Relative to whatever boundary or place marker you're concerned with.

Where is the topographic feature, the limit, the declaration, by which we can wonder what lies beyond.

I like the chocolate covered Payday currently. Peanuts and chocolate married together in harmony, followed by black coffee. Whowza! These candy companies need to make a luxury version where they lower the sweetness level a bit and increase the quality of the chocolate. Often, shelf peanut products taste a bit old.

Enpuddlement, or to be enpuddled, though I'm not sure how to give it the proper prefix without a professional linguist. Latin suggestions are instagni/instagnum.

Literally means getting stuck in or physically/mentally captured by a puddle. Elephants get stuck and die in sinkholes, as youtube shows us. Insects trapped in amber to be fossilized into gems have been enpuddled.

Philosophers are continually enpuddled by problems (puddles) they can't help stomping around in, like children stomping around in puddles.

Be careful stomping in a puddle. You never know how deep it is.

Never dive into a puddle assuming you've guessed its depth. The seemingly shallow can be deep and contrariwise.

For some unlucky organisms, to be enpuddled is to be annihilated/entombed.

I guess the term partially stems from the childhood fascination for being stuck in quicksand.

The stuff they put in a Violet Crumble candy bar? This is the only local product that contains honeycomb candy. Only ever had it once. Not great but not terrible either, which is something I might say of all commercial candy bars now a days. I notice it often when I see it on the shelf because I like the reflective purple wrapper.

Honeycomb toffee sounds like a better formulation than the styrofoam version coated in a thin layer of chocolate.

I vote that the remainder of this thread ought to be devoted to explaining Melvin Vopson's strange hypothesis, that information is a form of matter.

Hopefully it's actually quite simple, maybe something like when computers process/erase information, particles (matter/anti-matter pairs) make a brief appearance. This would be compatible with his information catastrophe idea, possibly.

The mass of information, however it comes into being, seems negligible if it comes by way of electrons.

In practical terms, when considering the mass of a hydrogen atom, you can often neglect the mass of the electron compared to the mass of the proton. The mass of the hydrogen atom is essentially the mass of the proton. — ChatGPT

In fact, you are more likely to find the worst aspects of us in them (monks and yogis). — Sirius

A hasty generalization. Though there is plenty evidence of hypocrisy/exploitation of gurus/teachers over their devotees. The worst part is when devotees are taught to put their teachers on a pedestal, to have absolute faith in them as if they were gods/kings on earth. This sometimes seems like a legacy construct of controlling/exploiting folks.

The perennial problem of the guru is understood by the adage: "Do as I say, not as I do."

It comes at the cost of no longer identifying with all that is healthy, good, beautiful and pleasurable in life. — Sirius

I don't think this is true either.

What is even more terrible is this spiritual tradition sets one up for a lifetime battle against oneself. It's a cult of self-overcoming, rooted in self-hatred, unrealistic goals and struck by a fear of relapse into all that enables one to identify with other human beings, i.e our innate weaknesses. — Sirius

You might as well be describing here the internal struggle of those suffering through Capitalistic striving for success or status. There is always a cult to deal with, either the one you enjoy, the one you're trapped in, or the one you're fleeing from.

A universe that is birthed, plays out and ends all the while no one was, is, nor ever will be there to be aware of it, seems, ultimately pointless. — Benj96

A universe full of observers also seems to be ultimately pointless, from my viewing point.

Why can't the planet Pluto do its thing without anyone there to see that it is doing its thing.

What level of quantifiable(?) observers would then justify the existence of any universe. If you had billions of planets of billions of just jellyfish level observers, would it be enough? Or are jellyfish counted as non-observers, comparable to dynamic self-reproducing minerals?

@javi2541997

I still don't understand your popcorn ceiling issue. It's all very mysterious. If it isn't on your walls, and you want to put things on your walls, what does that have to do with the ceiling? It looks like you have orange peel textured walls, same as I do, which I'd surmise is less challenging to deal with than popcorn texture.

Slap some picture pins into it and tell it who's boss. Those adhesive velcro strips for picture hanging we've got in U.S. (possibly Scott's brand) also work very well on orange peel texture. They didn't want to come off when I took down an eraser board I had on the wall, taking a bit of orange peel with it, even when stretching the release tabs.

