What question that you've never seen anyone else ask before interests you the most?

Were do viruses fit in the "tree of life"?

9

Outside. They don't have all characteristics necessary for the definition of "life" (they can't reproduce themselves), so they aren't classified as life-forms.

4
Probably as a stripped down bacteria.

2

Why is society so afraid of people purposefully altering their mental state? (In terms of cannabis, psychedelics, anything "mind-expanding.)

And even this isn't something that I've never seen asked, but aside from like Terence McKenna, I don't really know anyone who's interested in it, or even accept the question.

Edit this thread is a case in point. Not one single explanation, just people absolutely terrified out of their minds, parroting bad propaganda and even worse rhetoric. "I don't want my surgeon tripping when he's operating on me." And I don't want my surgeon drunk, and alcohol is legal, and I've never had the issue, because surgeons don't come to work drunk.

Genuinely, I'm tired of answering these "arguments" and no-one will accept how afraid they are, even when not a single soul can explain why.

4

because people in those states can act unpredictably and are thus unreliable. you don't want your surgeon to be tripping balls.

7
- Pffftt these childish and stupid "arguments."
  
  Your surgeon isn't drunk at work now, why would they be any less responsible with, say, LSD?
  
  Only people who've never used drugs think this way, that once you do any illegal drug, you're instantly hooked, can't stop, 247 high and sucking cock for crack.
  
  When you look at any science on the matter, those are simply asinine ideas which aren't supported by any of the evidence we have. Alcohol is clearly the most dangerous drug (well, arguably strong opiates, but it defined how you define dangerous or harmful, but Here's a handy ranking with a chart, comparing the relative harms of drugs.
  
  We've got decades of data to show psychedelics aren't addictive, people only use them a few times a year when they're "actively" using them, they're far safer than alcohol, and have loads of benefits.
  
  Cannabis is also extremely safe, and even when now it's at the point they're starting to admit the prohibition doesn't work, they're still pushing basically sixties propaganda like reefer madness.
  
  We allow people to get wasted on booze. We allow people to beat other people up, as long as its voluntary. There's literally a sport (face slapping) where the object is to just hit the other person so hard you give them a concussion and render them unconscious. Getting voluntary brain damage is fine?
  
  People can modify their bodies, jump out of planes, juggler chainsaws, spit fire, shoot guns for a hobby, celebrate with fireworks, swim in the Drake passage, but me, at home, doing LSD alone and watching great movies from the 60's is illegal.... becauseeeee?
  
  -4
In my opinion it’s because in the past human beings needed to be constantly working or assisting with a group in some capacity in order to ensure mutual survival for the group. Let’s say a village.

Activity which is not seen as being productive or could be construed as lazy has a stigma around it because it casts doubt on your ability to contribute to society.

Obviously none of this applies in the same way these days but there is a kind of primal conflation of intoxicants and laziness. Laziness is bad and so consuming intoxicants turns into a moral issue.

These attitudes are very deeply ingrained and although they can shift a bit as people become more liberal the deep suspicion remains.

2
- Youre assuming there's no use in using intoxicants, but there very much are. Arguably the most important, in terms of larger humanity.
  
  Those "deeply grained" attitudes are the product of 20th century propaganda.
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Binge
  
  In WWI it was completely normal to send your son/friend a package of morphine, cocaine and syringes.
  
  And what I'm talking about is "mind-expanding" substances.
  
  Alcohol literally depresses neural activity and makes it so you lose your coordination and eventually get sedated. It's the most "lazy" substance there is, yet none of these "deeply ingrained" attitudes concern it?
  
  So no.
  
  -1
I think the mindset of a society is hard to change. We do see some progress towards the use of psychedelics for mental treatments which I think is great(at least in my area of the world). Is it enough ? Not to my taste but it's progress. I can't wait for people to have access to that kind of help!

