I'm not so sure about foot binding in relation to this idea of simplicity/minimization but it certainly is very relevant/plausible. I think the kind o...
A deformity could become a culturally pressured/desirable modification, like with Chinese foot binding. It is a mutilation that goes beyond the superf...
Well, any combination of desirable traits can synergize with the image to make lust more potent. One can suddenly desire a person by image alone and i...
I suppose this is also true of many physical acts that give rise to an offense. If I slap one on the face, the pain/sensation as well as the offense e...
This is a normative recommendation. Your saying it ought to be the case that we treat offense as if it is solely the responsibility of the receiver. W...
Beauty is a sign of fitness in evolutionary biology, so we if aren't limited to just the visual, it could extend to what attracts us to the deeper fea...
Don't you think ethnocentrism is maybe a better term than racism for your thesis. Racism emerges more a symptom of thinking one's culture/ideology/cla...
You're supposed to just accept that his hands are functioning scissors and not to delve too deeply into how the prop functions. This would be excellen...
As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The moral aspiration behind communism produced a lot of failed states, both domestic and ...
The needs and desires of humans, as individual and group pursuits yield their consequence in mass, may be in the long term anti-life-force. If our act...
We can use AI to clarify/explore ideas to ourselves, it's just recommended that we don't use them at all. There is a huge problem of trust with LLMs. ...
Superficial beauty is often just about what triggers sexual lust, which is a hugely powerful instinctive force. The flaccid noodle becomes a turgid ro...
@"hypericin" On average the number of unique words used only once in any written work is 40-60%. This is a problem for translators if they don't have ...
I don't understand what you're getting at here. As if a person had thousands of diagnostic lights on their phenomenal user interface, where the pancre...
It's not impossible. "In 1984, a group of scientists, including paleontologist R. Dale Guthrie, ate a stew made from a 50,000-year-old mummified bison...
Think Maw is just considering translation from an insufficient sample of text with known (incontrovertible) meaning. The Rosetta stone would probably ...
I guess I'm still confused as to why one would make the assumption of incontrovertible meaning. Suppose there are 10 different civilizations similar t...
The likelihood of arriving at one meaning might be a consequence of how difficult it is to make the codex coherent though. If you had the set of all p...
Couldn't it be possible that there are actually hundreds to billions of variations of meaning that can be imposed on the codex that satisfy the level ...
I don't understand this assumption. Does every novel have a single incontrovertible meaning? Take for instance idioms/metaphors, which bring forth the...
But your alien text has structure and repetition, plausibly functions like a language as a carrier of information, like the Voynich manuscript. Otherw...
Isn't imposing a false meaning on the text achievable with a considerable bit of work? It's just mapping a known language/meaning onto a novel set of ...
I'm guessing if the text contains what could be construed as universal patterns, then maybe that could be used as a basis for discovering more complex...
No physical asset backs bitcoin which makes trading it easier than gold. Am not sure how crypto backed by gold works really but I'd assume some work n...
I guess I missed your point, that gold like crypto, and many other assets, are limited in their inherent use value, so they share that in common. I ca...
If there is a demand for pipyruses and they serve as a store of value, how can they be worthless? The value of other assets and currencies, influences...
You do have knowledge of your colleague, that he is dead. If you have no knowledge of your colleague, how do you know that he is dead and a colleague?...
Religions posit an afterlife of a kind and then skeptics must ask, while if there is that kind of afterlife which provides a bridge of memory to prese...
Reminds me of the pothole formed by the Air Ambulance plane that crashed on the streets in Philadelphia. If ever a pothole could be symbolic of death,...
You can argue for eternal oblivion or eternal consciousness, depending on what has been lost or gained. Without memory there is no way to know what ha...
TDS always sounds like it should describe die hard Trumpers, or Trump himself, rather than detractors. If absolute opposition to Trump is irrational, ...
These stoic aphorisms are kind of annoying. Drinking salt water is ok, assuming the concentration is low, but maybe we are intended to think of someon...
Thanks for unwrapping the aphorism. Sounds like a very tall order all the same, to become immune to worry and the torments of the mind by whatever mea...
"Suffering is a choice." This is cruel and simplistic. While there is plenty of suffering that might be avoidable if one could muster the courage/will...
Folks also move here at the speed of a falcons and rabbits. If one is tortoise-like, or even worse, clam-like or tree-like, keeping up is a bit hopele...
Greta got a second chance, a gift from Ahmir, but then she just dies in the space of a few lines. We need answers from Sam if she is somehow complicit...
The question is why are his dreams so perfectly sensible that they might as well be historical occurrences, memories, while everyone else's dreams are...
Oh, geeze, I got it so wrong. Embarrassing. It's strange Greta dies after her transplant and the two cats walk off together. Thought Ahmir could be Gr...
Might have to read it again to understand what is going on. Third time's a charm? Ahmir was the over enthusiastic fan who caused Greta to publicly rec...
Since it wasn't a contest there is no deadline to vote/comment. Why is everyone still hurrying for no reason. Authors are already outing themselves fr...
Sorry for the unfair criticism from the peanut gallery. Some of us are rather like Goldilocks, who can't help but complain about how uncomfortable and...
For Joseph Campbell, myth was somewhat like the educational operating code for integrating folks into their culture. He had used the metaphor of a wom...
I like this take. There is a meditation for us in the two houses, of stone and paper and what they might represent. Gunta's creative art, beautiful th...
It explains Stevie's mood/behavior but she is also still open and vulnerable enough to approach and connect with Gunta, an old toothless man, and appr...
It was a wild and fun start, with its colorfully picturesque and tangible surreality, and I really wanted to know what would happen next, took delight...
So much for open conversation. I don't think I'm averse to asking therapists personal questions of a trifling sort, especially if they concern me. The...
But the hurt finger is such a minor thing to ask about. It's not as if he's delving into her sex life. Maybe the subtext tells us as much, that this r...
A great medley of skillfully portrayed vignettes. The sober realism of Connor's dreams are so extraordinary they might be evidence of past lives. Pros...
Read it twice from a desire to appreciate it but it still sits uneasy with me. We cannot be sure of what else is going on in waking life of this violi...
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