You know what they say, give a prospective employer an apple and who knows what could happen. Give them a filled out job application and they may or may not call you back.

But what about apple cations? Potassium is important for your health.

For example, when I use pins, they end up broken because that bloody relieve makes them bend over. — javi2541997

The physics of popcorn walls in Spain sounds like it requires a post doc analysis.

Do picture nails not work on popcorn stone walls? There is probably always a work around for attaching something to a wall. Though maybe filling the walls with holes is not an option.

I've got giant tapestries of Hasui Kawase prints on my walls. Wonder how kitsch this is for someone who has a more sophisticated sense of decor. They aren't hung very professionally. I'd like to cycle them out with something new.



This big one probably not Kawase though.

The conspiracy slope is a slippery slope. The more facts you'd convince yourself to doubt the steeper the slope becomes, until you can't get out of well you've slipped into. Paranoia is a strange illness (thinking you're being lied to in this case).

I toured the Kennedy Space Center and got to see all that mammoth infrastructure for launching stuff into space. Why would the powers that be go through the trouble such an elaborate and expensive hoax.

If we don't deny/doubt that we can launch satellites into space. Why is it so hard to believe we could launch humans into space?

To start believing in dumb conspiracies would be horrible for my health. It would generate too much anxiety in me. For example, being convinced of solipsism to the point of paranoiac compulsive-obsession (this is truly awful).

Unlikely there are any bed bug experts on the forum but I heard you can buy a mattress bag and tape the opening shut. They should make one that comes with some kind of pesticide, or a bug bomb. If the suckers can't get out to eat you they'll eventually die, but that may take 20-400 days apparently and they are not only in your bed. People also use those hand held steamers for clothes/cleaning if you can make contact with the bugs. Run the steam knozzle along seams, corners, wherever they congregate to send them back to their maker. Establish a cleaning habit in your room: vacuum, vacuum, vacuum, wash, wash, wash.

Or, if you can afford it, call in an expert. They have those giant heaters that raise a room to killing temperature for an allotted time.

Yes, now I remember two of those posted from a while back, the crucified animals and the animals approaching Trump. Love the animal line up of the cats and the eagle with all the same attack expression. Though it reminds me I'm gonna to have to move into an isolated cabin in the woods where I can't get any news if that guy somehow becomes president again. If only nature could speed up time, both contenders might become to decrepit to run.

@praxis

The fish with the hat and the pig with crown was a bit surreal.

@Praxis and @universeness

Either of you guys paint ever paint anything dark, grotesque, eerie, or unsettling, or does such subject matter carry no personal appeal to ever manifest on a canvas.

Be wary about trying to form intuitions with regard to whatever Shannon information means outside of the technical context in which it is used.

In daily life, information and knowledge are often used interchangeably as synonyms. However, in information science, they are used as antonyms: zero information means complete knowledge and thus zero ignorance while maximum information corresponds to minimum knowledge and thus maximum ignorance. — Yunus A. Çengel

Information here is a synonym for entropy.

Good guess, definitely beach in Hau'ula, Northshore Oahu, I'm sure of it, where piano guys also did their stunt. I've seen folks plein-air painting there. Just propagated some red tree mallow (Hau'ula) from Hau'ula (red tree mallow) a short way down the road from there. The point in Laie would also be a great place to paint the Koo'lau range and coast from that vantage point. Plenty of plen-airs in that spot too. Very cool.

Though you couldn't get that perspective in your painting by plein-air as you'd probably be in the water.

The world’s major religions all have a primitive way of know: i.e., they use scripture and authority to decide what is and is not true. In Christianity, if the Bible says it, especially if Jesus says it, then it must be true. — Art48

Religions maybe concerned with the conservation of a kind of being in the world over knowing truth (in a scientific sense) that constitutes a unique culture/perspective/ideology. Beliefs in this case would just be means toward that end, whether or not they are really true.

We could imagine a religious culture as a species of being, or just a way of being in the world.

Ideally, individuals should be able to pick and choose their religion/culture/job on the basis of education/exploration rather than indoctrination but maybe I've just been trained to say and believe this.

I've been brainwashed by the cult I was born into.

