Are online Pranks real?

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Re: Are online Pranks real?

Post by Empiricist-Bruno »

Papus79 wrote: November 3rd, 2019, 10:42 pm I think if anything this story's just a miracle of absurdities, ie. man dead after a puff of flatulence aggravated a butterfly which caused a stampede etc., not sure what else to write on the headstone.

What's obvious - anyone making calls for potentially lethal force to be applied by law enforcement somewhere as a means to settle embarrassment over who cracked a better headshot on Call of Duty, there should probably be jail time for that sort of thing regardless of whether anyone gets hurt. That this got out to a wrong address and some completely detached third party paid with their life simply for living at the residence that the other user formerly lived at might also point out that there's clearly a hole in protocol here - ie. that people call the police and 'lie about things' (brand new human problem - hooda thunk!), I'd have to ask some of the law enforcement guys I know about how many filters they have between getting a call that someone's an armed assailant and feeling like they have enough evidence to see if it's a valid lead to go in - my guess is this department has needed an internal review BADLY for some time and yes, if this kid is going to jail it stands to reason someone over there should be dealing with equivalent consequences.
Your expression or analogy that a butterfly caused it presumably by flapping its wings, stirs up ideas of a graph in my mind to try and explain causers versus enabler because despite my best efforts you haven't understood that part and I am afraid there are many others like you out there. The butterfly can only unable a stampede; it cannot cause it. The stampede will always only be caused by the animals taking part in it. Some enablers,--typically supremacists-- will claim to "cause" it because either they don't understand/know the difference in that terminology or because they are lying or because they want full credit for the stampede that occurred and wish to dismiss the animals as nothing more than an harnessed forced. On the head stone, it should read, "Bullets don't kill, online Pranks do."

What is obvious to me is that you are quick to use abduction and confinement as a means to cope with interaction with passive technological objects.That means you, as a human being, are admitting failing to control technological fire or that the Gods Must Be Crazy. I think you should indeed get rid of that Coke bottle --from the movie just mentioned-- if it causes you this much misery.

What do you mean by this? You agree that some cop should be facing time too in light of this incident? Putting people in jail is not going to make a lasting meaningful difference. You need systemic changes and you can have these changes only if you are willing to temper with the traditional way of understanding things. There is no political will at the moment to deal with this. I am just trying to stir it up here, a little. Can you please share what are your ideas about the needed police reforms that could prevent this madness?
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Re: Are online Pranks real?

Post by Papus79 »

Empiricist-Bruno wrote: November 13th, 2019, 1:56 pm ...
A really simple way to perhaps restate our point of disagreement - I share the same view of free will that Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky do, ie. that no agent or actor can do better than what their given state at a given moment affords in any variety of ways.

The butterfly thing was a joke, sort of making fun of the absurdity of the situation but at the same time rather grimly noting that the guy died by about the most absurd set of contingencies imaginable. I'm sure there have been more absurd contingencies like someone walking along and getting conked on the head with something from a plane that fell off because a couple were trying to join the MIle High Club or something like that.

Also with respect to saying that just 'putting a cop in jail isn't enough', are you sure you're not just reading that into what I said? True, I didn't make this a thread to go on a diatribe about criminal justice and I have no clue what we'd agree or disagree on, but I really don't think I said enough to suggest that the system is perfect as it is and that this was the fault of one person on the team.
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Re: Are online Pranks real?

Post by Count Lucanor »

It seems obvious, from reading the news article, that this was not the case of an online prank. To be online, you have to be connected to the internet, but they say it was just calls. The nature of the medium is irrelevant anyway, since what matter is the false report, which could have been made with an analog phone.

It's also questionable to say that this was a prank. Pranks are meant to have fun at the expense of someone else. The victim of a prank is the one who gets ridiculed.

None of these happened in the case in mention. Someone hired a person known for making false reports to the police to make another such false report, faking a kidnapping, with the intention that the police went to his opponent's house. There's nothing "virtual" about this. It was a real person, with a real voice, making false claims to real people, through real communication devices, to provoke real actions.

The rest of the story, the innocent man assassinated by the police, is just the unfortunate consequence of the first actions.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
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Re: Are online Pranks real?

Post by Empiricist-Bruno »

When you start to make a fuss about definitions, you never see the end of the tunnel. For instance, you mention
Count Lucanor wrote: December 6th, 2019, 10:55 pm ...the innocent man assassinated by the police.
Well, the dictionary says that to assassinate you need to have political or religious reasons to carry out the killing. So, when the cops knock on your door and you open and they don't even know who you are but they slay you right away for some reason, it is still an assassination? But you know what, I see what you mean, what you are trying to say and it's okay.

More to the point of this thread, you mention:
Count Lucanor wrote: December 6th, 2019, 10:55 pm ... There's nothing "virtual" about this. It was a real person, with a real voice, making false claims to real people, through real communication devices, to provoke real actions.
I argue that that the computers that you call with the euphemism "real communication devices" are in fact, incapable of communicating anything to you. I think the fact that you aren't getting the gist of my message proves my point here.

It mesmerize me to see how some people think that their own "real voice" can be duplicated and heard by millions of others even while they are themselves asleep. Technology really is warping minds.

