Experience is experienced.


PairTheBoard

I know that you are satisfied w/ this view. I am not.

yep

If I squint really hard and push on my eyeballs, I can see how it is remotely possible that it isn't pretty.

Maybe would be willing to put into words how it is not a pretty view?

Howard; You will still have to walk your dog. You will still have to zoom to the store when you run out of Beer, or Wine or other needed beverages. You will still have to put up with your crazy family. You will still dream about getting into the pants of that 16-year old pretty girl, with perky boobs, that lives down the block; that you know you can never have. And you will still post silly questions on the SMP forum. Free Will or no. It's a trap. So have another Beer or shot of whiskey and enjoy it.

I'll repeat what I've said before: When I speak about free will it's w/i the limits of natural laws. I don't expect free will that allows me to bend spoons w/ my mind. What I want to know is whether or not I have what I'll call 'free enough will.' Free enough to make my own decisions, free enough to know that I know something. Such a thing may not be possible and I can accept that if proven but, in such a case, I wish that I'd never been born into this horror.

Here is my hero, Donald Hoffman!

Look at this fellow! Nearly everyone else is trying to explain consciousness using the laws of physics and he is going the other way. I LOVE it! If he's right he's hit the biggest bingo in the history of the world.





And by horror I mean this:

Can't, wish that I could. I can compartmentalize w/ the best of them but it's still the case that this life is either the greatest blessing imaginable or the worst curse. No middle ground, imo, and the entirety of it, to me, comes down to what I am: Something or nothing. I'll go on living w/e the answer is but I don't have to like it.

One of these days I might go off of the Metformin and get blasted drunk. I've had about enough of you enjoying your damn 132248559 varieties of beer that I can only have one of, jfc! What's the use of having just one? No use, that's what! So I don't drink at all and, lucky me, I don't have to.

I think you are into the process of realizing Hoffman is way out. Does he sell many books, cashing in? Wiping out reality is quite a stretch. Something religious about it. And something trivial as "consciousness" directing it all? Fits well into some dreams.

Think about yourself as an advanced computer and go from there. I do, and still interested in what's behind the bend. Just needs some practice.

You are thinking about it two sidewaysey

I've always thought about things 'sidewaysey' and it has served me well although it makes communicating difficult sometimes. Here in SMP I have a well informed and thoughtful group that is willing to talk about things and mostly intelligently, at that. It's a great resource for which I thank all of you people.

So I'm suffering an existential crisis and have for years on end. Death used to terrify me and now I look forward to it. Maybe there's something after all and if not then so what?

We have this right now, think about it as eternal (at least the good parts )

Getting accustomed to death is probably good, kind of training for it.

The most sophisticated answer I've come up with to this problem is that our notion of time and loss is fundamentally flawed.

The life you live here, in this universe, will exist forever. The feelings, choices, bravery, cowardice, people you like, whatever, are a written part of this universe and that will never change. You're essentially carving out a piece of the universe, a record of a life.

We have this delusion of recency, because that's how we experience time - as a now that feeds our senses and a past dimly reconstructed. So we think the past is gone, things change irreversibly, and that is that. But it's not true. It's just the localized bubble we live in, created by our experience of time, that tells us this. Why we ultimately experience time that way is a mystery for the ages.

You are creating a life that with each moment is eternally part of the history of this universe. What that means, I don't know. But it's something worth living and experiencing. Whether you move to another level or dimension of existence "after" this life or not.

Into the process? I STARTED w/ realizing that he's 'way out.' But I came to him after one day thinking that consciousness might be a field and went to youtube. Ofc, others have already thought of it. Here's David Chalmers:



I've read Henry Stapp's 'Mindful Universe which claims that the mathematics of QM requires choices freely made in a stream of consciousness.

And to double check if these ppl are kooks I read this paper until I got to what I was looking for: That consciousness being as similar to fields should be considered in the list of logical options.

Finally, look at this cover which had to be approved by Harris:



lol, w/ a cover like that you don't even have to bother reading the book!

And I looked up Hoffman on Amazon, one book. Does a lot of vids, though, and IDK if he gets a fee for appearing on a forum.

Without free will I am being created, not creating. Without free will we are all just portraits.

That is what you believe. I think you have no way of knowing that that's true. It's a common mental flaw/delusion to believe that if the word if programmed, we're just robots, with all that entails emotionally.

The truth is that you can't comprehend what's really going on, so you're using crude mental and emotional models of being trapped without choice, and then finding that horribly despairing. But it's only the crude models that are despairing. The reality is what it is, and it's not something you can grasp, ever - either in how it works, or in what it means.

