shirgall

I know I'm in trouble if people just sift what I've posted here years ago. I hardly ever post here anymore. I don't talk about politics at work most of the time. I made a stink about an acceptable use policy that was imposed on our customers that used the vague term "hate speech" though.

For the most part I don't post anything controversial. Not much to hide when talking about philosophy, history, science, empiricism, voluntarism, and truth.

Doesn't have much to do with the quote you pulled from my post from two and a half years ago.

They're already going after Ted T'so as a "rape apologist" but the theory is they are going after him for refusing to accept a Intel patch that would have substantially reduced entropy in the random number generator. I have to stay far away from this topic in public as I work in this space directly.

While the philosophical version is emergentism, emergence is quite prevalent empirically. Even the classic laws of physics emerge from the observed properties of quantum physics. You mentioned friction, but the property of converting mechanical energy from rubbing things together into kinetic energy, that is heat, is directly related to the underlying structure of the materials being rubbed together, making heat from friction an emergent property.

No, they aren't special. There are emergent properties in all sorts of media.

While I respect consciousness, I don't think it meets any common definition of God, nor does its existence justify any religion that I know of. Instead I attribute it to an emergent property of brain matter and its unique properties of interconnections, information retention, and feedback.

Depends what you mean by God, since there are thousands of mutually exclusive religions. None of them are credible.

Hard to call being skeptical of something that has no evidence a delusion, but since most people come to atheism not from rationality but rather from cultural Marxism, it's easy to tie it to the left.

The current situation was created with massive funding to create a resilient communications network in case of nuclear war. Before Al Gore took the initiative in funding one of the generations of the Internet, that's what we were doing with ARPANet in the 80s, and that's why there was a single namespace for domain naming and a central authority for doling out Internet addresses. But what was funny was that there were many email systems gatewayed together and the need to create blacklists against certain hosts and routes we found to be abusive of the scarce resource of bandwidth. It was always an evolving situation where those with resources to invest primarily being government institutions that needed to share a lot of data or get access to remote computing resources, educational institutions, large commercial business interests, and enthusiasts. Even so, most of the time where bandwidth was plentiful we all implicitly agreed to be gracious in what we accepted and economic in what we sent. That allows us all to make pretty robust systems that gave us what we wanted far more often than giving us exposure to abuse.

The Internet interprets censorship as packet loss and routes around it. Sometimes it costs a lot to build multiple routes, but that's how you make yourself resilient: creating choices.

Any system that can impose obligations without consent has an issue. How it deals with that issue is the interesting part.

There are curated FDR groups on Facebook, Minds, and MeWe.

People are quite capable of recognizing what they are doing is wrong and doing it anyway. Some even expect to be condemned for it. Some erect massive excuses for it. Most are driven by impulse or expediency, though.

Said of the Bible, "This Book is the mind of God, the state of man, the way of salvation, the doom of sinners, and the happiness of believers. Its doctrines are holy, its precepts are binding; its histories are true, and its decisions are immutable." To me, God is (in the) the mind of man, the answer to inscrutable causes, the solace if the misinformed, the excuse of mealy-mouthed manipulators who, despite their best efforts, are unable to degenerate those who are basically good and mindful of their effects on others.

I agree that this particular approach did more to get me off the "rollercoaster" than any other technique.

Arguing with determinists doesn't change anything.

How about this statement? - you had a choice to post on this topic or not

Aren't all systems of belief that require faith for adherence, lack of provision of evidence, and introduce diseases for which only their anointed have cures (at a modest cost) fraudulent?

The biggest lie the devil told is convincing humanity the eggs aren't in control.

Pattern recognition as a survival trait does not prove determinism, it's just evidence that some organisms can recognize patterns. Consistency as a property of recognized pattern does not prove determinism, it's just more evidence that good generalizations about patterns are still good. One does not have to fully understand anything to recognize a pattern or to formulate a plan to exploit a recognized pattern. There's nothing perfect about any of this.

I think the mindset should be a little different. You don't want a housewife, you want the mother of your children. It's not about what she will do for you, it's about what you will accomplish together.

The big holidays around here are still Halloween, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and birthdays. We're just not religious about them.

All of us are standing on the shoulders of those that came before us, who didn't know as much or communicate nearly as well as we can do today. The standard of living of the poor in the United States is better than most of even the richest Americans only a few decades ago. The average level of inflation-adjusted income is greater in even the poorest parts of the world, and the average has increased dramatically in only a few decades. Despite socialist policies that favor fearful compliance over consent, the freer thinkers and workers of the world have been the tide that floated billions of boats where only millions lived in squalor a couple centuries ago.

Unfortunately it has a little bit less peaceful parenting than I'd like. From the section "Minimum Necessary Force"... I'm still reading.