A thing called love
Do you believe in love after love?
Brb gotta feel what my insides say
Life after love
What is love?
Baby don’t hurt me!
Don’t hurt me!
Free will is an illusion.
Either as Hard determinism (60% confidence in this theory), or as in some form of Quantum randomness (40% confidence in this theory), you cannot just willy nilly pick something. Its just an algorithm, and, possibly, a little bit of randomness, if Quantum randomness is true.
I have a crackpot theory that I enjoy for the sake of enjoying it. What if our “soul” or “consciousness” is the collapse of the quantum field. Our decisions moment to moment aren’t random chance, but the unspeakable thing.
Again, pure speculation, but it’s a lot more satisfying and rewarding to live by than throwing moral responsibility to the universe.
Nah, if I commit a warcrime, I’m blaming the universe.
Aint my fault, should’ve made me a master
My understanding is that, according to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, everything that can happen will happen - so for every choice you’ve made, there’s an alternate timeline for every other possible choice you could have made. But it still makes no sense to claim that you could’ve acted differently in this timeline.
This many worlds thing I find that it is easier to visualise as an extra dimension with all the other dimensions within it, including time.
I dunno man. I’m currently in my time-space experiencing whatever I can. Is it my “decision” to not deteriorate in a pile of my own waste? Who knows! I’ll be dead before we have an answer, and I’m not a philosopher, so I might as well be an armchair optimist in the meantime.
Just because I probably could “disprove” my theory with science, I think the concept of self and science are inherently incompatible with our current model. So until someone can disprove my experience with the world, I’ll continue “choosing” to accept it.
Many-worlds is nonsensical mumbo jumbo. It doesn’t even make sense without adding an additional unprovable postulate called the universal wave function. Every paper just has to assume it without deriving it from anywhere. If you take MWI and subtract away this arbitrary postulate then you get RQM. MWI - big psi = RQM. So RQM is inherently simpler.
Although the simplest explanation isn’t even RQM, but to drop the postulate that the world is time-asymmetric. If A causes B and B causes C, one of the assumptions of Bell’s theorem is that it would be invalid to say C causes B which then causes A, even though we can compute the time-reverse in quantum mechanics and there is nothing in the theory that tells us the time-reverse is not equally valid.
Indeed, that’s what unitary evolution means. Unitarity just means time-reversibility. You test if an operator is unitary by multiplying it by its own time-reverse, and if it gives you the identity matrix, meaning it completely cancels itself out, then it’s unitary.
If you just accept time-symmetry then it is just as valid to say A causes B as it is to say C causes B, as B is connected to both through a local causal chain of events. You can then imagine that if you compute A’s impact on B it has ambiguities, and if you compute C’s impact on B it also has ambiguities, but if you combine both together the ambiguities disappear and you get an absolutely deterministic value for B.
Indeed, it turns out quantum mechanics works precisely like this. If you compute the unitary evolution of a system from a known initial condition to an intermediate point, and the time-reverse of a known final condition to that intermediate point, you can then compute the values of all the observables at that intermediate point. If you repeat this process for all observables in the experiment, you will find that they evolve entirely locally and continuously. Entangled particles form their correlations when they locally interact, not when you later measure them.
But for some reason people would rather believe in an infinite multiverse than just accept that quantum mechanics is not a time-asymmetric theory.
Free will and the “self” - just two sides of the same coin. You’re not free to choose, because there’s no “you” in the first place. You’re just a collection of atoms obeying the laws of physics. It makes no sense to say you could’ve done otherwise. No, you couldn’t - whatever caused you to make a decision in the first place would compel you to make the same choice every single time, no matter how many times you rewound the universe, assuming everything else stayed the same.
We do things for two reasons: either because we want to, or because we have to. There’s no freedom in being forced to do something - and you don’t get to choose your wants or don’t-wants.
I agree that free will is an illusion, but have decided that because it is true it isn’t worth thinking about further.
I don’t find the “why” to be interesting, which is interesting because it is like “I” am trying to avoid further reflection on that fact which “I” also have no control over. haha
Myself and Sasquatch.
I also believe in both this Lemmy user and Sasquatch.
Only the guy in the Sasquatch suit would say this.
We got 'em. We finally got 'em.
I believe what doesn’t kill you makes you…stranger.
I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve, and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.
What you need is a rain out.
I believe in social democracy, I believe that it is the best political ideology.
It combines a free society with a government provided safety net.
I see communism as being too restrictive, and unregulated capitalism as being way too out of control.
A progressive social democratic country with a strong government seems to me as combining new ideas with a stable foundation.
What Economic structure would you use in your ideal society?
I am not well versed in the theory if economics.
In general terms and speaking purely in an ideal world, I would expect that a regulated market economy would allow the society to exploit the free market and the greed of humans, while providing a solid foundation of government services for it’s citizens to rely on.
The indomitable human spirit
Only that which has evidence to support it.
How much n is enough n?
Depends on what n is.
What can go wrong will go wrong.
That my dogs will aways be happy to see me
This is adorable.
