TheEternalDutchman

Nedersaksisch en man van het platteland
Dutch-Saxon and man of the countryside

[TheEternalDutchman @DutchmanEternal]

@ob_nl Er bestaat in Nederland weldegelijk dezelfde soort emotionele verbintenis aan Israël als in de VS. Die Bergturk van de VVD ging compleet door het lint toen Douwe Bob een akkefietje had. Dat het probleem geen AIPAC-formaat heeft betekend niet dat CIDI geen probleem is

[Dwarsligger @dikwijlsdwars]

@melkgenieter @PunishedLuddite @BrentHadderingh Ze hebben gewoon geen benul van bredere plaatjes en de doorwerking van beleidskeuzes. Ze zijn tegen de gevolgen, maar vinden de oorzaken wel prima zolang het niet te gek klinkt.

[TheEternalDutchman @DutchmanEternal]

@dikwijlsdwars @PunishedLuddite @BrentHadderingh Het zijn boemers, ze zijn per definitie van gisteren

[TheEternalDutchman @DutchmanEternal]

@UnstableSudaca Dit maar dan met criminelen en de kosten die ze maken in de verzorgingsstaat met de jaren die ze geschoold zijn

[TheEternalDutchman @DutchmanEternal]

@wierdduk Als dat je standpunt is, waarom zou je dan als politiek commentator serieus genomen willen worden?

[v. Stormberg @VanStormberg]

Heel goed. Zeer eens. Schaf artikel 1 van de grondwet af.

[TheEternalDutchman @DutchmanEternal]

@PunishedLuddite verwerp fatsoen, omarm gezelligheid!

[TheEternalDutchman @DutchmanEternal]

@RosasMarysol2 Jij bent de reden dat Nederland is zoals het is, en je klaagt er ook nog eens over

[Wie Dan ook🍃 @PunishedLuddite]

3000 laiks van verstandig rechtse mensen.
"hardwerken" is jezelf succesvol een erfenis in lullen. Nederlanders zijn zulke aandoenlijk naïeve mensen.

[TheEternalDutchman @DutchmanEternal]

@PunishedLuddite Dit kunnen ze gewoon niet bedenken. Ja, een belasting heeft een ontmoedigend effect, maar het moet wel eerlijk zijn hé

[Wie Dan ook🍃 @PunishedLuddite]

Toeristenbelasting is mooi en goed, ze moeten alleen geen percentage heffen maar een vast bedrag. Dat schrikt backpackers en Britse vrijgezellen harder af. Nu komt de hoogste rekening te recht bij de rijksten, die rijken moet je juist een beetje ontzien.

[You Kipper @ukipperlad]

🚨 NEW: FROM ME

🧩 BOWDEN'S JIGSAW: PUTTING THE PIECES BACK TOGETHER

CASTING AN EYE ON THE BRITISH RIGHT

SPOILER: it's all higgledy-piggledy and pell-mell

🔗 LINK: https://t.co/fmGwjNqXbB

[TheEternalDutchman @DutchmanEternal]

@ukipperlad A very lucid take on party politics. One strangely more lucid that a less majoritarian one than we have here. Genuinly fine work

[TheEternalDutchman @DutchmanEternal]

@PunishedLuddite Als het op observeren aankomt, komt gelijk overal vandaan

[TheEternalDutchman @DutchmanEternal]

@fatsoenfuhrer blikkendag.mp3

[TheEternalDutchman @DutchmanEternal]

@PunishedLuddite Dit soort mensen zijn het probleem. Deze houding heeft ons hier gebracht

[TheEternalDutchman @DutchmanEternal]

@novusolus Cambrinus >>> Dionysus

[Jason Reza Jorjani @Jason_Jorjani]

For my first few years at Columbia, that is, before the events that transpired on the campus during my senior year in 1968, the closest rapport that I had with anyone was not with a fellow student but with a teacher. After taking several classes with him, I became the protégé of Professor Gerald Feinberg of the Physics department. Gary was a dynamic lecturer with a dazzling ability to convey complex theoretical knowledge in a way that could even be compelling to laymen. He would go on to make a career out of writing books that popularized the promise of science and technology for transforming the human future. Gary had penetrating and mischievous eyes that reflected his visionary genius, but for such a farsighted man he was also exceptionally kind and patient. By the time I was writing my senior thesis paper on the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics under his advisement, he had become my friend and not just my teacher. Gary had me over for dinner at his home on more than one occasion. We would often have coffee together around Morningside Heights, especially at his favorite Hungarian pastry shop across from the Cathedral of St. John.

