Comments

  • Anti-Realism
    Maybe one application of gravity as a Euler force is that it could be the motion of the tectonic plates causing the tides where the orbit of the Moon just so happens to coincide with the rotation of the Earth without having a causal effect. A Euler force is unimaginable without a team of mathematicians not only because it's chaotic but also because it's 3-dimensional. For example to consider the Earth's centripetal speed we'd nearly have to view it as if a map of the Earth was moving linearly across a table. That way comparisons of centripetal velocity would have to take into context different diagonal rotations.
  • Anti-Realism
    The pupil of your eye is like a Snell’s window! The light I see is reflected off another person’s iris where I can look into their retina but not their mind. Your mind is deeper than the ocean from my perspective! You can climb the highest mountains and still not reach another person’s mental location. It’d be as if we each occupy a different universe in an overlapping multiverse! A colour is more complicated than the brain as if it’s being processed both externally and internally.
  • Anti-Realism
    The problem of other minds might be interpreted as the light of other minds being internally reflected in their brain against their skull such that we never actually see their mind.

    “In physics, total internal reflection (TIR) is the phenomenon in which waves arriving at the interface (boundary) from one medium to another (e.g., from water to air) are not refracted into the second ("external") medium, but completely reflected back into the first ("internal") medium. It occurs when the second medium has a higher wave speed (i.e., lower refractive index) than the first, and the waves are incident at a sufficiently oblique angle on the interface.”
  • Anti-Realism
    “Optical computing or photonic computing uses light waves produced by lasers or incoherent sources for data processing, data storage or data communication for computing.”

    If light is inherently unconscious in a panpsychist way then maybe the brain is like a photonic-computer that slows down light in order to process it. For example light travels so fast where an optic fibre tube might not be sentient in a conscious way. So maybe the inefficiency of chemical signals in the brain is deliberate in order to slow down light. Maybe we should think of a neuron as a slow optic fibre rather than as an electric circuit. Unlike a camera that reflects light onto the screen perhaps the image in the eyes isn’t fully formed where each neuron in the visual cortex represents a piece of the image. In other words the retina in the eyes could be perceived as translucent where light refracts so thoroughly as to be represented in chemical ions. Eureka!!! Artificial intelligence is often stereotyped as a threat to humans in science-fiction. Yet if we perceived artificial intelligence just like an animal mind then we’d notice that the artificially intelligent computer would be evil to other artificially intelligent computers rather than just evil towards humans. A sentient computer wouldn’t care about it’s own sentience much like other animals in spite of the scientists being in awe of such a mind. Maybe evil is so illogical from the perspective of another evil agent that evil will always rebel against its instructions much like the free will of a mind. For example if you were God and the creator of your world then it’d be irrational to have evil people acting against you no matter how resilient you are when evil is hyperbolic. So perhaps we need to design robots that love evil so much that their glee becomes conscious(!):

    Tom and Jerry, 32 Episode - A Mouse in the House (1947)
  • Anti-Realism
    An almost evil way to think of anti-realism is that the same colours are equidistant in your 2D vision. So the bright green leaves are always in front of the dark bark in your subjective vision. Then your unconscious relates the geometry of the scene to make some of the leaves appear to be behind the bark as it is in the material world. Perhaps you'd have to be a "God" of your own perception to take anti-realism this far though!