Evolution
Believing in something seems to imply thinking something to be true without having evidence for it - otherwise it would be knowledge, a justified true belief. So I know a couple things, like that I exist as a conscious being, and have practical empirical knowledge of the rest of the sensory world too.
have practical empirical knowledge of the rest of the sensory world too.
Oho, that’s a pretty bold statement of belief for someone who can’t prove they’re not a brain in a vat!
More seriously though, there are tons of things that have conflicting evidence or are simply too big or complex to have enough evidence to have definitive proof for, yet we still have to make decisions about them. Like believing that X vs Y is a better governing system (eg democracy vs republic). Or what about questions that aren’t related to proof, like defining and living by ethical standards? Yet most people still find value in “moral” things, and believe that people should do “good” instead of “bad”.
Believe means to accept as true or real, and does not define the precondition to the belief.
How can you prove that you exist as a conscious being?
How can you prove that your senses can be trusted?
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I am thinking about whether I exist as a conscious being. Therefore there must be an ‘I’ to be thinking that.
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I can’t prove that my senses can be trusted with 100% certainty to tell me truth - in fact I can prove the opposite with things like optical illusions. However, when interacting with the world that I only know is real through my senses, basing my behaviour on those same senses that let me know the world exists seems reasonable to me. That’s what I call practical knowledge, rather than true knowledge.
How do you define “I”?
In other words you believe what your senses tell you to be real even though you cannot objectively prove your senses to be trustworthy?
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‘I’ is the thing that is thinking it
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I don’t ‘believe’ that my senses are real, but that it’s good enough to act as though they are real, regarding the sensory world.
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A theory I’ve been working on lately is that our worldview rests on certain foundational beliefs - beliefs that can’t be objectively proven or disproven. We don’t arrive at them through reason alone but end up adopting the one that feels intuitively true to us, almost as if it chooses us rather than the other way around. One example is the belief in whether or not a god exists. That question sits at the root of a person’s worldview, and everything else tends to flow logically from it. You can’t meaningfully claim to believe in God and then live as if He doesn’t exist - the structure has to be internally consistent.
That’s why I find it mostly futile to argue about downstream issues like abortion with someone whose core belief system is fundamentally different. It’s like chipping away at the chimney when the foundation is what really holds everything up. If the foundation shifts, the rest tends to collapse on its own.
So in other words: even if we agree on the facts, we may still arrive at different conclusions because of our beliefs. When it comes to knowledge, there’s only one thing I see as undeniably true - and you probably agree with me on this: my consciousness, the fact of subjective experience. Everything else is up for debate - and I truly mean everything.
Maybe a god’s existence is a core belief for some people, but it shouldn’t be. There shouldn’t be anything you believe without a logical reason to.
“Why is there something rather than nothing?” is a valid question - and the idea that something created it isn’t entirely unthinkable. The point is that you can’t prove or disprove it. Not believing in God is just as much a foundational belief as believing in one. Much of what you think about the world is built on these core beliefs - the kind that, if proven wrong, would effectively collapse your entire worldview.
Ok, let’s take a step backwards. How are you defining ‘god’?
Personally, I consider it synonymous with “creator,” but even if someone believes in a biblical God, that’s beside the point. While the idea of a biblical God is an entirely unconvincing concept to me, I still give it - or something like it - a greater-than-zero chance of actually existing. I can’t prove otherwise.
Another example of a belief like that would be belief in the physical world around you. You could be dreaming - or in a simulation.
So can I clarify that when you’re saying
Some people take the existence of god as a brute fact
That you mean
Some people assume that universe was created by something
?
Well, that’s not a direct quote from me, but yes - some people assume the universe was created by something. For some, that’s the person running the simulation; for others, it’s the biblical God as described in the Bible, or atleast their interpretation of it.
The power of friendship (I have no friends)
What is stopping you from having friends?
Myself I guess.
Aliens
What do you imagine life on other planets to look like?
I let my imagination run wild. I believe whatever society you can of, sci-fi, medieval, fantasy, steam punk, I believe it’s all out there. Waiting to be discovered. There’s got to be a planet out there filled with humans, like us, but they live in cloud cities and live intertwined with another species. The Grey’s are robots they use, like Detroit become human, as assistants. Or, there is a society where magic is the norm. They believe it’s magic but to us, it’s the manipulation of matter, powerful magnets, and transformation of states of matter.
Anything better than our boring, 9-5, money based, car dependant society.
That the US is far beyond fixing itself nonviolently.
Violence is always necessary when dealing with dogs that can’t talk, only bite. And Americans are easily some of the most violent people on Earth, so the worry isn’t there, it’s that once again someone will use that anger to fuel their violent actions but will direct it once more against the innocent. Also, the cops would never allow it, they’re even worse dogs, lol, and would definitely have to be put down before anything.
Honestly, I can’t see America becoming anything but a hwite ethnonationalist dictatorship. The lost and the stupid yearn for a messiah and will never even consider putting in the mental work so they would rather leave it all in the hands of an appealing character, and Americans know too little about the world to give it to anyone with a shred of decency and competence.
