LastThursday

The self is an identity much like the body. As such it has to maintain its own existence against possible destruction. The body uses pain, and hormones and its immune system; the self uses stories, hallucination and ownership. In reality the self is an extension of the body, it's just another way a body maintains its identity. The body has learned to abstract away parts of its identity to gain advantage by having a self.

All words are a social construct including: Universe.

I'm pretty regular with some of the things you mentioned. I wear blue blocking glasses in the evening, don't generally eat much after 6pm except maybe a biscuit or two, walk outdoors for 40 minutes or so for exercise and daylight. I'm also regular with my sleep and I'm in bed by midnight most nights, and fall asleep fairly quickly. I've kind of built those habits up over time as I've found out about the benefits of each one. It's all about not neglecting my body and giving it what it needs. I could do a lot more though. The top thing I did was give up smoking. I also don't drink much alcohol any more, probably about once a month. Going outdoors before midday is better for shifting your circadian rhythm earlier (if you're a night owl), which I never manage. I don't particularly restrict my diet in any way, although I have intermittenly fasted in the past when I wanted to keep my weight under control (it was rough). But I could probably eat less processed foods and make more meals from scratch. Luckily I don't have a sweet tooth, so I don't increase my sugar load, except when I visit friends(!). I would just do the recommended and reduce refined carbs and sugar and salt and fat, and increase fibre and fruit, vegetables and nuts: I could improve on all of those. I also take omega-3 and vitamin D suplements, but there's some doubt over whether I should with omega-3 as I probably get enough from my diet. You should also not over do it with vitamin D suplements, I probably only need to take them over winter in the UK. Overall I feel quite healthy and never get ill with colds or anything else. The point is to make all these things habits and not beat yourself up if you occasionally stray from them. Build them up over time.

Yay! I'm going to watch it at half speed so it really sinks in 😜

You're right that 99% of ideas are not new, but it's not all bad. To progress forward you need something to push off of. New ideas aren't generated in a vacuum, you need existing ideas to spark from. And if you want really good and creative new ideas, then you should have mastered the existing ideas first. The problem I see is that existing ideas are not understood well enough, and people parrot their superficial understanding to others, and they get propagated as half-baked. But it's to be expected, most of the best ideas are complex and nuanced and require effort to understand, which most people don't want to take on. Some ideas are so "out there" that only one person may ever come up with it (e.g. Einstein's Relativity). It's genuinely hard.

How does science comes to its conclusions? Shared direct experience.

That's a supremely intelligent insight.

Sure: Dancing; Playing an instrument or learning to play one; Painting, sketching; Meditating ; Most sorts of physical activity; Self hypnosis; Walking in nature, going to elevated spaces (cathedrals etc); For me personally thinking about existential matters and writing about them; Sex (actual); Learning or mastering something new.

IQ is a shit measure for intelligence. You have to know that even the dumbest person has a huge level of intelligence (just compare them to animals for example or robots with AI). Every person is an intelligent work of art, so what you're talking about is relativity. What a dumb person really lacks (comparatively) is awareness and maybe a natural ability to become more aware, but it's not hopeless. It's like a fire, once started awareness breeds more awareness.

Some morning thoughts on giving up work. I periodically get into a state where my tolerance for corporate work becomes low, and I get all sorts of negative thoughts and feelings arise. Despite having worked nearly all my adult life I've never really been well suited to working for someone else, it's always felt like putting a hand into the wrong glove. The list of things that bug me about work is long, but includes the long and rigid hours, having to kow tow to someone else's arbitrary whims, being in a collective of people you don't necessarily gel with, not being recognised for the effort you put in and the general drama of office politics. The general sensation I have is that if I were to drop working tomorrow, I wouldn't miss any of it whatsoever. I have not worked before for extended periods either when I have been laid off or when I've had the money to keep me going without work. On two ocassions I've had enough money to stop for six months or more. On another I couldn't find another job. I know full well that stopping my regular income is like jumping off a cliff: at some point you know you'll hit the bottom. But it is ultimately liberating, my time becomes mine again, and I don't have to tolerate that laundry list of dislikes I have about work. However, only once did I use those "free" periods to do anything productive with and that was when I went travelling. I'd had some money I'd saved up after a lucrative contracting job in London. At that time I really was in a mental state where I needed to just be somewhere else and be someone else. I was quite driven to shake my life up. Long term it didn't really change much of the make up of my life, but it did give me what I wanted at the time. And that word "productive" comes up often whenever I talk to anyone else about stopping work. The sentiment goes something like: "What productive thing are you going to do when you're not working?". To which my general reaction is "productive?". You see the framing is all wrong. The whole problem I have about working in general is the expectation that I should be producing something. That is at the centre of all that is wrong with the whole idea of employment. Essentially, I'm not a machine and I've never really wanted to express myself that way. The huge irony is that I spend all my days interacting with and thinking like a machine, since I work in information technology. But, there's a big difference in trying to (creatively) bend a machine to your will, and being treated like a machine yourself. I know myself well enough and unless I have something to focus my attention on, I will effectively languish. I've kept up wage slavery because it's the path of least resistance. To a degree is forces me not to languish, because it requires my attention and I get recompensed well for it, but I don't like it. Recently, I have effectively switched jobs despite still working for the same people. Whereas before I was working mostly by myself and catering to an external client, and was fairly autonomous; now I'm part of a team and learning the ropes again and answerable to others. In some ways taking a new job would be easier as the expectation on me would be less and I could be cut some slack to not know what I was doing. But I don't get that pleasure, I'm expected to "hit the ground running" but also be answerable to others who are effectively more senior by virtue of their knowledge: they wrote most of the software I'm working on. I think I need to quit, and to do it soon. But I also never want to work in the corporate world again. And I have no plan to keep me from languishing if I do so. But I do have a large cushion this time, so I can fall further off the cliff before I hit the bottom. It might be time.