You do view this message as a real message from a real person who logs on to Empiricist-Bruno and use this handle to communicate to you. People who agree to this angle are taking the virtual world for real. For sure, to enjoy being online, you need to act as if the handle you use were you but when you reach the point where you can't tell the difference between you and your handle then I think you have gone overboard.

There does appear to be a virtual reality and a real world reality and so long as we don't know what the other is experiencing or believes to be experiencing or knows that you can be experiencing either one of these states, then you can't discuss certain subject with them like, what's my real name? I am Empiricist-Bruno. That's my real virtual name. Real world reality does not even exist where Empricist stands. Surely, you can follow me? Somehow, I don't think you can but feel free to correct me if I am wrong. Thanks for your reply.
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Re: Are online Pranks real?

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Empiricist-Bruno wrote: December 12th, 2019, 2:11 pm You do view this message as a real message from a real person who logs on to Empiricist-Bruno and use this handle to communicate to you. People who agree to this angle are taking the virtual world for real. For sure, to enjoy being online, you need to act as if the handle you use were you but when you reach the point where you can't tell the difference between you and your handle then I think you have gone overboard.
If you hammer in a soft fitting with a brass hammer and a rubber matting between to not scratch the fitting - did you actually hammer in the fitting or only virtually hammer it in?

If you call the local pizza shop to order a pizza - did you actually order a pizza or just pretend to?

When the heat of fission powers steam turbines does it really create electricity or do we just like pretending that it does because the towers are really cool to look at?

It seems like what's getting missed is that either force or data communicating intention are getting encoded into an intermediate medium of some type, getting decoded at the other end, and it seems like your suggesting that if something got encoded and decoded then it's no longer real (or possibly, more strangely that its real in every case except for the internet). We could use all kinds of other physical dynamics like transfer or force through fluid dynamics or other situations where very real and immediate world effects are achieved through translation of force or information from one media back to another where there's no challenge to intuition and I'm not sure here where the internet somehow creates a buffer for solipsism.
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Re: Are online Pranks real?

Post by Empiricist-Bruno »

Papus79 wrote: December 12th, 2019, 7:30 pm
Empiricist-Bruno wrote: December 12th, 2019, 2:11 pm You do view this message as a real message from a real person who logs on to Empiricist-Bruno and use this handle to communicate to you. People who agree to this angle are taking the virtual world for real. For sure, to enjoy being online, you need to act as if the handle you use were you but when you reach the point where you can't tell the difference between you and your handle then I think you have gone overboard.
If you hammer in a soft fitting with a brass hammer and a rubber matting between to not scratch the fitting - did you actually hammer in the fitting or only virtually hammer it in?

If you call the local pizza shop to order a pizza - did you actually order a pizza or just pretend to?

When the heat of fission powers steam turbines does it really create electricity or do we just like pretending that it does because the towers are really cool to look at?

It seems like what's getting missed is that either force or data communicating intention are getting encoded into an intermediate medium of some type, getting decoded at the other end, and it seems like your suggesting that if something got encoded and decoded then it's no longer real (or possibly, more strangely that its real in every case except for the internet). We could use all kinds of other physical dynamics like transfer or force through fluid dynamics or other situations where very real and immediate world effects are achieved through translation of force or information from one media back to another where there's no challenge to intuition and I'm not sure here where the internet somehow creates a buffer for solipsism.

As I mentioned --and you may not have noticed-- I kind of believe in some sort of double independent realities with connecting windows: The real world reality and the virtual reality. For instance, if you create a work of fiction with characters and all that, then from within the story, the characters will "experience" their own reality. From our position as readers, these realities are virtual because the characters are fictional. So where does Empiricist-Bruno stands in this? Well, I believe Empiricist-Bruno is like that, a character in a story with the notable exception that he assigns me a personal password that allow me to create/modifiy what we see as his script. So if Empiricist-Bruno calls the pizza shop and orders pizza, will the pizza be for himself (a fictional character) or will it be for someone else (fictional or real)? If I am using Empiricist-Bruno to order a pizza for myself (its user), then Empiricist-Bruno orders it but he won't be eating it.

The only way to get Empiricist-Bruno to eat a pizza is just to write it in here, "Hey guys, I'm having a pizza right now. It just popped in front of me as I wished for it and now I am enjoying it. " Why not? Empiricist-Bruno is a fictional character, remember? But when Empiricist-Bruno wants me to have a pizza, he will have to contact some real world pizza-shop more specifically a pizza shop that keeps a window open on the virtual world and then find their virtual rep online and talk to them and since Empiricist-Bruno gives me access to his script, I'll let them know through him my address and the kind of pizza I would like. This order is not real. It is a virtual order but it may be taken as real just as fiction can be taken for real some time.

So, no, I have not ordered the pizza but Empiricist-Bruno may have done it for me. Obviously, if when the delivery guy comes around with the pizza and I tell him to go away with his pizza, Empiricist-Bruno is going to get demoted and next time he puts up an order for a pizza, he may not be able to get me what I'd like.

