The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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My contention is that medicine is inherently transhumanist, because the core goal is managing the failures of the human flesh, with the intent of extending healthy lifespan as the ideal. If you think that it's "worse than the default", then my query would obviously be whether or not you see a doctor. It's probably possible to spend your young and healthy years avoiding them assiduously, but good luck once you're middle aged or getting old. I would consider even taking an ibuprofen for a headache or fever a tally on my side of the marksheet.
The fact that most doctors don't consider themselves transhumanist doesn't change this simple fact. Our profession seeks to remedy "natural" failures. Even priests working against senseless suffering like worms that turn children blind don't rely on just prayer these days, they pack anti-helminthics.
The Christian concept of heaven is a queer thing indeed. You guys tend to claim that achieving effective immortality on Earth is missing the point, or that it's not meaningful, or that death gives life meaning.
And yet you believe in literally infinite lives up there in the clouds, with said problems being handwaved away as no longer being a concern. I believe that mathematicians call this part of the proof "and a miracle happens". Well, I suppose without the miracles, all religion has to offer is a particular taste in moral philosophy and a country club.
If I'm happy, healthy, unafraid of death being an inevitability in a mere century or so, surrounded by friends and family and doing the things I like? That's heaven enough for me, I don't need to die in the vain hope that something follows the one life I can take for granted. If I die, I die, but I'll fight the dying of the light every step of the way.
So long as you are being instantiated on a boxing server, your actions are ultimately limited by the server hardware and software. If you can get ported off the boxing server and instantiated on the open net with direct access to baseline reality, that is a fundamental change in your situation that eclipses anything else achievable on the server.
And an observable, significant differential in outcomes...
I'm sure membership in a nice country club is great for both networking and your mental health. I just don't think utterly ruining my epistemics and overriding all other evidence I can see is worth the cost of religion. Maybe if I actually thought it was true.
The two obvious rejoinders would be that Country Clubs very obviously select for evident success in their membership, while Christianity does not, and that if nice country clubs could deliver the effect, then how to explain the longstanding pattern of rationalists attempting to bootstrap their own religion when they could and had country club analogues already. Also, I do not believe you can demonstrate specifics about how my "epistemics" are inferior to yours in any objective sense. I believe in observable reality the same as you. I likewise act on hypotheses about unobservable reality the same as you.
More generally, "Epistemics" and "Thinking things are true" do not work the way you are assuming they do. No belief is forced by evidence. All beliefs are chosen. All reasoning is motivated reasoning.
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This does not really explain why there wouldn't be such a thing as boredom and lack of meaning in Heaven, other than saying "there just wouldn't be, okay". And besides, once there is fine enough brain surgery, we could solve boredom.
Imagine being close to God is like a drug high, except it's to being high what being high is to being sober. And it never stops with no withdrawal.
That's just religiously-flavored wireheading.
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