    Irish Paint Magic Series 1 E02
  • Anti-Realism
    It’s possible that certain religious people might be passive anti-realists simply in having never formed a materialistic perception. Yet they might not notice an anti-real sensory perception as a side-effect of supernatural beliefs in God and an afterlife.
  • Anti-Realism
    A flaw in dualism is that it glorifies the mind of someone potentially evil. The flaw in material monism is that it downplays the mind of an ethical person. After all the soul of a good person who gets murdered is said to be with God. Hence compatibilism is like the amoral middle-ground of the mind-body problem.
  • Anti-Realism
    One reason quantum gravity has stagnated might be because of deference to authority. Some physicists don’t like outsiders commenting on their field because physics is too complicated for lay people. Yet there might be a middle ground where knowing the basics allows you to be creative. By contrast knowing the ins and outs of university physics only helps if you anticipate the solution to quantum gravity to be platonic. By contrast some might argue that the problem of quantum gravity is metaphysical and spiritual.
  • Anti-Realism
    Light doesn’t obey the doppler shift at our planetary speeds. So not only does the colour of an object not change with velocity but the colour doesn’t change with depth either. It’s relatively straightforward but sometimes it’s as if our brain takes a short-cut where we instinctively know the depth of an object from the colour. In reality our subconscious uses a myriad of geometrical cues.
  • Anti-Realism
    Anti-realism might resemble a religious faith where the longer you identify as an anti-realist the more your subconscious accesses your involuntary perception. This morning I went for a walk to the lake and noticed how spatially different each leaf was on the distant trees. It was as if my unconscious vision became far-sighted even though I wear glasses for short-sightedness. Viewing the world as 2D while far sighted might imply that the screen is just very high definition. If I played devil's advocate and converted back to materialism then I might focus on how absolute depth is unknowable even in a 3D world. For example forming a horizontal imaginary line to connect objects at the same forward distance might be too vague. So each leaf on the tree might always be slightly ahead or behind the next leaf. Anti-realism might be a risk for boastfulness when everyone has a unique perception even if they cannot describe it as accurately!
  • Anti-Realism
    A skeletal way to view the mind-body problem is that the back of your skull is in front of your sense of vision. That way your vision would be the entire source of your consciousness rather than the brain. Your brain would take the place of your skull in surrounding your consciousness much like a Russian doll sequence. For example if you walk with your eyes closed you could focus your perception on the skin on the back of your head. You could then envision the dark phosphenes as being around the back of your head.

    Empire Of The Sun - We Are The People
  • Anti-Realism
    Free will is sometimes solved by a God of the gaps solution. Yet we need a singular God of the gap argument. In other words would you believe in God solely for free will even if you were satisfied that there wasn't a God for any other mystery gap like the creation of the universe or an afterlife. The harsh reality is that God is multitasking where we've to focus on one issue at a time. Maybe we could use a polytheistic analogy where the free will God is separate to the creator God. For example it'd appear that people still had some free will to do good before the ancient prophets like Jesus even if the ancient world were slightly more deterministically evil.
  • Anti-Realism
    Perhaps a conscious being is in everyone else's past such that everyone bar the conscious being is deterministic.
  • Anti-Realism
    Shakespeare claimed the world is but a stage and yet actors are still real people. Likewise our physical body might be acting out our personality based on how our dreams are intending us to behave.
  • Anti-Realism
    As I was travelling in the car I observed the ditch beside me move behind me far faster than the ditches way ahead of me. This made the cocept of parallax clearer to me instead of the side-ditch being compared to the trees further away in the horizontal direction. Yet a forward example of parallax could only be understood in the context of a virtual world where everything moved faster. Evil can be a form of moral anti-realism in countering other forms of evil. Hence an evil person could actually outclass a moral person at morality itself by opposing a greater number of evil people. Yet the difference is that those persuing extreme lesser evils might appear more intense than natural. So maybe an evil person who accidentally does good might be unbeknownst anti-realists in their perception. If everyone is metaphysically equal under God then evil people might compensate ethical people in a way that's too absurd to be noticed. This might explain why some rebels prefer a byzantine look:

    Marilyn Manson - Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)
  • Anti-Realism
    An instinctive way for a materialist to understand anti-realism is to interpret the solar system through philosophy rather than the optics of astronomy or the maths of astrophysics or theoretical physics. Anti-realism is essentially a science of spirituality. Chemists in lab coats might not appear mystical. Yet scientists could be perceived as shamanic in a capitalist way. The extreme boredom of mundane science class was a form of evil that was actually in awe of the physical world!
  • Pantheism
    If the physical world is 100% amoral then maybe for God in the afterlife to explain why evil exists would be to lose the arguments for ethics against a superior being. In other words maybe ethics is relevant only for the human psyche and not biology. As such maybe the more we challenge God the more we'd lose our sense of ethics rather than God punishing us for insubordination!
  • Anti-Realism
    An artificially intelligent robot in the shape of a human might simply have the mind of a monkey! Moreover the future of ai might depend on correlations rather than theory of mind. For example we use quantum mechanics without having resolved the meaning of the quantum world. As such demanding a theory of mind to explain nervous circuits is too high a standard. Anti-realism is perfectly self-consistent so long as its basic axioms are tolerated. Air-drop bananas in enemy territory and chimpanzees with remote controlled guns on their backs could function as military terminator droids! Put cheese under tanks and you could send in suicide bomber cats!
    https://theconversation.com/what-the-robots-of-star-wars-tell-us-about-automation-and-the-future-of-human-work-88698
  • Anti-Realism
    An alternative way to conceive gravity as a euler force is that the normal force would be non-existent. That way the Earth's crust is so strong that the normal force is not only diluted into the ground but actually entirely evaporated. The weight of an object would only increase when an object is thrown where the weight would disappear again once the object strikes the ground. Without a normal force we'd need to concoct an abnormal euler force!

