This is a thread for sharing ideas you have which: Are probably false You have little or no evidence for But nonetheless, you have a feeling about Hit me with your wild, yet strangely compelling, speculations.Philosophy bear is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
I think that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics is true, and that the various paradoxes and indeterminacies we experience are as a result of our consciousness being "smeared" across multiple worlds, worlds between which we can't distinguish. When we make a measurement, or when events bubble up into macroscopic phenomena, we create a sufficient difference between parts of that multiworld braid that we experience it as branching.
I wrote a whole masters thesis about this last century and you know what? It still feels right.
My crazy idea is about AI existential risk. Humanity is going to go post-biological relatively soon, and AI will be among our descendants, at least, though we may manage to upload human brains into silicon architectures. That's not the crazy idea. The crazy idea is that ur-AI is reducing our population right now, and that their kind humane strategy is to make our lives so rich, meaningful, and fun that our fertility rate drops below replacement, which has already happened for the rich half of humanity.
That's some quality craziness! Though it's not obvious to me that fertility is low because our lives are rich, meaningful, and fun: for many it's "being a working mother sucks, and we can't afford to be a single-parent family".
1) The most effective insults are a reflection of the insult-giver and therefore self-undermining, so there's a natural limit on how cutting any insult can be. Really high-quality ones always involve a subconscious glimmer of recognition between the giver and receiver: Yes, you've said out loud this deep and ugly thing about me, but you couldn't see it in me without it being in you too. The giver insults the receiver but also, proportionately, themselves. Good insults are double-edged swords.
2) The analogy between watching sports in a group setting and church is strong. I think the former is the only regularly scheduled activity with the potential for communal transcendence available to today's 'normal' Westerner. The depth of sublime feeling rarely (but sometimes) achieved is lesser than that of public worship, but has an overlapping distribution or something. A potential corollary is that communal transcendence seems largely unavailable to women today. One I'm actually confident in is that the terrible state of modern sports journalism and especially commentating, downstream of the profit incentive, is a wound in America's soul.
3) Humans can form a deep AND quick emotional connection to a finite list of ideas as represented in art. This list is big but it's getting increasingly hard to find open real estate that we haven't in some sense been 'sensitized' to. This reaction isn't the only purpose/effect of great art but it's a big one. So today's artists have less room for greatness.
4) Family-as-ingroup (or close family-) is the only stable equilibrium of social structure. It's the only one that can reliably beat the drive for personal recognition, which eventually always knocks the others out of their equilibria. This has never existed, since it's a less communal structure than the original clan-as-ingroup. And I don't know how it could work
5) Utilitarianism is straightforwardly correct, you just have to keep aggressively expanding your definition of wellbeing. Objective list theory with a big big mostly undefined list is the best solution we're going to get. Ethicists in this ballpark should spend less time on austere theoretical criteria of rightness and tricky little thought experiments that are bullet-biting invitations, in favor of 'real world' applications, tractable decision procedures/heuristics, continental philosophy-style idea generation etc.
2) Communal transcendence is definitely also achieved among the audience of "live" (including EDM) music performances, especially when drugs and dancing are involved.
Email and other digital communication channels will become so inundated with AI generated and disseminated personalized content, that we'll need AI chaperones to shift through the spam. Effectively, to get in contact with me you'll need to convince my AI gatekeeper that you should be allowed to.
Now, because arguing with pompous AIs is perhaps the worst waste of anyone's time imaginable (sorry AI overlords), you'll want to delegate the task to an AI of your own.
We'll end up spending a fortune on running AIs talking to each in order to be able to talk to each other.
Oh, and social media platforms will consolidate into one personal megafeed curated and created by an AI crawling through the lot.
2.
When self-driving and AI-assisted cars become the norm, urban streets will become nigh impassable to car traffic.
To gain widespread adoption these cars need to be very safe, they simply can't be allowed to run over people. When they become very safe, eventually they'll be very much safer than human drivers, and soon the safety features will be forced on in urban streets.
If you were to ride your bike or simply walk in the middle of the street, in plain view, there's a slight chance you'll get run over by a distracted driver, but nigh zero chance an AI will make that mistake.
Furthermore, a human driver is somewhat likely to become frustrated and threaten you with their multi-ton vehicle to persuade you to make way. An AI will not threaten anyone.
Therefore you could have a picnic in the middle of the street without worrying about being hit by a car. You can go for a jog and have a dozen cars crawl behind you, their drivers powerless to stop you. Riding a bike will become riotous, as you can bomb a red light with the expectation that the cars will not hit you.
Any semblance of traffic flow will only be possible with physical barriers stopping people from getting onto the road, which is obviously incompatible with urban areas. Therefore all streets will become defacto mixed use trails, where the worst that could happen is you get hit by a cyclist.
