Remote Learning

According to this article not everyone hates remote learning. I emphatically don't.  To tell the truth, the vast majority of my knowledge comes from reading books. With reading you can reread something if you don't understand it. Have music on in background. Have breaks whenever you like.  But listening to people requires constant attention, and most stuff taught at school was utterly dreary.  This made it beyond my ability to pay attention and I just switched off and started daydreaming. Indeed, most days, before the age of around 13 years old, I literally learnt nothing from one day to the next. This partially explains my perplexity when people bang on about how important school is.

I really hated school.  I resent all my childhood being wasted by being forced to go there.  

Far Cry 5

I don't really like modern computer games but bought Far Cry 5 for £12.50 yesterday. Played the first Far Cry game, which is excellent. Played maybe round a third of Far Cry 3 before my hard drive was formatted. No other Far Cry game. Far Cry 3 was OK ish.. but scarcely compares to Far Cry 1.  The problem with Far Cry 3 was all the crafting and timed stuff you were obliged to do, and having to go into shops to buy weapons, which all very much detracted from the experience. So not sure if I should play Far Cry 3 all the way through. So thought I might as well play Far Cry 5 to see if it's any better. Perhaps it will be as good as the first Far Cry!





My PC is 7.5 years old and never been upgraded, but it seems it can still run it. So that's the good news. Bad news is that the game starts very dark and people shooting at me. It would have been vastly better to start off in bright daylight in a picturesque idyllic tropical paradise as in Far Cry 1 with no enemies in sight. Just to soak in the scenery and get used to the controls etc. Why must we start off in the dark not being able to see anything! Do they want to put off people playing the game after the first 5 minutes?



Also, I have no idea what I'm doing, it all seems horrendously complex. To be fair I felt the same way about Far Cry 3 at first, but as I persevered it all became much clearer.



The map doesn't appear though when I press "M". It just gives me the journal. The "J" and "I" buttons also both give me the journal, and yes they are mapped correctly in the options. Perhaps I pick up the map a little way into the game? At the moment I haven't a clue where to go.



Why the heck can't they make a Far Cry game where the main character travels back in time to the age of the dinosaurs? Of course, he (or she) would have plenty of weapons. As well as dinosaurs like the T rex etc, perhaps there might be super intelligent dinosaurs of around our size with ray guns. Anyway, that would be an absolute blast. I'm pretty sure it'd be vastly more popular than than this Far Cry 5 game.



Anyway, for the time being, I'll persevere with Far Cry 5. Will update when appropriate.



Update:  A few hours later.



Been playing a litle bit more.  Now at last I'm seeing the environment in daylight.  However, it's nowhere near as beautiful as Far Cry or Far Cry 3.  The colours look washed out, insipid.  Even though only £12.50 I think this is probably a waste of money.  Why the heck aren't demos available for most computer games??





Update 13/06/20 I soon gave up on it. I just couldn't be bothered playing. Now I've bought the remake of Resident Evil 3 and see what that's like.

Admins and a flawed argument against an afterlife

I attempted to submit a post (scroll down to under dashed line) to a private Facebook Group called Science, Philosophy, and Psychology Discussion that currently has a staggering 65,508 members. It was rejected.



I sent the following (in blue) to the moderating thread in that group:

I submitted a post concerning a flawed argument by a certain Matthew Alpe against an afterlife. My post has not been permitted. The following "reason" was given:

to see the blog post one must be a member. this is not going to fly. the mature (sic) of the post is already problematic as it assumes a god and a heaven and is trying to be persuasive that this is true. this is akin to preaching.

My post has absolutely nothing to do with any "God", it is pertaining to an argument by a certain Matthew Alper against the afterlife. His argument is an attempt at a reductio ad absurdum -- namely by assuming the existence of an afterlife, this leads to an intractable problem about what it is that actually survives. My argument in turn essentially is that he is question-begging. I don't want to reiterate the arguments here though. The point being is that to claim I'm assuming either a God or an afterlife displays a complete lack of understanding of my post.



Nor of course do counter-arguments constitute "preaching". Of course, the admins may not agree with my argument. But not allowing an argument to be seen by labeling it as "preaching" is truly deplorable. Is this a group for those who subscribe to the modern western metaphysic and will allow no dissent? It seems so to me. Which contradicts what it says in the description of the group where it states "[t]he entire range of science and philosophy are open to analysis and discussion" and "[t]he administrators of this group pride themselves on free speech and will never censor posts or comments on the grounds of disagreement". To put it mildly, this appears to be contrary to the reality.



If one is an admin and their responsibility is to judge the suitability of posts, they really need to establish what the post is actually about. This involves reading and attempting to understand the content. Being an admin should also involve the capacity to understand arguments. The admins should especially have the capacity to distinguish between demonstrating an argument is flawed, and preaching.

Anyway, here is the post full of preaching about God and Heaven!



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An interview with Matthew Alper author of The "God" Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God.  In the interview he says:

So I have people say, “When I die I’m going to be in heaven with my family.” So I’ll say like, “Okay, you’ll be in heaven. Let’s even assume that’s true. You’re going to go to heaven. Who you are is going to live forever. You, Joe, is going to be around for eternity.” But then I say, “But let me ask, what if Joe gets dementia, Alzheimer’s tomorrow, and then you die a year into it, where your last self didn’t know whether to go to the bathroom or eat an apple, you didn’t know the difference between the two. You didn’t remember the names of your own children, your wife, let alone your own self. So is Joe the demented going to be floating around in this eternal headspace for eternity, or do you have this idealized version that it’s you, Joe, now as you’re talking to me? ”

Dementia is due to an impaired brain. Now, if there is an afterlife, the self/soul would have to be an entirely distinct entity from the brain. Hence, the impaired brain would be an irrelevance to our cognitive abilities. Consider if one has on a pair of eyeglasses. The lenses might be cracked, hence affecting one's vision. But that has no implications for one's vision when we take the eyeglasses off.



Immediately after the above Matthew goes on to say:

Or maybe is it going to be Joe 10 years ago, or Joe when you were five? We’re all chameleons. We’re a thousand different people in our lifetimes based on our periods of life.

We might have a 1000 different pairs of eyeglasses we could wear, all affecting our vision in differing characteristic ways. But our unaided vision is unaffected and perhaps our vision is different from the vision from all of the eyeglasses.



The real self is that which makes one the same self from childhood to adulthood, the same self regardless of whether one is drunk or sober etc. Go into all this in more detail in a blog post.



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I often seem to have problems with moderators both with facebook groups and various discussion boards as I also discuss here.

Pupil Dilation Exams

Avoid pupil dilation exams like the plague. 15 months later I'm still suffering from this occasional bright circle lasting 5-10 mins in the centre of my left eye vision. I was promised the procedure is completely harmless.



The older I get the more and more I realise that many so-called "experts" haven't got a freaking clue. Ophthalmologists in particular don't appear to have a scooby.

To infer the existence of others

One thing that people should be aware of is that if all our behaviour is entirely caused by neurons firing with our actual consciousness itself having no causal input, then we could not infer that others are conscious.