I teach windsurfing and i find my most important task for the first few lessons is to encourage people. It's so hard to do all the things at the same time right and it's easy to get discouraged falling in the water time and time again.

But it's totally fine to keep falling over and messing up. That's a normal part of learning. The trick is to see the fun in the messing up and trying. Someone screaming at you and being judgemental at such a time is the fastest way to kill your fun. I'm sorry that instructor did that to you.

I just want to encourage you to go out and play again, by yourself like you did before your lesson. See if you can find that fun. Don't let one jerk ruin it.

This was such a great read! Thank you!!

Real estate.

They know what they have in the ocean, and don't like people running into them.

It's a double edged sword.

But why are so many surfers such dickheads?

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"Here's a list of things that one day you won't know you've missed Naked in the river, watching planets as they kiss Surfers in the sunlight, dances on the sea Nothin' on your mind, spirit so free" - Karl Wallenger

One of my favorite tunes that includes surfing....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHiOb1toqGc

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The theory of surfing underwater has been critically critiqued by infamous Immanuel Kant, and his sister Candice Kant.

You can learn to surf at your own pace you don't need people yelling and belittling you. However it can be good to have someone to observe you and point out improvements you can make you paddling technique, popping up etc. Just watch heapsa guides

Saying it “might” may seem irrelevant but it’s not technically wrong to claim something might have consciousness. It’s sort of a “definitely maybe” thing as opposed to a “definitely not, a priori impossible” type thing. That’s the tension I’m working between.

There’s probably a continuum of things between a rock and a person, where the possibility increases. I think AI is climbing this continuum as it begins to exhibit emergent properties and agentic behaviors, which it has.

Also consider panpsychism. There is no good reason to be certain that something isn’t conscious. We just don’t know enough about consciousness to talk in certainties. I think doing so is a trap.

There is also no good reason to be certain something IS conscious, except perhaps ourselves, as we experience our subjective reality directly. We should live as if others are conscious but we have to fall short of certainty.

Thanks for sharing. Seems a bit like what Shawn Achor talks about in wiring the brain towards happiness. Train the brain to look for opportunities instead of catastrophes, and it will notice more opportunities over time.

No, I get it. But I think filtering useful tech because of human stupidity and greed when, as a culture we're too complacent to do anything about human stupidity and greed, isn't technology's fault.

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We of course should try to make our kids as healthy as possible,however this technology could have some darker uses and effects,but that's unfortunatley not really preventable with scientific progress

Sure, just one thing: consider a probabilistic argument. There are a quadrillion things out there that most definitely do not have consciousness, from rocks to stars to Clippy. There is only one we know does, a brain, and even then it's disputable that all types do. An argument that anything has consciousness must provide at least the beginning of a reason that it does, saying "it might" is not enough, because the huge, huge majority of things don't.

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Respect you, brother, that you led your thoughts scripted here and I got a fate to see. May you think greater and be greater.
See you in another crusade as an intentional being's journey, or what we called life.

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I think you are missing the point of the rising inequality gap.

That shit was crazy as fuck. I hope that's not how the world works and it was so over complicated there is no way you can prove any of that to be true. Sounds like you believe in karma which I think is a shit system. We just stated that free will is mostly an illusion if not 100% an illusion. The idea of being judged by a cosmic force for something you can't control is childish. I hope the universe does not punish biological robots that have no freewill for their actions. It would be much more intelligent for the judgemental gods to just change the creatures so they don't act in a "negative" way. Freewill is pretty much non existant at the human level of reality and no one can truly point to where it comes from if it does exist. Perhaps it exists at higher dimensions, but not here. So karma is really a higher system casting cosmic judgement on a smaller system that has little to no freewill. I hope reality doesn't function that way. You would figure if karma is real then all fishermen, all pest control and all meat farmers would be riddled with bad luck as they slaughter millions of fish/cow/pigs/bugs ect.

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I took a surfing lesson at the end of last year and had a horrible experience. I haven’t touched a board since and have only really gone knee deep in the water since (and I’m at the beach almost everyday). I’d always wanted to surf, and I borrowed a board and had a blast a week before I took the lesson . . . Then good god, I got a fucking psycho as an instructor and completely lost interest (I really want to try again though).

