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rockskon | 14 days ago

Humans are not machines. If your goal is to control rather than educate and guide, then we do not have shared values upon which to debate the contours of.

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ben_w|14 days ago

> Humans are not machines.

Were this the case, we could survive any poison or injuries, and discern truth from falsehood, simply by willing it so. We would never fall to drugs, nothing would get fetishised (in any sense of the word), political parties would be evaluated on merit alone rather than which name they proclaim.

And a lot of stage magic just wouldn't work. Special offers wouldn't be in exciting colours, gambling done with the same methods wouldn't ruin people; get-rich-quick schemes would fool nobody; photosensitive epilepsy wouldn't be a thing, and neither would the so-called "god helmet" (which, ironically, had one attempt to replicate the god helmet correlated only with suggestibility): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet

> If your goal is to control rather than educate and guide, then we do not have shared values upon which to debate the contours of.

The guidance I offer is only these:

1) you cannot escape a box whose existence you refuse to acknowledge.

2) The socratic answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing