People care about thought crimes, but not thought virtues. People often judge themselves and others unnecessarily harshly for having impure thoughts, but never praise others for wanting to do good things but not doing them/not being able to. Doesn’t seem very fair to me, it sucks how easy it is to latch on to bad thoughts and ideas, even when never acted upon. It’s a thing I’ve struggled with ever since I started being more self aware of my flaws, and this thought makes it a little easier to not give so much weight to my shitty thoughts

The idea that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon from less complex things working together. There’s no evidence of, for instance, a city or bee hive having “consciousness” so it’s philosophical, not scientific, but the idea appeals to me.

I think it appeals to me because it’s a bottom up approach to something we usually think of as top down. Emergence in general is very common in nature. Ants aren’t sophisticated but ant colonies can be surprisingly complex. Maybe it’s the same with our cells.

The “Dark Forest” hypothesis of the universe. It’s not at all new, but it’s new to me. I find it pretty interesting. Though my personal 2-cent take on the Fermi paradox is quite different.

You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.

Reading that quote made me reflect on the distinctions between body, soul, and consciousness in a new way.

It’s from the book A Canticle For Leibowitz for anyone curious.

Here’s the bigger picture - or the self-actualization I have reached - you & I are the universe, on a journey that spans billions of years, we have come alive just for a few decades at most, in a way for the universe to experience itself, & experience we do, but we lack awareness of who we are (one / the universe), what we have (here & now), & what we truly yearn (experience the universe / connect with each other). Everything else is Leela, the most engaging movie or play you ever saw. It is so gripping, we can’t look away, but it’s just a show!

The ancient Hindu texts known as The Vedas possess elements common to both quantum physics and the concept of Synchronicity.

I was very intrigued by a follow-up to the recent numberphile video about divergent series. It was a return to the idea that the sum of the integers greater than zero can be assigned the value -1/12. There were some places this could be used, but as far as I know it was viewed as shaky math by a lot of experts.

As far as I recall the story goes something like this: now, using a new technique Terrence Tao found, a team was seemingly able to “fix” previous infinities in quantum field theory - there’s a certain way to make at least some divergent series work out to being a real number, and the presenter proposed that this can be explained as the universe “protecting us” from the infinities inherent in the math.

It made me think about other places infinities show up in modern physics (namely, singularities in general relativity) and whether a technique something like this could “solve” them without a whole new framework like string theory is.

I was revisiting one of those old childhood truths recently about the philosophy of common sense. Someone had asked a question twice about what people gravitate to when it comes to trust, and the answers reinforced a fear I’ve often had. There are lessons that might make you appreciate humanity, and then there are those which make me not want to be a normal human being because of seemingly intrinsic behavioral entailments.

Biological engineering

Organic compute: growing digital technology

Moore’s law and exponential technological progress viewed from the wider frame of biological evolution, and “the singularity,” are pretty compelling and likely upon first hearing them. They’re many nutters around it but Kurzweil earlier books on it are quite sound.