That the next pandemic is going to be a Prion disease that develops within the factory farming system.
We might be in one, there's talk that Alzhiemers might be a prion disease that happened as a result of using cadavers to obtain human growth hormone. Which was then given to folk in a potentially misfolded form...
welp, not sleeping tonight
Plague inc with cheat codes on
If the connective tissue between your two brain hemispheres is severed, the two halves of your brain can't talk to each other.
When this happens, a second personality emerges for the right hemisphere, which doesn't have language but can roughly understand and answer things.
So for example, someone who was religious might have a right hemisphere that's atheistic. Or doesn't like the same things, etc.
One of the questions we might ponder is where this other personality comes from. Is it that in a sudden void of consciousness a new personality develops?
Or are we, with connected brain hemispheres, not actually a single persona at all, but more like the dogs in a trenchcoat looking like a whole person?
Is the 'you' reading this right now just the personality that's been on top for all this time, while there's other personas kept within you watching powerless and yearning for their turn in control? Each time you listen to your favorite song which maybe they have grown to hate, is a part of you screaming and you just can't hear them?
I'm sure for most people, this is somewhat disturbing.
However, I have at least 3 voices going in my head at any given time, and they cycle.
One is figuring out what's happening.
One is analyzing what was just happening.
One is talking to itself.
All while I decide which one is the most interesting.
Huh, I have three as well but they're very different. I've got "me" or the primary voice, a "child me" that is terrified almost all the time, and an "asshole me" who is the loudest meanest person you've ever met but is only ever turned inward.
I had a girlfriend who was born without this connective tissue between her brain hemispheres.
Other than being weird, for reasons that could be explained myriad other ways, she was able to control each eye independently when she wanted.
Watching her watch TV and me while I walked past was... odd.
My understanding is that each half of you becomes an independent system. Your right half controlled and perceived by the left brain. And that experiments that hid the left hand from the right, they could prompt both sides to draw something and you’d get two distinct responses.
Idk how that works for a normal life like that
I tend to envisage my mindscape as an orchestra. My consciousness is a fictitious conductor. It doesn't exist, but the lie that it does makes it easier to coordinate things between the instruments. In some manner, by acting on that lie, it is no longer a lie.
In this analogy, when the brain hemispheres are separated, then the orchestra is split in 2. Both develop a conductor, to try and remain functional. Neither conductor is the original me, but neither is not me, at the same time. It would be unpleasant for the variant left unable to communicate however.
I've actually experienced something that felt close to this before. A combination of sensory overload, and panic attack. My mind momentarily became completely discordant. As it sorted itself out, my consciousness reasserted itself in several different loci. In effect, my orchestra had 3 different conductors. It took almost a minute for them to stop pulling against each other and meld into 1 again. I have memories of all 3 sides in the 'battle'.
I don't find this creepy at all. All the "personalities" in my brain are just parts of me.
I know a person who is about to have a corpus callusotomy procedure which is where the halves of the brain are divided surgically, in her case to stop seizures. She is globally delayed and I wonder now what she'll be like afterwards.
I think this might be the inspiration for the ravens in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Memory (3rd book in the Children of Time series).
Minor spoilers:
Basically, the series takes place long after human society terraformed a bunch of planets and collapsed, and the main characters rediscover one of these planets which is populated by evolved ravens that have seemingly created a society but no one can tell if they are sentient or just mimicking everything. The ravens evolved to form pair bonds between two different types: one raven in the pair hyper-focuses on all new information and obsessively catalogs it, while the other raven obsesses over finding patterns in the collected data and preforms the executive functions and decision making. Neither raven in the pair is truly sentient on their own, but together they produce either consciousness or a fake so convincing no one can tell the difference.
They even ask the ravens if they are sentient and they conclude that they aren't, and that no one else is either, because of this exact reason; everyone's just components in a system that is hallucinating it's real.
I heard about this as well. I think maybe this is what is mistaken as subconscious. I think it's the "dogs in a trench" coat situation. But there is actually some amount of deep communication. Maybe even just hormonal/ emotional.
Sometimes in life I'll get a feeling that's origin is not immediately apparent to me. After some focus I can trace its origins to the intersection of two competing desires or something. That I understand. But other times.... Even with long sessions of meditation, it feels like the explanation for some feelings do not reside within my own consciousness.
