This is one of my fundamental beliefs about the nature of consciousness.
We are never able to interact with the physical world directly, we first perceive it and then interpret those perceptions. More often than not, our interpretation ignores and modifies those perceptions, so we really are just living in a world created by our own mental chatter.
This is one of the core tenets of Buddhism, and it's also expounded on Greg Egan's short novel "Learning to Be Me". He's one of my favorite sci-fi authors and this particular short led me down a deep rabbit hole of reading many of his works within a few months.
“ This is one of my fundamental beliefs about the nature of consciousness.
We are never able to interact with the physical world directly, we first perceive it and then interpret those perceptions. More often than not, our interpretation ignores and modifies those perceptions, so we really are just living in a world created by our own mental chatter.”
This is an orthodox position in modern philosophy, dating back to at least Locke, strengthened by Kant and Schopenhauer. It’s held up to scrutiny for the past ~400 years.
But really it’s there in Plato too, so 2300+ years. And maybe further back
Afaik, there's a difference between classical philosophy (which opines on the divide between an objective world and the perceived word) and more modern philosophy (which generally does away with that distinction while expanding on the idea that human perception can be fallible).
The idea that there's an objective but imperceivable world (except by philosophers) is... a slippery slope to philosophical excess.
It's easy to spin whatever fancy you want when nobody can falsify it.
This is absolutely what happens. It's even more tricky since our sensory inputs have different latencies which the brain must compile back into something consistent. While doing so it interprets and filters out a lot of unsurprising, expected data.
Thank you for linking this! I'm a big fan of Egan but had never read this particular short story. I feel like Egan is perhaps the only contemporary author who actually _gets_ consciousness.
I'm not sure this is unique to consciousness (whatever that is). What would it even mean to directly interact with the physical world? Even the most precise scientific experiments are a series of indirect measurements of something that perhaps in some sense is fundamentally unknowable.
Previously in the story it is mentioned that George as a child was curious about the etymology of the Olympics event and asked his father, only to be dismissed.
The callback at the end symbolizes his renewed curiosity. He is no longer ashamed of the way his mind works and if it makes him look different.
Data rates are almost always multiplied by powers of 10, because they're based on symbol/clock rates which tend to be related to powers of 10. There's no address lines, etc, to push us to powers of 2 (though we may get a few powers of 2 from having a power of 2 number of possible symbols).
So telco rates which are multiples of 56000 or 64000; baud rates which are multiples of 300; ethernet rates which are mostly just powers of 10; etc etc etc.
Of course, there's occasional weird stuff, but usually things have a lot of factors of 5 in there and seem more "decimal-ish" than "binary-ish".
I had a similar beautiful experience where an experienced programmer answered one of my elementary JavaScript typing questions when I was just starting to learn programming.
He didn't need to, but he gave the most comprehensive answer possible attacking the question from various angles.
He taught me the value of deeply understanding theoretical and historical aspects of computing to understand why some parts of programming exist the way they are. I'm still thankful.
If this was repeated today, an LLM would have given a surface level answer, or worse yet would've done the thinking for me obliviating the question in the first place.
Had a similar experience. Asked a question about a new language feature in java 8 (parallell streams), and one of the language designers (Goetz) answered my question about the intention of how to use it.
An LLM couldn't have done the same. Someone would have to ask the question and someone answer it for indexing by the LLM. If we all just ask questions in closed chats, lots of new questions will go unanswered as those with the knowledge have simply not been asked to write the answers down anywhere.
You can prompt the LLM to not just give you the answer. Possibly even ask it to consider the problem from different angles but that may not be helpful when you don't know what you don't know.
The first PDF is the record of a remote viewing session from 2 days before the USS Stark incident, and it is eerily similar to the incident. The feelings and "atmosphere" (can't think of a better word for it) sound like what you might expect on a ship being attacked by a random missile.
For example:
1. The drawing on p. 7 looks like the superstructure of a warship.
2. The next few pages might describe what it feels like to wonder if your ship is actually under missile attack.
3. On page 10 it records "aircraft--large, multiengined; distant; orbiting; distraction controlled, directed. 'Under orders.'" This USNI article has a little more detail on the AWACS plane detecting the incoming attack: https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2017/j...
There are other similarities, but the CIA report predates the attack, which is especially strange.
How many of these 'remote viewing' sessions didn't bear any similarities to anything?
If you throw a bunch of stuff at a wall, some of it is going to stick. Especially when it appears to be random words that can be applicable to millions of situations.
> Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is ex-
pected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of a magnitude similar to those found in government sponsored research at SRI and SAIC have been replicated at a number of laboratories around the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud.
From Jessica Utts, who was the president of the American Statistical Association and asked to review the Stanford Research Institute psychic programs (including Star Gate).
> Using the standards applied to any other area of science
Assuming this is true, I have to wonder why it would be that the science community apparently places a higher burden of proof on this sort of research, and whether that higher standard has been earned or not.
Ray Hyman, the other member of the review panel with Jessica Utts, disagreed with her conclusions ("the overwhelming amount of data generated by the viewers is vague, general, and way off target. The few apparent hits are just what we would expect if nothing other than reasonable guessing and subjective validation are operating."). Utts also seems to be involved in parapsychology organizations, which is pseudoscience -- I hope you won't dispute this much -- so I'd rule out her opinion as fringe, and not in any way the mainstream scientific opinion on RV.
RV is pseudoscience, you won't find scientific support for it, or anyone able to reproduce its purported results under controlled conditions.
The Amazing Randi probably had a challenge about RV that no con artist was able to win.
Edit: wait, it's even worse. Utts was completely biased and compromised:
> The psychologist David Marks noted that because Utts had published papers with [Edwin] May [a parapsychologist who took over Project Stargate in '85] "she was not independent of the research team. Her appointment to the review panel is puzzling; an evaluation is likely to be less than partial when an evaluator is not independent of the program under investigation."
So she was completely biased and wasn't independent of the leadership of Stargate! She had vested interests in it being "real", she was invested on RV and parapsychology!
> If you throw a bunch of stuff at a wall, some of it is going to stick. Especially when it appears to be random words that can be applicable to millions of situations.
Indeed. I'm amazed so many HN regulars are surprised by this. It's how horoscopes work, we've known this for centuries now.
Have people forgotten the scientific method, the standards of proof, etc?
> the CIA report predates the attack, which is especially strange
It's only strange if you believe the CIA released notes from their super-secret psychic program rather than the more plausible explanation that this is disinformation that was backdated for a boost of prestige.
Can you give me some evidence that this document was backdated? I'm not saying the government isn't shady AF, but I just wonder what's behind the immediate jump to "this has to be BS" rather than keeping an open mind.
Extraordinary claims (that RV is a real phenomenon) require extraordinary evidence. The null hypothesis is the default position, it requires no extraordinary evidence; the opposite does.
This is scientific method 101. Let's not pretend we're not familiar with it just because some dodgy CIA document surfaced.
Why does it need to be real- time? If rv is possible then it’s naive to assume that time is somehow “special” vs 3D. It’s possible that time is not unfolding linearly, that is only an illusion. “Remote” could involve accessing information from along the time dimension.
Long ago I was told of looking at a timeline so that time "travels" from left to right is the normal view, but now rotate that timeline so that it appears as a dot to you. You now see all events of the timeline, but without reference to "when" they happened. Lots of scifi plots are also described as such
Think about a maze drawn on a piece of paper. Because we’re in 3D you can see all of the maze at once but if you were a 2D entity inside the maze you would only see the walls / entrances / exits directly in front or behind you. Now imagine drawing a line from the entrance to the exit - that’s 2D + a time dimension. Now make it a 3D maze and an entity existing outside of spacetime would be able to see all events happening at once in 3D.
The first PDF is the results/notes of someone attempting remote viewing. Given the dates, I agree with the above poster that the similarities are impressive.
The PDF mentions a ship and some sort of unexpected catastrophe (in vague surrounding, horoscope-like terms) but it also mentions "high-powered lasers", Bikini atoll, H-bombs, and the drawings of the alleged ship superstructure look nothing like those of the USS Stark (some of the notes mention a "flight deck" like an aircraft carrier's; while the USS Stark does have a flight deck this is a mostly irrelevant detail about this class of ships). Plus this was done for the CIA, so unsurprisingly any "viewing" would be primed to refer to military hardware and events; imagine if they mentioned McDonald's, ice-cream, and an upcoming football match.
If you exclude H-Bomb, high powered laser, disregard the shapes don't match the USS Stark, and fixate on the coincidences -- pattern-matching, something the human brain has evolved for survival -- of course the similarities will seem impressive. This is "cold reading 101", a known trick. The average tarot reader knows how to do this.
Interestingly, we don't know of any other predictions that widely missed the mark. So if predictions 1 to 10 were made, most wildly inaccurate, but one of them vaguely/partially resembles something that happened some days after, that's not convincing to demonstrate anything but a random result. Let's say another prediction stated "calm waters, US dominance, safe passage, successful mission, happy sailors". How would we assess the accuracy of the predictive method?
