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You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
361–370 of 466 posts
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#362I've always believed that two things will broaden your horizon - travel and reading. If you don't have the means or the time to travel then your next best option is reading.
We need to qualify what we mean by “travel.” Airline pilots, stewardesses, and other people that travel a lot for work or other purposes do not necessarily have the “broadest horizon.” I think we should use another term to mean “experience other cultures and ways of life.” The same can be said about reading. Reading the entire One Piece manga series is not necessarily gonna broaden your horizons.
True, also they are doing a job. Most of them are only there for a couple of days before they are off on their next flight.
Not sure what the schedules are nowadays, but my uncle was an airline pilot with KLM and had a schedule which was 5 weeks work, 4 weeks off. He did that for about 20 years.
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you know you experience it beyond a reasonable doubt? Thoughts and intentions just seemingly appear in consciousness, without any explanation as to how they arose. Feelings are like this too; we don’t determine how we feel, we are simply served them. When experiencing a negative emotion, some people seem to believe they can ‘free will’ their way out of it by thinking positively or something there over, but tha…
> How do you know you experience it beyond a reasonable doubt? I have no reason to doubt my common sense experience. > we don’t determine how we feel, we are simply served it. No definition of free will that I have encountered considers it an absolute freedom from any form of determinism. We’re obviously influenced by our nature and external influences. For instance my emotional predispositions are largely determined…
>I have no reason to doubt my common sense experience.
That's why people thought the Sun moved around the Earth. I mean, it's just "common sense" -- you see the Sun in the East in the morning, and then it's in the West in the evening. It turns out "common sense" is not useful for understanding how things work.
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#364Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams goes into this subject and describes how one processes all experiences during sleep through dreams.
Everything gets connected and stored away. Repeated every night. The knowledge you have gets connected with the new information you receive. The more knowledge you have the more valuable new information gets. At some point there is simply very little new information about a topic and the topic bores you.
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
Choose to stop then? I mean social media that is - but seriously. Choose to say, “I’m not driven by my pleasure sensors” and do something hard for the sake of doing it - not for glory, not for nothing. Nihilism and predestination lead to some orettt dark places. Sometimes I feel like a lot of the folks I hear advocating against free will (which is really a stance against choice and even our own consciousness at its c…
> Choose to stop then? """Addiction is a neuropsychological disorder characterized by a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behaviour that produces natural reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences. Repetitive drug use often alters brain function in ways that perpetuate craving, and weakens (but does not completely negate) self-control.[1] This phenomenon – drugs reshaping…
I know what addiction is, of course I’m aware that there’s a biological component. I quit smoking, I have many friends who quit drinking or doing drugs. It was incredibly hard, but I did it. Some of them did it.
I met a young guy while I was backpacking last year who was quitting heroin cold turkey. He was back packing to quit - he’d simply chosen to walk out of his home and go without heroin for thousands of km from the trail system by his home in France.
He was a nice guy - I wonder what became of him, but still, he chose to simply stop. I think you have a lot more agency than you think. Yeah, things cannot be undone, but you can definitely will yourself to change a great many things. It’s just hard and our body resists doing hard things.
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
Choose to stop then? I mean social media that is - but seriously. Choose to say, “I’m not driven by my pleasure sensors” and do something hard for the sake of doing it - not for glory, not for nothing. Nihilism and predestination lead to some orettt dark places. Sometimes I feel like a lot of the folks I hear advocating against free will (which is really a stance against choice and even our own consciousness at its c…
> Nihilism and predestination lead to some orettt dark places. I think it's the other way around. Because as a society we believe in free will, we easily ignore the effect of environment on our choices. We let social media companies make their products addictive, because we believe that it's a choice to use them. If we ackwnoledged the fact that our choices are the result of our genetics and experiences, we could sta…
This is all just word salad though - you don’t have to ignore the effect of environmental conditions to believe in free will. Just because I was born to who I was or grew up where I did doesn’t mean that I cannot change things in my life. Seriously - it’ll be hard, but just try to change. I bet you’ll be surprised.
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#367This is a great way to frame a shift in perspective around what we consume, but just to add some nuance to this: not only should we be thoughtful about the content we consume in a similar way that we are thoughtful about the food we consume, but we should also be self compassionate.
Sometimes we want to eat those Chicken 'n' Waffles, just like sometimes we go on a trashy TV show binge! It's just a small thing that serves as a comforting release, and we shouldn't let the guilt overcome us!
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#368Is this actually true? I know the text sounds really nice. Also citing nicely crafted words from famous poeple helps. I guess roughly, this is right. But there's more to add. I have a brain with a certain configuration. This configuration is partly genetic and partly environmental. The environmental part has been shaped by every sensory input so far, including all the books. However, some books resonate well. They ma…
I think everything you're saying is correct, but doesn't discredit what the post says. I think even books we don't necessarily resonate strongly with can have small, hidden impacts on our behaviour and thinking. They might give us an example of what a person does in a certain situation, and we internalise how we might respond in a certain situation. In this I think it is kind of similar to an LLM, where we kind of pr…
Almost everything we do, everything we hear, everything we see, everything we experience etc.. they all have an impact. And while books do shape our thinking the statement "You are what you read" is nothing different from the hyperboles/metaphors "You are what you eat" or "You are who you associate yourself with" etc.
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#369Is this actually true? I know the text sounds really nice. Also citing nicely crafted words from famous poeple helps. I guess roughly, this is right. But there's more to add. I have a brain with a certain configuration. This configuration is partly genetic and partly environmental. The environmental part has been shaped by every sensory input so far, including all the books. However, some books resonate well. They ma…
>Our brain has a mechanism to put more or less weight on sensory input given previous input
I've always liked to say "free will isn't your current decision, but your previous one"
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd challenge this with a thought experiment. Imagine we put a group of toddlers on an island and somehow give them knowledge of language (and enough sustenance to survive), but absolutely 0 external input otherwise. These people, as they grow, would gradually develop their own views, values, and perspectives. Do the exact same thing on another island and you'd get entirely different results! One can see this very th…
This thought experiment is deeply flawed as it assumes that what you propose is possible and the outcome would be as you suggest. I am not convinced that people can bootstrap themselves like this and that language itself does not contain views, values and perspectives.
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