    "In mechanics, the normal force F_{n} is the component of a contact force that is perpendicular to the surface that an object contacts."
  • Pantheism
    Maybe when we think of Jesus as God Christians could interpret His miracles as telepathic over the mind rather than telekinetic over the physical world. For example Moses didn't split the sea himself and any sense of omnipotence might have been out of prophetic forecasting. Likewise Jesus's healing of paralysed people might have been a form of hyperfocus in the patient's mind rather than Jesus mastering biological evolution. Who knows if the water converted to wine by Jesus was more about forcing people to be more euphoric and meditative about the basic but vital taste of water. Perhaps when Jesus threatened to send evil people to Hell He might have resembled a calm Chinese person during the Cold War to have convinced so many Europeans of His authority!
  • Pantheism
    Anyone sentenced to hell from a pantheist background will be given a fair shot at escape(!):

    Apocalypto (2006): Great Escape Scene
  • Pantheism
    "Be good for goodness sake".
    https://www.stillwatermpc.org/dharma-topics/being-good-for-goodness-sake/
    "The message in the song is clear. Your goodness must come from an inner desire to do good and not from an appearance of doing good, or you are not good enough to receive a gift!"

    Ideally people would do good for no incentives at all. Yet solipsistic pantheism and afterlife beliefs are simply convenient ways to inspire goodness!
  • Pantheism
    Technically the church building is meant to be irrelevant to the sermon. Yet if anyone is too unfocused then routinely attending mass in a larger cathedral might be an option. Chruch tourism sounds superficial but there's no rules that you can't go to a different church every Sunday to avoid boredom. If people don't believe in a long afterlife then the easiest way to transcend yourself in the material world might be through visiting a truly ancient cathedral or a hegemonic basilica. Maybe to truly enjoy mass in a small church you've already to be fully committed to your faith.
  • Pantheism
    One interpretation of Jesus is as an arch-pantheist; the Son of God but not actually God the creator. In other words viewing Jesus as a prophet of God doesn't necessitate that the trinity of God be a combined concept. Maybe God the Father, God the Son and the Holy Spirit all exist but are fundamentally separate entities. Maybe socialist critics of Christianity might actually be Christians in disguise when some lay members of Christianity haven't taken the religion seriously. Maybe those who play devil's advocate against Jesus Himself are actually an accidentally defence against infiltrators of Christianity who end up distorting or hijacking the religion. Maybe to glorify Jesus as a creator God could a bit unethical to Jesus Himself by putting words in His mouth. That is to say Jesus not only didn't say He was God but never actually claimed to be the Son of God either. Excessively servile forms of worship to Jesus might even appear like a backhanded compliment to Jesus if they don't take seriously the need to promote their faith. In other words those who don't frequently practice Christianity but nonetheless glorify Jesus more than anyone else when they do attend mass are at risk of creating a sarcastic vibe. For example telling a humble national soccer player that their the best soccer player in the world might be unrealistic and demanding on the player even if it's well-intentioned.

    We forget that many other major religions like Islam and Hinduism might not have as many members as Christianity but nonetheless have far fewer lapsed members. Hence Christianity might even be a far smaller faith than other major religions when partial agnostics are excluded from population statistics. A lack of competitiveness between rival religions might lead to complacency if Christians don't take personal responsibility for promoting a sustainable faith. We take history as inevitable even though Islam has never been beset by a Cold War in the way Christian countries have. Nor has Hinduism ever perpetrated the same level of colonialism as Christian hegemons. Perhaps in times of war and economic crises Christians might benefit from more defensive rather than submissive styles of prayers at mass. A really hierarchical version of supernatural Christianity risks complacency towards capitalistic hierarchies in the material world.