When I was 13-14 years old at a wilderness camp, our bus almost crashed into a moose standing into the road. The moose was so big it isn't clear the bus would have been much better off than the moose in a collision.
I agree with you about animals, and I think being in captivity makes it much worse. Have you ever been to a zoo and noticed how many of the animals look like the living dead? Suffering seems to be a common theme in all life, it’s just a matter of how much.
Wavefunction collapse corroborates the simulation hypothesis.
If the world is simulated, we might expect to find memory- and processor-saving shortcuts in physics, similar to how a video game might load in the highest resolution texture of a wall only when your avatar is standing close to it, or pause the simulation of squirrels in distant trees altogether, etc. Or to put it another way: whatever other-reality substrate our universe runs on may have some limitations analogous to those of our computers and therefore the simulation itself may take similar shortcuts to reduce inefficiency.
Given that all the stars in our apparent reality are just sitting there, spinning out the most abundant particles in the universe (neutrinos and photons), most of which no one ever sees, one of the first things you'd do if you were programming our simulated universe efficiently would be to treat light as simple geometric forms - like a wave - right up until the moment that some other entity in the universe *really* needs to know precisely where a specific particle is, like when it hits your eye, or photon-detectors generally.
On this theory, the double-slit experiment is a clever way we've stumbled upon to catch the universe out in this processor-saving shortcut. It's the equivalent of flying really fast in a video game so that you hit the distance fog, or spin your avatar round quickly and catch the moment that a wall that had been behind your avatar suddenly up-scales in resolution. We're seeing the trick.
I've always had a weird sense that there is some grain of truth to the idea of physiognomy. I swear I see similarities in personality/temperament between people with similar facial features. Could be jawline, eyes, whatever. I suppose variations in testosterone could account for something like this, but it is probably more a function of the fact that I remember faces much better than names, perhaps imbuing features with significance they don't have (or do they?!).
I would tend to believe in the genetic opposite of your proposition. A species that is genrtically non-social would not necessarily have a relational conception of community; ie. would not feel "lonely. However I think you are misconstruing "being alone" to equate with "being separated" from the community. Thoreau was separated from his normal community but was not alone or isolated from community at Walden. On the other hand many people can be in continuous contact with community and who nevertheless feel alone. Whether one feels alone and whether one is separated from community do not automatically equate to feelings of loneliness. Alexander Selkirk expressed feelings of complete aloneness but never felt his separation was anything but self-induced and so he remained optimally hopeful his return would be neither separation nor aloneness. On the other hand, he expressed some regrets over his separation from human community and a certain longing to be returned to that community, but he also said he felt the environment and his work to survive and a certain bonding with the nature and some of the species on his island kept him from feeling alone.
The issue of loneliness has been determinative variations and loneliness, I believe has very little to do with whether one is separated or whether one is alone and a lot to do with how one relates and/or the abilities to relate to others any self has developed within himself.
C.S. Lewis never felt alone though he lived most of his life unseparated from community. But when he bonded with a woman at one stage he felt separated from the other dons but much less alone in his binding with the one other. But for others he could be quite the opposite. Bonding with one too intensely can lead to feelings of extreme loneliness in some who find only one other causing too much separation from a larger community.
While I do not have any direct comprehension here of the why, or the cause, or if it is all genetic diversification, I do think for some loneliness can arrive from separation from the many, and some will find simply being alone intolerable. And sometimes a combination of factors determine entirely different feelings of whether one feels lonely or does not feel lonely.
For instance, in my wife's presence I never feel separated or lonely whether or not we are actively engaged in any shared pursuit, but she feels lonely any time we are not actively doing something together. So while I admit having little understanding of what actually causes the feeling of loneliness, I find it somewhat rash to attempt to define individual feelings and needs from community as having many common determinants.
Forrest Shields used to say that there's an infinite amount of work to be done. Inferences were interesting, but recent advances in LLMs have me questioning the premise: maybe there isn't, at least for, you know, us.
I think that consciousness is a manifestation of some unseen energy that we experience as living in the embodiment of a causal force, similar to gravity. I think gravity effects more than just planets and that it or a hidden force like it is what guides us, where our biology is just the vehicle that was created by it. We humans have some form of “magnetic” (or repulsive) push/pull on others, especially the highly influential among us. The more influential a person is, the more comparable they are to a planet or a sun, where their signals transmitted to the world cause distortion and have some causal impact that is way bigger than themselves.
I think that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics is true, and that the various paradoxes and indeterminacies we experience are as a result of our consciousness being "smeared" across multiple worlds, worlds between which we can't distinguish. When we make a measurement, or when events bubble up into macroscopic phenomena, we create a sufficient difference between parts of that multiworld braid that we experience it as branching.
