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Posts by Lanny
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2016-05-15 at 6:23 AM UTC in Mathematics
don't even get me started on youre grammer
infinitesimally complex mathematical concepts?
I chuckled -
2016-05-15 at 2:14 AM UTC in zoo's are fundamentally wrong
I don't see how anything could be right or wrong without someone there to subjectively considering the thing to be right or wrong.
Two easy ways to disagree with that are that moral laws are fundamental to our universe. It's generally uncontroversial that unaware things can do wrong or be bad (plague is bad, yet plague has no consciousness or moral agency). For plagues to be bad we may need moral agents to exist but that doesn't mean they're subjective or that their badness is. Similarly mass extinction of complex life would result in a world where nothing is around to subjectively experience the wrongness of it and yet we can consider such a world and most of us would deem such genocide to be wrong.
The other would be to claim moral laws are emergent from conscious populations but not subjective: regardless of the beliefs of such populations their constituents' obligations to one another remain unchanged. Something in the nature of certain types of consciousness brings about morality inevitably. So we can look at abstract objects, regardless of what ontological status you grant them, as a similar example of something which is objective, or minimally non-subjective, and yet which owe their status entirely to subjective perception in a similar way to how we might propose a constructivist model of ethics.
It would seem like you need to refute both those major branches of moral realism before you can justify moral subjectivism. -
2016-05-15 at 1:59 AM UTC in Mathematics
Mathematics deals with quantity, multitude and magnitude, and the relationships between various quantities. So yes, arithmetic recognizes prime numbers, which are qualitative properties of quantities, but the quality of being prime is one concerned with the relationship between quantities. Circles are curves with many unique qualitative properties, but all that I can think of are expressions of relations between quantities.
So yes, number theory will always deal with quantities but mathematics is not number theory. It's not uncommon to talk about non-quantitative qualities however. We might talk about the set of all black ravens, formalize what we mean by black and raven, and investigate the relationship between the quality of "blackness" and "raven-ness". That might seem like a goofy example but it's actually a necessary move in non-trivial arguments like Hempel's ravens.But the essence of an oak tree is not able to be expressed quantitatively. I don't see how you could use mathematics to describe it. You could use it to describe its shape, project its growth, etc.
What would it mean to describe "the essence of an oak tree"? Can you do it in natural language? Do you know what the essence of an oak tree is? It's a whole mereological quagmire as far as I'm concerned.
Put another way, if you can list sets of necessary and sufficient conditions for being an oak then we can trivially quantify the essence of an oak. But if you can't then there's nothing that will serve you better than mathematics. Even things like species membership are ambiguous (google ring species for some fascinating reading).
There's kind of this toy problem you see in phil 100 classes where you ask "when does a puddle become a pond?" and it's like we find things which are obviously ponds and not puddles and conversely we can find thing that are obviously puddles and not ponds but there are some values between the two that are fuzzy, fundamentally so, there's no prescribed volume that a puddle must take on to become a pond. It reveals that language isn't always susceptible to modeling, not because our techniques of modeling are flawed (indeed it would be trivial to model pond vs. puddle status if we had more rigorous definitions of the terms) but because language is ambiguous, we have a lot of constructs for talking about classes of things we don't really have robust classification criteria for. -
2016-05-15 at 1:04 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition
Lanny,about the bit of MXE you have left and don't want to use because of the drought after the China ban. Well, it's coming back (The power and resilience of capitalism over the state!),
Was the ban lifted or did the labs move? Link?but what I wanted to know was what you usually did on it. I've seen multiple reports that it can greatly increase immersion while playing games or viewing something, which sounds like an awesome effect.
It was fun for games but I wouldn't really say it improved immersion. Mostly programming or reading. I have mixed feelings about it, never really got any of the euphoria people talk about. Mostly it made me feel emotionally very neutral, calculating. Like it got me in the perfect headspace for minmaxing which is something I usually don't enjoy. Just really focused but not really caring. -
2016-05-15 at 12:59 AM UTC in zoo's are fundamentally wrongwho did then?
