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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2024

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  • Subhuman lemmy posters: “We are spending way too much!!! $0.5m on scientific research!!! Outrageous!”

    Me: “Bro we spend billions killing children around the world who tf cares there are other places you should be concerned about budget.”

    Subhuman lemmy posters: “Errrm actually stfu stop bringing that up, we want to cut everything but that!”

    kys you people are freaks, this place is just as bad as reddit, entirely comprised of genocidal US ultranationalist sociopaths. I need to go to a forum that is not English-speaking.


  • Interesting you get downvoted for this when I mocked someone for saying the opposite who claimed that $0.5m was some enormous amount of money we shouldn’t be wasting, and I simply pointed out that we waste literally billions around the world on endless wars killing random people for now reason, so it is silly to come after small bean quantum computing if budgeting is your actual concern. People seemed to really hate me for saying that, or maybe it was because they just actually like wasting moneys on bombs to drop on children and so they want to cut everything but that.



  • Che Guevara wrote about in his book Critical Notes on Political Economy about how workers who are given full autonomy in their enterprises actually can become antagonistic towards society because they benefit solely from their own enterprise succeeding at the expense of all others, and thus they acquire similar motivations to the capitalist class, i.e. they want deregulations, dismantling of the public sector, more power to their individual enterprise, etc.

    The solution is not to abandon workplace democracy but to balance it out also with public democracy. You have enterprises with a board that is both a mixture of direct appointments from the workers at that company with their direct input, as well as appointments by the public sector / central government. The public appointments are necessary to make sure the company is keeping inline with the will of everybody and not merely the people at that specific enterprise, because the actions of that enterprise can and does affect the rest of society.

    Workplaces need to be democratic, but also not autonomous from the democratic will of the rest of society.


  • I define consciousness as the sense that it’s like something to be

    “Like” just means “akin to” and “to be” just means “reality.” I do not see why we would define “consciousness” to be “akin to reality.” Sure, if we define “consciousness” to be akin to reality, then we aren’t going to be able to explain how the brain “gives rise to it,” because you would be demanding that we explain how the brain gives rise to reality, which makes no sense, the brain doesn’t create reality. You could then conclude that consciousness is the basis of reality, but only because you defined it to be reality, not because you would have proved anything particularly interesting.

    that it feels like something from the subjective perspective of an organism

    Why is the perspective of the subject singled out as particularly important? A perspective is just a frame of reference, and you can define a frame of reference in relation to anything, I fail to see why the subject’s would somehow require a special explanation.

    I’d argue it’s the only thing in the universe that cannot be an illusion.

    Obviously reality cannot be an illusion by definition.

    Even if we were living in a simulation where everything was fake, it would still feel like something to be simulated.

    If we were in a simulation, everything would not be “fake,” because the simulation would still be a real part of nature. Reality cannot be fake, that’s a contradiction in terms.

    That’s all there is: the subjective experience of life happening

    Oxford Languages defines “experience” as a noun as “practical contact with” and as a verb “encounter or undergo.” Again, you are singling out the subject as particularly important and not giving a reason as to why. Experience just basically refers to having something happen to something else. A rock can experience erosion in the rain, a thermometer can experience fluctuations in temperature. I can experience a traumatic event, or I can experience some delicious food. I, again, do not see why we should single out the subject as requiring a special explanation.

    There’s no “you” at the center of the experience, no point in your brain where everything comes together and a self resides.

    That’s just how perspectives work broski. If you have a beaker filled with a substance and you want to measure just the mass of the substance, you can place the beaker on the scale first while it is empty and then tare the scale, and then put the substance in the beaker and you will get the mass of just the substance on its own. That is because you are centering the coordinate system, the reference frame, upon the beaker, so it acts as the zero-point of the system, and effectively disappears from the picture.

    As another analogy, consider two billiard balls colliding with each other in empty space and then bouncing off of each other. Conceiving of this only makes sense from the reference frame of a third system, because if you adopt the reference frame of one of the two billiard balls, then its position would always be 0, and thus could not change, and thus its velocity could not change, either, it would always be 0. from the reference frame of one of the two billiard balls, it is not moving at all, and it is solely the other one that comes towards it and bounces off of it. Because it is not moving, its velocity cannot be changed either as a result of the collision, only the other ball’s velocity can be changed.

    The object chosen as the basis of the reference frame effectively disappears from the picture by being used as the zero-point of the system. The fact it disappears means it can no longer “interact” with anything either, because its properties cannot ever be altered. From the perspective of a third observer, you can see that the reason I see a tree is because the light from the tree is interacting with my eyeballs. But from my own perspective, I cannot see my own eyeball, because it is the zero-point of the system and thus effectively has no properties. All I see is the tree on its own. Whatever system is being used as the basis of your coordinate system can never participate in an interaction, it cannot even have properties at all, except through reflection.

    The feeling of self is just an appearance within the prior condition of consciousness.

    Self-hood is a very different thing than what you have talked thus far. The self is something derived a posteriori through reflection, and is essential to our mental models of how the world works.





  • i use one of those trackball mice with the ball on top. first time i tried it i never went back, no need to worry about having a proper surface or desk space for a mouse ever again. if you reach the side of your desk using an optical mouse, you have to pick the mouse up and move it all the way to the other side of the desk, while is a proper ball mouse (a good one without too much resistance) when you flick the ball it can continue spinning a bit even as you release it, so you can flick it to the side and then bend your wrist slightly to then flick it again, and the mouse cursor will just continue moving without stopping, which in games you can do this to have endless turning around, when turning is always stuttery on an optical mouse due to hitting the end of the desk. it takes a little bit to get used to, but at least a good one with limited resistance and a large ball, you can easily get just as accurate as an optical mouse as well. the only downside i find is that i do have to take the trackball out and clean it like the ones on the bottom.






