Username does not check out lol

I recently had to install windows for a research project and the fact the “latest version” i downloaded moments before needed to update while installing and then again needed to update twice after it was installed pissed me off way more than it should.

Also gotta love that my laptop can go 5+hrs on a charge with arch and xfce but lasts less than 2hrs on windows.

Yes, remember it is totally immoral to pirate things from corporations who actively make everything worse for everyone.

Here’s a guide to what sites you should avoid so you don’t accidentally get movies, shows, books, music, etc. without paying FMHY.net

Serotonin Syndrome.

Remember folks: weather models are based on historical data. As climate change forces weather patterns to break from their historical norms, weather predictions based on previous models will become increasingly inaccurate.

Though the local, short term predictions shouldn’t be that affected so I have no clue why Siri tells me “it doesn’t look like it will rain today” while there’s literally rain falling outside my window…

If it wasn’t clear, I’m well aware of the unlikelihood of the situation. But what’s the harm in believing such? I mean it’s not like either of them is going to come back from the dead and say: “Actually, we argued about the internal weight distribution from astronaut motion, how it would effect the natural frequency of the capsule, and if that effect would be significant enough to need accounting for, not racism.”

Fun fact, my grandfather was a leading engineer on the Saturn V and other aerospace projects, and according to my dad he apparently got into arguments with Von Braun. Considering the line of work and knowing some of my grandfather’s written down arguments from that time, it’s likely these arguments were more about random physics than anything else, but I like to think it was about von Braun being a Nazi piece of shit.

I do know my grandparents were very against segregation to the chagrin of their neighbors, so it’s not entirely unlikely right?

Technically this is Octal since each digit (continuous symbol) has 8 possible states before you reach the next digit. 🤓

To me, it feels like there is a big difference between not realizing you are harming others and purposefully causing that harm because you know it is harm.

Blindspots in empathy is like saying something that hurt someone because you didn’t know it hurt them. Sadism is saying something that hurts someone because you know it will hurt them.

There’s definitely a difference between the feeling of sadism and revenge too. One you do because it feels like justice, the other you do because feels like eating candy.

This kind of ties into the answer to “why would you care?” This is actually something I’ve thought about a lot (big suprise lol) and the conclusion I’ve come to is that morality and empathy are not directly correlated.

There is a difference between not stabbing someone because you’d feel that pain, and not stabbing someone because you don’t want to be the cause of someone else’s pain.

Another influence for perceived morality is the desire to be like other people. We’re a social species so lots of us have an innate desire to feel connected to others. Sure there is some desire to be unique but often times that is constrained by the desire to be accepted.

You can satisfy this feeling Patrick Bateman style like most of the psychopaths I’ve met, where you just put up a facade, doing good things only when you know you’re being watched. Or you can satisfy it by doing what I did—which come to find out is basically cognitive behavioral therapy—trying to make yourself want to do the things others think are good.

I’m pretty sure this choice is also based on internal drives where people in the former situation want the benefits that come with being a good person or fitting in, while people in the latter case directly want to fit in, we don’t want to act good, we want to be good.

Honestly that desire to be moral that is separate from empathy can be detrimental. People tend to say that “empathy without bounds is self destruction” but it’s been my experience that the moral obsession is more damaging.

For example, not eating because your roommates have friends over in the kitchen and you would feel rude to interrupt them, is unhealthy and while it is empathy that may make you think you’ll ruin the flow of their conversation, that pain is minimal compared to the pain of not eating. You don’t do it because the empathy hurts, you do it because violating your overactive moral compass hurts.

Anyway this is turning into a rant, so I should stop. I do agree with you that most people seem to lack empathy for others and this is largely because they don’t try to see things from other people’s/things’ perspectives. But I disagree with your hypothesis that empathy is what drove me to increase my capacity for empathy in the first place. I think it was driven by much more self centered drives like pride and the desire to be wanted.

Fun fact: I think I had to purposefully construct my sense of empathy.

I was literally like psychopath-sadist when I was really young. I didn’t really enact anything irl besides torturing bugs or imagining cartoon characters in pain, but around 4yo I started feeling like I was a bad person because other people didn’t seem to desire to do those things, in fact hero’s in movies purposefully avoided violence.