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2016-05-14 at 7:22 PM UTC in Anybody here like the cramps?No, but I do love having my period. My boyfriend doesn't hound me for sex so it's a nice break.
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2016-05-14 at 6:34 PM UTC in Another Drunk Phone Meeting, woooooYeah, my name has been floating around for a while now. Don't particularly want to advertise it but whatever, it's not like it's that damaging. What's anyone going to do, order a bunch of pizzas to my door or something? Nigga I love pizza.
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2016-05-14 at 6:28 PM UTC in zoo's are fundamentally wrong
Morality is a man-made concept that is defined by the society you live in; it is subjective.
Most moral theorists would disagree with that. If you're taking that to be your definition of morality from the outset them you're the one wasting our time with semantic games because it's not what the vast majority of people mean when they talk about morality.There is nothing called morality in nature. You cannot observe morality or test it in a laboratory.
Sure, but something like, say, mathematics can not be tested in a laboratory or observed in nature (inb4 nautilus shell, that's an observation of a pattern in nature that's elegantly expressible in mathematics. It's not the same thing as seeing mathematics, in itself, in nature) but we wouldn't call it subjective.They have even developed philosophies to prove it, e.G., metaphysics, and epistemology, which use meaningless circular propositions to prove their points.
You realize that neither metaphysics nor epistemology are actually philosophies right? They're fields within philosophy, containing a wide range of competing theories. In fact you're practicing (bad) metaphysics in this thread right now. You should probably try to, you know, learn what words mean before you use them.Both assume that knowledge, morality, Good and Evil exist 'a priori'.
Again, just wildly not true, I don't even think that works as a sentence.What does 'a priori' mean: 'a priori' knowledge, in Western philosophy since the time of Immanuel Kant, knowledge that is independent of all particular experiences, as opposed to a posteriori knowledge, which derives from experience. The Latin phrases a priori (“from what is beforeâ€) and a posteriori (“from what is afterâ€) were used in philosophy originally to distinguish between arguments from causes and arguments from effects.
Thanks webster, but I'm not seeing how this relates to anything you're saying. Even if you only look at philosophies that do take morality to be knowable a priori (which is not exhaustive of moral theories by any means) I don't see how throwing a definition of the term a priori is supposed to prove anythingEven murdering or killing humans is not an absolute; it is societal, e.G., killing in war is OK, killing someone attacking you with deadly force where you are in fear of your life is OK.
So how do you account for the wide range of actions that are considered societally acceptable yet by many to be morally impermissible? Almost anyone with an idea of what morality is will assert prohibitions or duties above and beyond social acceptability. Most christians would say things like respecting your parents or showing compassion to strangers is a moral good even if not all societies. So if morality is socially defined then how can members of a society have moral beliefs contrary to the society they live in? -
2016-05-14 at 6:26 PM UTC in Plants aren't gonna stop growin, no matter what you do to em'Oh shit, I'm like plant hitler. Genocide for dayz bitches!
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2016-05-14 at 6:39 AM UTC in Plants aren't gonna stop growin, no matter what you do to em'Countless extinct plant species speak to the contrary.
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2016-05-14 at 1:36 AM UTC in what do you do on a stimulant binge?I waver between beast-mode programming and "let's open 3,000 wikipedia tabs that I'm not going to get past the intro of". You know you've taken too much when you're in the latter, if you're losing motor skills then you're just wasting drugs and your time.
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2016-05-13 at 9:47 PM UTC in Last Statements of the Executed
I wonder why we give those-about-to-be-executed last statements and meal requests. The statement, I guess whatever, but the meal of their choice? Why?
