint Topol-Minuteman peacekeeping exercise.
Have you ever read Small Gods by Terry Pratchett? Great book. Your comment reminded me of it because it includes the gods of that world dicing over a war of their followers
“Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.”
“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.” - Good Omens by Terry Pratchett
2016-2019 were all better than 2020.
I mean I agree we’re doomed but what the H does this rock have to do with it!
My favorite example is the 2016 presidential election. While there are many who would like to believe that Trump won due to Russian interference, I actually believe he won due to meme magic. A bunch of social misfits got together, sharing frog memes, while listening to Shadilay (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadilay), and memed their candidate into office.
I just think that objective, material reality is less objective and less material than I thought all along.
Russia employed a bunch of trolls, who helped create and amplify the memes.
I think reality is a lot more complicated and humans just look for the simplest possible explanation, like “Russia did it!” Or “Meme’s did it!” Or “Racists did it!” When it was all of them and many other reasons. See Dan Olson’s “In Search of a Flat Earth” video for a genuinely brilliant breakdown of this idea and how it relates to Flat Earthere and other nonsense.
The thing about meme magic though is that there's so many spooky "synchronicities" woven throughout that I can't help but take it seriously.
Richard Dawkins mentioned something alike this in his "viruses of the mind" essay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viruses_of_the_Mind but his discourse was limited to denigrating the religious and seemed to miss out on the bigger picture, that being, that if it were possible to ingrain a meme onto people's minds that one day, someone would use it as an instrument of mental war.
I've read many anecdotes of people going off the deep end with political stuff over the last 6 years or so, people who refuse have a reasonable conversation about or seem to be unable to explain their convictions that bad thing was actually good thing even when shown evidence to the contrary.
How did we go from relatively peaceful in the 90's to a maelstrom of insanity in less than 30 years?
If it were one person or a certain group of people, it might make sense, but this memetic virus seems to have spread worldwide, infecting almost everyone, and since our frame of reference is also infected we can't see that we're infected with it.
Is there a cure? I wouldn't know. Is there a defense against it? I don't know? Does it actually exist or is it a convenient cover story that I can blame all the woes of the world on? Once again, I don't know.
I really don't know if this is true, but I suspect that if you brought a group of average people from 2000, 1990, 1980, & 1970, I feel like they would all agree that the world has gone mad and that there must be some reason for it.
It depends on your values for most of the words in this statement. For example, sure things ebb and flow, but I don't think we can say things were relatively peaceful in the 90s. So, for most values, the answer is likely that things haven't changed as much as you think; you're just more aware of everything now. You can life by the adage, "ignorance is bliss", or live a less blissful life aware of everything going on, or even try to take advantage of those who are living blissfully.
America was not politically unstable in the 90's. It may have been rocky, but not unstable. Saying it was just as bad then as it is now is false.
Only a fringe element would have cheered John Hinckley Jr's attempt to assassinate Reagan in 1981, but today an attempt whether successful or not on either the Democratic or Republican front runners would get a resounding cheer from a not-insignificant section of the population.
I would hazard to say that, under the right circumstances, a single bullet could spark an internal American Conflict between the groups of people who can best be identified not by what they stand for but by what they stand against.
Trying to say that the tensions the country are facing today are equal to the tensions of the past glosses over the amplification of the screaming masses thanks to technology, the financial whirlwind created by the internet, where unimaginable fortunes can be raised and erased faster than you can blink, the lancing of the pus-filled boil of human misery that education and awareness brings, the struggle of the lowest-paid and lowest earning members of society to simply survive when the financial ladder of arbitrage no longer reaches their grasp.
Many of these things existed in some proto form in the 90's, yes, but they have grown since then and, like an abused child who becomes a sulking and angry teenager, may reach the point where they start to swing back. You can't treat the teenager like you treated the child, you're far more likely to get a black eye.
The 90's laid the groundwork for our current instability. Newt Gingrich showed that fiery and aggressive politics could win in an era of CSPAN and 24-hour news.
>Only a fringe element would have cheered John Hinckley Jr's attempt to assassinate Reagan in 1981, but today an attempt whether successful or not on either the Democratic or Republican front runners would get a resounding cheer from a not-insignificant section of the population.
I don't remember anyone noteworthy celebrating, even as a joke, the congressman shot during a baseball game in Washington. People may fantasize and joke about something happening, but stay solemn and respectful when that specific turd hits the fan.
>amplification of the screaming masses thanks to technology
The masses never needed amplification. They had large and loud crowds. Technology amplifies the screaming meagers, who sound like masses but still only have one vote each.
I don't know about a cure, but a likely defense is the same damn thing as slows the spread of an actual virus - slow down the spread of information. Social media that promotes viral content is to a memetic virus what globalization, international travel, and high-density cities are to an actual virus.
If it works in meatspace then it should be somewhat effective in the mental realm, right?
I would speculate some combination of these (plus some things I'm missing):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-counterfactual/
https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/heuristics
https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2022/02/is-reality...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
> I've read many anecdotes of people going off the deep end with political stuff over the last 6 years or so, people who refuse have a reasonable conversation about or seem to be unable to explain their convictions that bad thing was actually good thing even when shown evidence to the contrary.
And I've interacted with hundreds and observed tens/hundreds of thousands of "right thinking" people who suffer from the same inability to substantiate their "correct" beliefs, or the ability to address legitimate criticisms of their claims/logic without resorting to rhetorical wildcards like "that's pedantic".
> Is there a cure? I wouldn't know. Is there a defense against it? I don't know? Does it actually exist or is it a convenient cover story that I can blame all the woes of the world on? Once again, I don't know.
My intuition is that you just demonstrated a substantial portion of the cure: the ability to implement Unknown() - it is an amazingly rare ability these days. If you don't believe me, read internet discussions for one week deliberately looking for instances of people noting uncertainty in their beliefs, and the opposite: instances of people claiming to have knowledge of things that are unknowable (such as the contents of other people's minds, the future state of reality, etc), knowing the "correct" answer to subjective questions, and various other highly irrational behaviors that are typically excused as "you know what I meant" or "that's just people being people".
As long as we all agree that it's a bunch of literal trolls. The kind who live below bridges.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
I especially like the title of the section, "Russian Propaganda Is Not Committed to Consistency".
Not to mention running a terrible campaign that spent all of its time hanging out with megadonors instead of actually visiting the swing states that decide elections...
Trump nearly beat Biden in 2020, and he would have beaten any other Democrat candidate that year, which overwhelmingly points to it not being Russian interference as a major influence. Everyone knew what Trump was by the 2020 election and he still attracted more votes than Barack Obama got in either election (and Obama was a widely popular President).
I made a habit of trying to count broken campaign promises starting in the Clinton years, and it is pretty much universal that presidents over-promise during the campaign and do the opposite once they get into office. I haven't really kept accurate numbers, but it certainly wasn't unique to trump by any means.
Saying everyone breaks some campaign promises is like saying that everyone lies - there is an enormous range.
But what makes me less likely to trust Trump's claims and promises is his consistent denial of claims he made previously that he no longer wishes to make. It's hard to trust someone when they change positions and deny that they had a different positon. Gives very We were always at war with Eastasia vibes.
That assertion is unlikely to be meaningful, IME. Specific politicians are more and less credible in specific ways. To say 'all are not credible' is no more true or meaningful than saying 'all are credible'. Off the top of my head: All food contains water, but that tells us almost nothing about any food.
But the other half of the reason was that I kind of figured Hilary had it in the bag. She was simply better resourced in terms of money and in terms of the groups and individuals who were supporting her. How could she not win? Especially against Trump? Sure, she made some mistakes along the way, but Trump also mocked a disabled reporter during one of his campaign appearances. One could argue that he made just as many mistakes, if not more.
I don't really think Trump had any unfair advantages one could consider substantial (if anything he had a lot of disadvantages) nor do I believe that Hilary made any mistakes that were really damaging to her campaign. Its nuts, but the most convincing explanation I can think of is the weirdest and most esoteric one.
Just can't ignore those spooky synchronicities.
That he was a showman helped the memes. But I encourage you to consider mundane things like maybe people were tired of status quo globalism and willing to take a bitter pill to try and fix it.
I am reminded of a comedian's favorite response to this statement.
> Not all trump supporters are racist, but ALL racists are trump supporters.
I think a lot of people were just done with the current political system which had been failing them for generations and wanted an outsider to come in and shake (if not break) up the system. Sanders gained a huge following attracting massive crowds and passionate supporters for the same reason. People wanted actual change but the DNC wasn't having it so they did everything they could to undermine sanders before the primary. Republicans threw everyone they could think of into the race.
Trump wasn't a politician, didn't act like one, and no one in power wanted him to be elected. His election meant that I lost a lot of faith in Americans, but I gained a lot of faith in our electoral system. People can vote in someone even when the most powerful don't want them to.
Hell we even learned from leaked documents her campaign instructed the major networks to focus more on Trump as they thought he would be the easiest candidate for her to beat.
Likewise, her campaign had some phenomenal missteps, like never visiting a fairly rural swing state because they just assumed (wrongly) that she would win, while wining and dining megadonors in states that would never have voted for Trump like California.
Her and president Obama's obvious disdain for rural people (as evidenced by the "bitter clingers" and "basket of deplorables" quips among other incidents) made democratic establishment politicians rather disliked.
Personally, I think there are quite a few democrats who could have beaten Trump in 2016.
There's at least one book on this theory, such as Gary Lachman's "Dark Star Rising":
https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Star-Rising-Magick-Power/dp/0143...
I'd even go as far as the say that stochastic and emergent behavior is what forms our reality, not determinism. And that consciousness itself is the emergent behavior of the chaos working at the lowest levels of reality. At the end of the day, emotion and love and magic and all of that woo woo stuff is at least as real as atoms.
But we don't have good language today to talk about the physics of our own personal realities. The things that are true in my life may not be true in yours, and vice versa. We just assume that the true reality is the one we all agree with, but I have not found that to be the case.
So we talk past one another about, I don't know, critical race theory or whatever the flavor of the week is. When it's really about, how is my reality impacted as I learn the truths of your reality and our shared reality? If I'm wrong because I don't know something, does that mean that my reality is wrong? What happens if I make decisions over years of my life based on incorrect information? What does correct mean if it diminishes my quality of life? Can I be correct without hurting anyone else?
Some of these questions in the end aren't answerable. In my own reality, I struggle with having to eat meat because that's what my body was designed to do. I carved a rotisserie chicken last night, divided the breast into portions and consumed it. There was almost no separation between the chicken's life and my own. How do we solve something like war when an awful lot of people haven't even stopped to think about the violence their own survival requires?
I know this might go a bit off topic. I used to be a hardcore-non-spiritual until the recent few years of scratching the surface of the possibility of there might more more to reality than we see.
I'd love to hear any of your experiences that led you to turn to metaphysics, if it's appropriate to share of course.
I also sometimes experience phenomenon which can't be eliminated away with physics, or weird coincidences that can't be explained with confirmation bias or selective attention, and trying to pinpoint a pattern, so anything that you'd think worth sharing in that direction would help.
Even with the knowledge of our brains are subconsciously processing incoming information from everywhere and considering the possible bias by the fact that I'm seeking for something and want to believe, I still find many of the synchronicities with no possible scientific/statistically remotely plausible explanation.
I won't call it "quantum" or any buzzword. I don't call it anything. I'm still skeptic and I just see some patterns emerging and believe there's something beyond what we have discovered about life and consciousness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
Basically, science can only puts bounds on this stuff, it can't predict the outcomes of stochastic/emergent processes. Which is where I believe free will resides.
Which might sound like hand-waving, except that it's fundamental:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_indeterminacy
People have tried to explain away stuff like quantum entanglement and failed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory
Basically it comes down to: either the quantum decision was made before the experiment started and stored in hidden variables, or there's a nonlocal connection over a 4th space dimension which we don't understand, or the quantum way of talking about these things is the only description that works. Which unfortunately (fortunately?) seems to be the case. Maybe someone who groks this can explain it with better words. My gut feeling is that this is the physical manifestation of incompleteness:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theor...
Anyway, I'm starting to believe that macro-scale effects like social interactions follow the same rules as quantum mechanics. Probably what we'll find is that it's waves and energy all the way down. Like if every person is an antenna, and our interactions play off one another in a vast multidimensional space we aren't aware of, like ripples on a pond. I suspect that this is what's going on inside atoms, and a real-world effect of this is that quantum computers will be limited by noise, and building a simulation of the Hamiltonian and running it would give the same result as flipping coins a bazillion times. This might be yet another hidden variables interpretation though so I'm almost certainly wrong. Probably.
In my own life, I mostly journal any synchronicities, which tend to happen about every 5 days for me, then weeks or months of nothing. I have about 50 written down, but feel that I've only caught maybe 10% of them.
In the last entry, I wore a bowtie to an event to try getting outside my comfort zone, then we came home and the TV was showing the scene where he makes the guy with the goldfish and bowtie leave the office in Wolf of Wall Street. Now what are the odds of that, since I've never worn a bowtie before and may never again?
I've had more intense happenings like that, but unfortunately a lot of them are negative around tragedies so I don't want to get anyone down. Mostly bad feelings before bad things happen. I think that has a lot to do with my disposition, so I've started watching more for angel numbers, and more love-based synchronicities, which seems to help. I believe that our sensitivity to the quantum chaos foam or whatever it is gets more attuned the more we tune out, dissociate, meditate, etc and turn the volume down on our egos. So anyone can do this stuff at any time, it's just that western culture doesn't really have a place for it yet.
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/quantum-spookiness/
No amount of science can predict when an atom will decay. Just like no amount of capitalism can guarantee that everyone is safe and has a full belly.
You seem to decide what to notice in an ad-hoc way which means you'll be heavily influenced by what you want to notice. If you had made a hypothesis after wearing a bowtie, that you would see a bowtie wearing person on TV when coming home, then you would also have noticed the times when there was no synchronicity and could isolate your personal sensitivity to it from its actual occurrence. As it is, I don't think you can make any conclusions about nature from that record and the 5-day cycle might be nothing more than your fluctuating interest in finding them.