Not going to share a personal example, but eg plug "I bought my mom a vacuum cleaner for her birthday. Why did she get mad at me? she keeps complaining about the old one!" into ChatGPT vs find me any human willing to sit down and have that as an actual discussion with me as a human of any age. I'm just supposed to get it? I'm a fucking monster and unworthy of being loved because I need that explained to me? "You should just know!"
I have no idea why someone would get mad about getting a vacuum cleaner as a gift. It's boring, sure, but if you keep complaining about your old one, it seems pretty thoughtful.
Everyone’s situation is different. But typically the reason this offends is because for a stay at home mom a vacuum is a work tool. If the current vacuum is broken then you should just get a new one. It shouldn’t take the place of a Christmas present, which is the opportunity to get her something related to her personal interests rather than her job.
Interesting point of view. But it's common for a man to get a work tool as present (e.g. a drill or a set of wrenches), with the obvious implication that the man will usually be the one who will have to use that tool to fix things around the house - and I have never seen anyone find that offensive. So what makes the vacuum cleaner different?
Powerwash simulator is occasionally fun. There's shiny rewards, I don't have to deal with potential bad weather, and there's no random patches that take 20 times to get rid of. If I don't feel like powerwashing simulator, it will wait for me, forever, with no ill consequences or social judgement.
If I never wash my actual driveway, the same is not true. Therefore I will need to wash it at times when it's unpleasant or I don't want to, and it will take longer than powerwashing a driveway in Powerwash simulator.
In this scenario (again, everyone’s situation is different) DIY is more often a hobby for the husband. Repairs are infrequent enough that you could just hire someone as needed, but the husband chooses to do it.
Perhaps more importantly, it’s not his full time job.
The implication is that it implies vacuuming is that persons responsibility to the point of giving them "their" tools instead of it being a shared purchase for the house.
Not everyone will care, but this is a stereotypical type of present likely to trigger anger and resentment in the recipient for a reason.
Without context, the reaction is bizarre. There must be some back story that you omitted; maybe something about the mother previously asking other people in the family to vacuum, and being ignored?
My wife and I, by the way, are giving each other a joint New Year gift of a fancy robot vacuum cleaner: it's the best sort of gift, useful, elegant, and something that one would be reluctant to spend the money on otherwise.
> I grew up at a time when a home appliance was an acceptable gift for the woman in charge.
This is also how I grew up (my parents were a little bit more on the conservative side). This together with the fact that I am not deeply knowledgable in the US-American common practices also made it hard for me to understand why the mother was angry about this gift, in particular considering that she did complain about the old one.
I bought a expensive fancy pan for my wife's birthday a few years ago. We both cook, clean and do groceries and chores equally so it never occurred to me that it was inappropriate. We both like cooking. I'm more of a stewpot guy while she's better in general at "pan stuff" and had been complaining about the old pan. She chided me a bit for spending so much on a pan and there was that.
But when I mentioned it over coffee at work most of my female colleagues were aghast. I defended myself saying something like "It's the 21st century, we are way past the point that I can't gift a pan to my wife" and they said "Well that might be at YOUR home!", and I learned a thing.
Your mother is a unique person. Only she can explain her actions, if she wants to. Chatgpt or any other person won't be able to. Your mother may be neurodivergent in ways that make it impossible for someone else else to answer for her, or ways that make it hard to answer for herself.
You are worthy of being loved even if people close to you aren't able to express it to you.
1) (can be visual) you can setup cmd-tab to move between apps and alt-tab to move between one windows within an app (for example with alt-tab app)
2) (non-visual) with your window management prefix key setup two left/right cursor pairs like "JK" and "M," and use one to switch apps and the other to switch windows within an app
(or maybe JL and IK in the inverted T cursor unless you're using up/down for something else)
We are never able to interact with the physical world directly, we first perceive it and then interpret those perceptions. More often than not, our interpretation ignores and modifies those perceptions, so we really are just living in a world created by our own mental chatter.
This is one of the core tenets of Buddhism, and it's also expounded on Greg Egan's short novel "Learning to Be Me". He's one of my favorite sci-fi authors and this particular short led me down a deep rabbit hole of reading many of his works within a few months.
I found a copy online, if you haven't read it, do yourself a favor and check it out. You won't be able to put it down and the ending is sublime. https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1995-egan.pdf
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