self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
When I was born: Middle class By the time I was preparing to move to the UK: UMC, maybe lower upper class In the UK? Uh.. Working class? Maybe? It means something subtly different here, I'm hardly flush with dough, but I don't have to worry about my bills. This might change with a +1 or kids.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
4d ago
I agree with @DirtyWaterDog below. There is a lot of ruin in a nation, and America is nowhere near the point where the sane should want to grab arms and begin fighting to the death with their neighbors. Civil war sucks, many unpleasant situations are worth bearing to avoid it. This isn't even the greatest period of civil unrest the States has seen in living memory! I'm not American, but I know full well that things were awful in the 70s.
If they're rounding up your friends and family in gulags, taking so much of your wealth that you are genuinely unsure that you will survive the winter, beating you like a dog? Then it is worth grabbing your gun and finding a hill with good sightlines and excellent cover to die on. That day is not today, and it is exceedingly unlikely to be tomorrow.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
4d ago
As the most vocal resident transhumanist, I recommend Xi disassemble Mercury to build a Dyson Swarm.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
Thank you, and I appreciate you taking the time to have this discussion.
But in neither are they the same in the sense that taking a drink out of one of them will correspondingly cause water in the other bottle to disappear. Which is the kind of thing people are asking for.
I'm not as demanding as these people, but if they want a version of "continuity" that strict, they're likely out of luck. In a very important sense, I consider it a good thing that changes made to one copy of me won't necessarily affect the other. The whole point of making backups of me, or of one's wedding photos, is that damage or destruction to one won't delete the other.
You can, of course, achieve such ends far easier on a digital substrate. Google Photos does version control, it is also possible to provide exactly the same input to two digital copies of me. Assuming the hardware and software has error-correction, we should get indistinguishable outcomes. I just don't see this as all that important, my copies are not beholden to grow and develop in the exact same manner as the "original".
I'd push back on the idea that when we wake up, we can be thought of as waking up as a reconstruction of sorts. There's a physical continuity between the me right now and the me of one second ago. The me of one second ago isn't dead per se, but it no longer exists either.
"Reconstruction" is a fuzzy word, so if it helps things, I would say it's analogous to putting a computer to sleep and rebooting it. Windows might update, the time on the clock might change, but for all practical purposes it is the same PC, even if it differs slightly when you zoom in very hard.
I can reasonably expect my pc to not change overnight. But in a year? Two years? Five? It might have had some/all it's components overhauled or replaced. At that point, the question of whether or not it's the "same" pc becomes arbitrary (or more arbitrary than it already was!), or at least context dependent. As long as it still has a valid Windows license, my files are still there etc, I'll call it my PC.
So it goes for the most personal of all computing platforms: myself.
Other than that, I agree with your claims regarding the physics of things.
As always, a pleasure, and if you want to continue our discussion when you have thought my claims over, I'll be around. While we'll likely never get on the same page about beliefs in a "soul", it's been enjoyable nonetheless.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
This is why Buddhist and Hindu philosophy has never drawn or inspired any real attraction or attention from me, though I’ve read their religious texts. If I was someone in a past life... why would I care, if there’s no concrete mental and physical continuity between that life and my present life today? The two are causally disconnected. If it was me, it’s not me in any sense I regard as interesting or that I should care about.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/reincarnation
This comic is perfect. I have as little truck with Buddhist/Hindu notions of reincarnation as I do for the Abrahamic belief in eternal life or the dead rising again. There is no real reason to believe in a soul, at least in a soul that does anything useful like carry across memories or personality, and even that would be insufficient.
This is the exact reason why a mind upload is the antithesis of reincarnation, and why I find the former so compelling and the latter so meaningless.
Your ontology of identity may be flexible, but that’s exactly what most people don’t want. They want a continuation of themselves for tomorrow that feels pretty much like today...
Most people really haven't thought very hard about the ontology of identity. Which is fine, it doesn't come up a lot in practical contexts between birth till someone issues a death certificate on your behalf.
