This resonated so much with me. I am nearly 40 and have spent far too much of my life obligated to others and not setting healthy boundaries. And of course, now that I’ve realized that and started setting stronger boundaries with people about what they may and may not demand of me, there is anger and pushback that I am declaring sovereignty of my own time.

Lying and pretending to know something who’s actually a complete stranger to them

When the stranger is a drunk woman in distress clearly trying to get away from a predator.

Exactly.

LLMs are ideally suited for replacing corporate middle managers everywhere.

I’ve been working out 2 hours a day and started playing daily sudoku and lichess puzzles

If you’re congested, put 12 drops of the spiciest hot sauce you can get in a small cup of water and gargle it and swish it around like mouthwash.

You won’t enjoy it, but you will be able to breathe.

I can confirm for you that northern California is nicer

You visited the worst parts. No wonder.

Try Yosemite, Oakhurst, Morro Bay, or Monterey.

Yeah, I’ve thought about this a little bit but again my math isn’t so strong.

I guess approaching this more from computer science (something I’m more familiar with) you could compare with stuff like the NP Hard class of problems. And thus I offer that unproveable does not mean “wrong”. We generally “know” that P=NP is wrong but we cannot prove it only because we lack omniscience. Us lacking the information (in the physics sense of the word i.e. Hawking radiation) doesn’t mean the information isn’t there to be quantified.

Yeah, when writing this I sort of had the notion that any argument against hard determinism using quantum mechanics would instead 1) actually prove multiverse theory, and 2) therefore still prove in favor of determinism.

Maybe? My layman understanding of that topic is that the act of observation collapses alternative waveforms down to a single observed state. And if that’s the case, why couldn’t you “observe” the whole brain?

I’m glad you’re enjoying this topic as much as I am

I think this is my favorite answer so far.

That was poetic and beautifully described.

Fascinating. 🖖

Thank you for a fun answer.

I’ll have to find some gummy bears.

I like this take, but it also makes me feel like I could do a better job describing the intent of my question in more scientific terms. I hope to do so, here.

If one were to have sufficiently advanced technology akin to future MRI machines that could image the state of the human brain at Planck time resolution, my argument is that the very process of “a decision” (act, choice, idea, etc.) could be quantified. And if that is the case, then there must be chemical triggers and causal events that could have predicted that state of the matter and energy. And if that’s the case, then we must really be products of our environment in an (currently) incomprehensibly large chemistry equation.

If any one decision could be quantized, reverse engineered, and then predicted through such means, then it stands to reason every decision can be. And if that’s the case, free will cannot exist.

I’ll have to check it out

I want to add, that my wife has been a “scab” throughout all this and has been active on reddit, trying to show me memes and such.

The content she’s been showing me has been stale, old stuff I saw back in 2020. Same recycled jokes, same memes. Reddit is in a mode of hard cope right now and I doubt it gets better if we don’t return.

Squabbles seems to have not hit user critical mass. Tildes looks like it’s doing well.

The Lemmy + Kbin fediverse seems to be taking off like a rocket and has the best overall chance IMO of becoming the home for the best parts of Reddit’s community.