Westworld Commentary on Religion

In season 1 of Westworld, around episode 3/4, there is a scene in which Hector is speaking with Maeve about the religion of the spiritual natives. And he’s sort of describing their situation in a cryptic, indirect way. “this life is hell, the gods are in the other realm controlling us,” stuff like that.

What's interesting here is that in isolation, this sounds like random spiritual babble, but its actually true! It's just true in a way that they can't know based on their range of experiences.

The implication for me here is, what if that’s also the function of our religion, for our existence. A cryptic formula of what’s going on, but not too specific, because we can’t know all the details (our nervous systems leave us with a limited sensory horizon). And then scientists take it super literally in order to "disprove it," not realizing that they've completely missed the deeper truth by approaching the language the wrong way.

This is my perspective on religion in general, so seeing it manifest in Westworld was rather exciting.

Some Scattered Thoughts on Season 2 Episode 4 of Black Mirror

I would write this into a cohesive post but am in a bit of a crunch, so hopefully these can serve as helpful notes for someone who would like to write a thoughtpiece on this. Feel free to take, just happy to get these ideas out. I bolded the parts in particular that I thought could be nice aphorisms from the episode:



I saw ep 4 of black mirror, a truly beautiful revealing of the importance of death in the human story. with a presentist mode of existence, and the important characteristic ability that we have to "forget" (a la Nietzsche), would we really want to keep going, if we had the chance? easy to say yes now, hard to know what you'd say then.
this was the first good episode this season for me,
the importance of life's ephemeral glow.
her decision to stay with the girl into eternity was so much more heartbreaking than the option to die and preserve the meaning she lived
cheating death does not evade nothingness, if anything, it emphasizes it
sartre would have loved that episode
we live with this paradoxical yearning to both escape death and experience a type of meaning that transcends life. this episode sort of demonstrates that we can't have both, in a really beautiful way.
singularity is bullshit, technology can't "solve" existentialism.

Conversation with a friend:
i had to like, think for a while just to reconcile the emotional disturbance it left me with
thats a sign of a good ep

yeah
It's so creative, even as a premise, then to build that world, build the characters so that we care about them, and then introduce a conflict and meaningful resolution
All in 90 mins

Yes! How could they do so much in so little time!
High maintenance also is good at this in its own way
Like you know so much about everyone so quickly, from so little

Character driven plot development

But this black mirror had this kubrick-esque quality
Where even at the end, during the supposedly happy ending, you can't help but feel there is something deeply disturbing about all this when you're looking at those circulating lights at the very end
Similar type of discomfort u get during the outro to 2001 odyssey

Just like, not readily explainable, but you know there's something

This is what Heidegger called "working art"

Athletics vs Time-based video games, and Donald Hoffman Interface Theory of Perception

We ask:
What is the essential difference between playing a videogame and playing a sport?

Example: Smash Melee vs Fencing

Both require real-time split second reaction, in combination with predicting an opponent's response to specific provocations.

The essential difference, is that in this videogame, the physics world occupying your mind is virtual, while the space that you will the decision in is physical (entering the various inputs on the controller). These two unfoldings are synchronized in time so this divorce goes un-noticed, humming softly underneath the veil of immediate focused consciousness.

In fencing, the physics world occupying your mind and the space that you will the decision in are one and the same. But, perhaps more obviously, this fact also goes un-noticed.

So phenomenologically, there is no difference, but in the Hoffman construction of conscious agential experience, specific variables must be different (specifically A, and kind of G maybe):

Source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqDP34a-epI @ 16 minutes.

African Americans and Vegans

New interesting facts:

1. Black Americans are called African Americans, Black Canadians are called Black Canadians.

2. There was a temporary vegan collective in Iran, one of the few vegan groups in history which did not suffer from B12 deficiency.  The speculation is that there was a lot of animal feces everywhere which contaminated their food, and that they grew some veggies out of human feces, and ate the roots, which had trace B12 content.  This has inspired me to make the following graph:

Notice how a severe b12 deficiency hits when you first turn vegan, but if you continue to love animals to the point that you bask in their shit you actually escape the trend.  With enough Love anything is truly possible.

Hermit

Changed my life.
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201409/the-last-true-hermit?src=longreads&printable=true

Future Science

Automated Professors
http://narrativescience.com/artificial-intelligence-platform/

Open-Source Science
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632760
http://www.openscienceframework.org/

Automated/Centralized Experimental Infrastructure
https://www.transcriptic.com/

http://www.synthego.com/

Generalization by Familiarity

This is something we all do.

Source: I'm planning out a task (taking fully dissolved nmrs of several reaction crudes) into a series of microtasks (weigh out solids into a bunch of vials, screen solvents, dissolve crudes in those solvents, nmr them all together) out loud to my undergrad and suddenly I got a feeling of familiarity which led to me following with "This is a big part of being a chemist: taking a daunting level of work and reducing it to a few, simple, highly parallelized tasks that wont take very long at all."

And I thought, wait, that generalization I made is insanely specific to this situation, why am I saying this is what all chemists do?  The feeling of familiarity could have just been at planning itself, not the specific method of planning.  It could have been from just parallelization itself in the abstract, why did I have to say link it explicitly to chemistry?  We often get a feeling of familiarity after doing something, and tend to generalize this vague familiarity based on whats going on at the time, but can very easily pick out the wrong features to generalize since the feeling itself is vague, its the articulation which follows that we choose and specify.