I think this relies on a folk intuition about personal identity that, while comforting, doesn't stand up to scrutiny. What does "continuation" truly mean? You go to sleep every night, and for several hours, your continuous stream of consciousness ceases to exist. The "you" that wakes up is a reconstruction, a new instance of a pattern that has access to the memories stored in your brain from the previous day. We accept this without a second thought because the process is familiar and the fidelity is extremely high. The physical substrate is contiguous, but the conscious experience is not.
I will try and explain my personal understanding as best as I can:
- The person I am today is not the exact same as the person I was yesterday, a decade ago, or when a sperm fused into an egg producing the zygote that grew into me. I'm not even the exact same as I was a minute ago when I started writing this comment!
- In the same manner, I will not be the exact same person tomorrow, in a decade, or when I'm a senile old man, dying of dementia.
- Yet something is being at least partially conserved. The self_made_human of yesterday, today, and tomorrow are highly similar individuals, and wouldn't care too much if one was swapped for the other. He would care (and object vociferously) if you took present me and replaced me with either a zygote or the version of me with their brain turned into cheese by Alzheimer's.
This is the absolute core of it. Personal identity isn't a binary state of "me" vs "not me." It's a spectrum of informational fidelity. There is a threshold of similarity below which I no longer consider the entity to be a functional continuation of myself. A zygote has my DNA, but none of my memories or personality; it's a potential precursor, not me. A dementia-addled version is a degraded, corrupted file; the core data has been lost.
This is precisely where mind uploading comes in. The "continuation of themselves for tomorrow that feels pretty much like today" that you describe is simply what happens when the information loss between two points in time is negligible. You wake up, your brain's memory access is intact, the pattern is conserved, and so you "feel" like the same person.
A high-fidelity mind upload is designed to be the ultimate act of this conservation. It’s not a "copy" in the sense of a blurry photocopy but a photo taken with tomographic electron microscopy and {more speculation}. The goal is to capture the pattern with such precision that the informational difference between pre-scan bio-SMH and post-instantiation digital-SMH is far, far smaller than the difference between me today and me a year from now. And even if it wasn't that perfect, well, my essence is robust to minor perturbation. It's the major ones that kill the "me".
(In the limit:)
The digital version would wake up with a perfect, uninterrupted stream of my memories, feeling exactly as continuous as I do waking from a nap. It would remember typing this very comment. From its perspective, the transition would be seamless. To object to this on the grounds that the substrate changed from carbon to silicon is pure sentimentality - a preference for the original, increasingly faulty hardware over a superior, backed-up system running the exact same software.
The choice isn't between "the real you" and "a fake copy." The choice is between:
- Allowing the pattern that is you to inevitably degrade through aging until it falls below your own threshold of selfhood and is then permanently deleted.
- Executing a high-fidelity backup of that pattern onto a more durable substrate, ensuring its preservation and continuation.
Given those options, the preference seems self-evident to me. It's the most robust way to guarantee a "continuation of yourself for tomorrow that feels pretty much like today," indefinitely.
We can grade proposed procedures by fidelity of memory, stability of values, and preservation of personal style. I have laid out elsewhere the sort of blinded behavioral and circuit-level tests I would want. If a method passes those with no more variance than I display across years, it counts. If it fails, it does not.
Caring is allowed to be indexical. I care about versions of me in proportion to their connectedness to this one. That is a sane policy even if you are conservative about what “counts.” It also recommends cooperation between forks, which solves the alleged problem where copies become rivals. They are far more natural allies than almost any other agent in the universe.
I think John Polkinghorne was the only theologian I’ve ever read that made a case similar to this. Even as a Catholic myself, most of the arguments I’ve seen Christian philosophers make against transhumanism are incredibly weak.
On the theology line: I appreciate Polkinghorne’s attempt to reconcile persistence with physicalism (I must admit I've only skimmed it), but I do not need it to ground my choices. From a secular starting point the null hypothesis is no afterlife, and the world hands us ordinary cases that already break naive essence talk. Neurons turnover. Sleep erases consciousness for hours. Anesthesia erases it for longer. Memory is reconstructive and highly lossy. Yet prudential concern flows across these gaps because causal structure and stored information persist. Uploads aim to preserve that structure more faithfully than biology eventually will.
