John BS @johnabs@social.cleverlibre.org

@barefootstache As much as you probably don't want the input; can I recommend doom-emacs over neovim? As a former Vim diehard, I have to say it's pretty comfy.

Just a suggestion :3

@freemo @trinsec @Pat ...No comment 😂

@trinsec @Pat @freemo As a facial recognition expert, it appears to be the sign of relief after a particularly severe bout of constipation has been surprisingly alleviated by an equally surprisingly painless treatment. (If only a German was here to christen my description with a ridiculously long compound word.)

Imagine it: you haven't pooped in a week and a half, you're bloated and miserable. Suddenly, after enjoying a delicious, laxative-laced stroopwafel, a stirring in your bowels begins that begets the smoothest pooping experience of your existence: a perfect log, a single clean wipe, and a feeling of contented ease unrivaled by anything you have or will ever experience. It's bittersweet, as you know it's all downhill from here.

It is **this** feeling of completely unexpected joy caused by the reversal of a (pun-intended) crappy experience by a stupid simple method, that I believe we are observing here. Truly, this expression exemplifies these circumstances, and only a few will have the joy of experiencing it for themselves.

P.S. In case it was non-obvious, the poop thing is just an (albeit gross) illustrative metaphor for the emotions behind the expression 😂

Get ready to feel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mM-bp5PB34

Does anyone else feel alienated in their own culture? I often feel like a foreigner in my own country, and have felt more at home abroad, which isn't my favorite thing to deal with.

@jmw150
Why not something like (st)ensors? XD

@trinsec @barefootstache Hey, if quoting Than- I mean Margaret Thatcher is wrong, I don't wanna be right XD

@trinsec @barefootstache "A small price to pay for salvation" - Margaret Thatcher, 200 B.C.

@trinsec Oh please, Stirling engines are maximally efficient, and so are the dutch! It's not a massive leap to expect y'all had access to them since the stone age

@trinsec Nonono, your pre-windmill construction rely on stirling engines to keep the builders cool. Otherwise they'd roast! But once the windmill is built, you no longer need the engines...I think. Now that i think of it, shouldn't you be the one telling me how this works?

@trinsec Your people have done it this way for generations: start small with the smallest prebuilt Stirling engine you have left over from your last windmill build. If you got rid of this, now you learned your lesson: always keep at least one Carnot efficient heat engine on hand for days like these.

Put it in the sun, with the bottom in a nice stream or canal, and attach a small fanblade or hand held spinner toy to get a *slight* breeze to cool you down. With this marginal improvement, build a slightly larger one to get another marginal improvement. Repeat until your large windmill is crafted, and this time don't throw away your leftover engines!

@trinsec Hmm, I don't think you're doing it right...Wait, you're dutch, just go build a windmill to keep yourself cool! I daresay...my genius is sometimes frightening 😂

@trinsec Have you tried multiple feet, perhaps hands as well? Maybe the parity of limbs has something to do with thermoception xD

@trinsec "This game isn't good, but I'm going to 100% it anyway".

The curse of any or all of the following:
a) the completionist
b) the frugal or
c) the sunk cost fallacy 😂

@Pat @freemo

I appreciate your careful consideration of many of my questions, but I'm still concerned about a few of the points you bring up. Also, I'm just going to ignore the whole multiverse thing, since we have no evidence of any other universe existing than our own.

> It is wrong to harm someone even if they are not human.

Does that mean insects and cows qualify as "someones"? (See the next part for a followup).

> Regan uses the criteria of whether an individual experiences a subjective life or not (among many other criterion). He calls it “subject-of-a-life”. I think intrinsic value can be derived from that.

I can't prove anyone other than myself actually has this subjective experience though. Philosophically, everyone I interact with could be an automata, and I would have no way of knowing, which would make me the only "someone" in the universe. Hence, we have to assume not only that other humans, but all other (sufficiently complex?) creatures have this experience to determine whether or not they are valuable. This then leads to "what is sufficiently complex" to even warrant this consideration?

