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.

I'm not an expert in the science, so I include links to technical papers by professionals who do understand them. If you are not an expert in these "complex topics" how would you know when I am "glossing-over" something? — Gnomon

You are not an expert, as you say. I would want to know the physics inside and out before attempting to cite conjectures/experiments for support, though I can understand the (de)merit of trying to explain reality in one's own (un)fashionable terms. The test I guess is if people are interested.

But it's a fertile source of metaphors for philosophical reasoning about the roots of reality. Are you averse to metaphors & analogies drawn from physical fundamentals? :smile: — Gnomon

"Information is power." You could write a lot of good stuff on this without having to go anywhere near quantum physics or thermodynamics. You don't even need to coin a name for your 'theory' either.

The 'absolute' best answer currently available to humans regarding the exact mechanisms and source of human consciousness is 'we don't know.' For me, the best evidence we currently have, suggests that it is a process of the human brain alone. — universeness

:up:

@Gnomon

You gloss over interpretations of complex physics topics which I don't think you really understand in trying support your metaphysics. Your language and evasiveness is a red flag for me, suggestive of a kind of sophistry. But it wouldn't matter if everything you said was perfectly coherent, and you knew quantum physics inside and out, it'd be far too complicated for me to follow.

Makes me think of that Quantum physics professor that Dawkins interviewed -- too rich with metaphysical implications.

The Quantum misticism is too misty and the forrest of terms is too obscure and thick, and I'm cognitively limited, so I cannot pass.

Cheers to your passion.

Information is not merely processed data. — Gnomon

@universeness

Would either of you to care to explain the significance of this distinction that information is or isn't processed data. I suppose the technical definition you guys are using belongs to a specialized domain of computer science or information theory. Maybe it doesn't hold for ordinary macroscopic examples.

If I have a book of encrypted information that tells me how to do something but I've suddenly misplaced my encryption key, does the book lose information because I can't process or potentially process its data?

Even when the book has been decrypted, does it still lack information until I process/read it? A book is not a book without a reader.

On a fundamental level the book never loses significant information in the absence of any particular observer in a short time scale. This information, like energy and matter cannot be created or destroyed, just transformed. Whatever constitutes its fined-grained physical reality of the book as material has undergone some irreversible change in accordance the arrow of time (matter and energy always changing in flux). Some information changed but it is not relevant to the reader who is concerned with a particular macroscopic arrangement (the letter, words, sentences, the book) which come to represent relative information to a particular mind.

So maybe we can say that:

Relative information can be destroyed or lost.
Absolute information (energy and matter) can neither be created or destroyed and is fundamentally conserved, just converted. Absolute information ultimately has no meaning without a mind (is it information?); it must always exist in relation to a mind.

In order to lose relative information there must be a corresponding physical change of absolute information (energy and matter), no matter how trite that change may be, like losing your bitcoin key in a fire. But any change in absolute information need not always cause a meaningful loss in relative information, like losing the ink of single letter in a book.

Is it conceivable to lose or gain relative information with no corresponding change in the physical world?

Doesn't ChatGPT rely on the information contained within encyclopedias and textbooks? I've heard there is a breakdown in fidelity of information when ChatGPT begins to use its own output as a reference source. Its answers degrade into gibberish.

Encyclopedia and textbook are valuable as an enclosed and marked source of accurate information from which AI derives answers to questions. In that sense they can't become obsolete.

Regarding your question "where does the energy really come from", I have my own personal theory, as postulated in a non-academic thesis. — Gnomon

The energy comes from the erasure of information but is this reducible to the physics of running inputs through non-reversible logic gates? The input of energy of erasure is proportional to the energy lost as heat. This energy loss doesn't apply to reversible computation since information isn't lost.

How is Laundauer's principle related to the solution of the paradox of Maxwell's Demon?

Landauer's principle is closely related to the resolution of Maxwell's Demon paradox. Maxwell's Demon is a thought experiment proposed by physicist James Clerk Maxwell in the 19th century, which appeared to challenge the second law of thermodynamics.

In the Maxwell's Demon thought experiment, a hypothetical "demon" is described as a tiny, intelligent being capable of sorting fast-moving hot gas molecules from slow-moving cold gas molecules. By opening and closing a tiny door or gate in a partition between two chambers, the demon allows only fast molecules to pass from the hot side to the cold side and slow molecules to pass from the cold side to the hot side, effectively creating a temperature difference without doing any work. This seemed to violate the second law of thermodynamics, which states that heat naturally flows from hot to cold, and it appeared as if the demon was reducing the entropy of the system without expending energy.