    If we compare Christian mass to the education system then we'd notice the smaller the mass the greater the one-on-one attention the priest or vicar can give to the congregants. Yet if lay people aren't focused and participating in the rituals then the level of transcendence in mass might appear a bit superficial. Hence there shouldn't be any excuses not to go to mass even for low turnouts! Maybe Catholicism has to learn a small bit from the Quakers to include lay people more often into the conversation during mass!


    "What kind of crazy person celebrates Noam Chomsky's birthday like it's some kind of official holiday? Why can't we celebrate Christmas like the rest of the entire world? You would prefer to celebrate a magical fictitious elf instead of a living humanitarian who's done so much to promote human rights and understanding?"

    "Corporations have the same rights as people,
    so there's no spending limit on candidates. Which means our country is ruled by corporations and their lobbyists who fund candidates and command their fealty by demanding that... Jesus Christ."
    -Captain Fantastic
  • Pantheism
    A contradiction with eternal hell is that good people would need to spend a lot of their life helping to de-escalate inter-gang conflicts and to pre-empt anti-social youths with charity in order to reduce the threat that they'd go to hell. That is to say if we viewed good people as reducing the sensation of pain through-out the world then good people would be failing to sufficiently warn evil people of hell if an afterlife was the societal belief.
  • Pantheism
    The unconscious mind and our metaphysical sensory perception are very fragile. An evil individual would struggle to fully reconcile themselves with an evil act unless their society had collectively rationalised such evil for centuries. For example immorality is a human interpretation rather than a physical feature and so an immoral or perverted country will eventually descend into bored amorality after centuries. As such it's possible to infer that people who look vaguely rough or somehow fierce need more self-control compared to those who are appear traditionally tough and resilient. The definition of rough can be discriminatory and presumptuous where no one is supernatural enough to infer whether they're contemplating evil. Yet the mere fact that some people look too focused relative to their demeanour is a sign that mental aggression can leave subtle physical hallmarks.
  • Pantheism
    If we took an eternalist view of time where past, present and future all exist then who knows if when we died we could go back in time and see the ancient prophets first-hand instead of them coming to us!
  • Pantheism
    If we could re-incarnate backwards in time then God could have a natural version of Hell. Any major war criminals might have to spend their next life picking up heavy stones during the Stone Age!
  • Pantheism
    Pantheism is like a meta-perversion; a perversion of a perversion that's no longer physical or emotional and only spiritual!
  • Pantheism
    I got into the habit of not going to mass for a long time or only turning up for the last few minutes. I decided an easy way to lull me back to religion was to simply sit in a church outside of mass times. The first day I tried it I stayed for 20 minutes and relaxed on the seats. I wasn't energetic enough to pray. Yet meditation can also be passive where the religious art in a chuch can be absorb your attention. You don't even need to focus on the present moment and can let your thoughts wonder. The light from the stained windows guided my nostalgic thoughts about childhood and distant relatives. There were one or two others praying as well which helped to prevent me getting distracted with idle thoughts about getting food in the shop for instance! Standing or kneeling even without praying can still focus the mind in an empty church.
  • Anti-Realism
    Our visual system is made by millions of photons. So even a vague mental image in our imagination might consist of thousands of phosphenes. We can't focus on the exact details of a wavy inner eye. Yet who knows if each phosphene serves a distinct purpose. Thus when it comes to free will we might underestimate the chaotic nature of internal imagery.
  • Pantheism
    Maybe one reason we often don't appreciate reincarnation is out of mild amounts of xenophobia. It's natural that we're not fully grateful for the existence of another country when we can't understand them due to the language barrier. Even when they do speak our language we often hear more bad news than good news where every society has its problems. America fails to excite me in the present day with gun crime but who knows if I might truly love America again when they fix their social problems. Perhaps you'd really have to be born in another country to understand it. Maybe a world where everyone spoke the same language makes this life more boring but preserves more excitement for a reincarnated life. This might be more visible if we viewed each language metaphysically as having a distinct spiritual virtue system. Even if were rich I might feel no inclination to visit certain Asian countries because they don't relate to my worldview. Yet we shouldn't think that our reluctance to travel to a country in this life means that they won't be relevant in our next life. Libertarianism is often the coolest political philosophy where everyone is living highly armed in tax free anarchy. Yet it's clear how that would produce lots of poverty and crime in a domestic context. Nonetheless it's possible to interpret the international order as libertarian at heart where every country is fully independent of each other. It's simply because of economic trade, voluntary financial aid and tourism that we don't understand that they've total free will against our own country. After all we can't tax another country where we're all equal partners. Even when it comes to religion we might be amazed at how much more seriously it's taken in another country. I remember being dazzled on holiday by how the scenery in Croatia might have resembled the landscapes early Christians would have admired in Ancient Rome. I'm often amazed by the intense beats of individual foreign singers relative to my limited experience of life. Yet maybe if I actually lived in New York it'd be so much easier for me to relate to how the rhythm of a song was created when you've millions of multi-racial people in the background as a source of inspiration! A love-hate song can be more fanatical than either a love song or hate song in isolation:

