I’ve come to accept that reality is far less important to our daily lives than narratives.

I mean, it’s a real depressing understanding of the world, but after you embrace it, you learn to work around it and it can even be a huge asset or tool for getting results and interacting with others.

For me personally, I want to learn the disappointing truth about everything, but for the vast majority of people, they will live their whole lives without ever needing or wanting to learn who actually said or did what in history. It’s fine. We can keep building stories to influence people to do better things. There is no cosmic arbiter of truth who is going to judge people for spreading a story that leads to better outcomes.

This meme was circulated about 20 years ago by my reckoning.

It was clever back then, it’s far less entertaining now in an age when people are discarding science and factual knowledge wholesale.

We have very, very good models of each of those “things” listed. We have such good models for it, that even since this meme first made rounds, we have created new kinds of telescopes that can see gravity, we have created computers that can calculate using individual particles in superposition, we have built tools to view the edge of space and time and have imaged the event-horizons around black holes and we have created conditions close to beginning of the universe in labs and discovered new particles that validate decades or centuries of theorizing.

These models only break down in extreme environments or when they intersect in certain conditions. But by “break down” we don’t mean “scientists throw their hands in the air and become flat-earthers” we mean “we are missing some key data” to make different fields of science work together.

I am reminded of the detail in The Office where Michael Scott is stirring sugar into his diet coke.

Ungulates - Even MORE stomachs.

Cetaceans - why not even bigger?

Cephalopods - Starships and philosophy and tragic poems about how short life is.

Bivalves - even less brain, brain make feel bad, brain bad

Felines - Find and domesticate the nearest dominant life form

Murmurations of birds and schooling fish - Horrifyingly surreal swarm intelligences that can take the shape of things like pointing fingers and signs to communicate or a big pair of cartoon scissors that chase you.

The Curie family was an amazing story of pioneering science and true scientific effort to change the world. To say the Curie family made sacrifices would be an understatement, but few people know just how much work goes into developing whole new fields of science.

I think about that every time I see some charlatan or delusional nutter with no math or science background trying to get recognized on the Joe Rogan show for having some pothead idea that keeps getting rejected from mainstream science channels.

Fuck that, I will mess with shit.

“I want all humans to be able to change sex, race or species at will.”

“Give every human being the ability to experience what someone else has experienced by pressing a small button on the top of our heads.”

“Make volcanoes erupt food. Just endless, nutritious food for everyone.”

“Babies are hatched from eggs. I dunno man, seems like it would be silly.”

“No more mosquitoes. Replace them with tiny little airplanes that sometimes circle around you and you have to swat them down like king kong.”

Ideally our species survives and manages to send ships away from Earth well before that or you’re going to get a really warm summer eventually, followed by sitting on a charred ball of barren, airless rock for the majority of those trillion years.

If you get the chance, ask for omnipotence or to become conscious energy systems or something. You can still choose to experience being a human and having all these experiences, but you will never be stuck, you will never get bored or feel anything related to being mortal if you don’t want.

You could even choose to live a whole lifetime. Maybe billions of lifetimes, each one feeling totally and completely indistinguishable from reality, because it would be reality.

You could be experiencing that right now.

No, really, this is a fantastic question we should all ask more.

Because on the outside, in terms of space and the physical universe, it will undergo phase transitions, it will experience a long, slow cooling into rarified energy… but those terms “long” and “rarified” are just from our human reference frame. Roger Penrose’s work demonstrated how even a vast, infinite expanding space with tiny particles zooming through it, from other reference frames behaves exactly like the big bang. IE: as the universe cools and expands, it’s still infinitely dense and exploding outward from a different perspective of time and space. It’s perpetual.

That’s one thing. The other thing is this… time passing is meaningless if nobody is there to observe it. You will be dead for an infinite amount of time, you won’t notice a moment of it. But every passing moment you’re dead, the universe is rolling dice. It’s always rolling dice.

Eventually, even if it takes so incredibly long that we don’t have numbers to express it (we actually do) then something is bound to happen again. Eventually these “somethings” will be just right to create a kind of universe, complex information systems, and maybe even a consciousness that can experience it.

