Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

What a curious thing it is to be a strange loop, to contemplate your own existence, or, in this case, to contemplate non-existence of yourself and other things? This, I know, Hydrogen nuclei in the sun fusing to make Helium don't give two shits about their existence, neither do bacteria, or fawns, or ceiling fans, or cement blocks.

The ideal is always a strange thing too. Mathematics works completely fine for most things, but the moment you start imagining "complete logical systems", "ideal programs" that halt when any program input to them halt, you find that your ideal can't exist. Yet, the Hydrogens still fuse, bacteria continue to multiple, fawns prance, ceiling fans spin, cement blocks, not sure what they do in verb form, but they remain heavy I guess...

I recently retook Myers-Briggs and it places me at an extreme intuitive person. MB has scientific issues, but forgetting that, that makes me more susceptible to big, abstracting thinking like this than polar opposite "sensing" people, more concrete thinkers are. However, I've had to learn as a physicist that at the end of the day, things do exist, move around, interact whether I care to ponder them or not, and that I have to sometimes cull my dreaming or ideals and what could be and to look around at what actually exists and think about that too.

I know one guy who thinks like you.

"How do I know that enjoying life is not a delusion? How do I know that in hating death we are not like people who got lost in early childhood and do not know the way home? Lady Li was the child of a border guard in Ai. When first captured by the state of Jin, she wept so much her clothes were soaked. But after she entered the palace, shared the king's bed, and dined on the finest meats, she regretted her tears. How do I know that the dead do not regret their previous longing for life? One who dreams of drinking wine may in the morning weep; one who dreams weeping may in the morning go out to hunt. During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we know it was a dream. Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream. And yet fools think they are awake, presuming to know that they are rulers or herdsmen. How dense! You and Confucius are both dreaming, and I who say you are a dream am also a dream. Such is my tale. It will probably be called preposterous, but after ten thousand generations there may be a great sage who will be able to explain it, a trivial interval equivalent to the passage from morning to night."

- https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zhuangzi

First of all the article is very good. It's packed with very insightful gems. I recommend it.

Second of all, have you stumbled upon an increasing number of articles on this theme lateley?

Well that's because it's autumn. It is that season when nature starts its decaying cycle, and we as part of it, can't escape this process either.

About a week ago my mind simply stopped. I was working on something but it didn't matter. I woke up in this sort of a limbo state and I'm still in it. I feel like doing nothing, it seems that nothing really matters. I just sit and stare blankly for minutes. It feels like a part of me is not here anymore. I know it'll come back, it happened before, roughly in the same period. So I just sit, and I suppose this is a good thing. It's nature's way to remind ourself not to take everything too serious, and detach a bit, you know, breathe the air, smell the flowers, enjoy without worrying...

Never thought of it as seasonal ebb/flow but it figures.

"About a week ago my mind simply stopped. I was working on something but it didn't matter. I woke up in this sort of a limbo state and I'm still in it. I feel like doing nothing, it seems that nothing really matters."

That's... very concerning. I know you may feel like nothing matters right now, but the things you do (and do not do) during this time will affect you dramatically in the future when things start mattering to you again. For the sake of your future self, I hope you're still sticking to your usual routines.

I get similar from time to time. It's not as alarming as it sounds, but for some reason I just suddenly will lose all motivation, lose all will to improve, a kind of feeling that you just want to "exist" rather than do anything important (which is such a polar opposite from how i normally treat life).

I think it's some manifestation of burn out for me, but if I take the cue and take it easy for a few weeks, the creativity and will to improve always comes back.

Thanks for the advise, but don't worry, I didn't completely lost it. I just see it as a rebalancing period after maybe pushing myself too much. However, it's not really burnout and it's not really depression, it's just another part of me that simply wants to enjoy more the things that are around and stop worrying so much about the future.. Life goes on in cycles and this is just a pondering period after a more active one..

That's a really interesting phenomenon. It sounds like your subconscious mind decides that, after a lot of activity, now is the time for meditating and your conscious mind just has to go along with it. Best wishes to you.

"Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;

Man got to sit and wonder, 'Why, why, why?'

Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;

Man got to tell himself he understand."

from Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cat%27s_Cradle)

> MB has scientific issues, but forgetting that

Why? Meaningless test is meaningless. You might as well try to interpret your tarot cards

you might learn something, too.

How do you know that bacteria, or cement blocks, or hydrogen nuclei don't care about their existence?

Because we are the ones who say what 'caring' means.

> "ideal programs" that halt when any program input to them halt

Nit, but this can certainly exist. "Accept program as input, run input program" is one such program.

You can always (eventually) halt and say "this halted" for any program that halts. The hard part is distinguishing "this will never halt" from "this has not halted yet", and that will always be impossible for some inputs.

at the end of the day, things do exist, move around, interact whether I care to ponder them or not

How do you know? Maybe things out of your sight that you don't ponder about cease to exist for brief times.

I don't think the brain is powerful enough to maintain and project state for all the things we can observe these days.

The brain?

I don't think George Berkeley would have attributed that to /the brain/.

If one is considering whether there are objects independent of the objects being perceived, I would think that doubting whether the brain is what facilitates(?) our perception would also be questioned.

Neither is a CPU. A powerful GPU or cluster of GPUs, however ...

Unless there is some way to distinguish "things out of your sight that you don't ponder about cease to exist for brief times" from "things out of your sight continue to exist", I find the latter phrasing easier to reason about.

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