My point though is that you talk about all of that as if it’s some sort of chore.

To me, it’s a lot of the fun.

I rarely even get to the point of having to stop and weigh choices in my inventory, since every time I come across something new, I have to stop and check it out and try to figure out what it is and what it does and what sort of advantages or disadvantages it might have. I enjoy that. So all along the way, I’m figuring out what I want to or think I should keep and what I want to or think I can get rid of, and not because a finite inventory demands it, but because that’s part of the point of playing in the first place.

Broadly, you’re asking if other people actually invest the time and energy to sort out how to play complex games. I’m saying that we not only can and do, but that that’s a lot of the point. That whole process of sorting things out is a lot of the reason that we play in the first place.

Yeah - I just jump in and wing it.

At the risk of inviting the internet’s wrath, when people talk about the difference between serious gamers and casuals, this is the sort of thing they’re talking about.

“Serious” gaming involves a particular set of skills and interests, such that the person is willing and able to just jump into some complicated new game and figure it out. And it’s not just that “serious” gamers can do that - the point is that they want to. They enjoy it. They enjoy being lost, then slowly putting the pieces together and figuring out how things work and getting better because they’ve figured it out. And they enjoy the details - learning which skills do what and which items do what, and how it all interrelates. All that stuff isn’t some chore to be avoided - it’s a lot of the point - a lot of the reason that they (we) play games.

You talk about your inventory filling up and then just selling everything, and I can’t even imagine doing that. To me, that’s not just obviously bad strategy, but entirely missing the point - like buying ingredients to make delicious food, then bringing them home and throwing them in the garbage.

No surprise there. He’s a middle-aged teenage edgelord - what else would he do other than play video games and shitpost on used-to-be-twitter?

I don’t spend any time on Mastodon.

Why? Are there anarchists on Mastodon? Or is this some kind of sarcasm I’m not getting?

I do have a Mastodon account, but I never use it. I much prefer forums over microblogs.

The implication here is that anarchists are relatively common on the fediverse, and if so, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen this idea expressed.

But the thing is that I am an anarchist, and I’ve been keeping my eyes open, and I haven’t seen any other anarchists here. LOTS of authoritarian leftists, ranging from naive social democrats to full-blown “submit or die” tankies, but not one single other anarchist.

So are you actually trying to say that anarchists are common here? And if so, where are they?

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Gurren Lagann

I think this puts consciousness on too high of a mystic pedestal.

I think that one of the most common ways by which the devotees of reductive physicalism try to make it appear to be a valid position is by positing a false dichotomy by which they then sneeringly characterize anything that’s not simply physical as “mystic.”

What makes you think that it is impossible to observe someone else’s consciousness?

The fact that it’s an emergent phenomenon with no physical manifestation.

I think we’ll be able to (and in fact we already can to some notable degree) track neuronal activity in a brain and map it and interpret it, so we can make reasonably solid guesses regarding its nature - general type, intensity, efficiency and so on - but we can never actually observe its content, since its content is a gestalt formed within and only accessible to the mind that’s experiencing it.

There’s nothing at all “mystic” about that - it’s simple logic and reason.

And, by the bye, it’s also much of why actual philosophers rejected reductive physicalism almost a century ago.

Philosophy can’t have "a scientific basis.

If an idea has a legitimate scientific basis, then it’s not philosophy - it’s science. Philosophy explicitly addresses ideas for which there is not, and in most cases there can’t be, a legitimate scientific basis.

Conveniently enough, I just wrote another response to the thread, since there was more I wanted to say on the topic, and it addresses this.

It’s not a matter of not having the tools to test theories of consciousness - it’s more fundamental than that. We are consciousness. When we theorize on consciousness, we are engaging in consciousness. It’s inescapable - it’s the very thing that makes it possible to theorize. And it’s entirely experiential - you necessarily experience your own consciousness and cannot possibly observe anyone else’s. We are each and all, and necessarily, behind a veil of perception. It’s literally impossible for it to be otherwise - to somehow step outside of consciousness and observe it, since the only thing that can meaningfully observe it is that same consciousness.

Yes - we can concevably at least make some good guesses regarding the physical processes that correspond with our experiences of consciousness, but that’s necessarily the extent of it. Again, it’s not simply that we don’t have the tools to do more than that, but that it’s inherently impossible for it to be otherwise.

This is still nagging at me - there’s more I want to say. So, another response.

This particular theory is a pretty good illustration of the unfortunate ignorance of philosophy I mentioned, but an even better one is mentioned in the article - “the popular claim, advanced by philosopher Nick Bostrom and taken seriously by physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and David Chalmers, among others, that our reality is a simulation being run on a computer, as in The Matrix.”

That’s not just pseudoscience, but embarassingly ignorant. If these people had even the vaguest understanding of the idea, they’d recognize that it’s about as far from science as it’s possible to get.

The whole concept was first popularized by Descartes in the 17th century. He presented it as the possibility that one’s perception of reality could be manipulated by an “evil demon,” but the underlying concept was the same as “the Matrix.”

But the thing is that it was never intended to be an actual theory of perception and consciousness - rather it was a thought experiment meant to illustrate the fact that it could be the case that our perceptions of reality are controlled by an evil demon (or are a computer simulation), and we could never know.

The exact point is that it’s literally impossible to somehow step outside of our perceptions and our consciousness and analyze them, since any observations we might make are and can only be products of the very perceptions and consciousness we’re trying to analyze. So they could be entirely right or entirely wrong or anything in between and we could never know, since they simply are and can only be whatever they are.

As far as that goes then, it not only falls astray of but pretty much explicitly illustrates the distinction between science and pseudoscience.

And if Tyson et al had even the faintest understanding of philosophy - if they weren’t blinded by some ludicrously ignorant species of reductive physicalism - they’d already understand that, and recognize how foolish it is to treat the Matrix, or any other such idea, as a legitimate theory.

I’m pleased to see this.

In recent decades, science has been trying to move into areas, like consciousness, that are really philosophy, and all that does is fuck things up for everyone.

Yes - of course it’s pseudoscience - it can’t help but be, since it’s all untestable.

The problem is that, by labeling it “science,” whatever it is that someone proposes is immediately treated by devotees of scientism as certain fact, when in reality it’s philosophy, and thus “fact” is a quality it can’t even possess. And that’s doubly a problem because not only is it not and can’t ever be legitimately treated as fact but, not to put too fine a point on it, when it comes to philosophy, all too many scientists don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. In ways, many of them are even more ignorant than laypeople, since they tend to disdain and thus ignore the philosophy that’s gone before them.

I’ve been online since the early 90s, when it was just understood that there were risks, so you had to protect yourself. So it’s not so much that I got into internet privacy as that I’ve never done things any other way.

The only thing that’s really changed is that I’ve had to shift more from passively protecting myself to actively protecting myself, since corporate and government shitstains are constantly scheming to destroy our privacy in order to expand and protect their own wealth, power and privilege.

I couldn’t even watch the whole thing - my cringe meter topped off with Canti in a suit, sounding like a TV weatherman.

Judging by the community this is in, you’re probably thinking of the wrong “subs.”