Temperatures above 50C used to be a rarity confined to two or three global hotspots, but the World Meteorological Organization noted that at least 10 countries have reported this level of searing heat in the past year: the US, Mexico, Morocco, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Pakistan, India and China.
In Iran, the heat index – a measure that also includes humidity – has come perilously close to 60C, far above the level considered safe for humans.
Heatwaves are now commonplace elsewhere, killing the most vulnerable, worsening inequality and threatening the wellbeing of future generations. Unicef calculates a quarter of the world’s children are already exposed to frequent heatwaves, and this will rise to almost 100% by mid-century.
Living and dying are the same process. You can’t be born without dying. You could say biology condemns us all - very loosely - to a cult of death, as we must all participate.
Capitalism is worse than that. Capitalism is an ideology of exploitation. I’m fine with dying, it’s my fault for being born. I don’t see why I must submit to exploitation while I do, temporarily, exist.
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I’m a Buddhist.
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Just because you can’t recall it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. As a spermatozoon, you eagerly swam towards that egg, then that egg could have chosen to abort at any time. Yet here you are alive. You chose to be here. Deal with it, accept it and move on with your life.
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Yeah, there are plenty of things we have little to no control over.
Having delusions is one of them for sure, but can we say for certain we don’t at least influence what those delusions are or which direction they take?
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Can thought be considered a process that begins after being affected by an external stimulus? And without prior experience on which to base our response, we can only react according to the conditions set by that stimulus?
So is it truly we who control our thoughts or are we just acting in a predetermined set of reactionary impulses based on the accumulation of our personal experiences and gained knowledge over our lifetime so far?
We who are so easily influenced into outrage by trigger phrases specific to our fears or spurred into action by resonating soundbites promising our desires, are those our thoughts or are they just the mind left to its own devices?
I really don’t know. But it’s probably some food for thought in a way.
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Isn’t the internal stimulation just the nervous system zapping things to get a response? And doesn’t that need a trigger to get it going?
Anyway, I feel like I’m heading into contested territory here, but I gotta ask. At which point can we consider babies as conscious?
Most people will claim their earliest memory is at the age of 4 or 5 years old. So that time is probably considered as the general start of conscious identity. Yet some have reported that simulating the conditions in a womb such as sleeping in a fetal position or floating aimlessly within a larger body of water will grant them an instinctual sense of serenity. So it can be argued that at some level, we remember our time in the womb, even though we are not able to recall it directly.
And I’ve seen babies aged around 1-2 years old trying (unsuccessfully) to hide from their parents in order to attempt an action that had been forbidden several times before.
How early does our capability to store memory actually start? And at which point will the amount of stored and remembered experience be enough to count as consciousness?
Who would do the asking and what would be providing the answer?
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That’s because you’re a sinner and exploiting sinners isn’t to be punished, but praised. Exploit your fellow sinners, make them toil in suffering and you too shall redeem salvation in the form of stock options and tax evasion.
That’s the spirit! We must sacrifice the newborns to harvest better stock options.
If you’re fine with dying, Tepco is still looking for guys to clean up under Fukushima. They ran out of old gambling addicts who had big debts with the Yakuza.