I have synchronicities exactly as you have described in the same temporal pattern: happening in an extremely/unbelievable frequency within a short period like days or a few weeks, then complete silence for a few weeks or months. I've been observing this very pattern for years and the pattern is super clear for me. Yet, I have no idea why it's happening. Is it always the way it is and I just sometimes switch my focus, or is it really something that happens from time to time regardless of my focus, I honestly have no idea. But the pattern is there.
I, also, keep a journal of my synchronicities. It's almost four years now and whenever I open, read a few and remember it it gives me goosebumps and a feeling that I can best describe as "being connected to the universe and knowing there's more to it". It feels like "something" is trying to show me something.
The only data I have worth sharing is two things:
- Those weird coincidences generally happen when I need them: like, being mentally a bit off from my core and needing an "anchor feeling" to return to my presence and remember that "there's more to it".
- I have no idea why and this is definitely not a recommendation for a diet, but, they tend to increase when I intake too much sugar. Yeah, I know it sounds weird and I definitely know sugar is super-unhealthy, but this correlation is worth mentioning. Especially if I'm light on sugar but consume too much sugary food/desserts etc in a short "burst" period of days, I tend to have these synchronicities' "period" more. Again, this is NOT healthy as it involves eating sugar but the pattern is there.
Also your antenna analogy is very similar to what I had in mind for YEARS: maybe we're pure consciousness (or whatever the correct word might be) and not limited to three dimensions. Yet, we are "picked up" with bodies in the right state (with the chemistry and nervous system) acting as an "antenna that is tuned to our consciousness" and our brain waves like theta/delta etc. states might be the different "tunings" for "resonating in correct frequencies that match/react with consciousness". I've used all the words in quotation marks because they don't necessarily need to be actual "frequencies" or "resonance". They might be, or they might not be, but regardless of what their true nature is the analogy applies. Maybe they are somthing fundamental as vibration and electromagnetic waves but just simply isn't discovered yet, perhaps because we've been looking things the wrong way (at least in this connect) for a long time especially in western culture.
I know many people who read this would just think that I'm delusional and I totally get it: if I haven't experienced all of these through all the years as a skeptic who tries to dismiss it with confirmation bias and selective attention, I'd definitely call someone saying what I've been saying, a delusional, maybe even paranoid or someone with serious mental disorders. But I equally see the western culture totally dismissing anything that can't be explained with current science. I'm pretty much sure that we'll learn a lot about the eastern culture, shamanism, all the mystics, NDEs, and other similar metaphysical phenomenon but until we get there I think we should be open to some ideas that we culturally deem "impossible".
I don't give any special name or say that this phenomenon, but it acts in "weird ways" and science should definitely focus more on these instead of dismissing as BS.
If we're at the point in physics where string theory is the answer to "what are atoms?", it doesn't seem that woo-woo to ascribe some kind of reality to consciousness and the other abstracts that come with it. Unfortunately, as with string theory, there doesn't appear to be any empirical proof.
With respect to atoms -- the standard of 'realness' science seem to use is whether we can make reliable predictions about the behavior of a thing, and atoms seem to have put quite a few points up on the scoreboard compared to the woo-woo stuff. Now, if a real philosopher were here they'd probably point out that all of science suffers from the 'problem of induction' and that gathering a preponderance of evidence doesn't really prove anything, but c'mon we're mostly engineers at best here. Our models aren't wrong, they are just limited to a subset of the entire universe of possible phenomena (the ones people will pay to exploit, obviously).
We live in South Park episode now.
The winner in 2016 pitched themselves as an “outsider” for the masses, and sure was propelled by memes which are non-traditional. Even if you disagree with the winner, sometimes excuses like blaming Russia are just lies told to feel better.
Colloquially known as '/pol/'.
It explicitly called out GP's misunderstanding: "The Committee found that paid advertisements were not key to the IRA's activity, and moreover, are not alone an accurate measure of the IRA's operational scope, scale, or objectives, despite this aspect of social media being a focus of early press reporting and public awareness."
Measured against other political scandals, the fact that she did unclassified email correspondence (as all email correspondence in the State Department is) on her own email server was minor enough to not warrant charges as Comey's investigation concluded. https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/17/politics/state-department-ema...
I mean, rationally, it's hard to take it seriously. So, what, you mean to tell me that the planets, which are an unfathomable distance away from us, somehow impact human personality and how we behave? Doesn't exactly help things that the stars over our head are not the same stars as the one's over the heads of the ancient Babylonians.
And yet, once I took the time to actually look at my full star chart, I found that it described who I am to uncanny levels of accuracy.
Rationally, probably just a coincidence that my personality actually happens to align to what my personality "should" be, astrologically speaking. My alternative theory is that when enough people believe in something, that something becomes, well, "real-ish". So even if astrology is a bunch of made-up nonsense, it becomes real-enough simply because a lot of people believe in astrology.
Because the elections will always be close, they are extremely sensitive to relatively small effects. Something that moves the needle by 1% or 0.5% one way or the other can decide the election.
I think the 4ch-spawned memewar was one of those factors, though I also think foreign interference played a role as well.
IMO, those undecided voters in the middle are probably the least, uh, savvy as well. The type most easily swayed by memes, clickbait, etc.
Elections are often determined by how successful the get-out-the-vote campaigns are, to get the base to show up and vote. It's both much easier, and much more profitable to bring a lazy member of your base to the polls, than to badger someone who doesn't care much either into voting for you.
This makes the “swingable middle” rather large, and they’re not all rubes.
Campaigns seem to be iterating on scalable/personalizable social strategy. Obama figured it out better than Romney, Trump (maybe disturbingly) better than anyone before.
Prediction: some future candidate will go “next level” and piss everyone off even more, but it’ll work and they’ll be elected.
While this is true, the evidence seems to be that most independents actually have a party preference in their voting patterns -- they're what political scientists sometimes call "leaners", e.g., they register (and identify) as independent, but they have a clear lean toward Democrats or Republicans. From the authors of the 2016 book Independent Politics: How American Disdain for Parties Leads to Political Inaction: "The problem with leaners is that there is almost no difference between people who identify as partisans and people who say they are independent and then say they lean toward a particular party. More often than not, we can count on leaners to vote for that party, support the party’s positions, and sometimes even donate money to the party’s candidates. What’s more, leaners consistently support their party from election to election."
https://www.vox.com/2016/1/22/10814522/independents-voters-f...
I think the truly swingable middle -- folks who, for example, voted for Obama in 2012, Trump in 2016, and Biden in 2020 -- is actually a pretty small group. And, it's a small group that's got both disproportionate power at the ballot box and a fairly low engagement with actual political issues. I think I (somewhat reluctantly) agree with your observation about campaigns iterating on social strategy, though, because that tends to be the best way to reach those swing voters: they aren't motivated by ideology or policy preference, but by star power and charisma.
Being a registered party member provides very few advantages, and a lot of disadvantages (mostly in the form of unsolicited correspondence). There's also social caché to be gained in some circles from claiming to be an enlightened independent that has transcended the petty two-party duality, who just happens to consistently vote like a dyed-in-the-wool partisan.
My wife is one such person. She has very little respect for the Democratic party, and views most of it as an actively harmful waste of oxygen, but she will be damned if she gives team red a seat.
Barring a catastrophic change in party alignment, nobody is going to convince her who to vote for - but they do need to convince her to show up.
When people say "objective, material reality" they normally mean ... well, things like the gravity and chemistry and stubbing your toe being painful. What story you want to use to describe the aggregate behaviour of 100 million human voters has very little to do with that, surely
The sad thing is that Russia didn't even need to make anything up to make this happen. They poured fuel on our existing divisions, until we couldn't even talk to each other, then poured resources into social media to prop up one candidate while attacking the other. Our hatred made us too blind to see it happening.
While I understand this point of view, I personnaly think religion, mythology and beliefs such as this one give much more flavor and diversity to the world than what rational thought will ever produce. Religious people made magnificent temples, cathedrals, songs, paintings and so on : what if this way of thought was in fact beneficial for societies, in some aspects?
Science had almost no relevance to real life until maybe 100-200 years ago. Before that it was pretty much just imagining stuff for fun. Who could have expected that to lead anywhere useful?
Suppose I spill a bunch of puzzle pieces on a table and ask two friends to tell me what picture is on the puzzle. My friend Alice blurts out "Elephant" because she has seen a lot of grey pieces. My friend Bob spends more time and looks beyond just the color, at the shapes and the other colors present and determines the image is Fort Knox.
In this case does it matter what is actually on the puzzle? Even if Alice gets it right, she's basically just guessing in the dark. She's ignoring all kinds of other evidence and reaching a conclusion. Does she deserve a reward if she happens to have guessed correctly despite not developing an understanding of what she's actually seeing? (Put another way, is real life like a gameshow?) Conversely, is Bob 'less correct' for having taken the time to understand other details of the image?
I say, no. I don't think Alice can be correct here. Her view can only align with truth coincidentally. That she got lucky this time has no meaning.
I don’t understand what’s negative about the folklore. I feel as if you’re conflating this folk tale to an organized religion or something.
The comment I replied to reads "religion, mythology and beliefs such as this one".
Non-religious people may not have made temples or cathedrals, but I can promise you they have made songs, paintings, theaters, other random impressive looking buildings, and so on. The only things that really prevents the existence of more massive, impressive looking buildings is current worry about sustainability, safety, accessibility, and not having the budget of the entire Catholic/Christian/Other church to build them.
