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I've often wondered how other people deal with the questions of existence. What is real, after all? My dad had an old saying: "There's shit you can do shit ab
by dsp1234 10y ago
I've often wondered how other people deal with the questions of existence. What is real, after all?
My dad had an old saying:
"There's shit you can do shit about, and there's shit you can't do shit about".
Definitely can't do anything about whether we are in VR right now, or whether or not we actually exist.
- rjbwork 10y agoA philosophical mantra repeated many times throughout history in varying amounts of eloquence and simplicity - Stoics, Buddhists, X Anonymous type groups, Jews, and even freaking Mother Goose! I don't think it particularly bad advice myself.
- azeirah 10y agoYes we can, we can try to send a message to the creatures in higher levels of reality.
- willismichael 10y agoI'll take the bait, people have been doing that for thousands of years and call it prayer.
- ehsanu1 10y agoNah, they'd ignore that, if they even notice. You have to forcibly make them take notice. Like take over a galaxy and make all the stars in it blink in synchrony in some sort of code and establish a communication channel.
- yorwba 10y agoReminds me of this short story: http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/ Except there it's the higher level contacting humans.
- zamalek 10y agoMore precisely, they probably wouldn't notice that. You have to exceed the singal-to-noise floor.
- sangnoir 10y agoYou are assumming they higher beings are functioning on timescales comparable to ours. Imagine a colony of microbes on an agar block writing out morse code intended for us - but there is no-one and the labs are locked for the night. Yet they keep trying for generations... Alternatively - the spatial scales are very different and an entire galaxy or ours is not observable by their 'naked' eyes.
- ehsanu1 10y agoSure, it really depends on the speed of the simulation relative to their own, and the level of resources poured into this (is it a high school project, or the combined output of their entire civilization? what do they look for inside, if anything?), and of course, their actual objectives. Honestly, who wants to talk to some snot-nosed humans? They probably don't bother checking until the universe becomes one giant superorganism anyways. And even then maybe they just make their observations and ignore it as it tries to wave them down.
- alasdair_ 10y agoRobert Anton Wilson, channelling James Joyce, claimed "no man is a solipsist when he is scraping dog shit from his shoe." It sounds trite, but forcing yourself into situations where you absolutely must deal with the immediacy of "now" is a good solution to existential angst.
- alasdair_ 10y agoRobert Anton Wilson, channelling James Joyce, claimed "no man is a solipsist when he is scraping dog shit from his shoe." It sounds trite, but forcing yourself into situations where you absolutely must deal with the immediacy of "now" is a good solution to existential angst.
- baocin 10y agoReminds me of a Reinhold Niebuhr quote: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer]