Remembering things that haven't happened yet
bessstillman.substack.com
Remembering things that haven't happened yet
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Re: Remembering things that haven't happened yet
#2A simultaneously beautiful and heart wrenching story wrapped in truly exquisite literary presentation.
Re: Remembering things that haven't happened yet
#3[deleted]
Re: Remembering things that haven't happened yet
#4> Sounds like the researchers read Derek Parfit. I’m currently experiencing whatever the opposite of the “end of history illusion” is. Let’s call it: “The beginning of potentially infinite unknowable and yet inevitable futures reality.”
Sounds like existential anguish. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/306
Re: Remembering things that haven't happened yet
#5> Sounds like the researchers read Derek Parfit. I’m currently experiencing whatever the opposite of the “end of history illusion” is. Let’s call it: “The beginning of potentially infinite unknowable and yet inevitable futures reality.” Sounds like existential anguish. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/306
funny site
[ 31 ] days without a kant/can't pun
Re: Remembering things that haven't happened yet
#6> Sounds like the researchers read Derek Parfit. I’m currently experiencing whatever the opposite of the “end of history illusion” is. Let’s call it: “The beginning of potentially infinite unknowable and yet inevitable futures reality.” Sounds like existential anguish. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/306
funny site [ 31 ] days without a kant/can't pun
Re: Remembering things that haven't happened yet
#7Tangentially related, if you are ill, I would implore you to read Seneca's Letter 78 to Lucilius [0]:
You will die, not because you are ill, but because you are alive; even when you have been cured, the same end awaits you; when you have recovered, it will be not death, but ill-health, that you have escaped.
There is, I assure you, a place for virtue even upon a bed of sickness. It is not only the sword and the battle-line that prove the soul alert and unconquered by fear; a man can display bravery even when wrapped in his bed-clothes. You have something to do: wrestle bravely with disease. If it shall compel you to nothing, beguile you to nothing, it is a notable example that you display. O what ample matter were there for renown, if we could have spectators of our sickness! Be your own spectator; seek your own applause.
And if you have lost, or are losing, someone you love, read Letter 63 [1]:
So too it cannot but be that the names of those whom we have loved and lost come back to us with a sort of sting; but there is a pleasure even in this sting. For, as my friend Attalus used to say: "The remembrance of lost friends is pleasant in the same way that certain fruits have an agreeably acid taste, or as in extremely old wines it is their very bitterness that pleases us. Indeed, after a certain lapse of time, every thought that gave pain is quenched, and the pleasure comes to us unalloyed." If we take the word of Attalus for it, "to think of friends who are alive and well is like enjoying a meal of cakes and honey; the recollection of friends who have passed away gives a pleasure that is not without a touch of bitterness. Yet who will deny that even these things, which are bitter and contain an element of sourness, do serve to arouse the stomach?"
[0]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let... [1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let...
Re: Remembering things that haven't happened yet
#8> Sounds like the researchers read Derek Parfit. I’m currently experiencing whatever the opposite of the “end of history illusion” is. Let’s call it: “The beginning of potentially infinite unknowable and yet inevitable futures reality.” Sounds like existential anguish. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/306
> Sounds like existential anguish. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/306
After reading her article and your link, yes, and that seems to be caused by the practical impossibility to brute force an optimized path when there're too many possibilities.
It's like the curse of dimensionality but in a dynamic space: she can't ask for a complete set of videos to cover all the possibilities.
She can't ask for the top probabilities either, as this would require at least a sparse sampling of this very large space (ex: how likely is the aliens landing possible, not just in Phoenix like in her example, but at all?)
The desire to control your own destiny (or at least to optimize it) seems to cause a lot of anguish, as if the brain was running into a computability problem and the impossibility to compute was measured in a variable called $existential_anguish.
It makes me think about the halting problem
Re: Remembering things that haven't happened yet
#9[deleted]
Re: Remembering things that haven't happened yet
#10> Sounds like the researchers read Derek Parfit. I’m currently experiencing whatever the opposite of the “end of history illusion” is. Let’s call it: “The beginning of potentially infinite unknowable and yet inevitable futures reality.” Sounds like existential anguish. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/306
> Sounds like existential anguish. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/306 After reading her article and your link, yes, and that seems to be caused by the practical impossibility to brute force an optimized path when there're too many possibilities. It's like the curse of dimensionality but in a dynamic space: she can't ask for a complete set of videos to cover all the possibilities. She can't ask for the top probab…
When trying to control puts you into a state of anguish, you’ll know you have lost control, since you don’t set out to suffer like that. Ironically, you’ll want to surrender control, then you can move to a better state.