That and the constant feeling of deja vu
You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
101–110 of 466 posts
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#102If I read something with a critical eye, it’s not the content that shapes me, but the way I engage with the text. Otherwise, every conspiracy theory I read about would shape and change me.
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#103One approach I like is to relax and read the book quickly the first time, don’t take notes or anything. If it’s good, read it again (and again periodically). If not, don’t. This gives natural spaced repetition on the good stuff, and also you pick up different things in subsequent readings.
This is close to what I do sometimes (and I should be more disciplined about doing it all the time, TBH). I'll often read a non-fiction book once, at a leisurely pace, no notes or anything. Maybe I'll stick a few page flags in to highlight things that really stand out to me. Later, if I deem it worthwhile, I'l re-read the book and take notes. After that, I'll re-read my notes and try to consolidate my thinking and distill out the most important elements into a separate notes document. And on rare occasions, I may later re-read the original book a third time and refine my notes even further. If I'm reading a group of books on a related topic, I may open a new document and then read/re-read my earlier notes on each book, and put the synthesis into the new doc.
The biggest problem with all of this is simply that it's very time consuming. But when doing a pointed, intentional "deep dive" into something specific, I've found it to be effective.
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Free will hasn’t been proven. It’s up in the air how much is predetermined, and how to even define “free” in the context of free will. Even if we do have free will it’s still influenced to some degree by our biology.
> Free will hasn’t been proven. Free will is something that we experience which provides extremely compelling evidence that it is true. Things don't have to be empirically proven in order to be true, if that were the case then empiricism itself would fail the test as it has never been established to be true empirically.
Existence of mental illness or troubles makes me doubt that.
What is free will when you are suffering from pathological procrastination, depression or addiction ?
If you accept the fact that, like in addictions, your brain chemistry makes you smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol even when you know you’ll die from it and know it makes you miserable then how can you be convinced that you really control your normal behaviors ?
Why does anxiety makes me stay in my couch and antidepressants makes me want to go outside ?
I understand free will as a moral concept but at a biological level, i feel like it adds a lot of shaming and suffering to people who struggle to modify their behavior because science now knows that changing behavior is hard and impossible without physical modification of the brain structure.
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#105Earlier 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…
Hrm? When I think of things I tend to see multiple possibilities at once, and then decide which I think is the most reasonable, and go from there. Similar for emotions. I'm well aware of my emotions but can control them. And I think not doing so would be quite a poor way to behave. Perhaps it's that we all think in somewhat different ways, yet because our own mind is the only one that we will ever know - we simply po…
> Hrm? When I think of things I tend to see multiple possibilities at once, and then decide which I think is the most reasonable, and go from there.
And based on what do you decide ? Probably your past experience, your knowledge, your education and your moral values. Which are all somehow environmental factors.
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#106Earlier 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…
Hrm? When I think of things I tend to see multiple possibilities at once, and then decide which I think is the most reasonable, and go from there. Similar for emotions. I'm well aware of my emotions but can control them. And I think not doing so would be quite a poor way to behave. Perhaps it's that we all think in somewhat different ways, yet because our own mind is the only one that we will ever know - we simply po…
The amount of possibilities you see might be influenced by your emotional state, and what you call "reasonable" might not be the same thing as other people consider it.
A lot of our reasoning are applications of observations and best practices rules that we are sometimes not really aware of unless challenged by circumstances or outsiders.
This is to some degree necessary - the outside world is too complex to fully model inside our minds. The most important things that we can only build approximate models about are other people.
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#107Yes. So much this.
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#108Don't forget that you are the result of all the past sensory interactions that you experienced in your whole life, people you interacted with, books you read, advertisements, songs, news headlines, etc. Even if you think you don't remember them, at one point in your life it was processed by your brain and may have changed some posterior decisions you made, thus making you what you are now. Since I realized this, I am…
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…
Ibn Tufail reached the same conclusion using the same metaphors 900 years ago in his
Philosophus Autodidactus.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayy_ibn_Yaqdhan
Probably the most important work of Arabic philosophy.
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#109Earlier 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…
Hrm? When I think of things I tend to see multiple possibilities at once, and then decide which I think is the most reasonable, and go from there. Similar for emotions. I'm well aware of my emotions but can control them. And I think not doing so would be quite a poor way to behave. Perhaps it's that we all think in somewhat different ways, yet because our own mind is the only one that we will ever know - we simply po…
Are you positing that you have free will but that those around you with less emotional control don’t? I don’t think your example is serving your argument; your brain is structured in such a way that you reason in a way that is unique to you, and others reason otherwise based on the structure of their brains. I don’t see how this grants you free will. You’re talking about feelings and reasoning as part of conscious experience and that’s, in my opinion, the end state of all of the neurological activity that pointed us to feel or think a certain way in the present moment.
The chain of causality that leads to thoughts and emotions in consciousness is completely determined by the structure and action potentials that propagate through our brain and nothing else, and this doesn’t leave room for some conscious agent in our brain also pulling levers and further modifying causality.
Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
#110Don't forget that you are the result of all the past sensory interactions that you experienced in your whole life, people you interacted with, books you read, advertisements, songs, news headlines, etc. Even if you think you don't remember them, at one point in your life it was processed by your brain and may have changed some posterior decisions you made, thus making you what you are now. Since I realized this, I am…
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…
The books I've read have a say in this. Rutger Bregman concluded in his Humankind - a Hopeful History that deep down human is pretty decent. So I'm thinking the turnout would be rather similar in different communities.
I was kinda impressed with Bergman once the book came out so I took nine copies to Finnish MP's to share. Unfortunately they were not too interested in the humane message the book told