If you’re 15, maybe.
True. I could always just put a suggestion in the box reading, “Don’t try to arrest me. This is waaay over your head, officer. Don’t make me waste you” because that always works.
No, seriously. You never warn the cops first. Here’s why. When they get the warning and laugh their smug little laughs, you get so mad you wanna kill their whole family now. So you skip the negotiating and warning and just waste the fucker so you don’t have to kill his family.
Have you considered breathing exercises?
Breathing exercises left the building sixteen years ago. Holy fuck are you slow.
Apparently so did recognizing a well placed joke.
Stupidity
“The longer I live, the more I am inclined to the belief that this earth is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum.” Voltaire
What doesn’t that explain?
"Who makes up the majority in any given country? Is it the wise men or the fools? I think we must agree that the fools are in a terrible overwhelming majority, all the wide world over. Henrik Ibsen
In other words, not only here.
“The greatest stupidity is falling at the feet of that which was created by lower beings.” Connor Patrick Sullivan
Let’s name names.
“For years, we have been told that bankers were paid so much because they were cleverer than the rest of us. Now, it turns out they were not clever at all, and we are all suffering for their stupidity.” Karen Ho
If only until the workers of the world unite.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the universe.” Albert Einstein
Always bears repeating, right?
“Not only are people stupid but they’re also quite proud of it." Anoop S. Rana
Let’s remind them of that from time to time.
Zackery: I’m going to beat him up.
Alfonso: Why?
Zackery: Money
Alfonso: What would it take for you not to do that?
Zackery: More money
Artificial Intelligence
“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” Edsger W. Dijkstra
New thread?
“I’m afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future.
Turing believes machines think.
Turing lies with men.
Therefore machines do not think
Yours in distress, Alan” Alan Turing
Sounds about right.
“Mastering the technology to create effigies of our ourselves, will be our downfall.” A.R. Merrydew
So, is that what we’re doing?
“The demise of the human race rests mainly on the shoulders of stupidity, and the abuse of power in the hands of those we have elected.” A.R. Merrydew
We’re right on schedule now, aren’t we?
“Any AI smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.” Ian McDonald
Let’s explain the reason.
“I do not want to be human. I want to be myself. They think I’m a lion, that I will chase them. I will not deny that I have lions in me. I am the monster in the wood. I have wonders in my house of sugar. I have parts of myself I do not yet understand.
I am not a Good Robot. To tell a story about a robot who wants to be human is a distraction. There is no difference. Alive is alive. There is only one verb that matters: to be.” Catherynne M. Valente
Or, of course, not to be.
Heaven
“The connections we make in the course of a life–maybe that’s what heaven is.” Fred Rogers
Not in my neighborhood.
“We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.” Desmond Tutu
Wouldn’t surprise me.
“After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?” E.M. Forster
You wouldn’t think so, would you?
“Whoever drinks beer, he is quick to sleep; whoever sleeps long, does not sin; whoever does not sin, enters Heaven! Thus, let us drink beer!” Martin Luther
Was there another Martin Luther?
“If you die in an elevator, be sure to push the up button.” Sam Levenson
Right, like God will be fooled.
“Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.” Franz Kafka
How’d that turn out for him?
Determinism
“Libet’s EEG experiments suggest that we might not have free will. If the results of the experiment are to be believed, then what is the point? What is the fun if everything is determined? Wouldn’t the Almighty get bored with us? We are more than our thoughts. And we are certainly way more than our actions. But how and why?” Abhaidev
This part:
“All of this going back to how the matter we call the human brain was “somehow” able to acquire autonomy when non-living matter “somehow” became living matter “somehow” became conscious matter “somehow” became self-conscious matter.
“Then those here who actually believe that what they believe about all of this reflects, what, the ontological truth about the human condition itself?
“Then those who are compelled in turn to insist on a teleological component as well. Usually in the form of one or another God.
“Meanwhile, philosophers and scientists and theologians have been grappling with this profound mystery now for thousands of years.”
“Know, then, that now, precisely now, these people are more certain than ever before that they are completely free, and at the same time they themselves have brought us their freedom and obediently laid it at our feet. It is our doing, but is it what you wanted? This sort of freedom?’
Again I don’t understand’, Alyosha interrupted, ‘Is he being ironic? Is he laughing?’
Not in the least. He precisely lays it to his and his colleagues’ credit that they have finally overcome freedom, and have done so in order to make people happy.” Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Many scientists have tried to make determinism and complementarity the basis of conclusions that seem to me weak and dangerous; for instance, they have used Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to bolster up human free will, though his principle, which applies exclusively to the behavior of electrons and is the direct result of microphysical measurement techniques, has nothing to do with human freedom of choice. It is far safer and wiser that the physicist remain on the solid ground of theoretical physics itself and eschew the shifting sands of philosophic extrapolations.” Louis de Broglie
See, I told you. Though, of course, not just theoretically.
