Were do viruses fit in the “tree of life”?
Why is society so afraid of people purposefully altering their mental state? (In terms of cannabis, psychedelics, anything "mind-expanding.)
And even this isn’t something that I’ve never seen asked, but aside from like Terence McKenna, I don’t really know anyone who’s interested in it, or even accept the question.
Edit this thread is a case in point. Not one single explanation, just people absolutely terrified out of their minds, parroting bad propaganda and even worse rhetoric. “I don’t want my surgeon tripping when he’s operating on me.” And I don’t want my surgeon drunk, and alcohol is legal, and I’ve never had the issue, because surgeons don’t come to work drunk.
Genuinely, I’m tired of answering these “arguments” and no-one will accept how afraid they are, even when not a single soul can explain why.
because people in those states can act unpredictably and are thus unreliable. you don’t want your surgeon to be tripping balls.
Pffftt these childish and stupid “arguments.”
Your surgeon isn’t drunk at work now, why would they be any less responsible with, say, LSD?
Only people who’ve never used drugs think this way, that once you do any illegal drug, you’re instantly hooked, can’t stop, 247 high and sucking cock for crack.
When you look at any science on the matter, those are simply asinine ideas which aren’t supported by any of the evidence we have. Alcohol is clearly the most dangerous drug (well, arguably strong opiates, but it defined how you define dangerous or harmful, but Here’s a handy ranking with a chart, comparing the relative harms of drugs.
We’ve got decades of data to show psychedelics aren’t addictive, people only use them a few times a year when they’re “actively” using them, they’re far safer than alcohol, and have loads of benefits.
Cannabis is also extremely safe, and even when now it’s at the point they’re starting to admit the prohibition doesn’t work, they’re still pushing basically sixties propaganda like reefer madness.
We allow people to get wasted on booze. We allow people to beat other people up, as long as its voluntary. There’s literally a sport (face slapping) where the object is to just hit the other person so hard you give them a concussion and render them unconscious. Getting voluntary brain damage is fine?
People can modify their bodies, jump out of planes, juggler chainsaws, spit fire, shoot guns for a hobby, celebrate with fireworks, swim in the Drake passage, but me, at home, doing LSD alone and watching great movies from the 60’s is illegal… becauseeeee?
i didnt say the reason was fair or cool. if you’re not on duty or responsible, go bananas. theres cities you can move to where drugs are legal and everyone is quite civilized.
but i don’t want my president to be tripping, even on holidays.
More of the same, zzzz.
No there aren’t “cities in which drugs are legal”. There are cities in which use is decriminalised. UN drug laws still apply. Even in countries which have made cannabis legally available, it’s still technically illegal under UN laws, it’s just been “made available” through legal shenanigans.
i didnt say the reason was fair or cool
You gave a completely irrational reason which would never happen. According to what we know of these substances, it’s infinitely more probably that you’ll go to work drunk as a surgeon than going in under the effects of psychedelics.
It’s just not realistic what you said “the reason” is. You’re perpetuating the exact thing I’m asking about, and you don’t even understand that you have a baseless fear of the thing I’m talking about and you don’t even know it.
but i don’t want my president to be tripping, even on holidays
But you’d presumably be fine with them boxing and drinking alcohol? And alcohol as I’ve shown you with science, is way more harmful.
And as someone who’s known and interacted with literally thousands and thousands and thousands of drunk and high people, no other substance makes a person as fucked up as alcohol. Drunk people lose their coordination, inhibition, they fall, they vomit, they fight, they harasss.
And even with those things, if you take some care, you can avoid getting that drunk, as most people do.
You’re denying that substances which we know are physically less inebriating and less addictive could be used responsibly.
It’s like you’re trying to argue you’re afraid of hitting your head on a pillow when you lay down but have no problem jumping from a cliff to some rocks below it despite usually breaking a leg or two. And that that is why pillows need to stay illegal.
In my opinion it’s because in the past human beings needed to be constantly working or assisting with a group in some capacity in order to ensure mutual survival for the group. Let’s say a village.
Activity which is not seen as being productive or could be construed as lazy has a stigma around it because it casts doubt on your ability to contribute to society.
Obviously none of this applies in the same way these days but there is a kind of primal conflation of intoxicants and laziness. Laziness is bad and so consuming intoxicants turns into a moral issue.
These attitudes are very deeply ingrained and although they can shift a bit as people become more liberal the deep suspicion remains.
Youre assuming there’s no use in using intoxicants, but there very much are. Arguably the most important, in terms of larger humanity.
Those “deeply grained” attitudes are the product of 20th century propaganda.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Binge
In WWI it was completely normal to send your son/friend a package of morphine, cocaine and syringes.
And what I’m talking about is “mind-expanding” substances.
Alcohol literally depresses neural activity and makes it so you lose your coordination and eventually get sedated. It’s the most “lazy” substance there is, yet none of these “deeply ingrained” attitudes concern it?
So no.
