I have been sailing 9 weeks non-stop from Ushuaia to Lisboa. No emails, phones, newspapers, books and the only laptop on board (for watching movies) got broken... It has been rough seas around Cape Horn but pretty smooth sailing later... Watching sunrise and sunsets, stars, clouds etc. The things that had started coming to my mind - like things long forgotten or put away and now coming back as fresh memories... Very…
> I have been sailing 9 weeks non-stop from Ushuaia to Lisboa Whoa, what a beautiful experience. You're doing what most of us dream of doing :) Interesting that, in the absence of stimuli, old memories begin to surface. May I ask how old you are?
Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?
41–50 of 92 posts
Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?
#42Ontology! Since my earliest memories, my mind continuously wanders off to questions like, 'what is the nature of... things? What is the substance of... substance? What qualities of a thing can I think away, and still allow the thing part of it to remain behind?' For the longest time, as a kid, I was under the impression that it was the same for everyone, and that figuring these things out was what everyone was busy w…
That's a very chairwise comment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXW-QjBsruE&t=180s
Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?
#43Today I'm thinking in solutions on how to deal with public health in my country "pos-pandemic" as we have Universal Care for free tho tons of challenge to overcome the shortcomings.
We have the falacy that problems are easy to solve and simplest solutions are effective, begin Cartesian of course they are, however when you see the big picture... Things are not so simple, they take time and lot of effort.
Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?
#44escaping! Not sure where to , but away from here. Also, perhaps not that unrelated, escaping into fantasy worlds, usually the last thing I read. Some times I make my own, and set stories in them.
Wanting to get those ideas on paper was how I got into writing fiction (for fun).
Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?
#45I have been sailing 9 weeks non-stop from Ushuaia to Lisboa. No emails, phones, newspapers, books and the only laptop on board (for watching movies) got broken... It has been rough seas around Cape Horn but pretty smooth sailing later... Watching sunrise and sunsets, stars, clouds etc. The things that had started coming to my mind - like things long forgotten or put away and now coming back as fresh memories... Very…
If you want a small taste of that mental clarity, use the toilet without bringing your phone or any reading material. It wasn't called the "thinking throne" for nothing.
Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a very chairwise comment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXW-QjBsruE&t=180s
Thanks for the link! The content of this video is pretty close to the perpetual internal dialogue happening between me and all of my selves. I eventually wrote a book about my findings thus far.
Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have been sailing 9 weeks non-stop from Ushuaia to Lisboa Whoa, what a beautiful experience. You're doing what most of us dream of doing :) Interesting that, in the absence of stimuli, old memories begin to surface. May I ask how old you are?
54 y.o. but that was in 2011...
Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?
#48- On the malleability of culture, and the absolutely temporary nature of the world order that we think is stable. - On interstellar travel, and how completely bonkers it would be to ride on a steadily-degrading spaceship for a decade, with just enough fuel to stop when you get there, and no more. And what it might take to get our civilization to care enough to try (seems like a terrible calamity is the only way). - I…
> I firmly believe that there is a sequence of words that [...] would convince anyone of anything. What does make you think that? Have you seen or experienced something like this before? Your thought/ idea makes perfect sense to me and there surely is more potential to transfer ideas/ ideologies/ etc more compact than we do most of the time. I too, don't believe in good and evil humans but that everyone is capable of…
Less controversially, I think there's good in almost any idea that a speaker really believes in (ignoring bad faith actors) and if you can make people see, truly, your point of view and mesh it to theirs, you can both agree, even if you both abandon your original stance. So, nobody can really bring everyone 'to themselves' which is unstable as you say, but they can both find some average of their opinions that looks an awful lot like convincing people of a course of action or idea. The catch in my mind is that the words move you both, not just the listener. You can see it happen in real time in this thread.
Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?
#49Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?
#50In language, it's a lot of comedy (e.g. How could you tell if someone you already knew was wearing a disguise? How would they respond if you asked them? How would you know they aren't? What if they're lying? When you solve a catchpa to prove you are not a robot, how sure can you be, and who are you trying to convince, really? etc.) then, it's ethical and religious questions about power and politics (What is a just war? Is deception intrinsically more moral than violence? Do leaders have a divine mandate? For what are we accountable in regard to good and evil? What is the substrate of our experience? Is "The Simulation" just language?), and then some of what most closely resembles adolescent metamathematics (What are the most atomic operations and what property of the universe makes their number finite? Is complexity an artifact of geometry? What isn't a graph?)
The rest is too long to get into, but essentially it reduces to whatever deepity is sufficient to distract me from doing the work I'm probably supposed to be doing.