3 ms·
This is so fascinating, when I read about things like this (the common folk unknown who lived a full life full of thoughts and contemplations), I think about my
by politelemon 3y ago
This is so fascinating, when I read about things like this (the common folk unknown who lived a full life full of thoughts and contemplations), I think about myself and how I'm going to be completely unknown to the future too. I wonder if those unknown people from the past were able to self contextualize in the same way and my assumption is yes, there's no reason to assume otherwise.
- retrofit 3y agoI have similar veins of thought, but more around how these people understood the arcs of their lives, what constituted unusual challenge or reasonable success (during a much more difficult time period to be alive), what their thresholds for happiness and suffering were, and what constituted 'a good life'. Given life was so much more harsh for the average person living in Cambridge then than it is today, I wonder what the hedonic equivalent of having secured enough food to eat (for the foreseeable future), would be for today. You'd have to assume that just having food and shelter secured would generate a very high level of baseline satisfaction in life.
- washadjeffmad 3y agoIf you're feeling existential, read "Lena" by qntm, also published in "Valuable Humans in Transit".* Today, you can generate a dataset on your past emails, conversations, etc and either publish it or use it to finetune a LLM for under $10. You can then voice clone yourself and use that as a TTS frontend, making it possible to converse verbally with a you-entity with no more delay than a long distance call. * Or, absolutely do not read it, ever. It's hard to guess how people will react to periodic sentient virtual immortality.