While different religions all still agree on the idea of a higher power to explain the unexplained, my believe system is the most radical of all. Because it leaves no room for any other gods except science. I don't just dismiss their gods as false, but also dismiss the whole underlying structure all religions are built on, but without being aware (or if so I'm dismissing it) that my belief is just another religion.
yes totally (in this argument) ignoring anyone that might have been historically or currently been agnostic, atheist, or anti-theist.
> this is basically an appeal to authority argument no?
I think so. And I couldn't think of a better example then what you just gave with mentioning "appeal to authority". The fact that we deconstruct language the way we do in order to decide the validity of the argument is already a scientific process.
Sibling comment just mentioned trust which I also agree would be an important element of religious belief systems. In scientific process this trust is only temporary until we either managed to learn enough about this subject to see the truth for ourselves, or gave up on it and trust that those specialists who know (your appeal to authority argument) are qualified to know it for us.
I can't. It's self-contradictory. Religion is wholly based in faith: believing when you have no concrete, demonstrable, scientific reason to. No religion can exist without that core concept, you have to be willing to believe when you have no proof. More broadly all mysticism is based on faith, and all mysticism (ghost hunters! magic rocks! miracles!) similarly runs counter to science accordingly.
So non-religious scientifically-oriented people have more faith (willingness to base their lives and beliefs around things they can't prove exist) than religious people do? No.
In terms of religion, asking for proof, requiring evidence, is the true first sin: thou shalt not! Religion builds upon that first step, you must first suspend your rational mental self and then turn your brain over to someone else's opinions as fact (which you then must accept as true, even if there's no way to prove such; religion is always based on subservience to someone else's faith-based opinions; religion begins at the point where you turn off your brain and hand it to someone else who says: because I say so, and you must believe what they're saying and specifically not let reason interfere). Here's how religion begins for everyone: someone tells you a (typically fantastical) story, with absolutely no evidence to support it, and then you believe it; to believe it you have to shut down inspection, debate, skepticism, reasoning, and so on. One of the core tenets of all religion is: don't ask such questions; who are you to question; etc. Even the more docile religions fold at those corners eventually and require that you stop asking questions or challenging (aka shut your brain off and just believe on faith).
Science is contrary to faith. People occasionally try to worm around that in touchy-feely ways, you'll run across historical quotes by famous scientists saying dumb things like: my science is rooted in a powerful faith, dur dur dur. But that's just someone smart (at a thing) saying something exceptionally stupid about a different realm of thought and should be regarded as such. Like putting much stock into the dumb things Stephen Hawking used to say in the political or economic realm; geniuses are quite typically gifted at one thing, very rarely at two things, and people commonly seem to make the mistake of thinking that translates widely, when the opposite is true and it very rarely translates widely.
Science grows stronger through questioning, debate, inquiry, challenging notions, requiring evidence to believe. Religion - and all faith based systems - wither when confronted by such, without exception. They react in such opposite manners, because they are indeed opposites.
Pro-tip, instead of asking for "proof" like an interrogation, ask for clarification to understand the story or viewpoint. Getting in a fight over something neither side can prove is ridiculous.
But if you want to debate what we cannot know, riddle me this, how do you know we're not in a simulation made by a higher being? Math and science is the reverse engineering of our created universe. It's more probable we were created in some way than a random occurrence.
This is a thin excuse. These stories were held up as literal truths for centuries. The moral principles they embody are held up as serious until they become too unfashionable, then those are dismissed as metaphor too. If you claim a given religious lesson is good and valid today, what basis do we have for believing that someone in 40 years won't be saying that that lesson too was something that was never meant to be taken seriously?
> Getting in a fight over something neither side can prove is ridiculous.
Note how you're contradicting your previous argument, because you don't have a position beyond throwing a bunch of arguments at the wall and hoping something will stick. The burden of proof is on the one making claims; otherwise we should all take Russell's teapot seriously.
> But if you want to debate what we cannot know, riddle me this, how do you know we're not in a simulation made by a higher being?
We don't. Act accordingly.
It's not an excuse, it's reality. Your perception of religious people is outdated, ignorant, and generalizing. Should we not let any tradition modernize? Should all tradition and culture be discarded because it was once done differently at one point in time? Should we all practice life how you see fit?
> Note how you're contradicting your previous argument, because you don't have a position beyond throwing a bunch of arguments at the wall and hoping something will stick. The burden of proof is on the one making claims; otherwise we should all take Russell's teapot seriously.
A bit hostile there. No one is trying to claim anything, they are practicing their beliefs that make them feel good.
> We don't. Act accordingly.
Exactly, just be smug that you have it all figured out and let people go about their business.
Or you can keep judging something you know nothing about and generalizing billions of people.
You can't simultaneously claim that it's valuable because it's a tradition but my perception of it is outdated. Either you're practicing traditional religion - in which case you need to stand by the literal meaning of your religion's teaching. Or you're practicing something new, at most loosely inspired by past religious practices - in which case your new practice should be evaluated solely on its own merits, which are limited to say the least.
