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Mike Brock
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Unfashionable.

No human has ever seen what the world really looks like. We've only seen how bundles of neurons make sense of the electrical impulses from the photons hitting the back of our retina, sending signals down the optic nerve.

If you saw the world the way it looks in totality, when you looked up in the night sky, you wouldn't see blackness. If your eyes were sensitive to infrared light, radio frequencies, microwaves, ultraviolet and the entire electromagnetic spectrum, you'd see a universe glowing brilliantly above you. Yet we see but a tiny sliver of what we call "visible light".

It is strange that our intuition is that the human eye is the gold standard for visual perception of reality, when it sees so little of it.

Poetically? Romantically? Definitely not pedantically.

Coincidences are things that are statistically going to happen in any complex system at some frequency. Sometimes at unintuitively high frequencies, that leads to quite a bit of human confusion and misunderstanding about the nature of reality.

Sort of. But I think you might be getting hung up on the negative connotation of the word accident.

But at this point I think we're wasting time wringing our hands around the category of things that count as "accidents" into a reductionist vortex. You can really do this with anything if you try. The point is, that most of what you think of as your self-directed subjective experience, is a product of things completely beyond your control.

Whether we live in a deterministic or stochastic universe is really completely orthogonal to that point.

Did you choose when you were born? Who you were born as? Where you were born? Why you were born? Did you choose every unfortunate turn in your life, that forced you to take a new path? Did you choose to know about me? Or did a serious of events, largely beyond your control, but fortuitously aligned, bring you to this very moment where you're typing words onto a device, that you didn't choose to be invented, or a vast computer network spanning the globe that you didn't choose to be part of your world? Most of our lives are a series of accidents. That doesn't have to be a bad thing!

It goes without saying there's a "reason" for everything. Otherwise we wouldn't have a cognizable universe and we wouldn't exist. But that we find ourselves here in this moment is an accident of biology, history, circumstance, timing, and opportunity. The vast majority of things that brings you to this very moment were completely outside your control.

It's more comfortable to think that, yes.

We're all here by accident.

I worry that high fees could be a major challenge for non-custodial bitcoin. Even with Lightning, the cost of opening a channel could become prohibitive, and this could significantly advantage custodial solutions that can offer the double-whammy of key management and free zaps.

Well, I subscribe to Hume's moral skepticism, and I am not generally a fan, like Hume, of a priori reasoning at all. So I think the view generally can apply to everything.

Obviously, I'm not interested in debating whether the sky is blue. But when it comes to ideology, politics, culture and ethics ... I take nothing for granted in these domains.

The thing I never understand about people who buy into the argument the war in Ukraine is the US's fault "for expanding NATO", as if the U.S. unilaterally admitted the Baltic states, is how they explain the whole Turkey blocking Sweden from joining NATO thing. I thought the US is supposed to have unilateral agency in NATO, as the only party with any agency here something something.