this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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[–] yesman 9 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Were do viruses fit in the "tree of life"?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Outside. They don't have all characteristics necessary for the definition of "life" (they can't reproduce themselves), so they aren't classified as life-forms.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Probably as a stripped down bacteria.

[–] JubilantJaguar 4 points 2 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] jaggedrobotpubes 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Nate Hagens talking with Daniel Schmachtenberger.

Youtube it.

[–] JubilantJaguar 1 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] erev 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] JubilantJaguar 1 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] steeznson 1 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] JusticeForPorygon 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

The fun answer is kill

[–] Dasus 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] Num10ck 7 points 2 months ago (3 children)

because people in those states can act unpredictably and are thus unreliable. you don't want your surgeon to be tripping balls.

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[–] steeznson 2 points 2 months ago (61 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think the mindset of a society is hard to change. We do see some progress towards the use of psychedelics for mental treatments which I think is great(at least in my area of the world). Is it enough ? Not to my taste but it's progress. I can't wait for people to have access to that kind of help!

I'm still using mushrooms from time to time to deal with personal issues, trying to find a different perspective on my own, it has helped me numerous times. I think it also helped me reduce my overall stress and prejudice.

I would suggest you also try to find different perspectives on how people got different opinions on the subject. I really don't think being aggressive towards them the way you have been helps anybody. If anything, your opinion/facts are discarded quicker because you dont appear as a respectable source of information. You appear too emotionally connected to the subject. Especially to people who may be scared or closed to those different ideas.

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[–] tomi000 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] whotookkarl 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

On the surface of the body, you're moving, so you experience time dilation. Physically this is no different than orbiting The body. The clocks built into GPS satellites need to be constantly adjusted for this reason.

But the question how it works when the surface of a body rotates at relativistic speeds while the core is not moving breaks my brain.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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?

[–] DeltaWhy 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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?

[–] conor103 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] bizzle 2 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

How could we get three-dimensional phenomenon from string units?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

But a three-dimensional string would no longer be a string, and anything less than that would just be a longer version of the same string.

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