Idk why I’m telling you this, I’m really not trying to put you off or anything. Just . . . Take your time and research your instructor (that really goes for anything you get lessons in though, doesn’t it?). Don’t be like me and pick for stupid reasons, make sure it’s somebody known for being good with beginners. With all that said, I hope you do take lessons (with a good instructor!) and have fun.

Time on the water gives you time to think.

I'd call it "the moral luck of the initial condition."

As in, when we begin to consider whatever question we are considering, if we have two people who are trying to "do" the same thing, the moral value of them doing it will often appear/be (depending) different based on how they happen to have arrived at where they are, which is often a product of, at best, a great deal of random chance if not other factors.

And, since to an embryo the actions of their parents before they develop are unknowable, the condition at which an embryo becomes a fetus becomes eventually a person leads to the person then relating to something like "how they were genetically engineered" as equivalent to randomness.

Here's an example -

Two mountain climbers who don't know each other have each rented a cabin near the base of a mountain they both plan to climb tomorrow. But tonight, it is cold, and there is a snowstorm. They show up at the office at the same time, and they each get a key to their cabin, and they have to walk up some steep dirt roads to get to their cabins. When they got the cabins, neither of them knew of any sort of details about which cabin was which, they just reserved the one the system said was available at the time.

So they go up the road together, and it turns out the first cabin is only a quarter mile up the road, which is great. But the other cabin is up the hill further, let's say another mile up, in the dark, alone, during a snowstorm.

But then the person with the key to the close cabin puts their key in the lock and it breaks.

So, here's the situation -

If the person who rented the closer cabin forces a window open and goes into the cabin anyway, especially if they don't break it, that's fine. They reserved the cabin, it's their cabin - it's not ideal but given the situation it seems fine.

If the person who didn't rent the closer cabin does the same thing, it is not only bad, it's a terrible crime - even though the person who rented this cabin has never seen it before in their life, this is now their cabin, and forcing the window and going into it is breaking and entering, it violates that person's consent, it might be arguably assumed to be a personal threat, it might cause trauma that will be passed down to future generations, all sorts of stuff.

The point is not that the person who rented the farther away cabin would force their way in - they probably wouldn't! But the situation wherein each of them forcing their way into the window has profoundly different moral implications has come about mostly just by chance.

So yeah, there are a lot of ways you could change this situation, especially for future reference- you could check the cabins in the future to see where they are, you could do a better job of checking the weather report and arrive before the storm blows in, you could bring multiple people and rent a cabin together rather than rent it alone, you could bring a snowmobile with headlights, all sorts of stuff. Some people might even say you should burn down the whole campsite and build one fat concrete tower where everybody has to stay in an identical room.

But none of that helps you now. In this initial condition where you find yourself.

And from there there is an interesting ethical conversation to be had about what "the right thing to do" is for each person, if we assume the second person walking up to the farther cabin alone in the dark in the snowstorm is very dangerous,

For example, you could say that the person who rented the closer cabin really ought to invite the other person in at least until the storm blows over a bit for their safety - that they will call the front desk on the telephone and see if there's a Snocat that can take you up or something.

And you could frame that as either a good thing they should do, or as an obligation they really must do, and then discuss how all that works.

Or, you could also say the person in the second cabin, because of the moral luck of their initial condition, should be excused if they insist on coming into the cabin also even if the first person doesn't want them there - that there is no valid ethical basis for excluding them from doing this because the differences in moral luck are more important than, say, the right of the person who rented the closer cabin to consent to who comes into it or not.

And then what follows is a sequence of events with their own moral significance depending on the situation.

So yeah, I would say

initial condition

moral luck

and then "path dependence" wherein the same events can have different relationships with things like consent, free will, etc., depending on the order they happen in.

That’s exactly what I was thinking. You said it better than me tho.

I think I need to add that Intention just matters to beings in existence. Beings that don’t exist (yet or anymore) [eg. like thoughts someone will have in the future] don’t have any intention. They’re pure information.

And yes just like you said: nothing is everything or is in everything to be specific. I don’t know I it’s judgement but I deeply believe there must be some starting point to the existence of being, and if there’s a starting point there must be something less then 0 too like you said.

It’s nice talking to you about that topic, I’ve had it in my head for a couple years and never knew if anyone would understand what I’m trying to say.