564 karma · joined October 21, 2010
Research shows they will get slightly less of your antibodies, which if I understand correctly translates to one or two less cold viruses in the first year.
Arthur! I love you buddy! And I am also allowed to not like being a parent, it's a weird thing, but trust me it has nothing to do with you, you are the best! The best analogy I can give is that it's like how even though you have teachers you really like, you might not like that you have to go to school every day.
I hope that my own honesty about this will help you make your own choice when the time comes. The bottom line is, having kids is not the only acceptable path in life, though it is usually presented that way.
I can only say this so emphatically over the internet, but if you have not yet had kids, and you even remotely enjoy your life, DO NOT HAVE KIDS. Source: I am a dad.
They are in incredible burden that you cannot imagine or conceptualize prior. The company you founded, the marathons you ran, your PhD thesis, etc., these are all peanuts. Having a kid is like running a marathon every day for a year. If that sounds like fun to you, then go right ahead.
There are 8 billion people on the planet. You don't need them to run the farm, if you want to mentor someone there are lots of opportunities already. It's also a shit job. Kiss your weekends and evenings and any other free time goodbye. Like exercising? Good luck squeezing that in. Where this idea came from that having kids should be the default in life I have no idea, but it has got to stop.
The test I give my childless friends is to ask them what percent certain they are that they want kids. If it's less than 100% (and it usually is) I tell them not to have kids.
GET A DOG!
This feels a bit too Kurzweilian to me. I still don't understand how we go from General AI --> ??? --> Infinite $$$
It's quite well-produced, and it's probably the only UFO-related film I consider worth watching: https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/bob-lazar-area-51-flying-s...
It would also be possible, though ethically controversial, to test whether or not a person in an OBE state could reliably alternate between being pronounced dead, and then resuscitated. It would be a substantial finding to learn that someone could will themselves to both "die" and also to be revived.
What is certain is that as meditation becomes more popular these experiences will become more common and no longer ridiculed. We will then learn more by virtue of level-headed people sharing information about them. Who knows what we'll find?
"Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they think laughable." -Goethe
The irony for me is that I too used to think it was all nonsense, until I started doing the meditation. It's much harder to dismiss when you start to experience a litany of things you can't explain.
FWIW, this wasn't actually my goal when I started meditating, it just happened after some months of regular meditation, and I had to piece together what it was from limited information. As you can see from the number of downvotes, there's still a strong prejudice against even the suggestion that these are valid experiences with potential utility. So it goes!
It's a much nicer way to go out than many alternatives, and once it becomes more common knowledge I'm sure we'll see much more of it.
Sadly even the idea tends to make people angry, esp. if they have invested in a worldview where the brain is the sole originator of consciousness, death is the end, etc, even though all they have to do is try it for themselves, though for some reason most don't. Just don't tell me it's a hallucination until you've done it successfully yourself. I'll say I was certainly surprised. It is like sticking your finger into an electrical socket and then being shot out of a cannon out the top of your head into another world.
If you're interested look it up, it's not nearly as hard to do as people make it out to be, though I still can't do it exactly on command, I am getting better at it with practice. I don't claim to know everything about it, but the world you enter has some strange properties and its not as simple as just waltzing around as a disembodied spirit with x-ray vision or something. There's some overlap of the objective world and this other world which is not as rigidly objective as this one. Future researchers will figure it out I'm sure. It's a fascinating frontier of human knowledge, and I will say as far as hacks go, hacking your consciousness is a pretty good one.
<Holds up flame shield>
What do you mean, a number I can't count to? If I'm 8 years old this is like throwing a null pointer exception in my brain.
Also don't forget Michael Faraday, a bookbinder's apprentice who managed to figure out much of electromagnetism, among other things.
I agree with other commenters how it expanded their online world, and I'm saddened that there is no real alternative to this now, especially in the land of insular internet bubbles we live in today.
I also don't quite follow how arbitrary harmonics can result in a specific note--is the idea that if you conjoin any 2 or more harmonics of Note X, their pitch will sound like the pitch of Note X even though it is not technically being played?
To me his perspective seems a lot like our primitive ancestors looking at the stars and calling them holes poked in the sky--case closed. But you don't have to believe in a soul or anything like that to suspect that there's something significant about self-awareness that we haven't figured out yet. I feel like Dennett is the odd man out here. I suppose we'll have to wait and see if anyone can prove him wrong.
The point I was making was that those people do a disservice to open discussion because nobody wants to be painted with that brush, so it ends up becoming an HN-type situation where, as you rightly pointed out, there is a resistance to new ideas. There's probably a formal-discourse type term for it.
1. There's a fine line between open-minded and irrational, and unfortunately a lot of people end up crossing it. This becomes a negative feedback loop wherein more and more people don't want to risk their reputations by sounding like they identify with irrational / fringe groups or ideas.
2. It's easy to identify genius in retrospect, but prior to being validated, people who really think ahead of their time are by definition in the minority, so they either have to get used to being laughed at / criticized, or give up. So I guess I would say, keep looking for peers who are open-minded but not irrational. I went to Carnegie-Mellon (`03) and knew hundreds of bright people there, but only 1 or 2 who I considered to be able to think out of the box, as you say. They're people worth finding, though!
“On a bright summer day in the open air, the world with my ego suddenly appeared to me as one coherent mass of sensations,” he later wrote. He felt, in that moment, there was no reality sitting “out there,” independent of his sensations, and likewise that there was no self sitting “in here,” independent of its sensations. He grew certain that there could be no real difference between mind and matter, between perceiving subject and perceived object. “This moment was decisive for my whole view,” he wrote.
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