I can assume a limited responsibility for what Empiricist-Bruno says as he appears to be giving me control over what we believe is his script but this does not mean that I accept Empiricist-Bruno as myself or that I am him. Let's not go overboard. My responsibility toward the words of Empiricist-Bruno is like responsibility over a work of fiction. The dispute over what is or what is not a work of fiction can be interesting: Let's say Albert Einstein had first explained his theory of relativity through a work of fiction that he creates, would that have meant that E=MC2 isn't real? But this is digressing a bit, I think.

Your third question brings up an objection from me as your basic sentence appears loaded with a key inaccuracy.
Papus79 wrote: December 12th, 2019, 7:30 pmWhen the heat of fission powers steam turbines does it really create electricity or do we just like pretending that it does because the towers are really cool to look at?
The heat of fission power may indeed power steam turbines, however, the creation of electricity in such a set up is achieved subsequently by the power generators that may be attached to the steam turbines. It is the electricity of the motor or generator that we need to talk about. If you talk about the electricity produced by the heat of whatever, I believe you are wrong so I can indeed say that no, the heat of fission does not really create electricity. I think that is a fact.

If we pretend that "the heat of fission powers steam turbines that create electricity", we have failed to understand that steam turbines only
extracts thermal energy from pressurized steam and uses it to do mechanical work on a rotating output shaft.

Had you expressed that the steam turbines were connected to an electric power generator, I think your statement would still be wrong because the power generator uses the energy of the steam turbines to create its electricity. Electricity is not generated either by steam turbines or heat from fission or any other heat source.

I think it is important to know that electricity is not generated by any turbines or force (except here for static electricity) because when you aren't clear about this distinction, you may get to think that you are producing electricity when you ride a bicycle and a dynamo is attached to it. You think you produce the electricity when you don't really do that. It isn't your power that lights up the light of a dynamo attached to your bike. It is important to grasp this notion because if you don't grasp it, then you may start to think all kinds of other things that are just equally untrue.

My own energy is not at all used to put up words on this screen even as my fingers walk the keyboard, so I am not making these words appear-the system is. You need to be clear about this to have a clear grasp of the technology but if you believe you can generate electric power to power lights you will certainly miss the point here too.

The general desire to believe that the natural source powers the electricity is not unlike the general desire to believe that human power electric systems and that therefore, we are responsible for what they do. But going that route is going overboard in my opinion. Egoists want to think themselves as incredible and want to forget about our humble human limitations and so they themselves must be creating electricity. I could go on on this topic and explain how even political populism is another symptom of human failure to understand and appreciate the technology that is now infesting our world.

Sorry if I am not answering all your questions. I have tried to focus on what I thought were the most important ones. Maybe the answer to your others questions became clear along the way?
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Re: Are online Pranks real?

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I'd agree 'creating' electricity was probably a bad way to phrase it but one could say that the energy of the steam is siphoned by the turbines and in that sense gets translated from heat to electrical energy.
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Re: Are online Pranks real?

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Papus79 wrote: December 14th, 2019, 5:32 pm I'd agree 'creating' electricity was probably a bad way to phrase it but one could say that the energy of the steam is siphoned by the turbines and in that sense gets translated from heat to electrical energy.
In my opinion, as a college sciences graduate, the way you express this energy transfer seems to show that your understanding of energy may be different from how energy needs to be understood. Let me explain, if you go down a slope on your bike, your potential energy or gravitational energy is reduced and at the same time, your kinetic energy increases as you pick up speed on your bike. So, would you say there that your bike is siphoning your potential energy as you go down the slope?

Also, why use the word "siphoning" which gives the impression that energy is a thing and it moves up or down a siphon? Why not instead say that that the steam "fires" its energy into the turbines? It's just as... witless, isn't it?

When you sit on a chair and warm it up, do you believe you leave your energy in it? Has it siphoned your ass's energy or did you fire it into the chair? My point is energy is always located somewhere in some form in some system but no one system or form can claim that energy to be its own. Energy is more of a presence than it is a possession. But the misunderstanding that you express so well here is a reflection of how people want things to be even if they aren't that. This lead to what's often called a dissonance: People (especially artists such as signers) think it is their voice that you hear coming out of sound machines such as phones because they want to market it as if it were theirs (and if it is their energy in that voice then surely they have a right to it) and thus become rich on the back of something that clearly isn't even theirs. It is a scam but the population, being dissonant, goes along with it and from there all kinds of social inequities arise. You simply can't build a just society when you aren't just about technology. What happens in our dissonant society is that you get scapegoats just as in this case where a guy needs to to to jail for interacting with a voice machine. This scandal has got to stop.
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Re: Are online Pranks real?

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Empiricist-Bruno wrote: December 17th, 2019, 3:37 pm In my opinion, as a college sciences graduate, the way you express this energy transfer seems to show that your understanding of energy may be different from how energy needs to be understood. Let me explain, if you go down a slope on your bike, your potential energy or gravitational energy is reduced and at the same time, your kinetic energy increases as you pick up speed on your bike. So, would you say there that your bike is siphoning your potential energy as you go down the slope?
Admittedly I'm not a mechanical engineer and perhaps I could admit that I don't exactly know how steam turbines are set up in relation to the cooling towers on nuclear reactors. Colloquially it could seem like more of a direct-drive system if the steam is coming up through the center of the turbine and causing horizontal rotation but if the steam is still going up through the turbine and not getting 100% captured then I'd think of the energy in the flow of steam as not fully captured and the kinetic energy going to the turbine getting split off on another route, a bit like windmills aren't 100% stopping the wind but they are getting turned by it, splitting off a fraction of the kinetic energy, and again - not being a mechanical engineer - the term 'siphoning' seemed appropriate. It would seem perhaps less appropriate if you had a more direct line of force going through something like a hydraulic tube which fired a piston or something along those lines.