Landauer's principle comes into play as a solution to the Maxwell's Demon paradox. Landauer's principle states that erasing information (in this case, the demon's knowledge of the molecule speeds) incurs a minimum energy cost. When the demon observes and records information about the gas molecules (fast or slow), it is essentially increasing its knowledge, which implies a reduction in entropy. When the demon erases this information (to forget which molecules are fast and slow), it must dissipate energy into the environment, thereby increasing the total entropy of the system.

In other words, Landauer's principle implies that the demon's act of erasing information about the gas molecules requires energy, and this energy expenditure ensures that the overall entropy of the system (including the demon and the gas) still obeys the second law of thermodynamics. The reduction in entropy from the sorting process is offset by the increase in entropy due to the energy dissipated during information erasure.

Therefore, Landauer's principle provides a resolution to Maxwell's Demon paradox by showing that the apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics is reconciled when considering the energy cost of information erasure. This insight connects the realm of information theory with thermodynamics and helps maintain the consistency of the laws of thermodynamics. — ChatGPT

Hopefully ChatGPT isn't hallucinating a wrong answer.

How is Information Related to Energy in Physics?

There is already experimental evidence that meta-physical*1 (immaterial) Information can be converted into physical Energy*2. — Gnomon

At this point this is the only claim that I'd like to know more about but I'm not sure I could ever understand what is going on in the experiment to believe you are conceptually correct. Information can never be non-physically represented. Where does the energy really come from?

"Any logical operation with fewer output states than input states must produce heat to keep overall entropy from decreasing." But what exactly is producing the heat of the Laundauer limit in a non-reversible logic gate?

Why Pure Information Gives of Heat (Youtube)

A declaration without supporting explanation is hardly philosophical at all is it. — Benj96

Sorry for the rudeness, just a bit annoyed at your responses.

Because you cannot have any individual one component of the 4 (energy, time, matter or space) without the other 3. — Benj96

You admitted it was mistake to pose the initial question and you didn't directly answer my question whether you were thinking about substance dualism. If you can't have matter without energy as you say here, why did you ask whether consciousness could be a form of matter or energy? You set up the dichotomy as if it is significant/correct then drop it suddenly.

Photons in a vacuum are massless particles/waves. So that would be an example of a form of energy(?) without matter, but I'm sure you are talking about the bigger picture of dependent origination. If photons never act with matter we'd never be able to tell whether they exist, though all light is emitted from matter.

Potential energy doesn't require matter, space or time. It's just potential. The moment that potential is converted to something "actionable" it requires time, space and matter to "act." — Benj96

This is a non-sequitur weird response to what you quoted. Sounds like you have the big bang in mind.

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. — Gnomon

Melvin Vopson could've made a mistake in his interpretation and conjecture deriving from Laundauer's principle.

Is Information Physical and Does it Have Mass?

As it is possible to see from the discussion above, information is not physical by itself but has a physical representation and, naturally, this physical representation complies with physical laws. This is in good agreement with what Landauer actually wrote and not with his more far-reaching claims. Thus, the physical properties that Landauer and other researchers conjectured, ascribing them to information [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19], are actually the properties of the physical representation of information. — url=https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/13/11/540

One wonders if it light waves in a vaccum would count as a non-material medium for the storage of information. So if information has mass from nowhere, how could it travel at the speed of light? Only massless particles can travel at the speed of light.

Move over Einstein.

:monkey:

@Benj96

Sounds like a lot of BS, Ben. :monkey:

If in the story, there are a lot of birches (presented as regular birches) growing underground without any light, it's illogical if the author never explains how they do photosynthesis. Similarly, if a character is presented as a healthy human being, then later in the story is completely distorted, if that distortion is never explained, it's illogical given the premises. But if the premises are that the character is completely crazy (or not a human being), then, even if the reader can't make sense of their behavior, it can be considered logical. — Skalidris

@L'éléphant gave a thoughtful answer to this concern, which I agree with.

