last_philosopher

Today I went to an event happening at the building I went to elementary school in decades ago. I was worried the directions weren't clear enough and that I might get lost, but when I got there everything felt immediately familiar and I could still walk on autopilot exactly where I needed to go.

There's parts of our mind that encode information like about places that aren't part of explicit memory. You may therefore "remember" something that you don't recall knowing. What if rather than being my elementary school, this was a building I'd been to once a long time ago but forgotten? Or maybe a building that I've not been to, but unbeknownst to me was designed with a unique style by the same architect as a building I was more familiar with? It might also seem oddly familiar.

Reincarnation by nature is hard to define, let alone prove true or false. So I couldn't really rule it out entirely. But given all the other explanations, I'd lean against it.

The month first is best because consider what happens if a message gets cut off. You might get: "You'll be flying to New York on the first of ..." or "You'll be flying to New York on June..."

The first message doesn't tell you anything useful. Do you need to buy shorts or a parka? Do you have months to prepare or are you leaving in a few hours? Could this be an april fools joke? It's a 1/12 chance. Totally useless.

Second message, sure the details are unclear but at least you know what to pack and that you need to hurry about getting the rest of the message.

A sword by definition has a "pointed blade" accordingly any object with an infinitely long blade cannot be a sword. Rather, it's a blade ray.

This is a type of ad hominem fallacy because you're downvoting based on something about the speaker that is unrelated to the argument. You might argue that there is a correlation between the misspellings and logical fallacies, but you offer no evidence, and the fact that you committed this phallusy while spelling everything correctly speaks otherwise.

He didn't. The quotes in these tweets are fake. If I search for these quotes these tweets are the only results. Twitter is a hostile platform to reality as reality can get in the way of virality. Hence why you never see sources on twitter. This was likely written by someone with only a passing familiarity with gandhi's position on WWII who probably guessed at how he would speak based on his character in Civ.

What did gandhi actually think the Britiish should do in 1940? In his actual words:

I want you to fight Nazism without arms, or, if I am to retain the military terminology, with non-violent arms. I would like you to lay down the arms you have, as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.

Basically he was speaking for an extreme form of non-violent civil disobedience, not capitulation.

Also a famous gandhi quote: "Stop believing everything you see on twitter you gullible rube"

That would require some considerable effort to pull off.

Something far more plausible: a bug in zoom that reverses the camera and/or microphone button functionality.

In most cases, it's wrong to violate the social contract, especially while benefiting from it. However: the harm done by violating the social contract should be weighed against the harm of not violating it.

In this case, the harm of violating the social contract is pretty minimal, as copyright law is not a fundamental part of the fabric of society. One can even argue it's kind of dubious, as something that moneyed interests favor very heavily with no similar moneyed interests favoring a strong public domain.

The harm of not violating it is not only do you give money to a holocaust denier, you're giving it to him for denying the holocaust. Even worse, you're giving him money for being wrong, and so effective at deception that you are compelled to spend money disproving him.

The whole point of copyright is to encourage useful works and spreading of knowledge and art. In this case the work is not spreading knowledge, but un-knowledge. Irving is exploiting a loophole in copyright law that allows him to work against its very purpose.

Thus I'd say violating the law is ethical as the benefits far outweigh the costs.

There's a lot of assumptions in saying it's just meaningless chemicals

• That chemicals are meaningless and lacking intriniic value. Seen from the outside they may appear that way, but evidently from the inside it seems quite different.
• "We" are not some other unseen brain behavior (not a crazy idea since we've never seen consciousness working in the brain)
• We are within the brain
• The brain exists at all
• Any knowledge exists at all (dubious as Mickey points out)

But then what perceives the illusion? How can the whole concept of an illusion have any meaning without a thinker to perceive what isn't true?

Consciousness

Be careful with the hot water. A friend cracked his toilet that way.

Yes.

I observe free will directly. Watch: I will choose of my own free will to type a tilde at the end of this sentence instead of a period~ Behold free will.

Everything that says we don't have free will depends on indirect observations that blatantly make faulty assumptions. Do our senses accurately tell us about the state of the universe, and ourselves within it? Are our interpretations of this infallible?

Most egregious is the assumption that classical mechanics governs the mind, when we know that at a deep level, classical mechanics governs nothing. Quantum mechanics is the best guess we have at the moment about how objects work at a fundamental level. Many will say neurons are too big for the quantum level. But everything is at the quantum level. We just don't typically observe the effects because most things are too big to see quantum effects from the outside. But we don't only look at the brain from the outside.

Nor can we say that the brain is the seat of consciousness. Who can say what the nature of reality is? Does space even exist at a fundamental level? What does it mean for consciousness to be in a particular place? What's to say it can only affect and be affected by certain things in certain locations? Especially when we can't pinpoint what those things are?

So yeah I believe in free will. It's direct observation vs. blatantly faulty reasoning.