Normal

When people are in the majority, they defend democracy, but when they come into conflict with the majority they protest and demand exceptional treatment. Democracy is hypocrisy.

AI companies regard their own AI output as information pollution. AI content is ‘watermarked’: the sequence of words that appears natural to the human reader is based on statistical models and any sequence can be statistically compared to the model to calculate the probability of human authorship for that sequence. This strategy is necessary to prevent AI output polluting the AI training data; AI pollution would cause the model to diverge from intelligibility, which the AI can only emulate on the basis of conscious, intelligent communication. With the increasing uptake of AI, conscious authorship became uniquely valuable, and its commercial value will continue to grow. https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-marks-ai-generated-content

A ‘bussiness’ that has no ‘product’, and its only ‘service’ is creating money and charging interest on it.

Your home has the same value irrespective of price, but the higher the price, the higher the insurance, taxes, rates and maintenance costs.

To the extent that human rationality (therefore agency) is deficient, there are only two strategies of control: bullshit and terror. The only good thing about the failure of bullshit (capitalism, communism, socialism, religion, democracy) is that the duality of terror and bullshit becomes salient, and the incoherence of human reasons, values and world-models easier to acknowledge.

Ideas are not, strictly speaking, in your (individual) mind, but in-between minds. This is particularly salient in regard to the physical world; what I perceive as an object is necessarily an idea, but an idea that consists is something ‘being there’ for you too, also as an idea of an object and not internal and exclusive to me. The world is a synthesis of minds, continuously augmented by creative contributions of individual minds.

3000 years ago every individual was ‘schizophrenic’ by the modern diagnostic standard, misinterpreting their own mental states as external events. Despite now possessing the concept of mind/thought, contemporary society is still schizophrenic, misinterpreting our own mental states as ‘perceptions’ of something external we call ‘world’ or ‘reality’ that already ‘existed 3000 years ago’. https://open.substack.com/pub/michaelkowalik/p/voices-in-your-mind

Good faith demands that Christians should acknowledge as a ‘possibility’ that the story of Jesus could be fictional, which would compel them to justify the moral content of Christianity on its own merits, by consistent inference from logically necessary premises, and not just assume. The demand for rational justification applies to all religions, and if the logically necessary premises are correctly identified, and the inferences are consistent, then all religions should arrive at the same conclusions.

The mathematical notion of ‘infinite set’ is an oxymoron. The term ‘set’ presupposes finitude, a limit of inclusion, whereas the term ‘infinite’ contradicts it. Intuitionistic logic was premised on the argument that ‘classical’ logic cannot prove inclusion in an ‘infinite set’. This counts in favour of ‘classical’ logic, since ‘infinite sets’ are non-sense, therefore nothing.

With respect to what is the ‘frame of reference’ (or ‘space’) stationary?

If your identity consists in being ‘a body’, then you will die. If your identity consists in not being a body, but only wearing a body, then you will not die, provided the ‘I’ that wears it is integrated, not fragmented into a subject and an object.

The is no good reason to accept the results of any AI content estimator as valid, without already agreeing on the validity of the methodology. If people cannot distinguish AI from the work of conscious beings, then they are also incapable of validating the estimate.

God does not do deals. Perfection is in want of nothing.

Putin does not assassinate Zelensky, does not blow up his office with a missile, because they are partners, on the same team. Together they work the little people.

Hypocrisy is absolutely essential for the ruling power to elicit the unconditional submission of the ruled.

Covid was a global exercise in religious engineering. The official dogma was intentionally absurd, and the relief lied in total submission to absurdity.

The word ‘truth’ has a special meaning in religion. Religious narratives are not accepted because they make sense; they are intentionally nonsensical, they are understood to be nonsensical, and are collectively accepted as ‘true’ because they are nonsensical. It is precisely in this intentional submission to nonsense that psychological relief/bliss/salvation is accomplished; the overwhelming difficulty of consistent reasoning is renunciated, the trauma of constant uncertainty is abolished, and the convert becomes free of the constraints of sense, like a wide-eyed newborn. Consequently, religion is not rational consciousness, but its rejection and dissolution as something too painful to endure.

The biggest moral problem for Christians is not the authenticity of the New Testament (a story can be fictional but still metaphorically constructive) but their acquiescence to the Old Testament idea of God that commands genocide, makes deals with some tribes for special favours, demands chid sacrifice as proof of obedience, mandates genital mutilation of infants... I see no good way of resolving this as a constructive metaphor, except as a test of moral character that requires disobedience, which disqualifies this idea of God.

A person performs miracles in front of crowds: restores sight to the blind, resurrects the dead, walks on water, turns water into wine, raises from the dead etc and there is not a single first-hand description of what he looked like, not a single artisan draws his portrait.

The quality of evidence is not a function of direct observation but of confabulation… and the quality of confabulation is a function of the capacity to maintain and endure logical consistency.