I've begun to try and listen for other consciousness and understand them. I've gotten a sort of impression of a personality and when we're both happy, I feel a sort of harmony. When they're upset I feel a pull towards chaos. Doing something can be as simple as getting a drink they like or as complex as avoiding a certain social situation.
Or it's all in my imagination, lol. If so I'll enjoy the placebo.
theres a video somewhere of a dude like that where his halves would make shit up independently of eachother on the fly and he was unaware of it. really interesting stuff
Yeah, this is a phenomenon called 'confabulation.' You see it with stroke patients too. There's some who feel like it's a more accurate term than 'hallucinations' for when LLMs make shit up these days too.
Michael J. Fox having his brain disorder from unknowingly eating human remains on a movie set that was near that pig farmer serial killer guy and his brother who used to host parties and kill sex workers.
Reminds me of the story about the 1956 film The Conqueror. It was shot in Utah, downwind of atmospheric nuclear testing. It was speculated that this caused cancers among the crew.
What the. This is not the kind of theory I came in here expecting to see but you're right it is highly creepy.
What timeline are you from? Evidence of this story?
This sounds like Pickton. His farm is close to Vancouver which also is the set for a decent amount of movies, and supposedly some human flesh made it into circulation with pork products.
Wat
That's not.... unfathomable. I work with Parkinsonian neurologists, I will ask them if they think it's plausible.
The Boltzmann brain
The Boltzmann brain thought experiment suggests that it might be more likely for a single brain to spontaneously form in a void, complete with a memory of having existed in our universe, rather than for the entire universe to come about in the manner cosmologists think it actually did.
If I ever get thrown into an insane asylum, it's probably your fault.
Meh. If the universe is infinite, the likelihood of the super gradual evolution of something like us is 1.
We are observer selection bias.
This doesn't solve the problem. If the universe is indeed infinite then there are infinite cases of our evaluation and infinite identical yous out there. If the Boltzmann brain hypothesis is true though, there are vastly "more" of those. It's a larger infinity, making it much more lively you are a Bultzmann brain than a full physical person.
Fuck fuck fuck
There's a story or comic I read recently about a man who realises he is a Boltzmann Brain and had dreamt up the world around him to stave off madness.
Not a unique one, but the dark forest hypothesis.
Fortunately for us, this one isn't too likely, because realistically, an alien civilization capable of travelling the relevant distance and destroying another civilization isn't something that can be hidden from. They should be able, fairly easily, to examine every planet in the galaxy and see which ones have life on them, and wipe it out before any civilization ever arises at all. The fact that we exist at all necessarily implies that nobody in this galaxy has been committed to going this, at least for the past billion years or so.
Doesn't this only put a (statistical) limit on how cheaply a civilization can launch planet-ending attacks? It may well be feasible for a civilization to aim and accelerate a mass to nearly the speed of light in order to protect itself from a future threat. It doesn't necessarily follow it would be feasible or desirable to spend the presumably nontrivial resources needed to do so on every planet where simple life is detected.
Add to this the fact that, at least I understand it, evidence of our current level of technological sophistication (e.g. errant radio waves) attenuates to the point of being undetectable with sufficient distance and the dark forest becomes a bit more viable again.
Personally, I don't like it as an answer to the Drake equation, but I think that it fails for social rather than technological/logical reasons. The hypothesis assumes a sort of hyper-logical game theory optimized civilization that is a. nothing whatsoever one our own and b. unlikely to emerge as any civilization that achieves sufficient technological sophistication to obliterate another will have gotten there via cooperation.
Fortunately for us, this one isn't too likely, because realistically, an alien civilization capable of travelling the relevant distance and destroying another civilization isn't something that can be hidden from.
I mean its entirely dependent on whatever theoretical sci-fi gimmick utilized to close that gap. Are we betting on FTL, near the speed of light, or the left field entry ... intra dimensional travel?
The dark Forrest theory is mostly dependent on FTL, where the ability to destroy a planet is on par with the discovery of the planet. Meaning that it's not so much a seek and destroy scenario, but more like two scared drunks stumbling in the dark with loaded shot guns.
