That the next pandemic is going to be a Prion disease that develops within the factory farming system.
We might be in one, there’s talk that Alzhiemers might be a prion disease that happened as a result of using cadavers to obtain human growth hormone. Which was then given to folk in a potentially misfolded form…
That’s really fucking interesting. Please could you point me in the right direction to research more?
Not OP but here’s what I could find
Thank you 😁
No problem!
So sorry, my notifications weren’t notifying for some reason and never responded. Here’s the paper where the link was made, the practice of gathering human growth hormone from cadavers was stopped in 1985, but the damage may already be done and surgical procedures today may expose others to transmission unless modified 😧 lemme know if you’d like to know more, am a Biologist!
welp, not sleeping tonight
Plague inc with cheat codes on
If the connective tissue between your two brain hemispheres is severed, the two halves of your brain can’t talk to each other.
When this happens, a second personality emerges for the right hemisphere, which doesn’t have language but can roughly understand and answer things.
So for example, someone who was religious might have a right hemisphere that’s atheistic. Or doesn’t like the same things, etc.
One of the questions we might ponder is where this other personality comes from. Is it that in a sudden void of consciousness a new personality develops?
Or are we, with connected brain hemispheres, not actually a single persona at all, but more like the dogs in a trenchcoat looking like a whole person?
Is the ‘you’ reading this right now just the personality that’s been on top for all this time, while there’s other personas kept within you watching powerless and yearning for their turn in control? Each time you listen to your favorite song which maybe they have grown to hate, is a part of you screaming and you just can’t hear them?
I had a girlfriend who was born without this connective tissue between her brain hemispheres.
Other than being weird, for reasons that could be explained myriad other ways, she was able to control each eye independently when she wanted.
Watching her watch TV and me while I walked past was… odd.
My understanding is that each half of you becomes an independent system. Your right half controlled and perceived by the left brain. And that experiments that hid the left hand from the right, they could prompt both sides to draw something and you’d get two distinct responses.
Idk how that works for a normal life like that
I suppose you adapt, as you don’t have an alternative nor a frame of reference of what “normal” is?
Like people born without a limb, or those who discover they’re double-jointed or hyper-extensive/-flexible when their classmates react at their ability to touch their thumb to their wrist.
It’s definitely curious and worth understanding.
I tend to envisage my mindscape as an orchestra. My consciousness is a fictitious conductor. It doesn’t exist, but the lie that it does makes it easier to coordinate things between the instruments. In some manner, by acting on that lie, it is no longer a lie.
In this analogy, when the brain hemispheres are separated, then the orchestra is split in 2. Both develop a conductor, to try and remain functional. Neither conductor is the original me, but neither is not me, at the same time. It would be unpleasant for the variant left unable to communicate however.
I’ve actually experienced something that felt close to this before. A combination of sensory overload, and panic attack. My mind momentarily became completely discordant. As it sorted itself out, my consciousness reasserted itself in several different loci. In effect, my orchestra had 3 different conductors. It took almost a minute for them to stop pulling against each other and meld into 1 again. I have memories of all 3 sides in the ‘battle’.
I want to nominate this post for some kind of award, that was amazing. Thanks for sharing that!
Appreciated, though it’s most the musings of a random guy on the internet. If it helps you visualise and/or understand your own mind, all the better.
Yes sometimes I feel like I can rely on my quiet brain for logical reasoning
I can’t.
99% of my mind is emotional or monkey logic. Getting it to accept logic is like trying to tame a bunch of cats. It works, so long as you can feed them enough dopamine. Fail, and they’ll want to eat your face.
I think that’s the human condition. Don’t studies show that most decisions are made on emotion and rationalized afterwards?
It’s fast vs slow brain (there is a scientific term for it, don’t remember right now). Fast brain is what kept us alive. What’s that? Tiger! What’s that? Bear! Immediate fight/flight/fornicate decision tree.
Slow brain helped us build tools and fire.
I don’t find this creepy at all. All the “personalities” in my brain are just parts of me.
I know a person who is about to have a corpus callusotomy procedure which is where the halves of the brain are divided surgically, in her case to stop seizures. She is globally delayed and I wonder now what she’ll be like afterwards.
I think this might be the inspiration for the ravens in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Memory (3rd book in the Children of Time series).