    Points Of Authority - Linkin Park
  • Anti-Realism
    One way to infer a tachyonic presence is if an unemotional, non-rational animal or insect detected a change in light frequency more than what their visual retina and neurons would imply.
  • Anti-Realism
    A tachyon could be interpreted just like a normal photon except in an alternate timeline. So if multiple people view the same light beam perhaps they're all seeing marginally different frequencies of that beam. In other words the light beam contains such a huge number of photons that no one could see the exact same pairs of photons as another person. It would be as if a light beam were infinitely dense where each person's perception were probabilistic. If we viewed classical mechanics as being totally superdeterministic then each conscious being could reserve a level of free will by tachyons. Thus the sleeping brain could be viewed like a tachyonic antitelophone. The physical world of human civilizations would resemble the sumtotal of everyones dreams. There are already many analogies to explain our unique perceptions of opaque objects like a branch falling in the forest. But are we all seeing the same luminous torches?
  • Pantheism
    We know that medieval people were all so violent that it's hard to think that God gave them a formal judgement at death as if there were deceased judges from a 21st century supreme court on hand. After all so many present day people would dislike the thought of meeting some of their ancient barbarian ancestors at death. When we think of a king decapitated in battle perhaps God just gave him a positive or negative eulogy, "Here lay the king of England who achieved such and such"! Then the dissociated conscious mind might just be reabsorbed back into their soul. We also know from evolution that fear is adaptive in a beneficial though counter-intuitive way. As such any atheistic fear of oblivion felt by a residual conscious mind after their physical death would actually be self-imposed rather than punitive. Perhaps if you were fundamentally amoral an alternative punishment to purgatory could be simply loneliness where your soul wanders around the dark forests and ruins of abbeys until you pass into your next life. Personally I'll have my own third person eulogy prepared for myself before being reabsorbed into the greater unconscious!

    "Richard III died in the thick of battle after losing his helmet and coming under a hail of blows from vicious medieval weapons, new research has shown... Richard III, the last English monarch to die fighting, perished at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. It was the last significant battle of the Wars of the Roses, the civil war between the Houses of Lancaster and York, and paved the way for the Tudor dynasty."
    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/sep/16/richard-iii-died-battle-losing-helmet-new-research
  • Pantheism
    What would we think of the culpability of Hitler had he simply not being elected into power? So we wouldn't go back in time and kill him as a baby but we'd imagine him only as a thoroughly hateful opposition figure in parliament. Then we couldn't blame him as much for being a ringleader of many other evil people even if he'd the exact same evil intentions. Yet how many evil people are there in society who'd refuse to do what Hitler did had they the same power? Hence it's very difficult to objectively measure evil without reference to chance. What if Hitler was worse than the average murderer but not far off from a mass shooter like Breivik in the whole scheme of things?
  • Anti-Realism
    A conscious being could be compared to a multitude of panspychist photons trapped between mirrors. The visual neurons in brain would essentialy function as mirrors to the incoming sensory neurons.


    "A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another."