The point of my original analogies though, certain kinds of information, especially among idiots - like the sorts who'd call a swat team on a Call of Duty player at the request of another, is a bit like a kinetic energy transfer through an electronic medium. I'd actually say the dumber the participants the more natural that analogy seems to be.
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Re: Are online Pranks real?

Post by Empiricist-Bruno »

Papus79 wrote: December 17th, 2019, 7:43 pm
Empiricist-Bruno wrote: December 17th, 2019, 3:37 pm In my opinion, as a college sciences graduate, the way you express this energy transfer seems to show that your understanding of energy may be different from how energy needs to be understood. Let me explain, if you go down a slope on your bike, your potential energy or gravitational energy is reduced and at the same time, your kinetic energy increases as you pick up speed on your bike. So, would you say there that your bike is siphoning your potential energy as you go down the slope?
Admittedly I'm not a mechanical engineer and perhaps I could admit that I don't exactly know how steam turbines are set up in relation to the cooling towers on nuclear reactors. Colloquially it could seem like more of a direct-drive system if the steam is coming up through the center of the turbine and causing horizontal rotation but if the steam is still going up through the turbine and not getting 100% captured then I'd think of the energy in the flow of steam as not fully captured and the kinetic energy going to the turbine getting split off on another route, a bit like windmills aren't 100% stopping the wind but they are getting turned by it, splitting off a fraction of the kinetic energy, and again - not being a mechanical engineer - the term 'siphoning' seemed appropriate. It would seem perhaps less appropriate if you had a more direct line of force going through something like a hydraulic tube which fired a piston or something along those lines.

The point of my original analogies though, certain kinds of information, especially among idiots - like the sorts who'd call a swat team on a Call of Duty player at the request of another, is a bit like a kinetic energy transfer through an electronic medium. I'd actually say the dumber the participants the more natural that analogy seems to be.
When energy is produced through nuclear fission, you can calculate how much energy it produces by how much the temperature increases. This increase in temperature can make water boil and therefore the quantity of boiling water will also reveal how much fission energy was produced. The pressure or force produced by the steam is also indicative of the amount of energy produced by the nuclear fission. When this pressure is funnelled through a turbine attached to an electricity generator, the amount of electricity produced will also tell you about the quantity of energy that the nuclear fission produced as the energy spreads through these systems.

It is quite clear that not all the heat energy produced by nuclear fission can/will be turned into electricity. Turning heat energy into electric energy is indeed a bit like turning wind into electricity. But first, the heat from the fission needs to be absorbed by the water. Now the water will not just heat itself, it will also heat its surroundings so that energy is lost.

Only the steam can put pressure on the turbine and this gas will heat the turbine as well causing further loss of energy. Then the pressure of the steam will cause kinetic energy to appear in the turbine.This whole process of spreading of energy originates from the nuclear fission and radiate outwardly. So to say that the turbines are siphoning the energy of the steam really makes as much as sense as saying that the water surrounding a reactor core siphons the heat being produced by the core. The proper term for that is to absorb the heat.

So, if you'd like to use the term sponge instead of siphon, you would probably be a bit closer, even if I think I would still have an issue with that term too because as a radiation, it is questionable that heats counts as something that a sponge can absorb in the traditional way that sponges are known to absorb things.

When the wind moves and strikes the blades of a windmill, the wind imparts energy to it by applying a force or pressure to it. The act of applying a force to something can impart some kinetic energy to the object being pressured but it does not withdraws energy from the force applying the pressure. For instance, if you fire a space rocket that is anchored to the ground, it will exert a great pressure at the exhaust of the burning gases and whatever turbine you can put behind it to try and grasp the energy produced will not reduce one bit the energy created by the pressure of the burning gases.

It is the force applied to the blade of the turbine that will eventually be turned into electric energy and so there is no splitting of the energy of the kinetic energy of the wind or exhaust gases. At least, this is my understanding of it and I am quite confident that I am correct here.

Your last point is interesting as well. However, it remains a little unclear to me here what you are trying to say. When you talk about idiots, it isn't clear to me about which kind of idiots you are talking about. The real idiots or the online ones? Empiricist-Bruno may be seen as an idiot to some but certainly, that would be an online idiot and not a real idiot. I mean, if you think of yourself as really an online character, certainly you may decide to view Empiricist-Bruno as a real idiotic character too but that's really every thing I have been trying to explain should not occur and is unhealthy to do.

A real idiot would be perhaps the person who touches the strokes on a cyber window keyboard to then believe that he or she him/herself is now online.

So are you talking about the phone number that called the police as an idiotic character line # or are you saying some real world character who regardless of the idiotic approach of the police toward online comments still goes ahead and knowingly make a joke that he knows can back fire not just on him but that will make some idiots endanger someone's life?

If you believe that a kinetic energy transfer does occur between a real idiot and the cyber police then I think my explanation of how electricity is produced should help you see that it can't really occur that way.
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Re: Are online Pranks real?

