Posts by Lanny

2016-09-05 at 2:34 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition

Lanny Bird of Courage

If you can't get to BIOS (or can't visually confirm) there are a lot of different hardware failures that could get you there, but they're all that: hardware failure scenarios. Generally at that point diagnosis is most costly than replacement. There's a good chance the hard drive is intact so save that but most laptops aren't built to be modular, unit failure means replacing the system unless it's some specific line someone cares about LTS for

2016-09-04 at 5:14 PM UTC in I should have called myself Captain ACAB

Lanny Bird of Courage

fuck that was bad

2016-09-04 at 5:14 PM UTC in Lanny, why did you pretend to be a girl for so long?

Lanny Bird of Courage

Lanny will not answer these types of questions.

Sure I will, and have multiple times in the past. The reason I pretended to be a girl on zoklet is that it started out as a joke but went on long enough that I couldn't back out of it without it. I was (still am but not as bad) an awkward fucker and there were times in my life when I talked to people from zoklet more than in real life, people got to know me as a girl and it was just easier the keep that up than go through the process of being like "lol/jk". That's pretty much all there was to it, if I got some kind of sexual kick out of it I'd say that but I didn't. It does get you more attention, can't deny that, but that wasn't the motivation.

I've pretended to be a girl outside of zoklet but it was mostly just to troll. Also I usually gen female characters in games because there's frequently some gameplay difference which is interesting, also I tend to like the female models/armor designs better on a purely aesthetic level.

2016-09-04 at 5:04 PM UTC in I should have called myself Captain ACAB

Lanny Bird of Courage

just call me ish-beta-male

RIMSHOT.WAV

2016-09-04 at 7:46 AM UTC in Nigs @ Night: Real time feel time tbh fam

Lanny Bird of Courage

Everyone needs spots of every day heavy drinking in their life. I'm pretty much an alcoholic but I have cutting back periods and go hard periods and those times when I'm drinking heavily are fun memories. I don't know if the memories change with time or it was like that when I lived it but they all have the odd quality of feeling like I'm underwater, like I think back on those times and everything is vaguely monochromatic, memories of sound are diffused (as if heard through water), and it's just like really calm and weighless. Hard to describe, probably the effect of mild brain damage or something, but still pleasant.

Still not sure if it's better to smoke or drink. For better or worse I'm a drinker and couldn't replace it with weed if I wanted. Vaping and edibles are almost certainly better for your health than drinking but it's possible, if you're a half civilized human being, to be drunk all the time and carry on with your life while I've met very few people who can be normal high-functioning adults while high, I certainly turn into a useless pile of shit with pretty much any level of THC in my system.

2016-09-04 at 7:10 AM UTC in Why the fuck SHOULDN'T I do hard drugs for the rest of my life?

Lanny Bird of Courage

Hedonic treadmill etc, depending on where you set the sufficiency line on quality of a life worth living either light/moderate drug use or suicide are optimal.

2016-09-04 at 7:03 AM UTC in An open letter to God.

Lanny Bird of Courage

There is no way I sent myself back in time to not stand up to bullies, not do any of my homework or assignments, humiliate myself in front of girls, get expelled, and spend the next 8 years crying in my room all day until I discover drugs and destroy my brain.

I don't know mang. What if you:

stood up to bullies -> they kill or permanently maim you
did your homework -> hate yourself for playing into a system you loath and end up more depressed, potentially killing yourself
didn't embarrass yourself -> IDK about that one actually, maybe it built character or some shit
didn't get expelled -> see "did your homework"
didn't cry in your room -> maybe all that crying is going to be inspiration for some great achievement in the future
didn't do drugs -> maybe in the alternative timeline you're become the new hitler or something, or like king of SJWs, whatever you think is totally unacceptable so you needed to ruin yourself to protect the world or something.

Man, that's actually kind of depressing. What if we all have super cool time traveling powers and this is the absolute best we can do with them. Literal domain over time and all you can manage is dysfunctional limping along, fantasizing about a world where time travel actually would solve your problems. Haha, more depressing than fucking up your life, such a tremendous fuckup are you that the path of least fuck-ups still sucks dick.

2016-09-04 at 6:47 AM UTC in I'm slowly turning into obbe

Lanny Bird of Courage

So I believe I have brought up ideas kind of like this in the past, saying things like "We are all one" but I tend to mean this in a more vague and mystical, almost spiritual sort of way.

Hmm, I thought you had used that particular term before but I can't remember the context. Maybe I'm just remembering incorrectly.