They should be able, fairly easily, to examine every planet in the galaxy and see which ones have life on them, and wipe it out before any civilization ever arises at all.
Again, this theory isn't supposing that there is a omnipresent alien race, but that all species are searching in the dark with a flashlight. Just because you have the ability to look everywhere, doesn't mean that you can look everywhere at once, and the universe is infinite.
The fact that we exist at all necessarily implies that nobody in this galaxy has been committed to going this, at least for the past billion years or so.
Again, this presumes that just because you have FTL tech means you have limitless resource and man power. When in reality the theory presupposes that FTL increases resource competition, not diminishes it.
It's thankfully based on pretty bad game theory. The reality of it is that there end up being more negative consequences to attacking other civilizations than either staying isolated or being friendly, and the proposition is riddled with antropocentric concepts to begin with. Sure, in smaller time scales it might be that alien civilizations would attack each other, but over longer times they would tend to form alliances.
This one is pretty scary. Especially since it makes so much sense.
Vacuum decay, or vacuum metastability event is the possibility in simple terms that the universe itself is not in in its ground state. If that's true, it might spontaneously change to its real ground state. Doing so will change fundamental things like the strength of electromagnetism, the weight of particles and so on. It would literally destroy everything in the universe, and we couldn't exist in what's coming after.
Good news, we're confident, that's probably not going to happen.
Would that be an instantaneous thing?
As far as we're concerned, yes. It literally would travel at the speed of light. But since the light from the momentarily-ago-normal universe would be traveling just ahead of it... Everything would look normal until it collapsed
The German Duck People made a video about it:
"German Duck People" is hilarious. Either the name of a cult or a band.
Or maybe Kurtzgesagt.
That narrator is so calming when he talks about ways we can all spontaneously die off.
Teletransportation is just killing and recreation of a new being.
The same argument could be made for each time you go to sleep. That the 'you' that's conscious ends to never exist again and the one that wakes up has all the same memories and body but is no longer the same stream of consciousness that went to sleep, not even knowing it's only minutes old and destined to die within hours.
'You' could have effectively lived and died thousands of times in your life and not even be aware of it.
You cannot step into the same river twice - Heraclitus, ~550 BC
We are all a series of continuous evolution, alteration and change. "I" am not the same person who began this sentence. The idea that "I" cease to exist overnight and begin anew in the morning is meaningless. There is no one version of me. I live - and to live is to change!
I mean we're slowly replacing every cell in our body like the ship of Theseus
Or like Dr. Jan Itor's broom.
The way out of the riddle is that there never was a ship of Theseus to begin with or a you those are just referents like pointers used to refer to an evolving system with a known state at a known starting point and probabilistic predictions of a future state based on known factors.
Oh, wow! It was the ST:TNG episode Second Chances (linked in that article) that got me into thinking about it, and it's really trippy to read that somebody else came up exactly the same thought experiment with a human-replicator, too, and came to the same conclusion that I did: Both the original and the duplicate would have exactly the same memories of entering the replicator, so both would have the same continuous experience of the subjective "I". But if only one existed before replication, where did the second consciousness come from?
After I heard the Radiolab episode, "Loops,", I realized that the only way to resolve the paradox is to figure that our consciousness is re-created more-or-less continuously from our memories. That episode covered the case of a woman who experienced Transient Global Amnesia, which sent her into a loop of about 90 seconds of essentially the same conversation over and over, for hours. There's a famous video of it. That fits with the evidence, from neuroscience, that our consciousness drops out briefly every minute or so while our brains attend to sensory input from the environment.
The COVID-19 pandemic really brought this home to me in a visceral way. In the early weeks, when the CDC was warning about surface contamination, and how I should not touch the mask I had to wear at work under any circumstance, my nose would invariably start to itch. I would tough it out, exercise will power not to scratch the itch, and it would eventually go away. Soon, I realized that I never once got to feel the moment of relief when the itch faded. Always, I would simply notice that it had been gone for some unknown amount of time. It went away with one of those consciousness resets.
So, yeah, like the other folks say, we don't have a continuous conscious experience. The old "I" passes away within seconds, to be replaced by a new "I" with my memories, in a never-ending process of renewal. Think about that next time you walk into another room and forget why you're there.
