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I used to free dive for abalone a bit north of the Russian river (to avoid great whites). It wasn't very relaxing. You're on the surface. You take a few/five deep breaths for a bit to fill your blood with extra oxygen, then flip over with your head down. You try to use as little muscle as possible in order to conserve oxygen so you do a few gentle strokes with your fins to start moving down and then no more movement.…
I love freediving. But I almost blacked out and drowned once when I was doing it alone, hours hike away from anyone. Sure enough, I was using hyperventilation, which I didn't know back then was a big mistake. When I think back about it, it's crazy how close I was to death. Learned my lesson that day. As she says in the article, don't do it alone.
How did you know you almost blacked out? I'm most terrified of the stories that you can fade without knowing
I started swimming towards shore, pulled myself on the rocks there and rested. It felt weirdly wonderful. Warm rocks heating up my body, and a great sensation of calm. Only after a few minutes did I understand the gravity of what had just happened.
I never liked free diving. I prefer an 30 to 45 minute air supply, WAY more comfortable, plus you can stay down and get stuff done, instead of constantly surfacing. Blacking out from free diving is a real risk.
Thanks, I enjoyed this. I don’t free dive but I do appreciate embodied practices and I think you articulated really well why they are special and worthwhile. Although, the AI section fell a little flat for me. It felt shoehorned. Maybe someday we will build systems that have a real analogue to the sensations you described, but I don’t think we’re close yet. I don’t really care what Claude outputs on this subject.
I never liked free diving. I prefer an 30 to 45 minute air supply, WAY more comfortable, plus you can stay down and get stuff done, instead of constantly surfacing. Blacking out from free diving is a real risk.
I'm not saying scuba can't be the same for someone. For me, though, this is how I connect with my environment and feel truly present. It's wonderful. I couldn't achieve it with scuba.
I can't take this seriously at this point.
When you look at a factory with sophisticated automation, it might be overwhelming to think that these mechanisms are just cold steel, plastic, rubber, simple deterministic logic, and various actuators and sensors... But that's all it is.
We can acknowledge how incredible the tools and systems are without inferring sentience. It seems to me that the people who see a spark inside, some kind of salience, are deeply confused or misled and unaware of what the underlying technology is.
Either that or they're writing stories as entertainment; I don't know. Stochastic parrot isn't quite accurate because these models don't exist in a vacuum. They're coupled with extremely robust and complex harnesses which help guide the model to explore the correct context, utilize the right functions, revise their own outputs, and so on. They are not operating solely based on the model's capabilities alone.
There's no 'there' there. It's just a tool.
I never liked free diving. I prefer an 30 to 45 minute air supply, WAY more comfortable, plus you can stay down and get stuff done, instead of constantly surfacing. Blacking out from free diving is a real risk.
- for SCUBA you NEED to trust your equipment. You have to check and still be ready to handle equipment failures
- for freediving you NEED to understand your physiology and your limits
- for SCUBA you do have time which also means you "waste" quite a bit but simply wondering and wandering around, in freediving you must be in the moment
- you can freedive anywhere, just take your swimsuit and that's it... yet in practice not so many places are interesting or enjoyable, depending on your practice. You can SCUBA also pretty much anywhere but you better know the closest barotrauma chamber and at the very least a compressor to fill up your tanks.
- blackout is definitely dangerous but I wouldn't be surprised if it's statistically less risky than embolism. If you dart up in SCUBA well you better hope the bubbles are just in right place.
So... I'm not saying one is better than the other in terms of safety or comfort, simply that they are quite different and enjoyable differently.