I used to be young, but now I’m just immature
rosyatrandom
Karma: 179
Yes, and also no.
That is, there are Boltzmann Brains that represent my current mental state, and there are also ‘normal’ universes containing ‘normal’ brains doing the same thing, and there are probably a bunch of other things too.
All of them are me.
I was already going to respond simply that your friend believes these things because they want to believe them. They have to want to be rational.
As for me, I don’t put rationality above all things, because I think it can be something you delude yourself into both idolising and thinking you’re attaining; you can become something like a paperclip maximiser because you’ve convinced yourself it’s logical. After having been something of a virulent atheist rationalist many years back, I realised that many of the people on my ‘side’ were in fact narrow-minded and often heartless gits, and some of the religious folk were warm, funny, and very open-minded; faith for them was more of a matter of how they wanted the world to be, a matter of aesthetics and drive.
So, basically, if your heart’s not in the right place, who cares how rational/right you think you are? That certainly applies to your friend.
I just used whatever I had on the shelf—the only recommendation I would make is to go for strong, personally-familiar scents. Pine tree, cinnamon, lavender, jasmine etc.
My observation: cocaine turns normal people into arseholes and arseholes into even bigger arseholes.
My conclusion: I would never recommend it to anyone, and certainly never try it again.
Sniffing strong essential oils seems to have helped me regain at least some of my smell and taste
Before I say anything else, a couple of quotes from Pratchett’s Night Watch:
‘You haven’t killed your wife,’ he said. ‘Anywhere. There is nowhere, however huge the multiverse is, where Sam Vimes as he is now has murdered Lady Sybil. But the theory is quite clear. It says that if anything could happen without breaking any physical laws, it must happen. But it hasn’t.[...]’“He wanted to go home. He wanted it so much that he trembled at the thought. But if the price of that was selling good men to the night, if the price was filling those graves, if the price was not fighting with every trick he knew … then it was too high.
It wasn’t a decision he was making, he knew that. It happened far below the levels of the brain where decisions were made. It was something built in. There was no universe, anywhere, where a Sam Vimes would give in on this, because if he did then he wouldn’t be Sam Vimes, anymore.”And that, basically, is it. We are who we are, and our minds, our personalities, our very natures, our sense of morality and aesthetics… you cannot simply swap them out without changing who we are.
Being human, and being you-in-particular, entails certain ways of looking at things; morality is part of that. Is morality part of reality, then? It’s part of you, and you are part of reality.
Can we develop a drug that makes people afraid of people who suggest making drugs to make people afraid of something?
I’d say that the normal temporal dimension we impose on reality is related to, but not the same, as the kind of time that underpins our consciousness.
As you say, memory is a process, not a static snapshot; the act of being sentient cannot be usefully be broken down into a sequence of mind-states based at instances on the timeline.
But perhaps there can be something more like a dynamic snapshot; atomic slices of consciousness that span over normal time, and represent a combined state/process from which ‘this moment, this thought, this feeling’ can be abstracted.
There’s lots of ways to twist the kaleidoscope and interpret the underling structure, and they’re all (of course!) related to each other
That wasn’t an attack. It was a judgement.
they value safety of strangers higher than their own safety, and want to take the vaccine for the sake of all the people at risk in the society.
Quite apart from the actually low personal risk from taking a vaccine, why does this strike you as odd? This is perfectly normal and good human behaviour, and if you don’t share it there is probably something quite a bit wrong with you.
He’s a smug little Tory shit who fucked around and got found out.
That’s my thoughts on him.
That’s basically lucid daydreaming, then?
Trying to do that reminded me of something I used to do as a kid: I would watch static on TV, and find myself constructing imagery from it. Usually, it would be like traveling over landscapes, or a rotating/panning view over some entity, and the quality of the visuals would be like line drawings.
The reason I remember that is because my mental visualisations have a very similar quality. After maybe a ‘flash’ of a fairly detailed scene—or at least the suggestion of one—it rapidly devolves into short-lived abstractions, and only where I’m mentally focusing.
Perhaps what I need is to look at some static again and see if it improves visualisation.
And I tried it. Didn’t help :-/
I have never taken the idea of attempting a memory palace seriously, as although I have a terrible, terrible, memory, I also am terrible at visualising things.
To me, using a memory palace to solve memory issues is like making a speedboat out of coconut husks to escape a desert island. Or, perhaps, the xkcd regex ‘2 problems’ comic.
As, basically, an atheist, my response to the question ‘Is there an all-powerful god?’ is to ask: is that question actually meaningful? Is it akin to asking, ‘is there an invisible pink unicorn?‘, or ‘have you stopped beating your wife yet?’. To whit, a mu situation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative) .
There are a lot of different types of question, and probabilities don’t seem to mean the same thing across them. Sometimes those questions are based on fuzzy semantics that require interpretation, and may not necessarily correspond to a possible state of affairs.
The possibility of a god existing doesn’t equate, to me, to seeing if a possible thing exists or not, but rather whether the set of concepts are in any way possible. This is a question about the very nature of reality, and I’m pretty sure that reality is weird enough that the question falls far short of having any real meaning.
I’m glad someone else thinks so, too. I’d also go so far as to say that our notions of rationality are also largely aesthetic.
Most of civilisation right now seems to be one giant gas-lighting immoral maze, where any effort to point out or mitigate the massive problems we have is sneered at or ignored.
Yesterday, I managed to make an appointment for an ultrasound. However, I’m broke, and it turns out that the particular doctor is really expensive and has really bad reputation online
This is tangential, but part of the problem here is that your healthcare system is evil.
You should be able to see doctors for worries of this magnitude, and get the treatment/checks/referrals that you need, without this bullshit.
It’s only a problem if you want it to be a problem.
There doesn’t *need* to be anyone doing the interpreting, because all possible representations (and the interpreters/ees within) exist for free. I’m comfortable with that. There’s no need to invoke special privilege to make reality more complicated, just because you want it to be. Fundamental reality *should* be simple, on some level, don’t you think? The complexity is all internal.
I used to be heavily into this area, and after succumbing somewhat to an ‘it all adds up to normality’ shoulder-shrugging, my feeling on this is that it’s not just the ‘environment’ that is subject to radical changes, but the mind itself. It might be that there’s a kind of mind-state attractor, by which minds tend to move along predictable paths and converge upon weirdness together. All of consciousness may, by different ways of looking at it, be considered as fragments of that endstate.
Oh yes, ‘real’ is a fuzzy concept once you allow Boltzmann/Dust approaches. Things just… are, and can be represented by other things that also just are...