pjdorrell

The hypothesis that music is caused by a "glial illusion". That is, glial cells observe the activity of neural activity responding to music, and glial cells falsely perceive certain aspects of that neural activity, which results in dysregulation of neural activity in "downstream" neurons, which causes the emotional intensity we experience when listening to music.

The results of these experiments indirectly tell us something about our chances of ever meeting aliens:

* No physical collapse => Everett interpretation AKA "many worlds"

* Many worlds gives us the Anthropic Principle for free

* The Anthropic Principle explains the origin of the first living organism, or, to put it another way, the observed existence of the origin of our first living ancestor does _not_ set any lower bound on the probability of the first living organism developing from non-living molecules.

* A very low probability of the origin of life implies the non-existence of any other life in the observable universe.

* Therefore, no aliens.

(The aliens do of course exist in other parts of the total Universal Wave Function, but we never get to meet them.)

We could ask the opposite question:

Some forms of entertainment are usually only entertaining the first time. Like jokes. Or movies.

Music seems to be a form of entertainment. But usually we are quite happy to listen to a new song more than once.

So why is that?

If your theorem provers never prove a contradiction, they are all too weak.

The author says:

>"The status quo provides marginal individual benefit to the person making the decision while also causing marginal harm to society as a whole. Doing the right thing doesn’t really provide much tangible short term benefit."

This explains exactly why the majority of people living in a dictatorship don't try very hard to do all the things that they need to do if they want to change their own government.

They need to do things like finding out what is the truth about their government, and telling other people what that truth is. But doing that requires individual self-sacrifice, and most people, most of the time, don't what to do that.