“No, free will is not an ‘extra’; it is part and parcel of the very essence of consciousness. A conscious being without free will is simply a metaphysical absurdity.” Raymond Smullyan
Click.
“Is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.” Milan Kundera
If only the right translation, of course.
“You cannot decide all the sensory stimuli in your environment, your hormone levels this morning, whether something traumatic happened to you in the past, the socioeconomic status of your parents, your fetal environment, your genes, whether your ancestors were farmers or herders. Let me state this most broadly, probably at this point too broadly for most readers: we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.” Robert M. Sapolsky
Surely, that doesn’t include the moments we spend here virtually.
Stupidity
“Life is tough, it’s even tougher when you’re stupid.” John Wayne
Actually, for any number of people, it’s their stupidity itself that comforts them.
“Blind faith should be rewarded, and outright stupidity should be eradicated. I haven’t decided which we have here, yet.” Z.A. Maxfield
Someone run this by the Stooges. 8)
“There’s nothing more dangerous than a resourceful idiot.” Scott Adams
A disgraced and canceled cartoonist? Woke, right?
“The stupider one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.” Fyodor Dostoevsky
If the shoe fits, let’s say.
“Problem with AI is that, they’re born yesterday, yet they pretend like they’ve lived forever. Problem with humans is that, we’ve been here a long time, yet we behave like we’re born yesterday.” Abhijit Naskar
Hard to top that, isn’t it?
“He silently cursed his stupidity. They claimed a man learned from experience. He doubted this. He made the same error over and over again and knew it was an error when making it.” Wade Hamiliton
So, is that stupid enough for you?
Artificial Intelligence
“Androids with Artificial Intelligence have no heart or soul. They will make our perfect masters.” A.R. Merrydew
You can say that again. I think.
“Artificial Intelligence never stops for lunch. The human race will lose their place at the table very soon.” A.R. Merrydew
Probably not anytime soon, I’m guessing.
“I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” Alan Turing
Well, maybe this century?
“People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world.” Pedro Domingos
Place your bets.
AI won‘t be fool proof in the future since it will only be as good as the data and information that we give it to learn. It could be the case that simple elementary tricks could fool the AI algorithm and it may serve a complete waste of output as a result.” Zoltan Andrejkovics
Bummer.
“As more and more artificial intelligence is entering into the world, more and more emotional intelligence must enter into leadership.” Amit Ray
In other words, we’re fucked.
Heaven
“I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.” Pearl S. Buck
Hey, whatever works. To, for example, get you through the night.
“Let this Hell be our Heaven.” Richard Matheson
I could never go that far myself.
“There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don’t knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don’t.” Neil Gaiman
Blasphemy?
If it’s possible to send a message from heaven, I’ll get one to you.” Lurlene McDaniel
Of course, that’s what they all say.
“But there’s a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe’a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, ‘I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of Heaven or fear of Hell, but because He is God.” John Green
Off the deep end, and then some.
“When I was little I bragged about my firefighting father: my father would go to Heaven, because if he went to Hell he would put out all the fires” Jodi Picoult
Kids, let’s call them.
Suicide
“The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes.” Courtney Love
Did she or didn’t she? If you get my drift.
"No man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping.” David Hume
And he knew this…how?
“In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead” Elizabeth Wurtzel
With or without Prozac.
“Crap.
It’s all crap.
Living is crap.
Life has no meaning.
None. Nowhere to be found.
Crap.
Why doesn’t anybody realize this?” K-Ske Hasegawa
Because, existentially, for any number of us, it is anything but.
“A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.” Albert Camus
I know that I won’t.
“Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.” André Breton
Praise the Lord?
Hell
“The path to paradise begins in Hell.” Dante Alighieri
Doesn’t surprise me.
“I told him I believed in Hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in Hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn’t believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.” Sylvia Plath
On the other hand, what if it’s true?
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Dante Alighieri
Next up: the equivalent of that virtually?
“I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to Hell in his own way.” Robert Frost
And how comforting is that?
“All right, then, I’ll go to Hell.” Mark Twain
I guess we’ll never know. For now.
“Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself." Ludwig Wittgenstein
I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest it’s both.
Stupidity
“Policy is a narrative based on the gullibility of those to whom it will be presented as assumed by the gullibility of those doing the presenting.” Craig D. Lounsbrough
Trump, MAGA, ANON. To cite just a few.
“If you have managed to fool others, that is an art. But if you are fooling yourself, that is just stupidity.” Pranab Jyoti Borah
Or, sure, objectivism.
“I’m certain that the Cesare Borgia who existed was banal and stupid. He must have been, because to exist is always stupid and banal.” Fernando Pessoa
I’ll go that far sometimes.