So the shame/guilt of feeling like I was a monster, a the desire to be like everyone else, lead me to try and make myself feel pain when I hurt other things. When my mother or sisters would tell me to come kill a spider I’d pinch myself or bite my tongue while doing so.

Then, being a curious kid, I started just trying to imagine the physical sensations of being in different bodies and having different injuries. This eventually spread to trying to imagine different emotions and by and by I didn’t have to force myself to feel it anymore. When I see someone/something get hurt, I don’t have to think about it now, I just feel it.

While I’ll admit it is possible that I’m correlating this purposeful imagination with some possible natural development of my brain creating empathy, considering that until recently I only really felt pain, negative emotions, and physical sensations through empathy, I’d say it seems most likely I built it myself.

Since realizing this a few years ago, I have started trying to feel happy/positive empathy too and it does seem like it’s been working. Though, it’s slow going because I’m hella antisocial lol.

Oh and just in case anyone is worried, I’m no longer sadistic at all. I literally can’t bring myself to kill spiders or other bugs, and there are some scenes in movies I can’t stand to watch. I can unfortunately still feel those old feelings and empathize with sadistic characters/actions, but the saccharine feeling of enjoying causing pain actually makes me physically sick now.

MOND is my personal favorite way to avoid dark matter.

nvme0n1p1

Executive dystfunction is a symptom of ADHD and one that I have a hard time explaining to others. Most people I know don’t understand that even if I actually want to do something, sometimes I literally just can’t start doing it or I have to do weird shit like this to like talk myself into it.

Getting medicated helps a lot if you find the right meds. Honestly the current meds I’m on don’t help as much with focus, but they do help with just being able to fucking do shit and that’s the greater benefit in my opinion. The fact I can just think “oh I should do the dishes” and then start doing the dishes without having to think about doing it for half an hour before starting is still mind blowing to me sometimes.

Fair, when the moans and emotions are real, sound is icing on the cake (I did not intend that pun but we’re leaving it)

Like 90% of the time: Muted (or captions) >> sound on

Bad acting is less noticeable when you don’t hear the words. Plus when it’s muted you can make up your own story and avoid the step-bro, step-aunt, step-pizza-delivery-man bs

I’m bored so let’s imagine an example. Enter a truly exotic organism: nuclear power life form. We don’t have anything like this on earth but we can imagine one just the same.

First we know we need a way to draw radioactive elements from whatever soil or rock we’re on. We want to maximize surface area for the transfer of ions so we’ll build tube like structures to absorb nuclear elements and transport them into our reactor organ. We’ll want to minimize the radiation leaks otherwise we’ll die so we’ll need a working fluid system and heat transfer chamber and a system for dissipating that heat and in the process creating chemical energy.

For the chamber we can build special structures to hold the “rods” with structures using fluid pressure to move the control rods (or surfaces) between them. The most optimal solution for waste disposal is to grow the rods from their base and then have specialized cells that travers the rods and wear them down at the ends, collecting material that has spent the most time in the reactor, and then have those cells leaving our body through a specialized opening. A similar process can ensure the walls of the chamber never become unstable due to neutron damage.

The solid portions of these structures will need to be strong but light and be easily removed by chemical reaction. We know this kind of structure is possible because it’s literally how bones work. Maybe there’s a more efficient chemical reaction to use like the production of silicate surfaces but I doubt it.

These rods will be relatively heavy and we want them to orient naturally otherwise we’ll be doing extra work so if we assume gravity exists, we’ll build the reactor vertically. We can then build separate rocky structures to support the chamber that don’t need changing as often.

Lastly we need a method for heat transfer, assuming there is an atmosphere, we could just use fleshy flexible membranes to do this. Assuming we are in a more viscous fluid that allows good heat transfer, we could pump the fluid through us to exchange the heat. Or in the absence of atmosphere we could build a specialized large surface area sheet that can radiate heat into space effectively. Again calcium carbonate works for this purpose but so would some metals or a wide variety of materials if we don’t need to worry about electromagnetic radiation from a star.

Water as the working fluid would be optimal as its incompressibility would give us better options for raising the control rods. Furthermore it’s one of the most common fluids in the entire universe.

We could deal with high pressure easily but low pressure would require a more rigid structure probably with a near spherical shape if we really want to maximize efficiency like life does.