This is not evidence based, but an assumption about the nature of reality that is not provable. In fact, this opinion could be considered counter to the evidence, considering how many scientists/philosophers ignore the idea of a metaphysical self or free-will entirely. In that case, we truly are just automata, our sense of self/free-will is an illusion, and we're back to the whole "no intrinsic value" problem as there is no self in which to refer.

> "If life has no meaning and someone only cares about themselves, they’re not going to be reading this book anyway, or even considering the question."

But here is where the crux of my argument lies. By skipping over this question and just assuming its validity, we leave the door open for this assumption to be challenged, which, when successfully done, will just blow apart the rest of the remainder of the well crafted arguments the book is based upon. I agree with his premise, but without an objective moral reference point, we have no way of supporting it.

> Fortunately, many of these questions, like nihilism and existentialism, don’t need to be resolved to come up with a law addressing abortion.

I agree that many of these questions don't need to be answered to legislate; however, I think it's foolish (not you) to believe that all current legislation actually follows anything remotely resembling moral principles, which is another problem. I do think, though, that good laws are important, and good laws must rely on good moral principles, so I think we do need an answer, so long as we want to achieve something positive in our legal system.

> So I think a consensus, or at least a substantial majority can be reached on the question either way.

Finally, I think we would likely agree that consensus isn't truth, particularly when it comes to scientific inquiry, so why does it suddenly become sufficient with respect to making (possibly) life and death decisions about morality? Like slavery, for example, was practiced by everyone in the world for a very, very long time. That didn't make it morally reasonable though, despite the nearly universal consensus.

@Bro-Drillard @cirnog @freemo @Pat Even more puzzling, why does the universe obey natural laws at all? If it didn't, mathematics wouldn't work, as the assumption that the past, and the future will behave similarly wouldn't hold. But since it does, math works.

@cirnog @freemo @Pat First of all "armpit" 😂

Secondly, I think that's a dangerously large jump. I could make up an arbitrary response to any of those tough questions and call it a day as long as I can get people to believe it (Scientology anybody?), so there must be some set of criteria by which we judge the religion's explanation, and at least in certain instances, we can do this when they make claims about the material world that do not bear out (e.g. the "scientific miracles of the Quaran" which don't really exist). In other cases, we can evaluate how they align with our experiences, such as the distinction between Buddhism's desire to eliminate want and attachment vs other religions that view material wealth as a gift to be enjoyed and well used in the service of our family and others.

I agree that materialism is insufficient, but really only in the "meaning/purpose" category. Other than that, it's been pretty spot on for the last 500ish years, and all the way back to the Greeks and Mesopotamians even.

@Pat @freemo This is certainly an interesting argument I've not heard before; however, we must consider that science is poorly equipped to determine morality, as per the "is-ought" distinction. Science can only tell us what "is" not what "ought" to be in a moral sense, and in that case, we must accept some other axiomatic framework to impose the oughts onto what is.

I think this inevitably falls to religion, as without transcendent meaning ascribed to the universe, we're sort of stuck: if we reduce our moral understanding to sole materialism, it's trivial to make the case that nobody has rights or value period. We are simply pockets of relatively low entropy moving toward steady state in a cold, uncaring universe with no purpose. Good luck pulling anything resembling human (or otherwise) rights out of that hat. (And then, of course, we must determine *which* religion, if we go this route, but that's a different discussion entirely).

But moving forward from the top of your argument, first of all, how do we define harm? Is it through inflicting stimuli that trigger nociception? If so, does that mean giving someone food with capsaicin has caused them harm, even if they requested it? Is it through causing fear? Does that make horror movies harmful? Is it through the termination of the existence of that "thing", whatever it may be? And going back to the whole materialism argument, why are any of these actions morally objectionable in such a universe? If I can kill a bug, or a cow, etc, why does killing a person matter? They're simply creatures with different genomes after all.

