Oh. They were Licity's straw men, not mine. Supposedly, our transdimensional shape-shifting hidden masters, in modern conspiracy theory folklore? OK.Quote:
Originally Posted by RedfishBluefish
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"So why aren't you doing anything about the lizardmen? ...If you believe in them you have a moral obligation to deal with them."
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I know that they are possible, so believe that they might be actual.
Why do you assume I am doing nothing? And why assume that "beliving in them" (such a loose phrase) gives me enough knowledge to responsibly and effectively (and I also mean cleanly and quickly, if necessary) deal with their unknown actuality?
Problem was, what could or should I do about them, or anything else that is:
- ultimately possibly real insofar as not demonstrably impossible under the best science:
- utterly unknown to me, perhaps unknowable to me (if not to all relevant systems), in general or particular circumstances;
- possibly good or bad in few, some, many or all cases, at different times, from different perspectives;
- more or less quantum-informatically accessible or exposable to or by me under all more or less relevant conditions (which constantly change, and of which I am also mostly ignorant).
Trust me. I have done more than you can begin to imagine. The last bullet suggests the basic approach.
But really, I can't have a "moral obligation" to do anything stupidly or sloppily. Mere belief that all lizardmen are evil doesn't justify you in killing the good ones too. And I don't just have an obligation to do something about the evil I happen to actively believe actually exists. I have an obligation to do what I best can about everything that is evil, and that might be evil, and with the circumstances creating that evil.
Well? What to do?
First, you need a good ontology: discipline, and supple good logic; extensive factual and theoretical knowledge; based on this, a solid and systematic understanding of how things exist, exchange, combine and relate.
Second, understand that everything in all the universes are connected informatically, through various information-bearing media of various capacities and characteristics. You can use your own mentations, your directed attention, to inform, expose, encompass, catalyse ... information in other systems. You are a channel. A node. Use it with care.
Third, practice the ability to think and act in a way that is both probabalistic (conditional) and actual (final). Every object suggests its opposite. So it is a fundamental problem: how to both act and not act, to address and ignore, to save and destroy. One has to "multiplex", so to speak. And how to do this in real time: to multiplex in the present now in which I "do" it, but in a way that also encompassed all relevant actor time-frames (and excludes the irrelevant or unproductive).
Believe it or not ... I have my methods.
PQ
