Jump to content

Primary: Sky Slate Blackcurrant Watermelon Strawberry Orange Banana Apple Emerald Chocolate Marble
Secondary: Sky Slate Blackcurrant Watermelon Strawberry Orange Banana Apple Emerald Chocolate Marble
Pattern: Blank Waves Squares Notes Sharp Wood Rockface Leather Honey Vertical Triangles
Photo

LPW (Last Post Wins) v5


  • Please log in to reply
3101 replies to this topic

#2721
pokari

pokari

    Fingerling Potato

  • Members
  • 69 posts
Speaking of self-betrayal, I can't sleep. Why l, body, why T-T

Next time you betray yourself, come to me and I'll give you a hug. uwu

#2722
PItiful Boar

PItiful Boar

    Soppy Potato

  • Members
  • 198 posts

self betrayal is an oxymoron 



#2723
pokari

pokari

    Fingerling Potato

  • Members
  • 69 posts
How so?

A betrayal is a violation of a trust or promise; you can trust yourself or make promises to yourself, and you can violate that trust or promise. (Though completely violating your trust in yourself would seem to be a pretty wretched place to be—though it certainly happens, usually involving addiction or similar—violating promises made to oneself would be the much more common case).

Arguably, since we're just messy neural networks, this could be as simple as nueral subnet A reaching a different conclusion from neural subnet B; i.e. that just because you're one person does not mean you are of one mind on a topic (literally).

Alternatively the same grey matter might react differently at a different time, possibly with different stimuli, creating dischord between the decisions made at times A' and B'.

My point is, humans are not fully consistent rational agents; of course they can betray themselves.

#2724
PItiful Boar

PItiful Boar

    Soppy Potato

  • Members
  • 198 posts

imo theres no self to betrayal. you can betray another, who will look at you badly, and say youre a untrustworthy person. Self is always defined by others. And man is devolving from a social animal.



#2725
pokari

pokari

    Fingerling Potato

  • Members
  • 69 posts
Self is definitely not only defined by others. I mean, you can indeed say "self is defined by others" to make a pithy point about our nature as social creatures, but it's obviously not that pat and simple; that's just poetic licence.

And I can certainly betray myself, look at myself badly, and say I'm an untrustworthy person. I mean, it's not advised or healthy, but I've done it before.

Or are you just going to throw all self-reflection, all meta-cognition, and other introspection out the window? :/

Edited by pokari, 13 December 2018 - 09:26 PM.


#2726
PItiful Boar

PItiful Boar

    Soppy Potato

  • Members
  • 198 posts

even self reflection and introspection requires projecting the thoughts of others, so it's two levels of indirection - you thinking of the general opinion of what the general opinion would be, and how you fit within that general opinion (or not )


and not everyone is capable of doing two levels of referencing. for example our president can't, and so he has no concept of self. literally.


Edited by Feishy Pit Boar, 14 December 2018 - 05:16 PM.


#2727
pokari

pokari

    Fingerling Potato

  • Members
  • 69 posts
I thought more primitive consciousnesses (e.g. very young children, whose thought processes the President appears to often regrettably most closely resemble) were instead supposed to have a deficient conception of consciousness in others, not themselves.

#2728
666

666

    Potato Sprout

  • Validating
  • 1 posts

Oof



#2729
penrosecat

penrosecat

    Playa Potato

  • Members
  • 3 posts
I do wonder how many of the things that have already happened we end up trivialising when we speak, it all sounds so much easier in the past.

Somewhat related, we don't really think of the struggles of all the people around us everyday before judging them, hmm

#2730
pokari

pokari

    Fingerling Potato

  • Members
  • 69 posts
The past does seem so much cleaner and more certain in the present. I think a lot of it is the fault of well-meaning historical commentators who try to find the reason and rhyme in past events.

Take the U.S. stock market crash that led to the great depression 100 years ago—the way I was taught it in grade school, you'd think it was inevitable and everyone was blind for not seeing that their house of cards was going to collapse, but of course just like today I'm sure there were a hundred people predicting a hundred different things about the economy, and only in retrospect was anyone ever really convincing.

Or take the start of WWII; it's written in the history books that things got so bad in the beginning because everyone kept trying to placate Nazi Germany rather than launch a counter-offensive after it took the first couple countries, which sounds like a really stupid thing to do—but that ignores all the uncertainty there would have been at the time; they couldn't as summarily say "well of course Hitler is hell-bent on world domination, what were you expecting" because they couldn't know that; everyone would have been guessing and second-guessing his motives at the time. Furthermore, even though we take it as given, we don't know thay things would have been "better" had the war started earlier; maybe that would have resulted in a half a century of small skirmish wars in Europe instead.

I could go on, but the point is, the spark notes version of history isn't really describing history—it's describing the stories, with clean plots and well-paced climaxes and clear conclusions, that we tell each other about what happened. Real human life is much much muckier than that, and being in the thick of it is very different from being in a story.

I'm using the big examples of course but even on a very personal level, the corruption of information as "stories" seems to be pretty essential to the human condition; take for example how different people's recollections of the same event often diverge so wildly over time—that seems to be in part because we tell ourselves "stories" about what happened.

I'm not sure to what extent it's a memory-compression technique, or else part of our rationalising day-to-day events into things that fit into our world-views, but humans just can't seem to help themselves from shaving all the edges off of events until it's story-shaped, and then those simplified shapes are all we ever pass on to each other.

#2731
penrosecat

penrosecat

    Playa Potato

  • Members
  • 3 posts

it's rewind time



#2732
pokari

pokari

    Fingerling Potato

  • Members
  • 69 posts
*kool deticxe* owo ?emit dniwer s'ti nehw sneppah tahW

#2733
penrosecat

penrosecat

    Playa Potato

  • Members
  • 3 posts

meme



#2734
pokari

pokari

    Fingerling Potato

  • Members
  • 69 posts
Hmm.

Memes have an interesting relationship to excitement. They are not themselves exciting—in fact by nature they are repetitive and so should be boring—yet they are often closely associated with enthusiasm, and are often used in the employ thereof.

#2735
penrosecat

penrosecat

    Playa Potato

  • Members
  • 3 posts

even repetitive memes are now fun cause of deep fried memes



#2736
pokari

pokari

    Fingerling Potato

  • Members
  • 69 posts
Fun, or just satisfying?

Deep-frying is great, but I don't know that I've ever thought of it as fun... owo

(Except deep-fried ice-cream. That's kind of intrinsically fun on account of how delightfully improbable it seems.)

#2737
666

666

    Potato Sprout

  • Validating
  • 1 posts

Oof



#2738
pokari

pokari

    Fingerling Potato

  • Members
  • 69 posts
Merry Christmas to all who are inclined to celebrate it~

#2739
PItiful Boar

PItiful Boar

    Soppy Potato

  • Members
  • 198 posts
I will always be a faithful servant to appolonious of tyana

#2740
penrosecat

penrosecat

    Playa Potato

  • Members
  • 3 posts

I don't get it, I went out to eat, and it was crowded (all according to plan ofc) and it wasn't all that great. Then I slept for 5+ hours and had a really good dream. 


Wait, so what don't I get here? nvm