Is it? You just have to give up a lot for it. Perhaps you had less to loose back then, people were closer to this state of being, but that's not good, and it was probably much tougher to live like this at the time.
Thankfully the standard of living has been high enough for long enough for most people, that certain sacrifices are culturally unimaginable, but they are still there.
Freedom is not free.
If you refuse to make long-term commitments to other people and to society, you will loose the benefits of their commitments to you. Even ignoring other people, if you refuse to make long-term commitments to yourself or a certain goal, commitments that will require you to do lots of things you don't feel like doing, suspending your freedom, you will never build anything meaningful, anything that makes life worth living.
That's what being civilized is all about, collectively maximising our long-term freedom, instead of pursuing individual freedom at the expense of others freedom, instead of pursuing freedom in the present at the expense of greater freedom in the future. It's made us so much better.
Everyone still has the option to unplug from the matrix and go do whatever they feel like, good for you. But do not expect help if you don't help others, and do not expect much goodwill if you refuse to engage in our collective pursuit of making things better for all of us.
Do you mean in the US? There are many countries around Europe with large populations of traveling folks - they even have cars and setup camps only to move further when they feel like it. As far as I know there are many countries where no one asks anything if you set a tent and spend the night, especially in the mountains, but more generally on land that is not privately owned.
As long as you don’t litter and cause forest fires nobody cares if you live in the bush/caves. Hell, if you have a birth certificate you can get free health care here while living in the bush!
Possibly a dumb question: How do you determine the accuracy of the most precise clock? You don’t have anything more accurate to measure it against, right?
For me: yes. Dreaming is the only experience that kinda matches the descriptions of others' mind's eye. Day to day? Just blackness, only the light that comes through the skin of the eyelids.
You're seeing blackness because you closed your eyes. Seeing stuff in the mind's eye usually has to do with seeing stuff in open eye everyday life but not hallucinatory it's like on another plane of your normal vision and it's not a constant image it has to be invoked and concentrated upon almost like a flickering image that you could feel and see in your skull that's like behind your eyes and up a little bit. It's really hard to explain but closing your eyes isn't the way to see in your mind's eye.
My mind's eye doesn't care whether my eyes are open or closed. I can copy things back and forth between "reality" and "internal reality" quite seamlessly, so I can either keep my eyes open and bring things from my mind out into reality, or I can close my eyes and bring things from reality into internal reality. I don't strictly speaking have to close my eyes for the second one, but for example if I need to picture the room I'm in from another angle, but it's an inappropriate time to move from my seat, I can just copy the whole room into my mind, either close my eyes or unfocus and ignore my eyesight for awhile, and move things around inside my head. If there's a lot going in in the room, it's sometimes easier if I actually close them so I can spin the room around to the perspective I need.
Yeah also same. But I'm trying to clarify for a lot of people who think they don't visualize because the bar is set where they think that they have to close their eyes in order to visualize things.
This seems like a major point of confusion on the subject.
I agree with your interpretation, but there are those charts which show varying degrees of clarity of mental images (using an apple), I don't understand how to square that with just invoking the sense instead of actually seeing it.
I have aphantasia. I don't see / imagine imagery either awake or asleep. So I don't know that my dreaming experience is particularly different from my waking experience in this way.
I am curious how is solving geometry problems for you, can you imagine slicing some geometric body with a plane and what it results? or given some geometric figure and an instruction to build some lines can you see the result without drawing it on paper ?
Fro me it feels that imagining things uses completely different brain part, because for me it does not feel or look like stuff in my dreams or what eyes can see, imagining things feel different,the scenes feel to me unclear, disappear fast , I do not have the ability to lock the image or rewind like in a video. Remembering a recent scene has a lot more details and colors then some old memory.
For geometry stuff is the same, I can't say I see it but somehow I have an animation my head on how I can transform the geometric stuff, but it is not vivid and it is not like a clear video, feels like is a different part of the brain that does this not the optic part.
I do dream, but most of the time not with a visual representation. It’s more like reading a book.
There are very few occasions when I wake up and really have the memory of an image. But this fades so fast that I’m not able to really describe the image. I retain the memory of having a picture in my head. And it’s boring most of the time, because it happens in the middle of a dream and it’s basically just the last frame paused.
This analogy may be less communicative than you think, as for me, reading a book is like watching a movie - I don’t see the words on the page, I see what’s happening in the book.
When I was a kid, I was asked “how do you read so fast?” often and I would always proudly report than I can scan paragraphs and filter out the useless ones without reading them.
For example, I was reading some Pratchett and noticed that I had no idea how the protagonist ended up on a cliff (?). And then realized that I had automatically skipped the paragraph that talked about the cliff ascent, because it was “just a scenery description” and therefore useless.
I also remember having a long argument with my ex-girlfriend about the style of journalism where articles start like “I entered a small, dimly-lit room and Mr Brown, age 53, stood up from his massive oak desk and [blah blah blah]”. Like, this is all just fluff, I want to know what Mr Brown says and thinks and that’s all. I didn’t realize people might actually imagine the scene and enjoy it.
Going back to books — I think I care about how the book sounds more than I care about the plot or the vibe. I loved Lolita solely because the narrator was constantly playing with words, for example.
Haha, I never thought of visualizing the images described in a book.
To rephrase: it’s like knowing the words from a book, but not how the described image looks like.
But I cannot hold an image in my head. With concentration I can will an image into existence, but it does not hold still for even an instant. A shapeless tangle will interpolate into an apple and then back to a tangle.
But recently I realized I can visualize color, which was interesting.
I have a very limited visual imagination. I don't know if I would describe it as complete aphantasia, but I think it's close. Dreams are the only time I can see pictures in my mind.
Yes, from what I've heard other people with aphantasia often dream normally. I certainly do vividly, while struggling a lot to visualize even simple things in my minds eye.
I find myself paying for an illegal IPTV service, just so I can watch soccer from my home country while living elsewhere. I'd genuinely prefer a legal, reasonably priced option, but the only alternatives are these expensive, big-name services that insist on a set-top box. So, reluctantly, the 'less legal' route ends up being the more practical service for me.
The author themself appears to be unclear about the specific stance they are opposing. While it doesn't seem like they are strawmaning intentionally, they are arguing against positions that no reasonable person actually holds.
They do raise interesting questions, then often proceed to stomp all over them with all or nothing extreme positions.
Harrison Bergeron is a satirical dystopian science-fiction short story much loved by teenagers, not a starkly realistic portrayal of the inevitable outcome of social policy.
> For, there is clearly bound up in such arguments the assumption that those being reasoned with are free to change their minds based on the merits (or demerits) of the evidence presented.
I understand that the author is arguing sincerely, but certain statements raise concerns about whether they fully grasp the concept of determinism.
Why is it necessary to assume the existence of free will for a person to be capable of evaluating new evidence and have a subsequently revised opinion based on this new information?
One thing I use to help to understand this: when you watch a movie you nothing about, there are things in it that surprise you, delight you, and seem new despite the fact that the movie was made long before.
I feel a consequence of determinism is that time is a matter of perception. Something we use to understand our environment. But, really, we are players in a movie that we are also watching.
The feeling of deciding is no different than the feeling of coercion. It's centered around ego. We evolved to feel like we make decisions. That's it, that's all. The deciding, though, is done.
Another example. I play for my son movies featuring pizza. I ask if he remembers how good the pizza was last weekend. I suggest we have it for lunch but find we are out of leftover pizza.
Is it free will when he asks for pizza for dinner? Or did his environment make that choice inevitable?