This panspychism seems to depend on how we define what individual consciousness is, I believe you and I were recently discussing that subject. Remind me again what you believe the core of consciousness to be? If I remember correctly you said something along the lines that the "kernel of personhood" is basically the whole "I think therefore I am" thing. I believe I replied by questioning whether or not consciousness requires thoughts and whether we should consider our thoughts to be a part of our identity or instead to be events that we experience and are conscious of, to which I believe you replied something like word/thoughts are at least required to make the argument or have the position that someone/something exists. I think that makes sense, in order to claim or exclaim you/your consciousness does exist you would need to have a language/words/thoughts used to express what it is like - but what does that tell us about what consciousness is?

I think the context there was personhood. I think we can draw a distinction between consciousness and personhood, clearly non-conscious persons exist (sleeping people, people in temporary comas), and whether or not we think they exist the idea of a conscious non-person is at least conceivable (if we consider a certain era's cultural norms there existed humans who no one can reasonably deny consciousness to yet were considered non-people or partial-people in ethical and political dimension).

Is it like free will? This vague, difficult to describe sense that we feel must exist but upon closer inspection appears to be more illusory then we once felt?

That's a position many people hold, I'll call it synonymous with "emergentism" I strongly held to until very recently. Chalmers' argument shook that conviction though, paraphrased and probably butchered it is this: the pinnacle of neuroscience is a mapping from stimulus + state to behavior, putting aside issues like indeterminism (the argument still goes through in a physically indeterminate universe but it complicates things) a physicalist seems committed to thinking this is at least theoretically possible, we can predict behaviors and future brain-states based on initial state and input. Humans, on this view, are very complex machines; historically a kind of controversial position but one that's become increasingly palpable with time. The issue is that such a machine explains a mapping from input to behavior but it doesn't explain subjective experience.

Advocates of emergent consciousness argue that internal experience is reducible to physical states, to say "I'm in pain" can be taken as homeomorphic to a proposition about brain state (if you are in pain, then you have a certain brain state and vice versa) but the issue is that we seem to be able imagine a system that replicates this behavior (it can produce "yes, I'm in pain" for all the cases where a certain brain state is the case and "no, I'm not in pain" otherwise) without producing internal experience, like a computer that spits back these answers or some rube goldberg contraption that enforces the same logic. If such a thing is conceivable then not all isomorphic physical states have the same consciousness properties, meaning consciousness is not emergent from physical systems but rather a fundamental property of them like mass is. Arguably the response of advocates of emergent consciousness is that such systems are impossible, to have conscious-like behavior is to be conscious (alternatively you can deny internal experience, to a degree this and the former are the same position, a unification of behavior and experience) but I think it's a difficult case to make: we do seem to be able to imagine philosophical zombies in a logically consistent way and we seem to have overwhelming evidence of internal experience.

Maybe "consciousness" as you and I experience it is really just a highly complicated and evolved form of the "awareness" that all living things seem to possess. That seems reasonable.

So consciousness here is used like "internal experience", subjectivity, so in so far as we can say we possess consciousness we can similarly say any sort of animal does as well although perhaps to a lesser degree.

So what is awareness? Being aware of your environment, right? Showing that you are aware that something else exists I suppose. Something like that. So how do we know something is aware? It shows a reaction right?

So there's an interesting distinction between being conscious and having properties that let other, presumably conscious, things determine you are so. This touches on the Turing test, perhaps a generalized version, indeed we have some criteria we use to discern things with internal experience (animals, maybe plants) and those without (rocks). But we can imagine scenarios where our means of consciousness-testing fails: we can imagine some kind of creature that has all the appearances of a rock but which actually has a nervous system and some kind of perception and subjectivity. I'd argue we can also imagine the opposite, a physical system which has all the outward signs of human-level consciousness but which has no internal experience (although again, this is a point of disagreement). Anyway, the former case doesn't matter much, thing which are undetectably conscious and nonconscious are functionally the same to us and there's no controversy around them, it's the latter that, if you admit the possibility, rules out the possibility of emergent consciousness.

But do only living things have reactions to their environment? Some would say this is where the discussion gets a little silly, but seeing how we are discussing panspychism those people will have to bear with me for a moment. Can we admit the line we draw between living things and non living things to be a little bit hazy? Most people will say stuff like a virus is not alive but a virus is still able to evolve, replicate when placed in the right environment, it still reacts to the environment it is in, would it be too much to say that those reactions are like a crude version of the "awareness" we see in more complicated structures like organisms? Where does this end? Do the elementary particles that make up our reality not react to each other in a way which we could metaphorically relate to our own reactions and behaviors?

