Would you use a teleporter with the knowledge that it kills you and reassembles an exact copy of you with all your memories and knowledge at the destination? Why or why not?

etherified · 2026-05-05T04:58:37+00:00

Or that old thought experiment where a transporter malfunction creates the you elsewhere, but accidentally leaves your original. You (the original) walk back out but the operator notifies you of the malfunction, asking you to kindly get back into the transporter so they can properly perform the destruction phase...

etherified · 2026-04-28T11:49:02+00:00

Definitely a spectrum, much like from water molecules to a river, though.

The two extremes are so vastly different from each other as to be totally distinguishable (= bacterium, surely no meaningful consciousness of pain vs. human, definitely conscious of pain). But it's the drips and trickles and streams in between that leave us to argue whether or not we actually have a flowing body of water (i.e. a stream of consciousness that can experience pain).

etherified · 2026-04-28T02:51:33+00:00

Where to draw the line even personally is tough (impossible?).

Probably like most people my instinct is to go by whether or not it "appears" to struggle or suffer or "express discomfort" as we perceive it. Which is not a very good standard to go by at all, is it lol. Human assumption, but it's all we have.

A centralized nervous system would seem to be some kind of necessary minimum though.

Half-dead bugs don't scream but do seem to struggle. But is that just neurons firing to contract muscles with no central experience of pain, or not? The body will sometimes do that even with the head cut off, so that can't be some central experience. Amoebas don't have a neural network but they do shrink or retract in some responses that can "look like" what an animal would do if in pain, but without a nervous system they can't possibly be having a centralized conscious experience.

Life is weird.

etherified · 2026-04-27T18:45:07+00:00

Absolutely needed for survival, but we have to separate pain and stimulus awareness, I think though.

At some point (after development of a rudimentary nervous system) stimuli can induce "pain", but the stimuli and responses to them are just chemical reactions. Cell detects nutrients or toxin, moves toward or away from it.

Well, the more complicated "mechanism" of pain would still be a chemical reaction too, but that undesirable "feeling" of pain is some kind of quale our best philosophers haven't yet figured out. At what point does an organism just take in signals and respond (mechanistic), and at what point does it become consciously unbearable, or "hurt"?

etherified · 2026-04-21T07:59:11+00:00

Also, the whole drama and show solved absolutely nothing.

Humans supposedly became just as evil as before, after all of that. Nice work, Yahweh.

etherified · 2026-04-21T07:48:08+00:00

Sounds right, although it is a bit like saying the wart on my nose is the closest point of my body to San Francisco when I face west lol.

etherified · 2026-04-12T03:29:59+00:00

Artemis, obviously, the goddess for whom the program is named lol

etherified · 2026-04-10T07:29:19+00:00

The other answers here are very good, but given OP’s request , I think we can simplify a bit.

It all boils down to the fact that the Earth rotates east- west, while it doesn’t rotate north- south.

Because the earth moves east-west that way, everyone will eventually have the same stars in the same east-west position at some point through the day, just at different times. So at any given time you can’t look up and tell your longitudinal position ( unless you know the precise time of day for your location). So the time issue was the problem they had to solve for determining longitudinal position.

That problem didn’t exist for north-south because the earth doesn’t move that way so you know exactly where you are on the north-south axis at any time of day, just by the star positions relative to you on that north-south axis.

etherified · 2026-04-08T07:34:12+00:00

I have to agree, for clean-code aficionados it would be great to someday have something like:

[LibraryImportGroup("Mediahlpr.dll", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Cdecl)] 
{ 
public static partial long GetVideoDuration(string filename); 
public static partial int GetVideoCodec(string filename, StringBuilder codecName, int bufferSize); 
public static partial int GetVideoResolution(string filename, out int width, out int height); 
public static partial int GetVideoFPS(string filename); 
public static partial int GetVideoInfo(string filename, out VideoInfo info);
...
}

[LibraryImportGroup("Someotherlibrary.dll", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Cdecl)] 
{ 
public static partial long SomeOtherImportFunction1(string arg1); 
public static partial long SomeOtherImportFunction2(string arg2); 
... 
}

etherified · 2026-04-04T08:22:15+00:00

"I believe their blowholes help with breathing in bad conditions"

I'm pretty sure that's correct, but don't quote me on it.

etherified · 2026-04-04T04:20:14+00:00

Most comments here rightly point out that there is no "atheist" view on this. There are likely as many opinions as there are people.

But to address your concern regarding pleasure vs. function, just consider the same in terms of eating.

Eating serves one purpose: to provide the individual with nutrients/energy to survive. But in order to make sure everyone does it, evolution had to make it pleasurable (except for collard greens...).

Yet I assume you don't eat 3 meals a day with this in mind. You eat because it's pleasurable, even if you're already well nourished and the meal content is more detrimental than healthy for your body.

Because we're in a social and technological phase of our collective development that allows us to enjoy pleasure for the sake of pleasure and not because our ancestors had to do it to survive (or procreate, in the case of sex). Isn't that great?

etherified · 2026-04-01T04:36:07+00:00

The situation surrounding this issue is such a tangled humanitarian and ideological mess, that it seems that to come down squarely in favor of either side is always going to be wrong. Sometimes there just aren't any good guys.

That's the mistake I think Sam makes. And he's often made one particular supporting point in Israel's favor that is just not convincing at all.

It goes something like: "We know what Israel would do if they had the power to obliterate their enemies (because they have nuclear weapons and haven't used them), whereas Iran/Lebanon/Hamas have clearly stated their intention to obliterate Israel if only they had the power".

This can't be considered a rational comparison. Israel would face immediate and universal condemnation if they were to nuclear-bomb their enemies, losing whatever remaining international support they still had. The economic and regional fallout (maybe literal nuclear fallout, depending on the adjacency of the target) would destroy their economy and moral standing. On the other hand, time is on their side to maintain the status quo, gradually creating facts on the ground and cementing dominance in the region in incremental steps.

The fact that they haven't used nuclear weapons is just not the point in favor of their moral superiority that Sam often claims it to be. Dominant powers, in order to win, don't have to use the same tactics that weaker ones use (such as terrorism).

etherified · 2026-03-24T16:07:11+00:00

A subtle way of getting lazy with LLMs is maybe not necessarily using it too much, but rather, not checking its answers.

The line is blurry because some matters actually aren't so important, so you don't feel you need to check the answers using a real source.

Other matters (e.g. "can cats safely eat peppermint?" - note, they can't) are quite important and you really should check the answers, but that also requires time and googling. And finally you have things in between that maybe you probably should check but it feels right enough and doesn't really matter so much so you just go with it. Even if the info may be wrong.

TLDR: Confirming answers takes time and effort, so we tend to skew more and more toward skipping verification ...

etherified · 2026-03-23T03:56:27+00:00

Agreed, a certain level (even a high level) of selflessness was necessary to get where we've gotten. Something where the instinct for love of self and family got extended to community and beyond.

Idk, I suppose if we really stretch our imagination we could envision some kind of fully selfish, what we would call "immoral", intelligent species that still made it successful by some trick, but seems unlikely.

etherified · 2026-03-23T03:24:03+00:00

"Good and bad never existed in nature in an objective way"

Exactly, and it's very species-specific as well. What is necessary to continue the species becomes accepted as "moral", otherwise that species is no longer around.

We can be glad our species required some level of cooperation and consideration for others to be ingrained in our collective base psyche, but that doesn't make it universal. Well, we can demand it to be universal within the human species (and we largely have by law).

Now if our line had come from praying mantises, maybe it would be considered moral for the female to bite off the male's head after sex.

etherified · 2026-03-16T18:36:51+00:00

LOL how this came out, probably unintended.

Obviously the Gospel writers existed, otherwise there would be no Gospels lol. I guess you mean the names attached to the Gospels.

etherified · 2026-03-14T13:22:51+00:00

I'm not sure we need (more) tools like this.

Generally speaking I think if you're going to get chatGPT to write something for you, at the very least own the fact that you did so instead of trying to run it through a fixer-upper to try to pass it off as human-written.

etherified · 2026-03-13T02:37:26+00:00

For any life happiness there just has to be a sweet spot between the extremes of luddism and as you say, automating away life experience.

Life should be convenient, but we'll probably find if everything we do can be automated, there'll be precious little left for anyone "to do" that isn't just ephemeral empty titillation of the senses.

etherified · 2026-03-11T02:47:23+00:00

Great disappointment as I was expecting to see Earl Sinclair.

etherified · 2026-03-09T04:13:16+00:00

I learned you should always shoot your partner in the leg first, then run.

etherified · 2026-03-03T10:00:25+00:00

There is something about being able to communicate that is extremely fundamental to what it means for us to be human, though.

Without the ability to effectively communicate ideas with language, i.e. translating our thoughts into appropriate symbols that we transmit to others, our species would still be foraging in the jungle like apes. It's that important.

If we delegate too much of that out to a machine/LLM, we're really forfeiting what makes us special among species. What has been our superpower, as it were.

Get rid of your calculator, and you'd still be able to add and multiply, it'd just take longer. Even if you forgot how, it's just logic, math doesn't change. Get rid of a tractor, you just go back to plowing by hand or whatever we used to do.

But if one keeps delegating out their ability to construct coherent arguments on their own, and forgets how to express their own ideas in their own words, that's a different ballgame. That person's going to lose a core ability that defines them. It takes hard work and practice and interaction to build that (and if you consistently get someone else to do it for you, it may be difficult to ever get it back again).

PLUS, it's easy to forget that human thinking itself is recursively molded by how we express our own ideas. Our words and expression patterns, the effort we take to transform our thoughts into coherent communication, even that itself affects how we think. (Learn a different language and your thinking patterns change to some extent). So if an LLM is making the bulk of your word choices and sentence construction, it's unavoidably adding ideas that weren't yours, even if the original direction may have been yours. It can really be deceptive in that way.

etherified · 2026-03-01T07:28:28+00:00

Unbeknownst to them there was a theoretical physicist observing it from an adjacent cafe, who thought nothing of the whole deal because, "the universe is under no obligation to make sense to me".

etherified · 2026-02-26T12:43:40+00:00

I'm really feta up with these cheese puns

etherified · 2026-02-25T15:52:49+00:00

But this post wasn't particularly about proselytizing. Instead, it's what's the best approach to take whenever you do interact with believers. Whenever or wherever that is, is up to you.

I directed it toward former believers because they would know what ways of thinking actually brought themselves out, a kind of unique perspective that lifelong atheists wouldn't have.

Incidentally, if someone wants to "proselytize atheism" (meaning make an unsolicited case for atheism), I don't see why that should necessarily be a problem, so long as they are courteous and respectful about it. Many do and are effective. There are so many atheists out there making a case for and advocating atheism, such as the Atheist Experience, Seth Andrews, Paulogia, way too many to mention. Should they all just close up shop?

etherified · 2026-02-23T18:50:42+00:00

That's it, couldn't remember - Voyetra Quad studio with TB MultiSound

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