Put a ring on it immediately.

Oh enshittification is coming for Windows. In the future. Like it hasn’t happened yet or wasn’t the first and worst of these companies for it to come for. But something that hasn’t happened yet, not in the past. Interesting.

You can’t tell me you don’t understand why this is

well im not a philosophy professor, and ive done my level best to explain basic humanities concepts to you. its funny because i used to make these exact same arguments that you are, and my understanding was incomplete, as it still is. i hope you dont have it figured out as much as you think you do, because then you’ll likely not grow as a person. In any case I’ve made long arguments as well as I can make them. Thanks for the discussion

But your problems with my explanation depend on a view of reality that is completely divorced from history. Your conditions for realness depend on the existence of a real physical object and reject socially contingent objects, which is your right, but this is an example of an epistemological crisis: I insist that things that are socially real are real; you deny their existence, also denying the existence of law, value, many things that our society depends on. If you pick out parts of my argument that you don’t like and act like the points that I did make just don’t exist, then you are making your argument based on willful ignorance. But besides that, if your standard for what is real differs from mine we cant even have a debate, we just talk past each other smugly assuring ourselves that we are correct because our opponent is just like stupid or something. Maybe you think I’m stupid, I don’t think you’re stupid. My point is you can’t just deny the existence of things that are real in every way but physically. If a huge proportion of people in a society believe that something is real it is the same as that thing being empirically real. You can’t just throw away thousands of years of history because it disagrees with your narrow definition of objectivity. Or I guess you can, none is stopping you, but don’t pretend its consistent with reality.

Maybe god exists, maybe it doesnt, maybe god is just nature, but religion exists which would be the same as if god exists

I’ll try to be a little less obtuse. I thought better about getting into this in the shitpost comm, and since I’m getting massacred my first impulse was probably correct. But I’m a huge nerd, cant help it.

So I guess I don’t know what you mean by epistemologically consistent. As a general rule of epistemology, people can have different, incompatible epistemologies, which basically renders communication impossible, since the participants use different models to determine what is true. This uh happens a lot since people think the way that they determine truth is the “right” one. Even my attempt to adapt different ways of thinking to different situations has limits, since I’m never going to subscribe to like flat earth theory. Not all epistemologies are equally valid or rigorous. Arithmetic is highly rigorous, whereas flat earth has a low bar for proof. Also I’ll argue that the validity of various theories of knowledge are historically contingent. Empiricism isn’t just “more true” than religion because it is more rigorous; in fact the hermetic tradition was extremely rigorous and scientific, but because they viewed “god” as indistinguishable from nature, they could synthesize religion and empirical science without contradiction. Their scientific inquiry was a sacred religious ritual where god learned about its own physical body (nature) through the consciousness of the scientist which was a part of the consciousness of god. This kind of monism is completely foreign to us, yet Isaac Newton was a Hermetic whose theories are still highly relevant and rigorous. But if a scientist publicly expressed these views to the academy they’d be deemed an eccentric, if not a crank of the highest order.

The second part of your question is more straightforward. How would the world change if god didn’t exist the way I described, as being socially real? There’d be no churches, no religious art, no pilgrimages that attract tens of millions each year. There’d be no recognizable European medieval period. Tens or hundreds of millions of people wouldn’t donate their time or money to the church. Which like, wouldn’t that be fucking awesome? no indigenous “schools” no religious colonialism/imperialism.

But all these followers aren’t lying in order to trick you into thinking god exists. They feel god, they experience god through their institutions, rituals, art, monuments, and yes, crimes. This exactly is the limit of pure Empiricism, it forces you to completely disregard subjectivity, or relegate it to a lower order of “realness” than a physical object. A stone in the middle of a lake will have little effect on the outside world outside of its extremely local circumstances; but a religious belief can have deadly implications for millions if it becomes the policy of a government. Laws, money are socially real, determined by their existence on paper, are upheld by sophisticated social constructs that reach into our minds and our behavior. But again, is a law not “real”? Of course it is. Try to break one in front of a cop and find out how real it is.

Well I was specific to say that you have to look at things dialectically in order to see the connection. When you describe other people’s beliefs, you say they believe in something that doesn’t exist. So in order for something to exist, it has to be a “thing” or an object. This is its own type of logic called “Empiricism” or more radically, “Positivism”. Empiricism is a really good basis for reasoning, especially scientific reasoning. The creation of Empiricist reasoning is the intellectual basis for the (notably Atheistic) Enlightenment, which is the ideological superstructure for our current Modernist milieu.

But empiricism is actually bad at other kinds of epistemology (theory of knowledge.) For example, it necessarily divides the objective and the subjective into two separate “things”, as well as the mind and body. This leads to some wonky conclusions about metaphysics and the self, particularly where human experience meets nature. Empiricism is great at categorizing, but often fails to reassemble the collection of objects back into a monistic whole. As such Empiricism’s theory of social is extremely atomized and individualistic.

