I wonder if some of our intelligence is artificial. Being able to drive directly to any destination, for example, with a simple cell-phone lookup. Reading lifetimes worth of experience in books that doesn’t naturally come at birth. Learning incredibly complex languages that are inherited not by genes, but by environment–and, depending on the language, being able to distinguish different colors.
A coffee bean is a seed from the Coffea plant and the source for coffee. It is the pit inside the red or purple fruit. This fruit is often referred to as a coffee cherry, and like the cherry, it is a fruit with a pit.
Is human intelligence artificial? #philosophy
Have you ever heard the story of the snake?
One evening, a man walks along a dimly lit path. He suddenly halts, his heart pounding with fear. Before him, on the ground, lies what appears to be a venomous snake. He freezes, paralyzed with dread. Only when a friend comes by with a lantern does the true nature of the object come to light: it is merely a piece of rope.
I learned this story from Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist author. He would indicate with stories like this that our perceptions shape our reality. Often, we react out of fear and misunderstanding, seeing snakes where there are none. He said that mindfulness and deeper understanding can act like the lantern, illuminating the true nature of our experiences.
I wonder if it would help to think back to the first time you littered? When I was 5 or 6, I remember eating a candy and not wanting the wrapper any more. It had to be someone else who saw what I did and pointed out that it isn’t good if we all did this, because then the playground would be all full of trash and we couldn’t play there. I was like, “Oh, I get it.” But if someone hadn’t explained it to me, I think the behavior could have innocently continued for quite some time. I grew up in a very rural place (northern Canada).
Your condescension has sent my IED absolutely through the roof
Do I have to break out the crayons for you?
You understand condescension, and yet you still do it yourself.
Word of advice–be a good person to your colleagues, and let friendship possibly develop after one of you leaves. I’ve made many friends throughout the years once we each know there is no pressure to be friends. I’ve had many job leads throughout the years because people I previously worked with thought I was a great colleague.
Check out Aegis if you’re on Android. (See my other comment).
On Android, I replaced Authy with the open-source Aegis app. It’s just as functional, allows exporting, and doesn’t tie your data to your phone number (nor store it on a central system–not sure if Authy does this or not).
What is a hypermarket?
Here’s my take:
We’re built for about 150 relationships max (Dunbar number), and yet we benefit from cooperation above that threshold. Rather than make it so we have to have a personal relationship with everyone who could possibly benefit us, we accepted a ramped down version of relationship we call “transactions”. This is a very weak replacement for a relationship, but it is a sort of “micro-relationship” in that for a brief moment two people who don’t know each other can kind of care about each other during an exchange. Through specialization, we can do something well that doesn’t just benefit the handful of friends and neighbors we have, but tens of thousands and possibly millions of people via transactions (e.g. a factory, starting an Amazon business, etc.)
There is a process called “commensuration” in the social sciences, where people start to make one thing commensurate with another, even in wildly different domains. For example, to understand the value of a forest and to convey its importance to decision makers we might say “this forest is worth $100 billion”. It’s kind of weird to do this (how do leaves and trees and anthills and beetles equal imaginary humoney?) But slowly, over time, we have made many things commensurate to dollars at various scales. (I don’t think this is a good thing, but it does have benefits). In short, more and more things that were part of an implicit economy of relationships (e.g. can the neighbor girl babysit tonight?) have entered the explicit domain of the monetary economy (e.g. sittercity).
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IMO, in order to participate in the huge value generated by this monetary economy, people sometimes lose the forest for the trees (so to speak) and forget what really matters (e.g. excellence of character, deep relationships, new experiences, etc.) because it seems like we might be able to put off those things until “after” we square away this whole money thing first. But maybe “after” never comes–and the hollow life of a consumer capitalist drains the inner ecological diversity of a soulful life.
“We know better than you” has never been an effective way to change other peoples’ minds, in my experience.
I appreciate your question, but I think “we know” is problematic:
I’m not trolling, either, just asking questions from a philosophical point of view. I’ve changed my mind about several things I took very seriously and thought I was 100% right about. Could others be dealing with similar changing-mind-through-time processes? Could you?
Wolf in sheep’s clothing
I read this as “buying clubs”. Like, buy clubs and hit stuff. My first take was “Ah, the violent revolutionary type.” :)
I know it’s important to be vigilant against that form of uncritical-thinking-masquerading-as-unbiased-thinking, but please also consider that it’s hard to tell it apart from genuine interest and seeking to understand, especially in an online context. I don’t know the solution per se, because we have such limited views into each others’ worlds through text / social media. But I do know that if people can’t ask questions in one place, they will go elsewhere to find their answers.
Thanks, I do this sometimes, but there are also some… not very reliable posts in there on occasion.
That’s fair, I think we’re all trying to understand this new Fediverse thing. I understand that the underlying ActivityPub protocol is the same, but people tend to use these frontends quite differently. For example, I can’t downvote a Lemmy post in Elk (the software I use to follow other people). I also anticipate Lemmy posts to be more “community-oriented” in the way information is surfaced (like Reddit), whereas Mastodon is more focused on following a person or organization (like Twitter). There’s no wrong way to use the technology, but I do find the use cases helpful in organizing my expectations.
This is almost completely true, but I would add the caveat that PWAs (progressive web apps) are not as easy to discover and less familiar to install as an app in an app/play store. It might also be because it’s in Apple and Google’s best interest to not streamline that. But it’s still an obstacle nevertheless.