iNow

I heard she was going to volunteer at the local food pantry in her post working years and help to feed all of the children and mothers starving and suffering as a result of her reign. #theproblemofevil

Yet again, you are either unwilling or unable to answer my question directly. Why is that? It was a genuine question. I understand if it makes you uncomfortable, but that makes it no less valid nor no less deserving of a thoughtful response. Will you please help me better understand your position? That's all I'm trying to do here, is understand you better. Why does it matter whether we call ourselves spectators versus actors if nothing changes by doing so? In what ways do you believe they are different (in context of my position that it all occurs before conscious awareness / before the parts of our minds usually considered as "self")? Okay, now you're just being childish and silly. Of course I have more to learn, as do we all, but to suggest I don't understand our minds at all is borderline ad hominem, and 100% untrue. And my question to you is: HOW do you know this? You keep claiming it, yet have not even once explained. Or is it because I've challenged your worldview and you're uncomfortable considering different viewpoints? If I truly make "no sense at all" for you, then ask me to clarify my stance so you may better understand it. Don't run away like a child.

The "good guys" are definitely being drowned out by noise. No doubt there, but there are absolutely "bad guys" involved too, and it's not just on a single side.

Why does it matter if in the end it changes nothing? If the experience is exactly the same, who cares? We’re following the same “software” as we always have, it’s just now we understand it more completely. What makes you think there is any other possibility?

Only up until some threshold, though. The return on the gain follows an inverted U-shape as wages grow progressively higher. Workers can also be motivated to work harder via cattle prods or at the tip of a gun, but that obviously decreases morale.

Why, though? If, as you say, you’re “sure of very strong, total, absolute determinism,” are you not better described as a passenger than as a driver? Just trying to better understand you, yet you deflect my questions with irrelevant new questions back to me. Now I’m really confused… which is it? Are you sure of total absolute determinism or is the future not predetermined? Unless I’m missing something obvious, these two positions cannot both be simultaneously true. My experience, just like your experience and the experience of all others, varies and it is contingent upon the current configuration of the universe… with a special focus on the current configuration of me with all my bits and microbiota in my belly and bacteria being attacked by my immune system and whatever bad air I may be breathing or beautiful vistas I may be viewing… all of which contribute to my evolving neural aggregate… my experience in the present moment: iNow’s MyNow I don’t know what this means.

Ford and GM will also be / already are blaming this for their decision last week to pull back from expensive EV vehicle transition efforts.

Given this, in your opinion, why isn’t “spectator” an accurate description of our experience?

Remind me, when was that last election again?

I urge caution against painting everyone with the same one broad brush. We can agree on several problematic policies, but one of the problems we’re confronting right now is the need not to lose sight of the humanity of each individual involved. I’m sure you agree that many Israeli's find the idea of “ethnically cleansing the area” to be abhorrent.

Time began at the Big Bang. There was no “before” the Big Bang any more than anything can be farther north than the North Pole.

I’d wager an annual salary this is wrong, especially once AI is running on quantum computers, but that’s off-topic here. +1 for an otherwise good post

El-Sisi may have something to say about that

I’m curious whether you simply can’t answer, or if instead your existing narratives and baseline understanding of the workings of your mind has been challenged so deeply that you simply won’t or are too afraid to.

Regular exercise and good sleep are pretty universally good for our minds.

Depends on which narrative arrives that day, but it’s always just a narrative. Exactly Once more:

Vehicle in background should be a raised pickup with knob tires filthy from a recent muddin trip

How can you be so certain? But those cogitations seem to be pre-conscious, too. In short, you appear to be asserting a distinction without a difference.

We agree. Decline occurs and generally quite rapidly as we age. I’m still thankful given the current happenings in the world that he’s the one helping us navigate it. He knows how this works and better than most.

The trust scientists receive is precisely because they're willing to abandon past beliefs in the face of new evidence, and to ensure hypotheses map to our experiences in the world regardless of what we'd prefer to be true / regardless of what we want to be true. Your own example confirms this. We once believed in geocentric universe, but updated that to heliocentrism when new data arrived. Is that not a good thing, to update our thinking as we learn more? What point are you attempting to make, exactly?

What does it mean to "make a choice?" Are you not always acting on the conditions present in your neurobiology, based on the chemical inputs and signals which arrive prior to any conscious awareness or involvement from the parts of the brain commonly referred to as "self?"

No such condition is possible in our universe. Conditions are always present. Exactly, hence the previous comment is moot.

It's not necessarily more "free," but we do tend to feel better about our choice when it was made from a limited set of options. We're also less likely to be overcome by a "paralysis through analysis" when fewer options are presented. Relative value is the core point here. We seem to perform a relative value comparison across the options available before us, and when there are too many options we often feel regret that the one we selected may not have been the best fit... that we perhaps failed to maximize our return. We seem to fear that a different option may have had a higher marginal benefit / return to us, and the probability that we didn't maximize the benefit of our selection is higher when the set of options is higher. If you buy a hot dog at the baseball game, and the concession stand has 16 toppings (ketchup, BBQ sauce, relish, onions, chili, yellow mustard, dijon mustard, spicy mustard, horseradish mustard, stone ground mustard, etc.), you tend to enjoy your selection less for fear that a different combo may have been better. If we instead got a stand with only 3 toppings (ketchup, yellow mustard, and relish), then we feel far better about the selection since it's so much more obvious it was the best one available to us). The idea here is that with a smaller set of options, the selection we make is MORE likely to be better than the other available peers in the group, thus we generally feel better about it and more confident it was the correct one (we paradoxically doubt ourselves much less and feel remorse far less often in these circumstance of fewer choices, even though one would intuitively think more options are better). Not really related to free will though, IMO. The decision still occurs before we even realize it was a decision.

More precisely, the "language," the "rationalization," and the "choice/decision" are all also chemo-electrically done and it happens in areas of the brain which come BEFORE conscious awareness / BEFORE the areas normally considered "self" in our own minds eye. I understand, which is why I keep reminding you of the importance of not making too many uninformed assertions about it. This is another example of a post-dictive narrative that you are telling yourself, but it does not accurately map on to the way it actually occurred in your wet meat computer (aka: brain and nervous system).

As in... once an object crosses the event horizon, it's light can no longer escape gravity and thus can no longer reach us as the distant observer. For that reason, the object appears "frozen" and stuck still to us at the location immediately prior to event horizon crossing.