theilleists

joined 7 months ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

Rhythmic? No, not really. More exciting if the musician could somehow anticipate this fundamentally unpredictable event? Absolutely.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

In Aristotelian geography, the coastline is infinitely divisible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

When he gets pulled out, he'll be fisherman's Worf.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Acknowledged. Launching Starfleet standard hat distribution holoprogram.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (5 children)

You arrive without traveling, see all without looking, and do all without doing. You get a nifty flute souvenir. The ship explodes. Score: 0/100. Thank you for participating in the Kobay-ouchie Maru.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (7 children)

It speaks only in disposable cup idioms. It says: "Red Solo, when the beer fell." Now what do you do?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (9 children)

The alien blood corrodes away the bottom of your cup. Now what do you do?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (11 children)

The Kobay-ouchie Maru.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

They wrote that whole ass article and never stopped to consider that time may be both an illusion (in the sense that it is an emergent rather than a fundamental property of existence) AND necessary for the evolution of life (in the sense that other hypothetical configurations of physical laws which do not feature an emergent arrow of time may not produce life).

In regions of the set of all possible universes where the physical prerequisites of evolution were not present, nobody would be there wondering about why that is. In this region, conditions are right for life to evolve, so somebody is here to ask the question. It's just the anthropic principle.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

And even then, if you look at quantum mechanics through the right lens, its apparent randomness is only an illusion of perspective. If you flip the quantum coin, then with 100% certainty, perfectly deterministically, it will come up heads in one timeline and tails in the other. It's only because your two future selves can't interact with each other that they can't have an argument about what the result "really" was, so one says, "it actually came up heads, and the result was completely random," and the other says, "it actually came up tails, and the result was completely random."

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Of course, you can think of consciousness as analogous to excitation of a field, and, like the electromagnetic field or gravitational field, there is no center, and everything is interconnected. And yet, like every particle is ultimately a wave in disguise, we can still meaningfully talk about individual particles, because some waves do behave that way sometimes.

An individual consciousness is particle-like. As a shorthand for "this relatively independent packet of consciousness which has measurable distinctiveness from other packets and does not freely share perceptions or memories with them," it's often more practical just to say "I" instead.

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