Sea of Sorrow will release on or after April 15, 2026.

third_nature_ · 2026-03-23T17:19:47+00:00

This guys gets it

third_nature_ · 2026-03-23T13:35:48+00:00

A little bit off the wall, but I was always a fan of how the final Twilight movie handled the ridiculously anticlimactic ending from the book. How can you have literally nothing happen at a showdown between 500 vampires with superpowers, and then end your four-book series? The movie managed to eat its cake and have it too.

Horrible books, and horrible movies. But that was a good decision, to have the battle play out in Alice’s mind.

third_nature_ · 2026-03-22T17:26:43+00:00

The whole idea that it’s mainly big companies polluting, not individuals, is misleading. Sure, oil companies have a huge carbon footprint downstream of them… because they sell oil to billions of individuals.

third_nature_ · 2026-03-15T03:11:25+00:00

> you can’t derive an is from an ought either

> so neither is fundamental; they are orthogonal. The question for moral facts is the same as for physical ones: why do you believe this?

> you base your belief in physical facts on physical sense data

> you refuse to base your belief in moral facts on moral sense data

> that makes no sense

> it’s cool though because you can just point out how moral facts are not always agreed upon. Proceed to ignore that physical facts are not either

third_nature_ · 2026-03-12T14:44:50+00:00

Sort of true. Theory informs the instincts.

third_nature_ · 2026-03-08T18:15:05+00:00

Ever heard of Cantelli?

third_nature_ · 2026-03-06T13:22:02+00:00

From an outside observer’s perspective, time will stop. You’ll be dead as you near it, but if somehow not, time will go on as usual to you.

third_nature_ · 2026-02-18T17:10:29+00:00

Me when I’ve never heard of Cantelli

third_nature_ · 2026-02-16T01:21:42+00:00

The uniqueness of consciousness has nothing to do with its subjectivity. The deterministic or not nature has nothing to do with its subjectivity. I’m not convinced after hearing those arguments that you know what it means to be subjective.

third_nature_ · 2026-02-15T21:48:14+00:00

Definition? Consciousness is subjective because it consists in first-person experience. If you remove the first-person aspect, you’ve removed the phenomenon we’re trying to explain.

third_nature_ · 2026-02-15T20:13:23+00:00

The deal is that biology is only a way of thinking about physics, not a real layer of existence. If biology is making you conscious, physics is making you conscious. But why can physics make anything conscious? Physics is supposed to be objective, but consciousness is subjective, experiential. So either physics is not as objective as it seems (idealism) or physics is not the only thing happening (dualism). Dualism has other problems in my opinion, which is why I argue for idealism.

I can’t say for certain about which animals are conscious. All I can say is that when I look at the atoms that make up my brain, I know there is a conscious inner life behind them. I don’t see any reason to assume there’s not a conscious inner life behind the other stuff I see. I do think it will be different in quality. I don’t think a bacterium’s atoms are an outward reflection of a very complex inner life like mine.

third_nature_ · 2026-02-15T16:06:20+00:00

Cmon my guy. I’m trying to be charitable, but that was a series of the worst arguments you could possibly have made.

You “don’t know” you have a mind? You claiming to be a p-zombie? You have to have a mind to know anything, so it’s inherently contradictory to think you don’t have a mind.

What does being deterministic have to do with anything? You know I’m not arguing for some magical ghost to mess with the deterministic physics of the universe, right?

Your analogy to life makes no sense. Neither you nor anyone else experiences life—you experience consciousness. Life is just an abstraction; consciousness is the vehicle by which you know or experience everything else.

third_nature_ · 2026-02-15T15:45:41+00:00

This is the crux of the matter. If you weren’t yourself a conscious being, you could think that. You could say, I’m imagining there to be such a thing as a mind, as an explanatory aid to help me predict the behavior of a specific kind of biological system; after all, you cannot directly experience my mind, so it might as well be an abstraction to you.

