Nerd Pride Radio

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I actually prepared a list of addicts and cancer ridden old actors and then Carrie Fisher had a heart attack and I remembered why I just cannot do this terrible thing y'all do, with our minimal knowledge of causality.

I actually considered choosing folks so that they would not die (being generally shut out of raffle/out of my control style contests). But after 2016 that list was too long.

False.

I don't know what game we're playing.

It's false, seriously. You don't know how causality in the universe works and nobody else does either, from the finest physicists on down to idiots like me. And Mancha and Chappie share as much as some of the other movies on your list, so there. Various fouls!

Of course we don't know with an arbitrary degree of certainty how causality works, but we do have overwhelming evidence of how causality works on a macro scale at the energy levels at which human beings live their lives. And to claim that you putting a name on a list or you merely thinking about the chance of someone dying somehow has even barest fraction of a statistically significant change of actually being casually responsible for that person's death is an immensely extraordinary claim requiring immensely extraordinary evidence. To act as if it has a significant chance of being true in the absence of such evidence is a serious misplacement of energy.

Now, in your personal assessment, maybe the cost of a death is so extraordinarily large and the cost of not participating relatively small, so that when you balance it against that vanishingly small possibility that you might actually karmically cause the death of someone you don't know, the price of foregoing an activity you would likely enjoy and probably be very good at is worth it to you. That's fine.

It's not that; it's that I couldn't enjoy it under the circumstances. Death is very strange. It's hard to define, yet it's clearly real and permanent for bodies. Do we understand the nature of our physical existence well enough to understand death, or the connections between causes and effects, or the nature of spacetime, or the status of mathematical truths? I doubt it. Sometimes people die without any prior warning or preparation, and other times they die only after certain things happen. I have known when my loved ones were in mortal danger, across (large for me, but incredibly small, in the scheme of the universe) space. I have experienced the strange empirical experiences that sometimes accompany births and deaths, and im sure there's an explanation in nature, but not one we are near to understanding. My body picks up radio waves, is affected by magnetic fields, and muscles I don't know how to move, deep within my guts, affect my cerebral cortex's decision-making, though perhaps not as much as do parasites and bacteria! We might be in one of an infinite number of universes, encompassing all possible configurations of matter. None of the above observations is, by the way, the slightest bit stranger than Prayer or belief in a God - quite the opposite, in fact. I don't make medical decisions or voting decisions based on things I don't understand, but they do affect enjoyments.