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I'm using idiot to cast aspersion on behavior that's reckless under any condition and as a bonus caused an innocent man to die in this case. I'd apply idiot to the guy who made the suggestion and even bigger idiot to the guy who took him up on it and made the call and any guy hanging out with them who thought it was a cool idea or would have made the call themselves if the guy made the call hadn't made the call. There's probably an idiot or two somewhere in the chain between that phone call getting received by local law enforcement and an innocent man being shot.

What I saw with your first six blurbs, above the red 'point', is how well you were clarifying your understanding of the heat of nuclear fission heating water to create steam to drive a turbine (and just like that I flipped it from syphon to drive! - I don't think anyone reading this thread would hire me as a civil or mechanical engineer now). Same with wind. The more I read that I started wondering - with this much grasp on transfer and drive, isn't this sort of closing doors on the idea that human personalities start keying characters into Facebook, Twitter, Discord, a message board like this, or yammering on Call of Duty and that both they and the message they spin off into online SQL servers or over some sort of voice service isn't just an information relay and that human brains use information as an input source to which what they read in here either motivates them, makes them laugh, makes them think deeply about their lives (rare but if you're looking for that on Youtube it's out there), or decide that they want to ignore someone?

My general assumption, for most names I see on a forum, is that there's a human being somewhere who eats, drinks, sleeps, pees, shaves, likely has a job that they're not too crazy about but it pays the bills, and certain kinds of psychological inclinations and interests caused them to want to sign up to a philosophy forum. There could be Russian or Chinese bots here getting tested for ability to pass as human but even most of the ideologues here don't push that button, and a bot isn't anything magical - it's something that some kids working at the bottom of a ladder loosely attached to some government bureaucracy are getting paid peanuts to do and so in a way dealing with a bot is dealing with them in a similar way to how playing Call of Duty is interacting with both other players (guys and some girls twiddling their thumbs in front of TV's or computers) who may be on your team or the other team and then you have the backdrop of the activity and the interface which is the project of a software development team of quite likely a bunch of kids working ridiculous hours for fair to middling pay and getting stressed out at every milestone by their supervisors.

So I'd say that both the people keying messages here are flesh, blood, and whatever else I am and if they're bots then they're a bundle of if statements and loops deployed by someone or possibly a few someones who are made of flesh, blood, and whatever else I am too. If it's anything spookier than that it's typically only pulling on human neurons because there isn't enough leverage anywhere else.

I guess what I'm curious to unpack is whether you're making a broader case for solipsism or just a very narrow one and if the later - why the internet?
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Re: Are online Pranks real?

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Papus79 wrote: December 20th, 2019, 10:51 pm The more I read that I started wondering - with this much grasp on transfer and drive, isn't this sort of closing doors on the idea that human personalities start keying characters into Facebook, Twitter, Discord, a message board like this, or yammering on Call of Duty and that both they and the message they spin off into online SQL servers or over some sort of voice service isn't just an information relay and that human brains use information as an input source to which what they read in here either motivates them, makes them laugh, makes them think deeply about their lives (rare but if you're looking for that on Youtube it's out there), or decide that they want to ignore someone?
** meant to say closing doors on alternatives.
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Re: Are online Pranks real?

Post by Empiricist-Bruno »

Papus79,
When we communicate, there are always limits to the possibilities of said communication. If you don't understand what I am saying, if I fail to express myself properly, if you fail to interpret me correctly, if we aren't on the same page, if we can't be on the same page (due to diverging beliefs), if we disagree to the purpose of communication, if we do not agree as to whom is whom in a conversation, if we reject the other's perspective, then whatever exchange that occurs between the two of us can only be a failed attempt at communication.

So, what I am trying to do here is to see if can get on the same page. To that end, I feel some basic worldly and self understanding is required and I am seeing that it isn't there now. I am finding you inquisitive, and so I am attempting to see if what we are lacking here might be something that I can spark in you somehow.

Let me try and cover some basic facts with you, and hopefully, I will not loose you. First, when you watch tv for instance, you can dive beneath the sea and see what is there on the sea floor (with your oen eyes?) but you don't get wet in the process so is this evidence that all you saw was a lie and make belief? Was that evidence that what you see is arbitrary and you are the ultimate judge in deciding what you saw or did not see? Was that just evidence that you can see what a camera saw?
If you are willing to go with me through these questions, I feel that we may indeed get somewhere.

And when you describe to me the story of where idiots stand or could stand in the events in question, what I do not get and fail to see is where you and I stand in this narration? Are you the narrator of this story or are you and I characters of that story which I am reading here? When you provide the narration for allegedly real events, what are you really doing? And if you are describing a reality, how can you both be a character of that story and at the same time the story's narrator? So please help me identify where you and I really stand in this real story. Can you really be narrating a story and really act out as a character in that story that you allegedly are narrating? If I am not informed of where you stand in such a narration, then I feel I do not have the means to figure my point and you do not have the means to follow where I am going with this.

