Cyrus Draegur

Atomic energy enthusiast. Architecture enjoyer. Mecha appreciator. Sci-Fi reader. Friendly neighborhood shameless degenerate. Winged caniform synthetic biped techno-lich. Mostly Harmless™. Poly-Panro-Demi It/They/He

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Cyrus Draegur@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlStay alert.
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    15 hours ago

    I think he should be saying “Hmm, no…?” Because “oh” is an interjection of surprise but “Hmm” is a murmur of premeditation. Also, the vibe of a hesitant question contrasts the excitement and assertive certainly of an exclamation point.



  • It’s interesting that every group of people, basically ever, has started a religion.

    One such example of a group of people who had NOT developed religiosity I’m aware of, interestingly, also did not develop mathematics or written language, because the capacity for abstraction which form the substrate that religions grow upon is ALSO a prerequisite for speculative concepts like symbolic meaning and set theory.

    I’m speaking of certain mostly out of contact tribes of humans.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirahã_people
    And even they, despite living with an exclusively direct observation empiricism-based worldview, are still susceptible to collective hallucination (though they don’t cultivate it into an organized system that will ever persist beyond those who directly experienced any given hallucinatory event).


  • This right here. If we didn’t have religion, practically the first thing we’d do is begin hallucinating about one. There’s a “religion”-shaped hole in every human brain, basically, even though things that we wouldn’t necessarily readily recognize as religious patterns could come to fill it, wholly or partially. Our pattern recognition/reconstruction and predictive modeling systems will always generate hallucinations that, like most heuristics, are fundamentally not reality but MAY nevertheless offer sufficient utility (or the feeling of utility) that the synaptic connections they comprise will end up self-reinforcing.

    The amount of vigilance it would take to continually purge these cognitive patterns would be more expensive and exhausting than most of the potential dangers of letting them exist.

    But it’s possible to mindfully decide to cultivate the features and aspects of what emergently congeals there such that it’s more likely to be harmless, such as certain hobbies, fandoms, habits, or ritual-esque behavioral patterns.

    Reflecting on our experiences against an anthropomorphized hypothetical observer to gain insights we would otherwise miss shows up even in places like computer programming - see “rubber duck debugging” - sufficiently strict religious sects would most certainly decry this activity as idolatry to a false god, even if YOU clearly do not classify a rubber ducky as a god. Because, again, the root of religiosity is group consensus of a socially shared memetic hallucination. what they perceive becomes a component of their beliefs even if it doesn’t become a component of yours.

    This leads me to often consider spirituality, magical thinking, ritualistic behaviors, and religiosity in general as a bridge between our animalistic impulses and instincts vs. our sapience, or whatever you might label “higher” cognitive functions that enable abstract decision differentiation.







  • I’m still rocking a Galaxy Note 9 from 2018. Somehow still performs surprisingly well, holds a charge for longer than 24 hours, and I just don’t feel like the phones that came after it really offer that much of an advantage technologically. I don’t have any app slowdown or latency issues, really. I’m not about to drop several hundred dollars upwards of a thousand to get a meager incremental gain AND lose my treasured headphone jack which I still use on a weekly basis. I loved the note 8 and prior to that owned a note 4. I’m not sure what I even want to settle for from where I am right now. I know it’ll never happen, but I still ardently wish that the note 9 would just get a refresh, all the same features and structures (including the headphone jack!!!) but with newer versions OF the GPU, the CPU, the RAM, the solid state storage, a 5g antenna… The cameras were fine. Don’t even need better cameras. Oh well…