Sort-of memes that are cracking you up at the moment

maymays plz

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(or do they)

I thought I’d stumbled upon my philosophy undergraduate days for a moment.

I bet they were more fun.

My Latin isn’t up to scratch

Somebody has described how you get qualia?

Well, perhaps not thoroughly enough to form instructions to build a ghost in the machine, but I thought Hofstadter gave it a red-hot go in Gödel, Escher, Bach back in the day. As he has it, in a nutshell, awareness is an emergent property of a sufficiently complex system of nested feedback loops. This notion is kind of reinforced by the fact that your thinking becomes more intelligent as you get more self-referential and meta about it; thinking about thinking leads to better thinking.

A heater with a thermostat can be said to have an extremely crude awareness; keep adding layers of feedback enough times and you get a person.

That last paragraph seems to ring true
Have worked with some people who appeared about as sentient as a Worcester Bosch

Mine had more memes if I’m honest.

Bill Hicks, sigh. At the time felt like a mushroom eating cosmic hero, lambasting anyone.
Now feels like someone who’s done one line too many and voted for brexit.

https://mythfolklore.blogspot.com/2018/01/yesterdays-twitter-bayeux-star-wars.html

Hic Darcus Vadorus : This (is) Darth Vader.
Luxgladium tenet : He holds a lightsaber.
Non ego sum pater tuus : No! I am your father!
Hic Lucius Caeliambulus: This is Luke Skywalker.
Imo, non est verus : No, he is not (my) true (father).

Is this meant to imply that pondering this stuff is a mark of immaturity?

As I see it, there's a lack of intelligent discussion of these subjects. Sure, folks have been banging on about this crap for thousands of years, but modern physics, neuroscience and information theory has only been around for a relative blip, and I see very little sign that we are doing much to integrate the obvious implications.

I listened to a Neil deGrasse Tyson podcast about free will a couple of months back, and found it somewhat superficial; seems to me we should be further along with this.

People like deGrasse Tyson and Sabine Hossenfelder are starting to make the point that a claim that free will exists is, contrary to intuition, akin to claiming that God, or Russell's Teapot exists, and that the onus of proof is on those who claim the existence of something you can cut away with Occam's Razor.

But serious discussion should have moved past this point decades ago, if not for (even some of the smartest) people's stubborn refusal to integrate near certainties they find uncomfortable. We should be talking about the ethical implications of this all but inescapable realisation, and how to drag our primitive instinctual notions of morality towards something more evidence-based which would doubtless lead to better outcomes.

But nooo, let's all just mask our insecurity with pointless flippancy every time some unhip nerd brings it up.

Bill Hicks, sigh. At the time felt like a mushroom eating cosmic hero, lambasting anyone.
Now feels like someone who’s done one line too many and voted for brexit.

Oh yeah, cause a Brexit voter would totally say this in a million years:

The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly colored, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while.

Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don't worry; don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we … kill those people.

"Shut him up! I've got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real." It's just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok …

But it doesn't matter, because it's just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one.

Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.

The vibe of being just a blob of awareness brought forth by a complicated and very temporary arrangement of matter, which can't take credit or blame for anything, seems to dovetail pretty well with a lot of ancient wisdom, particularly Zen Buddhism, which seems to exist in order to say to physics, I told you so.

It’s the memes thread, flippancy is expected.

I made no comment on the maturity of the discussion, it just reminded me of how much this kind of thing used to matter to me and how I’d spend hours and hours discussing it with friends and fellow students.

I listened to a Neil deGrasse Tyson podcast...and found it somewhat superficial

NdGT? Superficial? Perish the thought!

Well sure, I totally expect flippancy here. But it's de rigeur any time somebody is close to driving the point home, even in an ostensibly serious context.

This concept has been doing my head in for decades. Sometimes it goes away for a bit, but it always comes back, probably because I don't see the conversation moving forwards very much at all...

His offsider is pretty lame, except for the black humour about racism; that has a lot of bite.

Don't engage in Hicks self-flagellation.

Maybe he'd have ended up like Jorden Peterson. Maybe he'd have transitioned. Maybe he'd have been governor of California.

It doesn't matter, you don't need to go there.

He is perfectly encapsulated in time, existing solely in his era and no where else.

Nerds

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https://youtu.be/FOHmY7XDNEs?si=AaFuNb-EJ1clk4Bd

will never stop telling people "I was there MAN!" for his set at the dominion theatre, early 90s. Was amazing, mind blowingly gut achingly funny.
If you're that insightful and heartfelt at that age, i don't see him slipping into the narrow minded conservative leanings you think he might have edged towards, and even if he did, you'd still have the younger version live on cd.
Just like John Cleese's move towards reactionary thought doesn't, for me anyway, take away from his monty python/fawlty towers/fish called wanda work.

We should be talking about the ethical implications of this all but inescapable realisation, and how to drag our primitive instinctual notions of morality towards something more evidence-based which would doubtless lead to better outcomes.

Not meaning to be sarcastic, but as a society/species, at this point in the 21st century, we can't have a serious conversation about anything, or anyone, no matter how important or vital anyone thinks it is.
Until someone dies, or is outraged by it and posts a short humourous, or long agonising screed on tik tok, or it is used by some dodgy alt right think tank, this stuff won't be rising up any cultural flagpoles for a while, if ever...

.

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A philosophy discussion thread already exists, it lasted 12 years during which time there were 39 posts, many of which were flippant. Could I suggest we use this forgotten resource for the posting of memes?

no