Have you seen David Lynch's Mulholland Drive by chance? Despite a lot of surreal disjunction of scenes and characters, we are still able to piece together a explanation of what might be going on that makes the film deeply satisfying, meaningful. This explanation may radically change if we start listening to David Lynch himself provide contextual clues.

Some viewers might be completely turned off by the non-sequitur character jumps and inexplicable improbable events, such that they have no desire conjure up a logic that justifies such a strange experience.

I've got to admit though, aside from Mulholland Drive, I find Lynch's other films less compelling because I cannot really account for the chaos of what is going on in a way that would sustain my interest. The will to do the work of achieving coherence is lost.

@Benj96

Do you have the idea of energy as a substance which would constitute one half of a dualism (the old classic of spirit/energy and matter)?

So either energy carries an inherent conscious currency/property, or matter does. Or they do when they interact in complex or specific ways. — Benj96

I'm trying to imagine energy (the ability to do work) in the complete absence of matter, which I'm not sure makes much sense. This would imply a completely non-material world where whatever constitutes a form of energy is sufficient in-itself for a kind of existence. Though if matter is really just a form of energy, it's all energy dude (and this is not profound). Our ability to understand energy requires everything that informs the understanding (energy as properties of organized matter).

The kinetic energy of a water wheel requires a lot of organized material in action. It is an example of just transferring motion of materials to do work, which is relative to an intentional observer's frame of reference. In such a scenario, how could your ever have whatever constitutes the forms of energy apart from the forms of matter?

@believenothing

I hope you're satisfied with the answers you got.

You might find the following article about global aphasia interesting. It is possible to lose the ability to understand or produce spoken or written language. These folks retain various cognitive capacities. They can still contemplate/imagine without the ability to talk to themselves. However, language may still play an important role in helping to develop these cognitive capacities in the first place.

Can we think without language?

In the end, when people read stories, do they want to be comforted in their opinions or do they want to learn something through a story that makes sense? — Skalidris

Haven't read any of Ken Liu's stories but am currently reading Dostoevsky's novella,Notes from Underground, and find that the narrator is somewhat ridiculous and unbelievable. The exaggerated madness/neurosis of the character is there for Dostoevsky to illustrate his pessimism/doubt/mock enlightenment ideals of his contemporaries.

Another oddity in Dostoevsky's dialogues which wholly breaks from realism is the length of speech/monologues of his characters. No one in history likely holds a dialogue this way. They go on for pages and pages sometimes, you'd think the people being spoken to would have left the room ages ago.

Perhaps Ken Liu's poetic license of inconsistent/implausible character is justified in a similar way, as a means to some other end.

Just as CGI replaced a lot of practical effects in film AI innovation may end up eliminating real cinematic photography altogether (if it is cheaper). This prospect is terrifying. Films will become more structured like video games, where actors perform the movement and voice work, and AI tools enhance the aesthetic skin/style/rendering. There still will be a lot of work to be done for any creative enterprise that isn't just a basic prompt image generation.

From the standpoint of having an original vision as an artist, you still can't really achieve it from AI prompts at all. Heck, I'm sure even many artists have trouble translating their vision to whatever medium. Prompt generation also leaves out the sometimes fun/therapeutic process of doing art -- it sometimes being as much about the journey as the end product.

The youtube channel Corridor (a crew of CGI enthusiasts) made an animated film using AI in the style of the gothic Vampire Hunter D films (which were painstakingly hand drawn). While it doesn't meet the aesthetic quality of the hand drawn films, and acting/writing is pretty garbage, it is still really impressive.

But what of hedonism and uncontrolled self indulgent pleasures of the senses would this, if it went unchecked have a negative effect on a higher cultured society, would it bring it down say or have these two always co-existed ? — simplyG

Maybe wealth could be a proxy for a kind of capacity for pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. The Gulf petrostates always come to mind when I think of dissolute hedonism. These countries/states are theocratic, conservative, Muslim, which contrasts absurdly with the most extreme kind of luxury eyes can behold, for privileged classes of course.

According to civil service minister Khaled Alaraj, many Saudi government employees are really only working for an hour each day.

