Deme

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The world doesn’t run on renewables. If the energy mix contains even a bit of fossil fuels, then any extra demand props up fossil energy that could be shut down.

Sure, but as if the politicians in charge could think that far ahead :D

Israel needs that insecurity. They need enemies to unite against so that the country doesn’t fracture along the liberal/orthodox divide.

And then everybody clapped.

Reminded me if Yuri Knorozov

From the article:

In the last major heatwave in the region, in 2018, 750 people died early in Sweden alone, and scientists anticipate a similar toll once the data is processed.

Not if it can’t spring off due to being pressed against the ground by the weight of the bird. I suspect that’s part of the joke. Don’t scare the bird.

I have built a wooden frame with an emergency blanket on it that I lift onto the window when needed. It lets some light in, but no thermal radiation. The silver side on the outside reflects heat, while the golden side lets thermal radiation pass through to the outside. The problem with aluminium foil was that it also kept heat in, and also it was annoyingly noisy when ventilating the room.

Still doesn’t stop the surrounding walls from soaking up heat.

laughs (cries) in tiny student apartment, facing the afternoon sun, without AC in a northern european country where buildings are designed for optimal heat retention

As of writing this (at midnight), the temperature in my room is currently 27.5°C.

I think its basic courtesy to put even a little effort to something as important as a breakup. Not doing it face to face or at least in a call removes the interaction completely. It’s taking the easiest possible path in a situation that will certainly affect the other person in a significant manner. It’s cold. Using a LLM for said text like in the meme is even lower effor and leaves the recipient feeling utterly worthless. Basically the same thing as getting fired via email.

Adhering to the treaty would result in there only being half as much anti-personel mines for civilians to step onto after the war, so it would still be doing something very positive. That being said, I do understand the reasons for withdrawing from the treaty. I miss the optimistic world where the treaty was drafted up, when it briefly seemed that most issues could be solved with multilateral international cooperation :(

Ai slop

I don’t agree with the conclusion that Mickey makes. Yes, our senses can’t be fully trusted, but they are the only way we will ever get any empirical information. Arguing against a materialist worldview by noting that our senses can’t fully be trusted implies that the materialist worldview is flawed. My issue here is that any alternative has even more dubious foundations. (this is why I raised Occam’s razor in my original comment). Would any inherent cosmic meaning even be relevant if we can’t ever know about it? I doubt that Donald here would be reassured about the theoretical possibility of meaning existing somewhere beyond our senses. I am not.

The allegory of the cave, as I’m sure you know, came about in the context of Platonic idealism. That’s how I’ve been talking about here as well. The allegory becomes moot if the objects casting the shadows and the shadows themselves are essentially the same thing. You need a dichotomy between two completely different things for it to be relevant. If it’s matter casting metaphysical shadows which we perceve as matter, then Mickey has no argument and it’s just accurate observations with extra steps.

I never said completely. Sure it’s fun to entertain such possibilities, but science doesn’t bother with unverifiable claims. That’s the realm of metaphysics, unless somebody clever or lucky finds an actual glitch in the Matrix which would allow the claim to be verifiable.

Boltzman brain sure is an interesting concept. If I am one and you’re a thought within it, then I must say that it’s a bit funny that it popped into existense with the correct theories of thermodynamics and cosmology that explain the brains own existence. Also means that the universe has seen or will see every possible brainstate, nightmare and daydream, infinite beauty and horror. Oh yeah and we may as well be living in a Boltzmann galaxy that popped into existence in a similar manner. But alas, the relative improbability of our own (non-Boltzmann brain) existence is not proof against it. Same goes for the simulation hypothesis.

Care to explaing what “subscribing to philosophy” would even mean? If you instead meant to say a philosophy, then yes. I do have my own worldview, as I think every thinking being does. I apologize if I was unclear in my previous comment, I was commuting while I typed it and had to rush it a bit. The first paragraph was a response to the first paragraph of your preceding comment, the second one to the second and the third to the rest of it. I’ll elaborate a bit:

If we don’t make the assumption that our senses and measurements could possibly derive information about the nature of the reality around us, then trying to do so (empirical science) would be quite insane in my opinion. Why would anybody seriously try to do something which they think is categorically impossible to do?

If some physical phenomena is found which can only be explained via some sort of substance dualism or idealism, I’ll let you know.

weird unknown forces we can’t explain

I assume you’re referring to dark matter with this one. It’s just an unsolved mystery. It sure would be interesting if it was ghosts, but we have no reason think so as of currently.

the results of tests looking different depending on if it’s being observed or not

How do you feel something without touching it and thus affecting it? To see something requires the object of observation to reflect or emit light. At small enough scales that will affect the object itself in a significant manner. Quantum physics sure is weird, but I don’t see how that would be a reason to think that ideas could exist independently outside of a brain or similar material substrate.

I suppose I should’ve emphasized the “on such a foundational level” -part of that sentence. Questioning and refining observations is obviously of paramount importance, but that’s only valid if we assume that deriving knowledge about the nature of reality is at all possible via our senses and observations.

That’s where the distinction between physics and metaphysics comes in. Metaphysics is philosophy and thus inherently unverifiable.

The things we imagine do exist, as patterns of activity in our brains, emerging from the complexity of a whole bunch of neurons in brains and as part of societies. I said as much in a previous comment about emergent materialism.

Our senses and measurements (or are those the same thing, with one merely augmenting the other?) tell us that we live in a purely material universe. I’m not claiming that our senses are perfect or that science is over with every secret revealed, but questioning the validity of our observations on such a foundational level invokes questioning the validity of the worldview (metaphysical materialism) built on top of them. That’s what I interpreted Mickey was on about in the meme.

Donald is despairing about the inherent meaninglessness of a purely material universe, so I assume that Mickey, with his radical rejection of all that Donald says, represents at least some sort of metaphysical dualism or idealism which would allow for inherent cosmic meaning.

I know. The matrix (or any other metaphysical idealism for that matter) is an example of a situation where we cannot trust our perception for knowledge about the true nature of the universe (much like the allegory of the cave), although taken to the extreme. The epistemological and metaphysical aspects of Plato’s cave are very much intertwined.

Eliminative materialism isn’t my thing no. Emergent materialism is what I roll with. So the human mind and culture and numbers are things that exist as emergent properties of other things.

Sure it could all be a lie with us living in the matrix or so on, and it’s fun to entertain such thoughts every now and then. But I won’t accept it as truth without a better reason than “but technically it’s possible”.