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I agree, and well put.
I believe in social democracy, I believe that it is the best political ideology.
It combines a free society with a government provided safety net.
I see communism as being too restrictive, and unregulated capitalism as being way too out of control.
A progressive social democratic country with a strong government seems to me as combining new ideas with a stable foundation.
What Economic structure would you use in your ideal society?
I am not well versed in the theory if economics.
In general terms and speaking purely in an ideal world, I would expect that a regulated market economy would allow the society to exploit the free market and the greed of humans, while providing a solid foundation of government services for it’s citizens to rely on.
The power of friendship (I have no friends)
What is stopping you from having friends?
Myself I guess.
The world is made of magic, it just differentiated into so many forms, that one of them is science and that’s what many people believe is all there is.
I feel in the mood to explain more about this:
Similar to european school’s history classes tend to be focused on european history (we call that “eurocentrism”), our worldview is focused on humans, i think that’s called “anthropocentrism”. While humans are important, it’s not everything there is. There’s also plants and other living beings, and in fact there’s many more of them than of us. I try to consider that.
I’m calling the unity of all life “magic”, i came up with that and it’s supposed to be a play-on-words on the german word “Magen” (stomach) (representing that plants and animals are connected through an important relationship that is food). Also the stomach is the organ most physiologically/spatially central in the human body, in my opinion. So i imagine that everything’s in the human is built around that “central” organ that is the stomach. That makes sense as the intake of food is the root of all animal existence, that enables animal’s existence in the first place. Thus “everything is created from the stomach outwards”, as supportive organs to help the stomach collect and digest food.
This is an interesting take.
I like to think of Science as magic, because it really is.
Ancient peoples played with “Alchemy,” and modern chemistry is simply that. They would lose it if they knew we could “grow” diamonds, or that we have created an entirely new element.
Or that we’ve turned lead into gold, though not very cost-effectively to say the least.
Only that which has evidence to support it.
How much n is enough n?
Depends on what n is.
God doesn’t exist (though there is a tiny, tiny chance there’s some higher power that doesn’t intervene, because the human intelligence gap is unreasonably huge, making humans undeniably special)
Every organized religion is a cult
Free will is an illusion
Aliens most likely exist, given the insane size of the universe and we know life can exist here
Humans will still always give in to their brutal tribal instincts and that’s why the world is how it is
I believe I’d like another drink.
Believing in something seems to imply thinking something to be true without having evidence for it - otherwise it would be knowledge, a justified true belief. So I know a couple things, like that I exist as a conscious being, and have practical empirical knowledge of the rest of the sensory world too.
Believe means to accept as true or real, and does not define the precondition to the belief.
How can you prove that you exist as a conscious being?
How can you prove that your senses can be trusted?
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I am thinking about whether I exist as a conscious being. Therefore there must be an ‘I’ to be thinking that.
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I can’t prove that my senses can be trusted with 100% certainty to tell me truth - in fact I can prove the opposite with things like optical illusions. However, when interacting with the world that I only know is real through my senses, basing my behaviour on those same senses that let me know the world exists seems reasonable to me. That’s what I call practical knowledge, rather than true knowledge.
How do you define “I”?
In other words you believe what your senses tell you to be real even though you cannot objectively prove your senses to be trustworthy?
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‘I’ is the thing that is thinking it
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I don’t ‘believe’ that my senses are real, but that it’s good enough to act as though they are real, regarding the sensory world.
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have practical empirical knowledge of the rest of the sensory world too.
Oho, that’s a pretty bold statement of belief for someone who can’t prove they’re not a brain in a vat!
More seriously though, there are tons of things that have conflicting evidence or are simply too big or complex to have enough evidence to have definitive proof for, yet we still have to make decisions about them. Like believing that X vs Y is a better governing system (eg democracy vs republic). Or what about questions that aren’t related to proof, like defining and living by ethical standards? Yet most people still find value in “moral” things, and believe that people should do “good” instead of “bad”.
What you just uttered is a totally valid belief in my eyes :)
Beliefs don’t always have to be based on mere intuition alone. It’s totally fine to be able to back up what one believes with arguments.
A theory I’ve been working on lately is that our worldview rests on certain foundational beliefs - beliefs that can’t be objectively proven or disproven. We don’t arrive at them through reason alone but end up adopting the one that feels intuitively true to us, almost as if it chooses us rather than the other way around. One example is the belief in whether or not a god exists. That question sits at the root of a person’s worldview, and everything else tends to flow logically from it. You can’t meaningfully claim to believe in God and then live as if He doesn’t exist - the structure has to be internally consistent.
That’s why I find it mostly futile to argue about downstream issues like abortion with someone whose core belief system is fundamentally different. It’s like chipping away at the chimney when the foundation is what really holds everything up. If the foundation shifts, the rest tends to collapse on its own.
So in other words: even if we agree on the facts, we may still arrive at different conclusions because of our beliefs. When it comes to knowledge, there’s only one thing I see as undeniably true - and you probably agree with me on this: my consciousness, the fact of subjective experience. Everything else is up for debate - and I truly mean everything.
