What’s option 3?
Getting really into sleight of hand magic and smoking a lot of pot.
I don’t know how to put this to you guys but the one on the right is significantly more plausible than the one on the left.
Also I don’t like turmeric.
We are all stardust though. Billion-year-old carbon.
yes but do you consider that important in any way? if you do you are closer to the person on the left
I would say it is a neutral fact.
Imo there is no meaning to life, everyone decides for themselves what to live for.
If someone likes the fact that we are made from starstuff, why yuck that yum specifically? It is kind of a nice perspective to take sometimes when life gets stressful.
It is also a part of a nice song by Joni Mitchell and a nice speech by Carl Sagan, both people I admire, but not something I think about a lot…
And we got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Well, I’m already sort-of the right one. I made an AI organize my documents, suggest articles for me to learn from, etc. I vent to AI, I ask AI for advice, AI is secretly running my life in the background.
I always remember someone that came to my country, Chile, without getting a visa, because chat GPT told them they didn’t need a visa, they were denied entry and had to flew back.
Was that you?
and there is increasing evidence of a correlation of “AI therapy” and suicides, or AI emotional dependency in general, character AI is really good at killing autistic people too.Ok, I exaggerated a bit, but this depends on the person I think. For me, it is the only way to move ahead sometimes
I have met the guy on the right irl. He was unbearable
I choose neither, and instead day dream about fully automated luxury gay space communism, knowing I’m gonna die before such a thing could ever come to fruition.
That’s just the guy on the right but with less hope and no capitalism.
No capitalism = more hope.
Stellaris players: How it feels to have a Spiritualist empire on one side of your border and a Materialist empire on the other.
My Pacifist Egalitarian Xenophile space elves: “Just be nice guys!”
You know… there’s a Space Hippies AI Personality mod on Steam. It’s actually really funny.
I choose not to be an idiot.
I want science and progress, but progress at the service of the wellbeing of mankind, not to enrich idiots who outsourced their critical thinking to chat GPT.
This is so overwhelmingly hyperbolic I’m not sure what to take from it
I just want to drop in and call out “death is a design flaw” specifically. It is not. Without death, there can be no evolution, and any change to the environment is extinction.
The mountains seem eternal, but there were forests before many of them, and though the trees will be different in the distant eons when the mountains are worn to nothing, the forests will live on.
Hmm, why can’t there be evolution without death? As long as organisms reproduce, genes are passed on, and some reproduce more successfully than others, why would it matter if existing individuals stay around or not? I don’t see how it makes evolution fundamentally impossible.
Without death you can’t have reproduction, you’d get way too many organisms to be sustainable in any way.
So we could go visit our great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents and they’d look like Jabba the Hutt. Holidays would be a beast.
death is what paves the way for change. Old ideas literally die out, since the dawn of time. The passing of strategy and technique happens in even single celled organisms
That is indeed what happens, and it is helpful. But I disagree evolution wouldn’t happen without it.
the laws of thermodynamics though, you eventually die. You eventually spend resources, you eventually have to obtain more, etc. Unless you are perfect, you may be killed unless you know your environment perfectly, no?
Yeah, but that’s an argument against being able to live forever, not an argument against evolution being able to happen, if you did.
That’s pretty cool in nature, especially with plants and fungi that don’t think. But applying it to people is kinda eugenics-y. “Billions should die so that our genes can improve”
Oh, giving ourselves endless lifespans is a fine endeavor. We’ve got plenty of ways to adapt to changing environments without changing our bodies, and we’re pretty close to being able to do that without dying and evolving anyway. Shit might get weird, but it always does with us.
Based. I always think stories about “immortality is bad actually” are weird because people are fundamentally capable of change. Lots of people choose not to change, but I think that’s because the boredom in their life is smaller than other forces like poverty, oppression, trauma, and culture. Give people infinite time to heal from their traumas and I think they eventually will. I think enlightenment is a more stable state than ignorance.
People often confuse being contrarian for being deep. If you don’t want to live forever, you don’t want to live right now.
This is interesting because you propose that eugenics is inherently bad because it requires a lot of sacrifice, is that right? Because it doesn’t have to. This line from Gattaca always stuck with me:
[Vincent’s parents are planning a second child, and are shown four candidate embryos] Geneticist: We want to give your child the best possible start. Believe me, we have enough imperfection built in already. Your child doesn’t need any more additional burdens. Keep in mind, this child is still you. Simply, the best, of you. You could conceive naturally a thousand times and never get such a result.
I could argue, could, that not doing eugenics on this level would be immoral. If we can use science to make people less prone to disease, to make them stronger and smarter, why wouldn’t we? I’m not a fucking nazi here, I’m looking for a serious debate. We are already doing this in a different categorical scope with modern medicine. If we claim that all births must be “natural”, then perhaps disease and death are also “natural” and we shouldn’t intervene, and do without medical science and just have nature run its natural course.
I don’t want parents to be able to choose whether their kids are autistic, because there’s nothing wrong with us, but society would rather change us than change the world so it can accommodate us.
We’re not just talking about autism here though. We’re talking about hereditary diseases, maybe a bad back, extreme allergies, etc. Their point is that if we had the technology to prevent our future child from carrying all sorts of genetic burdens (exposure to cancer, compromised immune system, terrible eyesight…) wouldn’t it be immoral to not use that technology?
We’re not just talking about autism here though.
We’re not, no. Sexual preference is genetic.
I’m not saying that this kind of thing cannot be used for bad purposes. I’m asking the philosophical question of where our moral obligation to do everything we can to give our children the best possible life begins.
Should we let them be born “as is”, and then have a moral obligation to do everything we can to make the best of whatever genetic baggage they have, or should we do whatever is in our power even before they’re born to give them a better shot at a good life?
Explosives have caused enormous amounts of death, but also allowed enormous amounts of people to live in safer, more affordable houses, and have been critical for mineral extraction that essentially makes modern society possible, as well as modern transportation infrastructure. Explosives, like most technology, aren’t an inherently “evil” thing, even though they’re used for bad purposes.
I’m not saying that this kind of thing cannot be used for bad purposes.
And I’m saying it will be.
We scoff at them both, but seriously pick one and get comfortable, looking reality right in the butt-cheeks is bad for the soul.
Stop looking at the cheeks, grit those teeth, and give that anus a good gander.
(Full disclosure: I am not a therapist, but it’s good advice.)
You say that as if nobody enjoys true crime. Seems like a skill issue to me
I take exception with the mixing of the stone cold fact that we’re all stardust with all that other crap.
It is good to be able to vape some weed and watch beautiful videos about amazing mind-blowing shit that actually exists, and not automatically entertain whatever magical/religious/supernatural idea is making the rounds in your neck of the woods.
I once liked the idea of being part of some new age, neo pagan group and mindset and being ‘outside the mainstream’ but the more time passes the more I regress into a hole of solititude that no one can breach.
Even last summer I wanted to see if I could finally go out and find a girlfriend… now I am seriously going back in my hole.
