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#81
Science / Re: End the Phone-Based Childh...
Last post by Icarus - March 19, 2024, 03:40:13 AM
We have a recent case in which a kid shot and killed some people. His parents are being indicted and face s prison time for not having supervised the kid sufficiently. In this case, the parent was negligent, according to the prosecutor.

I will go out on a limb and posit that the Asmo has no pre teen or teen agers to deal with. I agree with his premise,above, but it will not work for some of the kids.

I raised two kids with what I believed to be the best of my ability. One of them was rational, would listen to my advice, and behave accordingly. She was and is quite creative and she could have gotten into a mess of trouble. She did not get into trouble and only did a few stupid things.. The other one was an all out rebellious individual. He would not pay any attention to parental advice and would comply with demands only grudgingly, all the while plotting against the family system. He did stay out of big time trouble although he spent a couple of nights in the drunk tank at the county jail. 
#82
Introductions / Re: Salutations, Godless Ones
Last post by Michael Reilly - March 18, 2024, 01:09:04 PM
I really do wonder if all of this God business isn't deeply ingrained into my neural pathways. I have not raised my own two children in any kind of faith tradition, so if they do decide to explore that path, they will have a pretty clean slate. But man! This shit is in deep.
#83
Introductions / Re: Salutations, Godless Ones
Last post by Asmodean - March 18, 2024, 12:55:43 PM
Just learning, I'd say.

Scotch may aid or hinder the process, which... May or may not be helpful.

You can, of course, try to "turn around" the way in which you consider the world around you. At the end of the day, God is just a lazy explanation for something that you either do not know - yet - or something that you know, but have not looked at closely enough to see its natural patterns emerge. Doing so shoves god into an ever-shrinking set of gaps, to a point where you have to ask; "is it even a god anymore?"

That said, I was never a believer, so... Take it for what it is. If meth or gambling addiction are anything to go by, it may be difficult to un-learn something, even if you are motivated to do so and know better.
#84
Introductions / Re: Salutations, Godless Ones
Last post by Michael Reilly - March 18, 2024, 12:45:30 PM
I try to cultivate a healthy sense of curiosity about myself, and I have to tell you all: I do not understand why I can't extricate the whole God thing from my head. Not god as a metaphor for the unknown, but God as in the Bible God. Does anyone have any advice on how to get this crap out? Meditation? Therapy? Scotch?
#85
Religion / Re: Christian Nonduality
Last post by Asmodean - March 18, 2024, 12:27:44 PM
Quote from: Me_Be on March 16, 2024, 10:48:56 AMThe Bible is belief.
God is belief.
Christianity is belief.
Nonduality is belief.
Details matter, especially when there is quite as much devil in them as here. (The reason I am nitpicking is to avoid using chosen language as the deciding factor in definitionally-dependent contexts. Is "orange" a fruit or a colour? Is a vertebrate a bird? So forth. Avoiding linguistic ambiguity is a good starting point when trying to describe reality, which does not depend on the words you call it at all. Your models of it, however, may.)

The Bible is a book. A collection of stories from a couple of millennia ago, some in turn based on stories from even earlier times. It is not a belief, but people do believe in its contents.

God is a mythological creature. It's something you can believe in - or not. God is not a belief.

Christianity is a set of beliefs. There are many denominations of Christianity with contradicting views on specific theological issues. As a very surface-level analysis, however, you could say that it is a belief, thereby hand-waiving potential discrepancies.

Nonduality is a state of not being dual. It's absence, singularity and every plurality but one. As a philosophical tradition, it is as Christianity - a set of beliefs and observations. (Though from what I know, that one is called "Nondualism.")

QuoteThere is no such thing as Nonduality because Nonduality is not a thing.
This is a trick of linguistics. It would be like saying "There is no God because God is not a thing." It's... Lazy, somehow. Circular.

Even if a construct of a demented mind, it exists as such. It may be some degree of wrong and/or some degree of correct, and you could analyse the reasons why it must be so, but the expression "there is no such thing as..." implies absence of something as it is described. "No free lunch" means (literally speaking) that even if on the surface, you have been offered it for free, expect there to be strings attached. It does not mean that lunches do not exist. That would be circular argument - a much-used tool of the faithful (Much-trunkated example: The Bible is true because God says it is because the Bible says he does) but rather on the useless side when it comes to learning.

QuoteThe Oneness that is reality is not a concept. Duality and multiplicity are concepts, hence the paradox/contradiction of this NON-DUAL multiplicity.

The reality is that there is no separation or otherness.  There's simply everything&nothing one without a second.
Reality is a collection of interconnected systems. The practical degree of said interconnection, however, may vary. For example, due to wave-like nature of particles, an electron "almost certain" to be here *point* may upon resolution be in Andromeda. Let us assume that that electron is a part of my toenail. Does that mean that my toenail is connected to Andromeda? Practically speaking, no, it does not.

You may "zoom out" and view everything as a single unit. Meaningless, unless examining its properties or actions at that level. You can zoom in and determine the system's system's systems. That, in turn, would be meaningless on the scale of reality itself - just like my toenail electron resolving in Andromeda against astronomical (pun intended) odds.

QuoteThe misunderstanding of the word ''Nonduality'' often invokes the feeling of confusion within the thinker, especially how it then attempts to express the idea's ultimate meaning, using concepts. Misunderstandings form a kind of unavoidable ignorance; as Oneness is never recognised, because it's unknown.

