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Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

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41–50 of 92 posts

Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#41
post #4

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?

54 y.o. but that was in 2011...

Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#42
post #9

Ontology! 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

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?

#43
After a lot of therapy and treatments I've learnt that my mind wander so much in a lot of topics, that I have a tendency things as a whole, no matter the subject, and communicate so much information is really hard to me. For so long I thought that I was stupid/dumb.

Today 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?

#44

escaping! 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.

You should try writing and drawing out those fantasies - that turns them into a more concrete hobby. While you shouldn't daydream all the time, it can be a good boredom buster that you can do anywhere - a long bus ride, waiting for a pickup, etc. I keep a small notebook around for this purpose.

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?

#45
post #4

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…

> The things that had started coming to my mind - like things long forgotten or put away and now coming back as fresh memories...

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?

#46
post #42

Earlier 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.

you might find my last * point interesting about the thesis for multiple selves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31204611&p=2#31213841 however the fact there is no criterion for delineating the soul to a volume of matter makes me strongly believe that the rational belief is that we are living a sandboxed illusion and that there is only one decentralized being in the universe. We are the same soul talking to itselfs via the prisms of siloeds lifes, and when you hurt someone, you do in fact, hurt yourself. related: https://youtu.be/h6fcK_fRYaI

Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#47
post #41

Earlier 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...

Thanks :) I'm quite a bit younger than you (28).

Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#48
post #34

- 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…

It's based on the pervasiveness of some ideas. Some just shift the foundation of a person when they are accepted internally. If you can do that, you can steer anyone.

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?

#50
Away from screens, I'm doing hobbies I picked to actively keep me away from screens. On a motorcycle, I think my ego gets sufficiently preoccupied with keeping its physical host alive, and so then the rest of my mind can wander. Depending on flow state, the mind speaks language, symbolic memories, or in sufficiently intense activities, those disappear entirely and it's just sub-second sensory immediacy.

In 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.

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