Yeah, I've experienced similar in conversations about this recently. A lot of objections seem to boil down to mysticism.

This tech is in its infancy.

People criticizing current limitations are really missing the point. It's way ahead of what most anyone could have expected 20 years ago, and advancement is accelerating.

Fossils are objectively minerals though. This wasn't an unreasonable lawsuit at all.

Banning words is foolish.

Being thoughtful about how our words are interpreted by others, and building a culture around colloquialisms, slang, or new expressions that accurately reflect our message AND is recieved accurately by the person on the other end, is important though.

Language can upset, exclude, or make others feel dehumanized. If that's not our intent, it's worth investing in making sure that's not our impact.

If harming, exclusion, dehumanization, etc. is someone's intent, then I support them communicating that way all they want. That helps me and others understand what we're dealing with.

Lastly, people who hide behind "that's not what I meant" when they either know that it's how they are being understood, or don't care about how they're being understood, have a very poor and short-timed excuse imo.

I don't think we're communicating on a foundation of common values here.

These labels of innocuous things as degenerate, depraved, abomination, ect. are severely problematic.

Futurism is exciting, but you need a strong base in human history to get a feel for where we're going. If you think the future should be defined by stifling innovation under some form of central cultural authorities, then I'm not sure you have a good understanding of Humanity's trend towards self-determination.

The most successful, stable, and innovative cultures will be the least oppressive. The role of a state in modern, let alone future times should be to protect individual liberties wherever possible, not curtail them.

Traditional group think and monoculturalism is a system of violence against those who don't fit the mold, and will lead to stagnation and revolution.

Do you consider individual decadence or degeneracy in your examples to be dangerous?

The farther tech gets us from a scarcity economy, hopefully the further we will get from judgy social tyrany opinions like this.

No one has some objective correct definition of what's "honorable" vs "degenerate", and if they aren't causing harm to or impeding someone else's freedom, it's none of our business what they do.

Our secret to success has been in our relentless permutations, not our obnoxious penchant for forced assimilation.

This is a grossly common manipulation game they play, and it is absolutely never an accident.

I would recommend digital consciousness/intelligence instead, if we have to categorize it.

Artificial has connotations of inferiority and hierarchy, and we should be very cautious to avoid divisions along those lines both for ethical and safety reasons if we are ever able to truly manufacture consciousness.

I'd also question whether the categorization is meaningful for different kinds of consciousness. This gets further complicated if we end up being able to also synthesize new intelligent organic life. Or if we find other kinds of alien intelligence (both manufactured or organically occurring).

In the end, it might be better for us to just recognize consciousness as consciousness. Sentience as sentience.

You might really enjoy it then. Your first paragraph will probably translate to lost really well.

My issue was more on the writing direction. I like the story to feel like it was written to tell a specific story and mean something, and for characters to play an organic role in making that happen.

Lost to me felt like the story was made up as they went along, and took a backseat to the writers just wanting to surprise people. Characters too, felt like their behavior and arcs were written to surprise watchers and keep moving the goal post of unraveling the next mystery, rather then them having a meaningful identity and story of their own to tell.

The acting was strong though.

I loved season 1 for its potential. By the later seasons, I really didn't enjoy it at all, but still watched just to see if they actually had a story they were going to get around to telling.

I felt the characters grew (or didn't) in mostly disappointing ways, and the finale was better left unwatched. Have no interest in rewatching any part of it.

Lost is the perfect example of a show where the writers base the entire hook on building up a grand mystery. Every episode is meant to tease and make it feel like some great surprise is being unraveled, but in reality the writers have no idea what the mystery is yet. They're just barraging you with red herrings and random plot twists until they're backed into the corner of having to wrap it all up.

I think a better way to word this is to not depend on external validation.

It's important to care, and give a fuck about yourself and others.

I've found the "no fucks to give" attitude can also be an unhealthy coping mechanism when taken to the extreme, resulting in emotional withdrawal. Sometimes telling yourself you don't give a fuck while bottling things up inside is just compounding our problems.

I hope this wasn't a choice, bad or otherwise. Sounds like you weren't in control.

And if you can lose control, and get repeatedly violent with a random non-threatening stranger at the zoo of all places.. and your response was to run away, and take no responsibility for it?

I'm sure you mean well, and are generally great. But anger of this magnitude over something so small as a parking spot? How are you going to prevent it from happening again?

I'm not trying to make you feel worse, but what exactly did you learn from it? Why do you think punching someone over a parking spot was even in the realm of possible outcomes for you in this situation?

These are wildly aggressive and violent reactions to mild inconveniences.

You didn't just fuck up. You have serious emotional issues that you need to step up and start handling; if not for yourself then for your family.

As someone who had to grow up with a person who would get aggressive over minor things like this, there are no excuses for it. It's embarrassing, and terrifying.

We consider artifacts ancient, despite the fact they still exist?

