endoblast

Consciousness and God both seem to have this property in common: they're real but not what we think they are.

Only when we have a decent theory of consciousness will we know what counts as evidence for whether a particular entity is conscious or not.

  When Wellington thrashed Bonaparte,
  As every child can tell,
  The House of Peers, throughout the war,
  Did nothing in particular,
  And did it very well;
  Yet Britain set the world ablaze
  In good King George's glorious days!

(from Iolanthe by Gilbert and Sullivan)

Gather a group of the most powerful people in the land; give them ermine robes and manifold privileges; require of them nothing other than that they meet regularly to converse and debate in a prestigious and historical chamber. Allow them only the power to veto or delay legislation.

Gilbert and Sullivan were satirising but I think their point stands. It is possible to do nothing and to do it very well. While they're busy doing nothing they're not interfering or messing everything else up, even though they probably could outside the chamber.

The fact that heriditary peers are being ejected means nothing beyond the fact that these nobles have lost their inherent power.

The temperature a few metres below ground level is consistently cool (approx. 15 celcius) year round.

Could this be made the basis of an efficient cooling system?

It's funny how every source of knowledge converges to the same thing: mass media. Telling you what to think and trying to influence your behaviour rather than trying to inform you.

Using facts, omitting facts or emphasising particular facts over others in order to mislead you. The scientific journals are now included with their anonymous editorials. Peer review is pretty much the same as fact-checking.

Contrast this with good fiction, which employs falsehoods to point towards the truth: truth which cannot easily be verified but which is our real bread and butter.

It's hard not to trust answers which are superhumanly plausible.

Imagine being offered a choice of two oracles. The first oracle would give you an answer that is inspiring yet mysterious and oblique. The second gives an answer that is guaranteed to be unoriginal but also highly, highly plausible. It also maintains a record of all the questions and makes them available to unknown persons.

I miss being able to spontaneously buy a ticket and travel off to see a friend in another town or city. I did quite a lot as a young man with the help of my 'young person's railcard'. The cost would be prohibitive nowadays because only tickets bought well in advance are cheap.

Yes. There are distinct male virtues, such as courage, nobility and authority. But if a man isn't honest then he's not worthy of consideration. Or, if you like, he hasn't yet matured into manhood.

This is why so much of totalitarianism is about getting men to repeat lies. Or why those check boxes 'I have read and understood the terms and conditions' are harmful.

>the heat is moved to the ground for storage

..or into a giant sand-filled barge which transports the thermal energy up north for the winter.

Doubling down and doubling down on some feeling (or lack of feeling) repeatedly isn't merely a strategy. It is the selling of ones's soul. There's no one left inside by the end of it, just a shell, with no creative power or freedom.

Don't envy them!

I think you've got it the wrong way around. All ideology is wrong, incorrect and fails in contact with reality. The true purpose of ideology (or 'the system') is to provide its adherents with the excuse they need to act badly. It could be relatively mild attempts to increase social status through hypocrisy and virtue-signalling. Or it could be to commit murder, torture and so on.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it:

Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.

What obscures matters is that evil tends to operate in layers with each layer deceived by the layer above it in the hierarchy (or below it, if you prefer a lowerarchy). So at the bottom there is a multitude of relatively decent people who don't want to kill and really do believe in the system.

I go for a decent walk most days and it doesn't require effort or get boring. It goes well with listening to headphones and relaxing the eyes on the horizon plus seeing a bit of nature and humanity in action.

This does me a lot of good however the only upper body exercise I get is playing the piano! I can't see myself joining a gym or doing press-ups reliably in the long-term. I need to find a suitable hobby which has upper body + other benefits while being fun/interesting and low-risk. Carrying logs has helped but we have enough firewood now.