It sounds kind of fantastic and overly fanciful, but I am basing this on the evidence that it happened at least once before that we know of.

Seriously, even halfway through my expected lifespan and I’m already seeing a point where I’ll be ready to get off the ride. Not in terms of self-harm or depression, but just generally as the decades go on it gets less and less enjoyable in a broad sense.

Our brains absorb too much information and memories than our minds were meant to handle. Our emotions become an annoying liability. Our memories reveal themselves to be these tenuous and bizarre amalgamations of experiences and imagination and cannot be trusted, and maybe most annoying of all is seeing people making the same mistakes around you all the time, and tuning you out for being “old” more and more, determined to fall into the same holes and traps that could be easily avoided, but dragging all of society with them over and over. It takes away a lot of the magic of seeing the future.

Even all that would be something manageable, if I had a loooong life I would probably escape from everyone and just read in the woods or something. But holy shit it has to be alongside physical health because by far the worst, worst, worst thing about getting old is the aches and pains and minor irritations that turn into crippling infections, unhealed strains, and degrading senses.

I am quite positive that something happens after you’re dead for an infinity amount of time, no idea what, but it happened before so it stands to reason it may again, and even the slimmest chances become 100% assured after an infinite amount of time.

ITT lots of people who blessedly have no idea what an HOA is.

spectrum

Our species broadly doesn’t think in terms of spectrums or nuance.

I burned years of my life trying to make arguments from reason and explain how there can be simultaneous truths or that issues are not black-and-white. It has NEVER stuck, not with friends, not with family, not with strangers on the internet.

People’s minds largely do not work that way. We all HAVE to digest this and mourn it and let it pass through us so we can stop trying to argue with these blockheads in ways they can’t even grasp. We can change them if we tell them stories about feelings, if we make them feel validated or heard, we can change them with careful, patient one-on-one care like a parent telling a child bedtime stories… but this takes a level of energy, empathy and patience that few of us have. Some do, I give massive respect to those who have dedicated their lives to this kind of outreach. I wish we had more.

There’s a vast number of conservative parents who have said they would support abortion in cases of fetal abnormalities like “autism” because they’re not pro-life or informed about anything, they’re just scared. They’re scared of hardships, they’re scared of emotional labor, they’re scared of the social stigmas around having to care for someone with special needs, they’re scared they won’t love a child who isn’t normal, and will be judged for it.

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I mean, I’m sure there’s some folks who are really into that, but I’ll pass.

I’ll stick to my close-ups of aardvark noses wrapped in lace chokers, tyvm.

Conservatives hate pedophiles

I wish this was really a blanket rule.

I agree. But don’t really care if people use it, I just cannot stand when people wave it around like a new teddy bear that gives them a smug sense of superiority for… checks notes …using a product that someone is selling to let stupid people do easy things.

Sorry my comment didn’t have Subway Surfers playing in the corner with a popular streamer reacting to it so you could actually read it and understand it.

I’m not impressed by today’s AI and I also fully understand that the tech is going to completely upend society and will eventually be a part of our picture of utopia, or our picture of actual hell on Earth.

The people who are screaming it’s wild wonders and benefits are at least as closed-minded as the people who think we’re going to be able to put the toothpaste back in the tube. The actual direction this tech moves is going to be far more like the discovery of radio, in that at the time of it’s discovery and early implementation, the people then had no idea the implications down the road and we’re at the same point. Except the big difference and why this is contentious is that radio was far less dangerous to society broadly.

Radio was a fundamental force that always existed around us, we learned to use it the way our ancestors used rivers and waters to move goods and people. AI is completely human-made and doesn’t exist without human engineering, so it’s not neutral, it’s a tool shaped by man to do whatever a man wants with it.

Every REAL MAN knows that going to the bathroom is totally gay, it’s a place where men go and pull out their dicks and handle them, sometimes right in front of each other and they listen to each other’s body functions.

Real men will go pee in the parking lot to assert dominance, trust me, this is how you do it.