I don’t mean an application of technology. Or a specific fact. I’m interested in more big picture things.
I was astonished by the Great Green Wall Initiative in Africa. The plan is to create a continent-spanning wall of vegetation to prevent the Sahara Desert from expanding southward. It is nothing if not ambitious.
Apparently, the first phase is to create huge number of these tiny plots shaped in a special way to prevent rainwater from running off and planting drought-hardy native species in them, some of which can be harvested as a food source. Eventually, once the soil has recovered sufficiently, they can plant trees.
The initiative is high-tech in the sense of applying state-of-the-art knowledge on land management but low-tech in the sense that it will involve a whole lot of manual labour with simple implements.
But the scope of it is insane with 22 countries having signed on. It gives me hope that collective action in the face of climate change is possible anywhere in the world.
I thought it was to prevent the desert going north, but regardless it is a cool thing.
The idea that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon from less complex things working together. There’s no evidence of, for instance, a city or bee hive having “consciousness” so it’s philosophical, not scientific, but the idea appeals to me.
I think it appeals to me because it’s a bottom up approach to something we usually think of as top down. Emergence in general is very common in nature. Ants aren’t sophisticated but ant colonies can be surprisingly complex. Maybe it’s the same with our cells.
People care about thought crimes, but not thought virtues. People often judge themselves and others unnecessarily harshly for having impure thoughts, but never praise others for wanting to do good things but not doing them/not being able to. Doesn’t seem very fair to me, it sucks how easy it is to latch on to bad thoughts and ideas, even when never acted upon. It’s a thing I’ve struggled with ever since I started being more self aware of my flaws, and this thought makes it a little easier to not give so much weight to my shitty thoughts
The “Dark Forest” hypothesis of the universe. It’s not at all new, but it’s new to me. I find it pretty interesting. Though my personal 2-cent take on the Fermi paradox is quite different.
Dark forest was indeed mind bending to me. I’ve never thought of it like that and the novels just blew me away.
What is that personal take?
The dark forest hypothesis is the conjecture that many alien civilizations exist throughout the universe, but they are both silent and hostile, maintaining their undetectability for fear of being destroyed by another hostile and undetected civilization. Wikipedia
On top of that: the “dark forest” trajectory of the internet.
“If God is all-good, he can’t be all-powerful, and if he’s all-powerful, he can’t be all-good.”
I know this is just a retread of a philosophical idea that’s been around for centuries (if not millennia), but something about the way it’s phrased really grabbed my attention and made me seriously consider it.
The closest comparison I can think of is hearing a song that’s just okay, but years later hearing a cover that’s simply incredible.
This is what made me leave religion tbh. This notion right here.
“Why do bad things happen?”
Because God has a plan for us, and he needs us to go through this for his plan to work
“But… he’s all powerful. He could change the plan and we could have the same outcome. He’s infinite, which means there’s infinite ways that he could achieve the same thing… but we wouldn’t suffer”
He’s either all-good, which means he can’t choose what happens and he just tries to do good - but that means he’s not all powerful. Or he’s all powerful, but then he is choosing not to do the good things.
So I landed on “If there’s a god, then maybe he/she is just trying their best, and hey, that’s okay, I’m just going to try my best too.”
I’ve not heard this way with “goodness” — I think the scientific way is that he can be omnipotent or omniscient, but not both. Their coexistence is a logical contradiction. Since omnipotence suggests a free will whereas omniscience is determinism.
Omniscience may not be seeing a predetermined future, but rather the knowledge of every repercussion of every possible action you could make.
Such a being could actively make choices, while knowing the future, and all other possible futures that they chose to avoid.
I lean towards this view of omniscience, if only because I can’t handle the fact that every aspect of my life is predetermined.
FWIW I do not believe determinism can be real in any practical sense. Even if it is provably true, it’s not actually practically applicable in anyway because it is describing an inaccessible layer of physics, to us anyway. The “layer” above our determined one would necessarily have to be non-determined to have ignited the determined “sub-reality” of ours.