Most people don’t consciously decide to have children because they want to extend their biological footprint into the future, although we know evolution programmed that drive into us for that specified purpose. But it’s incidental to our conscious processing. I want to have children because family is what I find meaningful and fulfilling. Hedonism is empty and a dead end and even if transhumanism could extend my life a million years into the future, lack of a family would still ultimately leave me feeling unsatisfied. Even in my life right now, I would never be in a relationship with someone who wouldn’t consider or has already decided against having a family of their own. That’s a completely worthless relationship as far as I’m concerned.
We do not really disagree. Family is one of the big sources of value. The move I am making is not “replace family with silicon.” It is “keep the goods you care about for longer and more reliably.” My parents would like me around. I would like them around. My future kids would like both of those. Dying, in contrast, represents permanent separation. It is the end of both me and most of my dreams, and the connection I have with those I love.
This isn't selfish either. My grandfather is dying. He had a good life, it's hard to imagine better. He spent almost all of the last of his days surrounded by his kids and grandkids, loved and cherished even when there's so little of him left. I know that he will die without regrets, content in the knowledge that being a good person and doing all the right things paid off right until his body and mind decayed on him. He has long stated that he's old, and so very tired, and that death would be a relief.
No. I do not accept this wish, precisely because I love him. I do not love him selfishly, I would not hook him up to life support indefinitely while his organs, the brain being the most important, decay into ruin. I want him to be healthy, and happy, the kind man I once knew should stay. I can't save him, despite being a doctor. He couldn't save himself, despite being an even better one.
What I can only look forward to is the distinct possibility that this never happens to me, and that my kids and grandkids will have me around as long as they care to have me. Then I can tell them, with my recollection intact, just how much one old man really meant to me.
Longevity multiplies time available for the very commitments you name. Choosing survival is not hedonism. I want kids for a multitude of different reasons, and I very much intend to have them. I can fuck around with women without the intention of having kids, but every day, my desire to put a ring on someone and then have kids with them only grows stronger. It's probably better than even odds that I'll be married in a year or two.
I might as well tag @Rosencrantz2 and @HereAndGone, since this lengthy reply probably captures the answers to many of their questions.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
Making a few hundred, thousand, billion or quadrillion copies and sending them to various parts of interstellar space on Von Neumann replicators isn't a "miracle" miracle. If you have the photos on your phone being synced to the cloud or saved in an offline backup, you're half-way there.
They really won't be able to kill all of us.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
Third option:
Object, on the grounds that I see no good reason for the biological me to be killed right away.
Both the copy of myself and the original are just as valid. Killing even one of them for no good reason is murder, and I would be just as pissed about it if my perfect clone was going in the bin, and since he's also a perfect clone of me, he would object vociferously to my death.
I can only presume that super advanced aliens are a stand-in for something like destructive mind uploading, where the brain is... destroyed in the process of mind uploading. Like digitizing a shitty paperback without caring too hard about keeping the spine of the original intact. At that point, the "murder" is no longer murder, because there was simply no choice - bio-SMH (unless biologically immortal) will die without undergoing the procedure, and likely soon, which is why he'd sign up for that process. That would be a sad fact about engineering limitations, rather than sadistic aliens trying to make a point about personal identity.
As a matter of fact, I might even prefer that my perfect digital clone be the one saved in my place. He can copy himself on a hard-drive a few times to make up for the loss. Bio me just isn't that lucky or as durable, and is already limited by the tyranny of biology.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
Only if you assume a priori that there is no afterlife, or even if there isn't, you assume that there are actual ways to significantly extend life or outright prevent death.
These are pretty reasonable assumptions to make. Besides, as a doctor, my job usually involves extending life or preventing death. We could do better at it, but that's an engineering challenge, not a logical impossibility.
It's not that I "assume" such things, but rather that no life after death is the null hypothesis, and religious thinking to the contrary is hardly convincing. We might all reincarnate as Boltzmann Brains after eons, but I still prefer concrete, present-day solutions.
That's not cheating death, that's making a shitty copy of yourself but it isn't even you. How does that avoid death whatsoever?
