Dharma Curious (he/him)

Same great Dharma, new SolarPunk packaging!

Check out DharmaCurious.neocities.org for ramblings on philosophy and the occasional creative writing project!

  • 5 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • To be fair, I think this is a Lemmy issues moreso than the broader internet. I could be totally off base there, though. It just seems in my experience that Lemmy is particularly anti AI, while the rest of the Internet seems to be fairly neutral towards the technology as a whole, and potentially upset about the environmental impact and increasing prices for computer components.

    Again, I may be off base, though, as Lemmy is the only social media I use, so I’m not tapped into that side of things.

    I will say, if I notice people use the word “quietly” (as in “it will quietly revolutionize X” or “this has quietly changed my habits”) I do immediate assume it’s Chatgpt. Lol. And for what it’s worth, I’m not against AI in general, I think it’s great as a brain storming tool, a useful way to collect your thoughts, to bounce ideas off of, and to use when stuck on a project. But it’s uses are so limited compared to what it’s billed as that it is in no way this magical gift from on high like some think, but nor is it a completely and totally useless thing. The problem is that it’s being shoved down the throat of every website, device, and user of the Internet at such incredible rates that we’re choking on it. And the fact that it can “talk” like a person means people are anthropomorphizing it and that is very, very dangerous long term to the mental health of humans as a whole.

    My $0.02, anyway





  • Two stories:

    My mom was in a religious school for a few years, and her craziest story was sex Ed, which was mandated in the state at the time. The entire class was “take this shoebox home.” Literally no other instructions. The shoebox contained a mirror and nothing else. It was 20 years later before she realized what the mirror was for, because she wasn’t informed it was a sex Ed class.

    ETA: the school was mixed gender, the classes were not. Girls had separate classes from boys. The mirror was for standing over and seeing that you do, indeed, have a vagina, and then gaining absolutely other information

    I was homeschooled, but not in a religious way. My mom ordered the books the state told her to order. When we got them they were fine, until we got to the science module and it told us how ancient humans and dinosaurs lived side by side. … My mom immediately ordered different books.
















  • Tried to figure out how to post this comment a couple times without it sounding like proselyting my own view point. Can’t manage it. So I’ll just add this here: that’s not what I’m doing! I’m not attempting to convince anyone of anything. Lol.

    I’m a nondualist. Panentheism, to be more specific. I believe that existence is God’s way of experiencing. In other words, we are not just ourselves, and not just reincarnated as the next thing down the line, or spending eternity in heaven. But that every creature, every rock, every thing that has ever or will ever exist is you. You are Ghandi, and you’re also your own mother. You’re hitler, and you’re Stalin. You are God. And in between, after, and before, when you’re in that state of being without limitations, without boundaries and illusions of duality and separateness, you are fully aware of every thing you have been and will be. You understand all.

    It brings me comfort. It has allowed me to come to peace with the fact that I will die some day. It hasn’t given me peace for the people I have lost, but I try to remember them as the forms of God I love best, and the forms of God that knew me best. One day I will be gone, and I will dissolve back into the divine, and I won’t be so sad about losing those forms and those people, because I will be with them, as them, and know them better than I could ever have in this form.

    As a little aside, another way I like to look at this is through a Betty White quote. She once asked her mother what happens after we die, and her mother told her it was a secret. So whenever Betty lost someone she would say to herself “they learned the secret today”

    The secret is that you get to learn everything, at least as far as I believe.