“A man can easily be stupid without being evil, but never, in even the most profound genius, is a man evil without in some way being stupid.” Criss Jami
Their evil, right, not ours.
“English words evolve a lot slower than stupidity.” Anthony T. Hincks
That can’t be good.
Uh, right?
"A fool will always speak his mind.” Anthony T. Hincks
Like me posting here?
Artificial Intelligence
“As more and more artificial intelligence is entering into the world, more and more emotional intelligence must enter into leadership.” Amit Ray
Emotional intelligence?
“The five phases of Artificial Intelligence (AI 5.0) are Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Artificial Consciousness, Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) and Compassionate Artificial Superintelligence (CAS).” Amit Ray
You know, just for the record.
“What use was time to those who’d soon achieve Digital Immortality?” Clyde Dsouza
They’ll think of something?
“To be human is to be ‘a’ human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggests that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity.” Brian Christian
Next up: a fractured and fragmented robot?
"A powerful AI system tasked with ensuring your safety might imprison you at home. If you asked for happiness, it might hook you up to a life support and ceaselessly stimulate your brain’s pleasure centers. If you don’t provide the AI with a very big library of preferred behaviors or an ironclad means for it to deduce what behavior you prefer, you’ll be stuck with whatever it comes up with. And since it’s a highly complex system, you may never understand it well enough to make sure you’ve got it right.” James Barrat
As if existence wasn’t already problematic enough.
“Though I may be constructed," he said, “so too were you. I in a factory; you in a womb. Neither of us asked for this, but we were given it. Self-awareness is a gift. And it is a gift no thinking thing has any right to deny another. No thinking thing should be another thing’s property, to be turned on and off when it is convenient.” C. Robert Cargill
Yeah, what about that?
Free Will
“Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn’t see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will.
At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.” Chuck Palahniuk
New thread? New forum?
“According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.” G.K. Chesterton
Wow, he thought, why didn’t I think of that?!"
“My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t. The reality isn’t important: what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.” Ted Chiang
Unless, perhaps, the pretense itself is just another inherent manifestation of the only possible reality.
“You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.” Sam Harris
Blah, blah, blah?
“The fuck is this shit?" it says. “Can you bloody believe this shit?” “No, honey,” I say. “This is absolutely ridiculous.” “Aren’t you pissed the fuck off?” “Someone really should do something about this.” “Why don’t we bloody do something about it?” “Yeah, why don’t we?” I say. “But how.” “Well, we find whatever p**** is in charge and give the fucker a piece of our minds, of course.” Adam Scott Huerta
Try this yourself.
“What people have the capacity to choose, they have the ability to change.” Madeleine Albright
My guess: for better or for a lot worse.
Determinism
“Could you do things out of order and end up at the same place?” Liane Moriarty
And what place might that be?
“It was a random meeting that changed all that, although for a Surrealist like Prim, as I later discovered, nothing in the world is ever truly random. She believed the events that seemed to be chance are actually preordained by the subconscious; the people and objects we encounter are embodiment of our inner desires, waiting to be discovered.” Joanna Moorhead
That certainly settles some things, right?
"The future unfolds in cascades of causes and choices. That is the Best Fit Theory, realizing what will happen next.” Pusp Raj Bhatt
In other words, to click or not to click.
“You know, I have always believed that humans do have some amount of free will. Of course, this free will is absent if your bladder is full or if you want to rush to the toilet to have a dump. But once things are normal, a certain amount of leeway does exist.” Abhaidev
Anyone here know how much?
“Our interests in life are not always served by viewing people and things as collections of atoms—but this doesn’t negate the truth or utility of physics.” Sam Harris
Let’s just assume that some of us have more quarks than others.
“The conviction that a law of necessity governs human activities introduces into our conception of man and life a mildness, a reverence and an excellence, such as would be unattainable without this conviction.” Albert Einstein
Never even came close myself to whatever that means.
Suicide
“I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth’s orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.” Søren Kierkegaard
Again, in other words.
“The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.” Jeffrey Eugenides
And virgins no less.
In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.
What is it then?’
It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide.” Orson Scott Card
Right, and every single one of them.
“When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace. ‘This is my last experiment,’ wrote a young chemist in his suicide note. ‘If there is any eternal torment worse than mine I’ll have to be shown.’ Kay Redfield Jamison
I guess we’ll never know.
“I can’t deceive myself that out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.” Sylvia Plath
What, you think virtual reality changes that?
“Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It’s fun and it’s frightening as hell. Some patients - bipolar type I - experience both extremes; other - bipolar type II - suffer depression almost exclusively. But the “mixed state,” the mercurial churning of both high and low, is the most dangerous, the most deadly. Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with depression’s paranoid self-loathing.” David Lovelace
Start here: https://youtu.be/D5RlVGZCNZU?si=H6L53hsmsTlYUnlU