As far as you now using the word "drive" instead of "siphon", I would just observe that we are not making any meaningful progress. To "drive" means to push to propel. So, an engine is what drives a car and yet, the most common perspective in our world today is that people drive cars when they obviously do not. We constantly lie with the word "drive" and it renders the use of this word meaningless, due to self and media gaslighting. The truth as to matter if we are to communicate effectively. Unfortunately, ideology and less truth seem easier to sell but that is at our own risks and perils, especially over the long term.
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Papus79
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Re: Are online Pranks real?

Post by Papus79 »

Empiricist-Bruno wrote: December 24th, 2019, 6:11 pm Papus79,
When we communicate, there are always limits to the possibilities of said communication. If you don't understand what I am saying, if I fail to express myself properly, if you fail to interpret me correctly, if we aren't on the same page, if we can't be on the same page (due to diverging beliefs), if we disagree to the purpose of communication, if we do not agree as to whom is whom in a conversation, if we reject the other's perspective, then whatever exchange that occurs between the two of us can only be a failed attempt at communication.

So, what I am trying to do here is to see if can get on the same page. To that end, I feel some basic worldly and self understanding is required and I am seeing that it isn't there now. I am finding you inquisitive, and so I am attempting to see if what we are lacking here might be something that I can spark in you somehow.
So there are probably many different ways to use language and what I'll consider here are a couple that are somewhat diametrically opposed in their application:

- Speaking as plainly as possible, often to try and draw participants in a conversation together to a rather mundane, common-trade aspect of reality which most people's intuitions map onto and where it's at least assumed (correctly or incorrectly) that doing such can shelve the problems of combinatorial explosion both in terms of meaning and interpretation.

- Cryptic, synthetic, or probing language that in some eastern religious contexts is considered 'twilight'. This is language that can indeed be used by huxters and snake oil salesmen but when used in good faith it's an attempt to send a probe out into places that words haven't penetrated that well to date. It's the desire to jump into a submarine, dive into the intellectual, mythological, and archetypal 'dark matter' of culture, of nature, of the paths and junctions of the escapades and historical accidents of Darwinian evolution which have traced themselves out in reality as strongly as early childhood neural pathways, which didn't necessarily need to be primal highways of motive in the world but by historical accident they became precisely that, thus these tend to be some combination of both blunt facts (like those evolutionary psychology hopes to probe) and more nebulous ones (think depth psychology here) and it's an attempt to - hopefully - pick higher-hanging fruit than what something like physics can give us, and then as we pull it back down it's in the hope that said fruit doesn't dissolve in our hands, and if it does dissolve in our hands it's a signal that what we grabbed wasn't a thing in and of itself but a collection of disparate things that we mistook for something autonomous which means we have to keep trying until we do find solid structures or at least reliable enough relationships to say we've found something.

Both of these approaches are appropriate, the later I think is probably better for one's own private journals or for people like Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jamie Wheel, and Jordan Greenhall sitting on couches (eg. Rebel Wisdom) chatting about cultural potentials and fixes whereas the former is better for the position we seem to be in - ie. realizing that we're in disparate places and trying to figure out what points in common we can start from.

I get that the above was a bit lengthy but - I just wanted to clarify that I think both have their place for different uses.
Empiricist-Bruno wrote: December 24th, 2019, 6:11 pmLet me try and cover some basic facts with you, and hopefully, I will not loose you. First, when you watch tv for instance, you can dive beneath the sea and see what is there on the sea floor (with your oen eyes?) but you don't get wet in the process so is this evidence that all you saw was a lie and make belief? Was that evidence that what you see is arbitrary and you are the ultimate judge in deciding what you saw or did not see? Was that just evidence that you can see what a camera saw?
If you are willing to go with me through these questions, I feel that we may indeed get somewhere.
So starting with the blunt obvious that I doubt we'd disagree on - television stations have broadcasts that they want to show, based on some combination of public attention they'll get, the purpose of the channel (something like Discovery or The Learning Channel would be likely to host something like this on an oceanography show), and the mission statements and attitudes of those channels will curate that content. When you see someone bringing a camera underwater to show something - like a coral reef, like sharks, octupi, various fish, sharks, etc. you're potentially getting an educational lesson, it's probably going to be a bit weak because it has to be marketable for people who aren't in masters degree programs for marine biology, in other cases it may be someone simply showing their scuba diving vacation in Cozumel, Cairns, or something like that.

If I see underwater footage on TV, for me at least, there's an a priori understanding - one that happens subconsciously without deliberation - that I'm seeing mechanical capture of a quite real place on earth and it's a place where if I hop on a plane, fill out my travel visa, go to the right scuba shop, rent gear, and dive in the same place I'll see the same physical features - variances in living organisms like reef (or if we were talking about terrestrial places - trees and the like) are a given based on how much time lapses between when the TV show was shot and when I actually decided to go.

Here's actually a very good real life description of something that I did back in August. I found pictures of Moraine Lake in Banff, Alberta, so breath taking and had Moraine Lake as a computer background wallpaper so often that I actually decided to put the money down to take a tour - flying into Calgary, going to Banff, Jasper, Mount Robson, and out through British Columbia to Victoria and Vancouver. I took close to 3,000 pictures, I knew I was going somewhere very scenic and it did every bit as much for me as I remembered my trip ten years prior to Australia and New Zealand having done for me when I saw places like Milford Sound and the park lands which lead up to it.