Right, it's a case worth at least considering. I'm at least tentatively convinced of the argument for the non-physicalist model of consciousness, the notion that consciousness is a fundamental property of systems. Particles and virii alike are systems so they have at least the potential for consciousness, subjectivity, but it's a new way of thinking and I'm not sure what we could count as evidence in favor of that proposition. I've seen "information processing" advanced as a measure of consciousness just as "force generated in a gravitational field" is our common measure of mass, it's certainly appealing and upholds many of our intuitions although I'm not ready to hop on that train yet (philosophical zombies would seem to have a good deal of information processing and accordingly consciousness, but the argument relied on them not being conscious in the first place so some move is needed to resolve the apparent paradox).

These are pretty new ideas to me, I'm still unsure of my position, but at very least they seem to warrant a response from physicalism which I can't think of nor have I seen someone else advance in a compelling fashion.

Lanny, IIRC you were using once a week, although I don't know how your usage has varied.

But it's recommended that trips be done with significant gaps in order to fully integrate them. As time goes on, the frequency of trips for personal development greatly reduces for most people.

"Once you get the message, hang up the phone."

If you're using them for recreation or not integrating them properly, you're heading into dangerous territory. How dangerous depends on the individual and some chance.

I was tripping weekly or every other week for a while but it's tapered off, it's been several months since the last time I took a psychadelic. Seems to be self-regulating to a degree, it got to a point where I'd trip, I'd go through all the physical and emotional turmoil, and at that point of clarity when you realize something if you're going to realize something I'd come to the same conclusions as the last time, and the time before that, it seemed to be consistent. There's still some fun in watching your walls melt or music emerge from ambient noise or whatever but it doesn't justify dual harrowing experience that goes with it if there's nothing to be learned.

Ultimately the process of either going a bit loony or opening up to intellectual activity based in subjectivism (phenomenology, panpsychism, or even such mundane things as Cartesian rationalism), as one may take it to be, is not a product of repeated psychedelic experiences but a gradual process set in motion by the first one. I think when one realizes, viscerally, that any activity is contingent on the experiential faculty, and the fundamental malleability of same, certain doubts and reconceptualizations become inevitable.

Descartes was a smart guy, from simple repeated and mundane failures of perception be was able to pull together methodological doubt, and we can all understand his thinking without too much effort, but for me at least it took much more radical sensory and post-integration "failures" (which is an odd description of perception for a person doubting an external world) to internalize, to make intuitive. I remember the first time someone explained the problem of induction to me. I didn't get it at first, it was several hours later when I was on my own that I realized like yeah, that really is a problem and perhaps an intractable one, then I wondered how science worked, I thought about it for a minute and then I just stopped. The next day I went to like whatever, physics class or something, I took for granted experimental evidence pointed, more or less, towards truth, the problems of the prior day forgotten. For several years I held contrary ideas in non-overlapping magisteria of sorts (and I'm sure I still do) and it was the first psychedelic experience that brought those ideas into sharp, immediate, contrast, if not resolution.

2016-09-04 at 5:18 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition

Lanny Bird of Courage

10/10 Erectile Dysfunction tho

2016-09-04 at 5:17 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition

Lanny Bird of Courage

Holy shit, space cat got powers.

Also I felt the same way about Ano Hana, maybe more positive, I liked it and it got a tear out of me at one point but that final scene was pretty atrocious. Actually I remember there being like 5 "final scenes" and by the last one when they're all yelling in the woods I was like "jesus fuck, just roll credits already".

2016-09-04 at 5:03 AM UTC in An open letter to God.

Lanny Bird of Courage

I've prayed the same thing too. And God or whatever beings could erase all key memories like future winning lottery numbers, and make it so that you wake on that date thinking it was a very long and vivid dream so your not in shock about whats happened but still be greatfull to be back and not make the same mistakes.

Yeah, but what if this has already happened and every time you did something, maybe unconsciously, prompted by a dream it was because you sent yourself back in time in such a way and right now you're living more or less the best possible life you could.

2016-09-04 at 1:06 AM UTC in Hey niggers it's bumble

Lanny Bird of Courage

underrated post

Anyway, welcome back bumble, I hope you don't leave because I want to hear about all the terrible things that happened to you since zoklet closed. That probably sounds shitty and like I'm trying to chase you off but it's not how I mean it, the primary form of entertainment around here is telling eachother how much we've managed to fuck up our own lives. Come on down and take a walk down self-pity lane, it's nice this time of year.

