My 5T has been my daily driver for years. I’ve replaced the battery & USB port on it once so far, and that’s it. I’ve also run LineageOS (rooted + Magisk) since day 1, which I agree is its own set of challenges. Seriously no complaints and I’m not really shopping for anything more right now.
If the Fairphone 5 specs are solid I may take the plunge, but for my needs nothing else out there has been compelling enough to make a change.
Abandon the philosopical concept of an independent thinking mind capable of evaluating something by itself.
“Decisions” and “Thoughts” don’t exist without the environment, as they’re a succession of neuronal activation cascades in response to the current state of all stimulus, the previous connections formed in your brain, and reinforced patterns.
Leave a human being in an empty void and their thoughts will be built by severely boosting sensitivity and then responding to random sensory noise. Sever all sensory connections and the mind shuts down.
If anything it’s the reverse I’d think. Just look at books without a Happily Ever After and how that’s looked down on, and why its a requirement for Romance publishers.
Romance isn’t exactly a respected genre. Misogyny has a lot to do with that but the genre’s tendency towards formulaic tropes doesn’t help.
And before you get to the Happily Ever After? It has to be a rocky road, with a break-up. It’s almost like the HEA has to be earned through pain.
You've stumbled upon the basis of the debate between free will and determinism. imo, we are merely under the illusion that we're making our own choices. The universe is one infinitely complex system of falling dominoes, with each choice and action just being the result of the parameters set by the ones preceding it. We are all made up of the same basic building blocks, and are thus just subatomic systems obeying the laws of thermodynamics... it just happens to be the case that when a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it is able to think about itself - we are quite literally the universe experiencing its own existence.
Why is this? I don't know. Nobody knows. Consciousness and 'the ability to experience' is one of the most elusive and complex questions facing science and philosophy today. It's my personal belief that there is certainly 'something' more to this whole cosmic experience, but I'm not convinced by religion's answers and believe 'it' to be something so vastly incomprehensible and foreign, we'd never understand it even if the mystery were revealed to us. It isn't something I like to think about too deeply, because unfortunately, it opens up an infinite regress of questions we will likely never have the answers to.
Quite frankly, all of them, as in literally all of the levels. e.g., viruses are not considered "alive" in the classic sense, but they sense things sometimes & change their behavior accordingly. A single protein can do it too, like in mad cow disease / scrappy (called "prions"). Even a tiny snippet of DNA can make logical circuits akin to computer ones, implementing AND, OR, XOR, NOR, operations etc., plus feed-forward loops (& feed-backwards, and all other sorts).
Possibly even subatomic particles, and maybe even quarks (or strings?) do the same - e.g. the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle where you start to interact with something and then that changes it already so that you cannot measure other aspects of its previous "natural state". Okay that's not so much a "decision" as a "reaction" - but as you are questioning, what really distinguishes the two, REALLY?
Bacteria can sense a molecule (like sugar), literally start growing a tail (no joke!), and then swim towards it. All entirely chemically, and we have the technology to literally just kinda 3-D print all that at the molecular level (it takes an existing flagellum but once that is added to the mix, it can grow just like a crystal, by extension / copying of the old pattern).
Most of what we considered to have made humans "special" in the word turned out to be false - e.g. chimps & gorillas can "talk" (it's hard for their throats to make our kinds of sounds, but given the right apparatus they can get the job done), and think in abstract terms, and do math, and all kinds of things. Of course, humans ARE special - we are the only things on planet earth that if aliens came, could attempt to nuke them in orbit, and we literally light up the night sky! But there's a whole continuum of "dust" that share a lot of properties with us, in various ways. I'm not sure if animals have the same kind of subconscious vs. conscious interplay going on as we do, but if you have a pet and stare at it trying to work through a decision, you KNOW that it's doing the same as us, at a fundamental level. And then each time you go a level deeper, the similarities kinda never end...
Such questions may never even find answers, at least in our lifetimes, but it sure does seem worthwhile to ask anyway... it sharpens us, so keep digging!:-)
Life isn’t exactly an “accident.” Your parents had to make a deliberate choice to have sex. Now, there is some sort of probability involved in the chances of pregnancy, which sperm cell creates a new person, and that new person actually surviving all the way to birth and beyond. But ultimately I wouldn’t call life an “accident” outside of some very specific scenarios involving the parents. Your parents chose to create a new person, and that new person was you.
The purpose of life? Who’s to say? Ask ten people and you’ll get ten different answers. Some people spend their entire lives trying to answer that for themselves, others ignore it entirely. It’s a question only you can determine the answer for yourself. But my answer to the question will likely be entirely different from your answer.
But ultimately I wouldn’t call life an “accident” outside of some very specific scenarios involving the parents.
We spilled chocolate milk on our clothes then decided to put them in the wash. Then I decided to do some roller skating around the house while your mom did her aerobics routine, and, well, let’s just say there was a collision.
Some people can. In the bonus material for the LOTR extended edition, Elijah Wood talks about how he can fall asleep virtually on command, and this comes in very handy in film acting, where you often have many periods of waiting in between being able to work. Other cast corroborate this, commenting on seeing him sleeping frequently.
If you’re already using Nextcloud, it has a chat w/ video chat as well.
Matrix / Synapse / Element.io is also pretty cool. The UX might not be on par with what some family expects though. I don’t know if voice/video chat is built-in yet or not, but it was at least an option before.
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