Arthur Simpenhauer

@TheAnomalocaris I want to be a sage who sits on the sidelines and shakes my head wisely at the foolishness of the world, but whenever I see something that elicits any emotion, my dumb savage brain tells me I'm directly involved and need to respond in some way. Built wrong for the Internet.

Think I'm gonna "log off" and "touch grass". Either this website isn't built right or I'm using it wrong, for it doesn't seem to make my life better. Too much evil and ugliness showed in my face, which I lack the fortitude not to engage with. Best not to be here, I think.

@TheAnomalocaris I think it's a combination of my poor self-control and this website encouraging poor behavior. I used to crash out in ye olden forum days too, but at least there I got banned if I went off-topic too often. I need the firm hand of a no-nonsense admin.

@TheAnomalocaris I made this account thinking "I will just use this to talk about hobbies and make friends :3" and then a few weeks later I'm in half a dozen political and philosophical arguments and retweeting climate doom posts, and yet I haven't made any friends!

@TheAnomalocaris Inshallah. The only advice I can give is to keep putting yourself in situations where there are people (preferably some of them women) around you. I've never tried dating apps, but everyone I know who has says they're horrible.

@AmanogawaShiina Hell yeah, family! You have a job so that you do things like spend time with your loved ones, prioritizing work above that wouldn't be very cash money of you now would it?

Grandpa sad I haven’t spent a lot of time with him uuuu so forgive me if I take a few days to watch TV and eat with him. 🥺♥️

Stave Church in Snow. Theodor Kittelsen, 1907

@RexMendicorvm @ChrisRojas4081 @Cato37232237 Apologies for the somewhat rambling answer, lack of character limits isn't good for me. I also won't be answering any responses, as I've decided to "touch grass" for the foreseeable future. But you can of course still respond if you think anyone else would be interested to see.

1) I have no doubt St. Thomas would be very much interested in those things; what I think both he & the Stagirite would be fascinated by is how deep *form* penetrates into the inner workings of things. Elementary particles & organelles don't disprove form, they vindicate it. 2) AFAIK the core teachings of wuxing make empirically false claims about elemental cycles, & St. Thomas (among others!) has shown there's only one God, so animism is out. Vaisheshika is a more interesting case since many of its categories are similar to those of Aristotle, but I'm not that familiar with it. 🤷🏻‍♂️ 3) I just disagree here; structure, material constituents, efficient & final causes operate at *all* levels of nature (though they're most clearly visible in the biosphere). Nothing about double-split experiments (matter becomes more "unformed" as we get closer to prima materia) or inertia (material substances as such have a *natural* (essential/formal) resistance to change) disprove these basic categories. 4) See (3); question: does water have a potency to become hydrogen & oxygen? 5) The Aristotelian categories aren't mere terms or heuristic devices; they describe reality on every level of existence. Do you exist? If so what makes a whole being & not simply an assemblage of elements? There must be a unifying principle that makes you a unity (i.e. a form/essence/nature). If you want embrace eliminative materialism that's all well & good; in that case even whatever minima you posit must have a nature. 🤷🏻‍♂️

RT @Race2Extinct: Cold deaths are easy to count. Heat deaths are easy to hide. A hotter planet spreads pathogens, worsens heart and lung st…

Pavel Grechishkin - "Forest Lake. Valaam Island" (1988)

RT @Race2Extinct: Evolution takes millions of years. What we’re seeing is collapse in decades — that’s not adaptation, it’s annihilation. A…

nephew is warm

runs past and steals your water droplets

@Milk30944 All I can see is

This is high key performative as fuck. Apparently all the work someone does to advocate for equality and stand up for women around them means nothing if they don’t think fictional characters are equal to women. 🤷‍♂️

Meditate on this

I honestly think I prefer regular Christo-fascist LARPers to this type of Thielian "we must CRUSH the WOKE so that I can upload my BRAIN into a SPACESHIP and COLONIZE the GALAXY" gay-ass techno-fantasy. A single centipede is more beautiful than every rocket ever built.

If the West falls, perhaps China will make it to the stars. If Earth fails to colonize space, aliens will do so. Whoever wins, it’s a safe bet they will be more aligned with the truth than we are now, because that’s how you win. In the long run, truth (knowledge production) = power (ability to manipulate matter) = beauty (inner richness of the minds in question). Reality is structured such that, in the limit as time -> infinity, truth wins with probability 1. But I’m me, so I’d prefer my tribe not fail. And that’s why it’s so important that we find all the ways in which we have systematically deviated from truth and cut them out like cancer. Not to ensure that the universe has a beautiful future - that’s happening whether we like it or not. But so we have the honor of being the vessel for that future.

@Cato37232237 "So, I went to the church that makes your tits bigger".

@RexMendicorvm @ChrisRojas4081 @Cato37232237

To use Austin's somewhat dismissive phrasing "medium-sized dry goods" 😆; these concepts don't simply vanish because we can better discern the micro-material/mechanical forces at play when these various changes occur. A plant (unlike an animal) has a potency to extract energy from light due to it's form or essence, likewise fuel has the potency to release energy when exposed to an oxidant; and though an artifact, a ball has a potency to be moved through the air given its shape and material elements. You can say these aren't terribly informative with regard to the *details* of these changes (I agree!), but they're still crucial if we're at all interested in treating the world we live & breathe in as something that's actually real. Otherwise we're left with either Platonic shadows or atoms & the void.