The modern resurgence of Stoicism in the zeitgeist is exactly this: self-help without actually engagement with philosophy.
I’m mostly half-serious.
The modern resurgence of Stoicism in the zeitgeist is exactly this: self-help without actually engagement with philosophy.
You should write on an unsettled question that interests you enough to keep your interest for a long time. If you don’t have a clue what this is, then I recommend you do some literature review. Research is not done in a vacuum. Once you know what conversations people are having, then you can see where your perspective can make a valuable contribution.
This assumes that time (and perhaps space) is infinitely divisible. On the other hand, suppose there are points of time that pass, one after the other, like pages on a flip book. If this model is right, then the current moment would be the present. I’m not sure what scientists have to say about this; I suspect that we’re entering the realm of quantum physics. Either way the difference between continuous and discrete time is worth mentioning.
You should sharpen your claims to make them more apparent. There are moral claims thrown in with religious presupposition in a way that is neither illuminating for ethics nor philosophy of religion. Alternatively, this may be the wrong sub for your post.
After years of this sentiment being passed around online it’s clear that shit isn’t going to happen until we have a military draft/Vietnam War level incident. The pot is boiling too slowly for most of us to jump out. And even if we do try to organize a strike or civil disobedience, the government has gotten good at assasinating leaders that threaten the system.
There are a lot of claims here, but I’m going to focus on one in particular. I don’t think we have any moral obligation to reach our potential as a “creator race”. Taking into account your initial starting point, consider the following argument:
If this argument is sound, then the possibility of intelligent life does not depend on us. To me, this weakens any suggestion that we are morally obligated to fulfill our intellectual potential.
Perhaps one could object to my argument above on utilitarian grounds. If we can create more intelligent life than already exists, then we will be increasing the total amount of good in the universe. We are morally obligated to increase the good in the world (however “good” is defined) and so we are morally obligated to create intelligent beings. But this is a non sequitur. It isn’t clear that the creation of more intelligent beings will result in more happiness than misery. In which case, on a utilitarian analysis, it could turn out that we are morally prohibited from creating intelligent beings.
I know this isn’t the crux of your post, but I wanted to engage philosophically since posts in this community often go unanswered.
Hey you, reading this right now. You just drank water didn’t you?
There would be no religious wars, honor killings, more freedom, no religious leaders abusing their powers, no waste of labor and money on religious things, etc. It may seem that we would be more educated and have better understanding.
Removing the word religion from this excerpt wouldn’t remove any of these problems. We would still squabble over territory, resources, and ideological differences. To give a non-religious analogy: if a time traveler went back and killed Hitler, Germany would still retain all the problems from WW1 and the Weimar Republic that were ripe for a dictatorship.
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His name was my name too
Bookpilled. If you’re into science fiction books, he’s a great YouTuber to check out.
edit: Also, he does extra videos on his Patreon. But if you don’t like him try Outlaw Bookseller and Media Death Cult.
Well I suppose it depends on your views of consciousness. Some would argue that our consciousness is nothing more than an emergent phenomenon grounded on the electrical impulses of our neurons. Personally, I’m convinced that the phenomenon need not be physical. It should be possible, with enough computing power, to model the same interactions. But I admit that if you reject this possibility, then the simulation hypothesis loses credence.
Yes, this is the idea. Although, as another noted, you can argue back and forth on whether Bostrom’s argument holds.
Sorry, I suppose people haven’t heard of the “Simulation hypothesis” in philosophy.
Nick Bostrom argued that, statistically, it is more likely that we live in a simulation than not. Assume that an advanced civilization could build a machine with enormous computing power, sufficient to simulate a human mind and a universe “around” it. It follows that the number of such simulated minds/universes could be near infinite. So the probability of our actually being in a simulated universe dwarfs the probability that our reality is not a simulation.
I’m agnostic. If you find the statistical probability argument for the existence of aliens salient, then by the same token you should believe that our reality is a simulation. In which case, the existence of aliens once again becomes questionable; the statistical probabilities of an infinite simulated universe are outside the realm of our current knowledge.
edit: See comment below on Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis.
If we can pick math, then I choose logic.
I’m going to say no. Most of human history is nasty, brutish, and short.
I think they’re saying two things. 1) You have to live for a few million years in the past in order to get a billion dollars when you reach the present age. 2) You can’t just go to sleep for a long time to get out of the scenario.
Deepseek is pretty good tbh. The answers sometimes leave out information in a way that is misleading, but targeted follow up questions can clarify.