And why exactly would it have to be a "shitty" copy? The human body, including the human brain, runs on the laws of physics. The laws of physics can be simulated on a computer to arbitrary accuracy. A game of chess is still a game of chess, all relevant parameters are conserved whether using wood, plastic or bits. No reason we can't say the same for human brains.
My conception of personal identity is pretty flexible, but it is in no way stretched beyond breaking point by the notion that a digital copy of me is - for my purposes - interchangeable with me. In many aspects, it's nothing but a straight upgrade. If I want to be stronger, faster, more durable, more intelligent, it helps to be an entity in-silico rather than a meat computer.
Again, this is all madness caused by people who have rejected God and are trying to replace Him with themselves (or technology, or any number of substitutions).
I mean, all well and good, but your attempt to convince me that I'm making unreasonable assumptions is rather undercut by the fact that you're making far bigger ones. God is a really poor candidate for ontological simplicity, and even worse as health insurance.
Like, the reasons to believe in your God are not very convincing, and even I concede that we might be unavoidably hard-capped by ever diminishing supply of negentropy in the universe. If he's real, and also timeless, I'm sure he won't mind if he was to wait a few quadrillion years for my immortal soul as opposed to this century. Since Christians believe in medical care and extending healthy lifespan, there are no downsides I can see.
In your post a few weeks ago you talked about how you oneshotted yourself with an AI image of what your children could have looked like. Even from a purely secular point of view, children are the preferred method of achieving immortality for most of history. If you want immortality, have a big family. That option is closed off to me due to infertility, but I've made peace with that. But instead of chasing useless pipedreams of immortality, do something that will leave your indelible mark on the future of the world.
Having children is better than nothing, when it comes to leaving your mark on the world. But it is still a pale imitation of actually staying alive and healthy to tell people about it. I do intend to have kids, and I'm sorry to hear about your fertility issues. But doesn't change the fact that my kids would also like to have me around too. When I talk about life extension, it's not just me being selfish, but thinking about my parents, and my grandfather, and all the other humans alive who would like to keep on being with their loved ones.
I am rather familiar with the technical challenges of human life extension. When I claim that it is possible, I can only hope it is a semi-informed claim. This is not at odds with it being incredibly difficult, which it is. Difficult isn't insurmountable, we went to the moon and will be back. That was as much of a "pipe dream" for almost as much of recorded human history.
It is the destiny of all men to die, kings and vagabonds alike, and you cannot and will not escape it
It was the destiny of all men to experience half of their children dying before adulthood. You couldn't save them, whether you were a king or a pauper. And yet, look at us today. Soon, any death might well be the same kind of tragedy that is the passing of a child. We can all live for so much.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
I will "accept" my inevitable mortality at Heat Death, assuming we can't find a solution for that minor problem.
I genuinely cannot understand the drive to "accept" what might well be the worst possible thing to happen to you, personally, or the people you love. Death sucks, we should be doing everything possible to avoid it. If it's "inevitable", we should first begin by trying even harder to actually check if that's actually the case.
Is cryonics the optimal arrangement? Probably not. But we're not spending the majority of global GDP on curing aging, which is what a sensible civilization would be doing.
You need to learn to accept your mortality; even if cryonics worked freezing yourself wouldn't save you from a bullet or a skydiving accident or anything else.
You can do quite a bit to reduce your risk of being shot or dying in a physical misadventure.
But the correct solution, in my humble opinion, is to push back even harder against death. We need to figure out a way to scan and upload human brains, alongside means of running our minds in-silico. Once that's an option, we can trivially ensure that nothing short of vacuum decay or the end of the universe poses a meaningful risk. That might not be the platonic ideal of immortality, but I'll take living so long that I need scientific notation as a decent consolation prize.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
I am interested in cryonics, but I'd be lying if I said it was more than an academic curiosity to me, despite my strong transhumanist and anti-dying bent.
Firstly, and most importantly, I am young and in good health. The kinds of things that could kill me are more like being run over a bus than a drawn-out chronic disease where there's room to make such arrangements.