A little thought experiment on death. Say you had a close family member who had been diagnosed with an incurable disease. He has been given anywhere up to a few weeks to live. You visit them and they seem as well as they can be given the circumstances. You leave and a week passes and you've received no update on them, no information at all. Are they dead or alive? Like Schrödinger's cat, since the family member is not a quantum object, then they are not in a physical superposition of states: they must be either dead or alive. Note that the same ambiguity exists as for the famous thought experiment. The ambiguity is existential. The resolution to it is easy enough nowadays, you can contact them, or at least contact someone who can physically check in on them. In other words, information resolves the ambiguity. Could there be a different resolution? What is death but a permanent cessation of information about a person? The only way you can ever know that a person "lives" is to receive some information from that person, either remotely or face to face or from a third party. Whatever information you do receive triggers the "is living" signal. Note that to truly know if someone lives, we must keep receiving information to that effect. Whenever the information flow stops, then we are immediately back in the ambiguous position and have to guess if they still live. We must "fill in" information and using heuristics like "they're young", "they're healthy" and so on to do so. I'd say in general we heavily bias in the direction of "living", we treat each other as if we're nearly immortal. But we could bias hard the other way, and assume that as soon as we lose sight of someone's presence (information) they are dead - this is just as logical. Although, the most logical position to hold is that there is a 50% chance that the person is dead, at all times. This would hold for everyone you knew. This is just a probabilistic view and would seem somewhat natural. Information is king however. We can have a more dynamic view of aliveness and death. We can solely base things on what our senses are telling us directly. When we are not currently experiencing a person, instead of pretending, we can just accept that they are dead. When we re-experience a person (in the right way) we can say that they are alive. Expanding this idea more broadly to inanimate things, things are constantly popping into and popping out of our experience. We can instead take a stance that all that exists is only that we have direct experience of. When it goes out of our direct experience it stops existing. Only then is there no ambiguity to be had. In a strong sense we are (mostly unconsciously) playing the game of probability using prior knowledge to bolster our assumptions. We pretend that things don't suddenly stop existing, that fit and healthy people don't suddenly die when they leave our front door. That if we chose to we can call that friend at any time. Occasionally, we're wrong and the person or place or thing doesn't ever come back into our experience, and we should grieve. But we should acknowledge that there is this constant and dynamic interplay between existing and not existing, alive and dead - and maybe that makes grief easier.

The point is the thing itself. It's not that life has a point or meaning, it's that life and more broadly existence is the point itself. Life is beyond stories, so it's not explicable as a story. Ironically, my previous statement is just a mini story, so language is not up to the task. Only direct obeservation, direct knowledge and direct feeling can answer it, if there is an answer to be had.

The logical end point of your question is "Why not everything at once?". You should work backwards from there.

I always had the feeling that New Agers just co-opted scientific words to make their ideas sound legitimate and rigorous. You get the same with the word "quantum".

Against my better judgement I'm going to poke the hornets' nest: is solipsism a position to adhere to or an inherent fact to be made aware of? Which of the two makes you a true solipsist?

A bit of wordplay for the day. I fancied I might travel through my mind to an ocean of sand and blinding light. Night fell and I was coolly touched, the breeze whispered and all was peace and calm. Fatigue overcame me and darkness enveloped my being, my mind drifted here and there sweetly untethered. What unease then when in that night blackened desert an even darker form manifested. I reached within for a mote of recognition but there was none, my only defence was to call out to the form. "Ho! What goes there?". All was silence for a while. And then it spoke without mouth or voice: "I've come to take you away." Terror overwhelmed my mind and I scrambled to escape. But it was no good, the form morphed and seeped into my every pore until I became it. I woke and the sand and light was blinding.

@MuadDib it reminds me of a time when I nearly knocked myself out messing about making chlorine gas. Never smell the chemicals. I didn't even know friction drilling was a thing, tungsten carbide is the biz.

