lckdscl [they/them]
I self-identify as an nblob, a non-binary little object.
For not having to remember ports, use a reverse proxy. Keep configuration text files in a repository somewhere, online or offline. Then maybe write an ansible playbook to install all the packages you need and configure as you want. For services that don’t have config files, document in a personal wiki what you do to have it set up.
I currently have a lot of things installed and use a mixture of docker compose files and config files (podman can also use compose-style files). I’ve written down a guide for myself on how to redeploy my whole server and plan to use ansible to reproduce the setup.
Flow charts are also good to visualize the state of things.
Bell’s theorem imposes that a hidden variable theory that makes the spontaneity of quantum measurement unspontaneous is only possible if it is nonlocal.
Nonlocality means two things can be correlated and their corresponding nature be known simultaneously at once due to this correlation. Once you know one, you know the other, without any relaying of information between them.
I agree. While we are finite individually, we can acknowledge the transgenerational flow of ideas and thus treat our knowledge-making enterprises as also constantly developing, so what is knowable can flexibly grow. For me there is little purpose in conjuring up a demon with perfect knowledge or complete systems of knowledge as that is very rigid and undialectical.
The following is rambling so feel free to ignore if it doesn’t cohere, I need to do more thinking and reading about these related ideas to build up my understanding further.
spoiler
As for the second point, I take my experience and train of thought to be real. But it is simultaneously an “illusion” as what is left of my identity and decisions are a result of the sum of lived experience and interactions.
I think I do subscribe to an emergent mental faculty based upon material relations and contexts but this only restrict its form and does not take away its meaning at the emergence level.
Thermodynamics being macro level explanations for lower level statisical mechanics does not render the former meaningless. Its language game and concepts function at its own level, not out of convention but out of an epistemological need as we turn our attention from well-understood equilibrium ideal regimes to less well-understood real life nonequilibrium regimes.
Similarly, the free-will concept might have material grounds but its emergence level is what is experienced, of life events unfolding where one is the subject.
Once I grasp the self, “I”, it ceases to be homogenous and monolothic, but rather becoming a mental explosion of colours and memories and constant reflections of these things. Everything in my past, I can reinterpret (relevant as someone who lived through traumatic events), and this is consciously done, as far it comes to me through active recollection to reframe my trauma and reclaim my youth.
Hence, I reinterpet the freedom of my will not as a moment of “choice”. Life is not merely a series of choices for me personally, but a series of events interpreted and reinterpreted as actions and beliefs immersed in the context at the time. The context influenced me as much as I have interpreted the context to be as such. I am the subject understanding and unveiling my will through my past events as the object of analysis, with full “objective” context included. The concept of a choice as part of decision-making fades away.
Rather I act at any moment with some degree of awareness and through later reflection and metareflection interpret rational “will” from it. I cringe at weird things I did, but at those moments they were fully real and consciously intended. Through these reflections come negations of things I did, but which I don’t want to do no longer. Thus, I elevate my understanding and have developed as a person.
That’s where you might have said it’s more of an observed process, rather than a conscious choice, made there and then. In this respect, I do admit that’s how I have decided to interpret free-will, which is more empowering than a religious or scientific interpretation. I don’t already believe in one-to-one causation in society, so my passage through time being caused by this or that is trivial as nothing I do exists in a vacuum. And I am simultaneously aware of my influences and also that I can be influenced by things I might not grasp through a deeper reinterpretation until many moments (or years) later. The mind at any moment in time is dragged by the flow of time and the material forces pressuring it to keep going, forcing it to move along. Certain things take a long time to be understood well. For this reason, I reject the strong notion of free-will that needs conscious choice at every minor crossroad in life, however these words and definitions might look like in vacuo.
Deconstructing this strong notion free-will will show that it is not a closed concept, ready to be embraced or desired: we need to understand personal ability (this goes hand in hand with philosophy of illness), personal identity, personal responsibility, etc. Come up with rigid, static frameworks for each of the above and you’ve lost the sense of my experience as a human who felt I have steered my life in certain ways, but also have allowed myself to be steered in other ways.