Maybe a god’s existence is a core belief for some people, but it shouldn’t be. There shouldn’t be anything you believe without a logical reason to.
“Why is there something rather than nothing?” is a valid question - and the idea that something created it isn’t entirely unthinkable. The point is that you can’t prove or disprove it. Not believing in God is just as much a foundational belief as believing in one. Much of what you think about the world is built on these core beliefs - the kind that, if proven wrong, would effectively collapse your entire worldview.
What i don’t get here is what the existence of a “creator” would have to do with abortion. Just as an example, what if there is a god. What does that tell us about everyday life, or about abortion?
It would be very well conceivable to me that there is a god, but they have no opinion about whether we do abortions or not. How are these things connected?
In the case of being anti-abortion, we’re talking about people who believe in the biblical God - and they often point to chapters in the Bible to justify their stance. In most cases, it boils down to the belief that life begins at the moment of conception and that all life is sacred. There are also passages in the Bible that speak about God having plans for unborn children.
Ok, let’s take a step backwards. How are you defining ‘god’?
Personally, I consider it synonymous with “creator,” but even if someone believes in a biblical God, that’s beside the point. While the idea of a biblical God is an entirely unconvincing concept to me, I still give it - or something like it - a greater-than-zero chance of actually existing. I can’t prove otherwise.
Another example of a belief like that would be belief in the physical world around you. You could be dreaming - or in a simulation.
So can I clarify that when you’re saying
Some people take the existence of god as a brute fact
That you mean
Some people assume that universe was created by something
?
Well, that’s not a direct quote from me, but yes - some people assume the universe was created by something. For some, that’s the person running the simulation; for others, it’s the biblical God as described in the Bible, or atleast their interpretation of it.
I believe the pen in front of me exists.
That coffee cup is suspicious though.
I Believe in the Power of American Native
It took me longer than I’d like to think of an answer.
Maths.
Maths is good.
- Water is wet
- The sky is blue
- Women have secrets
The sky isn’t blue.
- The universe and everything in it was made for a reason.
- The message of Jesus, while deformed and deeply mixed with Western nonsense by Rome (polytheism, pagan rites and an immature disregard for self restraint, to name a few), will serve as a basis to unite the West to the rest of the world (up until now it’s behaved either as an armed landlord, a mob boss or a deranged killer, and that includes the European colonial project called Israel).
- People are fundamentally kind hearted and prosocial, but unexamined trauma, pettiness and immaturity, and an overall disregard for thought before action (a moral obligation, btw), keeps them from being who they were always supposed to be.
- Hard labels don’t/rarely belong in this world, and never apply to people. If you wanna understand the universe and the people in it you’re gonna have to understand them as a collection of spectrums/ranges, not as singular adjectives and nouns that are either meaningless or overly exaggerated.
do you believe that randomness exists?
The universe and everything in it was made for a reason.
I wonder how randomness would fit into this. I believe that randomness does exist and that order/causality has its limits.
Randomness? Or uncertainty? Cause I understand uncertainty (both epistemologically and physically, and more so the former than the latter), but it’s hard for me to understand randomness when everything comes from something that came before, forming a line of causes and effects (knowable and unknowable) from the beginning of the universe until today. Perhaps through quantum physics, idk, but I don’t think I need to understand it as long as I only take into consideration what happens after the collapse of the wave function, lol. I also understand that consciousness is a black box, and free will is evidently real (go diet or be faithful in your teenage yours, you’ll quickly discover your freedom as you’re fighting yourself) but is axiomatic and cannot be properly explained in words (it’s part of the terrain that cannot be represented in the map).
I have read the following very beautiful explanation of randomness:
You may very well assume that the universe is deterministic, i.e. one thing follows after another, but even if that is so, you still end up with infinitely many stars in the night sky, and you cannot predict their patterns and shapes from mere computational-prediction alone. You need to venture out into the night and see the stars for yourself in order to find their arrangement and yourself in the middle of it. That is what randomness is all about: The stars could have any pattern, but they have exactly one. The same applies for humans: Humans could have any character, but they have exactly one. The true human character causes free-will, and that is what you and me experience as the wonder of life.
That is beautiful indeed. 😊❤️
I think the universe we experience is a mathematical continuum with an added layer of probability.
The problem with trying to describe my theory is that what I’m proposing is literally the simplest thing in the universe. It is the one rule that there are no rules and that by ordering the slices of the continuum into discrete moments of time, all of the rulelessness coalesces into matter and space by virtue of being repeatable probability waveforms which can be represented in 3D space via an emergent 4D manifold.
Even that is already very dense. For more on the manifold, you may refer to the 1983 paper from J.B. Hartle and Stephen Hawking, “The waveform of the Universe.”
