autogeneity

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I think it's more like entertaining the possibility more than is justified, rather than firmly believing it. I don't think when most people, say, reblog a good luck post, they believe in it doing something the same way they believe, idk, that the sun rises in the east. it is probably closer to pretending as though it's true.

iirc the post OP was referencing was making the claim that engaging in this practice is beneficial towards believing true things in general (or actually that it is essential for that — that we need to have an outlet for fantastical thinking or something). OP is saying it has a harmful effect on that. it's unclear to me that there is any effect at all.

See, I think the effect actually goes the other way-if you start believing in "harmless nonsense" you'll be more likely to accept and start doing more nonsense, and it's easy to pick up more and more until you're accepting antivax arguments "just in case" and then you're well on your way to the granola-hippie-to-fash pipeline. This all happens through essentially the same methods as that one "girl dinner to fash" TikTok: you uncritically accept some seemingly harmless but false shit, and then you're weakening your defenses against more harmful false shit because you're not in the habit of rejecting things that aren't true.

#like we're all making shit up here lol I would want evidence of any impact either way #additions

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#huh I sort of instinctively follow that up with 'idk if I'm phrasing it very clearly' or similar #might help if you are facing this misunderstanding

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Most real numbers are not arithmetically definable. This means, more or less, that there is no statement in the first-order language of arithmetic which is capable of uniquely identifying such a number. There are a countable number of arithmetically definable reals and an uncountable number of reals overall. A number is analytical if it is definable by a formula in the second-order language of arithmetic. Again, almost all reals are not analytical, because there are only a countable number of second-order arithmetic formulas. Likewise, most real numbers are not definable in the language of ZFC.

Humans and human minds are finite (or finitistic) things; presumably most real numbers are not "humanly definable", or perhaps even "physically definable". It may be the case that most real numbers cannot be individually picked out, named, or specifically described in any way given the constraints of the physical world. This does not mean that nothing can be said about them: we can still confidently conclude that an undefinable number greater than 6 is also greater than 3. Roughly, they can only be spoken about in generalities, with statements that apply to infinitely many of them at once. It is impossibly to even conceptualize any one of them specifically.

I am puzzling over two things right now:

Are there truths which are true of individual undefinable reals? These truths could never be stated or even thought, and almost by definition they could not have any bearing on the real world, but are they "there"? It seems like there should be unique truths about undefinable reals; for any undefinable real r, surely x=r (free in x) is uniquely true for r. But maybe this is a cheat, maybe there is no well-defined predicate "x=r" for undefinable real r. If you do believe there is such a predicate, I am tempted to ask: what does it mean? Of course by definition no answer can even in principle be formulated.

Do undefinable reals even have independent existence? I mean, in set theory they arguably don't: for undefinable real r and s, the statement "r ≠ s" does not correspond to any valid sentence in the language of ZFC. We know "from the outside" that they are distinct, but... do we? We can say tautologically "distinct undefinable reals are distinct", but surely general truths should in some way just be families of specific truths. Like "all dogs are smaller than the moon" is true because each dog individually is smaller than the moon. But we cannot individually say that any two undefinable reals are different from each other, or in fact individually say anything about them.

All this assumes that the universe, or at least human experience, is in some sense "finitistic" and therefore that most reals are in fact undefinable to us.

#math

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That cool bee book I was talking about a while ago mostly refrains from philosophical digressions (which I think is a strength, I appreciated how the author had total confidence that just clearly presenting the facts about his subject would be enough to make a fascinating book without the need for any "...and here's why that should blow your mind" editorializing, and he's totally right), but there was one towards the end I've found myself thinking about a lot, which is: he wants people to stop using "self-consciousness" (i.e. the concept exemplified by the mirror test but used implicitly or explicitly in tons of other contexts) as a criterion for which animals can be considered sentient/morally relevant/having significant inner lives/however you want to describe it. Not, as you might expect, because he thinks it's an unreasonably high bar to meet, but because it's such a low bar that it produces no distinctions: he argues that basically any animal with any kind of developed central nervous system has to have some kind of self-consciousness almost by definition.

The example I remember best is: imagine you can see an object in your visual field getting closer to you. No matter the specifics, it's obviously always going to make a huge difference to how you evaluate this situation whether the cause of the object getting closer is a] the object is moving towards you, or b] you are moving towards the object. If a, then something might be pursuing you or falling on you or a thousand other things that are just not even worth considering in the case of b. But visually the two cases are indistinguishable; if you're going to be able to track the difference, your brain has to be putting at least some work into keeping tabs on what your own intentions are and what choices you're making as you move through the world, predicting the expected consequences of those choices, and maintaining a fairly tidy mental separation between stuff in the world that you're making happen and stuff in the world that's just happening of its own volition. Otherwise, every time you walk towards a rock you'll freak out and think the rock is rolling into you, or vice versa.

And it's not hard to see how this applies to your entire sensory world right, it applies to sounds and tactile sensations and even feelings internal to your body to some extent, if you're going to both perceive the world and take actions in the world then it's mandatory to mentally separate yourself and the world before that's going to yield even an ounce of helpful information, you just can't function successfully on the most basic level if you're processing stuff that you're doing on the same level as stuff that's happening, if you're in that state then you simply don't have a usable model of the world at all, you just have chaos.

So you can very easily eliminate a certain seductive narrative about the evolution of consciousness, which starts with very primitive animals who are mentally processing nothing but basic sensory inputs, then as you rise up the chain more complex animals are forming concepts of objects and building up a more nuanced understanding of the world, until finally you approach humans and the mind becomes so subtle and sophisticated that it gains access to this special advanced meta-level of thought where it can even understand itself! No, the self is precisely the one idea that has to be in place from the very beginning, before any of it has even the most rudimentary practical value. Self-consciousness isn't the pinnacle of the mind's evolution, it's one of the lowest, most basic foundations that everything else builds off of.

