It’s probably a reference to how ridiculously, disproportionately violent waffle houses are known to get, and the timing is just coincidental.
It’s probably a reference to how ridiculously, disproportionately violent waffle houses are known to get, and the timing is just coincidental.
Not amazed, just depressed.
Did I stutter? Protecting your family is protecting your family, now fetch the jumper cables and a lightning rod, we’ve got some identity theft to thwart.
I despise them as much as the next queer liberal but it isn’t just the vile boomers falling for this. Keep an eye on your grandparents, maybe sit down and explain the more common scams and tell them to call you if they get something weird. No banking info over phones, etc.
Season 3 - “Gamera”
It’s got everything you could want. Inexplicably awful children, space travel, a giant rocket powered turtle. My partner and I have been randomly shouting “Capsule!” at each other for many, many years because of that movie, confusing a great many family members in the process. Absolutely wonderful episode.
Yo but at least were getting another Guillaume David album! And a game or something idk…
Now you can have a hot diggety great time with the Footlong Stroker Masturbator! You will be sure to get a full load of mayonnaise when you slip your firm shaft into this massive Stroker! Made out of a durable PVC Plastic on the outside with a “Real Feel” super soft skin silicone on the inside…this fun little Masturbator gives a whole new meaning to the term “Take me out to the ballgame”! This Discreet Play Toy enables you to proudly display it anywhere until you are ready to “Get Wild”…then Both ends screw off to reveal an Anus on one side (for the more adventurous)and a Vagina on the other. Sticking your wiener in a bun will never be the same. This is an outrageous play toy for the man who really “Loves” his wiener!
You’re welcome. I think.
I’ve never needed a product this badly in my life. I have so many friends that compulsively pick up and fiddle with anything in my house that is not nailed down, this will be like catnip to them. Traumatic catnip. It will be my sweetest revenge.
Haven’t been thrown out of enough ambulances.
I get the impression you don’t think this was a good thing to have done, hence the interrogation?
Not very satisfying answers I’m afraid, they were probably 8-10 and I have no idea how we got onto the topic since this was 15+ years ago.
They were actually pretty grateful, feeling it had set them up for a lot of positive realizations down the line. We play D&D now and they’re working on their masters, so I guess they weren’t too badly scarred…
Hey, you look like cowny hawk
I had a former summer camp kid come up and credit me with having given them their “first existential crisis” (for explaining that when you die, “you just cease”) which I am proud of.
Those can’t be real. Dear god. Her poor back.
(I am absolutely going to steal the Principle of Objective Things in Space, that’s wonderful.)
There’s a drive philosophers have, to question why things are the way they are, through a very specific lens. Why is it wrong to push a fat man onto the trolley tracks, if his death would save six others? Why is there a difference between the perception of the shadows and the perception of the man with the shadow puppets? Does free will exist, and why does that matter?
These are all the pursuit of meaning, and while they are noble and important questions to ask, they are not questions driven by the pursuit of understanding. Philosophy depends on assumptions about the world that are taken to be incontrovertible, and bases it’s conclusions from there. The capacity for choice is a classic example, as is the assumption of a causal universe, and though they’re quite reasonable things to assume in most cases, it can get mind-bleedingly aggravating when philosophers apply the same approach to pure fields like mathematics, which require rigorous establishment of assumptions before any valid value of truth can be derived.
Which is not to attack philosophers. I want to be clear about that, I bring this up just to emphasize that there are differences in thought between the two disciplines (that occasionally those differences in thought make me want to brain them with a chair is unrelated to the topic at hand). The philosophical study and speculation as to and on the nature of consciousness is perhaps the single oldest field of inquiry humanity has. And while the debate has raged for literal ages, we haven’t really gotten anywhere with it.
And then, recently, scientists (especially computer scientists, but many other fields as well) have shown up and gone “hey look, we can see what the brain looks like, we know how the discrete parts work, we can even simulate it! Look, we’ve got the behavior right here, and… well, maybe… when we get right down to it, it’s just not all that deep?” And philosophers have embraced this, enfolded it into their considerations, accepted it as valid work… and then kept right on asking the exact same questions.
The truth is, as I’ve been able to study it, that ‘consciousness’ is a meaningless term. We haven’t been able to define it for ten thousand years of sitting around stroking our beards, because it’s posited on assumptions that turn out to be, fundamentally, meaningless. It’s assumed there is another layer of abstraction, or that there’s a point or meaning to consciousness, or anything within the Theory of Mind. And I think it’s just too hard to accept that, maybe, it all… doesn’t matter. That we haven’t found any answers not because the question is somehow unanswerable, but because the question was asked in a context that invalidates the entire premise. It’s the philosophical equivalence of ‘null’.
Sufficiently complex networks can compute and self reference, and it turns out when you do that enough, it’ll start referencing The Self (or whatever you’d like to call it). There’s no deeper meaning, or hidden truth. There’s just that, on a machine, a simulation can be run that can think about itself.
Everything else is just… ontological window dressing. Syntactic sugar for the teenage soul.
Can’t, but I suspect not for the reason you’re hoping. The consensus, at least among computational neurologists (the field that, among other things, studies how brains work mathematically), is that “consciousness” as a concrete thing isn’t really… real. It’s just a term humans created to loosely describe a phenomenon that arises from any sufficiently complex well-ordered network. If you want to know what it really looks like, you can run your own OpenWorm robot! The human ‘mind’ looks just like that, only around a dozen orders of magnitude more complex.
The problem is that you’re asking mostly meaningless questions. Even the loose definitions of consciousness aren’t definable to the ‘atomic level’ - a mind is a mathematical construct. It’s like asking where the files on your computer live; I can point to the sectors of the harddrive where a program is encoded, or even hand you a really really massive stack of punched tape, but neither of those actually are the computer program. What we call the program is the interaction of a grammar consisting of logical rules and constants running within the linguistic and computational context of an automata. It’s the same as with a mind - it’s the abstract state of an unfathomably complex machine.
Alas, philosophers answer questions about the interrelation of minds, but not what a mind actually, chemically, is. They can extemporize at great length on the tendencies of a mind, the definition of consciousness, the value of thought, the many many vagaries of morality. They cannot, unfortunately, sit down and draw a picture of a mind. Many good and important questions can be answered by philosophers, but not every problem can or should be assessed with the tools they have.
You may be conscious, and you may have many long and deeply opinionated thoughts about what it means to be conscious, and how you can know that you are in fact conscious, but you cannot tell me what consciousness looks like. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t really care.
I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, but you should sometime present an engineer with the trolley problem. I’ve done this many times, and the invariable result is that they will ask endless questions to establish the parameters and present endless solutions within those parameters so that nobody has to die at all. It is, in short, a problem. Not an ontological tool for unlocking hidden understanding, which falls under the purview of your ‘philosophy’, but a practical problem. Like how you’re going to prevent some big mean mother-hubbard from tying you to the hypothetically metaphorical trolley tracks. And the solution? Is a gun. And if that don’t work, use more gun. Like this heavy caliber tripod-mounted little old number designed by me. Built, by me.
And you best hope, not pointed at you.
They have a reputation for it, though I’m not sure if it’s entirely deserved this article does a good job of explaining it and references the above meme