I'm still using mushrooms from time to time to deal with personal issues, trying to find a different perspective on my own, it has helped me numerous times. I think it also helped me reduce my overall stress and prejudice.

I would suggest you also try to find different perspectives on how people got different opinions on the subject. I really don't think being aggressive towards them the way you have been helps anybody. If anything, your opinion/facts are discarded quicker because you dont appear as a respectable source of information. You appear too emotionally connected to the subject. Especially to people who may be scared or closed to those different ideas.

1
- I would suggest you also try to find different perspectives on how people got different opinions on the subject
  
  No offense, but; oh, please.
  
  I find it extremely annoying that people pretend as if I've not listened to or considered the "different opinions". If it even was different opinions. It never really is. That's my point. People don't really form an opinion of the subject as an aversion to it. If I could just relay my personal experiences to you. The frustration of politely bringing the topic up pretty much always ends in people getting extremely upset. And I've worked customer service for decades. I know how to be polite.
  
  I don't need to accept the asinine propaganda being touted as someone's opinion. Like the "I don't want my doctor being high" shit. It's almost as disrespectfully asinine as "if people do LSD, they'll peel themselves as oranges or try to fly by jumping of high rise buildings". No respectable doctor is someone who goes to work high. And if they're a doctor who's not respectable and have a drug issue, they shouldn't be a doctor, but those doctors exist currently. And according to actual science we have on the issue, reforming drug laws to be more liberal really works on addicts, so legalising drugs will actually make it less likely your doctor would be high. Doctors have access to pharmaceuticals all the time, so why on Earth would they need to wait for them to be legal? Them being legal wouldn't make it okay for them to be under the influence at work, just like it's not okay for them to be under the influence now.
  
  See. I have considered their "opinions". More than they have. And that's my issue with it. People get somewhat upset, and then say "have you considered", when it's literally them who are refusing to even consider my side.
  
  If anything, your opinion/facts are discarded quicker
  
  That is a myth as well, btw. Well, according to the flimsy research we have.
  
  What is true however, is that some people will sometimes (or most of the time) perceive neutral attitudes as hostile ones. Unfortunately, not my issue. Where I live, we speak directly. It's in our culture.
  
  However, for that one guy, I'm not really being neutral towards. But this comment, for instance, is completely neutral.
  
  You know who appears too emotionally connected to a subject? People who can't even consider something else than what someone programmed into their brain through shitty propaganda, because they get extremely emotionally upset if they even try.
  
  It's a cold hard fact that prohibition of drugs is extremely harmful towards the planet, and any sort of even indirect defense of it or defense of aversion towards discussing it is bad for the world in the long run.
  
  Imagine if you were suddenly transported to say to the 1800's or something. Imagine how annoyed and disgusted you would be with people who'd get annoyed (or even downright violent) at you for you trying to talk about how chattel slavery is bad.
  
  edit oh I forgot to mention, there's one person that I actually managed to completely convert during a single night. He began touting 60's propaganda. (Literally, he was like 70 or something at the time and this was in 2011 or something.) He was the president of the local Mensa. (Any my coworker, he worked part time essentially.) He actually considered my points. It took a while to get through the propaganda, but once I just posed the same simple questions enough times (and after a bottle of Jägermeister) he suddenly stopped at one point when he was raising his finger in protest, then froze, looked somewhere far and was like. "Huh. I think you got me with that one." And that's how you recognise intelligence. He actually listened, unlike 99% of the population with that extreme aversion to the whole topic.
  
  -1

Stop spamming please?

4

the topics seem good. but posting to two coms is kinda spammy. as opposed to asking in one, then collect answers before asking for further additional responses in another.

2

What are we going do if (and when) it turns out that economic growth is not compatible with environmental protection and yet a prerequisite for political freedom?

Sorry for the bummer of a question but to me the conundrum looks more obvious every day, I really want to know the answer, and yet (almost) nobody is talking about it.

