the “hopelessly lost” aspect of the matrix bears here. You are disinclined to question the reality of a game that you are successful in. Without that doubt you won’t escape it. So success becomes failure then. Because it directly increases your lostness.

Video games lack that “hopelessly lost” aspect. I mean, nobody mistakes them for reality and never comes back.

That’s a big if. And “real world” is shakey too. Yr running with a stretchy hypothetical here.

Except for poetry. When you wake up from your dreamcoffin you’ll still have your poetry skills and a few memorized poems.

First : the algorithm predicts thar our behavior today will be like our behavior yesterday. Which makes sense.

Second : what you eat determines how you poop. And they do control what we eat. So that makes sense too.

So both work together.

What’s a “commercial break”? Arrrrrrr!

Actually I don’t know anybody who hates trans people. Tbf it’s a pretty dull subject.

It might be voice to text. It sometimes gets carried away.

Just put little silver skulls on the front of your hats already.

Human society does the same thing.

We’re ok when we talk about what we saw.

Less so when we talk about what somebody else saw.

Crazier and crazier when we talk about what somebody said about what somebody said about what somebody saw. Which is arguably the internet.

“informed”

Lol

But I kid. Your logic fails to escape the box I propose, I think. I think that only direct observation achieves good reliability. That and maybe conversation with personal friends.

Beyond that, big nope. It’s the epistemological equivalent of drinking out of lead cups except the damage is quicker.

Everybody say it all together now…

I’m an intelligent, autonomous, free-thinking individual!

Instead of demanding that the peers get vaccinated they could just stay away from the peers.

It was a wrong turn anyway, so I edited it. Sorry. I hoped to catch it before you replied.

But my point was the arrogance and disrespect. I find it shocking. The actual form of the insult was secondary.

Agreed

That was the original idea for alien. The aliens are actually this advanced cultured race. But they get crazy in childhood and puberty.

Factual information comes from the authority of the hour. The authority of the hour is determined by vast mindless forces.

it’s a basic prerequisite for participation in contemporary society.

A fancy way of saying “mandatory”

So get your fluoride some other way, like in the toothpaste. Everybody wins.

I appreciate your concern. But to your first point.

Intelligence is biased towards intelligent expression and interpretation. That limits it, in expression and perspective. Seeing through intelligence-colored glasses. Expressing though an intelligence-preferring filter.

But we are larger than our intelligence. And this larger form has its own expressions.

Though we, as individuals and a culture, are in the habit of ignoring this larger self. It exists. Like the invisible part of an iceberg underwater.

If you had to guess, what form would this “loss of social skills and non-mating” take in a human population?