Toilets are different though. If you’ve ever tried to fix one you’d eventually figure it out.

Most people would call a plumber and pay the bill for swapping the feces-capacitor-unit or whatever is billed, and that’s how toilets work to them. They don’t think it’s magic, they think it works because the plumber was paid.

To anyone who has tried to fix one, it also isn’t magic. It’s just a really clever design consisting of several valves controlling the input and output of water in different pipes. I won’t try to explain as there are several different designs, but the main idea is that valves work just like logical gates. On/off. Just like a computer has bits and booelean operations, toilets work by manipulating the gates(valves) either by user input (pressing the flush buttons) or by conditions changing (the pressure of water at certain levels).

Toilets are logical. You can run Doom on toilets. Try to run Doom using the bible.

They surely do in Tokyo…

That thing was smarter than my smart TV.

HEY! every once in a while it feels, like, kinda special and directed at me. so doesn’t that mean that - aside from all the times it doesn’t - the world was created just for me, in “my image”?

That’s an interesting line of thought - see, standard human religions involve actors with often inhuman motivations who often react emotionally… It’s not necessarily locus of control. It’s a powerful actor changing the environment, and as your own actor you can choose to attempt to influence them (through anything from appeasement to outside intercession to trickery), you can adapt your own actions (like changing to more drought resistant crops), or you can throw up your hands and say “times is tough, it’s not my fault - it’s because the gods are fighting”

Then you have the Roman Catholic God (aka the Roman religion deliberately engineered to make for good subjects to an empire and using Jesus’s name).

Almost all religions, including Judaism, have this idea of a creator (translated as master of the universe for Jews, the yawning void ginnugagap for the Norse, etc), but the Creator isn’t really an agent - it’s beyond understanding for even the gods. They’re the source, and living in harmony with their design brings good things and going against it brings misfortune. The creator only interacts indirectly, mostly through creation or emergent properties of systems

Then you have gods - like the God of the Israelites. They have power, agency, have limits (great as their power might be), and can be influenced by individual or group actions of humans.

But then you have the Roman Catholic God - it combines the omnipotence and omniscience of the creator with the agency and motivations of a god, and it is the only supernatural agent, the others are just constructs serving its will

My point being - if you have this one agent creating everything, who cares about you individually and shaped reality based in part on your actions as an individual - is that not an absolute internal locus of control? If your reality is being personally tailored by an all-powerful, perfect agent, then your actions become absolute… You don’t have the power yourself, but your actions and experience become able to shape everything based on the judgement of this all-powerful God

It’s interesting to think about

https://whywontgodhealamputees.com/ top tier website

Yeah I don’t understand religions that view medicine with scepticism but practice prayer with complete confidence. If I was religious I’d see modern medicine as a mericle. We can cure most cancers easily. Granted not all cancers but most.

my unemployment, anxienty, depression, and alcoholism need to have a chat with Epicurus…

Every word I say is a lie. In fact, I’m lying right now.

(Does that count as one?)

Story of my life.

I think we tend to drastically underestimate animals… Keep in mind, most of our pets are insanely inbred social animals who are undersocialized and basically left in solitary confinement for most of their life

But AI has led to some interesting results - we can now plot languages as high dimensional shapes in information space, which is basically the core of an LLM. All human languages have similar shapes - so they started to use similar techniques to create language models for animal languages.

We don’t have nearly enough data to train one yet, but already we’re finding that language is everywhere - what we thought were instinctual signals turn out to be a lot more like learned, symbolic languages than we’ve ever imagined

For example, names are everywhere - cats, dolphins, whales, and birds definitely have names… We’ve found language and names everywhere we’ve looked closely enough, and in even plants and fungi this might exist through chemical and electrical signals.

My point being - animals have their own internal model of the world. Do you think programmers are magic when you watch them change a few words and modify a program? Maybe, maybe not. I think artists are magical when they draw something from nothing… It genuinely blows my mind every time, because no matter how much I study it they’re doing something impossible for me

Some animals understand - we had a Boston terrier that genuinely understood vets were necessary, he absolutely hated it but would begrudgingly hop on the table and let them pose him or give him shots… Just like a person, he would do his best to disassociate and do what it took to get it over with ASAP. He wasn’t really an obedient dog - but he was cooperative. He was stubborn as hell until our interests aligned… We established he could scratch the door to come in or out, and he would secretly go off on adventures. One day we found him a mile away from our house, walking down the sidewalk with purpose - neighbors would sometimes tell us they saw him leaving the neighborhood, but he always looked before he crossed the street and used the sidewalk.

Our next dog loved to watch dog shows - one day my sister got a medal, and we put it on her and she smiled like her dream came true… Took it off and straight face. Put a lanyard with keys on her to see if she liked the weight - nothing. Put the medal back on - huge smile

It’s really ingrained in us that humans are unique in experience… We’re not. Animals can learn arithmetic and play video games, they can use Instagram and form rudimentary systems of government (crows are a great case study). Dogs can use pubic transport to travel between their den and hunting grounds. Animals can choose to seek out drugs or commit suicide. They can learn to use money and engage in prostitution, they can learn to cook food, they can seek out humans and ask for help. They can have language and understanding of the world - the big difference is they don’t have the same motivations.

So do they think humans are magic? Some of them do, others figure out how to work the light switch themselves, others just accept that lights turn on when humans are around

We aren’t omnipotent and omnicient though, taking merely a thought to make all the bad things go away.

Nope, it was proven that animals know vets are helping them. They just don’t know they need to be helped. The argument doesn’t have any merit. If you don’t know something, you should tell yourself “let’s figure it out” instead of “there’s a reason this all powerful being does this weird shit”.

always does…