That looks like Pounders beach, in Hau'ula. Did you paint that from a picture or were you there.

He can't see the cruelty he is about to inflict to his own existence, but he can see it through the life of a dog. — L'éléphant

In your scenario there is no reason for killing the dog because it is a random act, which makes it cruel and unnecessary.

We would euthanize the dog without qualm if we knew the dog would be suffering until death. The question is whether or not the person who is seriously contemplating suicide can get outside of his/her own narrow perspective and initiate a transformation toward greater well being. Radical psychological change is possible. We should always consider trying to heal ourselves before ending it all.

There was a guy I knew who lived next door who suffered some kind of progressive neurological disease coupled with a war injury to a nerve plexus in his back. He couldn't walk on his own, was stuck in a tilted chair and couldn't sleep. The burden on his wife to take care of him probably immense. I would of liked to hear whether he thought life was worth living at that point. He lived for quite a few years after the couple moved away. He should of had recourse to the option of euthanasia if he desired it.

We're seldom privy to the details of one's suffering.

Antinatalists may fail to consider that because death is not an experience, in the same way being unconscious has no content/memory, that being and becoming someone/something is inevitable and eternal.

There will always be something that it is like to be, because in sleep/unconsciousness/death time and space have no breadth or duration for a subject or non-subject.

But this doesn't deny the value of annihilation in causing our troubles to cease, if we can't solve them by any other means. We are all headed for the wonderful drain, which will catapult the enigma of awareness of someone, somewhere, elsewhere.

The tree of life will blossom and fruit its strangeness again (you, I and they). There will be no memory to permit us to say it happened again.

You may become a creature who does not have the means (knowledge) to kill itself to end its own suffering. I don't want to become that turtle that got a straw stuck up its nose and have to live for years that way. That we believe that suicide is an option at all, is a strange privilege of radical self-determination. We should try to exercise that same self-determination in trying to untie the knots of our own personal suffering before we choose a final solution.

This thread opened a few rabbit holes in my local internet spacetime fabric.

Never have I heard/seen Ningen Isu until this moment. But I'm not sure I ought to recommend them to anyone. Intellectuals have high-brow refined taste so they would unlikely stoop to enjoy satirical nihilistic metal.

Ningen Isu is a Japanese metal band that formed in 1987. The name "Ningen Isu" (人間椅子) can be translated to "The Human Chair" in English. The band is known for its unique blend of heavy metal and hard rock with lyrics often inspired by Japanese folklore, horror, and supernatural themes. They have a dedicated following in Japan and have released numerous albums over the years, contributing to the Japanese metal music scene. The band's name, "Ningen Isu," reflects their distinct style and the dark and mysterious themes often present in their music and lyrics. — ChatGPT

So I don't really know how to answer this question for myself - why suicide or why not? — rossii

Why not explain the material and or psychological sources of your suffering.

Maybe you have chronic gastritis and your stomach is digesting itself and as a result you also have chronic insomnia, which is not unrelated to your really bad sciatic pain. The world hasn't yet invented proton pump inhibitors, so you have to rely on calcium carbonate as an antacid remedy, which is contributing to the development of kidney stones. All this is happening while your mother has sudden onset dementia and she has gone missing. This is terrible because you really do love her, and found comfort through her after your significant other committed suicide. Of course you found it impossible to keep a job with all these other stressors going on and are now worried by losing your rented living space. Everything is falling apart.

Burdened with this situation I might have committed suicide.

How awful is your own life compared to the above scenario?

Meh, we resonate with whatever tickles our inner pickle. There are blue moons, when for whatever unintelligible reason, the brain attunes to a piece of music as if it were an intoxicating drug.

But for the time in between those moments, one may wish and hope, to find something safe that tickles the inner pickle just a little bit.

Jeremy England's theory of "dissipative-driven adaptation" is interesting step toward explaining abiogenesis, but probably still a bit of a hunch at the moment.

You might be able to conceive of a macroscopic analogue to a molecule, a bunch of sticks jointed together by springs, that has very interesting/dynamic behavior depending on how/where energy is introduced into it. The idea would be, whatever degrees of freedom the structure has, it reconfigures in such a way as to increase heat dissipation (but I don't really understand this).

