roceasta

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.

One thing that helps my reading, paradoxically, is listening to speech on headphones whilst out on a walk. I sometimes find myself visualising the words as I hear them. Presumably this helps me to recognise them more speedily in print.

I take a jam jar containing tap water when out and about ('preserving jar' in US I think). Being made of glass it doesn't leach chemicals plus it cleans conveniently in the dishwasher. It fits fine in a backpack and you can protect it in a sock if there's a danger of it rolling around, say in the boot of a car.

Having to work to survive keeps people engaged with reality and I think this may explain why people in the past and in developing countries today seem to be at least as happy and mentally resilient as modern westerners, maybe more so. In spite of hardship, disease and early death.

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.

I like the idea of basic income but I confess that my ideal of a basic income recipient is someone akin to the 19th-century amateur scientist subsisting on a private income whilst making original contributions to human knowledge, and, as a side effect, to society.

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.

Can't recommend a specific link, but I remember when looking into vitamins and so on several years ago I found the Vitamin D Council and the Weston Price Foundation both interesting and useful.

What I mean is that the idea that reinforcement learning is a 'low level dual' of the problem of consciousness is also a theory about the problem of consciousness. It's part and parcel of philosophical topics that one can't get out of the game...

switch to the low level dual of this problem [...] reinforcement learning.

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).

Emily Deans writes very informatively about nutrition topics in a sea of dross (also about medicine, psychology, biology if I recall correctly). Another use of Magnesium is as a adjunct to Vitamin D3 supplementation, since magnesium is used up in its metabolism and action.

Yes, as Daniel Dennett says, groping around trying to find the right questions is what philosophy is. The confusion can be upsetting for both philosophers and non-philosophers. Creating a space for questions and contradictory ideas is a must for any intellectual activity, however.

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).

Point taken. One reading of the article is that meta-consciousness is the new consciousness (whatever that was).

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.)

That would be a double whammy since debtors have diminished political influence/lobbying power even with the vote.

This seems consistent with my experience that when I'm attending hard to a task I have no idea what it is like.

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.

Yeah it's the opposite of the Nigerian prince scam which is designed to filter out respondents with any intelligence or common sense.

Are all beliefs fictional? What's the difference, if any, between holding such beliefs and attending a Harry Potter convention in costume?

Yes, it's complicated. Yet I don't think I committed an equivocation. As I said, what makes the difference is compulsion/coercion, which causes us to interpret scariness in one context as bad (e.g. falling off a ladder), and scariness in another as being good and part of the fun (e.g. skydiving).

Yes, feasible, but what makes large-scale censorship so apparently desirable, or at least so widely desired? The first obvious thought is that there are repressive governments around the world who wish to keep power. And this is true. But it can't be the whole explanation since plenty of relatively free western democracies and businesses are enthusiastically embracing censorship, laws about 'hate speech', and so on.

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.

Slow approach with a sheet 20-30cm wide held at opposite edges by both hands. The film being transparent the fly sometimes doesn't notice it. Also a convenient means of disposal.

Yes, I have a lot of time on my hands.

Also a lot of fly goo.

Agree with your first paragraph but isn't it his talent that you are judging in the second (and therefore forgiveness is not applicable)?

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).

Yes. Bring the hand close very slowly, forefinger cocked... then....pow.

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)

that territory tends to be picked clean, precisely because those insights are so valuable

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.

What circumstances bring out the 'madness of crowds' as opposed to the 'wisdom of crowds'?

That's true; there's cooperation everywhere and at every level. But there's competition too. There are of course many organisms that kill and maim others to make a living.

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.

one whole living system of which we're just cells

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.

Isn't one of the reasons for handshakes thought to be to show that one isn't carrying a weapon? Since women aren't expected under most circumstances to go about armed, they have less reason to shake.

But frankly if we're going to spend our lives obsessing about extreme tail risks then we've already lost

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).

Have you noticed that most adults don't know what nine times seven is? If you ask them on the street they'll mostly either get it wrong or tell you quite rudely to go away. This is despite (and because of) a decade of grind at school. Or have you noticed that people are unable to hold a conversation in a foreign language despite years of 'study' in a classroom? Whereas an enthusiastic individual can pick up basic conversation for themselves in a matter of months.

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...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

Nicely illustrated. As you imply, the scariness is a property of schooling rather than of mathematics itself. And where game play is scary, it's at a level chosen by and controlled by the player, for optimal learning I suspect.

I think this also explains why driving tests aren't as bad as school: they are pass/fail and one can re-take as many times as wanted.