"The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself."
-- Carl Sagan
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
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"Hydrogen is an odorless, colorless gas which, given enough time, starts to wonder where it came from."
— Not Einstein
A rock may be intelligence. It just thinks at a far shower rate than humans.
In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels there are trolls made from rock with silicon-based brains. They are usually also dumb as rocks – until the temperature gets cold enough, then they suddenly become hyper-intelligent.
Ignoring creative liberties, it is assumed silicone based life forms would need high temps to thrive. Is quite possible that they would immediately die if exposed to human temps. Possibly these high temps would result in very fast computational skills.
Is interesting though. The speed at which you think is not entirely related to intelligence. If you created a computer the size of the solar system, it would be far far far more intelligent than an individual human. But because information would take hours to traverse across different regions of that brain, conversations and answers to questions might be incredible slow to come. We actually already take this into consideration when designing computers. The physical length memory is from the CPU is now critical.
"Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Anyway, heres Tom with the Weather." - Bill Hicks
And we're using atoms in the universe to do it.
We should have a community called /c/originalshowerthoughts
I'll give you a better one, we should have a community to share assumptions/theories of how we came to exist, the comments here are wonderful
When you study how the brain works you are a brain looking at a brain
Yeah, I know. Doesn't help much.
We are proof we do not live in a cold uncaring universe
We are the closes system, we are the universe witnessing and caring about itself
We are an insignificant part of all there is, but that still makes us entirely a part of all there is.
Buddy I've got some bad news about space...it's cold and it doesn't give a shit.
You're in space right now. Everything is in space.
The Boltzmann brain theory gives the idea that it's more likely for a brain to spawn, complete with memories, in the middle of space than it is for science to have developed (and continue developing) the way it did.
But what if that brain's knowledge of the universe is wrong? What if matter, should it even exist, is not made from atoms and that brain just thinks that?
Whoa dude!
PS This is a great shower thought!!!
It's all a part of God's plan /s
This has the same vibe as saying everything in math is set theory, which IMO is more reductive than older than 14 and deep ^TM^.
We Humans have been on a journey of self examination since we first understood we exist
It's like we are mirrors of the universe... woah!
Every journey of self awareness has to start somewhere
More specifically, we are made of things which behave continuous until interacted with when they behave discrete (but revert if the persistent info about the interaction is erased).
While simultaneously building virtual worlds we procedurally generate using continuous functions which convert to discrete units in order to track stateful interactions with free agents, ideally with memory optimizations like erasing the state tracking and conversion if the info around an interaction is lost.