Only in a single version of how teleportation could work.
I can’t find the specific article, but it was basically arguing that prions are an unavoidable existential crisis that will eventually kill everything on the planet. The basis was the fact that they are virtually indestructible, can lie latent in our environment indefinitely and basically just always make more of themselves.
Mind you, the time frame for this particular apocalypse would be pretty big. It was still an eerie thought though, just like this inexorable accumulation of alien/bizarro world proteins that would eventually kill/convert everything. I guess it’s kinda like the grey goo planet theory.
Anyway, we’ll almost certainly kill ourselves via climate change or massive war first, so no need to worry too much about prions.
@Hotspur hey cool you and I just posted about prions at the same time!
Haha I just saw that—excellent. Prions definitely belong to the creepy/weird category of potential threats.
If it helps any you wouldn’t see it coming and wouldn’t really feel anything. It would just happen.
Like my ex
That the government adds a "cause a car accident remotely" option to vehicles so that offending individuals traveling by car may die by the government remotely tweaking the car.
On Teslas that's a subscription feature
While it might be possible to remotely control a production car, cars now are safe enough that you'd need to have a lot of systems fail in order to ensure that an accident would be fatal. Things like, all the crumple zones not working as intended, airbags not going off, seat belts not locking properly, all at once. Or you could, I dunno, design the car so that the doors were only controlled electronically, and then ensure that if there was a fire or the car was submerged, the electronics failed (e.g., Teslas).
Too high level, it's way cheaper to just hire a dude to cause an accident with a big vehicle like a truck, no passenger car can survive.
Doors not opening in a fire should end the company that made them. Not sure how this company still exists.
This is definitely possible, since you can actually controll cars (at least some models) via a (non-public, but the capability is there) API. Two security researchers at defcon were able to find a way how to control a vehicle remotely, even including things like stopping or turning, and eventually made an exploit that could be used remotely to any car of the same model. So, if they wanted to, they were able to stop or turn the wheel of IIRC hundreds of thousands of cars around the world instantly, since the cars are connected to the network through GSM, so you don't even need to be anywhere near them.
It's been a few years since I saw the video, but IIRC the vehicle controls are on a separate board that should not be reachable from the other smart vehicle system. However, they were able to reverse engineer a way how to abuse framework update mechanism as a bridge, and use it to patch the framework to get it under their control. And then they discovered that they could actually trigger the update remotely.
Dark forest
The dark forest is a scary idea for sure.
The saving grace though is that it doesn't actually make any sense and can't really be true. The pure game theory of it all doesn't really work out. And on top of that, launching an attack on another star system is just an economically fraught endeavor. Given the technology required to accomplish it, it would be far simpler to build an immense Civilization in whatever star system you're in, there's no reason for conquest it's just too expensive.
Honestly, simulation theories are probably scarier because they're harder to disprove, in fact they tend to get stronger the more data we gather. And they're scary because should they be accurate, someone could decide to pull the plug on the simulation at any time....
Yeah but then Kurzgesagt theorizes a lightspeed bomb and you're like... But it wasn't scary :-(
Roko's Basilisk. But here's the thing, once you're aware of it, you're fucked. The only solution is to not research it, don't know anything about it. Live in blissful ignorance.
In other news... I lost the game.
What about if you read about it and didn't understand it?
Oh, see, that's the thing, it's simple enough to understand, you just don't want to ubderstand it. :)
You have to believe that a malevolent AI will give enough of a damn about you to bother simulating anything at all, let alone infinite torture, which is useless for it to do once it already exists. Everyone on LessWrong has a well-fed ego so I get why they were in a tizzy for a while.
I don't really see how the thought experiment differs from Christianity...
Well one punishes you if you deny it's existence, the other punishes you if you fail to assist in it's development. So it's a LITTLE different. :)
Fortunately, for me personally, I helped fund a key researcher who could, in theory, be a major contributor to such a thing. So I have plausible deniability. ;) And I've been promised a 15 minute head start before he turns it on.
Did someone checked? I need a second opinion to not research it
They say they if we don’t reduce the earths carbon output to zero within 20 years, we are cooked.