I would contend that what you’re describing cannot be knowledge. Knowledge is a certainty by definition. It is “known.” Probability trees are a web of the unknown. “Knowing” the tree =/= knowing reality. Probability is not real, just as numbers are not real. They are concepts. They do not fall into the realm of known reality/experience/matter. You describing knowing that 2 + 2 = 4 conceptually. You are not describing the knowledge of the four trees in your lawn, of which there is only one instance.
But we’re talking about the omniscience of an all powerful entity that can create and destroy universes on a whim. Of course it’s beyond our abilities, just as dogs aren’t building steam engines, we aren’t looking at multiple timelines when we make decisions. 🤷🏻♂️
I guess I am not communicating well enough but you’ve summarized the real question of this definition well: is the being within, or without our universe?
If above, then there is no contradiction. If they’re within our universe proper, on “our level” then there is a contradiction that can’t exist.
The power to create and destroy universes cannot come from within this universe. Hence this debate is rendered moot, if that is the premise that they are not within our universe/physics.
And there is only a true point in this type of discussion if you’re talking about what is applicable within our known universe.
Yeah, I understood you, I just didn’t agree that omniscience and omnipotence could not possibly coexist.
You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.
Reading that quote made me reflect on the distinctions between body, soul, and consciousness in a new way.
It’s from the book A Canticle For Leibowitz for anyone curious.
Excellent book. I’ve read it several times, but not recently.
It really is a fantastic book. I’m a sucker for mid-20th century nuclear apocalypse literature, but this book is in a league of its own.
first thing that came up for me is The Egg.
For me, it’s an “anecdotal” or “more relatable” golden rule so it’s nothing really new. The interesting part was how it ties cosmic beings and rebirth cycles.
Neutral Monism. Particularly applied to whether an AI that acts sufficiently human would necessarily experience consciousness.
You can add onto that Virtue Ethics, applied to the question of whether an AI which acts human but is not conscious ought to be treated as if it were conscious anyway — because to do otherwise would damage one’s moral character.
Learning about Daoism has been pretty cool though I can only really read the Dao De Jing because there are no temples near me. Buddhism is way more wind spread and easily accessible comparatively speaking. It is also how Lao Tzu and Siddhartha Gautama come to many similar conclusions about suffering and leading a good life.
Here’s the bigger picture - or the self-actualization I have reached - you & I are the universe, on a journey that spans billions of years, we have come alive just for a few decades at most, in a way for the universe to experience itself, & experience we do, but we lack awareness of who we are (one / the universe), what we have (here & now), & what we truly yearn (experience the universe / connect with each other). Everything else is Leela, the most engaging movie or play you ever saw. It is so gripping, we can’t look away, but it’s just a show!
I was very intrigued by a follow-up to the recent numberphile video about divergent series. It was a return to the idea that the sum of the integers greater than zero can be assigned the value -1/12. There were some places this could be used, but as far as I know it was viewed as shaky math by a lot of experts.
As far as I recall the story goes something like this: now, using a new technique Terrence Tao found, a team was seemingly able to “fix” previous infinities in quantum field theory - there’s a certain way to make at least some divergent series work out to being a real number, and the presenter proposed that this can be explained as the universe “protecting us” from the infinities inherent in the math.
It made me think about other places infinities show up in modern physics (namely, singularities in general relativity) and whether a technique something like this could “solve” them without a whole new framework like string theory is.
Moore’s law and exponential technological progress viewed from the wider frame of biological evolution, and “the singularity,” are pretty compelling and likely upon first hearing them. They’re many nutters around it but Kurzweil earlier books on it are quite sound.
Organic compute: growing digital technology
Dialetheism is the view that some contradictions (i.e. p and not-p) are true. The argument for this is based on the liar’s paradox:
This sentence is false.
If you follow the logic through, you get the conclusion that it is both true and false. It requires some changes to Frege-Russell-style classical logic to be coherent, but it allows one to solve almost all paradoxes in one philosophical move. For example, you can have naive set comprehension principles
Biological engineering
