https://twitter.com/joshchafetz/status/1357657545670881284
Regular mask on top of N-95 != bare minimum. But let’s just pander to the base anyway.
https://twitter.com/tj_harley/status/1357700244482490371
LOL
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You can only ever ask if there is something rather than nothing when there is something. Nobody asks that question in the infinite number of nothingverses.
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The concept of time is meaningless in an unchanging “proto-universe”.
Ok, so?
Is there 1 (or 0) or infinite nothingverses?
Yeah I acknowledged that, which means the biggest question we can possibly ask is a paradox - something we can never understand.
“Where did the unchanging proto-universe come from? What was around before it?” are reasonable questions to ask by all our human understanding.
Just handwaving it off as “Well we can’t possibly understand because we’re locked in our conception of time. We should just accept it.” might as well be “God created himself, then he created the unchanging proto-universe.” Which was my original point.
We’re basically dogs trying to figure out a mirror.
I get all that, it’s just that I think you’re more delineating the limits of our capacity as a species to reason about this sort of thing than thinking meaningfully about the actual facts of the case (because they’re inaccessible to us). But we’re way far afield now lol.
ETA ah OK I see you’re using ‘paradox’ in the old-school way. We probably more or less agree then, I just don’t really care :)
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Obviously I am talking out of my ass here but one idea is that if there is a nothingverse that for some reason and with a low probability can turn into a universe and now if you run this over and over occasionally a universe will pop up, sometimes intelligent life occurs and wonders why is there something. The answer might be: there is no reason, it simply is.
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If a nothingverse can turn into a universe, then it’s not really nothing. It’s a well of potential energy that can occasionally spontaneously manifest itself as kinetic energy.
That in itself is a thing. It may not exist in our 3D world. But still, it is a thing in some higher-dimensionality or other type of dimensionality we don’t understand. It is not no-thing.
Yes, that’s why when physicists and laymen talk about nothing in this context they do not mean the same thing.
You keep applying “rules” from inside the system to outside the system.
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In Manitoba one church tried to defy the order and almost every other church leader sent them a scathing letter
Welcome to stupid Alberta!
I have never met a white Christian under 40 (don’t live in America)
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To your point here, I read this Wired article about anoners:
That subhead sounds good, but there’s something more disturbing buried under it. This bit sort of blew my mind:
Those numbers, however, heavily overstate the level of belief. Toward the end of the poll, Schaffner asked respondents which statements they had heard of before taking the survey. A large number of Qanon supporters, it turned out, were rating as “true” statements that they were encountering for the first time.
There’s a lot of ink spilled over why Qanon is persuasive to people, but a big reason seems to be that the barrier to adopting a new belief is so low. People are just ready to immediately nod along to something they are hearing for the first time. This is a hard thing to get your head around if you are of a skeptical frame of mind.
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It’s a bit more than that though. These people would be highly skeptical of anything AOC told them even if it sounded more or less true to them.
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Right but here it’s a pollster prompting them with a new belief, not a trusted source of information. My point is this bypasses the whole thing of like “it’s hard to distinguish fake news from real” or “echo chamber bubble effect” or any factor like that. The test is simply “does it sound good to me”. A distrusted source of information will override that, but a trusted source of information is superfluous.
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If “outside the system” is something we can’t apply our normal rules of reality to, how is different from God?
It isn’t, which is why I don’t bother to argue against Deist conceptions of gods. But “God” refers to the intercessory god of the Abrahamic faiths which does claim to interact with our world.
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And because the GOP appears to have maxed out its percentage of the white vote in 2012 (Romney got a whopping 59% of white voters higher than Trump in 2016 or 2020), that means that a conservative majority will have to include more nonwhites. And if you think Black voters are mostly a lost cause (heh) for the GOP, then since Asian voters are still a very small and highly concentrated slice of the electorate, that really just leaves Hispanics by process of elimination.
So, which way, Republican man?