I believe this phenomenon is called “linguistic relativity”, or “The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis” [1], which says that a language affects its speakers' cognition or even personality. I'm probably not truly bilingual, my native lanuguage is Ukrainian, but I too feel as if my personality and behavior is slightly different when I talk or write in English.
Yes, it's called Advaita Vedanta. Swami Sarvapriyananda's lectures are always a great source of knowledge about Advaita.
So Advaita is about you, that is, about consciousness. You are consciousness. And then it goes something like "you're not your body and you're not your mind, you are the "pure subjectivity" present in any qualia, you are Sakshi." Or Atman, also a popular term.
Also there's that equation that Atman = Brahman (brahman being the universe/existence itself? [1] but I don't buy it, maybe I don't understand what that means yet)
And all of this supposedly is ought to make you feel better about your own problems or suffering, idk? I'm not sure how tbh, I just have a metaphysical interest in this topic. It didn't help me with my problems.
So in every qualia there is the content of experience, and then there is the very first-personal givenness of whatever is subjectively given [2]. Experiential presence. But it's only a conceptual difference, not a real nomological/metaphysical one. There's just qualia. There cannot be qualia without an experiencer, an experiencing that is happening. We wouldn't even call that "qualia". Similarly, there cannot be just this abstract quality of first-personal givenness, mere subjectivity without contents. We wouldn't call that an experience.
So in Advaitic terms: consciousness = subjectivity = Sakshi (just a laconic term) [3] = experiential presence = immediacy of experience = mineness = for-me-ness = the first-personal givenness of experience = the real metaphysical "I". So contrary to popular nowadays philosophers of mind, quale is not consciousness. Qualia consist of 1) consciousness and 2) contents of consciousness. And these two are inseparable, I make only a difference in words to explain what it is, on the level of concepts. In nature there are only experiences going on.
Advaita says that you are that which experiences. Whatever you experience — that you are not. This is a useful phrase to remember. A distinction.
You observe happenings of your mind just as you observe your body and the outside world and everything else. (the mind is even sometimes called as "the subtle body" by Advaitins)
You are singular, only one. Experiences - many
You - never change, but experiences come and go
You are very simple and propertyless, but your experiences and feelings are complex and can change
There is no seer and the seen, there is only a process of "seeing", and you are that.
Also from this follows that I am you and every conscious person, animal or being is the very same subjectivity, instantiated in different contexts (locations, times). This is also sometimes called Open Individualism theory of personal identity (term coined by Daniel Kolak) [4] [5] [6], or sometimes Universalism by Arnold Zuboff [7] [8], or as in writings of Edralis [9] [10].
There's also that concept of self-luminosity (svaprakasatva), that self-consciousness is just consciousness. Light reveals many other objects but simultaneously reveals itself. You don't need another source of light to see light. For advaitins, light is a metaphor for you, for consciousness. [11]
Also the mistaken identification of yourself, as consciousness, with your mind is called Adhyāsa (superimposition) [12]. There's a technique for grasping this concept intuitively called Drig Drishya Viveka, Swami Sarvapriyananda often talks about it [13].
This is true, we can travel only up to 8.2 billion light years (radius of the affectable universe/2) which is the largest completely causally connected region, in the sense that every point can observe and reach every other. 8.2 billion light years is the furthest distance that we could reach and then return from at the speed of light. And it is much smaller than the radius of the observable universe (46.4 billion light years)
I make jazz piano music and funky electronica, drum & bass occasionally. My most representing albums are The Box of Unusables, Nightly Blues, Gematria. All available for free download on bandcamp:
Firstly, contrary to Benatar, our lives are not "meaningless", even from a cosmic perspective. Our personal problems, concerns, relationships, and feelings are in no way less significant merely in the virtue of the size of the (multi)verse. Your feeling of pain is still pain, whether the universe contains billions of galaxies, or is just 10 light-years across. Same with joy, same with health, everything.