Second, perhaps I was mistaken before, since this really is important, we might be facing a real, no bullshit technological Singularity. LLMs are shockingly smart, and while I'm not interested in litigating the definition of "AGI", they are clearly both Artificial and meaningfully Intelligent. They also offer a potential road to true superintelligence, which I am reliably told can solve most of the world's problems. When it comes to cryonics, we might genuinely be able to overcome all but true information-theoretical death.
I am more concerned, at present, by the risk of automation-induced unemployment or my p(doom) of roughly 20% than I am about dying for other reasons. I need my money for the potential headache of ending up unemployed or unemployable. If $10m fell into my lap, I would certainly sign up with Alcor or another provider, but right now, it's simply not pressing.
Would you make the same decision? Should anyone be allowed to make that kind of trade-off with the assistance of medical staff?
Yes, and a "why not?"
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
It's clear to me that that's a claim about how likely cryonics is to offer a route to resurrection after death.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
I am one of the lucky ones. No risk of growing up with anything but a secure attachment style. I have never had a moment when I wondered whether my parents loved me or would pick me first.
Then I went to medical school and discovered that lots of people did not have such good fortune, for all that I took it for granted. Classmates from broken homes. Friends who talk about their parents like cautious diplomats. I remember feeling almost offended on their behalf. If you cannot trust your parents to have your back, who exactly is left?
Scotland has not helped my selection bias. The proportion of intact, ordinary, quietly wholesome families in my immediate orbit feels surprisingly small. I keep wanting to file a quality improvement report for society.
As for the usual question, do I try to live up to the values my parents gave me, or do I optimize against their failings? Yes, although the first part dominates. They taught me the obvious trilogy that turns out not to be obvious in practice: work hard, be honest, treat people with respect. That is not a complicated moral philosophy, but it is a rather reliable recipe to becoming content. My parents are, like every human I've ever known, flawed people. That is not incompatible with them being good people, which they very much are. I'm lucky to have them as my parents.
Culturally I am not particularly Indian. They never treated that as a crime. They are mildly religious. I am aggressively antitheist. Everybody made peace. We have literally never argued about politics. I do not want to. If there is a place I refuse to import culture war into, it is the family group chat.
My father is the canonical example of work as a form of love. The night before a colleague in India asked him to see his granddaughter with an ovarian tumor that needed immediate surgery, so he stayed. Later last night, he did an emergency C section for his nephew’s wife. At the end of all that he still called me before sleeping. It is hard to nurse any pride in my own work ethic after that sort of data point.
Have I been a decent son? Mostly, with detours. The plan is to pay compound interest. Give them grandchildren to cuddle. Raise my kids the same way, with the understanding that the money I make and the effort I spend are more for them than for me. I will consider it a success if my children are half as fond of me as I am of my parents. If love compounds at that rate, the long run will take care of itself.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
It adds up to a whopping "I don't know" and a "I'm touched you guys think I'm the right person to ask". I'm probably better than anyone else on this site, but that really doesn't mean all that much.
The NHS, and its ERs/A&Es are a fucking mess. But if they can tell that your issues don't warrant admission, or anything more than a Tylenol and a kiss on the forehead, they might let you out early, depending on how cute you look. People come to the A&E with frivolous complaints all the time, they also come here when they're dying. It's a toss up, and I'm out for a piss-up so take my words with a grain of salt.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
Maybe @self_made_human can shed some light on what standard practices are considering that he might be a doctor at the same hospital and would at least be familiar with Scottish medical records, but assuming they're substantially similar to American records, I'm not seeing much here.
Does a bear shit in the woods? Nah, they're shitting at the same gay pub I am, at the time of writing this missive.
Anyway. The NHS:
There are places where wait times can exceed 12 hours. Up in Scotland, 4-8 is my best bet for anything we don't think is going to immediately kill you.
It really depends on the particulars. We do a lot of documentation in the NHS, my life is 90% documentation, 10% checking up on whether they're going to die before my boss talks to them. It is not impossible for someone to be swiftly dismissed if they appear grossly unharmed, but this was likely at Ninewells, the main hospital in Dundee. It has a certain reputation, I remember someone telling me that there was a period where it was without electricity for the better part of a week, let alone the abysmal wait times. But if they can triage someone as insignificant, they will. Looks great when it comes to KPIs.