Think about correctly holding a tuning fork. Depending on which handle we hold, determines how the input energy gets dissipated. It hums if one of its modes of vibration is not dissipated by holding the correct end. Maybe we could imagine some molecules as tuning forks, which act differently depending on how they got tethered/distributed in a solution/matter mix. Maybe when these molecules vibrate that actually cause some-kind of alignment of their neighbors, and thus the process of higher order self-assembly gets going... Energy from outside the system would drive oscillations that drives self-assembly.

Such configurations that become locked into dynamic cyclical processes may always require the flow of energy of a universe moving toward thermodynamic equilibrium.

The periodic table for instance is an amazing example of transient negantropy (structure), as the phenomenon of gravity has pushed hydrogen atoms into relatively (un)stable atomic configurations, through a process that has increased global entropy. The interplay of these differentiated atoms allow for some wild inorganic processes to occur, even before life could ever begin.

For instance, there is evidence in Gabon, Africa, of a cycle of natural fission during a time in Earth's history when Uranium-235 was in high enough natural concentrations to undergo a chain reaction. This natural atomic reactor required water (neutron moderator) to sustain the reaction. Sunlight no doubt played a part, as well the presence of an underground river, in delivering the water back to the fission site after it was evaporated. So here you have a very strange example of a unique cycle in the crust of the Earth, dependent on all kinds of just so structures (the special ashes of long dead stars bathed in the light of a living star).

Life is just another just so structure, on par with what we might consider less exciting stuff.

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You've struck a wonderful or terrible idea. We've all heard of the phenomenon of Santacon. Folks could develop a Trump version of that, TrumpCon. We could all get away with committing crimes and avoiding jail time, so long as we become indistinguishable from Trump himself.

If we all raided Trump tower as Trump, they would have to let us into the penthouse.

Don't see much of an issue paying to have someone stand in line for you.

What if hiring someone to stand in line is a way to circumvent a rule of 1 product per customer. The entire line could be stand-ins for a single person. The scalper could take that product and then sell it at a higher price elsewhere. But this is more about organized queuing conspiracies hidden in plain sight.

That's a horrible way to underestimate life. — baker

Not sure what you mean by this. If the bliss ever arrives then life will be less underestimated. It's not an all or nothing proposition, either. The smallest increment of positive change by habitual meditation may help to rework bad attitudes, so we become more at ease in this world. This is the hope at least. The prison ought to become more of a playground.

Zombie nature is Buddha nature: empty. — praxis

This makes it sound depressing and austere. Buddha nature must also be full of joy.

People "meditate" to zombify themselves, to robotize themselves. — baker

This is an ignorant take on the value of meditation. Suffering folks might internalize their zombie nature far before they are driven to the mat (meditation). I've just had a mini breakthrough in my meditation practice. My stress level has diminished substantially. I've been waking up and wanting to do my work rather than avoiding it (like a good little robot).

But I'm still a working zombie, chained to the hull of a ship, rowing for someone else, burning boat loads of fossil fuels, that I may eat and sleep in comfort. Philosophers would tell us there is no free will either ( so who is responsible for making zombies or allowing us to see our zombie nature for what it is?)

If one can't escape being a robot, one might as well strive for robotic bliss (if it is real).

The zombie seeks to kindle the fire of its lost soul. Meditation might be a tool to do this.

omnes servi sumus

Are you against the formation of a techno-optimistic religion?

So long as the devotees tolerate my techo-pessimistic sentiments, and they don't make me flagellate myself or others, or humiliate me for not being able to do math problems, and let me go outside sometimes, and let me be the bell ringer. It's not like I feel I have any control over my life now. I could just as well be an indebted brick maker (slave laborer) in Pakistan, had I not the courage to free myself.

Imagine AI telling me that euthanasia is an opportunity to change myself for the better. So long as it doesn't mandate it, ok. Does it do my thinking for me, by hidden carrots I cannot see?

Nature does what nature does, no matter how awful it appears. AGI just seems like a gift of weapons ("thanks mother nature") for the masters of the universe to have an arms race with, for power over others/resources, at great cost to the stability, harmony, simplicity of life on earth.

