Simon Paynton

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
It is not ‘conscious”.

Good point.

Unseen wrote:
I think AI is already doing research to answer questions I ask.

That’s the point I’m making.  You have to ask the questions.  AI doesn’t know what to ask.

AI is good at summarising information, apparently.  But can it do research – does it know where to look for new information?  Can it ask the right questions?  Does it know that it doesn’t know?

_Robert_ wrote:
You can do better with facts than that, Simon.

I know, but it’s so intricate, it’s hard to keep track of.

The Jewish people were looking for a state and a homeland – as are the Palestinians.  They have the homeland without the state.  It seems like the Palestinians are being used as footballs by all sides.

A middle-Eastern homeland and state for a middle-Eastern people seems like a reasonable idea in principle, for both sides.

Unseen wrote:
Clearly, that’s a roundabout nonsensical way of admitting that it’s likely the world would be a safer place. Thank you for your honesty. BTW, I’m not for abandoning Israel, but we need to be able to tell it forcibly on occasion that we aren’t backing it’s actions.

But surely it has a legitimate right to be there in the first place.

Unseen wrote:
Atheists don’t see suicide as sinful or an instance of sloth. They may not feel, in some instances, that it’s anyone else’s business.

You may be right.  I wonder what the suicide rate is among the religious, who presumably see it as a sin.

In Switzerland, Spoerri et al. used census data (3.7 million adults) and death certif…

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Would you say that there’s something in atheism that makes people want to kill themselves?  I don’t think there is, and I’ve never heard of that before.  Atheism makes people want to celebrate life and make the most of it.

Maybe suicidal people gravitate towards it as a nihilistic position.

I saw on Facebook recently that some people say that atheists are more likely to commit suicide than other groups.  I don’t know if that’s true or not.  If it is, then it could be for a number of reasons.  Atheism is a nihilistic position in that, simplistically, it’s the “worship of nothing”.  However, that’s for people who over-think thi…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
If the universe isn’t eternal, than the universe itself is wasted along with everything that was once in it.

Wasted for whom?  There’s nothing to feel a sense of waste.  You could say it’s the existential dilemma of the atheist: uncomfortable impermanence vs. the comfortable eternity of the religious.

The only sense of waste is tha…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
How to deal with it indeed.

I think the only thing to do is to live a good life: authentic and compassionate.  Then, at least it’s not wasted.  There is no cosmic significance of anything.  The point is, what’s it like for you?

Everything passes, everything comes to an end, all is temporary, all is change.  How to deal with it?

Digital files are as fragile as the physical medium they’re on.  I’ve lost loads of stuff over the years from hard drives going down.  Vinyl lasts forever if it’s well looked after.

Yes, but it’s still on the internet, therefore it’s not lost.  If something is not on the internet then it’s really lost, until it is posted.

I like collecting DJ sets from European DJs, and they go offline within a little while, but there are some gems on there.  So I keep them and take the best bits and make mixtapes out of them which say w…[Read more]