My rambling is not intended for self-validation that I somehow possess a made up free-will; in a revolutionary context I need to want to constantly look after my actions and reinterpret it so that my desire for a better world is not in full cognitive dissonance with my own current state of affairs. It makes sense in my head to want to navigate life as a subject wanting to project myself forward through interpretation of possibilities (either after or before said action) and as an object of nature; as the totalities of things around me and as a physical embodiment in sociocultural contexts. I find there is a balance to be achieved, or made aware of.
How about Uptime Kuma status pages? They’re separate from the admin page and you can add Docker containers as monitors.
From David Bohm in Chance and Causality
Now, as we shall see in this chapter and in other parts of the book, the mechanistic philosophy has taken many specific forms throughout the development of science. The most essential aspects of this philosophy seem to the author, however, to be its assumption that the great diversity of things that appear in all of our experience, every day as well as scientific, can all be reduced completely and perfectly to nothing more than consequences of the operation of an absolute and final set of purely quantitative laws determining the behaviour of a few kinds of basic entities or variables. (p. 37)
But we do not assume, as is generally done in a mechanistic philosophy, that the whole of nature can eventually be treated completely perfectly and unconditionally in terms of just one of these sides, so that the other will be seen to be inessential, a mere shadow, that makes no fundamental contribution to our representation of nature as a whole. (p. 143)
There’s plenty of space to reinterpret free-will (or concretized moments of free-will recognized or experienced by humans, if you’d like) into this representation of nature as wholly infinite and constantly developing.
If you scrap the indeterminism = free-will assumption, you can interpret this way:
- determinism and no free-will.
- indeterminism but genes + environment/structure govern everything, so free-will illusion.
- indeterminism and genes + environment/structure impact culture and cultural learning, but meaning and content delivered through understanding and cognition is still an experience and hence uniquely free to interpret and reinterpret itself, leaving room for some freedom of the will.
To preface, I have no logical or syllogistic arguments against determinism. Many arguments are sophistic or simply ahistorical and undialectical.
Also, I take it that you’re assuming “free-will = indeterminism” and “no free-will = determinism”? I’ll roll with this for now.
Hard (Laplacian) determinism presupposes that you can fully predict the future once you know all the initial conditions. This means all events must necessarily have one-to-one connections between their cause and effect, granted we know the initial conditions and the functions to evolve it. Thus, “knowing what’s likely” is, in my opinion, not convincing enough to believe in metaphysical determinism.
Notice the connection between knowledge and reality here:
The universe could be deterministic for all we know, but we cannot know all the initial conditions to evolve it deterministically for ourselves. Here, if we subscribe to some kind of technical limits to our knowledge acquisition, then we have “seemingly” random or stochastic processes, but governed by completely deterministic processes. Our physical theories have mathematical equations we can solve to connect cause and effects. Sounds too good and simple to be real? From the text I linked above:
Nature, however, is much more clever than this. Towards the end of the 1800’s, mathematicians and scientists began encountering some very difficult equations to solve — some in fact were completely unsolvable. A particularly troublesome set of mathematical equations were non-linear differential equations. Much in the same vein, there existed the horribly difficult and outstanding problem of three mutually gravitationally attracted bodies — the so called “three-body problem” (or its generalization to “n-bodies”).
At first, problems such as these were cast-off as special cases and largely ignored. It would turn out that these so-called “special cases” would bring the birth of a new way of thinking. When these equations were finally studied in detail a fundamental change, which would ultimately overthrow the ideas of determinism, began to occur in mathematics and science. Inklings of the science that would be come to be known as “chaos” began to appear.
So are our theories just incomplete? That there is a deterministic fabric but we are not clever enough to figure it out? If we can’t figure that out then for all we know we do recognize a psychological free-will. One might retort that this free-will is an “illusion” (i.e. not real; doesn’t exist in a metaphysical sense). I don’t like this because I take phenomenology/experience to be first class, not mathematical equations, the latter is chauvinistic and reductive. The content of people’s thoughts and decisions are meaningful to them. One’s action could be interpreted by outsiders as both determined and completely unpredictable, depending on who you ask. If you psychoanalyze someone to “get down to the bottom” of their desires to explain how they are currently, then it functions as therapy, not necessarily something logically right or wrong.
If you say to your coworkers and fellow working class people that their lives are ultimately governed by mathematics and physics, then you either depress a potential comrade from future actions or set the ball rolling for their revolutionary escape (through negating what you’ve just said).