Something may rise from the ashes, but it may require our ashes in the mix.

Dartmoor (Devon, England) would be a beautiful place to live. Got to stay on the moor for seven days in a cabin next to a thatched cottage with an AGA stove (those behemoths that would seem unliftable and never go fully cold). Walked a 10 mile circuit, from Tor to Tor across what might as well be a celestial plain. Sat under a frigid waterfall. The entire landscape was a novelty to me. The stone rows and circles, vestiges of the Neolithic, also contribute to ancient mystique. Though I'm sure the weather, and work, would cause the novelty to evaporate if I felt trapped there.

While sitting on a Tor I encountered a member of the British aristocracy (maybe some rich asshole role playing now), dressed in fox hunting uniform, prancing about on a handsome horse. He was doing roll call with a huge pack of svelte hounds. Each dog would respond to its name call by submissively touching the horse. A scene that really stands out in memory.

@Gnomon

:up: Am done pestering you and offer an apology to @Benj96 for any offense. I just can't understand or follow what is being said.

Is Information the Fifth Form of Matter (Interview with Melvin Vopson, Youtube)

@Gnomon

Did you read Vopson's paper, The Information Catastrophe?

A recent conjecture, called the mass-energy-information equivalence principle, proposed that information is equivalent to mass and energy and exists as a separate state of matter. In other words, stored information has mass and can be converted into energy, and a full hard drive is marginally heavier than an empty one. — SciLight Volume 2022, Issue 9A by Avery Thompson

The Information Catastrophe, Melvin M. Vopson

The total calculated mass of all the information we
produce yearly on Earth at present is 23.3  10-17 Kg. This is extremely insignificant
and impossible to notice. For comparison, this mass is 1000 billion times smaller than
the mass of single grain of rice, or about the mass of one E.coli bacteria [26]. It will
take longer than the age of the Universe to produce 1Kg of information mass. — Melvin Vopson

In terms of digital data, the mass-energy-information equivalence
principle formulated in 2019 has not been yet verified experimentally, but assuming
this is correct, then in not a very distant future, most of the planet’s mass will be made
up of bits of information. Applying the law of conservation in conjunction with the
mass-energy-information equivalence principle, it means that the mass of the planet is
unchanged over time. However, our technological progress inverts radically the
distribution of the Earth’s matter from predominantly ordinary matter, to the fifth
form of digital information matter. — Melvin Vopson

Vopson's paper here reads like a wacky sci-fi premise, projecting an exponential impossibility. How could information mass replace the normal mass of the Earth because of computers, yet register no measurable change? My question would be, where or how does the mass of this information reside in time and space as a physical entity -- what particles carry it?

I feel lost in the wacky sauce.

@punos

Weird how ChatGPT got such a clean paragraph. It can't translate or unscramble the original paragraph because it doesn't remember how it scrambled it. I think it went through several unsuccessful scrambles to get the one I posted. It's like when you translate sentences through Google translate, you lose the original.

Found it. The original paragraph was an output of ChatGPT:

The short story you're referring to by Jorge Luis Borges is titled "The Library of Babel." It's a famous and widely anthologized work that explores themes related to infinity, knowledge, and the nature of the universe through the concept of a vast and labyrinthine library containing all possible books. In this library, every combination of letters and words, including every book ever written and those that have never been written, exists. "The Library of Babel" is one of Borges' most celebrated and thought-provoking pieces of fiction. — ChatGPT

@Gnomon

I'm not attacking you, just doubting. Cheers.

@Gnomon

Assuming you really do know what you are talking about, you lack a principal of charity. Your audience doesn't have the means to understand you. If other roads of combined inquiry, such as a deep dive into information theory, statistical thermodynamics and quantum mechanics (a synthesis of knowledge about physics) get us to your understanding, we still might be able to disagree with how your present your information, or reject the implications conveyed by your 'philosophy'.

Why don't we need to study physics or information theory to understand your philosophy? If we do, you're speaking to the wrong audience. You need to sell it to a room full of physicists (aka the"shut up and calculate" terrorists).

If you could summarize the value of your perspective in a single paragraph, how would you? Sometimes one person's philosophy is another person's headache. Example: "Don't you dare tell me I don't have free will."