I think this is really cool stuff! I don't know enough about the relevant academic philosophy of mind debates to say how far all this does or doesn't speak to that, maybe someone will tell me the "self-consciousness" concept being attacked here is a strawman somehow, I don't know. But it's definitely impacted the way I (just a dumb guy who likes creatures) think about our small small cousins and what their lives might be like and I think it's super interesting. If you think it's interesting too then maybe you wanna buy The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka and read it. It's mostly not about this stuff, as I say it's light on philosophy and heavy on bee-life immersion, but if you actually read this whole post then you're probably in the market for that I feel like.

#interesting #biology

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every time someone talks about blaseball I google it, this clarifies absolutely nothing, and I promptly forget again for next time

#dumbassery #genuinely right this moment I couldn't tell you what it is because the answer never fits into anything #and so apparently my brain just errors out at storing it?

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its so brave that you have such a 2012-coded url in this 2024 world

would you call a bear brave for standing in a new construction suburb or would you recognize the unfamiliar world they built around him

#I mean yes I would call that bear brave for surviving in the unfamiliar world.

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irl tumblr meetup with the mutual circle but no one says what their url is so u have to guess who is who

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My friend made a uquiz that assigns you a whale species. Take it. Take it now.

#blue whale #yep I do be chilling #kinda surprised I did not also get bowhead given how many times I answered 'shove my head at it' lol #poll

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#animals #cats

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unavoidable that you will be the villain in someone else's story. You will be painted in an unfavorable light. You will be the irredeemable one. and all of this will happen despite how nice you might usually be or how kind or how respectful or how warm. and you will just have to move on.

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just once I want to see a good post critiquing makeup culture that doesn’t turn out to be made by some janky radfem blog

#lmao yeah geez that is some serious level of cursedness

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Crotone (2) (3) by Michele Palombi

#what colours!!! and contrasts!!

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How much do you think one would need in investments to live off passive income where one buys some thousand dollar plot of land in New Mexico and lives in a storage shed? Just enough for food and medicine right? There are cheap plots of land in walking distance of places you can buy food and medicine. I think about this pretty much every day. Ever since I started investing in an index fund around a year ago. Would the suck of not having electricity and plumbing (well presumably I would be able to charge up my phone and laptop on grocery runs) be more or less than the suck of having to work for a living? I have enough invested for my fifty dollar a month medicine, just not for food yet...

#fascinating #I don't think this is something I want at present but it was in the past maybe it will be again someday #I have considered caravanning

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.

perhaps there is some form of extremely ice cold comfort to be found in the fact that since I was dating [roughly] monosexual people, my relationships were most likely inevitably doomed to end from my transition anyway. even if in the one case I had accepted meaning little to my partner and in the other not been so pathetically a complete Fool. maybe I can let go of some resentment and regret (respectively) in the notion that it was maybe in some fairly concrete sense not meant to be.

this would perhaps be easier if it felt less like I got lucky that one time and may never connect with anyone ever again. or if I didn't love people Forever.

#m #ref notes #don't mind me I am just still failing to move on after 2 years #🙃 #this is about past relationships it is not saying anything negative about anyone but if it is about you #maybe think if you'd want to read me being senti about it

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A surprisingly helpful bit of social maneuvering I've figured out from trial and error: Throughout your life, you are going to need things from people. Often, it's going to be on a deadline. And when that deadline passes, you generally want to know what's going on. So, you need to ask them.

There are two kinds of people, broadly, in this situation. The Shameless will tell you what the holdup is, with absolutely no regard for if the reason is "good enough". This is actually very helpful, because you get the real reason immediately, and can start working on a solution.

The Ashamed is trickier. People who are Ashamed are people who were often told they were giving excuses when they were trying to explain, and they'll often avoid you until they solve the problem on their own. This causes them and you a lot of stress, and often takes a lot longer to solve.

Long term, the strategy for dealing with people who are Ashamed is to provide a supportive environment where they're comfortable sharing any problems they're having with getting things done. But, there's a way to at least partially short-circuit that:

Provide an explanation for them.

One example might be "Hey Susan, I noticed that I don't have your report yet. Are you busy with other projects?" The readymade explanation signals that you're willing to accept an explanation, which is the big anxiety point.

Sometimes, you still won't get an honest answer- especially if the honest answer isn't "good enough" by the standards of the person who traumatized them. But, I've found that it often at least gets you a lie that lets you give them some slack or work around the problem.

Let's say that Susan has actually completely forgotten that she needed to do the report. She's horrified at herself, and completely unwilling to admit the real problem. But, she can now safely reply with "Sorry Jennifer, I've been swamped, and it got lost in the mix. I can have it to you in two days. Does that work?"

From there, so long as Susan gave an estimate for when she can actually do it, she and Jennifer can hash out a solution.

It's not a perfect solution, but it works astonishingly well for how small of a change it is.

#advice #interaction

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#girl help I was looking into local flights yesterday and the airline I would normally take is all 737s #and THEN #saw on the news literally just now that their damn thing apparently just lost a wheel????

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Reblog and share at least one thing that brightened your day today, large or small 💙

#blessed barbell <333 #first attempt at snatch balance was good! and also pretty enjoyable #glad it's friday I'm looking forward to the weekend #the past week was quite stressful between the job application assessment and interview and the license test #and aaaalll the prod releases #things feel calmer now which is nice. #last night I spent some time staring at the sea after a long time which helped so today felt more grounded #less all over the place