> No one is trying to claim anything, they are practicing their beliefs that make them feel good.
Doing something because it makes you feel good is not an approach with a good reputation (indeed it's something religious people often vigorously oppose). If it's just a set of practices and not a factual claim, why do you care about other people pointing out that it's not factually true?
> Or you can keep judging something you know nothing about and generalizing billions of people.
Ironic to accuse me of judging or generalising while falsely and ignorantly claiming I know nothing about religion - I guess it's fine for you to judge and generalise people you know nothing about, hmm.
But yeah I'm judging you, based on your responses, not based on theism. You haven't talked to the billions you are judging and grouping together (generalizing).
Seriously: if you reread your text, do you see no errors (or at least potential errors)?
So yeah, atheists and really religious folk are very similar, mostly in their "certainty about things around them." As a former Catholic, this is a thing I'm trying to discard in both directions? E.g. when I was younger, "It's important to be Catholic to recieve communion in the church." A little older, "Aha, I will NOT recieve communion." A little older than that? "Lol, it doesn't matter, I'll do this myself, at home, with a donut and grape juice with the kids because why not."
"Science" isn't a god. You don't believe in science, you don't have faith in science. You might have faith, or believe in people or textbooks that describe the current state of "science" but they're not divine.
Science doesn't "leave no room for any gods", if there was evidence of a god (or gods), then that would be science too. There just isn't any evidence to support such a thing.
Assuming the "my belief" here is still talking about science, I think it would be wrong to say that it dismisses gods as false. Instead, it dismisses most arguments of the existence of a god as unfalsifiable, and thus cannot be reasoned one way or the other. There is no proof one way or the other for something unfalsifiable, and instead time can be spent on what is.
There are certainly religious scientists who maintain their faith and scientific contribution without compromising one or the other.
Atheism is not an assertion that there is no god. It is the understanding that we cannot with our current level of technology prove there IS a god. Therefore, we cannot believe in a god.
That is the baseline argument: Prove it. You can't. That is the end of the conversation.
In other words, the assertion you make here is one of the very few things we CAN prove and DO know. We CANNOT prove there IS a god. We CANNOT prove there is NO god. Therefore, we abstain from believing in a religion until sufficient evidence is provided.
That is why atheism is not a religion. There is no belief involved. Because we do not pretend to know. We assert that we do not, and currently can not, know.
But it's a highly debated topic itself (as most things are in this realm).
In general though, people mean it as they don't believe in God, and use agnosticism to indicate they do not believe one way or another.
However, by dictionary definition and from citing Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism
"Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities."
Anti-theism is the assertion there is no god. The prefix "a" can mean "not" or "without." "anti" means "against", "opposite of."
So no, it is not the assertion there are no deities. It is an absence of the belief in any deities.
The perspective I am arguing from is that there is no other coherent argument to be made about the existence of deities. We cannot currently prove there is no god. We cannot currently prove there is a god.
Wikipedia's first sentence is the broadest definition but not the de-facto, the second sentence you left out shows that.
If you don't want confusion you'd want to use atheism for belief no God exist and agnosticism to indicate you don't feel one way or another. Which I believe is what most people do.
Otherwise you start a semantic debate which is as pointless as a religious one. If you want to communicate the nuance of your beliefs without much explanation, use the two different words, otherwise use atheism as an umbrella term, which is what the "broadest sense" wikipedia is hinting at.
I wouldn't be against an interpretation of agnosticism that is functionally identical to my interpretation of atheism, but at a certain point one word to describe a world-view is never going to be sufficient and explanation of the nuance is going to be required.
You can say "Christianity" and you would be referencing both the Westborough Baptist Church and Christian Unitarian Universalists.
I already described in detail in my first comment my interpretation of Atheism so I don't know where confusion could possibly come in.
Therefore, I reject your premise that I "have to use the interpretation of what people mean, not the broadest one" because:
- that varies from person to person and I cannot read people's minds.
- Your interpretation is not universal
- the interpretation I presented is actually quite widely understood and common.
So while you are correct that I cannot assert "Atheism is X", you are wrong that I am wrong.
Also you are the one having the pointless semantic debate about something I already explained and clarified in my first comment. Call me agnostic I don't care, even though an interpretation of agnosticism is that god CANNOT be proven, which is NOT what I said.
> So while you are correct that I cannot assert "Atheism is X"
Yes, that is my point. You said "Atheism is (not an assertion that there is no god = X)"
> you are wrong that I am wrong.
You are wrong that GP is wrong. Everyone is also right.
