I used to be young, but now I'm just immature
I have never taken the idea of attempting a memory palace seriously, as although I have a terrible, terrible, memory, I also am terrible at visualising things.
To me, using a memory palace to solve memory issues is like making a speedboat out of coconut husks to escape a desert island. Or, perhaps, the xkcd regex '2 problems' comic.
As, basically, an atheist, my response to the question 'Is there an all-powerful god?' is to ask: is that question actually meaningful? Is it akin to asking, 'is there an invisible pink unicorn?', or 'have you stopped beating your wife yet?'. To whit, a mu situation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative) .
There are a lot of different types of question, and probabilities don't seem to mean the same thing across them. Sometimes those questions are based on fuzzy semantics that require interpretation, and may not necessarily correspond to a possible state of affairs.
The possibility of a god existing doesn't equate, to me, to seeing if a possible thing exists or not, but rather whether the set of concepts are in any way possible. This is a question about the very nature of reality, and I'm pretty sure that reality is weird enough that the question falls far short of having any real meaning.
I'm glad someone else thinks so, too. I'd also go so far as to say that our notions of rationality are also largely aesthetic.
Most of civilisation right now seems to be one giant gas-lighting immoral maze, where any effort to point out or mitigate the massive problems we have is sneered at or ignored.
Yesterday, I managed to make an appointment for an ultrasound. However, I'm broke, and it turns out that the particular doctor is really expensive and has really bad reputation online
This is tangential, but part of the problem here is that your healthcare system is evil.
You should be able to see doctors for worries of this magnitude, and get the treatment/checks/referrals that you need, without this bullshit.
It's only a problem if you want it to be a problem.
There doesn't *need* to be anyone doing the interpreting, because all possible representations (and the interpreters/ees within) exist for free. I'm comfortable with that. There's no need to invoke special privilege to make reality more complicated, just because you want it to be. Fundamental reality *should* be simple, on some level, don't you think? The complexity is all internal.
I used to be heavily into this area, and after succumbing somewhat to an 'it all adds up to normality' shoulder-shrugging, my feeling on this is that it's not just the 'environment' that is subject to radical changes, but the mind itself. It might be that there's a kind of mind-state attractor, by which minds tend to move along predictable paths and converge upon weirdness together. All of consciousness may, by different ways of looking at it, be considered as fragments of that endstate.
Even though they pin-point varies issues in society such as radical leftism
Oh, no, is LessWrong becoming one of those places?
I don't believe that that is a necessary assumption at all; the conscious state is still an abstractable representation, and if it maps to a dynamic process that itself can map to a temporally-connected collection of brain-states, then that is just more layers of abstraction.
The Boltzmann Brain could easily be not a brain-state representation, but a conscious-state representation.
That's basically lucid daydreaming, then?
Trying to do that reminded me of something I used to do as a kid: I would watch static on TV, and find myself constructing imagery from it. Usually, it would be like traveling over landscapes, or a rotating/panning view over some entity, and the quality of the visuals would be like line drawings.
The reason I remember that is because my mental visualisations have a very similar quality. After maybe a 'flash' of a fairly detailed scene -- or at least the suggestion of one -- it rapidly devolves into short-lived abstractions, and only where I'm mentally focusing.
Perhaps what I need is to look at some static again and see if it improves visualisation.
And I tried it. Didn't help :-/