New Testingstan

Nietzslime wrote:and like, if you want to know about the free will debate - why would you ask on sdn? why not find a more appropriate community?

i don't have a lot of friends and am anxious about joining new forums

adr wrote:

Nietzslime wrote:and like, if you want to know about the free will debate - why would you ask on sdn? why not find a more appropriate community?

i don't have a lot of friends and am anxious about joining new forums

too bad reddit has threaded comments

it has insular elitist communities within insular elitist communities

Nietzslime wrote:i am the ivory tower

tbh right i think the problem is the attitude 'why ask on sdn it is not a goo dplace for philosophy' sorta

cause ... people don't talk abuot things to get answers

they talk abuot things to talk about them and share ideas and shit

i mean obviously this never happens on teo because they're all comabtive assholes, but man i ask people about stupid maths shit all the time just to feel out my own ideas y'dig

ps all these ideas involve robits

threaded comments :evil:

that's a good point stark

and i mean, i wouldn't have started cottoning to a bunch of things without getting involved in discussions in communities where nobody really had any expertise

but part of it is just that i don't have the energy to engage in that kind of discussion when i know that since my ideas aren't with the hivemind i'll largely just get attacked for them

when i hang out with people who are receptive i'm perfectly happy to go on and on about gadamer and habermas and transhumanism and my own half-baked theories springboarding off such things

so it could just be that i am increasingly disillusioned with the standards of the sdn environment

i better go start a miss manners board

yeah i wouldn't even say that teo is hostile to 'new' ideas; they're just hostile to anything they think is 'wrong'

like fucking batman who basically posts 100% nothign but 'lol mike wong said xyz'

shit i'm getting dangerously close to agreeing with something simon jester said once so i'll stop

but i've found talking to the non-idiots from teo directly is far more instructive or interesting (and doesn't raise the blood pressure) than actually posting

shooting the shit with ford = you will recieve great ideas

SDN is just an exercise in mental masturbation.

Nietzlime, I have not looked at that thread because it's usually a bunch of matrix shit from douchebags but I would for serious read your contribution.

Or you could just post it here

Aaron wrote:SDN is just an exercise in mental masturbation.

I consider TEO to be like driving a sportscar. If you're doing it for any other reason than your own pleasure, you're wasting your time and your money.

On that note, I test drove an RX-8 last week. ME WANTS!!!!

ZOOM ZOOM

hahahaha

fanboy's parody of duchess in neitzsche's pst thread is great

it was a parody, right?

"assume 100 megaton shields"

artemas wrote: "assume 100 megaton shields"

Questor wrote:

Aaron wrote:SDN is just an exercise in mental masturbation.

I consider TEO to be like driving a sportscar. If you're doing it for any other reason than your own pleasure, you're wasting your time and your money.

that's kinda how i view all internet forums, if it's not fun why the fuck would you keep doing it

Losonti Tokash wrote:Nietzlime, I have not looked at that thread because it's usually a bunch of matrix shit from douchebags but I would for serious read your contribution.

Or you could just post it here

i'll throw something up with a little depth tomorrow

but here's the basics

1. pretty much everyone admits that a big part of the problem of free will is that the language is confused. entire books have been written on this issue, but basically, there's no good way to define the concept of free will without basically finding synonyms. you can sort of intuit what we're talking about, issues of agency and non-determined choice, but analytic philosophy abhors intuition as a rule.

2. this lead to the creation of a position between free will and determinism called compatibilism, the idea that 'free will' can co-exist with a deterministic universe. stark's contributions to the sdn thread advocated a basically compatibilist position (i think, he can correct me). i'm in the camp that says that compatibilism is kind of bullshit.

3. the nature of knowledge and experience are bound by conditions that are not directly accessible to empirical inquiry. in light of that, when we're talking about the existence of free will - and related to that, consciousness, since the two issues are bound together in pretty obvious ways - we may be forced to come up with new ideas about how to explore these experiences, and possibly some counter-intuitive ways of defining 'truth'* that may sound like awful bullshit

4. subjectivity is fucking bananas, okay? bananas. and at heart there is pretty much no really good way to reconcile it with the reality we live in unless you want to either pretend that you don't exist or start making things up.

