Beth

Funny thing though, Reg. Your first post was really readable, pulling the reader into your perspective and quite compelling.

The AI post was boring and skimmable without engaging the reader at all. I’ve rarely seen such a clear example of the gap between human and non human communication.

Thanks, Reg!!

Have a great week!!

I dropped the above last paragraph into an LLM. It returned this:

Here is a revised version that preserves your intent and tone, but sharpens the ontology and removes the last smuggled metaphors of time having “flow”:

The idea of temporal change is an evolved intuition. Human cognitive architecture developed to model the world as three spatial…[Read more]

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

A moment isn’t precious because it will be gone. It’s precious because it is what it is. In the Block Universe, time and eternity are not “things” that can be harmed.

“If there is no fundamental particle… no beginning and no end… there is no reality as we intuit.”

Yes, correct. That is exa…[Read more]

The fox guarding the henhouse and the Great Writ. Yeah, a Republic if you can keep it…..

The paramilitary murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti is exactly what arbitrary force without effective oversight looks like in practice.

Yes, it is all in the data but but the truth is likely more nuanced. States with higher percentages of evangelical Protestants, theists, and biblical literalists tend to have higher overall frequencies of Google searches for the term “porn.”

Similar work connecting religiosity and web searches found a link between state-level religiosity and sea…[Read more]

The rationale switched from Theological irrationality to Pseudoscientific irrationality.

Yes, that is a good point and a good distinction. I agree that Classical liberalism did not generate antisemitism. It was probably a 1,000 years too late for that. Classical liberalism attacked the fusion of church and state and religious privilege or legal…[Read more]

Yikes, here I am, late to the party!

Thanks, Reg!!

Have a great week!!

After WW2 the ideals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sounded good. But ““Lest we forget” implies history contains lessons that we should learn from and  remember past catastrophes to avoid repeating them. But with human nature this always becomes “History is bunk” and the past becomes obsolete noise and only the present matters.…[Read more]

The UN stated out with noble ideals but it has lost a lot of respect. It was never a moral body, just a diplomatic one that existed to keep states talking to each other. We will never get moral clarity out of a system where Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Russia, and liberal democracies all get equal seats at the table. At best we get a consensus of…[Read more]

@Jake  I can’t disagree with any of your comment regarding intelligence, and I particularly like the capitalised Actual Intelligence. Really good food for thought.

Panpsychism is an attempt to avoid “consciousness from nothing” by baking mind-like properties into the foundations of physics. That is almost like an argument for Creationism. For me, consciousness is an emergent property, not a fundamental physical property. It is not present in parts that can be assembled.  In the same way that water mole…[Read more]

Thanks Reg!