𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

I’m certified omnireligios. I celebrate every religious holiday of every religion, ever. Employers have to accommodate; I work, like, 4 days a year.

I see this classic question as a sophistic trap premised on a false dichotomy. You can create “categories” of things in any way you like and then drive debates about what they mean or imply.

I’ll look at this one:

1. A live person is a body, but a body can also be dead, so “life” must be Aruvam.
2. But how do you know if something has Aruvam? It moves? It reproduces? A river does both of those.

It then usually goes on one of two directions:

• Lots of things look and act like they’re alive; therefore Aruvam must be in everything, and the whole universe is alive, and there’s your religious framework.
• Or: Aruvam clearly can’t be in a chair, since a chair doesn’t demonstrate Aruvam in any observable way by. Rivers might fulfill most of the qualities of life, but they clearly don’t demonstrate Aruvam. So only some things have Aruvam and so they’re imbued by something with this holy essence, and there’s your religious framework.

I think this is all lazy, and built on sloppy ontology. I’ve decided that my new word, Bliggigly is everything that poops, and everything that doesn’t poop is Fanfasma. So: is life Bliggigly, or Fanfasma? Debate! And then, create a religion around it, get a few generations behind it and gather up some texts written by some philosophers on the subject into a book, make it a canonical holy text, and now you’ve got everything you need to have a good holy war against the infidels.

Under Tamil philosophy, life is clearly Aruvam, because that’s how they’ve defined their categories. You have a li ving person. You kill them. The same body exists; this must be Uruvam. So the difference must be Aruvam, therefore life must be Aruvam. Oh, but now we get to say that Aruvam is distinct, and we get to infer that there must be a spirit.

But: can rocks have Aruvam. Why not? How do you tell if a rock is happy? What makes a rock happy? We don’t like getting broken up, but maybe that’s the greatest thrill for a rock. Or, rocks can’t have Aruvam - why not? Can you prove rocks don’t have Aruvam? Can you prove dead people don’t?

Choose your categories, and you have to build religious frameworks around them to make sense - but, ultimately, it’s all predicated on some distinctions that are axiomatic and yet unprovable, and yet people build entire cultures around this stuff.

I believe Aruvam and Uruvam is a false dichotomy, and poor distinction that falls apart under scrutiny. It’s interesting to debate it for the sake of the argument, but there’s no intrinsic Truth you can derive from the debate. Anymore than you can glimpse some Truth about the universe from Bliggigly/Fanfasma.

I’m only 20% good, so they’re 80% good. Murder them and take their stuff. It should be easy, stupid goody two-shoes.

That is a perfect description.

Maybe? Like, how hard is it to put a Tsar Bomba on the asteroid when it’s a light-year away? Or, if it came from the Oort cloud, a thousand years before whatever nudged it in, nudged it in?

I don’t know. Putting a bomb on a timer on an asteroid seems pretty simple. If we’re time traveling, we’re also space traveling, because the solar system was about a third of the way around the galaxy at the K.T. event. In comparison, the shift to the impactor 1ly away would be margin-of-error stuff.

There were no constraints posted; no “you can only take a truckload of stuff”, or, “you appear on the Earth where that point was at that point in time”. I mean, if all you do is travel back in time 1 year without also traveling in space, you’re going to be breathing hard vacuum when you come out.

So: I’m assuming:

• I can choose where I come out
• I can take anything I want with my - I’m not traveling Terminator-style
• I can get my hands on a working Tsar Bomba before I go (that’d probably be the hardest, aside from violating the laws of physics)

However, for the other ideas? What’s hard about transporting a murder of crows to the Triassic? I don’t even have to go myself.

You’ll certainly gain some valuable insight, even if it has nothing to do with your question. Which is more than I can say for LLMs.

It works the other way around:

Is that the while story, though? A defederating B also means A rejects content from B, right? Otherwise, it would be less than useless: defederating a CP hosting instance yet still allowing B to push that content to A would be disastrous.

Seriously, do not use LLMs as a source of authority. They are stochistic machines predicting the next character they type; if what they say is true, it’s pure chance.

Use them to draft outlines. Use them to summarize meeting notes (and review the summaries). But do not trust them to give you reliable information. You may as well go to a party, find the person who’s taken the most acid, and ask them for an answer.

That’s a really good point; social animals will get farther.

Crows, then.

Really? Howdy! I’m an ordained priest in the Church of Bacon. I’ve performed two weddings as such, even; I didn’t get ordained for no reason. Both marriages are still holding, so I count those as wins.

I’m also an ordained Discordian priest, but that happened back in the 80’s and I don’t think I have any record of it. There may have been a number of pharmaceuticals involved.

Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll watch it.

Corvids, in general, but ravens seem to be the most intelligent of the bunch.

Of we’re talking points, then you’re rolling the dice. If they’ve already murdered, you’re not preventing those, so you’ve done no good. If they’re going to murder at least two more people, you should net out positive, by preventing those murders. But you can’t know they’ll murder more people; maybe their murderin’ days are over, and they’ve given it up; maybe they’ll get hit by a bus before they can kill anyone else; maybe they’ll get caught and imprisoned before they can kill again. If you murder them, but they’d never have killed again anyway, you’re pretty well net negative.

I’ve only watched through season 3, so if there are any other spoilers below, they’re purely accidental.

So: while The Good Place is somewhat ambiguous about the question of Doing the Wrong Thing for the Right Reason, I think in balance it’d weigh against you. You should have tried other things first - like tipping off the police. If all you’re trying to do is get into the Good Place, your best bet is to try and reform thre person. Even if they killed you - maybe especially if they killed you - self-sacrifice in a good cause is clearly a lot of points.

OP’s question specifically mentions a “good place” and a “bad place.” This implies some higher power or powers. If they exist; and if there is indeed an eternal afterlife; and if the difference is existing in eternally pleasure or existing in eternal torment; then you’d be a deranged fool to not care what god thinks.

Pascal’s Wager says that the rational decision is to be devout. The flaw in his logic is that there are a great many religions, and you can apply the same wager to Islam, to Buddhism, to Thelema*, and by Pascal’s own logic the only reasonable decision is to be devout to all of them at once, which is impossible.

• Thelema might be the exception here, because Satanism has very few rules that penalize you for breaking them. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” allows you to be a Mormon, if you want. The best hope for most of us is that Thelema is the One True Religion.

I really like this question. So: rather than killing Hitler, what if, instead, you killed Stalin? Was it inevitable that a strongman dictator would have taken over, and ruined the potential of communism? I guess we have evidence that the answer is “yes,” in the form of Mao, but weren’t the Chinese communist party(s) greatly influenced by the Soviet model? What if Russia had, instead, developed a more democratic system of government - was it possible, and couldn’t it have affected how China’s developed? But, maybe it is always inevitable that dictators emerge from internal revolutions like this.

Here’s another scenario: what if you stopped Oswald, and prevented Kennedy from being assassinated? He was popular, and likely to win a second term. What would 4 (~5) more years of Kennedy look like?

How much power do I have?

If I could divert the asteroid that resulted in the K-T event, that’d drastically change history. It may not have stopped dinosaurs from eventually going extinct, but it’d have given them 33 million more years more to evolve, and would certainly have affected mammalian evolutionary history. Maybe, just maybe, raptors would have gotten smart enough.

Ooh! Take back a lot of ravens. They’re almost smart enough already. Heck, I wonder if taking ravens back even earlier would be enough for them to evolve into something dominant. Problem is, they’re not particularly social, and I think that’s been our greatest advantage.

Or: introduce modern octopus to ancient oceans.

Stopping the K-T event is my favorite, though. It would absolutely have changed how life on Earth has evolved since.

30M years between extinction events is about all you get, though.

Fellow human being, you are awesome. Even with the expectedly years-long journey (money may be no object, but I assume we still have to work with current tech and obey the laws of physics) I’m down. Money being no object, let’s bring a hundred of our favorite people and decrease the odds of going stir-crazy.

I’m thinking, like, a really big Discovery I.

Well, I’d also accept another moon out of the elliptic, but while Jupiter would be awesome, Saturn still has my heart for the next few hundred thousand years.

Titan’s also a proper planet; if it were orbiting the sun, it would be classified as such, giving it all of those great features you mentioned. But, it’s posed as a vacation, not a place to live, so maybe one of the other moons with a better view of the rings.

Not Titan? I think the rings would be worth seeing.

You can refuse to disobey an illegal order. The military has a fairly clear list of what constitutes “illegal,” like executing unarmed non-combatants. The UCMJ makes allowances for this; it protects you from being court martialed for refusing to obey an order. However, the soldier doesn’t get to decide whether the order of illegal; it can’t just be something they disagree with, like invading Canada.

I do believe that, if such circumstances came about, a soldier could probably get away with a fairly broad interpretation of “illegal orders.” However, this is mostly theoretical.

First, if you thought peer pressure on high school was bad, it’s nothing compared to the Army.

Second, it doesn’t stop there from being immediate consequences, some of which might very well result in you being dead, many of which would just make your life hell. There are an almost unlimited number of legal orders you could be given that would make your life hell.

Third, it’s really predicated on the illegal order being given fairly low down the chain. If the commander of the US forces sends down orders to kill all the orphans in a town, the USMC isn’t going to help.

Fourth, the person giving you the order could threaten to kill you, right there, unless you obey. Sure, they might get in trouble later, but that doesn’t really help you now, does it? And maybe they won’t get in trouble. Maybe they say they gave you some other legal order you disobeyed, and no-one is willing to gainsay them.

But really, your question is whether there’s any protection if you disagree with an order, and the answer is “no.” There’s a narrow set of defined “illegal orders” which you can, theoretically, disobey.

In peacetime, you can decide to become a conscientious objector, and look forward to spending some time in prison. Once you join, you have almost no option for rejecting a legal order, without facing some sort of punishment.