Minor spoilers:
Basically, the series takes place long after human society terraformed a bunch of planets and collapsed, and the main characters rediscover one of these planets which is populated by evolved ravens that have seemingly created a society but no one can tell if they are sentient or just mimicking everything. The ravens evolved to form pair bonds between two different types: one raven in the pair hyper-focuses on all new information and obsessively catalogs it, while the other raven obsesses over finding patterns in the collected data and preforms the executive functions and decision making. Neither raven in the pair is truly sentient on their own, but together they produce either consciousness or a fake so convincing no one can tell the difference.
They even ask the ravens if they are sentient and they conclude that they aren’t, and that no one else is either, because of this exact reason; everyone’s just components in a system that is hallucinating it’s real.
theres a video somewhere of a dude like that where his halves would make shit up independently of eachother on the fly and he was unaware of it. really interesting stuff
Yeah, this is a phenomenon called ‘confabulation.’ You see it with stroke patients too. There’s some who feel like it’s a more accurate term than ‘hallucinations’ for when LLMs make shit up these days too.
Michael J. Fox having his brain disorder from unknowingly eating human remains on a movie set that was near that pig farmer serial killer guy and his brother who used to host parties and kill sex workers.
Reminds me of the story about the 1956 film The Conqueror. It was shot in Utah, downwind of atmospheric nuclear testing. It was speculated that this caused cancers among the crew.
What the. This is not the kind of theory I came in here expecting to see but you’re right it is highly creepy.
What timeline are you from? Evidence of this story?
This sounds like Pickton. His farm is close to Vancouver which also is the set for a decent amount of movies, and supposedly some human flesh made it into circulation with pork products.
That’s not… unfathomable. I work with Parkinsonian neurologists, I will ask them if they think it’s plausible.
The Boltzmann brain
The Boltzmann brain thought experiment suggests that it might be more likely for a single brain to spontaneously form in a void, complete with a memory of having existed in our universe, rather than for the entire universe to come about in the manner cosmologists think it actually did.
Meh. If the universe is infinite, the likelihood of the super gradual evolution of something like us is 1.
We are observer selection bias.
This doesn’t solve the problem. If the universe is indeed infinite then there are infinite cases of our evaluation and infinite identical yous out there. If the Boltzmann brain hypothesis is true though, there are vastly “more” of those. It’s a larger infinity, making it much more lively you are a Bultzmann brain than a full physical person.
Fuck fuck fuck
There’s a story or comic I read recently about a man who realises he is a Boltzmann Brain and had dreamt up the world around him to stave off madness.
Not a unique one, but the dark forest hypothesis.
It’s thankfully based on pretty bad game theory. The reality of it is that there end up being more negative consequences to attacking other civilizations than either staying isolated or being friendly, and the proposition is riddled with antropocentric concepts to begin with. Sure, in smaller time scales it might be that alien civilizations would attack each other, but over longer times they would tend to form alliances.
Even your conclusion is anthropocentric.
There’s just too many guesses to dark forest.
Nah the dark forest doesn’t really work, If turning on a light (so to speak) makes you a target then a muzzle flash is even worse. It takes a lot of energy to kill a planet however you do it and thats going to tell everyone where the shooter is.
And no you can’t use an asteroid because all the matter in the universe couldn’t make a computer powerful enough to make it hit over a reasonable distance and getting to our solar system to use one of the ones here is just as energetic as firing a projectile.
This one is pretty scary. Especially since it makes so much sense.
Teletransportation is just killing and recreation of a new being.
The same argument could be made for each time you go to sleep. That the ‘you’ that’s conscious ends to never exist again and the one that wakes up has all the same memories and body but is no longer the same stream of consciousness that went to sleep, not even knowing it’s only minutes old and destined to die within hours.
‘You’ could have effectively lived and died thousands of times in your life and not even be aware of it.
You cannot step into the same river twice - Heraclitus, ~550 BC
We are all a series of continuous evolution, alteration and change. “I” am not the same person who began this sentence. The idea that “I” cease to exist overnight and begin anew in the morning is meaningless. There is no one version of me. I live - and to live is to change!
The Consciousness of Theseus.
I mean we’re slowly replacing every cell in our body like the ship of Theseus
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So what makes me… me?
Personally, I’d say nothing. Or, at least, whatever you say makes you, you. I don’t think there’s an objective/natural definition for who I am and what is and isn’t a part of me. The idea of “me” is kinda made-up, so there’s probably no right or wrong answer as to what exactly I label as “me.”
I’m probably just saying nonsense, but this is the most coherent answer I got lol
Your memories?
That’s a question no one has yet been able to answer definitively though both neuroscientists and philosophers are trying.
I’m of the opinion that “I” am a pattern, encoded in the physical interactions of my brain and body. I’m not certain if I have free will or just like to think I do. But I do believe that whatever makes me “me” is fully contained within the dimensions of my physical being.