Perhaps you have pre-chosen all of what you do, and now you are living it in slow motion, feeling and experiences the consequences of your choice. Why would that be any less meaningful than real time, forward looking choice? Perhaps it is your lot in life to be a passenger, believing you're not, and experiencing the life of your character. Which is meaningful. Imagine there's a vast Akashic Record, and you've tapped into it, and are living through the record of someone else's (determined, because it's already happened) experience as if you are them. When you step out that experience, do the feelings become meaningless? Does the insight and wisdom?

Feeling despairing if all decisions are pre-made is

a) silly and contradictory and
b) really just a projection of total loss of power and identity, caused by a fundamental misunderstanding of reality and a crude projection of what the above would actually mean.

None of which has to do with reality itself. Existential deterministic angst is just the mind reaching the limits of its competence in a spot where the projected meaning is awful. It's not something real.

View yourself like a piece of art. That's something!

If your decision flows from a continuous history of you, then it's you all the way down that's making the decision.


PairTheBoard

<snip for brevity>

Ofc I have no way of knowing if anything is true so I use what's available and project from there.

I strongly disagree w/ the bolded and what's starting to happen w/ AI is a good example why: Nobody 'cares' about the typical factory robot bec it's just a machine but ppl are talking now about the ethics of dealing w/ a conscious AI esp whether or not it'd be ethical to turn it off. For we humans consciousness itself may be real or it may not be. If it's not I see no reason to care about anything so while I care about many things I also bear in mind that there may be no reason whatsoever to do so.

The second paragraph is what I use to cope. 'Maybe it's this, maybe it's that, I have no way of really knowing, wait and see', etc, etc. But those are just words and they are insufficient consolation at those times when I look about me and see just what ppl do to each other. If it's due to the mechanistic workings of the universe I can accept that but I don't try to pretend that it is glorious in any kind of way. It's horrible and that's the end of that. If it's not mechanistic then we have a chance of improvement.

One or the other: 'worth it' or not w/ no real way of knowing which, if either, is true. That's my view and it's burdensome.

My problem is that I identify w/ this piece of art the most:

Well, that is just anxiety. Has nothing to do with whether you have free will or not.

I can assure you that it is definitely you who decides what to have for lunch later this day. That it is purely a function of stuff leading up to the decision (the sum total of what has occurred that makes you who you are combined with the situation you find yourself in) isn't some unhappy story. Would you rather have free will and find that you choose something theoretically unpredictable for lunch instead of something that makes sense?

Personally, I prefer that my lunch choices make sense.

The cure for the tortures created by thinking is usually not more thinking.

Unless you want to do a Nietzsche, pass through prolonged intellectual and emotional hell and come out the other side with the same conclusion you'd have reached if you just had a little fun for an afternoon instead of going on a years-long rumination, more thinking is not the answer.

You can stay and think about those things just some quanta of your time. You have the right to think about other things also.

You can't always dwell in what stupid *******s are up to. I'm following the series "Genius" about the life of Einstein right now. Very rewarding.

Move to a different block. Also you can drive about and leer can't you. Take the dog, usually animals love to scout about, it's part of the evolutionary drive. You will make a great team. And forget the Beer, just smoke weed.

Howard needs to take his mom and move to a Florida party suburb or something, where 20 somethings wear bikinis all the time. The angst will evaporate like mist.

Why does the premise that "all is mechanistic" lead to horror? For me, that premise leads to bemusement.

Aside from all the amusement in the link below, I posted this so Howard Beale can insure himself from all the anxieties of living in the universe:

/6-of-the-strangest-insurance-policies-ever-and-10-extras

I loved this one and read about it years and years ago:




Alien Abduction Insurance

Also known as UFO insurance, alien abduction insurance pays insured individuals under the event that they are abducted by aliens.The policy was first offered by the St. Lawrence Agency in Altamonte Springs, Florida, and is said to have insured at least two claims.

According to Burgess, founder of British Insurance, this coverage is only for the “feeble- minded”. Notable policyholders included Shirley MacLaine and a former professor at Harvard University.

Though, to date, tens of thousands of people have purchased alien abduction insurance, and the famed Lloyd’s of London claims to have sold more than 40,000 of them. To receive compensation from Lloyd’s, policyholders must pass a lie-detector test, and provide video footage or a third-party witness.

However, 39 people, all of who were members of the Heaven’s Gate “religious group”, based in San Diego, California, were unable to do either of the above.

The cult was insured by the London brokerage Goodfellow Rebecca Ingrams Pearson (GRIP), at the cost of $155 a year for a $160,000 payout should someone be abducted. In 1997, the members’ insurance was withdrawn as all of them committed suicide in an attempt to reach an alien space craft in pursuit of the Hale-Bopp Comet.

Heaven’s Gate’s alien policy included double payment if an insured person was impregnated during the course of an invasion. Men were also included in this, for protection against the “unknown capabilities of alien technology.”

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$