malicious hexbears are taking advantage of people's trauma to turn them against the west folks (and judging by the recent survey, turning them trans too? 
)
https://lemmy.world/comment/12777548 link cuz im not a lib
the comment in the screeshot is responding to @blakeus12@hexbear.net's wholesome introduction post here: https://hexbear.net/post/3631051
I made a TLDR here: https://hexbear.net/comment/5484512
i wonder if they wandered off to some other place or if they finally did some self crit and are just on new accounts lol
I believe there's a chance that a Lemmyverse jagoff account named "FrightfulHobgoblin" is the same proselytizer to this day. When they're not busy declaring that a sufficient number of TI-88 calculators bolted together is equal (or superior) to human consciousness, they're being a creep and sex pest elsewhere in the network.
It's probably easier for a creep to be a sex pest if they see a feeemale that they're stalking as "just a meat computer with only an illusory consciousness" that can be hacked with sufficiently clever word choices and stalking tactics.
that sounds almost more like sollipism, although I suppose they share a lot of similarities.
"Simulation theory" is another related belief that techbros picked up, thought they invented it first, and congratulated themselves for it. They really like the idea of everything around them being reductionistically crude resources to exploit or obstacles to overcome, where they are by contrast the Main Character through some unspecified justification.
i dont quite understand how simulation theory leads to solipsism though, there's no reason to think that just because you are part of a simulation that you are the only one experiencing qualia, and in fact unless you are complete narcisst who think whoever made the simulation is literally controlling every single other part of the simulation to, idk, measure your reaction to shit i kinda feel like believing you are in a simulation should actually lead you away from solipsism because it's both a much less narcissistic assumption and also that i feel like a simulation with many thinking beings would be way more interesting than some puny human's brain?
That's just it: the loudest, richest, and most powerful "simulation theory" believers are narcissists and do go on further to describe people they don't like as "NPCs" that don't actually have consciousness, only pre-programmed responses to stimuli.
The most glaring example is
and he tweets exhaustively about his "NPC" delusions.
i guess i should never underestimate their narcissism but it's still such a foreign concept to me...
It would have been a foreign concept to me too if I hadn't been around such creeps since they called themselves "Extropians" in the 90s and started rebranding every few years after that.
Some people really do see themselves as the Epic Main Character Video Game Boy and everything around them as a big video game.
again I know this is because I'm just not wired like that but it seriously seems so... lonely to me. like you seriously only think you're the only person that matters and you have no one else to actually have conversations with? like frankly speaking i dont think i would uh, last long thinking like that
Oh, one of the creepiest features of
's abusive relationship with Grimes was when he convinced her that she was only a construction of his own mind, made specifically to please and serve him.
That's fucked.
he convinced her that she was not real? i am fucking amazed that is even possible, i actually do know there is a philosophy that none of us actually exist and existence is an illusion of our brains (which is kinda popular among physicists from my understanding?) but how do you convince someone experiencing qualia that you are real and that they are not???
Yes. That's the bewildering thing to me: she believed it, apparently. She even started tweeting about that belief.
Dennett popularized that shit, too: the idea that the very first and arguably only thing we can be truly aware of (awareness itself) being an "illusion" whatever the fuck that is. If it's an illusion, how is anything we perceive in our illusion supposed to be taken as anything but more illusions? It's a go-nowhere belief that's just vulgar materialism for its own sake.
yeah ever since I first read about it I kinda took it as coping that physicists did to try and keep reality neat and predictable to their nice long complicated math equations as possible even if it doesnt really fit with what they experience in their day to day life, not to get into a whole "free will" debate but like "it's an illusion" does not really adequately explain the feeling of choosing between actions or being able to choose not to act on a desire or why that illusion is somehow useful in ensuring a lifeform survives (and i think "it was random chance" is about as strong of an explanation as saying "god did it")
This conversation may even provoke another struggle session with "Hard D" determinists and those are always a fucking chore. It amounts to the same thing as "what if it's all a simulation" to me: "what if free will is an illusion and everyone just beep boops directly to incoming stimuli?" Well, that "illusion" is the only kind of "free will" we have and probably will ever know, so shitting on it to score nerd points is tiresome and even masturbatory to me.
Maybe everything we do is predetermined on some subatomic scale. We still experience qualia and consciously ("illusion" or otherwise) live accordingly. What the fuck are we supposed to do, with our lives, with society itself, with these clout-chasing asterisks in our lived experience? Once some tedious Reddit nerd claimed "society should be completely revised to meet Deterministic principles" and even the hints at his proposals were bazinga dystopian hellscape ideas like developing panopticon systems of such relentless thoroughness that everyone at all times would effectively be just circuits on a big circuit board.
That sounds fucking miserable and shitty for its own sake, some asshole's spank bank power fantasy that'd make any life lived under it worse than the "illusion" ever was.
yeah i was a little afraid of that when I used the term probably will just say disengage immediately if anyone tries lol.
but like from our best approximation of nature this isn't in the case, which is why i just think the popularity of the "we don't exist" theory among physiscts very strange, it almost at some level denies both experience and physics itself to cling to this philosophy because it supports the idea that everything is predetermined like you so desperately want, it feels almost religous in nature (and again to clarify, it's not the philosophy itself that is religious, i do think it has some validity as far as I think dismissing it out of hand would probably be an even more religious thinking, it's moreso that i find the popularity of it among people who are well known to like, fucking despair that quantum mechanics means the universe is fundamentally not predetermined to be a sign that a lot of them are probably not coming at it from a super well grounded philosophical perspective)
yeah it's a big part of the reason I don't follow the philosophy, whether I actually exist and it's me choosing to follow this or if it's just how my qualia was predetermined to be arranged, I fundamentally think the philosophy is anti-human and leads to a lot of ideas for society that I (or my qualia) resolutely oppose. kinda similar reasoning for why i give no thought to whether or not we live in a simulation other than maybe like a fun 2am conversation when I'm drunk with my friends, focusing and obsessing about it doesnt do any good for society and that ultimately is my number one philosophy.
When I want to be generous and not just say "shut up, nerd" or remind said nerd that the most divorced manchild in the world shares his (almost always a he) enthusiasm for the belief system, I usually give an easy to swallow version of my take like "this 'simulation' is all we have ever known, effectively is the only existence we have any experience or knowledge of, and what would you even start to do after 'escaping' it even if 'escaping' it was somehow possible?"
It's hard for me to even imagine internalizing such empty narcissistic beliefs, but I've had decades of experience trying to argue, even plead, with such people in the past. They're real, and they're disturbing.
Food=healthkit
R/showerthought posts were awful
Reddit became even more insufferable than usual when that shit started to take off.
/r/writingprompts was full of bazinga like
"ELO~N has just mathematically proved that the universe is actually a simulation. He decides to demonstrate that by launching the world's nuclear arsenal into space to cause a simulation-wide lag spike." 
Those weren't even prompts. They were "idea guys" that wrote short outlines, including their dull "twists" and expected someone else to write it out for them.