johndoe4589

I don't understand the implicit relationship you see between the regularity observed in our reality and consciousness. Why can't one go with the other?

That consciousness nonsense has you reading a post and reacting to it.

The simulation argument is silly, because all it does is "postpone the explanation" as Alan Watts joked in "Time and the more it changes". If our universe can be simulated, then so what? It is the same puzzle with the Matrix as Jed Mac Kenna explained in his famous trilogy: in Matrix 2 or 3 (don't remember), Neo escapes from his "simulated" reality, only to find himself in another. What if the other one is simulated? The movie just stops there, and Neo isn't actually free. He just switched one reality for another.

is this essentially a reminder that the materialistic view of the universe / reality is outdated, or am I reading too much into it?

I'm drinking 1-2 cups a day. The question for me is what do I get for quitting caffeine?

For me it's just a ritual in the morning.

I have to admit the coffee I make at home with the Bialetti is so bad compared to the one I can get in town, that I wonder why I bother sometimes. I just can't make that thing work. Even with the freshly ground coffee I buy at the market. It tastes nice on the day I bought it, it tastes like crap already the next day.

But if I can drink just one good cup of coffee like the one I can get in town, and I get that nice little kick I'm happy and I don't really need any more the rest of the day. If only I could get that nice little kick just with my morning coffee! Sometimes I wonder if I also have built a tolerance, but I think the coffee I make with the Bialetti is just crap. I barely feel it.

But even though my morning coffee is usually not very good... I'm still wondering what's in there for me quitting just 1-2 cups a day? The people commenting on the article are abusing the substance, 5-10 cups a day? 2 liters of soda? For years on end?

It's a very serious issue. I feel like it's been going on with Google for a long while now. I'm 41 now and maybe I'm getting a bit jaded but I find it also curious how there is supposedly so many resources and websites out there and yet I feel like I discover less and less of them.

It's true that it is in our nature like KaiserPro said, but I think in the early days of Google, you'd find out so much more diversity of content because websites both small and big were all appearing in search results.

Which makes me realize... in fact it is the content farms which are part of the problem. They forced search engines to filter more and more of the content in order to provide quality results.. we end up with a minority of high traffic sites and the rest of the voices are difficult to find outside of news aggregators.

Reminds me of this article published in in Nature in 2005: "The Mental Universe", from Richard Conn Henry.. similar idea (The PDF is first result in Google)

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/full/436029a...