Imagine you want to take the first moment of time, represented as one whole, and break the next moment of time into two pieces, but knowing that the third moment of time will double again to have four pieces, you want the first piece of the 2nd moment of time to be larger, more like the whole of the 1st moment, and the second piece of the 2nd moment of time to be smaller, more like the quarters of the 3rd moment of time.
Mathematically, you can do this - at least for the first two moments. If you want a magic ratio that you can divide the whole by, and then divide the resulting number by that same ratio such that both of those results added together equal the original whole, there is such a ratio. It is the golden ratio. But it does not follow that continuing to divide by the golden ratio will get you the next four pieces that would also add to one whole, constituting the third moment of time. Rather, adding all of the rest of the infinite series where each next number is the previous number divided by the golden ratio yields, miraculously, the golden ratio.
No, if you want each moment to snap to bounds where every moment of time has twice the number of “pieces” as the previous moment, there is no one ratio where you can divide every piece by a formulaically derived ratio to get the size of the next piece.
However, you can derive a perfect equation for a ratio of reduction for the size of each piece if instead of increasing twofold each moment of time, the mathematical size of the universe increases by a factor of euler’s number for each moment of time. (Euler’s number, for any unaware, is an irrational number like pi or the golden ratio–it goes on forever, only approximated at 2.718. It is the factor used to calculate rate of growth rate as the growth compounds on itself. If you have a dollar with 100% annual growth rate, and compound it only at the end of the year (once), you’ll have 2 dollars. If you compound it twice, meaning you’ll only apply a 50% growth rate, but you’ll do it twice, you’ll have 2.25 dollars from the 50 cents you made mid-year experiencing 50% growth during the second compounding. Compound 4 times a year (1.25)^4 and you get about 2.44. Compound an infinite number of times and you get the irrational number e.)
So, if the universe’s size increases by a factor of e every moment instead of a factor of 2, you can find an equation that creates a ratio which smoothly descends from the golden ratio, approaching 1, as the ratio that each unit needs to be divided by the previous unit to prevent any division between moments of time if they were unraveled back into a single continuous string rather than 4-dimensional space. And we start thinking about the internals of moments of time less as discrete units, now that each moment has an irrational unit size, and think more around a descending density as you move from each moment of time to the next. But a vastly increasing size offsets the density to keep the sum total of any moment identical to the total value of any other moment.
But this does not yet explain why matter or the fundamental forces exist to begin with, how that 4D manifold is supposed to emerge from this theoretical curve. And the answer is that there are an infinite number of possible curves that can fit this ratio regression. There’s the simplest one, which solves the problem as simply as possible. But what if you add a sine wave to that? Within the bounds of a moment, the sine wave will go up and also down, canceling out any potential change in density totals. But maybe this is slightly less likely than the more simple curve. And a sine wave that goes up and down twice, with a frequency of 2, even less likely. And the higher amplitudes, higher frequencies, all even less likely, but still possible.
But why would the universe be calculating frequencies of sine waves as probabilities? And I believe it’s not so much a calculation as it is a natural relationship between the positive and negative directions, starting at 0. If you have a moment where the size is e to the power of 0, its size is 1. And you can proceed with the universe I described where the size increases by e every moment, trending toward infinity, or you can move backwards on the number line where e to the higher negative powers trends toward 0. The math should all be the same, but inverted. An equal but opposite anti-verse. I believe that matter arises from interactions between the shared probability of what is likely to happen in either universe at any given moment of time. And from either universe’s perspective, they both see themselves as the positive direction where the math of space trends toward infinity and the other universe is the one that gets smaller and smaller. But because they both look the same internally, they are effectively the same universe, thus the shared probability.
So, these infinite frequencies and amplitudes of sine waves overlaid on top of the lowest energy curve create stable collections of frequencies also known as eigenstates, which can be combined into the sort of manifold Hartle and Hawking described, where 4D space and time becomes an emergent relationship between the underlying waveforms of probability and the spatial organization of layers and layers of mathematical curves that are not identical but do rhyme, in our universe seen as fundamental particles.
That is what I believe. I think we’re living in virtual spacetime continuum that emerges to more coherently organize huge swaths of mathematical probability waves that in concert represent what might or might not be at any given level of complexity.
Which seems like a lot of words to explain that we definitely don’t exist for sure because the fact that we’re here indicates we only probably exist.
Great. Glad we cleared that up.
Dang, the time cube dude was right all along
That the US is far beyond fixing itself nonviolently.
Violence is always necessary when dealing with dogs that can’t talk, only bite. And Americans are easily some of the most violent people on Earth, so the worry isn’t there, it’s that once again someone will use that anger to fuel their violent actions but will direct it once more against the innocent. Also, the cops would never allow it, they’re even worse dogs, lol, and would definitely have to be put down before anything.
Honestly, I can’t see America becoming anything but a hwite ethnonationalist dictatorship. The lost and the stupid yearn for a messiah and will never even consider putting in the mental work so they would rather leave it all in the hands of an appealing character, and Americans know too little about the world to give it to anyone with a shred of decency and competence.
