this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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Again. Nobody is saying there is a definitive starting point of "In the year 0 ICBA, the first homo sapien was born". There fundamentally cannot be without omnipotence.
But... there was. Or, to be less precise, there were probably multiple definitive starting points before one took hold.
Yes. The individual was, potentially, "evolved". But the population "reverted" back. That doesn't change the fact that there was an individual who had reached the next stage. Because... a mutation/defect is isolated until it isn't.
But for the purposes of a thought experiment/"shower thought"? Yeah, there was very much a point where a single human existed. We just will never know beyond "it probably happened in this very large span of time".
Which is actually how most science works. You cannot ever know what the first molecule in a rockslide to start moving was (without, again, omnipotence). But you can decrease the granularity and understand what the first rock to fall or even what part of the rock tipped over first and so forth.
For all scientific and "meaningful" purposes? That is sufficient and it is just not worth even discussing which molecule "started it".
For the purposes of philosophy and thought experiments? There was very much a first molecule. It just doesn't matter outside of that domain.
Unfortunately that's still not quite right.
Individuals cannot evolve, but more importantly there is no "reverting back" evolution moves in one direction. It's the slow slow change in the genetics of an entire population.
Additionally, rocks slides and evolution are not really comparable. As you said only one rock needs to fall to cause an event that has a definitive start and end. Evolution is an ongoing proccess that never ends and it is infinitely more complex than a rock slide. The issue is we as humans are attempting to categorize an ongoing never ending proccess.