AI's Software Advantage - Murray Shanahan on Johnathan Bi

#existence #thoughtexperiment #software #ai #postreflection

If I was in 1000 AD, how could I treat an infection with modern knowledge?

I got into a really long conversation with some people about this on Reddit so I figured I'd do a full write up.

There were a lot of suggestions in the thread like honey, garlic, wine, onions and so on but that's using knowledge of the time.

Plus honey was really expensive and a very seasonal item.

You can way more easily turn wood ash into lye/strong base, use that as a bleach to disinfect cloths, make soaps, and clean working surfaces and it'll be way more effective than the poultices and home remedies you're thinking of in your head currently.

The general process would be, burn hardwoods to create ashes, sift the ashes so it's all an even texture, wash the ashes in copious amounts of charcoal filtered, boiled, and settled water (use more water than ashes as to not give yourself lye burns) then filter through a cloth to get the non dissolved particulates out.

You can then boil off the water to get a powder and mix it in measured proportions to get a highly diluted bleach analog and use it in whatever soap making or cleaning processes you want.

Find tree nuts like acorns to press into usable oil, or barter for grain oils and animal fats to make soaps. Buy some vinegar to use as a direct antiseptic (better than nothing), wax to impregnate cloths for water resistant bandages/wound sealant, and some copper plates or pans so that you avoid having your gauzes, packings, and bandages touching dirty porous surfaces and you're practically off to the races.

I can go into more depth about actually how to make the soap, make rudimentary pH testing strips, and all that but this post is already getting long.

If you have some input I'd love to read it!

Reddit thread if anyone wants to read the original discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryWhatIf/comments/1kil0hs/if_i_was_in_1000_ad_how_could_i_treat_an/

Decentralized education is a vision that democratizes learning, making it free and accessible to everyone. By distributing educational resources across a network, no single entity can control the curriculum.

https://michaeltheanon.blogspot.com/2025/05/decentralized-education-free-mind-free.html

#activist #activism #mind #education #philosophy #thoughtexperiment #indoctrination #college #protest #fight #idea #decentralized

   
#ThoughtExperiment: Many #Worldlets?

or in other words, fractions of #World, not the whole World. #TimeTraveler #theories often involve splitting or multiplying #universes … But if we think this through further, its scope might not be quite so universal as it is typically presented …

🔗 https://aus.social/@KronoMoon_TotalLunarEclipse/114462733797499137

#TimeTravelTuesday #Quantum #Physics #kronodon

   
#TimeTravelTuesday #ThoughtExperiment: Many #Worldlets?

or in other words, fractions of #World, not the whole World. #TimeTraveler #theories often involve splitting or multiplying #universes. Time Travel events divide #spacetime into two near-identical clones. Grandfather lived or did not, you did not meet yourself or you did. But if we think this through further, its scope might not be quite so universal as typically presented.

Take 3 heavenly bodies: Mother #Earth, the #AlphaCentauri triple star system (at 4+ light years away), and #Polaris, the #NorthStar (at 400+ light years away).

Now we program our #TimeMachine to take us back one year (#retrograde) where we meet ourselves. Hi selves! This all takes place in one year. There's the original us, there's us leaving the present, and there's us meeting our past/original selves a year earlier — standard #boilerplate #scifi #movie #script.

Alpha Centauri will have to wait another 3 years before any of this information can get to there. This is related to the concept of a #lightcone which expands at the speed of light. This doesn't sound quite so much like birthing a twin universe, does it? Now what about the North Star? It will have to wait 433 years for news of our Time Travel event(s). And that's still pretty much in our tiny #celestial neighborhood.

The point is that the effects of such events are largely localized and rapidly diluted as we move farther away. This still has its paradoxical problems, but it doesn't quite feel like the whole universe dividing into two — maybe part of it (a universelet? a subuniverse?) Possibilities are that in moving further out in space-time, the effects of a Time Travel incident may be 'blurred out', as are anomalous numerical samples in the law of large #numbers. If one pours a cup of coffee into a lake, it doesn't change the color of the lake. There is a brief chaotic #glitch before it is no longer measurable.

It is tempting to imagine space-time as "stitching" itself back together. (Glitch & stitch?) Such speculations are related to #StephenHawking's "chronology protection conjecture" of 1992. And along with #blackholes, #entanglement, and other #quantum phenomena, if Time Travel is possible, then we should be looking for it at every scale. We could be surrounded by time-traveling particles everywhere all the #Time.

🔗 https://Wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation … #ManyWorlds
🔗 https://Wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_paradox#Consistency_paradox … #GrandfatherParadox
🔗 https://Wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone … #LightCone
🔗 https://Wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel#Absence_of_time_travelers_from_the_future … #TimeTravelTheory
🔗 https://Wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers … #LawOfLargeNumbers
🔗 https://Wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_protection_conjecture … #ChronologyProtectionConjecture

#Community #TimeTravel #Research #GlitchInTime #Kronodon

The Eternal Mirror: Facing Ourselves Beyond This Life. We've explored the profound fragility of the ego that often hides beneath narcissistic defenses. Now, I want us to venture into more difficult terrain, to contemplate something most shy away from: What happens when we leave this material plane?

https://michaeltheanon.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-eternal-mirror-facing-ourselves.html

#afterlife #heavenandhell #heaven #hell #Christ #Christistheway #deepphilosophy #philosophy #thoughtexperiment #mind

"Who, or what, is Esco?" Is all Javier could think. Esco took a step closer to Javier, leaned in and whispered, "There's not enough room for both of us. Say your goodbyes Javier."

Javier attempted to grab his doppelganger but he man in a blink.

Javier stood there, silent, unmoved, confused and scared, but only for a moment. Javier clenched his fist and flames erupted from them and the metal fences on the alley bent toward him...

#storytelling #creativewriting #thoughtexperiment #writefreely

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/more-drowning-children

"A person who lives in the cabin and fails to rescue every child seems much less monstrous than someone who only ever encounters the situation once, even though both of them “touch” the situation exactly as much. Still, as the hypothesis predicts, we are less comfortable with this situation than the normal one where you live far away from the cabin and never worry about it - living near the cabin seems to have some moral impact." #ethics #charity #thoughtexperiment