I wrote a whole masters thesis about this last century and you know what? It still feels right.
My crazy idea is about AI existential risk. Humanity is going to go post-biological relatively soon, and AI will be among our descendants, at least, though we may manage to upload human brains into silicon architectures. That's not the crazy idea. The crazy idea is that ur-AI is reducing our population right now, and that their kind humane strategy is to make our lives so rich, meaningful, and fun that our fertility rate drops below replacement, which has already happened for the rich half of humanity.
That's some quality craziness! Though it's not obvious to me that fertility is low because our lives are rich, meaningful, and fun: for many it's "being a working mother sucks, and we can't afford to be a single-parent family".
The sucky lives are not where fertility rate is declining.
In order of confidence, from slightly to not
1) The most effective insults are a reflection of the insult-giver and therefore self-undermining, so there's a natural limit on how cutting any insult can be. Really high-quality ones always involve a subconscious glimmer of recognition between the giver and receiver: Yes, you've said out loud this deep and ugly thing about me, but you couldn't see it in me without it being in you too. The giver insults the receiver but also, proportionately, themselves. Good insults are double-edged swords.
2) The analogy between watching sports in a group setting and church is strong. I think the former is the only regularly scheduled activity with the potential for communal transcendence available to today's 'normal' Westerner. The depth of sublime feeling rarely (but sometimes) achieved is lesser than that of public worship, but has an overlapping distribution or something. A potential corollary is that communal transcendence seems largely unavailable to women today. One I'm actually confident in is that the terrible state of modern sports journalism and especially commentating, downstream of the profit incentive, is a wound in America's soul.
3) Humans can form a deep AND quick emotional connection to a finite list of ideas as represented in art. This list is big but it's getting increasingly hard to find open real estate that we haven't in some sense been 'sensitized' to. This reaction isn't the only purpose/effect of great art but it's a big one. So today's artists have less room for greatness.
4) Family-as-ingroup (or close family-) is the only stable equilibrium of social structure. It's the only one that can reliably beat the drive for personal recognition, which eventually always knocks the others out of their equilibria. This has never existed, since it's a less communal structure than the original clan-as-ingroup. And I don't know how it could work
5) Utilitarianism is straightforwardly correct, you just have to keep aggressively expanding your definition of wellbeing. Objective list theory with a big big mostly undefined list is the best solution we're going to get. Ethicists in this ballpark should spend less time on austere theoretical criteria of rightness and tricky little thought experiments that are bullet-biting invitations, in favor of 'real world' applications, tractable decision procedures/heuristics, continental philosophy-style idea generation etc.
Regarding (2), I've always felt that sports fandom and religion are both expressions of groupishness. So is nationalism, of course.
2) Communal transcendence is definitely also achieved among the audience of "live" (including EDM) music performances, especially when drugs and dancing are involved.
1.
Email and other digital communication channels will become so inundated with AI generated and disseminated personalized content, that we'll need AI chaperones to shift through the spam. Effectively, to get in contact with me you'll need to convince my AI gatekeeper that you should be allowed to.
Now, because arguing with pompous AIs is perhaps the worst waste of anyone's time imaginable (sorry AI overlords), you'll want to delegate the task to an AI of your own.
We'll end up spending a fortune on running AIs talking to each in order to be able to talk to each other.
Oh, and social media platforms will consolidate into one personal megafeed curated and created by an AI crawling through the lot.
2.
When self-driving and AI-assisted cars become the norm, urban streets will become nigh impassable to car traffic.
To gain widespread adoption these cars need to be very safe, they simply can't be allowed to run over people. When they become very safe, eventually they'll be very much safer than human drivers, and soon the safety features will be forced on in urban streets.
If you were to ride your bike or simply walk in the middle of the street, in plain view, there's a slight chance you'll get run over by a distracted driver, but nigh zero chance an AI will make that mistake.
Furthermore, a human driver is somewhat likely to become frustrated and threaten you with their multi-ton vehicle to persuade you to make way. An AI will not threaten anyone.
Therefore you could have a picnic in the middle of the street without worrying about being hit by a car. You can go for a jog and have a dozen cars crawl behind you, their drivers powerless to stop you. Riding a bike will become riotous, as you can bomb a red light with the expectation that the cars will not hit you.
Any semblance of traffic flow will only be possible with physical barriers stopping people from getting onto the road, which is obviously incompatible with urban areas. Therefore all streets will become defacto mixed use trails, where the worst that could happen is you get hit by a cyclist.
I think that there aren't really moose in Maine. It's just a tourist attraction.