Secondly, our lives are certainly not inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. The whole future of the Sun depends on whether humanity's descendants exist long enough to develop the technology to stop it from going nova and gather its energy. If Earth is indeed the only planet in the observable universe to contain life, then our lives are of tremendous significance. Either we live and hopefully, build grand Kardashev IV-utopia among the stars changing the universe completely, or we go extinct.
Somehow preventing our sun to swell into a red giant is also only a short term and meaningless problem in the grand scheme of things. You would have to prevent the heat death of the universe if you want human mankind to exist forever or accept that things will eventually come to an end.
Even if we assume we could somehow do this, I would recommend you to watch some Star Trek episodes with Q. Living forever can be even more depressing than to live one finite life.
And I'd wary against generalizing from fictional evidence. As much as I love Star Trek, it has one hell of a anti-life-extension, anti-transhumanism bent. Perhaps because it's a story about humans becoming a better people, and for it to be directly relatable, it has to involve humans like us - unmodded, whether by genetics or technology.
I mean you can use your own brain and think about the idea of living forever and the consequences it would have. The more I think about it, the more it becomes a depressing idea at least for me.
I've done that a lot, and I find it an optimistic idea. Sure, we'd need to refactor some things in society to root out the hidden structural dependencies on life expectancy being double-digit years, but other than that? I see mostly upsides.
(And in terms of boredom, because I'm guessing that's what you allude to by invoking Q: you can always decide to end your existence after you get bored with eternal life.)
It's about meaninglessness. Maybe it's just me, but things (including life) that are finite are valuable and special for me. Also in terms of Lord of the Rings I would rather be a human or hobbit instead of an elf. But I respect elves and get your point, it's just not for me.
Eternity is an overwhelming concept. It's easier to tackle it through mathematical induction.
Can you imagine a day in which you feel so fulfilled, so bored, that you say to yourself, "it's enough"; a day in which you wouldn't be interested in what tomorrow will bring? I can't. Hence, by induction, I'd prefer immortality.
I'm probably not going to change your mind, just sharing the elvish perspective.
That's Deseret, an alternate alphabet for English. According to a converter, it says:
> I like writing in this text, it looks cool. Works different than standard old Latin alphabet, but at the same time formed* from the Latin alphabet. Imagine this being used for practical purposes. Random dude intrigued by the Deseret Alphabet.
Supporters of the Strong AI Hypothesis insisted that consciousness was a property of certain algorithms -- a result of information being processed in certain ways, regardless of what machine, or organ, was used to perform the task. A computer model which manipulated data about itself and its "surroundings" in essentially the same way as an organic brain would have to possess essentially the same mental states. "Simulated consciousness" was as oxymoronic as "simulated addition."
. . .
Paul had rapidly decided that this whole debate was a distraction. For any human, absolute proof of a Copy's sentience was impossible. For any Copy, the truth was self-evident: cogito ergo sum. End of discussion.
Yes, they do, in an abstract sense. Existence in math means a very different thing from existence in physics. There are mathematical objects that exist, and those that cannot and do not exist. Someone posted a SEP entry earlier, which is a good start on this topic.
>the main difference between concerning ourselves with whether or not mathematical objects exists vs music
There is no 'vs', because there is no difference. Music is math, any song or sound is a mathematical object. A physical waveform that you hear can be encoded digitally in numbers: ones and zeros. So any given wav/flac file is just a bunch of numbers that give rise to the qualitative experience of sound, when interpreted in a certain way.
For example, a digital waveform consists of samples, each sample takes 16 bits to encode. Sampling rate of 44.1kHz is 44,100 samples per second. So you have 16 bits per sample x 44100 samples per second per channel x 2 channels x 300 seconds = 2^423,360,000 possible permutations of a 5-minute audio file without compression, which is a number with over 127 million digits. A little percentage of these permutations would count as music (even if your tastes are really diversified), most of it would just be noise. But all these possible 5-minute audio files include not only every song and every performance that existed or will exist. They also include every possible sound recording: songs that will not be written, Paul Graham saying that he hates HN, Paul Graham saying that he loves me and the rest of the file is silence, you and me discussing this topic with Plato for 5 minutes, etc, etc. The data exists and can be discovered and listened to, even though some of these examples are obviously not physically possible (i.e. Plato is dead).