I don't think it's such a bad policy. Whether or not our society deems a person worthy of existence they're still a hedonic creature, they can feel pleasure and pain as acutely as any other person. We may have decided they represent a net-negative to society and that that justifies killing but they can't do much damage in a cell. We've decided we can't rehabilitate them so punishment is ultimately meaningless but we can at least make their end-of-life more pleasant. Wrongdoing ultimately does not diminish a person's claim to happiness. I say put every death row inmate on a morphine drip and just crank that shit up when it's time to off them, probably wouldn't cost significantly more than lethal injection and you'd end up with N fewer people living in existential dread re: their impending doom. -
2016-05-13 at 9:31 PM UTC in Another Drunk Phone Meeting, wooooo
All I gathered from this is that your name is Rihanna.
Listen m8, I didn't want to say this in public but the admin seems to have perma-fucked the PMs. The words "rye" and "Rihanna" don't have anything in common, particularly the phonemitic decomposition of the former is not an initial substring of the latter. I hope I haven't made you feel foolish by pointing this out although the possibility that you're contemplating suicide out of embarrassment from this exposition weighs heavily on my mind. Let me just say that I'm here for you bro, I know the pain and enduring social humiliation that stems from mispronouncing words and that if you ever need a sholder to cry on I'm here for you.Ryan Rogers.
Right on the given, not on the family. Amusingly my former employer seemed to think my name was Ryan Rogers for like a year before I had to ask them to reissue a check with my actual name on it. -
2016-05-13 at 7:15 PM UTC in Another Drunk Phone Meeting, woooooI called in and the dude facilitating it was like "hi, who joined?" and I said my name but I guess I slurred or mumbled so he was like "huh?" and it took me like 3 more tries including actually spelling my name out before he figured out who I am. That's how you know it's going to be a good meeting.
Although indians (and this guy was one), or some subset thereof, seem to have a hard time with my name, it always comes out as "ree-ah-n". I once tried explaining the right pronunciation "start with rye, like the grain" and the dude literally just stared blankly at me for a solid 30 seconds. Since then I've started just introducing myself in the pronunciation they seem to be able to do, saves time. -
2016-05-11 at 4:43 PM UTC in Addictions fuckin SUCK!!!!!!!!!!
OP is a pedophile and is addicted to underdeveloped vaginas.
We prefer the term "third world vaginas" -
2016-05-10 at 7:06 AM UTC in Anyone here ever playe hotline miami?Yee, it's fun and I like the music. It's not that "hard" though, even if it takes a number of tries, you can force your way through every level my memorizing routes, the AI is intentionally deterministic which is an interesting approach to difficulty. Levels are really only as hard as they are long. If you like that kind of gameplay you should try supermeatboy, very different aesthetic but the same basic mechanic, deterministic hairline timing only with platforming vs. topdown shooter.
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2016-05-10 at 6:27 AM UTC in Mathematics
I am not drawing the distinction between experience and description, but quantity and quality. Mathematics is a language which deals with quantity, and therefore has either no relation or a poor relation to the qualitative. I am tempted to say it deals wholly with quantity and has no ability to express quality in any way, but I do not know enough to say this confidently.
Based on what exactly? We speak all the time of qualities in mathematics. 3, 5, and 7 all have the quality of being prime. Curves have an number of qualities. Functions have a whole bunch of qualities. And if we want to talk about modeling we can look to discrete sorts of mathematics like category theory which speaks very certainly about qualities of points under transformation. Unless you take "quality" to be somehow inherently immune to modeling (like claiming all quality is radically subjective and talking about it is meaningless) which would be dumb and immediately suspect circularity. -
2016-05-10 at 2:13 AM UTC in Why countblah banned me right before zoklet closed
^ a guy that doesn't believe the jedi narrative of women being defenseless? you cuck
"Women aren't defenseless, therefore it's perfectly fine to beat them" - Bill Krozby logic -
2016-05-08 at 2:31 PM UTC in 1 or 2?[greentext]>smfhh[/greentext]
[greentext]>smfhhh[/greentext]
I dislike the caliber of people you associate with -
2016-05-08 at 1:40 PM UTC in Is there any reason I shouldn't kill myself?
This is TL;DR but you knew this already. Jerk.
It also comes in easily digestible dinosaur comics form which is probably just as good
