How far down the rabbit hole do you go?

[JackRiddler]

Eh. Wrong night to ask. Motherfucking country. Originally, "mother" meant mother and "fucking" meant fucking, and that's what it still is, a motherfucking country.

And I have no problems with your idea, just want backing. Because anything can be anything in theory. Also, the books emphasize one opening constantly, Alice's mouth - what she eats and what she says are both very important.

[JackRiddler]

The Simulation Thesis has always kinda baffled me -- much like the hooplah over the "Anthropic Principle," it seems like an uroboros of cascading tautologies snuffing themselves out of existence in a single simmering second. You know?

Roll with me here. The Universe is precisely tuned to support human life precisely because human life has evolved to be here to take those measurements. It doesn't signify an intelligent creator, it just signifies the inevitable system requirements for the current moment, which, as we all know and often forget, it completely non-negotiable, unlike almost everything else humans talk and think about while we're here. Then again, I always thought the Descartes aphorism "I think, therefore I am" was a sad lament about the limitations of thought, rather than an inspirational spark of insight.

...wasn't there another one of those dwem’s who made some aphorism about all the world being a stage or something…?....inviting some speculation about what you can see if you take a peak behind the scenery......

I see the Simulation Thesis the same way -- when you consider the system requirements for a simulation of this scale, it's basically 1:1 isomorphic to the Universe Thesis, which is based on the observation that HOLY FUCK WE ARE ALL INSIDE THIS HUGE THING RIGHT NOW AND IT IS ALIVE.

…I dunno though…I’m supposing no-one out there actually thinks George Lucas actually built a planet-sized city to play around with do they…?





Although I admit the trajectory from




to





implies they may be trying to economise on hard disc-space


( ...although it is still a crap theory...)

[semper occultus]

...that woodcut is amazing ...worth a repost - not sure about the rest of it though Jack

....in other news : silicon valley computer nerd develops theology centered around super-human computer nerds shock......

Creating God in one’s own image
Posted by Ed Yong on November 30, 2009

Psychological studies have found that people are always a tad egocentric when considering other people’s mindsets. They use their own beliefs as a starting point, which colours their final conclusions. Epley found that the same process happens, and then some, when people try and divine the mind of God. Their opinions on God’s attitudes on important social issues closely mirror their own beliefs. If their own attitudes change, so do their perceptions of what God thinks. They even use the same parts of their brain when considering God’s will and their own opinions...< >....a region called the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) that’s been linked to self-referential thinking. The mPFC is more active when we think about our own mindsets than those of others. Epley found that it was similarly abuzz when the recruits thought about their own attitude or God’s,

http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscienc ... own-image/

I always thought the Descartes aphorism "I think, therefore I am" was a sad lament about the limitations of thought, rather than an inspirational spark of insight.

…..I think Descartes was on to something if by “I am” he was meaning my intuitive conviction that I am an organic piece of slowly decaying meat occupying base-reality and we broaden the scope of “thinking” to mean something beyond just electrical brain activity to include all sorts of barely acknowledged processes that seem to inter-penetrate us at the physical or even cellular level

http://www.namahjournal.com/doc/Actual/ ... iss-1.html

[JackRiddler]

Nah, he was just trying to show that even if no sensations are reliable, one still exists in some form that at least thinks.

[NeonLX]

LOL @ Jack for the trajectory straight down from Lincoln and Marilyn towards Bush the Stupider.

[JackRiddler]

LOL @ Jack for the trajectory straight down from Lincoln and Marilyn towards Bush the Stupider.

Twas semper who posted that and I hope you get the joke relating to earlier posts in this thread: since the simulation is supposed to get harder for the simulators as the society transitions to "posthuman" (since it's soooooo much more complex than mere biology, according to the genius who came up with the idea), the machines save on harddrive space by combining Lincoln and Marilyn into a degraded Shrub.

[NeonLX]

Hahaha. Yeah, I picked up on that. And thanks to Semper for the original post!

More of the beauty that is RI.