Almost 70% of employed Saudi nationals -- more than 3 million -- hold jobs in the public sector, according to McKinsey. The cushy positions are highly coveted because they offer ironclad job security and lucrative salarie. — https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/20/news/saudi-government-workers-productivity/index.html

One wonders how civil society functions within Saudi Arabia if a majority of its public sector only work a few hours a day. There must be a considerable underclass/immigrants holding things together. Some folks in a subreddit were commenting on this CNN article, sharing stories of how working with Saudi public sector was frustrating because they won't do what they consider "slave" work and instead have recourse to outsourcing tasks they don't want to do. This sounds so absurd and is probably awful for the stability of the nation in the face of possible economic downturns.

Neither a year nor a kilometer exists as such, i.e. physically. You cannot perceive them with any sense. They are concepts. They are conventions. — Alkis Piskas

Yes and to be consistent you apply this also to the notions of space and time, infinite and continuous. They are concepts. They are conventions. With this in mind, what supports the belief that space and time are really infinite and continuous rather than finite and discrete?

Because there is no start or end in either of them. Neither any point in the middle. At least we cannot define any of them, therefore we cannot assume that they exist. — Alkis Piskas

There is no start or end to time and space. I'm just saying that this attribution is as imaginary/arbitrary as any contrary claim, that there is a start or end to time and space. Not a bid deal, just a silly quibble. It just occurred to me as a possible inconsistency on your part, but maybe I don't understand you.

Neither a year nor a kilometer exists as such, i.e. physically. You cannot perceive them with any sense. They are concepts. They are conventions. — Alkis Piskas

It's odd to assume time and space are really infinite and discontinuous on one hand, then deny the existence of a kilometer. If we're to be consistent here, time and space don't exist either. Personally I find units of measurements far more tangible and intuitive than any applied notion of infinity.

My quibble is pointless though. Thank you for your responses.

I believe that ancient people, the lives of whom were much simpler and without such a multitude and amount of measurements, had a better notion of time and space! — Alkis Piskas

Here I would assume any ancient people's notion of time and space was conditioned first by everyday discrete objects and relevant measurements that became standard to help them in their everyday lives. Zeno's preoccupation with infinity wouldn't be ordinary in any sense, and therefore wouldn't be suggestive of a common people's notion of time and space. But I don't really know.

Zeno assumes falsely --but I believe for us only, not for himself-- that time and space are finite and have a discrete (discontinuous) form, and so they are divisible. But this is a fallacy. They are not; they are infinite and continuous, so they are indivisible. — Alkis Piskas

Why is it right to conclude that time and space are really infinite and continuous rather than discrete and discontinuous? Either of these abstract properties are just mathematical inventions/conventions which prove to be useful. Time and space can obviously be divided (measured in units), or treated as infinite and continuous.

If time is infinite, it's still divisible by seconds in relation the diurnal or lunar cycle.
If space is infinite, it's still divisible by length of feet in relation to how much horse food, water or minutes it takes to get to town.

Through ordinary material/spatial divisions,we see that are practical/natural limits to the notion of infinity.

So what am I missing?

Is that a Socratic tendency? — Vera Mont

Sorry, there were four too many of those questions. :sweat:

Guess I merely stating my belief in psychological hedonism, that a pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain is the primary source of human motivation.

Find why Zeno's Achilles and the Tortoise is such a pseudo paradox ... — Alkis Piskas

What passes as a rigorous explanation for why Zeno's paradox isn't a paradox? One can race a man against a turtle and see that men and turtles traverse finite distances over time.

The length of every half distance to reach the finish line infinitely diminish within the finite distance because it is imagined so. This is the dream of some mathematician, who introduces infinity as a problem to a real world scenario. If a finite distance is infinitely divisible in the realm of maths, so be it, but it doesn't apply in a way that makes motion in time impossible.

Most decisions, whether toward short or long term gratification, involve the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain.

Imagine the classic scenario of the marshmallow test for very young children. They're told if they can delay gratification for a bit they'll be rewarded with more marshmallows. If they didn't have an expectation of a any enjoyment, or the avoidance of pain, there would be no incentive to do anything.

Is the preference to avoid pain at the expense of transient moments of high pleasure, considered hedonistic?

Consider possible outcomes of a more sadistic version of the marshmallow test. The children are told that they will be harshly beaten if they eat the marshmallows that sit on table in their room. Those that make the mistake get beaten. Would there be any children, who having lived through the experience of being beaten for eating the marshmallows, continue to choose to eat the marshmallows again and again because the pleasure of the eating outweighs the pain of the beating?