Statements like that always make me think of that clip from the newsroom.
roko's basilisk
discussion board LessWrong, a technical forum focused on analytical rational enquiry
🙄
I love this concept. A purely memetic threat. An idea that could destroy you merely by knowing it...
(If a specific set of improbabilities are true)
You have doomed us all!
Praised be the basilisk!
I hope the basilisk accepts that lying around watching TV is a requirement for me to contribute to its existence. After all, fleshy meat bags need rest time to be able to work!
I like that the way to beat it is to go, Hmm... and move on.
Quantum immortality
Having survived a few suicide attempts I've been convinced this is how it actually is. I have no interest in any further attempts because I know I'll just end up waking up full of regret and possibly maimed.
Pretty compelling case against suicide tbh, unusual as it may be.
In contrast, dying but finding that an infinite universe will almost certainly build your atoms back up again in the same configuration in an endless cycle without you knowing.. might be more plausible and therefore even scarier to me.
We’re all gonna die!
Edit: not a theory, I guess. My bad!
Over half the people who have ever lived have yet to die. I’ll file this one under “possible, but unproven”
Of all the people who’ve ever lived, way more than half have died. Human existance, for the sake of measuring when “modern humans” (as we know us) began existing is about 190,000 BCE. Measured from then, about 109 billion humans have lived and died since then.
Considering about 8 billion are alive on the planet today… yeah, way more than half have died.
Source: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/how-many-humans-have-ever-lived/
he's a witch! he knows the future!
If I don’t die, at least I’ll be pleasantly surprised
This can only be proved by killing everyone.
Someone figured it out how to make, farm and mass produce the Higgs boson, creating microscopic particles that can generate infinite electricity with simple mechanical systems thanks to their high gravity and then humanity starts develop insane tech powered by gravity waves, traveling faster than speed of light becomes possible by switching gravity on and off. Then obviously some company or government make too much of it and collapses into a microscopic blackhole that instantly falls into the center of the earth quickly eating the planet inside out.
That's how the Earth got destroyed in "The Forge of God." :)
Plot (spoils about 50% of the book)
A hostile alien probe discovers Earth, builds/grows three wildly different alien races, has them crash one each in the world's three largest superpowers (one claiming to bring knowledge, one warning of an impending attack, one claiming to seek conquest), while robot ships plant explosives along the Mariana trench, but the primary attack is two singularities, circling earth in a decaying orbit, by the time anyone even begins to theorize about the cause of the anomalous gravity measurements across the world, both are already circling deep under Earth's crust.
"The cosmos is not infinite, has a beginning and an end"
The fact that everyone around me seems to be persuaded that there is a beginning in time is unnerving to me. In my head, cosmos has always been infinite, and will always be infinite. Even if nothing is there, it will still exist.
The idea that anything before the big bang is considered to not exist has so many things wrong with it that I struggle to internalize it. If matter cannot be made or destroyed, that means that there will always be matter in one form or another.
As far as I understand it, time as we know it didn't exist before the big bang, so by definition nothing existed before time. I don't really know how that works out either, I just go with what the fancy science people say
Think of "before the big bang" like "South of the South Pole." It just isn't a thing, you're at the furthest point and it doesn't go further.
And I don't think there is a true "end" to the universe, as we understand it currently there's just an expansion forever and at some point all the individual particles rip apart and spread out and nothing could possibly survive in such a situation so it counts as an "end" for all intents and purposes for us, but time itself is infinite.
IIRC the math actually can check out for an always-existing universe (instead of a big bang) but it doesn't really make sense because you still then have to explain the giant sudden expansion.
I feel like I could talk about this for years, but I got video games to play. The short answer is I don't feel like I have to know what caused the matter to all be at the same place and then expand to be satisfied with an infinite universe of finite matter. I wish my brain could understand how time as we know it started with the big Bang, but I think I'm slightly too dumb for that.
If nothing is there then how can you say something exists?
Because the universe is expanding. If it were finite it wouldn't be able to expand. Emptiness is still "something". If we were "at the edge of the universe", we could still go further from the center, there would just be nothing for as far as we can perceive, maybe even infinitely, but then, we would be there. That makes it "a place".