Secondly, in what cases is it reasonable to cause harm to human/non-human entities? In the human case, we can rely on the natural rights philosophy, in that I can only violate your rights if you are actively seeking to violate mine. This is because if we all have equal intrinsic value, your rights and my rights are also equal at each level of the hierarchy of rights. But this presupposes the idea of inherent value which is deserving of protection, which can't be found in a gene sequence or with a brain scan. Even worse, how does this apply across species (or does it at all)?

Finally, if we only consider human morality as it relates to other humans (as a convenience to ignore possible futures for now, we can deal with them as they arise) we still have the issue of deciding which humans to protect and which to discard as medical waste. From your argument, this is determined based on harm; however, can you say I've truly harmed someone by ending their life while they're unconscious? Does that make killing people in their sleep acceptable? Or better yet, if they were simply unaware I was slowly suffocating them with nitrogen, so they got sleepy and took a nap they never woke up from, did I cause harm then? If so, it was only in the last sense of the word mentioned earlier: terminating their existence, but it was done in the most peaceful, painless way possible. And since this outcome was inevitable anyway, and we don't have evidence-based intrinsic meaning, how can it be definitively proven wrong?

I'll certainly check out your suggested readings, but color me skeptical at the outset. Regardless though, I think we should err on the side of caution, rather than assuming potentially bad ideas are correct because some experts believe them (like doctors thinking babies don't feeling pain while being circumcised...no idea how they came to that conclusion, they literally faint from the pain). Anyhow, thanks for the discussion and reading material :3

Also, what does 2that mean?

@Pat @freemo I'm gonna take a somewhat contrary opinion here, at least on the definition of person-hood (totally agree the supreme court is an absolute nightmare for loads of reasons which freemo may or may not remember from one of my earlier posts).

Why should the definition of person-hood be based on anything other than our shared human nature? I've never seen this question answered well. How can we justify basing it on a (possibly mutable) list of criteria which could be used to justify stripping other individuals of their rights/legal protections?

It seems to me that the only reasonable definition of person, is that all humans are persons by default. Thus, it stands even unborn humans are persons. If we abandon this notion of universal person-hood, does that not allow the justification of all sorts of evils we've witnessed in the past? Blacks weren't persons, nor were slaves of any race, Jews, Roma, disabled, LGBT, etc. just pick a regime and you'll find places where certain characteristics were used to exclude people from their rights. It seems the unborn are the excluded group du jour, but why is this any more justifiable than the previous alternatives?

This is the problem I have with the current perspective on abortion: mainly, it seems to ignore the actual moral dilemma and seeks to reason from desired effect to cause, rather than from moral principle to outcome. That is, "we want full bodily autonomy for women, thus we can ignore the humanity of the children they're carrying" instead of "all humans have inherent worth and value, so despite the unfortunate circumstances, taking this human's life is still unacceptable, and we will provide assistance/alternative options to prevent further unwanted pregnancies and help new mothers raise/adopt their children". While I understand the whole "helping people with government programs" thing isn't super big on the republican priority list, I think this is where some bipartisanship can help people in the trigger-law states who no longer have access to abortions be better able to care for their children.

Don't get me wrong, I think there are loads of cases when any empathetic individual could reason that an abortion would be beneficial to the mother. However too much empathy can be just as bad as too little. If we strip the weakest and least defensible among us of their most foundational natural right (i.e. life), can we not justify similar abuses to others? What then? What prevents the powerful from restricting person-hood such that it loses all meaning, thus returning us to the time when only the ethnic majority, wealthy, males are the only "people" in society?

While that last bit may seem like a slippery slope, I posit it's the logical conclusion of allowing person-hood to be arbitrarily restricted: i.e. powerful people will make the weaker people defenseless, and I think it may set a dangerous precedent. What do y'all think?

A project well outside my comfort zone that I did for a class is going through peer review!

Inspired by my lovely wife, and my own fascination with optimizing workflows, a collaborator and I performed a comprehensive literature survey to determine what work has been done using brain/human computer interfaces and neuroergonomic frameworks to improve design inclusivity for neurodivergent individuals.

Once it's published, I'll share a link here, after all I probably shouldn't be posting spoilers before it's accepted ;)