So all music already exists mathematically, and it can be a useful mindset that your job is to discover it. A lot of musicians see it that way, Tessa Violet, for example:
https://youtu.be/QzBoGVToWEo?t=342
There is so much wrong with this. It's clear that you're essentially presupposing there is either "free will" or "determinism" when in fact the right distinction to make is "free will" as opposed to "no free will".
Anyway, when you make a rerun of the universe from the same initial conditions, you get randomness because of quantum mechanics, so the future outcome is not exactly the same, and you can't predict anything with certainty because of probabilities. But look, all of this has nothing to do with free will. Neither determinism nor quantum mechanical randomness give you an absolute-metaphysical-libertarian superwill when you're not a subject to the laws of physics at all (unless you believe that you're a soul/cartesian ego/some other supra-physical mental entity with dubious ontological status). You're basically arguing against this abovementioned concept. But actually default, regular free will is just an effective description of reality where persons have volition, and it exists as an emergent rather than fundamental thing.
Before you start to make the same argument that free will doesn't really exist, consider the question: does Hacker News exist? Well, duh, of course not! There are no websites, no Internet and no computers, it's obviously all just fundamental particles acting in some ways, you know, just the wave function of the universe deterministically obeying the Schrodinger equation, etc. Naive reductionism. But here we are, reading Hacker News. Guess what, you don't live on a level of fundamental particles. Does, for example, chess exist? Your argument implies that it does not, but here I am, playing chess in a separate tab.
So, do persons exist?
Does free will exist?
It strikes me that people don't bother to make real arguments against free will, like a psychological one, for example.
> It's clear that you're essentially presupposing there is either "free will" or "determinism"
Yes, free will doesn't seem possible in a deterministic universe.
> Anyway, when you make a rerun of the universe from the same initial conditions, you get randomness because of quantum mechanics, so the future outcome is not exactly the same, and you can't predict anything with certainty because of probabilities
Then the universe is not deterministic.
> Before you start to make the same argument that free will doesn't really exist, consider the question: does Hacker News exist? Well, duh, of course not! There are no websites, no Internet and no computers, it's obviously all just fundamental particles acting in some ways, you know, just the wave function of the universe deterministically obeying the Schrodinger equation, etc. Naive reductionism.
No, there is a difference between something existing and free will. A computer can calculate an answer to some query, and the answer exists, doesn't mean it was generated through the computer's free will.
I never see people discussing the statistical aspects of free will.
For instance, I may decide to have an apple tonight, or spaghetti, or whatever. Thus, I seem to have free will. But if one collected statistics on what I ate over time, there would be patterns and it would be much more difficult for me to overcome those patterns with "will". The more time and events you look at the more you see things like unconcious maintenance of weight, preferences of types of food, and so on.
Yet the long term patterns are made up of the individual choices that seem free.
I have this vague idea that some further exploration of this might be compared to the statistical ideas of quantum mechanics.
That's because it's not an interesting thought as related to the notion of free will. Everyone accepts that humans have subconscious biases that impact their decisions. The discussion of free will is higher level than that. The fact that you can't will yourself into not breathing is not a refutation of free will.
The question is essentially, when all biases are accounted for, is there some aspect of free will that remains? You experience free will constantly, and you assume it in all interactions with other agents. Is that an illusion, are we just puppets in a play? Many philosophers believe that it isn't, even if determinism is real. I'm not sure if super-determinism is still compatible or not, but it may well be.
I mean, I can will myself into not breathing. I used to hold my breath between subway stations. But that's about as long as I can do it.
I feel like there's some sort of analogy between how you can have local violations of conservation of energy where particles pop into existence from nowhere, but longer term it has to even out.
Further reading:
1 // https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
https://qz.com/925630/feel-more-fun-in-french-your-personali...
Chen et al 2010, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/014616721038536...
Chen et al 2013, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jopy.12040
Athanasopoulos et al 2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02643294.2020.17...
M. Keith Chen 2012, https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...