My point though is that you talk about all of that as if it's some sort of chore.

To me, it's a lot of the fun.

I rarely even get to the point of having to stop and weigh choices in my inventory, since every time I come across something new, I have to stop and check it out and try to figure out what it is and what it does and what sort of advantages or disadvantages it might have. I enjoy that. So all along the way, I'm figuring out what I want to or think I should keep and what I want to or think I can get rid of, and not because a finite inventory demands it, but because that's part of the point of playing in the first place.

Broadly, you're asking if other people actually invest the time and energy to sort out how to play complex games. I'm saying that we not only can and do, but that that's a lot of the point. That whole process of sorting things out is a lot of the reason that we play in the first place.

It can never be achieved

Why not?

If an individual can outgrow a need for a mommy and daddy to watch over them and tell them what to do, then so can a species.

But yes - for the relatively short term (in the anthropological sense), such a system is effectively impossible, so yes - "the goal should be to get as close to it as possible."

And in fact, the only way that it can be achieved is incrementally, as ever more individuals reject the whole concept of institutionalized authority. Eventually, a point should be reached at which the view that it's illegitimate is so widespread that those who claim it will no longer be able to exercise their claim.

Or to put it in simplistic and not-really-accurate terms, the claim "I'm the President of the United States" will be as ludicrous as the claim "I'm the Emperor of the Universe," and will be treated with the same disdain.

We will never achieve total post scarcity.

I agree.

The extent of the universe as a whole might well be infinite, but the extent of the resources to which humans can have access most assuredly is not.

We can never eliminate institutions of authority

I disagree.

I not only think we can - I think that unless we destroy ourselves first, we inevitably will.

Again, it's akin to an individual outgrowing the need for a mommy and daddy, just on a broader scale.

For example, we can never eliminate the police force, as there still would be some sociopaths who we would need protection from.

Except that the police are ever more likely to BE sociopaths than to protect us from them.

That's the exact problem I mentioned in the last post - hierarchical authority effectively rewards and thus selects for sociopathy.

People with morals, principles, integrity and/or empathy will have things that they'll refuse to do.

Psychopaths don't have those constraints - if so inclined, they're willing to do absolutely whatever it takes to get what they want.

So all other things more or less equal, psychopaths actually have a competitive advantage in hierarchical systems.

Which is exactly how and why "power corrupts."

So in conclusion, am I right in considering the communist utopia as a singularity?

Roughly, though it would be more accurate, if less appropriate to this STEM-obsessed era, to call it an "ideal."

I suspect that it's not an accident that it's so memorable.

Throughout the movie, there's all of this plot stuff going on. That's of course to be expected, since that's what movies do.

But at the same time, there's little bits and pieces of the theme song coming together in the background.

Then the story ends dramatically, and with a touching and heart-warming coda, and what's the Lectroid's reaction? "So what? Big deal."

Then the closing theme plays. And that's the real culmination of the movie.

Ah... that was worth waiting for.

I think we can safely assume that we're going to be seeing a lot more of those two women at the community center - they're too detailed to be throwaway characters. And I'm looking forward to it - Ri-chan with an ara-ara onee-chan and a little, sharp-eyed tsundere should be good.

I guess if you want to just sort of vaguely gesture toward things that were very obviously the point and focus of the novels, and things that they do better than the vast majority of books, and instead lament the nominal failure to expand on side issues that aren't even relevant to anything else, then you're free to do so. I really don't see the point though.

To me, it's as if you're looking at Van Gogh's Starry Night and saying, "Well yeah, the colors and texture and movement and composition are all great and all, but I'm just disappointed that there aren't any people in Victorian dress in it. And not even one madonna and child!"

I think this puts consciousness on too high of a mystic pedestal.

I think that one of the most common ways by which the devotees of reductive physicalism try to make it appear to be a valid position is by positing a false dichotomy by which they then sneeringly characterize anything that's not simply physical as "mystic."

What makes you think that it is impossible to observe someone else’s consciousness?

The fact that it's an emergent phenomenon with no physical manifestation.

I think we'll be able to (and in fact we already can to some notable degree) track neuronal activity in a brain and map it and interpret it, so we can make reasonably solid guesses regarding its nature - general type, intensity, efficiency and so on - but we can never actually observe its content, since its content is a gestalt formed within and only accessible to the mind that's experiencing it.

There's nothing at all "mystic" about that - it's simple logic and reason.

And, by the bye, it's also much of why actual philosophers rejected reductive physicalism almost a century ago.

On the contrary, a volunteer army allows the ruling class to prosecute wars without risk to their own families.

As does conscription, since there are always exceptions made for that explicit purpose.

So that works out the same either way.

If a war arrives that is necessary, justified, and also has broad support among the population there will still be those who avoid fighting because they know that others will do so for them.

Yes - there will always be such people. The issue is how many of them there would be.

I would say that a nation that's unhealthy enough to have so many such people that they would make the difference between winning and losing deserves to lose.

You can make a similar argument about taxation. By your logic payment should be optional, since a society that genuinely wants to be just and fair should also voluntarily want to give money to achieve that.

Yes, and I in fact would. And with the same proviso - any society that would fail as a result deserves to fail.

In your example though, I would argue that what that actually illustrates is that the establishment, maintenance and expansion of institutionalized hierarchical authority, and particularly through military means, is fundamentally evil.

It's not that evil has an advantage broadly, but that evil essentially axiomatically has an advantage when pursuing fundamentally evil ends.

Or in simpler terms, the disadvantage good people would have in war is not an argument against good, but an argument against war.

At the moment, I have... seven, I think. I mostly use two - one at kbin and one at lemmy.ninja. I have one at lemmy.world that I check in on occasionally, but there's generally too much junk to wade through there. And I have one at lemmy.nsfw for... you know... stuff. The rest are languishing.

I just open them through my browser. I have a tentative plan to switch to an app, but I'm waiting for them to get a bit more settled first, and really the browser works fine.

I find each instance to be a different experience, so I just switch between them as I see fit. And I'm still looking for at least one more - something deliberately scholarly and sedate.