TheEncogitationer wrote:
Chimp ‘civil war’ breaks out between 200 great apes

I’m not sure it’s all that surprising.  The group got big and split into two.  Now, they do what chimps do and the two groups are fighting each other.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Since the Dobbs decision, Christians are becoming more aggressive.

I think “aggressive” sums up MAGA in general.  Aggressively stupid, aggressively selfish, aggressively unaccountable.  There was one on the radio today claiming that the Christian God is a God of war.  They’re aggressive.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
What do Americans consider immoral? (turning left on red is not there).

This is very interesting.  “Marital infidelity” is way out in front by miles, with only 2% finding it morally acceptable.  That’s the only one that is on my list of evolved “moral domains” – sexual pair-bonding.  It would be interesting to see ho…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
If Lefty ideologue listens what does she say in response to this Iranian?

That video is from a UK “right wing dingbat” channel like Fox News: it’s an outrage machine.

“When we read Apollonius’ biography…[Read more]

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a70223461/constant-universe-time/

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
How do some people go against the moral grain?

The article talks about wanting to please a “moral audience”, and this could be one way that we choose our moral principles.  Maybe this is true.  What about an audience of one – me?

I think this comes down to “subjective endorsement” – i.e., moral principles carry n…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
Only men. Women get a pass? Chimps, Kangaroos? Same deal?

“Men” = “people”.  We’re all men.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Do you see “now” as a real moving present sweeping along the line or a a point of access within a fixed structure.

I understand it to mean “now” is local to you. But that doesn’t mean it moves. It just means your current brain state only has access to one region of your worldline. “Now” is real as perspective b…

[Read more]

TheEncogitationer wrote:
In all fairness, any prediction could be considered true if the prognosticator talks nebulously enough, moves the goalposts, and, above all, talks a lot. Astrologers, psychics, and self-proclaimed “prophets” do it all the time.

They could, and they do, but this was different.  She went around telling people their futu…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
“Now” is not a universal property spread across space. The universe doesn’t care where the time zone line is drawn. Only humans do. Our segmentation of our experience of time flow is just a convention. The feeling that clock time reflects a moving reality is mistaken.

OK, true, the clock isn’t evidence of anyth…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
So yes, we do experience a “present” but not “now”. Experience is a perspective from one region of spacetime, not evidence that reality contains a moving “now”. A camera records one frame at a time, but the film does not move through the camera — the whole reel exists.

I don’t know what it proves.  I’m not saying it…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
In spacetime, an object is not a 3D thing that moves. It is a 4D curve or a “worldline”. From my birth to my death, I am not “an entity” or dot moving through time. I am an extended 4D structure. Think of a thread woven though spacetime. (Or as I called myself previously – I am an ontic worm).

Yes, but you only expe…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Modern physics does not operate with any variable for time = flow. No equation contains a term to describe ‘time is moving’. Relativity explicitly forbids universal flow as different observers in different locations disagree on temporal ordering.

Is this not “argument from ignorance”?  We can’t explain it, ther…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
I needed to stop confusing time passing with time as a coordinate 🙂

Yes, but the coordinate keeps changing as time passes.  Or, as you pass time.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Do we cooperate or compete to survive?

It’s interesting to think about the conditions where it’s optimal for the individual to cooperate, or to compete.  As a species, it’s necessary to cooperate to survive.  As individuals, it’s sometimes optimal to cheat.

loganharris wrote:
To Sammy, we were too dim to realize that organized religion had evolved for a reason, and to oppose it so much was a character flaw.

Even if it was for worthy goals, there are other ways of achieving those worthy goals, and we don’t have to use religion.  Unless one of those goals is “worshiping God”, in which case you’re…[Read more]

loganharris wrote:
To Sammy, we were too dim to realize that organized religion had evolved for a reason, and to oppose it so much was a character flaw.

But everything happens for a reason.  That’s a dumb reason to follow religion.  It evolved for all kinds of reasons and purposes.  So what?

The fr…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
Don’t knock sexual repression. It is great for creating teenage and early twenties suicide bombers.

It’s worst in highly patriarchal countries, where the rich men hoover up all the wives, and the poorest men are left with no-one to marry.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
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 searches for explicit content like “po…

[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Why Ideology, not Faith, drives the Culture War.

