Harold Doyle3 said:Yeah, I actually went back and forth on this exact point with Sigmund (by the way, where is he? I hope he's doing alright; if he’s just taking a break from posting but still lurking, well, cheers to you, Sigmund!)
That whole process of being turning into nothingness? It's just shifting from hollow to empty.
So, what’s your take on the difference between who you are right now and who you were three days ago?
Are you any "less" you if, heaven forbid, you lose an arm in an accident? Or if you just happen to forget an experience?
The "Self" is basically just a collection of experiences. Every single thing we go through belongs to someone—it’s always tied to a specific "Self." There isn't such a thing as an experience that doesn't belong to someone. In that sense, I guess the "Self" is what Kant calls the "condition for the possibility of experience."
Harold Doyle3 said:Yeah, I actually went back and forth on this exact point with Sigmund (by the way, where is he? I hope he's doing alright; if he’s just taking a break from posting but still lurking, well, cheers to you, Sigmund!)
That whole process of being turning into nothingness? It's just shifting from hollow to empty.
So, what’s your take on the difference between who you are right now and who you were three days ago?
Are you any "less" you if, heaven forbid, you lose an arm in an accident? Or if you just happen to forget an experience?
I guess I'm kind of leaning towards agreeing with you on that. 😢
Harold Doyle3 said:So essence has no content? Is there no dialectic there? By what method did Hegel arrive at being—the transition from essence to non-essence and back again?
Man, you actually nailed it. "Being lacks substance." I mean, if something doesn't have any substance, what does it have? Nothing. And what is it that lacks substance? Nothingness. So, Being basically just turned into nothing.
So what is nothingness? It's just the thing that has no substance. Nothingness is basically... Nothingness somehow exists. How? Just like anything else that lacks substance. You're calling that "Being." "Being lacks substance." Basically, nothingness became being.
The way Being shifts into nothing is just vanishing. And when nothing shifts into Being, that's becoming. So, vanishing and becoming? That's just "becoming" itself.
Sandra Murphy33 said:I suspect he was just joking, but since he’s always so poised and formal, it isn't exactly easy to tell, is it? 🙂
(See, Sandra Murphy33!! This is why you should probably stick to avoiding those emojis altogether 😬 😛 .... )
I honestly thought he was kidding, too. So, should we hold a vote to decide if he was joking or not? And if we do, does Simply even get a vote in that? :nemaemotikonapasetimisli:
steelridge58 said:Maybe we should switch to a two-week cycle for the next round, and instead of just this quick two-day window, we could set aside three or four days for voting to make it easier on everyone.
Amanda Jackson5 actually brought up a question in the Comment section about whether someone is allowed to vote for themselves, though I honestly haven't a clue myself. I’d really love to get your take on this—what do you all think? If we all decide that self-voting is okay, then I'll go ahead and update the rules, but if not, we can just leave everything exactly as it stands now.
Why not? I mean, if the whole ethical point is trying to look at your own actions the same way you judge everyone else—and judging others the same way you judge yourself—then there shouldn't be any reason someone couldn't vote for their own choice if they really feel it's the best one.
(Of course, if you're the type who's skeptical about how objective you actually are when judging yourself versus others, you'll probably be more careful if your own answer looks too good. But if you don't see yourself as a potential "sinner" and think you've reached some kind of absolute truth, then I guess there's no real barrier there. 😉 )
Amanda Jackson5 said:As Robert Torre puts it, the real question isn't whether there’s anything waiting for us on the other side, but rather whether we’re actually living while we're still here.
The real question is, does life even matter if there’s nothing waiting for us on the other side? I mean, back when we were all immortal souls, we hung around for thousands of years—ever since we were just civilized monkeys—so two hundred years feels like a blink of an eye, I guess. Maybe.