Were my various pictures of Moraine Lake just like everyone else's? Not exactly. I had certain shots (like on to of the 'moraine' rock pile) which were probably 99% similar in terms of camera angle to other people's most popular shots of the lake and mountains. I also made a point to walk up what would appear to be (from that vantage point) the right side of the lake and take as many pictures from other angles as I could. Clearly the time of year matters, degree of cloud cover matters, because you'll get different colors, different 'feels' to the pictures, and I'll add that the rock flour in the water which makes the images of the lake itself so impressive can range from turquoise to a greener color based on how much sun you have.

The above experiences did map on well to my expectations, the variances that I saw between the Moraine Lake that inspired me to plan a trip to Banff and the Moraine Lake I actually saw were - and I'm going to say this carefully (we can unpack this later) 'within tolerance' of what I expected. The most immediate things I mean by 'within tolerance' which I could offer right now is that the weather was conducive to going out and taking a walk (Maligne Lake in Jasper - different story), the only major variables that can dilute the value of such a view - which I learned going to Milford Sound - is if the scenery on the bus or car ride to the point of interest in and of itself is so beautiful that by the time you arrive at the point of interest it's actually anticlimactic, and that's not a matter of having arrived somewhere like the beach in Dark City and realizing it's just a painting on the wall - it's a problem over-exposure to certain sort of landscape geometries that our brains process as deeply meaningful or significant (I think this has implications when you see it in the patterns of consistent rock layers in the same way you see loads of fractal geometry in great cathedrals such as Notre Dame of both France and Montreal).

One thing I will say, notably, about pictures vs. actually being somewhere - and I'd say this about film as well - I'm sure that if I saw an oceanography show, jumped in the water at the same place and saw those things with my own eyes the one thing that would be different is quality of depth perception and distance, that's something that clearly gets flattened or lost with 2D film. Hollywood has tried to fix that with 3D movies and a very obvious place where that made a differences - seeing Avatar in both 2D and 3D where seeing it in 2D the floating rock climbs were much more claustrophobic where they were less so in 3D.

I doubt that will directly answer your question but I hope it will at least give you at least some common territory to pry into.
Empiricist-Bruno wrote: December 24th, 2019, 6:11 pmAnd when you describe to me the story of where idiots stand or could stand in the events in question, what I do not get and fail to see is where you and I stand in this narration? Are you the narrator of this story or are you and I characters of that story which I am reading here? When you provide the narration for allegedly real events, what are you really doing? And if you are describing a reality, how can you both be a character of that story and at the same time the story's narrator? So please help me identify where you and I really stand in this real story. Can you really be narrating a story and really act out as a character in that story that you allegedly are narrating? If I am not informed of where you stand in such a narration, then I feel I do not have the means to figure my point and you do not have the means to follow where I am going with this.
So here's a rather big and ugly problem that we can't get rid of as conscious agents trying to describe a universe that we're embedded in. Lets say I have a picture frame in my hands and it's a bit of a magical picture frame in that I can stretch it or collapse it at will to whatever size I want (think of it maybe like a data projection - ie. we're wearing Google glasses and I can transfer the frame I'm drawing to your headset as well).

In the distance we have a crowd of people. I zero in on a conversation between two people, that frame now holds two people. I then see that those two people are technically in a group of six people that they know but they're just having a side conversation relevant to the group more than them - cool, I just enlarged the frame to hold six people. They're actually standing in line to get tickets at the CN tower to get an impressive view of Toronto so now I need to take a few more shots - one of their group and the ticket agent (to show the context of where they are) and if I really want to get acrobatic, tip my camera on its side, I can try to capture that group, everyone else in line, the ticket agent, and enough of the CN tower for you to be able to tell that it's the CN tower without the six people in question being either out of the frame or coming in at too low of fidelity to see who they are or what they're doing (might need to get relatively close to them and then aim upward). If there's a security camera behind us standing there then I have us looking at those six people, those six people, the ticket line, the ticket booth, and CN tower. Now.... if I really want to get wild, I can grab satellite footage of what's happening over Toronto and Mississauga and you'll see a very large container of all these things and far, far, more but you'll lose all of our relevant detail.

In our conversation about idiots online they live on planet earth - so we're all included in that story. We're talking in an online medium, in that sense we're part of a slightly overlapping zone. That we're talking about them explicitly would make us part of a story that some college undergrad might be doing if they're writing a term paper on discourse regarding outrageous news on social media and, unknown to us, this thread could be getting analyzed by said student to compare the range of reactions from knee-jerk to thoughtful, types of responses per assumed age and gender demographic of the user. A story behind that story we wouldn't see is that student's paper getting graded by the professor and the impact on their lives (positive or negative) that the quality of their work, or their relationship with their professor, which would impact the remaining course of their education.

In essence - such frames are essentially arbitrary in and of themselves, and thus separating ourselves out from one story or another isn't an actuality - it's just a tool for contextualizing information or drawing comparison and contrasts between two things that coexist in a larger frame. It's a bit like the statement 'there are 2x' and x can be absolutely anything, it means nothing out of context and it almost seems farcical at this point that the Pythagoreans cared as much about '2' being opposition when in reality the more salient question is 'two what?'. A hydrogen atom consists of a proton and an electron (2 different things but still 2) and it's about the simplest and most common atom out there and its tough to tell whether it's still 2 'things', whether we can void that because a proton is many quarks, or whether the example gets voided because it's two different things, ie. proton and electron, and that the situation only applies if its two identical things. As is nearly always the case context is king.