Either way, free-will in the sense of phenomenology versus free-will in the sense of indeterminism are really separate concepts in my eyes.
But then, by accepting the former free-will and being on the fence about the latter free-will, am I conceding that nature-in-itself is truly deterministic and that we’re too dumb to figure it out?
To have a nature-in-itself being deterministic while everyone believes they have free-will, you might subscribe to the existence of a Kantian unknowable thing-in-itself. This, I presume, refers to the ultimate in what you mean by “ultimately no freedom”. In other words, if this nature-in-itself is actually governed by deterministic principles, then we ultimately have no free-will.
But why do we have this assumption of determinism (and scientific reductionism; if we believe from the Big Bang, everything was determined)? Just because our 19th century mathematics and mechanistic physics worked out well then? Why is this determinism a fallback epistemological assumption? Are we just influenced by the way mathematical and physical sciences are taught in schools? That we can know these bits of proofs and derivations once we grasp these abstractions of nature taught by our teachers?
On the other hand, the universe might be infinitely complex and constantly changing. Let’s take this assumption à la Engels: The ebbs and flows of our scientific development is a dialectical grapple with this dialectical nature. The dialetheistic structure of {abstraction}, {negation}, {concrete; production of new knowledge} is not a static method, but manifests itself in how we might choose to best move forward and develop new ways to understand the world.
This means not projecting our assumptions and dogma. Events that have no one-to-one connections between their cause and effect, but rather one-to-many, or many-to-many, are still caused, but they are indeterministic. Quantum physics can be interpreted to be completely indeterministic, but still caused. This is acceptable if one accepts the infinite nature of the universe that allows itself to be captured and abstracted by humans (inb4 occam’s razor). We are to understand it at some certain levels and parts, but not the whole all at once. If we understand this, the “necessity” of one-to-one cause and effect seems like a dogmatic belief that only function to hinder further development. It can be a limiting case of certain physical theories (classical physics), but that is where it ends.
I don’t know extensively about it, but I have engaged with crossover science/biology/economic topics that deal with modelling “rational agents” to derive predictions. I find it overly reductive and hyper-individualist. It uses weird justification from “human nature” and static ideas of “conformity”, “cooperation” and “non-cooperation” that only concern form and quantitative measures, depriving it of symbolic and meaning content. Its games and experiments are hyper static, isolated scenarios where real world implications and (material) relations are cast aside as “irrational” or unimportant factors, whereas for real humans these factors are central to their decisions and worldview.
Many have already said a lot, so I won’t write an essay here. I agree to a certain extent that culture is steered by the US in the popular consumer market. But if you take the center/periphery model of culture seriously (I don’t), then you can expect a lot of niche/scene things to come out of periphery nations and in turn influence the center nations, like US/UK. I can comment a few things:
- Artistic merit lies in the eye of the beholder.
- Just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s good. Likewise, if something that isn’t popular doesn’t mean it’s bad.
- Hollywood has a lot of budget, big music labels in the US/UK have a lot of budget. They can hire experienced producer, promoters, gig/cinema managers etc. to promote and distribute their stuff. Art in the East does not often have the same budget to distribute and promote. This means lack of exposure on the consumer end.
- Lack of local exposure on the artist end. If “Western” music is enjoyable, and Eastern musicians make music inspired from it, what’s the power play here? It’s not necessarily a hegemony, it’s a matter of recognising lineage and historical contingency.
- Watch some USSR movies (e.g. Tarkovsky) and listen to some USSR music (e.g. Kino).
- A lot of Japanese anime/manga also has “unlikeable and selfish main characters, and boilerplate, tropey plots.” Big budget and high incentive to pump out a lot of content will lead to slop, but there’s always a % that produces instant hits and cult-classics.
- There’s a lot of cool and hip Eastern-based music out there, you will have to look outside the top charts though (same goes for Western music). Again, your opinion lies ultimately in the eye of the beholder: I find Hollywood movies too cookie-cutter, and Western top chart music too overproduced and formulaic still. There are small scenes and collectives anywhere, pushing the frontier for arts and media. What about ZA/UM, making Disco Elysium?
- Lots of cool scenes in London/New York come from immigrant/world musicians. Just because it comes from the US/UK doesn’t make it “Western”.
What about https://floccus.org/?