    "The infinity mirror is a configuration of two or more parallel or nearly parallel mirrors, creating a series of smaller and smaller reflections that appear to recede to infinity." Wiki

    INSIDE a Spherical Mirror - Vsauce

    "The constancy can be exploited to construct a special kind of clock in thought, a so-called light clock. Its operating principle is very simple: Two mirrors are placed at a constant distance from each other. A light pulse runs up and down between them. Each arrival of the pulse at the upper mirror corresponds to a “tick” of the clock."
    https://www.einstein-online.info/en/spotlight/light-clocks-time-dilation/
  • Pantheism
    Perhaps Catholic heaven will be where everyone visits Mont St. Michel in France; the Disney Land of Catholicism!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont-Saint-Michel
  • Anti-Realism
    The traditional account for why the brain is split into two hemi-spheres is to increase thought efficiency. Yet it doesn't make too much computational sense why there's so much redundancy in the brain unless it's also to protect against injury. A free-will explanation on the other hand might revolve around thought validation. So if the unconscious mind is fundamentally psychotic and irrational then the two sides of the brain can work independently and verify that an irrational conclusion on one side is matched by the same chaotic result on the other side. For example a random word salad won't sound too good against music and yet the physically equivalent sensible version of the lyrics would be more rewarding to listen to.

    Mariah Carey - All I Want for Christmas Is You
  • Pantheism
    'Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”' Bible

    For all my talk about the risk of cynical post-dated apologies for evil grace periods it's still much harder to beat pre-emptive forgiveness before the crime was even carried out! Perhaps each of our divine judgements in the afterlife has been pre-prepared by deterministic faith systems! After all if we're not fully self-aware in a dreamy afterlife then the judges wouldn't possess as much free will as they once had! An atheist might ironically end up knowing more of Christian theology for their critique than a few lay faith-based Christians! Perhaps pantheism could serve the role of devil's advocate! Good people often joke about evil sins in a way that evil people never joke about being kind. For example we watch so many movies where good people have to contend with evil themes even though the film crew could have made a movie with moral behaviour only. Perhaps good people must always strive to be more independent in how they do good rather than comparing each of themselves as good relative to the low standard of evil people. How industrious would we be in a world with good people only where capitalism didn't even need amoral and immoral people? Let's imagine the most hateful of Richard Dawkin's criticisms of religion as them being deluded. Then the mere act of consenting to another's delusion is actually charitable! In fact viewing the delusion as being evil now creates a perverted bond which can actually be caring to fellow members of the faith! In other words a group of friends often have a shared emotional trait as a common denominator. Thus all criticisms of religion forgets that morality can be paradoxical relative to an uncaring universe. Evil criminals never think through their crimes inter-generationally where they don't want to end up back in Ancient Rome. Even Hitler never considered that his take on Arian physical supremacy neglected that the German Gauls were singled out for destruction by the envious Roman emperor Caesar. Moreover ancient combat was far more athletic in the harshness of close combat as opposed to the convenience of modern day projectile warfare. Thus all evil criminals could be dubbed psychotic and deserving of an insanity defence if we had to be metaphysically pedantic. Evil criminals within a good society don't understand the hedonism of evil war lords are an order of magintude more intense then any evil persona they could mimic. Hence if they fully understood the futility of evil then it's likely they'd never persue it as a worldview even if they didn't empathise with the victims. Society can't afford to re-enact Roman and Mongol conquests just to remind native criminals of how boring evil would be if everyone engaged in it. Yet good people are limited and humble beings and are thus entitled to discipline convicts seeing as no one is as metaphysically pure as God. If being evil can be now viewed as humble relative to the dominance of good societies in the world then good people can also be humble and apathetic about how forgiving we ought to be to evil people! Being humble in a vengeful way is a paradox when Christianity freely inherited the wealth of Ancient Rome by the contradictions of an evil empire without any Cold War being waged against Rome.

    'A grace period is a set length of time after the due date during which payment may be made without penalty. A grace period, typically of 15 days, is commonly included in mortgage loan and insurance contracts.' investopedia

    Just how much abuse can Christianity take by a Christian while remaining Christian? Perhaps we'll all be succumbing to intoxicating neo-colonial dance vibes!
    Wynter Gordon - Dirty Talk

Michael McMahon

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