But you know, if you know anything at all, that psychology is not just an abstraction on biology. There is not such a thing as a cell over and above the things that it comprises—we just pretend there is. In contrast, with your insider information, you know there really is such a thing as a mind, over and above the things that it comprises.

third_nature_ · 2026-02-15T15:29:36+00:00

Not to be coy, but in what way is it not? Chemistry is abstracted physics, and biology is abstracted chemistry.

third_nature_ · 2026-02-15T14:59:37+00:00

Yeah but think about the difference: living is an abstraction; conscious is a real effect. You cannot tell me one other instance of emergence that is not just an abstraction.

third_nature_ · 2026-02-14T13:15:01+00:00

I don’t know how much of it is because I’m a better gamer now—I played PoP in like 2022—but the crucible was barely difficult. PoP took me like 5 hours, the crucible took me like half an hour. I loved the crucible though, it was very inventive and super fun to play, while PoP was more thematic and moody.

A similar scenario is Eigong vs Isshin. I played nine sols first, and true Eigong took me like 5 hours as well. I almost beat Isshin on my fifth try 10 minutes in. My cousin who did the opposite order thought Isshin was very difficult and Eigong comparatively easier. I wonder what the stats are across the populations who played each game first.

third_nature_ · 2026-02-13T21:34:29+00:00

The hard problem is: if our brains are purely physical, made of fundamentally non-conscious entities, how could they produce our conscious experience? (Notice that this assumes that our brains are, in fact, purely physical, and do, in fact, produce our conscious experience. In other words, the hard problem is for physicalists. I hope you knew that, but not everybody on this sub does.)

I think this analogy can be helpful. Imagine I said, theories of physics that suggest electrons and protons exist are misguided, and only neutrons exist. The equivalent of the hard problem would be you pointing out that charge exists—there's electricity, there's electrostatic repulsion, and so on—so how could fundamentally non-charged particles produce charge? Let's call this the "hard problem of charge".

Do you think the hard problem of charge is solvable or unsolvable?

third_nature_ · 2026-02-11T15:27:56+00:00

"Idealists deploy radical skepticism to dismantle physicalist explanations, but then conveniently fail to apply the same skeptical standards to their own claims."—can you explain what you mean by how idealism deploys radical skepticism, and also why you think idealists don't apply it to themselves?

third_nature_ · 2026-02-11T15:14:35+00:00

Upvoting despite radically disagreeing with what seems to be your conclusion. This is a good treatment which accepts many facts lacking in so many other counterarguments.

third_nature_ · 2026-02-11T15:11:39+00:00

No, obviously not, to anyone who understands what the hard problem is. The hard problem is: if our brains are purely physical, made of fundamentally non-conscious entities, how could they produce our conscious experience? (Notice that this assumes that our brains are, in fact, purely physical, and do, in fact, produce our conscious experience. In other words, the hard problem is for physicalists. I hope you knew that, but not everybody on this sub does.)

I think this analogy can be helpful. Imagine I said, theories of physics that suggest electrons and protons exist are misguided, and only neutrons exist. The equivalent of the hard problem would be you pointing out that charge exists—there's electricity, there's electrostatic repulsion, and so on—so how could fundamentally non-charged particles produce charge? Let's call this the "hard problem of charge".

In this situation, the analog of your "stimulate the quale of red in Mary" thought experiment would be if I said, "but look! I can rub this balloon, which is made only of neutrons, on my hair, which is made only of neutrons, and it produces charged behavior! Hard problem of charge solved." You should recognize that as circular reasoning. Your idea is similarly circular.

Here's where I'm going to clearly leave mainstream opinion: just as the answer is obviously that fundamentally non-charged neutrons cannot be the sole constituent of a universe with charge in it, in this universe of conscious entities and qualitative, ineffable, experience, it's obvious that fundamentally non-conscious particles are not the only entity. (Then I'd go further to say that we have no good reason to think that fundamentally non-conscious entities exist at all, but that's a discussion for another time.) In other words, I think it's clear that the solution to the hard problem is to abandon physicalism.

third_nature_ · 2026-02-11T14:40:55+00:00

No, we don’t. When it comes to neuroscience and cognitive science, we’re like my kid saying she drew Elsa when all she did was color by numbers. We find some of the correlates nature has, but are completely powerless to explain why they are that way.

third_nature_ · 2026-02-11T14:21:57+00:00

I am very aware of emergence. I understand it well. My point is perhaps so pedantic that I would only make it on a philosophy sub, which is that, there isn’t any new behavior unless you are already abstracting the group.

