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0 pointsomnicognate3y ago0 comments

There are many rational reasons for a person to see these questions differently to you and plenty of explanations of those reasons around. You may disagree with them, but to claim that differing views must spring from phobias or other irrational mental states rather from a different assessment of the evidence is baseless ad-hominem. I would strongly recommend avoiding statements of that form in general as they achieve nothing good.

I could make a similarly disrepectful and unsupported claim about the mental state of people who believe most human creative activity is simply recycling learned ideas, and we could spend some time flinging insults at each other, but why?

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donatj3y ago

Hear me out. In the most basic sense, to believe the mind a box that can output things not based on input is inherently to believe it "irrational" in the truest sense of the word.

It is to believe the mind to be non-functionally pure[1] in the programmatic sense. Output based somehow other than purely on input.

And if that's the case, the question is where does that irrationality come from? A random number generator? Any developer knows there's no such thing as actual random. It's all either list based or based environmental aspects.

I don't see room for an argument to be made that the human mind isn't just mixing ideas/the environment that doesn't rely on some form of magical thinking.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_function

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