Documentation would take maybe 30 minutes at worst, if it was a few scratches and the patient was young, healthy and more eager to get back home. The main delay would be egregiously long waiting times, then a quick physical and history taking. Even if the documentation was profuse, it might not be counted, as we often spend hours finish up even if the patient has, for all purposes, been discharged and told they're free to go home.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
Better at diagnosing CTE and concussion? I could use that.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
I appreciate it, even if I'm still left dazed and bemused. Maybe I'll get to catch a game live when I'm visiting the States this year!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10d ago
That makes us what, three years old in our latest incarnation? Very lindy by niche internet fora standards. I look forward to many more.
independent user-funded (ad-free!) open political speech forum
Not for us mods, I have some of the spam messages seared into my retina, haha.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10d ago
This is highly inscrutable to me, barring the reference to Taylor Swift's ?fiancee ?husband. Still, I hope that everyone has fun!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10d ago
I'm given to understand that Urban England does not suffer from a paucity of security cameras.
This isn't Urban England! It's Urban Scotland!
When I first set foot in London, several years back, I was distinctly unsettled by the sheer number of security cameras around. In the central parts, there were more of them than the stop signs.
Scotland? Far, far fewer. You can hop into Google Maps like I just did and check out that bit of Dundee, the only cameras I can see are private security cams, and not that many. That is not the same claim as saying that the police don't have footage, they likely do, but even the UK isn't a homogenous surveillance state.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10d ago
You are overlooking the fact that a post Heat Death universe has infinite amounts of time at hand. It really doesn't matter how unlikely an event is, as long as it isn't categorically/logically impossible.
Being an old-fashioned meat brain? Can happen "naturally" in a very small chunk of the universe's lifespan. As far as I'm aware, our decision theories are inadequate to the task of settling this (same issue with the simulation hypothesis) so I remain agnostic as to the actual ramifications. It is instrimentally useful to me to act as if I exist as an entity that won't poof out of existence. Hasn't failed me yet!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10d ago
Uterine prolapses are hardly unheard of, but they're almost certainly happening in middle-aged women with weakened pelvic floors (post childbirth) instead of young athletic women. You'd have to try very hard to get that to work.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10d ago
I'm not sure who I could call about this really, I don't think the Dundee police would feel any additional obligation to tell me than they would any other rando, and I don't know anyone from those parts myself.
Aren't Boltzmann Brains both implied and not ruled out by our current best understanding of physics? A truly energy-less vacuum is impossible, which means that any given volume of space-time is ergodic, and that over sufficiently long time scales, will be recapitulated. A post Heat Death universe is abundant in few things but time and space.
I would imagine that the discovery of new laws of physics could, at least in theory, falsify the notion.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
11d ago
Your delivery started with labeling it as 'LLM psychosis' or 'homegrown schizophrenia,' then backpedaled to psychedelics and 'high risk'. That's not constructive critique, it's pathologizing a philosophical post.
Dafuq? Do you deign to notice the bulk of my second post? Where I engaged with his arguments?
"Philosophical". Right.
NAD didn't take off the same way, because most of your profession know not to give medical advice over the internet. Most of them understand that they have traded shitposting for a higher level of respect, for the opportunity to be listened to when they do leverage their medical credentials.
I invite you to have a quick browse through /r/AskDocs.
At any rate, I didn't don my doctor cap in my first comment. It was only when he elaborated that my concerns continued to mount.
My claims stand. I didn't read the op again, it wouldn't change anything. My claims would stand even if he'd smeared shit and blood on a picture of the Pope, scanned it and attached it as an op. My claims are not about his behaviour, they are about yours.
Pointedly ignoring that my earnest advice was prompted by OP's behavior. Very convenient.
@faul_sname , @SnapDragon , @lurker despite being laymen, have noticed the exact same concerns that I have. It doesn't particularly matter a jot whether or not I flex my credentials online, and I have been entire honest about them. Unless he pays me and takes me on as his doctor, the harm caused by advising him to seek an appointment with someone with actual jurisdiction is nil.
