You've stumbled upon the basis of the debate between free will and determinism. imo, we are merely under the illusion that we're making our own choices. The universe is one infinitely complex system of falling dominoes, with each choice and action just being the result of the parameters set by the ones preceding it. We are all made up of the same basic building blocks, and are thus just subatomic systems obeying the laws of thermodynamics... it just happens to be the case that when a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it is able to think about itself - we are quite literally the universe experiencing its own existence.
Why is this? I don't know. Nobody knows. Consciousness and 'the ability to experience' is one of the most elusive and complex questions facing science and philosophy today. It's my personal belief that there is certainly 'something' more to this whole cosmic experience, but I'm not convinced by religion's answers and believe 'it' to be something so vastly incomprehensible and foreign, we'd never understand it even if the mystery were revealed to us. It isn't something I like to think about too deeply, because unfortunately, it opens up an infinite regress of questions we will likely never have the answers to.
Abandon the philosopical concept of an independent thinking mind capable of evaluating something by itself.
“Decisions” and “Thoughts” don’t exist without the environment, as they’re a succession of neuronal activation cascades in response to the current state of all stimulus, the previous connections formed in your brain, and reinforced patterns.
Leave a human being in an empty void and their thoughts will be built by severely boosting sensitivity and then responding to random sensory noise. Sever all sensory connections and the mind shuts down.
If I remember my cognitive science classes, all decisions even complex are powered by a person’s neural circuits, in which neurons talk to each other chemically using neurotransmitters. Basically, large groups of constantly-rearranging neurons are what turn what you call “chemical laws” into constantly-evolving decisions.
Frankly, the decisions that we make are chemical reactions. The difference is in the complexity of the decisions that we can make. At that point, though, in order to answer your question, we would need to argue about what one would consider to be a decision that’s complex enough and a decision that’s not complex enough, and that leans much more into philosophy and ethics rather than science.
I can only tell you that, from a mechanistic point of view, there’s not really much distinguishing our decision making process from, say, the decision making of a flatworm
Side question: Why do Reddit and Twitter and all of these other social media shitshows use idiotic terminology like 'permanently suspended'? Surely the correct term is 'banned'. The word suspended in this context usually implies a temporary nature.
Mistborn: The Final Empire! If I’m not mistaken, “heist book in fantasy setting” is literally one of the main things that inspired Brandon Sanderson to write this.
the thing about Enterprise is even at its worst, it’s not an entirely bad show - the supporting cast is good, they are set in an interesting time period, and the premise is ostensibly interesting.
The main problem for me is that, setting aside the fact that the main theme comes straight from the Patch Adams soundtrack, the show is straight up boring. They came so close to something really interesting with Archer being flawed because he was the first, and perhaps even not really the right guy to be captain. But then the writers had to make him a mary sue, he fails is way to success every episode, and becomes like the ship’s alcoholic dad, constantly getting into the dumbest yelling arguments with his wife first officer — who he is also canonically racist against by the way. You would think/hope they were setting him up for some growth on that, but, instead they chose to try to make a lot of the show indirectly relevant to 9/11
By the time the show finally set the stage to become interesting the majority of its audience had already been alienated
What Paramount ought to realize about it is that Enterprise failed because of the writers and producers and not because of the cast or setting and it should not be very difficult to do significantly better than the original
The jbod idea sounds good to explore further, as it tha home server and storage would be separated. However it would add an additional device to the power bill.
However i don’t need the full amount of all disks at all times. If i’d want to unplug via shell script, i’d need to plug it manually in person back in for storing things. I actually do not need it running all the time, as the home server ssd can cache most of what i need recently in access. The jbod is then more an archive.
i’m mainly looking for a way to power down the inexpensive hdd’s. I could use the raspberry pi as the jbod controller, but it does not properly support wake on lan, so thats also not an option
But for real, you’re totally on the mark on how each of them pivot from each other, how Kira hits eats of them
“these ar- these are my friends” - Kira
Really shows how sh’es grown. I love the double take, and pause when she first is about to blurt it out, then says it more sincerly to Bareil. Thanks for pointing this out and reminding me of how awesome #DS9 is.
First season set in 2164. Episodes include depicting the events I linked. Second season in 2165, same deal, depict all these events plus whatever new stuff the writers dream up. By filling in existing canon, half the seasons stories become really easy to break, saving time and money, and people who respect canon will have nothing to complain about. Ten year time jump explains why the actors look older. The only problem is no Trip, but he can easily cameo in a dream story or an alternate timeline, heck they could even Harry Kim him back to life.
edit: added bonus, there’s an opportunity to retcon and apologize for Code Of Honor.
I re-read books frequently. But then, I am a fast and voracious reader. I’ve recently been trimming down my library from around 7000 books due to an upcoming move, and there’s a hardcore of about 2000 I’m unwilling to get rid of because they’re either reference materials or old friends I expect to re-read before I die. There are some things (LOTR, much Heinlein, Oz books, Alice in Wonderland…) that I’ve read a dozen times or more.
I do re-read some non-fiction, mainly history. But most of my well-worn books are fiction.
I largely quite like SNW, but this episode had some extremely questionable eugenics apologia laced into the narrative.
I think the broadest problem with nu-trek (though it’s strongly reined in in SNW) is the heavily maudlin over-scoring and the bathos-laden dialogue. When almost every exchange between two characters sounds “perfectly written” and is dripping in score, it’s hard to take seriously.
If SNW employed like, 20% more restraint in that regard, it would sing.
I’d start looking just to see what options are out there even if you don’t end up deciding to leave. You could start investing the amount that you’re missing from the match so that you don’t miss out on compounding growth, but it’s certainly a pay cut however you look at it and if it’s already been 6 months I don’t trust that it’ll be temporary.
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