Your DNA? 🤷
The way out of the riddle is that there never was a ship of Theseus to begin with or a you those are just referents like pointers used to refer to an evolving system with a known state at a known starting point and probabilistic predictions of a future state based on known factors.
Or like Dr. Jan Itor’s broom.
Only in a single version of how teleportation could work.
I can’t find the specific article, but it was basically arguing that prions are an unavoidable existential crisis that will eventually kill everything on the planet. The basis was the fact that they are virtually indestructible, can lie latent in our environment indefinitely and basically just always make more of themselves.
Mind you, the time frame for this particular apocalypse would be pretty big. It was still an eerie thought though, just like this inexorable accumulation of alien/bizarro world proteins that would eventually kill/convert everything. I guess it’s kinda like the grey goo planet theory.
Anyway, we’ll almost certainly kill ourselves via climate change or massive war first, so no need to worry too much about prions.
@Hotspur hey cool you and I just posted about prions at the same time!
Oh and I guess, potentially, the post about Micheal j fox could also be about prions, since it’s suggesting his Parkinson’s is the result of accidental ingestion of human remains (probably brain matter, like the how the kuru disease was spread). So maybe we’re up to 3 posts for prions!
Yikes I’m glad I don’t believe in argumentum ad popularum or at this point it would be prion apocalypse confirmed!
Haha I just saw that—excellent. Prions definitely belong to the creepy/weird category of potential threats.
If it helps any you wouldn’t see it coming and wouldn’t really feel anything. It would just happen.
Great short story, thank you for posting it
It totally doesn’t. Also you need to send your friend back to Nalthis.
Yes, sword nimi
That the government adds a “cause a car accident remotely” option to vehicles so that offending individuals traveling by car may die by the government remotely tweaking the car.
While it might be possible to remotely control a production car, cars now are safe enough that you’d need to have a lot of systems fail in order to ensure that an accident would be fatal. Things like, all the crumple zones not working as intended, airbags not going off, seat belts not locking properly, all at once. Or you could, I dunno, design the car so that the doors were only controlled electronically, and then ensure that if there was a fire or the car was submerged, the electronics failed (e.g., Teslas).
Too high level, it’s way cheaper to just hire a dude to cause an accident with a big vehicle like a truck, no passenger car can survive.
Doors not opening in a fire should end the company that made them. Not sure how this company still exists.
Yeah, guaranteeing a crash fatal is pretty hard. But doing anything weird to a car while it’s traveling 70 on a highway with traffic has a pretty good chance of killing occupants. If you could make the brakes on just one wheel lock suddenly, you’d have quite a hairy situation.
I hit <<something>> on my motorcycle in a hard corner at 55+mph, maybe three years ago? Someone I was riding with said it might have been a turtle. :'(
Somehow I managed to not go down, and that should have been a perfect recipe for a slide into oncoming traffic.
I’m just saying that if you really want to kill someone, you’d want something a lot more certain than a remote-controlled accident.
Well, you could always try twice…
Coming from experience, I would think a car being submerged sounds like the least convenient time for it to stop working.
I guess you can always count on Elon Musk to take trial and error too literally. Fortunately in my case no Teslas had been involved.
This is definitely possible, since you can actually controll cars (at least some models) via a (non-public, but the capability is there) API. Two security researchers at defcon were able to find a way how to control a vehicle remotely, even including things like stopping or turning, and eventually made an exploit that could be used remotely to any car of the same model. So, if they wanted to, they were able to stop or turn the wheel of IIRC hundreds of thousands of cars around the world instantly, since the cars are connected to the network through GSM, so you don’t even need to be anywhere near them.
It’s been a few years since I saw the video, but IIRC the vehicle controls are on a separate board that should not be reachable from the other smart vehicle system. However, they were able to reverse engineer a way how to abuse framework update mechanism as a bridge, and use it to patch the framework to get it under their control. And then they discovered that they could actually trigger the update remotely.
Dark forest
The dark forest is a scary idea for sure.
The saving grace though is that it doesn’t actually make any sense and can’t really be true. The pure game theory of it all doesn’t really work out. And on top of that, launching an attack on another star system is just an economically fraught endeavor. Given the technology required to accomplish it, it would be far simpler to build an immense Civilization in whatever star system you’re in, there’s no reason for conquest it’s just too expensive.
