it manifests in us what we think particularly often.

Underrated

@simulate thank you, sir.

Thinking my dick is big sadly doesn't work

Then why am I not rich, beautiful and smart?

@don-rager 😅 I'm sorry, for you.

@Fast-Nop maybe you aren't trying hard enough.

Well what you think only manifests in you not outside of you 😊

@Wombat Exactly, and it totally makes sense! You develop anything you think about in your mind and build habits of thinking. So thinking negatively about yourself repeatedly will teach yourself to do that. And unless you might actually have done something bad, there is no reason to think negatively of yourself.

@simulate exactly!

@Wombat great insight 😁 thanks actually

Btw., what has been used for millennia to not only talk about desired reprogramming of the mind, but to actually achieve it, that's called "magic" if done on individual level.

With the added purpose of providing social glue in groups too large to stabilise by personal bonds alone, this phenomenon usually appears under the form of "religion".

It's not by stupidity that similar things can be observed in all human cultures.

@Fast-Nop I don't fully understand the relationship. Can you elaborate it please?

@Wombat Which one exactly? Between reprogramming and magic/religion, or between magic and religion?

@Fast-Nop When communicating positive values and informing people truthfully, I think religions can be a very good thing, because of said social bonding and because of such positive values.

@Wombat The way I understand it is that religions program peoples thinking. In general, I think culture does that, and religion is very cultured.. but I am not sure if they are the same.. I feel like culture is more just of necessity, but religion is directed at a goal?

@simulate There are no positive and negative values in an objective sense. The very definition of good and evil is already the core of the cultural frame.

The main limitation is, a set of values that would destroy its society will not make it precisely because it would destroy its bearers, so the historic observer has to account for a certain kind of self-selection bias.

Religions create and found cultures. That's why Damiani wrote a thousand years ago that philosopy was the maidservant of theology. Because philosophy comes at a later cultural phase and can only work the garden that is already there. Science in turn has no say at all here because science is about facts, not values.

Values are set, not discovered, understood or argued. That's why philosophy routinely fails on that one. Only religion can do this because this is a deeply irrational act.

Reason is copy, madness the original.

@Fast-Nop Well objectively, nothing matters. Sure. But our reality is our subjective experience, and not at all objective, and can never be, unless we are somehow omnipotent.

@Fast-Nop I think you are overlooking how values are set, by discovering facts. The ultimate conditions of life are alive or dead. Existance or non existance. All that DNA is doing is learning how to keep existing even better. And explicit, consious values are how we, as highly sophisticated organisms orient ourself in our reality. It is an attempt to map the entire reality to good and bad, and ultimately that has to be emerged out of our DNAs struggle to survive, as a species, a collection of organisms.

@simulate Still, what's good and what's evil has been answered so vastly different across cultures that there is little in common.

Oh, and facts don't lead to values. Values shape how people react to newly discovered facts. Science basically says, if you do A, you'll get B. But science can never answer the value question whether we should want B.

Even dead or alive matters less than you think it would because there have been plenty of cultures where the life of the individual was of no particular concern.

@Fast-Nop Well I believe if you put dead or alive into the equation, you will have science giving you value. Anything that leads to a rise in probability of death for humans is bad. And anything which secures survival is good.

The cultures are then networks of people in various relationships, all acting synchronously to secure the cultures survival. All we ever do is trying to help our DNA survive.

@simulate That's a misunderstanding. Value is not in the sense of usefulness here, I'm speaking about values in the sense of morals / ethics.

Besides, given that the biggest problem of humanity is global overpopulation, I don't think it would be hard to make a case against your statement that anything raising the probability of death for humans would be a bad thing.

@Fast-Nop Well you could say that the only problem with overpopulation is that people start dying and populations begin to stagnate.

I find it hard to find a case of a value that is not linked to humanities survival, not in the individual sense, but in the collective sense.

Also survival does not mean, reproduce, no matter what, it also means, lower fertility if population becomes dense. All of this is also part of helping humanity live longer.

