Nerdy Keith
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Reg the Fronkey Farmer replied to the topic Sunday School February 1st 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 2 months, 3 weeks agoI 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]
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Reg the Fronkey Farmer replied to the topic Sunday School February 1st 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 2 months, 3 weeks agoAs 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]
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Reg the Fronkey Farmer replied to the topic Freethinkers Must Be Free Spirits, In My Opinion in the forum Small Talk 2 months, 3 weeks ago
Scientists and mathematicians are trained to follow evidence, yes. But that does not automatically make them the free-est thinkers. In fact, their training often pulls in the opposite direction. Most working scientists spend their careers inside an accepted framework, not questioning it. Richard Feynman was rare not because he was smart, but…[Read more]
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Reg the Fronkey Farmer replied to the topic Freethinkers Must Be Free Spirits, In My Opinion in the forum Small Talk 2 months, 3 weeks ago
A free spirit can be apolitical, impulsive and even intellectually lazy. They can actively advocate for (or against) weed, gay marriage, and abortion. These are positions that are arrived at. How were they reached? Were they inherited from family or from the culture and environment someone grew up in or were they arrived at by not being…[Read more]
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Reg the Fronkey Farmer replied to the topic Sunday School February 1st 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 2 months, 3 weeks agoThe 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.
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Reg the Fronkey Farmer replied to the topic Sunday School February 1st 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 2 months, 3 weeks agoYes, 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]
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Reg the Fronkey Farmer replied to the topic Sunday School January 25th 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 2 months, 4 weeks agoThe 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]
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Reg the Fronkey Farmer replied to the topic Sunday School February 1st 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 3 months agoHave a great week!!
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Reg the Fronkey Farmer replied to the topic Sunday School January 25th 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 3 months agoAfter 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]
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Reg the Fronkey Farmer replied to the topic Sunday School January 25th 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 3 months agoThe 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]
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Reg the Fronkey Farmer replied to the topic You don't need determinism… in the forum Small Talk 3 months, 1 week ago
I am not “me”, an unchanging physical entity. I am a sequence of highly similar spacetime regions whose internal structure overlaps. I once described myself as a “constantly merging shadow copy”. That is I am the person I was yesterday plus some incremental changes. Keep that idea going and each day (or minute, hour) I am a different person.…[Read more]
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Reg the Fronkey Farmer replied to the topic You don't need determinism… in the forum Small Talk 3 months, 1 week ago
Question for block universe supporters. That is definitely me 🙂
We don’t experience “motion through time.” We accumulate records and memories and have stable correlations between them. My brain at one spacetime location contains records of other locations. (The “block” is the four-dimensional spacetime structure). Nothing in block univers…[Read more]
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Reg the Fronkey Farmer replied to the topic Sunday School January 25th 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 3 months, 1 week agoPanpsychism 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]
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Unseen replied to the topic You don't need determinism… in the forum Small Talk 3 months, 1 week ago
Question for block universe supporters. If moving forward through time is an illusion, why can’t we have the illusion of moving backward through time? It should make no difference, right?
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Reg the Fronkey Farmer replied to the topic Sunday School January 25th 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 3 months, 1 week agoHave a great week everyone!
It only took one monkey to create the entire works of Shakespeare. His first name was William. (rtff)
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Reg the Fronkey Farmer replied to the topic Sunday School January 11th 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 3 months, 1 week ago-9F….wow…stay safe and keep warm!!
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Reg the Fronkey Farmer replied to the topic Sunday School January 11th 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 3 months, 1 week agoYou should get to see the Northern Lights this time around – tonight in much of the USA.
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Reg the Fronkey Farmer replied to the topic You don't need determinism… in the forum Small Talk 3 months, 1 week ago
I have so much more to write on this. I will try over the weekend. Just finalizing a project for work tomorrow, so maybe Sunday.
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Reg the Fronkey Farmer replied to the topic You don't need determinism… in the forum Small Talk 3 months, 1 week ago
Some more thoughts……The human concept of Time is difficult to shake off. It feels intuitive but this is only because we feel an innate sense of Time because we have evolved a hard-wired temporal sensitivity. Marking the seasons and changes in the weather helped us survive. We even have a circadian rhythm to a natural light-dark cycle (as do all…[Read more]
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Reg the Fronkey Farmer replied to the topic You don't need determinism… in the forum Small Talk 3 months, 1 week ago
Almost. In the block universe, things absolutely do happen. Stars explode or conversations happen. But these only happen locally (within regions of spacetime). What does not happen is a global update of reality. Another way of putting it (I am also explaining it to myself as I write this) is that nothing happens to the Universe as a whole but…[Read more]
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