4

I disagree that economic growth is a prerequisite for political freedom. I think that type of thinking has been perpetuated by capitalists to keep capital flowing. Communes and mutual aid don't have great or any economic growth but can allow for political freedoms that we don't even have now.

2
- The counter-argument is that communes are populated by an unusual variety of human being, hence their rarity, and that most people are motivated by less disciplined human goals such as status and material accumulation.
  
  1
Nate Hagens talking with Daniel Schmachtenberger.

Youtube it.

2
- Interesting, will do. I do know of the host's dark take on such matters.
  
  In terms of more mainstream pundits it just really bothers me how many so many of them are obviously intelligent and well-meaning yet incapable of breaking out of the mental straitjacket of orthodox economics, despite all the evidence that its usefulness has run its course.
  
  1
Die

1
- The fun answer is kill
  
  2
Sustainable growth is popular but we are going to need to invest in unpalatable energy sources like nuclear power in order to power it. We also need to make sure recycling actually happens as opposed to local authorities shipping the materials overseas for “processing” (i.e. being dumped or burned).

Human populations tend to decline as an economy becomes more advanced and people are able to plan their families. We are already seeing population growth stagnating much more quickly than expected in countries like China. That will cause demographic challenges so we are going to need to rethink how we manage immigration so it can happen sustainably with public consent.

Lastly, increasing economic output doesn’t necessarily mean consuming more resources. If a country becomes more productive, by for example integrating a new technology, then you can increase output with the same or fewer resources.

1

If you had a microscopic object that took up the smallest amount of space physically possible, what shape is it? What shape is a pixel/grain of space?

3

I think it would not have a shape, or would rather be a zero dimensional point. For it to be any shape, it would have to have features, but you've already defined this as the fundamentally smallest 'thing' so it can't have any features smaller than itself. But you could also probably convince me that it's a sphere. I'm not sure if mathematicians consider a sphere of infinitesimal radius to still be a sphere or not, but treating it as infinitesimal kinda makes sense to me even if it's actually finitely small (the Planck length?)

A more interesting question to me is, assuming positions in space are discrete, which I'm not sure follows from saying there's a smallest possible object, how are those 'voxels' arranged? I don't think that's necessarily equivalent to asking what the shape of the smallest object would be. Pixels on a screen are in a rectangular grid, but the actual elements are circles in some types of screens.

There are a number of shapes besides cubes that can fill 3D space, but do the voxels even have to all be the same shape? Are we even looking for a 3D tiling, or could it be 4D in spacetime, or even higher dimension if it turns out the universe has more than 4 dimensions? Does it have to tile at all, or could it be entirely irregular while still being discrete? Is there any conceivable experiment that could prove any of these things, or is it unknowable?

4
- What you're talking about sounds similar to the Planck length to me. I'm not a string theorist, but my understanding is it is well defined in normal 4D spacetime (where Planck time would be the time it takes a photon to travel one Planck length). Planck length is based only on universal constants (Planck's constant, speed of light, and the gravitational constant), and so any "thing" smaller than that is unphysical.
  
  I think the interesting question is how do we get continuous experiences, measurements, and observations from a spacetime that is fundamentally quantized.
  
  3
- If it is a sphere then, the question that comes to mind (and may in turn inspire the first question) is, how would they fit together? If you cluster spheres together, you always end up with space between the spheres.
  
  1
A string

2
- How could we get three-dimensional phenomenon from string units?
  
  2

If time dilation occurs when the velocity of an object approaches the speed of light and relativistic speeds, do objects experience time dilation when rotating at relativistic speeds? Aren't there pulsars or black holes rotating at relativistic speeds, how would someone's clock near the surface compare to someone a couple AU away from the star not rotating with the object?

3

On the surface of the body, you're moving, so you experience time dilation. Physically this is no different than orbiting The body. The clocks built into GPS satellites need to be constantly adjusted for this reason.

But the question how it works when the surface of a body rotates at relativistic speeds while the core is not moving breaks my brain.

4