My thesis already marked a transition from Physics into Philosophy, and if a less philosophically minded Professor than Gary Feinberg had been my adviser, I doubt that it would have been approved. Not only did Gary approve my thesis, but he also urged me to take a few more philosophy courses, stay an extra year at Columbia—a decision that would prove fateful — and secure a second major, in Philosophy, before graduating in 1969. My thesis argued that the MWI of Hugh Everett was incoherent because it denied free will, which is the precondition of even the most basic intentionality required to frame any testable theoretical model of physical phenomena.

Basically, the idea was that if the quantum uncertainty of probability functions was resolved in every way that it could possibly be, but that this was hidden from us because each resolution of a wave into a discrete and measurable particle took place in one of infinitely many parallel universes that are isolated from one another, then no ‘person’ in any one of these universes—including ours—ever really made a choice about anything. If our brains are made up of quantum particles, then what seem to be our trains of thought, let alone our decisions, are actually just the random outcome of wave function collapses. In every one of the parallel universes where there is a version of us, each of us thinks everything imaginable and makes every ‘decision’ leading to every action that we do not ‘choose’ to do in the other universes — including this one.

The moral implications of this are monstrous, but even just on an intellectual level, it makes nonsense out of rational thought. The kind of reasoning involved in developing a scientific theory, which must be testable in practice — in other words, through meaningful action — is a cognitive process that is intrinsically intentional. It requires some basic level of free will, even if this will is massively conditioned by all kinds of contingencies — physical, biological, psychological — beyond our control. It still has to be the case that the scientist has some cohesive agency, which is impossible unless he has an individual character defined by a coherent trajectory of meaningful choices that reflect his persona, aims, and interests. That kind of agency is precluded by the MWI of Quantum Mechanics, and so the theory itself is incoherent because it denies the ontological or epistemological preconditions of any meaningful scientific thought as such.

Far more interesting than this thesis is what came out of it in terms of my relationship with Gary. Feinberg found the paper fascinating for two reasons that were very relevant to his own work. The first was that it considered the scientist as a type of person and science as an activity in humanistic terms or from a perspective that I later realized was “existential.” Feinberg was hardly an existentialist, but at just that time he had been developing a Promethean vision of the social task of the scientist to expand and explore the horizon of the human potential for future evolution. The second thing about my senior thesis that appealed to him was its implicitly non-reductionist view of the relationship between consciousness and physical phenomena. My argument at least implied that we needed a new Physics that, even if it did not abandon materialism altogether, would allow for an account of human thought and intentional action that described the mind as something more than an epiphenomenon of physical mechanisms. Gary was also looking for this and had been so bold as to seriously consider Parapsychology research as a domain wherein he might find evidence for it.

Before coming back to Columbia (where he studied), Gary had been a member of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton University and garnered a security clearance at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. Only those closest to him knew that this had brought him within the orbit of private think tanks and secret policy advisement groups with access to classified projects. Later, these groups would also grant him entrée to Rockefeller University, where he worked part-time in addition to his teaching responsibilities at Columbia. This nexus of clandestine connections was the matrix for Gary’s monumental 1967 paper in Physical Review on the “Possibility of Faster-Than-Light Particles” and his monumental 1969 book The Prometheus Project: Mankind’s Search for Long-Range Goals. The 1967 paper postulated the existence of a type of quantum particles that Feinberg named “tachyons,” which he proposed were the physical basis for the hitherto anomalous mental abilities of precognition and psychokinesis. The 1969 book was nothing less than a proposal for a techno-scientific elite to take control of the world and guide a unified humanity into the achievement of Promethean goals such as radical life-extension (including by means of cryonics), the development of superhuman intelligence (by means of both genetic engineering and computational cybernetics), and colonization of the entire solar system. During the whole period in which Gary developed this vision, from 1966 through 1969, I was his protégé and confidant. Though I admit that in 1968 and 1969, my attention was more than a little divided.

– Jason Reza Jorjani, PSYCHOTRON

[TheEternalDutchman @DutchmanEternal]

@UnstableSudaca what?