Now the only thing left to deal with is reproduction. This is actually relatively simple if we don’t have an atmosphere or we have one that isn’t dense: build a smaller version of ourself with some starting plutonium, put it in a specialized channel, open the back of the channel to superheated water and let the expansion of steam yeet our child a long distance. That way it won’t compete with us for resources.

Sure likely the egg would need to be built with some odd shape to deal with the impact and to make sure some viable roots made it below the surface but that shouldn’t be too hard.

Anyway this has been a very fun little exercise, but more importantly, I created life that wasn’t at all based around life on earth (the mention of bones was a proof of concept, the idea of solid structures is definitely not just earth specific). It doesn’t need to exist in an earth like environment, and it mostly doesn’t look like life on earth.

There are probably some more organic ways to structure things besides rods, like interlocking spirals, but other than that everything else earth-like is literally just from applied physics. Not just the roots but even like pushing the fluid around would only be efficient if it was done like it is inside us. How will we push our fluid around? Through tubes that undergo peristalsis. That’s not because I think things have to act like humans but because humans are bound by physics and physically, that’s the best way to move large amounts of fluids in a body (assuming you can’t construct an optimized turbine  and compressor of course).

We definitely can never say we know what ALL aliens will look like, but it’s almost guaranteed that if there is life in the universe, some of it will look like the life we have here. And all of it will be designed the way it is because of its environment, an environment whose physics can be understood. We can and possibly already have thought up some life that isn’t on earth but is somewhere else in the universe.

While I agree about this being pretty on par for earth, you are wrong about us having no idea what aliens would look like.

I get that maybe you were using hyperbole but seriously if physics is consistent across the universe, we can make pretty good guesses. Also science fiction is definitely not just based on life on earth and I can provide an example.

First, life according to nasa is any self sustaining chemical system that can undergo Darwinian evolution.

Basically if a thing can make more of itself and those “children” have the chance to be at least slightly different from their parents, it is life.

Well guess what, the universe tends to disorder. There is only one way to be the exact self replicating thing you are. Ergo, given time, you will stop working unless you are able to fight entropy which requires the production of entropy (see the second law of thermodynamics).

Basically all living things MUST take in some form of energy and output it in a more disordered form. Every living thing must eat and every living thing must produce waste.

Now this doesn’t have to be in the form of chemical energy. It should be possible to create an organism that can sustain itself by taking in quanta of high frequency light and emitting more quanta of lower frequency light.

However, that is strictly to stay alive which is only part of the definition of life and not even the real important one. The important aspect of life is that it can reproduce itself and equally important: reproduce itself not always exactly the same.

Building a copy of yourself requires more elements and moving any amount of mass requires applying a force (newtons laws). Now you could simply sit around and let diffusion bring nutrients to you. In which case you either need to be a machine that simply slowly build itself by chance, or you could be a cell with a semipermeable membrane that uses ion channnels to create an electrical potential across said membrane to facillitate your acquisition of those building blocks and outcompeting the former kind of life. Which one is more likely? So which one will become more complex and possibly large enough to be seen as an alien life form and not alien bacteria?

Anyway if you do work via diffusion, you’ll want surface area but you don’t want volume because force over distance is energy, so bigger than necessary means loss of energy, means getting out competed. This forces life which relies on diffusion alone to become more round shaped though it’s not a big loss since that’s how most simple membrane materials want to be anyway.

Now if you eat something, you need a way to turn that food into work you need done. This means you need to have (or parasitize) some chemical machinery that takes food and does something useful. If you need to replicate yourself then you also need a machine or machines that create more of each part of you. In most cases specialization of machines reduces waste, so a living thing will produce little units that each do specific tasks rather than a single protein that does everything because that’d would require more order and thus more energy. Instead the cell becomes a little factory that does the same stuff in a way that doesn’t require perfect rigid order because that’d be a waste.

Ta da, we have earth like life. If it’s beneficial for these units to work together, they will. Maybe they’ll merge into a single cell like thing like slime mold. Maybe one will use the other like a mitochondria. Maybe they’ll stay separate but signal each other as a colony. Maybe multiple colonies will combine to form something like a man o war jelly fish. Maybe a cell will be able to differentiate itself later allowing it to form a more complex multicellular organism with different systems specializing for specific tasks.