I would have preferred that the scientists involved would have used the word data as well, to make the difference with information clearer.
At the fundamental level, there is no demonstration of 'meaning' or 'intent' or 'determinism' imo.
I can conceive of no meaning, intent, feeling or determinism inherent in processes such as particle spin or quantum fluctuations. — universeness

No one has the decryption algorithm to the following scrambled paragraph, if there is one:

srevinesu lebaB yrtpolexse si yldwi fo dna si eht ecdirbelsac egdelbaac knwoeldge, a ti. stiltu, tsav erutan, krow eninihtarbmal, sterlet, yreve dezilogtnahna delater, hguorht trohs eht fo lla dna reve taht egroj siulL . noitcif. gnithguoht-vekorphtuo tsecip uoy'er gnirrefer eht dna ytnifni, ot eht yretlib tpecnoc smuaf dna

Our minds will try to give it context. Those are letters look like the ones used in English. Hey, I speak English. It's obviously gobble de gook. A computer might be able to compare the letter set and count to a coherent English paragraph elsewhere on the internet, maybe if it weren't derivative of ChatGPT. But how many complete paragraphs also contain the exact same set of letters and is this a problem? It looks like clues are left but maybe they are false clues. Why even assume it came from a paragraph that was transformed by some process, without someone there to tell us so.

This possibly highlights the role of the observer and the relative nature of information as processed data. How do we go about decrypting it? Maybe whatever process that scrambled it is irreversible. Information has been lost in one sense, relative to an observer, but whatever corresponds to the lower level of information/data of the physical world is conserved. The lowest level of data (bits) is fundamental, but not the representation of it.

A not so trite answer to "consciousness without particles" would be : the same way we have Energy "without particles that have mass". — Gnomon

You overlooked the part where people equate consciousness with working physical brains. If we started performing brain surgery on you, we might be able to knock out everything associated with your philosophical theory.

Though light is typically considered non-material, a form of energy, it is physical. Purely photonic brains would still be physical brains, if possible.

So, all I can say at this point is that there are people a lot smarter than me who do not find the Mind : Energy notion ridiculous. — Gnomon

I'm still lost as to why you don't think it's a false dichotomy. It is parsimonious/orthodox to conclude minds need physical materials to emerge in the universe and to do work. Where any work could possibly occur, you can apply the concept of energy.

It's not Science that makes "speculation" on the relationship between Mind & Energy "ridiculous", but the ancient metaphysical belief system known as Materialism. That common-sense "objective" worldview did not take the mind of the observer into account. — Gnomon

Materialism has evolved into physicalism to accord with the perspectives granted to us by physics.

Physicists/philosophers alike will continue to wrestle with whatever the role of the observer has to play in the interpretations of quantum mechanics but the subject is, and will always be, leagues over my head. Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent. :monkey:

Closer to the Truth: Does Information Create the Universe? (Youtube) I like Allen Guth's take on the question of whether or not information is fundamental.

But it does not have anything to say about the legitimate scientific/philosophical query we are discussing on this thread : "Could consciousness be a form of energy like the rest?"

The classical science answer would be, not just "no", but "hell no!". Yet the fundamental sub-atomic science answer might be "maybe". — Gnomon

Most people think a brain is required for consciousness. We can manipulate brains to make people fall unconscious, as I'm sure you've probably experienced general anesthesia yourself. Brains are made of matter and the work that they are able to do is function of the physics of organized matter in motion. It is a parsimonious proposition, based on evidence, to believe that consciousness requires a brain and a brain requires matter.

The question, could consciousness be a form of energy, implies a dichotomy that doesn't make the answer to the question trite/obvious. How do we have consciousness without particles that have mass and why speculate on whether we could if everything around us makes the speculation ridiculous?

It is possibly a mistake to say everything is energy with regard to the principle of mass and energy equivalence (though my understanding is limited here). Electrons produce photons all the time, but they don't become photons. Fission/fusion produce both mass and massless kinds of radiation, but for a star to lose mass, it is losing tons of particles with mass from its stellar wind.

A star never directly loses mass from photons, as the photons don't carry mass. A star loses mass indirectly from photons in their contribution as force carriers to help break nuclear bonds.