Having better ranged capabilities allows you to better control the engagement. Combined with good positioning, they can force an enemy to begin an attack earlier than they are prepared for, on unfavorable terrain, or to retreat and give up strategic field positioning.

Could be. I wonder how much our individualism plays into it. I always see governance as "they" and "them" too. And that may be where my defense of the non-voter comes from.

Many of us are so disconnected that we don't want to be associated with each other, or consider ourselves parts of their group. So when it comes time to organize, it's very difficult to go in and pick which team you want to pretend like you belong in.

It's hard to get engaged in these broad concepts when I'm most comfortable in my own private world, and I kind of just hope to be stay safe there with the occasional interaction of the small community I connect with.

This was well worded & good perspective for me, thanks!

I agree that it's clear our decisions or non-decisions have an impact on others, even if we resent it. I just disagree that we bear a moral responsibility for those (in)decisions.

Especially with how difficult it is to compare harm, and project the outcome of those decisions.

I'll vote for a Biden over a Trump. But I really resent being given that choice, and honestly feel like I have the right to disengage from a system that forces it on me. I didn't consent to this system. Enough people seem to like it enough that they maintain it, so I'm not sure it would be morally right for me to change it, even if I could. But I'd absolutely like to feel like I have the right to walk away from it if I get tired enough of feeling not represented.

On the desert island, I'd like to think I wouldn't eat the meat, or participate in the voting. That choice isn't for everyone, but feels like it's the right one to me.

I agree with you in your examples, but don't think any are a good example of what I was trying to express.

The waterbottle scenario isn't a zero-sum situation as if you had a choice to take someone's water, endangering them in the process, while you didn't need it. I think the best alternative I could give to this one is an interesting inverse of having one vote but no one you desire to use it on: if I made you aware of people who are in danger of thirst or starvation, and need donations or funding to survive. You presumably have limited funds, and cannot help everyone who needs it, so you would need to choose which people you will save. The others will continue to die. According to the WFP, about 9MM people annually starve to death.

In this scenario, do you accept moral responsibility over all of the people you are choosing not to help? Or do we acknowledge that we aren't super heroes, there are reasonable limits to our responsibility to others, and that the individual pursuit of comfort, sustainability, and pursuit of passions/meaning has its own value?

The Epipen dilemma is similar in that we can imagine it as an inverse scenario to not voting - you have the option to do good, and can choose not to. Or extrapolate to assume you have two people, and only one Epipen. And you must decide who will recieve it, knowing the other will die.

Abstaining from voting isn't quite the same. If you genuinely believe that either candidate will do harm, then I don't think you have any civic responsibility to support one over the other.

For the last example about the trash bag that wouldn't give marriage licenses to gay people? I think she was perfectly within her right to refuse to perform a function of her job. I also think she, and anyone else who refuses to perform a function of their job should be fired from that job. If she truly believes participating in gay marriage will in some way cause harm to her in a theoretical afterlife, then I believe it is immoral to try to force her to participate in it.

I think we all have to find a balance of pursuing meaning and comfort in our own lives, while helping (or at the very least not harming) others. But when being a part of a society is compulsory for most people, I think it is too much to expect them to carry some kind of moral responsibility to engage with it and choose between two choices that do they disapprove of.

The best topical analogy I can think of that helps represent my thoughts on voting is the stranded passengers scenario. You are stranded on a desert island with a group of people and have run out of food. The group has pushed it to the brink of starvation, and without securing something to eat, you will all die. The prevailing opinion of the group is that you must resort to cannibalism, and you must choose between the two most popular meal choices, where your vote may be the deciding factor, or a third person who is almost garunteed not to be selected by popular opinion.

To complicate this a little further and help make it a lesser of two evils situation: one of the meal-candidates is a violent criminal, and the other is the one who's body would provide the most sustenance.

In the desert island scenario, do you have a moral obligation to vote?

This might not be popular, but I think individuals have a right to refuse association, and divest responsibility to a broader group.

This line of thinking (admittedly extrapolated to the extreme) would make you responsible for any person who died from lack of access to a resource that you have, simply because you didn't seek them out to provide it to them. The level of effort involved is a fair qualifier to bring up, but I would still disagree that there is any scenario where someone is obligated to make a decision they feel is immoral to mitigate a worse outcome - especially if you allow for metaphysical beliefs that could be effected by these decisions.

I think this is an argument only considering the short-term impact. Withholding votes sends a signal that your vote is available, but no one has attracted it with their platform.

In the future, if the issues important to a vote witholder are common enough, it's reasonable to expect that a candidate will emerge from that population in the future, or recognize the niche and cater to it.

Anymore, if I'm not really feeling a book (or show/movie for that matter) after giving it a sincere effort while I was in a good headspace to read it, I close it.

There's too much amazing content for us to move on and discover to waste time on something that isn't resonating.