This is where structure becomes a diverse thing, but see we already know what a living thing needs and these structures will be built to facilitate those. You need a system for acquiring food and possibly a separate one for removing waste. And you need a system for reproduction.

All life needs this and we’re familiar with it because that’s how life on earth works.

Now depending on what energy you eat, things get a lot more diverse but they follow from physics so we can predict them.

You eat light from a directional source? Then you want broad structures that face that source.

You need nutrients from diffusion? Then you want a network of tubular shapes to maximize surface area and minimize volume.

Need to trap prey? Build a net, build a harpoon gun, grow prehensile limbs and claws to grab them. Trap them with slippery walls or sticky substances. Immobilize them with venom or vapor and then enclose them for digestion. Grow legs or other methods of propulsion and get after them. Grow fangs to stop them from getting way.

All of those things are things life on earth uses. Because they’re the options that work and guess what: they will work anywhere else in the universe.

Are your oceans made of ammonia? Maybe kerosene? Who cares. If there are life forms in it that are small, filter feeding will be the optimal strategy for life. If there are big ones then direct predation with teeth will be efficient.

Need to move through a fluid? Fins will be the best option. Need to move through a really viscous fluid? Spiral propulsion systems like flagellum with be the way to go. Have to move along the ground and can’t propel yourself by the means above? Well you’ll develop a foot of some kind to use friction to move.

If physics is at all consistent across the universe, there will be similarities between life across its entirety because that’s what life is. Life is optimizing physics, optimizing energy/resource use to reproduce more life. Sure maybe there are weird situations we don’t have here on earth so we don’t have life adapted to that but that’s the entire idea behind science fiction.

Does Hank Green count?

Furthermore, by your definition of rock, basically all crystals are not rocks. Quartz is a single mineral. It is also considered a rock. As are all other gemstones which are a single mineral. If you think impurities count then again water counts because it has minerals like fluoride and carbonate and halite (salt) in it.

Now one could make the argument that lava is specifically molten rock extruded from beneath the surface of a terrestrial planetary body to its surface. In which case, water on earth doesn’t typically fit that description unless it’s like melted permafrost that melted before getting drawn to the surface or something.

However, on a very cold terrestrial planetary body which was comprised partly of ice, thermal vents / volcanoes would produce water and it would fit the definition of lava. Water is certainly lava in that context.

Considering that physics is assumed consistent across the universe, water viscosity would have the same range regardless of where in the universe it was. Ergo, the water you drink may not be earth lava but it is the exact same viscosity as the water that is lava.

So you still know what the mouthfeel of lava is even if you’ve never ingested any “real” lava.

Sidenote, if you really do want to figure out how silicate lava feels, you could probably find the dynamic viscosity of a certain lava flow and then create caramel under the right conditions to get approximately the same viscosity. Eating butter and sugar might not be healthy but it definitely is less immediately damaging than pouring 700°C fluids into your mouth.

Ice is a mineral. Thus, water is lava. Hence, you eat lava every day, and it is not the texture of thick honey. QED.

No emotions are communicable as emotions are qualia. However you can describe an experience or experiences that give you similar emotions, and if the other person feels quallia for those experiences they will assume you have the same.

Is your red the same as mine? We cannot ever say. But does your red happen when you see something I’d also call red? Most likely (unless you’re color blind).

The same is true of emotions. Maybe when you lose a loved one, you feel the feeling I do when I’ve accidentally hurt someone in a way I feel I can’t undo. Both are pain, but we will never know if the pain we feel for any specific experiences are the same because all feelings are incommunicable.

Now emotions typically have physical effects too and it is likely that people with similar bodies have some sort of qualia you can reference using the experiences that are associated with them “I feel cold” “I feel weak” “my body feels heavy” etc. Or maybe someone already can predict that they’d feel a specific qualia if they went through what you describe, but that’s never guaranteed.

Unfortunately you don’t have the option of verbal communication with a cat, but you do have physical effects. Furthermore, emotions arise from experiences yes? Remember how you can assume someone has a qualia for cold because they’re human and you’re human so if you experience a qualia corresponding to cold then likely so do they?

Well ennui is listlessness caused by lack of stimuli yes? We most likely feel it because we’re “predators” and have the desire for stimuli and engagement. The same can be said of cats. Ergo, it is entirely possible they could feel an emotion corresponding to it just like us. I would be more surprised if most animals did not feel boredom.