nota_bene

I'm done writing stuff online.

Good luck to y'all.

Mandatory hardware based backdoors, unlimited funding for CPU power to accelerate decryption of intercepted data, etc.

This seems to eternally remain relevant:

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-...

That is exactly why I don't share it.

I think the best way to handle this dilemma is to try to sense which of your friends and family members are most open-minded and to start with those. (Personally, I feel like once you've experienced it, it becomes some sort of responsibility to create awareness about it, because the benefit for everybody is just to big to keep quiet.)

I don't practice religion anymore, but understand 100% of your experience and fully agree (before my experience, this would have been some sort of "ridiculous new age blah blah" to me).

I fully agree, this is the "other window" I know of (I would say though that it is a different window, it adds something different, neither better nor worse).

And it physiologically rewires your brain - for the better, as you can read here: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-to...

This leads to the question "How can we get rid of social anxiety?":

Other human beings are a subset of your environment. So you may ask "How can I improve my perception of my environment?". This is (only) 1 of the many benefits of the experience you live through when you ingest the substance LSD: Handled the right way, you can experience the most awe inspiring moment of your life, you can not just see beauty, but live it, be immersed by it and be a part of it. You're likely to ask yourself over and over "why was this hidden from me all those years?". You can literally feel your entire environment in a very positive, magic and vibrant way (hint: find yourself an isolated place in nature that you like and listen to your favorite music). And part of this feeling is very likely to stay with you, after the experience. It may be subtle, but a very subtle positive change in the way you feel and perceive your environment can change your thoughts dramatically and therefor your general behavior. You can become very positive.

This is why it's completely wrong for humanity to keep this substance illegal. This substance can lead to a whole new appreciation for our Planet, the Universe and for the human beings around us.

(Of course, "follow the money" seems to apply here as well, when I think how this molecule seems to be able to replace heavy side-effect ridden anti-depressant therapies which are of course one gigantic cash cow for the pharma industry.)

Note: It is absolutely mandatory to educate oneself about the substance as much as possible beforehand and to prepare one's experience by respecting all the rules that apply (and: there are a couple of medical conditions which make the substance very risky for you, should you suffer from one of them knowingly or unknowingly).

This is extremely interesting, because the effect which is proven in this study is (only) 1 of the many beneficial aspects from the experience you live through when you ingest the substance LSD: Handled the right way, you can experience the most awe inspiring moment of your life, you can not just see beauty, but live it, be immersed by it and be a part of it. You're likely to ask yourself over and over "why was this hidden from me all those years?".

This is why it's completely wrong for humanity to keep this substance illegal. This substance can lead to a whole new appreciation for our Planet, the Universe and for the human beings around us.

(Of course, "follow the money" seems to apply here as well, when I think how this molecule seems to be able to replace heavy side-effect ridden anti-depressant therapies which are of course one gigantic cash cow for the pharma industry.)

Note: It is absolutely mandatory to educate oneself about the substance as much as possible and to prepare one's experience by respecting all the rules that apply (and: there are a couple of medical conditions which make the substance very risky for you, should you suffer from one of them knowingly or unknowingly).

happiness is kinda pointless and ephemeral

Ephemeral? Yes.

Pointless? No: If you are happier, you'll make people around you happier. If everybody tries to achieve that, we'll have a much saner society. Thus, we should take it as our responsibility to achieve a good level of happiness as often as possible (obviously not by making others pay for it).

Neurological changes?

Yes, see: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-to...

It's starutp-scene-connected-tech-heavy-news more than anything else.

Yes, and that's because it is a very powerful marketing tool for Paul Graham's huge YC business.

Isn't the first question to ask "Can I trust Windows?" (and the answer "no", for all the obvious reasons)?

Realistically, we have to assume this, given the fact that this is the approach used by the "five eyes".

Don't forget that borders are becoming less important. Corporate interests don't care about borders and national interests.

I'm not downvoting. I'm not pro-cheating either. People should have sexual freedom and be open about it with their partners, if they feel the need for it, to be happy.

I see the need for privacy at all level of our lives. Unless we all make a democratic and informed choice to drop this value. But since this requires enormous maturity, society might be ready for this in a couple of hundred years.

Could be that I'm naive as well, but personally, I hope that people will finally get the message Snowden tried to pass and in the process sacrificed his future (and maybe even his life) for: We're about to abandon our privacy.