*this last bit may not be me, it may be that I've been reading Heidegger every goddamn year in University for 3 years now and have started to metamorphosize into a secular mystic nazi fuck whose books grew even more incomprehensible as he grew older and sometimes makes me wish that i had paid more attention in calculus

also, the sdn thread swerved near a couple of interesting points

1. there's good evidence to suggest that people who believe in free will are happier and more productive than determinists or people who think that consciousness is just some weird mirage arising from having too many neurons

the sdn thread brought up the idea that believing in free will, even though it doesn't exist (or so most of the people on sdn believe act out the belief in as pre-determined automatons), is 'useful' for society since it allows laws based on responsibility to exist, so it's good that society reinforces it since otherwise people would do whatever they wanted or something

what's interesting about this is the hypocrisy the discontinuity between this and what a similar thread about, say, religion, which is obviously a fantastic tool of social control and maintenance of order, but which most sdners would agree should be torn down by an angel holding the light of truth aloft or whatever to emancipate people

so why is one sort of lie used as a tool to keep order good (or at least neutral) and another evil?

i don't mean that just to rag on sdn - it's actually an interesting issue - is calling someone guilty when he really couldn't have done anything else more acceptable than saying that he's being judged by a higher, outside authority for his actions? not that ethics even exist in a determinist world, so what the fuck does it matter, idk, but you get the idea

this is a decent site on the subject, though i hope you went to a university that had an agreement with online academic libraries and kept you in the system after you graduated

also, this is what i'm talking about with heidegger. read that summary. if none of that made any fucking sense whatsoever, congratulations, you're still sane

uraniun235 wrote:

Questor wrote:

Aaron wrote:SDN is just an exercise in mental masturbation.

I consider TEO to be like driving a sportscar. If you're doing it for any other reason than your own pleasure, you're wasting your time and your money.

that's kinda how i view all internet forums, if it's not fun why the fuck would you keep doing it

Exactly. The problem is that it seems like some people on TEO think of it like a teenager sees a sportscar. They do it to brag and show off without having the skill to appreciate what they are doing.

OK... I think at the end I stretched the metaphor until it broke, there.

should have just gone with overcompensation


anyway someone should point out that all these arguments that things that are hard to explain are actually illusions, especially consciousness, raises the rather big question of who is this "you" person being fooled into thinking he exists or does things

but hey good thing philosophy is a bunch of crap so we can just ignore basic concepts and call other people dualists

free will is (bullshit|realz) and i could explain at length why i came to this conclusion, but instead i want to discuss how i came to this conclusion


using that as a topic sentence, construct a 140 character essay by thursday. #finalexam

i believe everything in the world can be distilled to basic physical things i can analyze with what little SCIENCE i know #finalexam

its interesting that you make the connection of people who believe in free will being on average happier than those that dont. a guy named stouffer in the 40s compiled a bunch of work on why some soldiers fight better than others, but anyway it was found that pilots had less stress in their lives than non-pilots, and fighter pilots less stress than bomber pilots. despite that all three groups had something like a 70% casualty rate, those who perceived having more control over their life generally were happier.

also im wondering what the distinction between free will and "formed from a bunch of neurons" is exactly

also i totally didnt realize that thread was from 6 years ago, i thought everyone was just being hilarious (they were)

my biggest issue with christianity (and similar religions) is the double-think you need to actually believe it

i mean the public message is that god is pure and good and holy and somehow benevolent

but it's clear to anyone who's actually read the bible that he's really a murderous sociopath that likes to toy with people

it's like saying you should trust hannibal lector to babysit your kids even though you know he eats people cause he's not really that bad

no it's okay he mellowed out after we murdered his son just trust him okay

Dooey Jo wrote:no it's okay he mellowed out after we murdered his son just trust him okay

well really it was more like committing assisted suicide since he supposedly had the ability to whisk himself away from being crucified

I unironically love that people are raging about quantum mechanics in a thread on free will. It's almost as though, even when confronted with a dumbass thought-experiment, they can't quite figure out how to address it as such, instead trying to attack the thought-experiment itself.

B-A-K-U-S-T-R-A wrote:I unironically love that people are raging about quantum mechanics in a thread on free will. It's almost as though, even when confronted with a dumbass thought-experiment, they can't quite figure out how to address it as such, instead trying to attack the thought-experiment itself.

q: what part of a woman's body do you notice first?

a: her personality /unironicsmugdog

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