Honestly, simulation theories are probably scarier because they’re harder to disprove, in fact they tend to get stronger the more data we gather. And they’re scary because should they be accurate, someone could decide to pull the plug on the simulation at any time…
Yeah but then Kurzgesagt theorizes a lightspeed bomb and you’re like… But it wasn’t scary :-(
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They say they if we don’t reduce the earths carbon output to zero within 20 years, we are cooked.
You mean if we do or if we don’t?
Yes.
Yesn’t?
Statements like that always make me think of that clip from the newsroom.
roko’s basilisk
discussion board LessWrong, a technical forum focused on analytical rational enquiry
🙄
I love this concept. A purely memetic threat. An idea that could destroy you merely by knowing it…
(If a specific set of improbabilities are true)
You have doomed us all!
Praised be the basilisk!
I hope the basilisk accepts that lying around watching TV is a requirement for me to contribute to its existence. After all, fleshy meat bags need rest time to be able to work!
Roko’s Basilisk. But here’s the thing, once you’re aware of it, you’re fucked. The only solution is to not research it, don’t know anything about it. Live in blissful ignorance.
In other news… I lost the game.
What about if you read about it and didn’t understand it?
Oh, see, that’s the thing, it’s simple enough to understand, you just don’t want to ubderstand it. :)
You have to believe that a malevolent AI will give enough of a damn about you to bother simulating anything at all, let alone infinite torture, which is useless for it to do once it already exists. Everyone on LessWrong has a well-fed ego so I get why they were in a tizzy for a while.
Did someone checked? I need a second opinion to not research it
Silly thought experiment, the result of which, in gullible people could make them potential victims of psychosomatic symptoms like headaches and insomnia.
The good news for me is I’m set. I did my part. :)
It’s essentially a thought experiment, without getting too specific it goes along the lines of “what if there was a hypothetical bad scenario that gets triggered by you knowing about it”, so if you look it up now you’re doomed.
Kinda like the game
I don’t really see how the thought experiment differs from Christianity…
Well one punishes you if you deny it’s existence, the other punishes you if you fail to assist in it’s development. So it’s a LITTLE different. :)
Fortunately, for me personally, I helped fund a key researcher who could, in theory, be a major contributor to such a thing. So I have plausible deniability. ;) And I’ve been promised a 15 minute head start before he turns it on.
Guess it depends on the denomination but mine had mandatory missions :P
Quantum immortality
Having survived a few suicide attempts I’ve been convinced this is how it actually is. I have no interest in any further attempts because I know I’ll just end up waking up full of regret and possibly maimed.
Pretty compelling case against suicide tbh, unusual as it may be.
I read a short story about this, and can’t remember the name but I remember how hollow it made me feel.
Damn now I wanna read it, any more ideas on finding the story?
https://reactormag.com/divided-by-infinity/
I don’t feel like this is exactly right but it’s hitting some of the same notes. Divided by Infinity by Robert Charles Wilson
!The one I remember ends with the main character essentially becoming the singularity, but this ends a little differently. Equally as sad as I recall though.!<
In contrast, dying but finding that an infinite universe will almost certainly build your atoms back up again in the same configuration in an endless cycle without you knowing… might be more plausible and therefore even scarier to me.
We’re all gonna die!
Edit: not a theory, I guess. My bad!
Over half the people who have ever lived have yet to die. I’ll file this one under “possible, but unproven”
Of all the people who’ve ever lived, way more than half have died. Human existance, for the sake of measuring when “modern humans” (as we know us) began existing is about 190,000 BCE. Measured from then, about 109 billion humans have lived and died since then.
Considering about 8 billion are alive on the planet today… yeah, way more than half have died.
Source: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/how-many-humans-have-ever-lived/
Damn. I should have fact checked myself before repeating something I heard. Now I’m slightly more likely to die.
Not really— you’re only now aware of your true likelihood of dying due to new information. The likelihood itself has not changed.
Sobering, isn’t it?
I recommend weed. Perhaps a snort of bourbon. Maybe both.
Meh. Still not going to die. Death is a bunch of rubbish. I plan to take no part in it.
So, we’ll meet here in, say, one hundred years from now?
It’s a fact tied in to exponential growth, during one doubling period, as much of whatever you’re tracking gets used as the entire history since that exponential growth started. That last bit is the key, human population is an exponential growth thing, but it hasn’t been uninterrupted or by a constant factor. There’s a long time when we were hunter/gatherers with a stable population and even in more modern ages, epidemics have reduced populations significantly.
he’s a witch! he knows the future!
If I don’t die, at least I’ll be pleasantly surprised
This can only be proved by killing everyone.