This article is super-interesting.  I know you’ve got to be clever to do all that statistics stuff.  Evangelicals are conservative and have conservative (i.e., highly patriarchal) views.  Non-religious are mainly liberal and have liberal views.  That makes a lot of sen…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
ask him to justify his framing of almost every issue through the narcisstic lens of Trump. How is it that the president of the USA subordinates the interests of the people he is representing as the ultimate public servant to his own interests?

If you did that, he would ruin you, and possibly have you shot, lol.  Is anyone still…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
My take (yours may differ) on the cause of the fracture was replacing (or displacing) the concept of universal individual rights in favor of group-identity moral ranking. A lot of modern progressiveness has moved away from treating everyone as equal individuals and toward treating people primarily as members of…

[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
I thought as mass approaches speed of light it becomes infinite?

I think that mass becomes infinite as it approaches the speed of light through space, not time.

jakelafort wrote:
And if big bang is a beginning at what point does blocking become the nature of the thing as a whole?

It’s a shape.  I can’t visualise something in 4D, but I presume we have length, breadth, height, and time.  Eventually, if there’s heat death, then events stop happening and time runs out.

Inside the shape, local events exist a…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
Does it follow that the universe is eternal?

You’re talking about a finite 4-dimensional block.  It must have edges.  At one edge is the Big Bang.  At the other end is heat death, or whatever its terminating fate is.  In between, is the history of the universe and all its internal events.

Unseen wrote:
The block universe gives an unbelievable account of experience. If you take it seriously, nothing actually happens, however experience consists of a cluttered stream of experiences.

Yet, we travel through spacetime at the speed of light.  So, the block universe could exist.  But I am still unable to connect the “self” with “now”.

Unseen wrote:
No, you feel you have a certain amount of agency.

What I’m saying is, we treat ourselves and each other as if we have agency, whether we “really” do or not.  It’s on this level that we’re held accountable.

Unseen wrote:
Some will say, “But that’s nihilistic. That means there’s no point to anything. The child abuser, the family annihilator, the terrorist…they’re no better or worse than the hero or altruist or selfless caregiver.”

I don’t know what to tell you other than…”Yup! In a very real sense, we’re not the author of our actions, no matter…

[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
The notion that the big bang, the trillions of galaxies and septillions of planets, the inception and explosion of life forms on Earth or anywhere, the construction of the Pyramids and The Sphynx, the sinking of The Bismarck, and that time my cat destroyed my tablet by knocking a coffee mug onto it, as well as everything included in…

[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
I must respect your beliefs?? Some chance of me doing that when I don’t even respect my own. I don’t believe things to feel safe. You don’t want your beliefs respected. You want them immunized for criticism.

Someone said that people with intellectual humility are more successful, they didn’t specify in what way. …[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Me, in conversation with a evangelical street preacher in Dublin last week.

What did they say back?  Anything?  Very well put.

Simon Paynton wrote:
For some the cross is a plus but it’s a negative for me.

Very good.  It reminds me of the way to tell the axes of a graph apart: x is across.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
For most Christians the cross is a symbol of the resurrection, not the trinity.

If the trinity is going to represent the cross, then it needs to be a 4, not a 3.

TheEncogitationer wrote:
King Iyk has made it pretty clear how Christians can use AI to spout pseudo-mathematical apologetics.

You can’t knock him for trying.  But I think he’s misguided (by AI).

There’s the whole article in last week’s Sunday School about how AI validates what people w…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
The Gettier Problem: True Justified Belief without Knowledge.

Again, I think the problem with True Justified Belief is the statement, I am factually justified.  To know I am factually justified, I must know that my belief is true, yet I use this justification as proof that the belief is true.  I justify the truth o…[Read more]

I understand that the concept of truth is not simple and is hard to define precisely.  If something is l…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Religious justification is more powerful than anger or hatred and that is how ordinary people become instruments of atrocity.

I actually think that extremist religion and politics can justify “righteous” anger and hatred, blotting out all compassion or respect for human rights.  That’s because morality has an…[Read more]

Understanding is true belief.  False beliefs are either redundant or harmful because delusion is always unsatisfactory.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Univ. of Oklahoma punishes instructor for failing Christian student who didn’t do the assignment.

She wrote a right-wing rant instead.  I think that the student, Samantha Fulnecky, will never be able to get a normal job now.  But there’s plenty of work spouting off on YouTube, playing the victim and pretending to be…[Read more]