Meng Hao walked into the McDonald's. The cultivator taking his order gave a derisive snort, but Meng Hao did not really care, because he had repressed his aura down to the Single Patty Realm, and a fool would not be able to tell his true level of burger eating.
"Give me... a Happy Meal!"
The cultivator's face flickered before he finally regained his composure and laughed. "You couldn't afford a Happy Meal. Get lost! Don't you see that there are Double Quarter Pounder Realm eaters waiting behind you?"
Meng Hao slapped his bag of holding and threw 80 billion spirit McDonald's coupons onto the counter, causing an earthquake which demolished half of the restaurant. Everyone dropped their jaws. None could see how this was possible!
"I'll take that Happy Meal with a side order of fries, " Meng Hao said. He was as calm as the ocean in a painting of an insanely calm ocean. "And let me see your manager!"
The cashier cultivator coughed up a mouthful of ketchup. He simply could not handle Meng Hao's killing intent, because he was only at the Quarter Pounder with Cheese realm himself. Even though Meng Hao had suppressed his aura, because he had cultivated the Heavenly Burgin' Qi, this was enough to kill people a few levels higher if he truly wanted.
It was then that another man which a much more fierce aura stepped forward. "You dare make trouble here?"
"P... Patriarch Hamburglar!"
Patriarch Hamburglar was 99 cents of the way into the Big Mac Realm, plus tax! Meng Hao was pushed back two feet, knocking over a soda machine. Powerade Mountain Berry Blast geysered outward, killing several onlookers.
Of course, Mayor McCheese saw all this happen through the window.
Meng Hao coughed up a mouthful of blood, snorted, constricted his pupils, and then his expression went calm. He unleashed the aura of 64 patties, condensed down to a 2 patty stack that could fit into his mouth!
Mayor McCheese coughed up a mouthful of cheese. His pupils constricted.
"Is this... Seeking the McRib stage??"
Meng Hao had the gentle air of a scholar, but it wouldn't stop him from killing several people in a McDonald's.
"Burger Devouring Scripture! I'm Lovin' It!"
With the first keyword of the Burger Devouring Scripture, everyone below the early Quarter Pounder With Cheese stage exploded into purple mist. The light of the immense heavenly burger shone down with the contours of a golden arch as 9 illusory burgers floated around Meng Hao's body, which is probably an important xianxia number that matches the number of lakes in some sacred Chinese province I've never heard of. But that was only a fraction of Meng Hao's power. He waved his arm, bringing forth thirty more cultivation techniques that hadn't appeared in over 400 chapters!
"Heavenly Tribulation Fries! Eastern Everburning Egg McMuffin! Fruit Smoothie Guillotine! Soul McCafe Mocha Incarnation!"
Meng Hao's expression was the same as ever as he slapped his bag of holding, and brought out his karmic ketchup packet, Fry Cook Lord medallion, seventeen different wooden time spatulas, a five-coloured resurrection coupon, the silk burger wrapper, various souls of lightning McNuggets that he may or may not still have, and his mask of the legacy of Ronald McDonald. Oh, and the image of a flying Chicken Snack Wrap dragon appeared. Remember that? It was basically his Main Thing at the start of the novel, but quietly faded into irrelevance. Until now!
All of this takes some time to describe, but actually happened in the space of only a few breaths.
"What! Impossible!"
Meng Hao wanted to summon the parrot as well, but it was too overcome with eroticism by the purple fur depicted on a nearby poster of Grimace, and was busy drilling out a glory hole straight through the poster, and the wall it was pinned to, with its strong parrot erection.
But it was more than enough. The Hamburglar's soul flew out and was absorbed into his mask! He screamed as his body was destroyed completely.
Meng Hao brushed off his robe and swept up his spirit coupons and everyone's bags of holding which probably didn't have any cool sh*t inside unless I write him into a corner later, and anyways, don't worry about it for now. He surveyed the rubble that was all that remained of the McDonald's.
"Guess I'll be taking that Happy Meal... to go!"
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