If you don't want confusion you spell out exactly what you mean instead of just using labels, since both "atheism" and "agnosticism" cover broad ranges of beliefs. With that said, "strong atheism" is generally understood to be a positive belief that there are no gods, "weak atheism" is understood as a passive lack of believe in the existence of god(s)—but with a bias against their existence in the absence of compelling evidence. "Agnosticism" meanwhile can be either a synonym for weak atheism (mostly through misuse IMHO) or the belief that it is impossible for anyone to know whether or not god(s) exist—with the connotation that equal weight should be given to both possibilities.
The most scientific of the three positions is weak atheism. Strong atheism makes claims which can't be supported by the available evidence, or possibly by any amount of evidence, while granting equal weight to mundane and extraordinary claims runs counter to the scientific principle of seeking the simplest possible explanation consistent with the observations.
That's why I said "If you want to communicate the nuance of your beliefs without much explanation". Weak/strong atheism is another label too though, just a less known one.
"Spelling it out" would be an explaining it. I've never heard of the strong/weak qualifiers and I would assume there are less people that have than have heard of agnosticism. It's a good classification of the spectrum of theism, but you would have to explain it, which is fine if you want an even higher degree of nuance vs the broader atheist / agnostic terms.
You don't always need to communicate the nuance, sometimes you just need a quick general statement "oh no I'm atheist/agnostic" when asked if you're part of a religion or a similar scenario.
Anti-theism, read literally, seems more like the position that god(s) exist and should be opposed. It's not a common belief system, but one can put together a plausible storyline where God is just a supremely powerful entity with neutral or negative disposition toward humanity but with a good Public Relations system. Given the claims of omniscience and omnipotence, how could one distinguish perfect propaganda from truth? One work of fiction I recall described a belief system which was a mirror image of Christianity holding that Satan actually rebelled against a negligent or malicious God for humanity's sake, fighting on our side but losing in the end—but as they say, history is written by the victors. It's an interesting thought exercise, anyway.
I doubt it's the one you're thinking of, but this was also the gist of Memnoch the Devil, the 5th Vampire Chronicles book.
If you're interested, you can find a free copy of March to the Stars in the Baen CD which accompanied Storm from the Shadows, available here[1]. (These CDs were issued along with certain printed books, with a license from the publisher to redistribute them, as a means of advertisement.) Unfortunately there is no longer a direct link to the book available on this site; you have to download the full CD.
Spoiler alert: it's not about love.
One might take my point of citing the century as a statement on the (lack of) originality of such thought, but tbh I mostly meant as a resource: other people, out there, have already thought and reasoned about those issues for literally hundreds of years at this point, so parent might find some solace (and some critical developments) in their production. This is not restricted to Romantic issues, btw - most of the stuff we pass for original in places like this, are likely to have already been discussed ad nauseam in philosophical circles all the way to the 1970s (at which point academia kinda ran out of stuff to talk about, and started focusing on the meta -- but I digress).
I got absolutely none of what you said here from your original comment and perceived you entirely as attacking them or a troll; but in the nearly lowest effort troll way possible, and it even took me a day and 3 messages to get any real content from you.
It’s hard to distinguish well-meaning content from meaningless content nowadays and I know it’s an annoying bit of extra work, but I hope you can see the value in doing a little more to be heard.
I don't know. The religious and mythological concepts such as punishment, judgment, sacrifice, angels, daemons and elves look like a derivative reflection of humans and their society. By comparison, the concepts from science and technology such as force fields, wavefunctions, wormholes and black holes seem genuinely novel and weird.
Personally, I would certainly not give up on the scientific truth - often in conflict with religion and mythology - to enjoy some of that mythological flavor.
If you believe you will live forever in heaven blowing yourself up might be an entirely rational decision. The premisse is irrational, and people would usually maintain a sense of ultimate uncertainty ... this fails catastrophically in case of fear. That's not irrational in face of better judgement. It's just not rational, so it's useless to bring up that word, unless to stress the western philosophical angle, which you have carefully avoided.
Thoughts on the two clocks?
https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline/ https://longnow.org/clock/
Ironic?
Then, they started speculating that maybe her evil and malice were split from her, and they became its own evil kami, and that's what's trapped inside the rock.
The funny part is that it was clear they were making this up on the spot, not constructing it from historical myths. When given the opportunity to tell a story about an evil spirit sealed away a thousand years ago in a magic rock that kills you if you touch it, who has now escaped, which we know because the rock split in half in real life, and who is now presumably causing chaos across the countryside, people aren't going to let minor technicalities get in the way. (I wouldn't let them get in the way, either.)
"For lack of some caulk civilization was lost"
> 「自然現象の可能性が高いので致し方ない。可能であれば元の形に近い状態に戻すことが理想ではないか」
Rough translation: It's likely this was a natural phenomenon, it can't be help. If possible, I think it would be ideal to put it back to its original shape.
You could easily have another one with a modern setting, since the rock splits in 2022.
Timing can’t be a coincidence.
Maybe someone thought it'd be funny to make up a legend about a spirit captured in a rock in order to troll people hundreds of years in the future.