Personally I would do this but it depends how well you get along with them. Obviously the last thing you want is arguments and sulking. Having your own space to retreat to would be the thing to negotiate ahead of time.

I don’t think it’s necessary to have a formal education in any subject, it’s more of a shortcut in the best case. An open curiosity and some logic for mitigating the biases from our reasoning is probably sufficient.

Superficially that is the appeal of Harris, he is articulate and strong on logic but it will only carry an idea so far. His stance on atheism is a good example of limitations of a purely rational approach to living in the world. I agree with his point that we probably would be better off without religion but we still need some of the spiritual elements. I suppose he would argue that he obtains this from an introspective practice which make his blind spots all the more surprising, given his obvious expertise in the area of self awareness e.g. Waking Up app and book. There’s some interesting insight on this point by the producers of Decoding the Gurus podcast where they recently mused the rise of fascism. One other podcast on the fringe of philosophy that I’ve found entertaining and informative is The Very Bad Wizards, it’s run by scholars for fun but I first became aware of many of the basic philosophical tenets there.

Thanks for the links, appreciate it.

I also had the feeling we were talking at cross purposes 😂 Language really shows it’s limits when considering these topics, it’s incredibly easy to mangle a sentence and give a completely different idea.

Impressed that you correctly detected the influence of Harris on my thinking although I didn’t read that text in particular. I’m only just getting into this subject as an amateur but it seems that you have studied it formally?

The self is synonymous with experience. It’s why the self is simultaneously a substantial entity and completely without substance. We remember what it felt like to be ten years old and yet every single cell that generated that sensation has long since been replaced by adulthood. People who receive traumatic brain injuries can become strangers to their family and even themselves. The self is a contrivance and an emergent property of a neural network. Ever changing, elusive and yet reassuringly familiar.

The last thing I will do is deny anyone else’s experience but it sounds like you want to do that, all the while unaware of where that impulse originates. As if it percolated up into consciousness completely unbidden or did you will it into existence?

I suspect the reason we can’t find the self is the same reason we can’t find the other conceptual objects in our imaginations. They feel real and they are useful but ultimately they are like money, religion, nation states, laws and insurance - purely conceptual and dependent on our shared belief in them.

I’m suspicious of the desire to lean too heavily on concepts such as the self and free will. Much of our societal structures past and present depend on their existence, how else can we accuse others of crime if the perpetrator didn’t have a choice? It wasn’t that long ago that we were prosecuting animals for the crimes listed in our statutes. Currently we don’t believe other animals are capable of this level of agency but nobody has presented any compelling evidence, either way.

I suppose it’s early days for neuroscience but many functions of the mind have been linked with areas of the brain, except the generation of the self. That self seems to come about as a result of time spent in the world and is shaped by it so why can’t we find it? Even if we do find a particular area of grey matter, it’s not as if we will find a self molecule and be able to measure it, that’s not how neural networks operate. The best we can say is the self is an organism with memory, a vehicle for genetic material that has become so complex that it’s unable to discern what it is made of.

It’s a huge problem. Software engineers need to step up and say no to creating artificial barriers between the user and the device. Electronic and mechanical engineers should be making devices that are repairable.

In my workshop I have switched to buying old industrial tools that don’t have embedded software. These machines were built in a time when people expected to repair their own stuff and keep it working.

It’s difficult to imagine a corporation whose ethics are more toxic than Apple but everyone seems to be following their lead and jumping on this mendacious bandwagon.

Right. It’s perfectly normal to have difficulty sleeping. We often don’t know why and that’s okay too. In time it will pass, as all things do.

I’ve heard people advance the argument that since the self cannot be shown to exist, ‘free will’ is also absent and we can absolve ourselves of responsibility for our actions. I don’t believe in the Judeo-Christian conception of free will but I still want to be involved in my decisions and choices, even if that is limited to an awareness.

• Sleep and wake at the same time every day.
• Wake early.
• Avoid caffeine after mid day.
• Cool temperature bedroom as you go to sleep.
• Avoid stimulation immediately prior to sleep e.g. screens, intense exercise, arguments.
• Make the bedroom a place of rest exclusively, no screens, noise, etc.
• If sleep is elusive don’t stay in bed, go do something and come back later to try again.
• Worrying about sleep only makes sleep more difficult.
• Don’t use alcohol or drugs to help sleep except very briefly to get over a hump. Of the benzodiazepine class, zopiclone is effective for short periods to re-establish a sleep pattern.

The self as an illusion is an interesting concept to play with. We think of ourselves as identities so that we can operate socially. However when one examines the moment to moment experience of consciousness the self is nowhere to be found.

In America the corporate dictatorship was started when oil was discovered and the billionaire class created.

It’s a good test when working with people that you don’t know, contractors, etc. In the automotive industry we work with a lot of electronic system suppliers and they deliver embedded software in the form of ECU. Software in this form can hide a multitude of horrors so the only way to keep track of it is to make release declarations, implying testing has been carried out. If that’s not present, you can’t trust it.

As you point out, opioids numb the spirit, not the pain itself. We stop caring about pain from its many sources, emotional and physical. Viewed at the level of consciousness pain is conceptual and can be manipulated to be diminished or magnified by the context and expectations. I’ve never consciously used cannabis as pain relief but I can imagine it operates in a similar way, making it easier to interpret the sensation as something other than negative. I know from meditation that removing judgement from my thinking has a similar effect. Pain is bad but we are not obliged to judge every painful event and compound the situation.

The ball was black, made from rubber, tennis ball size. Only a hand was imagined. No particular colour or gender. The table was made from Elm.

Bicycle technology. Suddenly I could travel three times the speed of walking for the same effort.

The struggle is real.

Poweramp still going strong ten years later.

That’s the point I’m making, android cannot know who is driving and has to assume it’s the user of the phone because that is the safest assumption. There should be an option to accept liability for using the phone and driving but that may not be legally defensible. Sexy people outside my window should also sign disclaimers because I keep crashing my car looking at them.