Well heck, that really is a much better retort. Well said.

Enjoy your sense of smug superiority, I guess…?

At the risk of sounding like the kind of edgelord I was calling out initially: Who?

No, seriously, that show was off the air before I was born. I only know what you’re talking about because of this cliche’d line, I’ve never seen the show or anything. Has there really not been anything in the 23 years since they bulldozed his neighborhood that is wholesome enough to guilt me with? Has society really stagnated that much? Is your sense of decorum only anchored by a largely forgotten children’s television show?

And we’re all very impressed.

Between the teargas and the smoke from trump’s cuts to the forestry service I used to just have a couple in my glovebox.

Seriously. “Why do you own all these gasmasks???” my mother asks, somehow forgetting the several consecutive years where trump’s thugs were regularly gassing me & all of my friends…

“Please stare into the spiral, sir”

Edit: Of fucking course there’s already porn of this.

Not amazed, just depressed.

The whine I’ve been seeing the most is that the moderators shouldn’t be able to “crusade” or “fact check” they should just be there to do their job, and trump shouldn’t agree to another debate unless there will be no fact checking.

Yeah, and somehow they think that will reflect positively on them.

Confirmed. Holy shit.

https://www.instagram.com/p/C_wtAOKOW1z/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading

At least she took advantage of the lax enforcement herself several times, which was nice to see. Fucking hell though…

Well. At least we didn’t have to worry about that.

I want a source, not because I doubt you but because I desperately need something to distract me from the stress of this political cycle and that sounds fucking hilarious to read about.

Haven’t been thrown out of enough ambulances.

I get the impression you don’t think this was a good thing to have done, hence the interrogation?

Not very satisfying answers I’m afraid, they were probably 8-10 and I have no idea how we got onto the topic since this was 15+ years ago.

They were actually pretty grateful, feeling it had set them up for a lot of positive realizations down the line. We play D&D now and they’re working on their masters, so I guess they weren’t too badly scarred…

I had a former summer camp kid come up and credit me with having given them their “first existential crisis” (for explaining that when you die, “you just cease”) which I am proud of.

(I am absolutely going to steal the Principle of Objective Things in Space, that’s wonderful.)

There’s a drive philosophers have, to question why things are the way they are, through a very specific lens. Why is it wrong to push a fat man onto the trolley tracks, if his death would save six others? Why is there a difference between the perception of the shadows and the perception of the man with the shadow puppets? Does free will exist, and why does that matter?

These are all the pursuit of meaning, and while they are noble and important questions to ask, they are not questions driven by the pursuit of understanding. Philosophy depends on assumptions about the world that are taken to be incontrovertible, and bases it’s conclusions from there. The capacity for choice is a classic example, as is the assumption of a causal universe, and though they’re quite reasonable things to assume in most cases, it can get mind-bleedingly aggravating when philosophers apply the same approach to pure fields like mathematics, which require rigorous establishment of assumptions before any valid value of truth can be derived.

Which is not to attack philosophers. I want to be clear about that, I bring this up just to emphasize that there are differences in thought between the two disciplines (that occasionally those differences in thought make me want to brain them with a chair is unrelated to the topic at hand). The philosophical study and speculation as to and on the nature of consciousness is perhaps the single oldest field of inquiry humanity has. And while the debate has raged for literal ages, we haven’t really gotten anywhere with it.

And then, recently, scientists (especially computer scientists, but many other fields as well) have shown up and gone “hey look, we can see what the brain looks like, we know how the discrete parts work, we can even simulate it! Look, we’ve got the behavior right here, and… well, maybe… when we get right down to it, it’s just not all that deep?” And philosophers have embraced this, enfolded it into their considerations, accepted it as valid work… and then kept right on asking the exact same questions.

The truth is, as I’ve been able to study it, that ‘consciousness’ is a meaningless term. We haven’t been able to define it for ten thousand years of sitting around stroking our beards, because it’s posited on assumptions that turn out to be, fundamentally, meaningless. It’s assumed there is another layer of abstraction, or that there’s a point or meaning to consciousness, or anything within the Theory of Mind. And I think it’s just too hard to accept that, maybe, it all… doesn’t matter. That we haven’t found any answers not because the question is somehow unanswerable, but because the question was asked in a context that invalidates the entire premise. It’s the philosophical equivalence of ‘null’.

Sufficiently complex networks can compute and self reference, and it turns out when you do that enough, it’ll start referencing The Self (or whatever you’d like to call it). There’s no deeper meaning, or hidden truth. There’s just that, on a machine, a simulation can be run that can think about itself.

Everything else is just… ontological window dressing. Syntactic sugar for the teenage soul.

Can’t, but I suspect not for the reason you’re hoping. The consensus, at least among computational neurologists (the field that, among other things, studies how brains work mathematically), is that “consciousness” as a concrete thing isn’t really… real. It’s just a term humans created to loosely describe a phenomenon that arises from any sufficiently complex well-ordered network. If you want to know what it really looks like, you can run your own OpenWorm robot! The human ‘mind’ looks just like that, only around a dozen orders of magnitude more complex.

The problem is that you’re asking mostly meaningless questions. Even the loose definitions of consciousness aren’t definable to the ‘atomic level’ - a mind is a mathematical construct. It’s like asking where the files on your computer live; I can point to the sectors of the harddrive where a program is encoded, or even hand you a really really massive stack of punched tape, but neither of those actually are the computer program. What we call the program is the interaction of a grammar consisting of logical rules and constants running within the linguistic and computational context of an automata. It’s the same as with a mind - it’s the abstract state of an unfathomably complex machine.