Temperatures above 50C used to be a rarity confined to two or three global hotspots, but the World Meteorological Organization noted that at least 10 countries have reported this level of searing heat in the past year: the US, Mexico, Morocco, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Pakistan, India and China.
In Iran, the heat index – a measure that also includes humidity – has come perilously close to 60C, far above the level considered safe for humans.
Heatwaves are now commonplace elsewhere, killing the most vulnerable, worsening inequality and threatening the wellbeing of future generations. Unicef calculates a quarter of the world’s children are already exposed to frequent heatwaves, and this will rise to almost 100% by mid-century.
Living and dying are the same process. You can’t be born without dying. You could say biology condemns us all - very loosely - to a cult of death, as we must all participate.
Capitalism is worse than that. Capitalism is an ideology of exploitation. I’m fine with dying, it’s my fault for being born. I don’t see why I must submit to exploitation while I do, temporarily, exist.
That’s because you’re a sinner and exploiting sinners isn’t to be punished, but praised. Exploit your fellow sinners, make them toil in suffering and you too shall redeem salvation in the form of stock options and tax evasion.
That’s the spirit! We must sacrifice the newborns to harvest better stock options.
is it? I don’t recall ever asking to be born, i’m pretty sure that just kind of happened.
Just because you can’t recall it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. As a spermatozoon, you eagerly swam towards that egg, then that egg could have chosen to abort at any time. Yet here you are alive. You chose to be here. Deal with it, accept it and move on with your life.
does a delusional person choose to have delusions?
Things that are outside of our psychological realm, and physical control are quite literally something we have no control over.
Yeah, there are plenty of things we have little to no control over.
Having delusions is one of them for sure, but can we say for certain we don’t at least influence what those delusions are or which direction they take?
i mean you probably influence them, but much like dreams, are they really representative of anything other than your mind left to its own devices?
Human conception may start at the sperm race, but human consciousness doesn’t begin until a few years into childhood, so at the end of the day, who knows.
Can thought be considered a process that begins after being affected by an external stimulus? And without prior experience on which to base our response, we can only react according to the conditions set by that stimulus?
So is it truly we who control our thoughts or are we just acting in a predetermined set of reactionary impulses based on the accumulation of our personal experiences and gained knowledge over our lifetime so far?
We who are so easily influenced into outrage by trigger phrases specific to our fears or spurred into action by resonating soundbites promising our desires, are those our thoughts or are they just the mind left to its own devices?
I really don’t know. But it’s probably some food for thought in a way.
thought must be influenced by some level of internal stimulation, as you can deprive your senses and still think. Likewise, before you have the capability of memory, you are not conscious, it is simply impossible. Consciousness is directly tied to the ability to remember. Thusly it must be some mix of the two, life experiences, and remembered experiences.
Just one or the other is incapable of providing anything interesting.
You have to have some level over the control of your thoughts, otherwise you wouldn’t be capable of typing, or speaking, or most things in life really. If everything is predetermined it has to be predetermined at a higher level, quantum mechanics and multiverse theory for example. In some capacity, the vast majority of judgements we make in our lifetimes is based on the cumulative life experience we have gained, as well as a ability to engage in critical thinking allowing us to process said experience and to formulate an action to follow.
both, kind of. The mind left to it’s own devices will formulate thoughts for you to hold, it doesn’t like the lack of thought and understanding, it’s probably the reasoning behind religion, and it’s certainly the driver behind science. We’re also social animals, and as a result we like to conform to the pack, it’s what keeps us alive, so if other people are saying something, we have some fundamental level of bias against the alternative. Racism is a good example of this.
Isn’t the internal stimulation just the nervous system zapping things to get a response? And doesn’t that need a trigger to get it going?
Anyway, I feel like I’m heading into contested territory here, but I gotta ask. At which point can we consider babies as conscious?
Most people will claim their earliest memory is at the age of 4 or 5 years old. So that time is probably considered as the general start of conscious identity. Yet some have reported that simulating the conditions in a womb such as sleeping in a fetal position or floating aimlessly within a larger body of water will grant them an instinctual sense of serenity. So it can be argued that at some level, we remember our time in the womb, even though we are not able to recall it directly.
And I’ve seen babies aged around 1-2 years old trying (unsuccessfully) to hide from their parents in order to attempt an action that had been forbidden several times before.
How early does our capability to store memory actually start? And at which point will the amount of stored and remembered experience be enough to count as consciousness?
I’m a Buddhist.
i’m not familiar with Buddhism so if there is something i’m missing here, that would be why lol.
Who would do the asking and what would be providing the answer?
this is a good question, amusingly enough there is no answer, philosophy sucks.
If you’re fine with dying, Tepco is still looking for guys to clean up under Fukushima. They ran out of old gambling addicts who had big debts with the Yakuza.