this picture will never not be funny
just the absurdity of donald duck putting out that statement (which even makes some sense and fits donald’s overall depressed mood) and mickey mouse being the sly one and contradicting donald, coming out with the upper hand from the argument, is just so amusing.
no, the joke is that you don’t actually know that the chemicals inside your brain are actually chemicals. for all we know, we could all be living in a big computer simulation, and your feelings are actually caused by bits and bytes on a computer. so, we only think that we’re driving on a brain powered by chemicals because of the things that we can observe from within the simulation, in other words, the simulation makes us believe that we’re only feeling love because of silly chemicals doing things. meanwhile our feelings could be much more universal and come from the simulation itself (which could itself be universal), while the chemicals are only a pretense to make the simulation more believable.
Congratulations, I never thought I would meet someone that could convince me that the simulation paradox was absolute garbage in the way you did here.
Can I borrow you to help destroy other paradoxes?
i’m not sure whether you’re being sarcastic
I am being silly for sure.
in that case i still don’t get your comment.
Perfect! Thank you.
That hypothetical doesnt really change what I said though. It would make the materialist position incorrect, but it still wouldnt be hypocritical because it would still be consistent with itself, and it still wouldnt give you any course of action with which to “fight” the nature of the universe.
well, i’d say, deeply embedded into many of us is a deep sense of magic; that the world can in fact be changed if we give up the materialistic worldview. so, the moment we stop thinking in terms of chemical processes happening, is when the true change/magic happens. at least that’s my view of it.
i think lots of people have that worldview, including the mouse in the comic and probably also many american capitalists, because as long as the world is materialistic, you are bound by its laws and reality, meanwhile the core concept of a lot of tech bros’ worldview is that we will eventually be able to transcent that material nature; transhumanism, that we will make the (supposedly) “impossible” possible (thinking outside the box), “singularity”, etc.
transhumanism isnt transcendent of material reality though, its literally just the idea of using technology, which runs on the rules of nature to modify humans into some more desired state, its not that it does impossible things so much as that the limits of what the material universe allows are actually much grander than our current abilities are up to.
I can’t even get past Donald’s statement which is absurd to me. What actually has “intrinsic value [in the] universe” and what difference does it make if my experiences are “intrinsically valuable” or not?
i think what donald is referring here is the concept of the universal, which is a very important concept throughout all of humanity’s history. it says that there are ever-lasting, always-present laws (the so called universal laws) that everything is derived of. As such, there are clear ways to act and that distinguish right from wrong. This is the basis of all morality and therefore also of the legal code, politics, philosophy, and everything that guides our societies.
This is also frequently brought into connection with natural law, which states basically the same thing.
The reason why it is important is because it is really the only thing holding society together. You can’t have a country of a billion people if the people think that you can just make your own laws and do whatever you want. The reason why world-spanning connections exist is because we believe in coherency, i.e. that things are the same way, more or less, everywhere, and it is therefore possible to establish communication and provide something like a connectivity tissue across the whole globe. Without that, you wouldn’t really have one humanity at all but a whole lot of very small tribes all probably fighting each other, no state building or higher society. So it’s a really important concept to think of.