2016-09-04 at 12:56 AM UTC in My life is boring.

Lanny Bird of Courage

I use feminine form pronouns to refer to zek but I'm not her, just sayin.

But I'm also like 98% convinced blackbird is zek, she denied who she was on sanc or redfrn or wherever well after it was established as fact. Not that it matters, I'd like to take this opprotunity to make it clear that niggasin.space is a safe space for all people regardless of how they identify. And by safe space I mean highly abusive and generally a shithole but I'm not going to tell anyone to leave.

2016-09-04 at 12:47 AM UTC in How many solar systems are there?

Lanny Bird of Courage

When in doubt about astronomical terms, the English language will provide you with the answer. Do we write solar system with a capital S? If we do not we can safely say the term applies to multiple bodies/objects/phenomenon.

The schoolhouse explanation of the language would suggest this is true but it's not really how English works. There are questions about what is and isn't a proper noun but putting that aside there are unique identifiers that we don't capitalize by convention. Consider the sentence "I am going to school", school is not considered a proper noun yet we take the subject of that sentence to be one particular place. Similarly it can be modified by an article which proper nouns can not ("I'm going to the school to see what happened") but still refers to a unique place.

2016-09-04 at 12:41 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition

Lanny Bird of Courage

Did any of you end up trying U-47700?

How was it?

Thought about it but didn't. After nearly killing myself with poppy seed tea I decided untested RC opiates weren't right for me. Interested if anyone else did though

2016-09-02 at 9:10 PM UTC in The color of your hat

Lanny Bird of Courage

fur lined hat hackers unite to defeat corrupt capitalist pigs!

2016-09-02 at 4:52 PM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition

Lanny Bird of Courage

England: a proud nation famous not only for having the western world's most incomprehensible territorial division but also the birth place of not one but two native tongues: English and Degenerate Chavish. Famous linguist Gnome Bitesky, after spending the last decade trying to articulate a grammar for the latter had this to say: "stick yer dog'n'bone up your moms ass you bunch of dumb cunts"

2016-09-02 at 4:22 PM UTC in ATT: HYDRO

Lanny Bird of Courage

^I watched that video while listening to some skramz tracks and had a hard time telling the tazmanian devils apart from the vocals.

2016-09-02 at 4:18 PM UTC in I'm slowly turning into obbe

Lanny Bird of Courage

Please don't turn into obbe. Remember the scientific method, the clarity of logic. The right approximation of the truth is the one that comes with the least assumptions etc.

I mean the scientific method itself is largely a dogma, a very successful and useful one, but then so were like biblical dietary restrictions or sharia law for a time. Philosophy of science is not a closed book and most working scientists either don't know or don't care about foundational problems with their methodology. Same goes for occam's razor.

"Oh no, I'm turning into Obbe," you lament, as if you've damaged your brain and are somehow becoming lesser, lower on the totem pole. I know I'm not as smart as some of you, and I know I'm a little more open to the paranormal and spiritual perspectives, but that doesn't mean I'm some sort of clown or joke to be laughed at.

If you are changing hopefully you change into someone who isn't such an asshole.

Aww, don't take it the wrong way blood. I certainly see how you could take that from my post, and I suppose I did mean it in a sort of tongue in cheek sort of way, but really it's the opposite. I'm saying that a lot of your ideas I've previously dismissed as batty I'm starting to become sympathetic to, I'm saying you were right. The I really do hold to the ideas I'm associating you with here, it's just kind of shocking to me since they would have sounded very off the wall in the past, some (in particular, compatibilism and panpsychism) are positions you brought up and I actively argued against.

2016-09-02 at 5:02 AM UTC in The color of your hat

Lanny Bird of Courage

Hacker is a term that needs to be thrown out as meaningless. Outside of a narrow time and context there is no coherent definition that can be given and I think the desire to carry it on is a mix of childish and pathetic, especially among a certain demographic of young programmers who like such even cringier stylings as "rockstar" and "ninja". "code ninjas" need to fucking kill themselves.

The hat thing is kind of silly too. If we adhere to the MIT etymology and the definition of hacker that implies then "hat color" is incoherent, "hacker" describes a full human ethos and there is no room for hats, legality is incidental rather that essential. It would be like says "are you the kind of person who steps on aphids or ants when walking down the street", probably both but it means nothing. As far as I can tell the whole thing was invented by "white hat hackers" (aka salaried assholes) trying to cash in on the perceived (but in reality non-existant) sex appeal of the popular notion of the meaning of the term hacker.

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