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.

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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.

We’re dumb animals, not much different from other dumb animals.

If squirrels had news media, they could have a story that says, “Thousands of squirrels are lining up to try to cross busy streets in front of cars.”

And some number of squirrels would read that and think, “What the hell is wrong with them?”

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?

As is generally the case, only a relative few have enough power to actually do something meaningful, and as the winners of the countless battles that had to be fought as they crawled their way up whichever hierarchy to the top of which they now cling, they tend to be ruthless, self-serving, dishonest, amoral and entirely heartless, hiding behind a convincing-enough veneer of principles and integrity.

So as is generally the case, the world can be roughly divided into those who could do something but won’t. those who would do something but can’t, and those who aren’t paying attention, for whatever reason.

I guess if you want to just sort of vaguely gesture toward things that were very obviously the point and focus of the novels, and things that they do better than the vast majority of books, and instead lament the nominal failure to expand on side issues that aren’t even relevant to anything else, then you’re free to do so. I really don’t see the point though.

To me, it’s as if you’re looking at Van Gogh’s Starry Night and saying, “Well yeah, the colors and texture and movement and composition are all great and all, but I’m just disappointed that there aren’t any people in Victorian dress in it. And not even one madonna and child!”

Undoubtedly.

To paraphrase Lily Tomlin, no matter how cynical I get, it’s still not enough.

I don’t bother with the right-wing propaganda networks so I don’t know, but I can’t imagine how they might spin this to blame Biden when his administration hasn’t even been involved in the process.

The whole thing hinges on a purely internal conflict not just within Congress, but in the House specifically. How does that even colorably come to be blamed on an entirely separate branch?

I don’t doubt that the propaganda outlets and the grifters will simply lie, and conjure up some entirely different account of things that won’t match up at all with the plain objective reality of the whole thing stalling because a group of hard right House members are demanding concessions and refusing to vote in favor of a budget that doesn’t include them, but I can’t even imagine what it will be, since it will have to be essentially completely false, from start to finish.

Unfortunately, I also don’t doubt that some significant part of the Republican base will believe whatever it is, since they’ve been so thoroughly indoctrinated and made so subject to their emotions that they literally can no longer distinguish between reality and fantasy.

Still though, even with as confused and misled and blinded by emotion as much of the Republican base is, and as brazenly dishonest as the propagandists and grifters that are profiting off of them are, I can’t imagine how it might be the case that Biden will get the blame for this. It’s not just that it’s not narrowly true, but that there isn’t even a colorable basis, as far as I can see, to even pretend that it is.

Setting aside the fact that this is a generalization and thus naturally overstating things, I don’t doubt that there’s some truth to this.

There’s a sort of rigidly intolerant moralizing that arose on the internet over the last decade or so, most exemplified by Tumblr, and gen z was right in the middle of it.

It puts me in mind of the Victorian era, with a group of people who absolutely and unequivocally condemn anyone and everyone who violates their rigid sense of propriety, or more precisely, the stereotypes that they substitute for those people. Of course, the biggest difference is that they have a completely different set of rules to which they insist that all submit - instead of a religious morality mostly concerned with sex they have a secular morality mostly concerned with social behavior. But they share that absolutism - the smug certainty that their way is the only way and that any who believe otherwise are not only wrong, but due to the fact that they believe otherwise, so monstrous as to be unfit to even judge.

That last is the trap - the thing that sets that extreme of moralizing apart and keeps it going when it takes hold. Those who come to believe in it end up believing not simply that they’re right, but that believing as they do is the defining trait of people who are fit to judge the matter, so they then can and do reject any and all differing views out of hand on the basis that the mere act of holding a different view means that one is obviously an inferior being, and since one is an inferior being, whatever one believes is and can only be wrong. It becomes a closed loop, in which people aren’t even capable of considering different viewpoints.

And that’s presumably the quality that’s being characterized, and with some accuracy, as them not having the skills to disagree.

I’d note though that this is just one manifestation of the problem. It’s a new version of it, made possible by social media, and it appears to be notably widespread, and particularly in a relatively narrow age group, but the dynamic itself is likely as old as human civilization.

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.

This is pretty accurate, but it should be noted that ALL ideologies can be and often are treated essentially as religions.

They all serve as dogmas and myths around which a set of true believers congregate, who then alternate between telling each other their myths of inherent superiority, proselytizing non-believers and lashing out at the followers of competing sects. They all lay out moral guidelines by which they can both affirm the faithful and condemn the heretics and unbelievers. They all demand absolute submission and attack any sign of deviation, and since they’ve defined themselves as inherently morally superior, they consider any of those attacks to be self-evidently morally justified. They all have a hierarchy (whether formal or informal) by which dogma is disseminated to the faithful, with the view (again, whether formal or informal) that ideas that have not been sanctioned by the designated people somehow don’t qualify.

And, pointedly, they all have their own “Satans” - the ideas and/or people that they can generally be counted on to blame for whatever evil might arise.

I sincerely believe that if any aliens are observing us, they’ve concluded that we actually value and reward insanity and loathe and punish sanity.

And they wouldn’t be entirely wrong…

I don’t even understand this headlong rush for an app. And especially being so desperate for an app that you’d use one that embeds ads unless you pay to remove them.

It just seems completely backwards to me.

With Reddit, it made sense - it was awful in a mobile browser, the official app was complete garbage, and either way it was buried in ads So you could (and I did) use a third party app and get a cleaner and more useful interface and no ads.

But Lemmy’s already fine in a browser and it’s ad-free. So what’s the point?

I could maybe see, somewhere down the road when the apps are complete and established, it might be interesting to experiment with some and maybe find one that’s got just the features I like most. But that’s not what I’m seeing. What I’m seeing are people desperately clamoring for an app - any app - it doesn’t matter how primitive and janky it is - they just desperately need to have an app right now, today, this instant. As if lemmy is completely unusable without one.

And it’s just… not that way at all. Sure, it could be better, but it’s fine.

So I just don’t get it.