Isn't being more familiar with words a good thing? Another thing that seems to help is keeping a boring old deadwood dictionary next to my favourite armchair.
297 karma · joined July 3, 2017
Whereas many of us spend our limited freedom chasing pleasurable (and unpleasurable) illusions that lead only to disorder and despair. That said, there are plenty of sane, wealthy people in the West who do important work for the sake of it, because they wish to. How do more of us become like them?
Also, despite apparently comfortable conditions, there are plenty of survival problems which remain. For example, meteor strikes, super-volcanoes, cancers, toxic ideologies/religions. Plus an unlimited number of as yet unidentified problems.
These problems are more abstract than working for a pay packet to buy food but they are nonetheless real. And they are not being sufficiently addressed! Universal Basic Income could turn out to be an important breakthrough in this regard, I think, if we also address the question I posed at the end of paragraph 2 above.
Whereas the reality of people receiving free money might be somewhat different. There's the drip, drip welfare payments of just enough money to survive without being motivated to find a job. Then there's the fallout, family break-up and chaos that occur in the wake of a lottery win. Both morally questionable.
Or perhaps there might be a settling down period of people acting irresponsibly followed by a recognition that engagement with the problems of civilisation and survival doesn't end because one has food, shelter and internet. There are novels to write, structures to design, problems to solve and of course there's science to be done. Work is more fun than 'fun'. Pick something worthy of your talents or start the slide into mental disorder and addiction.
Whatever the truth it almost goes without saying that a study alone cannot sort these issues out. Perhaps it can help. But in science experiment is insufficient there has to be theory to go with. (This is a major reason why so few studies in medicine and psychology are reproducible. I assume in sociology too.) What makes it more difficult in this case is there are moral components which can't be assessed empirically, only by conjecture and criticism.
But that is itself a theory about the problem of consciousness! So why not do both? There's no obvious short cut through the confusion, but discoveries in one field may guide questions in the other. In general I think it helps to have one's feet on the ground as well as one's head in the stars (for instance Newton ground his own lenses).
>18th-century scientists trying to make sense of heat
All that mucking about with the problems of phlogiston could have been a necessary step towards thermodynamics. Similarly, speculations about consciousness could turn out to be a necessary step towards AGI (or vice-versa).
I think of consciousness as being 'what you are paying attention to and what it is like'. One problem with this is that when you're attending sufficiently strongly to something you can't actually notice what it is like; there isn't enough bandwidth free. Yet some of the associated ideas ('qualia') may linger in working memory for a more relaxed examination afterwards. Which proves that you were paying attention and that mental work was going on. (Perhaps it also shows that trying too hard is counter-productive due to lack of integration with the rest of the mind.)
>For instance, it is the occurrence of a sense perception that triggers the metacognitive realization one is perceiving something. N, in turn, evokes X by directing attention back to it: the realization one is perceiving something naturally shifts one’s mental focus back to the original perception. So we end up with a back-and-forth cycle of evocations whereby X triggers N, which in turn evokes X, which again triggers N, and so forth.
This also seems plausible since we can't perceive a new thing accurately without a prior expectation of what it's like. This could be solved by an iterative cycle of increasing realisticness and accuracy.
My guess is that a clue lies in the censorship going on much closer to home, in our own minds. Thoughts which contradict our ideas about who we are and what we should do are suppressed all the time. They fail to reach the light of consciousness. In other words, like the individual mind, it seems the hive mind must eventually develop an ego.
Also a lot of fly goo.
Myself I'm starting to question the sense of judging people for their 'beliefs'. Two reasons: (1) most people deeply desire to gain social status and consequently will profess anything to secure it if we judge them in this way, (2) what are beliefs, anyhow? Do they even exist? If they do, why is it necessary to 'believe' things (i.e. to try not to question or criticise certain ideas, which is impossible in the long-term even if you stick your fingers in your ears).
Other techniques I've employed: (1) cling film (saran wrap), (2) detergent spray (slows em down; dispatch after 2-4 rounds), (3) vacuum cleaner nozzle (they hunker down but are sucked in upon take-off)
People often think that a field has been 'picked clean' and conclude that either no further progress is possible or that further discoveries are going to be rare and incremental.
e.g. "the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals" -- Michelson, 1894
But there are always deep problems and this implies that unlimited progress is possible. The really big discoveries can happen at any time and are of an unpredictable nature, not least because they affect multiple fields. They leave behind plenty of smaller problems for everyone to pick up.
So the divine unity that the mystics, poets and psychonauts speak of cannot derive from nature per se, as many people believe. In my comment I tried to give an alternate explanation.
It's a moving metaphor but of course cells within us have the same genome whereas different humans have different genomes. So it's hard to consider them part of one living system, unless one accepts the Gaia Hypothesis.
The sense of oneness or of a divine essence permeating the whole of physical reality is caused by the fact that we don't perceive external entities directly. Rather we each of us perceive our own unified model of reality comprised of tokens for all entities including tokens representing external physical objects. And we may eventually become aware of this, giving rise to that sense. For some people this happens with the assistance of a hallucinogen which I think distorts the model enough for it to become noticeable as a model. Others have spontaneous spiritual experiences.
None of which is to say that life isn't precious, or that consciousness is not a wonderful thing.
Yes. And the tail risks are asymmetrical here. Bureaucrats take on responsibility for thousands or hundreds-of-thousands of children in their district. They look bad however few of these kids are harmed or killed. So what might be a perfectly acceptable risk for an individual family is not acceptable to the local government.
The more they interfere and assume responsibility for children the more additional responsibilities their offices will be loaded with when things go wrong. Which will cause further problems, et cetera, because although parents love and provide for their children, institutions don't know how to (and can't afford to).
This is because coercion in education is: (1) painful, (2) prophetic, (3) it doesn't work!
What happens in real life is that if somebody needs to know something because they are keen to do something else then they will learn it efficiently, 'just in time' and precisely to the extent needed. Assuming their creativity is relatively intact...