I don’t think there is a correct answer to the question you are posing. You asked for people’s opinions and I gave you mine.
And I showed you how it obviously can’t be that. Come up with a new explanation.
Not fucking with you, if you could genuinely think of another, I’d be pleased.
There is a correct answer. It’s the inordinate amounts of drug propaganda, and people’s tendency to self-reinforce and perpetuate that propaganda.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman#Drug_war_quote
“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
— John Erlichman, Nixon’s “right hand” man
No, that’s just your opinion.
Do you know what “opinion” means?
Facts are distinct from opinions. Good opinions are based on facts, though.
Like mine.
Which I just proved to you, that the drug propaganda was purposeful political lies.
Yet you still won’t believe it. Why? What is it in you that’s so deeply ingrained that you can’t even as a thought experiment question something which was literally programmed into you?
lol we get it you like drugs
Stop spamming please?
the topics seem good. but posting to two coms is kinda spammy. as opposed to asking in one, then collect answers before asking for further additional responses in another.
What are we going do if (and when) it turns out that economic growth is not compatible with environmental protection and yet a prerequisite for political freedom?
Sorry for the bummer of a question but to me the conundrum looks more obvious every day, I really want to know the answer, and yet (almost) nobody is talking about it.
Nate Hagens talking with Daniel Schmachtenberger.
Youtube it.
Interesting, will do. I do know of the host’s dark take on such matters.
In terms of more mainstream pundits it just really bothers me how many so many of them are obviously intelligent and well-meaning yet incapable of breaking out of the mental straitjacket of orthodox economics, despite all the evidence that its usefulness has run its course.
Die
The fun answer is kill
I disagree that economic growth is a prerequisite for political freedom. I think that type of thinking has been perpetuated by capitalists to keep capital flowing. Communes and mutual aid don’t have great or any economic growth but can allow for political freedoms that we don’t even have now.
The counter-argument is that communes are populated by an unusual variety of human being, hence their rarity, and that most people are motivated by less disciplined human goals such as status and material accumulation.
Sustainable growth is popular but we are going to need to invest in unpalatable energy sources like nuclear power in order to power it. We also need to make sure recycling actually happens as opposed to local authorities shipping the materials overseas for “processing” (i.e. being dumped or burned).
Human populations tend to decline as an economy becomes more advanced and people are able to plan their families. We are already seeing population growth stagnating much more quickly than expected in countries like China. That will cause demographic challenges so we are going to need to rethink how we manage immigration so it can happen sustainably with public consent.
Lastly, increasing economic output doesn’t necessarily mean consuming more resources. If a country becomes more productive, by for example integrating a new technology, then you can increase output with the same or fewer resources.
If you had a microscopic object that took up the smallest amount of space physically possible, what shape is it? What shape is a pixel/grain of space?
I think it would not have a shape, or would rather be a zero dimensional point. For it to be any shape, it would have to have features, but you’ve already defined this as the fundamentally smallest ‘thing’ so it can’t have any features smaller than itself. But you could also probably convince me that it’s a sphere. I’m not sure if mathematicians consider a sphere of infinitesimal radius to still be a sphere or not, but treating it as infinitesimal kinda makes sense to me even if it’s actually finitely small (the Planck length?)
A more interesting question to me is, assuming positions in space are discrete, which I’m not sure follows from saying there’s a smallest possible object, how are those ‘voxels’ arranged? I don’t think that’s necessarily equivalent to asking what the shape of the smallest object would be. Pixels on a screen are in a rectangular grid, but the actual elements are circles in some types of screens.
There are a number of shapes besides cubes that can fill 3D space, but do the voxels even have to all be the same shape? Are we even looking for a 3D tiling, or could it be 4D in spacetime, or even higher dimension if it turns out the universe has more than 4 dimensions? Does it have to tile at all, or could it be entirely irregular while still being discrete? Is there any conceivable experiment that could prove any of these things, or is it unknowable?
What you’re talking about sounds similar to the Planck length to me. I’m not a string theorist, but my understanding is it is well defined in normal 4D spacetime (where Planck time would be the time it takes a photon to travel one Planck length). Planck length is based only on universal constants (Planck’s constant, speed of light, and the gravitational constant), and so any “thing” smaller than that is unphysical.
I think the interesting question is how do we get continuous experiences, measurements, and observations from a spacetime that is fundamentally quantized.
If it is a sphere then, the question that comes to mind (and may in turn inspire the first question) is, how would they fit together? If you cluster spheres together, you always end up with space between the spheres.
Our Planck length reality voxel isn’t made up of physical matter; it’s much too small. It’s basically just quantum field fluctuations. It probably wouldn’t interact with the Higgs field either so stacking them together would be impossible.
If time dilation occurs when the velocity of an object approaches the speed of light and relativistic speeds, do objects experience time dilation when rotating at relativistic speeds? Aren’t there pulsars or black holes rotating at relativistic speeds, how would someone’s clock near the surface compare to someone a couple AU away from the star not rotating with the object?