If we’re saying EM waves equal thoughts, then that isn’t "imaginative"—it’s just a fact, right? 🙄 Ever since I read Drago Plečko’s theory about how you can't actually produce a thought if your jaw is completely relaxed (déjà vu, I know, I think I’ve mentioned this before...), I started testing it out. Now, I literally feel sudden bursts of thought-sentences firing into my brain like an (unwanted) EM surge. It doesn't even have to be a negative thought; it just feels like a sudden strike, complete with all the physical stress markers—heart racing, blood running cold, the whole deal.
The interesting thing is that these clear, sentence-like thoughts usually hit during those brief moments when I'm confused about something; they arrive as suggestions or instant solutions. I listen to them because, frankly, I don't have much choice, but later on, it turns out they were just some kind of "sacrifice" or the path of least resistance. They aren't the actual solution...
Am I just stuck with a clueless guardian angel?... 🤔
I guess I don't know, but Socrates says his never actually gives good advice. Like, he only shows up when S. is about to mess something up, just to try and stop him.
hiddeneagle98 said:I’d argue that the distinction matters because you don't have a homogeneous, amorphous blob of matter sitting in your skull doing the thinking and feeling; instead, you have this incredibly intricate, highly organized network of neurons. It feels like a massive stretch to suggest that this structural difference is irrelevant—to claim that consciousness is just an inherent property of everything, implying my keyboard is somehow self-aware and contemplating how I'm tapping away at it.
On the flip side, I’m convinced there has to be "something"—this underlying mechanism that dictates why everything is the way it is, determining where every particle lands and how it behaves in the next moment based on its relationship with every other particle.
When you look at how that "something" governs a system as uniquely complex and deeply interconnected as the human brain, you start to see how consciousness emerges as a sophisticated form of resolution—essentially a high-level calculation of particle movement.
Moving a photon through a vacuum is a relatively straightforward calculation, but managing the behavior of a massive, diverse swarm of particles—especially heavy ones—requires a much more intense, qualitatively complex set of "math."
To put it simply: how does a particle "know" (or calculate, or perceive, or sense) which direction to take? In that very same space or domain where the particle is performing that calculation, consciousness appears. It acts as a collective computation for a vast number of intertwined particles whose behaviors are interdependent. Because solving such a system isn't trivial, consciousness emerges within that domain as an advanced, non-trivial method for resolving the movements of that entire cluster of particles.
This complex web of particles, contained within its own self-referential "bubble" (which arises as part of the computational method used by this interconnected system), perceives this process as self-governance. That's the gist of it, anyway... I'm struggling to find the right terminology because we lack the vocabulary to describe something that exists entirely outside our own cognitive domain.😁
The more I dwell on this, the more certain I become that this is essentially the Occam's Razor of existence.
I definitely agree that the distinction matters. But I have to disagree on the part about the Sun being just some uniform, amorphous mass of stuff. https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...one-knows-why/
We can get even more creative here: if everything materialists say is true—that our thoughts and experiences are "really" just electromagnetic patterns in our neurons—then why couldn't electromagnetic patterns somewhere else be thoughts and experiences too? Like, why couldn't the electromagnetic patterns of the Sun actually be the Sun's own thoughts and feelings? And if that's the case, maybe the Sun is basically some kind of solar god influencing people on Earth through the Earth photon path?
Alright, come on, give me something way more imaginative than that.
And why couldn't it work like in Sagan's Contact? Maybe "aliens" just contact individuals directly so they don't even have to physically land on Earth. Or, if we're talking imagination here: like, 160 years ago, nobody had any clue that what we call electromagnetic waves even exists. To some enlightened materialist atheist back then, everything we take for granted today involving EM waves would've seemed like straight-up magic—you know, long-distance communication, moving things from afar, all that stuff. Basically, EM waves would have felt "incorporeal." So, isn't it possible that in another 160 years, we'll stumble upon some other form of "matter" that looks totally "ghostly" to us now, almost like "magic"? And maybe some "aliens" actually have a "material" form made of stuff like that? It makes me wonder if those various "gods," "angels," or "demons" are just aliens like that, influencing human history by communicating with specific people through these weird mediums.
Yeah, it’s a total mess, for sure. I mean, even Pope Paul VI mentioned how Satan's smoke somehow seeped into the Church through a crack, and then Benedict XVI said it’ll probably stick around within the church hierarchy until the end of the century. As for what the Catechism says about the Antichrist and the Second Coming, here goes:
675 Before Christ's coming, the Church has to go through this final trial that’s gonna shake the faith of tons of believers. The persecution following its journey on Earth will reveal the "mystery of lawlessness" through religious deception, offering people fake solutions to their problems if they just abandon the truth. The ultimate religious lie is the Antichrist's deception—basically a pseudo-messianism where people worship themselves instead of God and His Messiah who came in the flesh.
676 This Antichrist-style deception is already showing up in the world whenever people try to fulfill messianic hopes through history that can only be finished beyond history through eschatological judgment: the Church has rejected—even in its milder forms—the forgery of a future Kingdom of God called millenarianism, especially in its political form as a secularized messianism, "corrupt in its very essence."
677 The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through that final Vazam, where it follows its Lord in His death and resurrection. The Kingdom of God won't happen through some historical triumph or steady progress by the Church, but through God's victory over the final onslaught of evil—a victory that will cause Christ's Bride to descend from heaven. God's triumph over the rebellion of evil will take the form of Judgment Day after the last cosmic upheaval of this passing Earth.
So, does that mean Christ is coming back in a physical body again? I don't know, maybe not. Honestly, whatever the Catechism says about it, it doesn't really seem to make sense to me that He’d come back the exact same way, like a physical man.
Amanda Jackson5 said:Honestly, if aliens ever decided to stage an invasion here in America, their smartest opening move would probably be sending us a fake, robotic, AI-driven version of Jesus. We wouldn’t be able to tell him apart from the real deal even if our lives depended on it, let alone expect anyone to distinguish truth from fiction once they pass over to the afterlife.
If the Antichrist actually shows up, I guess that's probably how it'll go down.
So, I think I get your point: basically, gravity didn't even exist before Newton because nobody had agreed on what it was yet. Then, once Newton showed up, it suddenly became a thing. And after Einstein, it still exists, but it shifted because he convinced everyone to buy into his theory—which is kind of different from Newton’s anyway. So, if Landauer manages to talk everyone into his theory, I guess gravity just vanishes?
I bet this is just another one of those little intelligence tests you're throwing at us. 😉
So you brought up gravity—that moment where we all basically agree on the facts and call it settled science. But honestly, before Newton came along, nobody really knew if it even existed. When he dropped his theory, some of the biggest names back then actually claimed he was just "adding magic to science" (looking at you, Leibniz and Huygens). Then Einstein comes along and totally flips Newton's script. Now, you've even got Landauer out there arguing that gravity isn't even real—just some kind of side effect from other phenomena. It makes me wonder, when can we actually say a theory is "done" and officially agreed upon? If we can't ever truly reach that point, then maybe truth is either constantly shifting or it just doesn't exist at all.
But honestly, how can we even be sure that in twenty, fifty, or maybe even a hundred years, they won't just decide this whole thing is garbage? I mean, if they agreed on one thing before and then flipped the script completely, how do we know they won't just change their minds again?
jadeheron5 said:I mean, look. For something to be an absolute truth, it either has to be so blindingly obvious that denying it makes you sound completely unhinged—like trying to argue that gravity doesn't exist while you're falling off a skyscraper—or it has to be able to withstand intense scrutiny, passing every single logical test without leaving any room for doubt.
That’s really the only way we can verify anything as truth. Everything else? Well, that's just someone's opinion.
But I mean, there are definitely times where people claimed stuff and everyone just collectively decided they were crazy. Then later on, it turns out they actually were right (or, I guess, we just all agreed they were right now).
I could even give a specific example—there was this guy who was labeled a total crackpot, basically treated like he was losing his mind. Now, people think he was spot on: https://bkoznjak.wordpress.com/2021/...lice-znanosti/
So, like, was it actually true back then that he was a crackpot, or did the "truth" just change? Or maybe he was always right, and we just hadn't reached a consensus on it yet?