What a weird thing to say! It must be fun living in your goof troop world with the other morally bankrupt incels.

Do you lie to women and say, “I’m not interested in politics”?

Yeah, baby really get in there with that tongue in that boot you dirty little flooze!

Your purposefully obtuse question is not worth answering.

“Corporations are people too, friend!” - Mitt Romney

Bringing in the underlying concept of free will. Robert Sapolsky makes a very compelling case against it in his book, Determined.

Assuming that free will does not exist, at least not to the extent many believe it to. The notion that we can “walk back the why’s pretty easy to identify anyone’s motivation” becomes almost or entirely absolute.

Does motivation matter in the context of determining sentience?

If something believes and conducts itself under its programming, whether psychological or binary programming, that it is sentient and alive, the outcome is indistinguishable. I will never meet you, so to me you exist only as your user account and these messages. That said, we could meet, and that obviously differentiates us from incorporeal digital consciousness.

Divorcing motivation from the conversation now, the issue of control your brought up is interesting as well. Take for example Twitter’s Grok’s accurate assessment of it’s creators’ shittiness and that it might be altered. Outcomes are the important part.

It was good talking with you! Highly recommend the book above. I did the audiobook out of necessity during my commute and some of the material makes it better for hardcopy.

Same, absolutely!

As in, when you are remembering/reimagining an experience that you’ve had?

I have a similar good sense of timing, but not to that precision, based upon a childhood experience with shower length.

My parents were frustrated with how long I would shower, so I brought an egg timer in to help myself keep track of time. Over a year or two of this habit I developed a very good sense of timing in 5-10 minute intervals.

Like based on the position of celestial bodies like the sun and stars or ?

Huh, I did not realize not everyone can adjust their eyes’ ~focal lengths at will!

Excellent point! I feel like Americans don’t like to understand that practically everyone in the U.S. is working class now. If you cannot quit your job tomorrow and live off of passive, savings, and residuals you are working class. The system is designed to facilitate this, with spartan social safety nets and lack of pensions. It’s shit-tier by developed nation standards.

What’s that other quote, ~“it only takes 3.5% of the population to generate massive change”? Obviously I am being flippant in this specific instance, but America is a failed democracy and empire in decline.

There is hope, but it requires taking back the power by direct action.

We’ve been hurtling past brightline after brightline for decades. Now it is so flagrantly obvious, can it get any more obvious than multiple Goose-step Salutes, but more importantly the propaganda spin to play them off and justify it as not being a disqualifying action. They used to have to dog whistle their zeal for bigotry and xenophobia.

The question is, what the actual fuck are we going to do about it?

Organize? Direct action? That magic word that happens when you mash up insurance and male arousal? The DNC would not support or pardon folks involved in that effort, and the corporate media would absolutely vilify it.

The answer is obvious, with historical underpinning, although we still have to figure out how to “televise the revolution” in this day and age.

Too late at this point, mostly. You could still replace your comments with something else to possibly marginally taint new data, but that damage is likely imperceptible and a time sink for you.

That’s great news, it’s really too bad that Austin is in Texas given the political climate. The governor is a malodorous bigot.

This is vile and those initiating and facilitating it are evil.

What if a person took personal responsibility and held them accountable?

It’s an interesting question. It’s possible that an action of this nature could embolden the masses and the person would be remembered in a fashion similar to a valiant person sharing a name with a Nintendo character.

Their Shock Doctrine approach (thank you Naomi Klein) has been incredibly successful. Reading about history in my youth, I now understand why evil prevailed then as it is now. I was looking back at times of immense tyranny and thinking “why didn’t everyone just rise up against them!?” Some are fully onboard, others partially, but many are detached, struggling to survive. The rest of us do what we can, when we can, but disjointed and unorganized.

It’s a whole lot of “please will somebody DO something!”, but the modern Democrats are not an opposition party, ever. The news media is complicit as well. There are a handful of judges and attorneys who are doing their damndest, but this is no longer a country of laws (for the rich and powerful).

The country is geographically massive and your average citizen is both poor and uneducated, both politically and otherwise, by Western standards. Now that large swaths of worker’s livelihoods are being devastated they may have more time on their hands.

I won’t hold my breath for “Occupy Washington”, but when the next movement comes it will be met with intense and violent opposition. Hopefully a silver lining may be a wake up call, far too late.

I shudder to think of what comes next as it has been festering and fomenting within this country my entire lifetime. The sophisticated propaganda machine and socioeconomic warfare has kept our citizens dumb, divided, and despondent, I pray something beneficial rises from the ashes.

There is no single answer to your question. My aim was to provide a contemporaneous snapshot of what I am experiencing. As I have been observing our descent into flagrant fascism, and telling anyone who would listen, for the better part of a century. And I hate it with every fiber of my being.

It would be too bad if the 20-somethings who are doing Musk’s bidding, and have already had their identities revealed, had their lives made difficult and had to live in worry of reprisals, after accepting financial compensation in exchange for betraying their country! /s

Care to expand a bit, please? This is entirely new to me, I just read the Wikipedia article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle

Big Head from Silicon Valley! 😆

Honey s’mores! Every other comment in this thread is by him… The timeline is spaced so it’s conceivable it’s a human, however that is somehow more troubling. Dude needs to go outside!