When I was 13-14 years old at a wilderness camp, our bus almost crashed into a moose standing into the road. The moose was so big it isn't clear the bus would have been much better off than the moose in a collision.
They've gone extinct since then . It's Maine's best kept secret. I provide evidence in my recent posts about alligators and Florida.
I agree with you about animals, and I think being in captivity makes it much worse. Have you ever been to a zoo and noticed how many of the animals look like the living dead? Suffering seems to be a common theme in all life, it’s just a matter of how much.
FWIW I think you are right about the bears and tigers. And orangutans
Wavefunction collapse corroborates the simulation hypothesis.
If the world is simulated, we might expect to find memory- and processor-saving shortcuts in physics, similar to how a video game might load in the highest resolution texture of a wall only when your avatar is standing close to it, or pause the simulation of squirrels in distant trees altogether, etc. Or to put it another way: whatever other-reality substrate our universe runs on may have some limitations analogous to those of our computers and therefore the simulation itself may take similar shortcuts to reduce inefficiency.
Given that all the stars in our apparent reality are just sitting there, spinning out the most abundant particles in the universe (neutrinos and photons), most of which no one ever sees, one of the first things you'd do if you were programming our simulated universe efficiently would be to treat light as simple geometric forms - like a wave - right up until the moment that some other entity in the universe *really* needs to know precisely where a specific particle is, like when it hits your eye, or photon-detectors generally.
On this theory, the double-slit experiment is a clever way we've stumbled upon to catch the universe out in this processor-saving shortcut. It's the equivalent of flying really fast in a video game so that you hit the distance fog, or spin your avatar round quickly and catch the moment that a wall that had been behind your avatar suddenly up-scales in resolution. We're seeing the trick.
I've always had a weird sense that there is some grain of truth to the idea of physiognomy. I swear I see similarities in personality/temperament between people with similar facial features. Could be jawline, eyes, whatever. I suppose variations in testosterone could account for something like this, but it is probably more a function of the fact that I remember faces much better than names, perhaps imbuing features with significance they don't have (or do they?!).
I would tend to believe in the genetic opposite of your proposition. A species that is genrtically non-social would not necessarily have a relational conception of community; ie. would not feel "lonely. However I think you are misconstruing "being alone" to equate with "being separated" from the community. Thoreau was separated from his normal community but was not alone or isolated from community at Walden. On the other hand many people can be in continuous contact with community and who nevertheless feel alone. Whether one feels alone and whether one is separated from community do not automatically equate to feelings of loneliness. Alexander Selkirk expressed feelings of complete aloneness but never felt his separation was anything but self-induced and so he remained optimally hopeful his return would be neither separation nor aloneness. On the other hand, he expressed some regrets over his separation from human community and a certain longing to be returned to that community, but he also said he felt the environment and his work to survive and a certain bonding with the nature and some of the species on his island kept him from feeling alone.
The issue of loneliness has been determinative variations and loneliness, I believe has very little to do with whether one is separated or whether one is alone and a lot to do with how one relates and/or the abilities to relate to others any self has developed within himself.
C.S. Lewis never felt alone though he lived most of his life unseparated from community. But when he bonded with a woman at one stage he felt separated from the other dons but much less alone in his binding with the one other. But for others he could be quite the opposite. Bonding with one too intensely can lead to feelings of extreme loneliness in some who find only one other causing too much separation from a larger community.
While I do not have any direct comprehension here of the why, or the cause, or if it is all genetic diversification, I do think for some loneliness can arrive from separation from the many, and some will find simply being alone intolerable. And sometimes a combination of factors determine entirely different feelings of whether one feels lonely or does not feel lonely.
For instance, in my wife's presence I never feel separated or lonely whether or not we are actively engaged in any shared pursuit, but she feels lonely any time we are not actively doing something together. So while I admit having little understanding of what actually causes the feeling of loneliness, I find it somewhat rash to attempt to define individual feelings and needs from community as having many common determinants.
Forrest Shields used to say that there's an infinite amount of work to be done. Inferences were interesting, but recent advances in LLMs have me questioning the premise: maybe there isn't, at least for, you know, us.
I think that consciousness is a manifestation of some unseen energy that we experience as living in the embodiment of a causal force, similar to gravity. I think gravity effects more than just planets and that it or a hidden force like it is what guides us, where our biology is just the vehicle that was created by it. We humans have some form of “magnetic” (or repulsive) push/pull on others, especially the highly influential among us. The more influential a person is, the more comparable they are to a planet or a sun, where their signals transmitted to the world cause distortion and have some causal impact that is way bigger than themselves.
> 1. Are probably false
My ideas is about how *things like* how terrible of an idea it is to use this as a filter.
I say it jokingly, but holy smokes man.