The thing that constitutes the "I" that you are is just patterns of ideas and thoughts and behaviors in the form of electrical / chemical impulses in a brain. You spend your whole life transmitting those patterns to the people around you by communicating with them. When someone "gets to know you" they are building a simulation of you in their mind. The more time you spend communicating and observing each other, the higher fidelity that simulation becomes. Importantly, there is no true difference in "kind" between the patterns-and-thoughts-and-behaviors you hold in YOUR brain and call "I" and the patterns-and-thoughts-and-behaviors others hold in THEIR brain and give YOUR name. It's not a perfect copy, but it's also not NOT a true version of YOU. That means when you die, you *literally live on* as a distributed simulation inside the brains of everyone who ever met you and came to know and love you.
(This is my poor paraphrase. Check the link for relevant excerpts)
Mar 17, 2025
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đź•ł
I think I spent most of my life thinking I had a specific lack, i.e. that I was less "real" than the people around me. Only in the last few years did I realize that our general conditions produce what feels like a personal failing... we are awash in information but not meaning; the conditions of our lives feel disconnected from a shared history or struggle; the tools or vocabulary by which we can bring "ourselves" into being keeps getting thinner and more trivial. If you feel like you're waiting for yourself to arrive, waiting to be alive to yourself in a way that makes you aware that you are free, I recommend Kierkegaard. He's lowkey a funny troll, also.
Nov 5, 2023
Everything above 100% is true btw^
All things considered I think I have a pretty normal interior landscape. Songs get stuck in my head. I daydream & I fantasize & I ruminate & I contemplate. Sometimes my mind is busy, sometimes it is totally quiet. Memory is something that constantly fails me-- it's closer to propaganda than documentary to me. And the projectionist who plays the propaganda to me is this blind, deaf, volatile schizophrenic intent on making me, the rememberer, as deluded & ill informed as possible. Sometimes I'll have this strange feeling that I've received a memory from the future in a dream, even more rarely I'll get this sort of memory in the waking world. To understand what I'm talking about, click the link I've supplied.
But really, honestly, outside of that I like to daydream a lot. Today I was thinking about visiting Georgia & daydreaming about being a young Russian nobleman in the 19th century, the son of some diplomat or something, laid out in some Tblisi opium den. I'm faded as fuck & I'm staring at the rug and the ceiling & then rolling over facedown in the naked breasts of some Georgian woman. She is perfumed & her arms are fat & she pets my hair and coos-- this is incredibly disgusting to me of course.
Sometimes I think that Consciousness is a curse. Free will was given to us by God, but Knowledge of Good & Evil was something that we were tricked into taking up by the serpent (ouroboros). Not a coincidence that all great sages exhort those who seek wisdom to cease with their perception & their perception of perception & their perception of perception of perception. Meta-cognition is the flattened out ourobouros (serpent) that traps the thinker in Hell.
Feb 14, 2025
đź’˝
Maybe we do have free will and I just think this way because I’ve never felt I had control over my life! I don’t know how we possibly could have ended up here, but I strongly feel that my consciousness is only a manifestation of my physical body, which takes its place in an inevitable evolutionary march of organic machinery. Hopefully this is only a disconnection from my environment and spirituality. Maybe God will strike me down for such a sentiment. Maybe one day the matter that makes me up will arrange again, and I will exist after death. I do have principles and think it’s important to act on them but the action is inevitable as well. Someone please prove me wrong
Mar 10, 2025
Top Recs from @heumann
you people seem cool so i try to avoid too much nerd/code/tech talk but here we go anyway. 🤓
one of the most useful skills i have acquired as a coder is the ability to steal things from the internet. there is so much stuff on the web that you ostensibly are supposed to pay for, but with a little coding know-how you can scrape the relevant data, download it to your computer, keep it forever and never pay a dime for it. Or maybe pay for it once but be able to cancel your ongoing subscription to it.
I have used this skill to steal / borrow / archive:
- workout videos from a paid yoga app
- cocktail recipes
- food recipes
- music
- library books
- instructional materials
- graphical source material for making art
Depending on what you’re doing, this can require more or less technical skill, but likely less than you expect. this is also a thing that chatgpt is very good at walking you through, if you ask it for help. it feels especially rewarding to learn a new skill in service of saving yourself money, too.
Even if the content in question is free, it’s nice to know you’ll have it for eternity even if a provider goes out of business, and it enables you to search/organize/manage the content however you like (with no ads, paywalls, etc).
it’s a useful exercise in digital literacy that demystifies a little bit of the technical world that surrounds us, and it always gives me a thrilling little frisson of “civil disobedience” or at least naughtiness.
Apr 28, 2024
đź—Ł
i still read hyperbole as “hyper-bowl”
Mar 18, 2024
so first of all, if you didnt know, you can press and hold on stuff in a photo on your phone and create "stickers" you can send in imessage.
but i just discovered you can press and hold on a "live photo" and get an animated sticker
i am going to be so annoying in chats with this feature
(I don't think pi.fyi supports gifs/animations so visit link to see example)
May 5, 2024