@Fast-Nop The theory even goes far enough to say that this is how all life emerged.
Random patterns stabilized to reproducable patterns. And those patterns competed for resources. So they became subject to natural selection and started evolving (because of inherent instability i.e. random mutation) and gradually they improved to better secure their existance.

@simulate Well if you stretch the definition of "humanity's survival" far enough to become a general umbrella for everything, then of course you'll see every value connected to it. ^^

The counter point is that the values in different cultures are pretty different, so that completely opposed approaches can serve "humanity's survival", and that makes it a meaningless basis.

Self-sacrifice for the group? Totally common throughout history. Western press already spirals into meltdown when a dozen Western professional soldiers get killed in combat.

Human treatment of disabled babies? Well, the Spartans would have thrown them into an chasm and called that totally human.

The more I learn about DNA the more and more I have come to believe there is nothing random about it. I think we were designed. By who or what is the question. 10 years ago I would have been more certain about this. However, now, I haven't a clue. I just hope the who or what isn't a prick.

@Demolishun I would say our DNA is a regression to the rules of physics. It's basically a blueprint evolved to survive on this earth.

@Fast-Nop I don't think the different values make them meaningless. I think there is just a very large error that spreads all of the different approaches people have come up with out. Just like there isn't "one perfect animal" there isn't one perfect culture. They all adapt to different conditions.

@simulate I didn't want to say they are meaningless. Although, they can be - or not. It depends on what amount of meaning we decide put into them, thereby creating them in the first place.

The actual mindfuck here is that it's humans who create them, and then culture bends backwards, attribute this creation to some deities or so, and lives by the values.

This is circular logic, and the astonishing thing is that the circle becomes stabilised by the culture walking it. That's pretty much what you wrote far in the beginning of the thread on individual level. It's also what I was referring to with religion vs. magic.

@Fast-Nop Really cool, I love this. Really makes you think about society. I guess you could say that people agree on rules, and those social rules program people growing up in the culture. Good rules stay and bad rules are being opposed and will be broken at some point. And here good is really just a democratic evaluation, a consens in society about how to value things.

This leads me to markets, which I believe are actually just functions which put values of things into relation. Trading markets aggregate many evaluations of all traders into one value ratio between multiple resources. I think they will become much more important for democracy in the future. I am envisoning kind of a "market for ideas" where shares of ideas could be traded. Kind of like kickstarter, only with integrated voting and collaboration.

@simulate Democracy is rooted in the value setting that all people are of equal worth. Historically, that's a rather exceptional view (and isn't even really true in Western countries). Ancient Egypt for example made it over millennia while our democracy only counts in centuries.

Usually, such systems fall down either when they suffer defeat from external enemies, or when their increasingly clueless elite starts thinking it's all about them personally. It's not the wish for democracy that pops up, it's that they fuck up so much that the status quo becomes unbearable.

Btw., I find "idea trading" a funny idea because trading implies scarceness while ideas proliferate best when they circulate freely.

@Fast-Nop Yes, I have not quite figured out how to put it all together yet, you are pointing out valid concerns. I guess trading is not the correct way of seeing it, more as investing. I would like a platform where people can describe ideas for solutions to problems, and other people can contribute to the ideas, kind of like with git, only for a more general specification. People who contribute a lot would get the respectively higher share of the entire project, and value is again determined by distributing some kind of currency to certain ideas. So a market could decide which ideas are most useful and people could directly profit from investing effort into those projects. Its kind of like an abstracted stock exchange.

@Fast-Nop So I guess on the one hand you have people investing time and effort into developing and realizing ideas and projects, and on the other you have people voting on the ideas and projects using a currency, which is valued similarily by everyone.

@Fast-Nop @simulate @Demolishun I am surprised about the discussion evolved. Thank you all for the inspiring read.

@Fast-Nop @simulate I think you should call the Atheist Experience. That would make for even more interesting discussions.

I actually enjoyed this conversation @simulate and @Fast-Nop

@spdhiraj99 Me too :) @Fast-Nop seems to be a very persistent and critical thinker, which is very useful in philosophical discussions 👍