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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2624 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 18, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Can you explain more of what you mean in this section? [We always fight against its cold cruelty and every victory of ours leaves us weaker and worse off. Few seem to understand this at the meta level, so in modernity we go from blunder to blunder and become ever more cringe with each generation.]

Are you talking about a 'fight' against evolution? Can you explain what you mean by 'cringe'? I understand this word to mean social awkwardness but it is always viewed relatively.

We are animals whose sense of drive fulfillment evolved to be derived from sustaining our material needs, war, tribal belonging and pursuing power. Yet now we perform abstruse specialist tasks which are usually far less satisfying, we are exposed to too little violence, commercial services allow us to eschew community and the judgement of others, to our own detriment.

Pursuit of agency and power typically involves people selling their soul and time to some corporate shoggoth. The traditional way of having a war band and stabbing more or less distant neighbors or maybe even tearing off some territory to claim your own is now a distant memory echoing only in certain computer games.

Pretty much every historically basically inevitable societal advance has removed us further away from direct fulfilment of most of those goals and having to resort to replacement activities.

E.g. So I'm exposed to the spectacle of my highly paid (for the region, $5k a month is chump change in the US) specialist ancestor spending a lot of her scant free time at desultory attempts at growing some salad and beans. People cheer and care for absurd sports, it forms their identities. And so on.

Eliminative materialism is a false path my friend. It’s not too late to turn back.

I'm not an eliminative materialist. I believe mental phenomena are, however, arising from the processes in the underlying physical matter. Maybe the thought processes themselves matter, and aren't purely an 'experience', maybe not, but they of course exist.

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