  • bunchberry@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonethey were buddies rule
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    2 months ago

    That’s not how political parties work, though. Political parties are largely ideological institutions, they exist first and foremost not to win elections but to propagate an ideology, and winning the election is just a sign that they succeeded in their goal of convincing people of their ideology, and so now enough people agree that it can take root in the state. When political parties lose, it’s very rare that they will interpret their loss as “we need to abandon all our values to match the opinion polls.” No, they interpret their loss as meaning they failed in their goal of convincing people of their values, and thus should change their strategy of their out-reach, not changing their whole ideological position.

    Democrats going against the rich elites would be an abandonment of their party’s values and everything they stand for. In most countries, if you dislike the ideology of a party, you vote for someone else. The party itself has no obligation to change its entire ideology for you, such a thing very rarely occurs. If that was the case, then every political party would all have the exact same position, just all copy/pastes of whatever the opinion polls say.

    I keep seeing all this bizarre rhetoric about how if the Democrats were “smart” they would just abandon their whole party’s platform and adopt some other platform, but this makes zero sense, because you have to consider motivation. Their motivation is not to just win the election, but to convince you of their ideology, and abandoning their ideology does not achieve this. Democrats are not stupid, they just don’t have the same motivations as you. Yes, they want to win, but they ultimately want to win on their platform, not on someone else’s platform.

    That’s how political parties work. They have a platform, and the platform is paramount. If a green party adopted all pro-coal and pro-oil lobby positions just to win an election, that would not be a “smart” decision for them, because, even if it leads to their victory, it still is an abandonment of their ideology. Democrats are unabashedly a pro-rich elite party, it should not be smart for them to become anti-elite, because it is not aligned with their motivations.


  • bunchberry@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRule medication
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    2 months ago

    Yes, it’s ultimately a cautionary tale as to why social democracy is unsustainable, as it is just the implementation of social policies while maintaining capitalist hegemony. There is no such thing as a benevolent oligarch. Capitalists have utilitarian reasons to implement pro-worker social policies, and it’s usually to reduce unrest or increase productivity. The moment those reasons no longer become relevant, they will begin to dismantle it. Much of western Europe in general right now is suffering from nonstop austerity for a long time now.


  • bunchberry@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneCaptcha rule
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    2 months ago

    Bell’s theorem demonstrates that you cannot have a deterministic theory that would also be Lorentz invariant, that is to say, compatible with special relativity and the speed of light limit. The speed of light limit is very well tested over and over again, and no one to this day has ever been able to construct even a single mathematical model that could even approximately reconstruct the predictions of quantum field theory in a way that is deterministic. That suggests that any deterministic theory would actually make quantifiably different predictions than quantum field theory, and yet we don’t have any evidence that its predictions are violated, and quantum field theory is verified to 12 decimal places of precision.

    I don’t really understand your point about the dice. If you have two “quantum” dice that are exactly the same, they are not guaranteed to land on the same thing, and that is precisely what it means to be nondeterministic, that even if all the initial conditions are the same, the outcome can be different. Yes, we cannot make the whole universe the same throughout the experiment, but to make sense of this, you cannot speak in vague philosophy but need to actually specify in mathematical terms what parts of the universe you think are determining the outcome, which, again, any attempt to specify such a thing would require contradicting the predictions of quantum field theory.

    My issue with your argument is that, whether or not you intended this or not, what you are undeniably arguing is that all our current physical theories are currently wrong and making the wrong predictions, and they need to be adjusted to make the right predictions, and you are basing this off of what is ultimately a philosophical criticism, i.e. that it is not deterministic and you think it should be, without even having a viable model of what this determinism would look like. It just seems far too speculative to me.

    Yes, you can always make the argument that “our old theories have been proven wrong before, like Newton’s gravity was replaced with Einstein’s gravity, so we shouldn’t put much stock into our current theories,” but I just find this unconvincing, as you can make this argument in literally any era, and thus it completely negates the possibility of using science to understand the properties of nature. Every scientific theory would have to always be interpreted as just something tentative that can’t tell us anything about nature, because it’s bound to be replaced later, and instead we’re just left arguing vague philosophy not based on anything empirical.

    I will readily admit that if I base my understanding of reality on our best physical sciences of the era, those can be overturned and I could be shown to be wrong. However, I still find it to be the most reasonable position as opposed to trying to “intuit” our way to an understanding of nature. The person who strongly defended the Newtonian picture of nature prior to Einstein was later shown to be wrong, yes, but he was still far more correct than the majority of those who insisted upon trying to derive an understanding of nature entirely from intuition/philosophy. I am with Heisenberg who argued that until we actually have any experimental evidence that violates the predictions of quantum field theory and can only be corrected with the introduction of hidden variables, then positing their existence is pointless metaphysical speculation, not derived from anything empirical.



  • bunchberry@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlForgot the disclaimer
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    2 months ago

    Ah yes, crying about “privilege” while you’re here demanding that people shouldn’t speak out against a literal modern day holocaust at the only time when they have the political power to make some sort of difference. Yeah, it’s totally those people who are “privileged” and not your white pasty ass who doesn’t have to worry about their extended family being slaughtered.