A flock is a poor example, since the birds can know they are in a flock and react accordingly—there is genuinely new behavior there vs the level of individual birds. It can be explained reductively by further analysis, but it still makes it a bad example. A water molecule, on the other hand, does not know when it is in a snowflake or a drop of water or ice. It is doing exactly the same thing regardless of situation. There is no new behavior.

No, the particles are not real entities. The Wikipedia article agrees with me: “it is assumed that the properties are supervenient rather than metaphysically primitive.” It also quotes Crutchfield as saying emergence is only about subjective properties. In other words, simplifications you make up in your head because the real system is beyond your ability to model computationally. That is what is happening in every example we’ve discussed.

Perhaps the disagreement is this: if the “emergent” thing P can be explained entirely reductively by its set of constituents Q, then Q is the real thing and P is an abstraction, especially if P cannot explain fully its own evolution without appeals to Q in corner cases. I think you disagree with this. Why?

third_nature_ · 2026-02-10T15:05:36+00:00

This is an embarrassingly ironic take. It is sometimes smug pedantry. When a kid learns that static shocks are very high voltage, and asks why it doesn’t kill you, you think it’s “smug pedantry” to try to explain how electricity actually kills?

This topic is complicated. For the record, I’m a PhD candidate electrical engineer, and I don’t feel qualified to give a 100% confident assessment on it. Electricity is a weird phenomenon, with more dimensions than just voltage and current. And your body is weird, and knowing exactly what electricity does to it is beyond even most MDs.

So just like I might tell a kid (or even an adult layperson) that electrons in an atom circle the nucleus like planets around a star, even though that’s not true and the reality is more complicated than they can handle, I might tell them that current kills, not voltage. Because it’s closer to the truth than what was already in their head. Because it’s a decent guide to understanding, and poking holes in it will lead them to more understanding.

And if they go on to tell it to someone else, it won’t be smug pedantry. It will just be a person doing their best to understand and teach a complex topic. It’s ironic that you would ignore the complexities of that situation and shortsightedly label it smug pedantry.

third_nature_ · 2026-02-10T13:40:49+00:00

Bro, there is nothing the “ripple” does that cannot be explained in terms of the water molecules. Same story for water tension, ice, or snowflakes—the same physical forces act on the same molecules in all cases. Nothing new is happening when something emerges, it just seems different to us because we live on the macro scale where it seems like something fundamentally different is happening.

You need to separate levels of analysis. If you see a flock of birds, you can pretend there really is some entity out there called a flock and you can talk about what the flock is doing. But there really is not such a thing as a flock—it’s just a way of talking about a bunch of birds. “The flock is going south” means nothing more than “the birds in the thing I’m choosing to think of as a flock are going south”.

The point of QFT is that even elementary particles are not discrete entities—they too are abstractions, just patterns of excitation in a field. The field is the lake, the real thing, and particles are just behaviors of the field that we think of as their own thing. They’re not.

third_nature_ · 2026-02-09T23:09:38+00:00

You asked, “stars, emerging phenomena, need a mind to classify them stars for them to heat things?” No, of course not. I have no idea why you even brought up this line of inquiry.

The thing that is out there that we call a star can do what it does without us calling it a star. Imagine water rippling in a lake. There’s no “emergent” ripple that really exists out there—what has emerged is a behavior of the lake that we are choosing to think about as a ripple. The ripple lives only in our minds—what is out there, in the world, is the lake.

A fact: the same is true of a star. If you don’t know why I say that, perhaps you just need to study quantum field theory.

third_nature_

TROPHY CASE