 Only the conceptual world is known, and in and of itself knows nothing. That's the paradox of Nonduality which is pointing to the nonconceptual using concepts. But, behind the message of every belief lies the pure clarity of reality, the absolute truth.
Deliberately-confusing language may contribute to misunderstanding the proposition. It really is not complicated and while it may have some, shaky though it may be, intellectual scaffolding to lean on, it quite simply gives the individual sensor data analysis far too much credit. So someone born blind does not know what blue looks like. Well, so-effing-what? They can still understand what blue means in the broader context. It's energetic photons at certain wavelengths, hitting the retinae of the eyes and those interactions are being processed as "blue." So, does blue exist even if you cannot conventionally sense it? Of course, it does! It refers to photons of certain energy, which are trivially demonstrable to exist.

QuoteI personally think it's useful in the sense of thinking for oneself, and having the capacity to not believe something just because it's what everyone else believes too, so it must be true. We can listen to other people's personal takes on knowledge and belief, and then make up our own mind as to whether we perceive it that way too, or not.
Mmmh... Yeah... There are no good reasons to believe anything. There may, however, be sufficient reasons to accept something as true until proven otherwise.

If it's important to you - verify it.

QuoteThe more deeply we think about Nonduality, the closer we come to the realisation of the true nature of reality, eventually arriving at a conclusion that all ''religious beliefs'' are simply analogous to the multiple characters and images seen in our nightly dreams.

Thoughts...
An advice more than thoughts. You are unliekly to arrive at the "true nature of reality," whatever that expression means to you, in any meaningful way by thinking about nonduality. That just churns and re-churns your pre-existing datasets in search of new conclusions. Get a few more measurements, compare against conflicting datasets and add to your own. Your mind is an open system - treat it as such.
#86
Politics / Re: Politics and Islam in UK
Last post by Asmodean - March 18, 2024, 11:50:39 AM
As long as there is a market for it, I agree, it should be extracted.

When it's more commercially viable to build wind turbines (for example), the market will sort itself-self out. :smilenod:
#87
Politics / Re: Politics and Islam in UK
Last post by zorkan - March 18, 2024, 11:44:58 AM
God wants you to burn all the oil from the earth. Says so in the bible.

Genesis 1:26-28 King James Version (KJV)
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

We can imply he meant all the oil reserves as well.
Some UK politicians are adamant that every last drop of oil will be extracted from the North Sea and to hell with climate change.
#88
Science / Re: End the Phone-Based Childh...
Last post by Asmodean - March 18, 2024, 07:57:33 AM
I tend to think that the problem with the kids is the adults.

I don't think phone-free-this or no-social-media-before-that is the correct approach. I think the adults should be available, present and wise enough to matter in their kids' digital life.

I see far too many kids left almost completely to their own devices - either by parents "my age," who graw up together with the Internet, or a generation younger than me, who were left to their own devices by the generation before me, who to a larger degree lacked the "digital street smarts," and so could not pass it along, and having made it OK "in a different world," they may assume that their kids will too. Some will. Most even, I think, but that's not the point.

It's difficult enough not to be manipulated, propagandised to, scammed or have your dick pics stolen out in the world wild web as an adult - kids should learn to navigate it within as well as without. Is it appropriate to use your phone in the classroom? It might be. You can, if you know what you are doing, "trivially" verify or debunk claims, look up definitions and data and so forth. In order to do that properly, however, you have to have some understanding of source management, search engine biases, misinformation and so forth. Yeah, eventually, "you" will learn as "I" did, but remember, when I was 12, "so was the Internet." We were on much equal footing, "I" and "it." It's a different many-headed hydra today.

Then of course there is an aspect of digital bullying, extortion and other such (semi-)criminal nonsense. I think that to the degree it can be stopped, it can be so most effectively by using those same "street smarts" I mentioned earlier, rather than legislation and prohibition.

A third aspect of it is that when you as a parent complain that your kids spend "all their time" online, what have you done to meaningfully engage with them? It's not that some parents don't try, but a lot really do not, or they go about it in confrontational, authoritative manner, thus removing any potential for fun from the equation.
#89
Science / Re: End the Phone-Based Childh...
Last post by Icarus - March 17, 2024, 11:58:16 PM
I hasten to agree that phones are, while highly useful, they are the source of much developmental difficulty. I have thought about this subject in the past.

I am not sure that the phone is entirely responsible for the ultra sensitivity that is present in some of the younger psyches. There are other influences too. A gradual change of the manner in which parents discipline their children has something to do with the child's or adolescent's ability to cope with reality. 

As an old guy who grew up in a world with a far tougher set of social norms, I can have no patience with the implementation of "safe zones".


 

 
#90
Science / End the Phone-Based Childhood ...
Last post by Tom62 - March 17, 2024, 07:27:08 PM
"The environment in which kids grow up today is "is hostile to human development"," argues Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and business school ethics professor, saying that since the early 2010s, "something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents."

The Atlantic recently published an excerpt from his book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness:
QuoteBy a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data... I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online — particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity — all were affected...

There's an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world. My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now...

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting "safe spaces" and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to "microaggressions" and sometimes claimed that words were "violence." These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.

The article argues educational scores also began dropping around 2012, while citing estimates that America's average teenager spends seven to nine hours a day on screen-based activities. "Everything else in an adolescent's day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed... The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else." (For example, there's "the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face.")

The article warns of fragmented attention, disrupted learning, social withdrawal, and "the decay of wisdom and the loss of meaning." ("This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life.") Its proposed solution?

  • No smartphones before high school
  • No social media before 16
  • Phone free schools
  • More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

"We didn't know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It's time to end the phone-based childhood."