I think it's very hard to talk about time without involving time itself. All the stuff about an ever-present now, and saying there's no past or future, is trying to explain time in terms of time itself. You could just say the passing of time is a quality of consciousness, much like "red" or "loud" is. Like it's impossible to explain "red" without experiencing it directly yourself, it's the same with time. Time is ubiquitous though. It never stops and everywhere you go it's there, so it's not the exactly the same as "red" or "loud". But it is the same as consciousness itself: it's always there. Are the two the same thing? Is time just consciousness? I don't know. If time is synonymous with change, then it could be because reality is groundless. Time itself seems absolute, but its manifestation is not: all appearances within consciousness are in relation to all other appearances. This means that appearances are untethered (groundless) and are completely free to shift and dance around each other. I think it's this constant shifting around that is time itself. But the change does happen at a certain rate (another time related word!), and that also seems to be absolute.

Thoughts, emotions and environment all trigger and affect each other. Change one and you change the others.

To round off my YouTube tour (it's been long) I'm going to take you to all the places I missed along the way. In no particular order: More maths. Lots of algebra on a blackboard, but very watchable. Michael Penn guides you through seemingly difficult problems step by step. You'll need calculus level at least to follow For chemistry that shouldn't be done, Nigel Braun films his trials and tribulations of making his fantastical ideas into reality Dave Plummer is a proper ex-Microsoft computer geek. His interests and investigations are varied and covers all facets of computing, with interesting and unusual projects If you're into geo-politics and reportage old and new then Johnny Harris has it covered with slick videos and his love of maps, what's not to like? I have been known to like trains (guilty geek). Reece Martin goes in depth on different transit infrastructure around the world and gives his opinions Geoff Marshal's enthusiasm for trains and buses knows no bounds, he's visited every station in the UK and goes into the field to shoot his videos. Lots of London based videos but many further afield in the UK For your London history of transit Tom Wright (aka Jago Hazzard) winds his way through it with subtle humour. Well researched Dee (last name unknown), covers software development practices and culture and is one my newer channels. Informative. Another Brady Haran channel covers all things to do with computer science, with John interviewing professionals in the field. If you want to know how computers really work look here Laurie Kirk covers software development concepts for modern operating systems, using props and a bit of acting to get the ideas across, entertaining stuff. Adam Savage makes stuff for all sorts of projects, see him in his workshop taking you through the process of prop and model making, high energy at times and insightful Joe Scott mostly covers science related subjects, but sometimes forays into other areas. Good sense of humour and well researched Xyla Foxlin makes rockets (!) and other builds. Excellent energy and great to see the process of making intricate pieces Izabela Pitcher models (and makes) period clothing. If you want to know the ins and outs of how garments used to be made and worn in an every day sense (mostly women's but some men's), then she's your woman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Gn5nRX7RuI (embedding not allowed boo!) If you want to see gender fluidity in action (and how it's a construct) then Jude Howard is a "femboy" who dresses up as a woman. Hilariously entertaining at times and superb editing. And I'm not even 100% sure how I came across this channel... And... that's it folks!!

You have to be careful here, nobody is born able to play the piano for example. But you can have a predisposition for finding certain things easy that others find hard (and vice versa). Even then you may never get a chance to exercise that predisposition in practice. And also, a lot of practice may trump someone's else's latent talent if they haven't developed it very far. Talent is learnt.

He should definitely pay you rent. You're not obliged to pay him back for his help at all, even if you feel grateful. It seems like you didn't ask him to help you, so there was no arranged agreement there. If you had agreed to him staying rent free before he helped you, then it would be different. You can show your gratitude in other ways.

@MuadDib that was interesting, I always thought these sorts of systems had simple proportional feedback loops, but it's much more sophisticated. With my engineering hat on, you could take an FFT of the motion to get a frequency response graph, and then apply feedback to attenuate certain frequencies to stabilise the motion. You go from the time domain to the frequency domain, fix the motion there, and then back to the time domain. This is how a lot of digital signal processing works, normally for audio. Anyway, that's getting into the weeds!

@LastThursday It is because the internet has put on me ideals of Life that Only by living in a cabin i can not achieve. SEE?? You are a slave to your thinking, not a slave to the internet. It is possible to change your thinking.

I think I'm nearly finished with my YouTube extravaganza, but still there's... maths! I fell in love with maths when I encountered my first calculator at six years old. Even though I don't actively practise maths much nowadays, I find that I'm still way ahead of the average Joe in that department. At work, if they need someone to work out a formula for this or that, I'm the oracle. Alex (last name unknown) tackles sometimes tricky mathematical ideas and uses props to get to the heart of them. Dense at times, but easy to follow once the ideas click, but no less excellent for that If you like good animations and a bit of algebra, then Burkard Polster explains complex maths in simple ways with a bit of light humour thrown in Numberphile hosted by Brady Haran talks to many varied mathematicians, each episode covering a different aspect of mathematics, in a digestible format Matt Parker both comedian and mathematician tackles all sorts of maths both theoretical and applied, often going out into the field to explain Grant Sanderson is the OG of using animation to explain mathematics. He often tackles intricate mathematical concepts and makes them simpler to understand, good stuff