Snowden has risked his life and will be forced to remain paranoid for the entire rest of his life. His cause is noble and 100% justified. He did it for society, for us. What did we do to thank him? We labelled him a traitor and showed no support. And most of all: Almost nobody listened, almost nobody changed habits accordingly. So what does it take to make people listen and understand that our privacy is about to be completely abolished by technology?

It takes exactly leaks like this one. Brutal, emotional, visible and highly controversial events.

Spot on.

I don't get it. It's become so obvious and people still seem to categorically refuse to admit the elephant in the room and to act upon it.

It's as if everybody was in some kind of unbreakable state of permanent cognitive paralysis.

And quantum physics will stop being weird once we get its rule set (lightning and thunder had God status, once).

If A harms B, then your argument is that B has no right to retaliate it

Yes and no. Yes, because no judgment allowed means no punishment allowed. But: the correct answer to A's action would be a sanction against A, in the sense that it would prevent A from harming again in the future. The wrong answers are: judgment, retaliation, punishment, revenge.

In other words, the world should just go on as it is

It will. And it's also exactly what's happening here.

What is important, I think, like many other things, is the 'appearance' of having free will. Because without that, all life looses it's meaning.

Not to worry, we'll always have this appearance, because causes and effects work on every macro and micro level. No system of sensors will ever be able to measure all variable, no model will ever be able to include all variables and no computer will ever be powerful enough to model everything. So, the magic remains.

If some choose not to apply guilt or blame to others, well, then that was also in the cards.

Correct. Like this discussion and everything logically was also "in the cards". So, yes, in a sense "it does not matter", while it still does.

If there is free will, then there is a distinct advantage to understanding and believing that fact.

The issue is that you see an "advantage" in free will. I suppose you mean that free will would make you more powerful because you would not believe that you "can't change things", etc. This belief however is false. It's not logical. Even if we understand that there is no free will, we are still going to make "our own decisions" based on all the variables in our lives. The vastness of the variables in our networks is such that it can never be measured and modeled entirely. It is simply too complex for us to understand, which means that it will never feel like a network of causes and effects. So our choices will always feel like our own, and that is good enough for us, it seems. For example, I'm still going to try to create useful products and believe I can become successful, because that's what motivates me, that's part of my "variables".

All correct, except:

as societies we act pretty illogical

It just looks that way on the surface. Below the surface, you can track all decisions back to their causes (down to "the smallest" scope).

I would think that "free will" is developed

If you see life as a 4-dimensional network of variables linked through "cause and effect", then there is no place for a "free" variable which could introduce free will (or its development). Unless you introduce invented concepts such as "soul" or "god", etc., which means that you quit the rational discussion altogether.

Historical guilt and merit still exist in the absence of free will

Historical guilt and merit would simply be the sum of all guilt and merit of a society, meaning actually the sum of a lot of nothing...

if we discovered that we have no free will we'd still have free will to act on a certain way upon it

No because we'd actually act upon it because of purely logical chains (1) of cause and effect, not free will.

--

(1) Or rather "networks" (of cause end effect) that work through all of the (currently 4) dimensions.

The issue with (2) is that the physical state of our body and brain is a function of all past and current surroundings and context (including our genome). Which means it can never be independent, but is instead fully defined.

Where you're correct is: We can never prove the absence of free will, because we can never understand then entirety of our environment (how the universe "really works", etc.). But when you take what we know today and apply rational thinking, it certainly looks like there is no free will.

We all have the ability to act at our own discretion.

That is exactly what my argument would deny. There seems to be not even an inch of free will.

Does it really matter

100% percent yes, for example: The absence of free will forces us to stop judging people, simply because the concept of "guilt" (on the negative side) and the concept of "merit" (on the positive side) are proven to be entirely baseless. If we applied this to our culture, we'd live in a totally different world.

What's worst is when people leave worthless comments like these.

There is no need for these experiments: There is no free will, and you can understand this by simply applying pure logic/rational thinking:

When you're born (the "1st second" of your life) you're given 2 variables: (1) Your genome and (2) the environment you're born into. You have absolutely no control whatsoever over these 2 variables (with their infinite number of sub-variables they "contain"). And everything else that follows (the "2nd, 3rd, nth... second" of your life) is a function of these 2 initial variables: And this includes your brain that you will use to make the infinite number of choices in your life (both consciously, such as "I'm going to buy milk" and subconsciously, such as "firing neuron X at second Y", "moving atom A to location B", etc.).

EDIT: Downvoters - please state why this would be wrong.

Isn't that a huge contradiction?

Try counting web devs who are pro-privacy but implement Google Analytics in their work. You'll get close to 100%.