Empiricist-Bruno wrote: December 24th, 2019, 6:11 pmAs far as you now using the word "drive" instead of "siphon", I would just observe that we are not making any meaningful progress. To "drive" means to push to propel. So, an engine is what drives a car and yet, the most common perspective in our world today is that people drive cars when they obviously do not. We constantly lie with the word "drive" and it renders the use of this word meaningless, due to self and media gaslighting. The truth as to matter if we are to communicate effectively. Unfortunately, ideology and less truth seem easier to sell but that is at our own risks and perils, especially over the long term.
I'm somewhat doubting there is much progress that can be made unless, as I said earlier, a mechanical or civil engineer could show up to this thread and tell us that there's a very precise and narrow word usage accepted as cannon in that industry for what we're trying to describe. Short of that words are rather imprecise tools and even with that all we're doing is looking to an authority as an arbiter of value - which is fine, just that one could admit that aside from brokering word usage agreements it's questionable how much accuracy over and above brokered agreement is actually added.
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Count Lucanor
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Re: Are online Pranks real?

Post by Count Lucanor »

Empiricist-Bruno wrote: December 12th, 2019, 2:11 pm When you start to make a fuss about definitions, you never see the end of the tunnel. For instance, you mention
Count Lucanor wrote: December 6th, 2019, 10:55 pm ...the innocent man assassinated by the police.
Well, the dictionary says that to assassinate you need to have political or religious reasons to carry out the killing. So, when the cops knock on your door and you open and they don't even know who you are but they slay you right away for some reason, it is still an assassination? But you know what, I see what you mean, what you are trying to say and it's okay.
I'm eager to know about that dictionary. In the rest of them, assassination is synonym of murder, homicide.
Empiricist-Bruno wrote: December 12th, 2019, 2:11 pm More to the point of this thread, you mention:
Count Lucanor wrote: December 6th, 2019, 10:55 pm ... There's nothing "virtual" about this. It was a real person, with a real voice, making false claims to real people, through real communication devices, to provoke real actions.
I argue that that the computers that you call with the euphemism "real communication devices" are in fact, incapable of communicating anything to you. I think the fact that you aren't getting the gist of my message proves my point here.
I clearly stated "through real communication devices", not "by real communication devices". The communication devices are real devices that channel messages.
Empiricist-Bruno wrote: December 12th, 2019, 2:11 pm It mesmerize me to see how some people think that their own "real voice" can be duplicated and heard by millions of others even while they are themselves asleep. Technology really is warping minds.
Should we think that the person behind the Empiricist Bruno nickname has not sent a real message to the one behind the Count Lucanor nickname, because all that Count Lucanor can count on is letters printed in a computer screen? The answer is no. Speech (verbal or written) is a system of sounds, and it implies the intentionality (which also implies wilful minds) to communicate something by way of representational symbols, between actual human beings. I can recognize the intentionality behind the message encoded in symbols that I see printed in my computer screen, so I'm very much justified rationally to think that it is a real message from a real human being. Of course, it can de devised a way to transmit random, non-intentional messages (verbally or written) by non-thinking machines, like the Turing test proposed. But at the level of technology right now, deception is hardly achieved, and there's little evidence that Empiricist Bruno is just a machine. And even so, if that was the case, it still would be a real machine: the "virtual" nature of the message still will be, inevitably, tied to a real, material source, and still will use representational symbols, all of which are materialized in some way they can be perceived by the senses.
Empiricist-Bruno wrote: December 12th, 2019, 2:11 pmYou do view this message as a real message from a real person who logs on to Empiricist-Bruno and use this handle to communicate to you. People who agree to this angle are taking the virtual world for real. For sure, to enjoy being online, you need to act as if the handle you use were you but when you reach the point where you can't tell the difference between you and your handle then I think you have gone overboard.
Actually, your endorsement of the existence of an independent, kind of magical or abstract "virtual world", makes you the one who confuses reality. Prior to the existence of modern communication mediums there were books and newspapers, all of them configuring a sphere of symbolic interactions or encoded messages, but no one goes overboard thinking that their symbolic function makes them unreal.
Empiricist-Bruno wrote: December 12th, 2019, 2:11 pmThere does appear to be a virtual reality and a real world reality and so long as we don't know what the other is experiencing or believes to be experiencing or knows that you can be experiencing either one of these states, then you can't discuss certain subject with them like, what's my real name? I am Empiricist-Bruno. That's my real virtual name. Real world reality does not even exist where Empricist stands. Surely, you can follow me? Somehow, I don't think you can but feel free to correct me if I am wrong. Thanks for your reply.
I think you are equating "virtual" with "mediated by symbols" or "representational" and confusing these with virtual simulation, obviously encouraged by the existence of a sphere of human interaction called internet, which has been called "virtual", meaning that it simulates the interactions seen in other human spheres. Symbols take place or represent something else, and can be in some sense thought of as being "virtual", however, this by no means implies being unreal, false or simulated.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
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