BurtonLucifer's Blogger Blogging

In  my earlier blog  I laid out a model for belief. A minor clarification first: The wording of the definition of belief implies conscious choice. While there is a measure of control over this it is far more common to arrive at the belief via "evidence". The horse 🐎 grenade 💣 is the removal of the quotation marks around "evidence" for maximum faith. When we decide to accept a concept as either true or false we have measured our faith and have passed a threshold of confidence. When we reject a concept the threshold of confidence was not met. This is commonly seen as a lack of belief. It is rather a lack of faith in the belief. The belief is still created, but has little influence in the person's life. This is in contrast to lack of beliefs stemming from never having heard about the concept in the first place. The agnostic equivalent belief is "I don't know" with a side order of "I don't care". After a few run ins I think that maybe s...

Once upon a time in a land far far away was a people comprised of two types; the Normies and the Hip Cats. The Hip Cats were very cool. They always knew the right things to say or do. That made the Hip Cats very popular with the Normies. The Hip Cats were so cool that they could do things impossible for any Normie to accomplish. Normies would flock from miles around to witness the accomplishments of the Hip Cats. And with training, over generations, some Normies were becoming Hip Cats! Pretty soon the Hip Cats were inundated with the mundanities of maintaining fledgling civilizations and were being prevented from being cool and doing cool things. They needed help. So they brought on board a subgroup of the Normies, the Squares to help them out with the day to day tasks. The Squares were ever so smart. They were able to keep track of details and manage the tasks that fell out of running the place. They were very good at long range planning. And being invited into the inner circle of the...

I'm currently working on answering the very important question "how much cannabis can I vape before I die?". Like, lifetime achievement. I've made strong headway over the last 23 years and have established a strong pace that ensures a high value at the end. But along the way and going into the future the looming shadow of cannabis prohibition threatens to reduce the total I can vape to unacceptably low levels. I wish to appeal to you, the reader, to do everything you can to overturn prohibition. Together we can beat the odds and ensure that the total amount of cannabis vaped by yours truly is at the maximum it can be. Thank you for your support.

To find the meaning of life you must find the meaning of life. Which means you have to look. The poor man's solution is to believe the quest ended and no further questing is necessary. Or allowed. And everyone believing otherwise is wrong and all contrary facts must be ignored or vilified and the unbelievers must be slaughtered... As you may be able to discern, I am not a fan of the poor man's solution. It's based on beliefs that aren't true and made illegal to challenge. To find the truth about the meaning of life you must use the truth. So what is truth? There are two forms of truth, objective truth and subjective truth. The goal is to align subjective truth with objective truth. So you need to understand stuff. Like, really understand at least the important concepts if not the details.  So how does one understand stuff? I'm a bit ambivalent about this. Science. Learn how science works. Study science. Become a scientist. Follow science and notable figures in the s...