Like the way you describe religion, as " trust me bro this thing exists," is a perfect example. There is that part to it, the belief in a god, but there is also creation and appreciation of monuments and temples, ritual, community, social events, group study, all of these human experiences that collectively make up the very real and undeniable power of religion. But my understanding of your explanation just has a bunch of alienated individuals with the same wrong ideas, with no explanation or historical context as to how things became this way. This is also how people come to the very wrong assumption that the value of money doesn’t exist. Because it doesn’t have an objective form, it doesn’t exist. This is just completely untrue. It is socially real, which is as real as any object. In fact religious belief and power is just another form of social currency.

Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm and countless other philosopher theologians imbued Christianity with a consistent, self supporting logic. That was their job, and they have been extremely successful. We can discuss the limitations and shortcomings of that logic, but denying that it is logical is just willful ignorance.

Dialectics has its own shortcomings, so I’m not arguing that one is better than the other. But each form of epistemic reasoning, of which religious belief undeniably contains a vast epistemology, has certain advantages and shortcomings. In my opinion our task isn’t to find one way of reasoning and then brow beat others into accepting that reasoning, this is a form of fundamentalism – a way of determining knowledge, meaning and truth that supercedes all others in every way; which is exactly what religious fundamentalists want people to believe (so those people can be exploited, as fundamentalism always serves some higher power whether it be religious or economic.) Instead I think we should learn as much as we can, acknowledge the strengths and shortcomings of each way of conducting analysis, as well as our own strengths and weaknesses in doing so, and use them as tools to help us understand the world that exists. Leave nothing out, embrace contradiction, and learn how to become the most fulfilled, practical and honest selves.

But then again, everyone is on a different path ;)

There’s a philosophy called dialectics where opposites actually define one another. Atheism is a really good example of this IMO. Atheists usually define their beliefs as “no religion” but in practice they are anti-god, anti-religion. This means that even though religion has its own internal logic, being anti-religion has an opposite logic: what is good over here is bad over there. So it really ends up being that theism and atheism, through their contradictory traits, embody a single rational system.

But as many people have learned, through wrestling with these contradictions, we eventually reach a third stage where we just don’t give a shit anymore, or maybe we develop some ways of grappling with metaphysical questions which religion is really good at but atheism basically just deny these problems even exist. I think that’s why we often relate atheism as being childish, because a lot of people who are self aware and introspective will start out with a religious phase, then go through an atheist phase, and finally land in that secret third thing that is unique to the individual and their community.

I was recently reading a book about Hegel and early Marx, and the author Cyril Smith quoted one of Marx’s letters saying something like, “atheists are like children trying to reassure a grownup that they don’t believe in the bogeyman” do it seems like these “reddit atheists” have been on this same bullshit for at least the last 150 years

Can confirm, I have spent a lot of time in Columbus Ohio.

Elon Musk loves a fake presentation.

Yeah I thought that too, but it has strong epistemic/ontological implications. Kind of a mix imo

What’s epistemology? What is object/subject dualism? What is Gödel’s incompleteness theorem? Idk, I just know other people are stupid

Some of y’all have a piss poor education in humanities and it shows

I have no self control with weed, I was literally high for about 3 years straight. Was high functioning, and it helped me through some very difficult times. But I had a severe psychotic break last November that took about 6 months to fully recover from. Tried going back but my tolerance isn’t at a place where I can function on it anymore, and if I have it in the house I’m high from when I wake up to when I go to bed. Idk why I have no self control, blame it on the ADD baby. Wish I could smoke a few times per week like my friends but I can’t so, I’m on that sober shit.

Its not too bad, I read a bit more and play less video games

My Dr recently prescribed me Trazodone, total game changer. I’m still a night owl but I can fall asleep when I want.

Jimmy Eat USA

“You made me be rude after I insulted you and you called me out on it”

Leave me alone. I’ve wasted enough time on you. You clearly have your mind made up and can’t even comprehend why someone would be skeptical of a company that is driving away its users and advertisers, of which I provided many examples. I wrote several paragraphs supporting my argument, and several sources. You responded in seconds with two sentences. Hopefully you wise up before taking a bath on whatever your investments are. I wish you all the best in life, but this is finished.

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

I have been saying this for years

Google is having problems, they can’t make profits anymore. Its different because reddit was never profitable, but googles been profitable for years.

Edit: I said they can’t make profits, but what I should have said is they can’t innovate and produce new value, they can only cut expenses and squeeze consumers with subscriptions and advertisements in order to remain profitable. Eventually there won’t be anything left to cut and will then cease to be profitable. Google is on the decline.