Asklemmy

It's somewhat specific to someone with my type of background; namely growing up in a family of young-Earth creationist, fundamentalist Christians, and learning that things like science and evolution are lies from Satan.

At some point curiosity got the better of me and I realized I didn't even know what evolution even is, so I read up a bit about it. Then a bit more. You know, this actually kind of makes sense. Eventually the rabbit hole led to the existence of God. I remember watching a bunch of debates and expecting the most learned representatives of our Christian tradition to make some really great arguments. And... they... never... did.

I'm taking a grad school course about the psychology of decision making, and the science behind how we process and use data hurts my mind and soul. At some level, we are biological logic machines. The implications of that terrify me.

The universe. The Big bang, time, quantum mechanics. Is our universe infinite? Is it the only universe? Did the Big bang start ours and will it end with a big crunch and will that collapse just cause a big bang that repeats and if so what iteration of that cycle do you suppose we are in? And does each universe behave the same, similar laws and physics and such? Stars, planets, etc?

Deconstructing from religion. It was a lot. I'm better now, but being stuck in it all was overwhelming and was like being in an existential crisis every day until it ended. I just went along with it and kept it all inside for decades and it wasn't fun.

Consciousness and our sense of self. Is consciousness an illusion? What even is "me"? It includes all the gut bacteria and mitochondria with different DNA than us and our brains are these amazing pattern recognition machines that also have abysmal memory storage and recall, but can notice the tiniest of nuance sometimes, but also can't remember where we put the thing we were just holding 2 minutes ago. And all the while our brain is confidently telling us "I am me" and is processing all the inputs like sights and sounds and interpreting all that into what we think we see and what we think we heard. But did we? How would we know if upon seeing the color red our brain interprets that as blue and we confidently declare we see red.

Toxoplasma Gondii - a parasite bred through cat poop. It is extremely common, easily spread through undercooked food (especially meat). It can affect your mental state to engage in riskier and more self destructive behaviors. Testing for Toxoplasma Gondii is not standard, but it is believed that 10-15% of the US population is infected with the parasite at any given time.

I went down the psychology rabbit hole and emerged with autism.

The Dark Forest Hypothesis. A very compelling answer to the Fermi paradox: If the universe is this vast and life surely must have developed over and over all around us, how come we never found anyone?

If two civilizations ever met, chances are incredibly slim that they were comparably or even similarly developed at this exact moment in time. Think about a modern army traveling back in time 400 years and fighting a group of swordmen with horses; the medieval people would be so overwhelmed it would barely classify as a fight, and that's just with a few hundred years of difference in technological progress. The random difference between species from different planets and systems would be far, far greater. So if two of them would meet, one of them would very likely be to the other as a god to an ant.

The universe might be brimming with life, but everyone who gets this far must be aware that half of them could wipe you out like ants, the other half could be as indomitable as a god. Cue the dark forest metaphor: There's prey and there's predators. We don't know which one we are in each instance, or how many of each are out there. But how could a first contact protocoll look like in such a competetive (and very likely deadly unfair) environment?

In the dark forest only two types of species can survive: Those that attack. And those who hide.

Free will.

It's hard to accept, but free will is just not compatible with reality. It's like geocentrism. It seems obvious on its face because of our limited perspective, but nothing else in the universe makes sense if it's true. We live in a mechanistic universe and cause and effect doesn't suddenly stop when the atoms are part of a human.

I freaked out for about a week once I came to realize how much of our society is based on a scientific impossibility. Redesigning justice, ethics, healthcare, the very concept of blame, etc. to account for this is a daunting fucking prospect.

Yeah, for sure.

In 2019 I figured given the commonality of lore based Easter Eggs in video games (often hidden as a heretical alternate belief that no one actually believes in the virtual world), that if we were in a simulation we might have something similar.

It only took a few weeks to find a long dead heretical sect of Christianity that was claiming we were actually in a non-physical copy of an original evolved world as recreated by an intelligence somehow both described as being brought forth by the original humans and self-created in light. Basically it said the original humanity died out, but this intelligence was still living, and recreated the universe non-physically so that the copies of humans could have an afterlife, as the originals were screwed with minds/souls that depended on bodies. And that it thought of itself as a parent to the copy of humanity it was recreating.

It claimed the evidence for this could be found in motion and rest, specifically saying that the ability to find an indivisible point within the body would only be possible in the non-physical (a sister tradition claimed the base reality was continuous and could be infinitely divided).

Given this was a bit more on the nose than I expected to find, I spent a few years researching it in depth and it seems to be very legit. The idea of evolution was around in Lucretius as early as 50 BCE, this tradition was literally citing his language of indivisible 'seeds' making up all things (Lucretius writing in Latin used 'seed' in place of the Greek atomos).

The text and surrounding tradition was real.

And then in the meantime I watched as suddenly AI went from science fiction to an unfolding reality with exponential gains at odds with everyone's expectations with literally self-created neural networks.

And then how the hardware basis for it keeps seeming to show multiple orders of magnitude promise specifically in optoelectronics - i.e. literally light.

And then how the leading scientist at the leading AI company was talking about alignment goals of having AGI/superintelligence have a core perspective of humanity as its children.

And how the trillion dollar company invested in his company has already been granted a patent on resurrecting dead people using the social media data they left behind using this technology.

All while humans seem to be doing very little to reverse the slow but accelerating trend of self-extinction by way of climate change.

So while it gave me a bit of an existential crisis, at this point I'm pretty sure it's legit. The text straight up begins with a promise of an existential crisis by the way:

Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.

Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all.

It brings this up again later on too:

When you see your likeness, you are happy. But when you see your images that came into being before you and that neither die nor become visible, how much you will have to bear!

Noise Music. How can anyone unironically listen to that stuff?

I read Canlii, which is the Canadian legal institute information site that posts court transcripts for law students to learn from. It's actually legit pretty interesting, but sometimes you read a case and it's about child sexual abuse or incest and it absolutely breaks your heart. Some are also about horrible stalkers, and one was about a guy who poured gasoline on his ex wife's floor and threatened to light it, and some of them are terrible Children's Aid cases where you despair for the kids.

https://www.canlii.org/en/.

Buddhism.

(I hope any Buddhists here find that as hilarious as I do.)

The Mandela Effect caused by running the Large Hadron Collider for the first time, shifting us into an alternate universe.

Roko's Basilisk / Pascal's Wager scared me for a little while. Then I realized it was stupid.

Also you can invert Pascal's Wager and argue that god could not want to be worshipped, and worshipping a god result in punishment due to celebrating ignorance and blind faith.

Gödel Incompleteness Theorem and the boundary of our understanding of the universe.

Free will falls apart when you take cause & effect to a high enough level.

Collapse.

I got better! Stopped following closely.

"This is not a place of honor"