Even an ultimate pursuit of ascetic self-denial must have an incentive. The subject that demands such self-control must know the anticipation for reward/relief, even if it never comes.

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The dark facilitates the light? — chiknsld

More so, you can't meaningfully have the concept of one without the other, and how we value either is dependent upon a variety of contexts in which both (stimuli and its absence) play potentially good and bad roles in relationship to what we are.

I might ask, is it possible that darkness could ever be considered good? — chiknsld

This thread seems rhetorical/poetic and maybe plain silly. You might upset the neighbors.

Toward the question, sure, like anything else, it's just a question of moderation and balance. Darkness is fine, insofar as one always has means/access to light, given how vital our vision is for navigating the world. It's too much or little of anything, or stimuli in the wrong proportions, which threaten well being or life.

Some folks buy black out curtains with a desire to help themselves ease into sleep by shutting out the light. That kind of sweet darkness before bed is bliss.

How could the good exist without darkness, if one is necessarily conditioned by the other?

We all understand what may compel a person to say that life has no meaning. It all boils down to what seems to be pointless and gratuitous suffering. A life form must sustain costly and improbable structures of all kinds against the flow of entropy. No wonder folks get lost (and drown) in the sauce. So many things can go wrong and if we feel we can't adapt, we freak out.

Reality goes on for those who aren't asleep. They might look at your unconscious body and count the hours.

And so we'd expect, when the earth loses its last sleeper, that the universe is deaf, dumb and blind to itself -- like one asleep.

A canid is a chien is a koira is dog. Whether each is real or imaginary doesn't depend on labelling laws but on whether they can bite. — Vera Mont

Just being a bit silly over here, so don't mind me. But we agree, by your criteria, a dead dog is not a real dog.

There is a tiny country in Europe, sandwiched between the border of Andorra and France, which has stringent labeling laws for canned goods. They believe it a crime to equate the material identity of fresh fruit with processed fruit. Canned peaches are not real peaches in this country. This also extends to deceased humans. No dead body shall bear any resemblance in memory to its former person and that is why it is perfectly fine to eat and can the dead.

You'll find the canned smeaches right next to corned schmeef, and though these may have been derived from peaches and people, they are not real peaches and people.

So I'm guessing what is real, depends on your criteria of what is real as it might concern the borders of identities.

Arguably some cases of media coverage of public mourning are beneficial, insofar as it encourages more meaningful kinds of charitable support for those affected by the loss. Though this wouldn't seem to apply to celebrities and heads of state much of the time.

This maybe a stretch, but maybe some of the outpouring of emotion over Diana's death was related to having some good reason to love her character. She was a humanitarian, or at least played one on television. What else can one affiliated with the monarchy do to serve (or to appear to serve) the public? This kind of virtue signaling has tangible benefits in the promotion of charity.

Just saw some ultra nationalist folks mourning the loss of Prigozhin. Imagine if he was as beloved by the public as Diana, and not in the way North Koreans mourned the loss of their former head of state, Kim Jong-il (as if it were one's civil duty to do so).

I call it maudlin commercial sentimentality. People seem to have rejected reason, perspective, any sense of proportion in favour of raw, undisciplined emotionalism. — Vera Mont

Does this same assessment apply to folks that go to musical concerts or sports games? How much of culture then can be judged so? Few might call a PGA golf tournament an example of undisciplined emotionalism, but it is arguably as absurd if not more so than a pop up memorial.

People, hundreds of people who had no personal acquaintance with any of the casualties, leave heaps of flowers, candles, greeting cards, stuffed toys and balloons at the site of the lethal incident. — Vera Mont

Most sites of typical mourning that I've encountered are not that big and if they are big it relates to the notoriety of the deceased, or what their passing represents or evokes in strangers. When a community loses a beloved hero, there is a show of great mourning. Sometimes the tragedy of the case and subsequent news coverage can bring various communities together. Urban mourning site might be quite different in this respect, with more contributions.

A local case that spring to mind was about a mother rental cleaner who was randomly beaten to death in front of her child by some meth addicts. It was so sad and I could see why strangers could be moved to contribute to a street memorial. Another involved a missing child presumed dead at the hands of her foster parents. Both of these cases were extensively televised, which no doubt generates a chain effect of gossip/discussion/participation.

Am not likely to ever leave something at a pop up memorial. Would be more interested in visiting the graves of famous authors/scientists to see what is left there.