FanonFan [comrade/them, any]

I look into this every few years and have yet to see any evidence of it. Even the scale alone means any of them would have to be orders of magnitude worse than high fructose corn syrup or sucrose to be worrying, since they’re multiple orders of magnitude sweeter.

For a comparable level of sweetness to HFCS, a serving of artificial sweeteners is a fraction of their Acceptable Daily Intake.

There’s quite a few caffeine free, sugar free sodas, at least in the states. Taste is subjective tho

Kinda depends on what you’re looking for. Going through my podcast app:

Dimension 20 is a bunch of CollegeHumor actors doing DND campaigns. I don’t play DND but have enjoyed this so far.

The Dollop is a couple comedians riffing about strange people and events from history. More entertaining than educational but you might expand your knowledge a bit as long as you don’t put too much weight in their research.

Blowback is a history podcast that goes over major historical events that people probably know of but not much about. The production quality is amazing and the research is really good. It’s like listening to a well-made documentary. Plus they got Jon Benjamin as a guest actor for season 1.

Welcome to Nightvale is a surrealist horror/comedy with a fun vibe. Lots of memorable one-liners.

My Dad Wrote a Porno is pretty funny, although I felt like the bit sort of wore out after a few episodes and stopped listening. Seems to have an audience and still be going so maybe it picks up.

Citations needed is a solid critique of news narratives.

Monday Morning podcast is okay if you want to hear Bill burr rant to himself for a while. He’s been doing it for like 13 years so there’s probably gold in there, but I think he’s better when he has someone to riff with. Only listened to a handful of episodes though.

I’d guess it’s because it captured the demand for english-language isekai at a mid reading level, and snowballed with hype around new releases, which quickly got rolled into the movie franchise as well. For 15 years there was a new release almost every year, between the books and the movies, so you couldn’t really avoid hearing buzz about it. If it was just one book without regular injections of hype into the public consciousness, it’d probably be largely forgotten.

Kids don’t care so much about prose and they’re usually too naive to pick up on political subtexts, at least consciously. As a kid I liked them for the escapist fantasy and the simple narrative.

The line between medicine and drug is largely arbitrary.

Start with the basics of diet, exercise, water, sleep, social interaction. They’re consistent and have very low harm potential. It’s also shocking how much each of them contributed to a sense of well being, or how much a lack of any one of them can cause a downward spiral.

Supplements and vitamins also aren’t super risky, although they aren’t well regulated and many do nothing in their pill form. One or some of the vitamin Bs seem important for me personally, although I’m not 100% certain and I don’t know which one(s) and to what degree. But I’ll drink a monster energy regularly because they have 200-400% dv. Omegas from fish oils may also be good. L-tyrosine and things like it are commonly discussed in nootropics boards, I can’t vouch for them personally.

As far as medications, it’s unlikely you’ll find an easy and risk-free solution, unfortunately. Even well-studied prescription medications aren’t guaranteed to work for your specific needs and have potential to make things worse, which is why in an ideal world everyone would have access to a medical professional that can oversee their use. And often the ones that work aren’t immediately obvious, but demonstrate marginal improvement over the longer term. In fact euphoria and hypomania (which in the moment feel like “oh my god this drug is working”) may be signs the drug isn’t a good fit. Very difficult to gauge on your own.

Online prescription mills are fairly painless if you have a good idea that a specific medication might work for you. I used them to get on a specific antidepressant after doing my own research.

Kanna and St John’s wort both have SSRI compounds I believe. Be careful, just because something’s a legal plant doesn’t mean it can’t interact negatively or have harmful effects. But these are probably the closest to what you’re asking.

Kratom is legal and can boost mood but has high addictive potential. In my experience not worth it except to get off more addictive substances.

Dex/dxm/dextromethorphan is an active ingredient in some cough suppressants that has antidepressive potential. Can be purchased with no additives at some pharmacies and online. Tripping on this isn’t fun at all in my opinion, I’d rather do salvia, but small doses seem to have some mood improving effects that last a few days

Stay away from diphenhydramine (I mention it because it’s often spoken of in the same context as Dex). Its use has been linked to dementia.

Psychedelics can help deconstruct old assumptions and mental structures that may be contributing to your depression. I’d describe the experience as rediscovering the magic of existence. Many of them also have antidepressant qualities-- a sort of afterglow that may last a week or a month. Microdosing is said to tap into the afterglow without tripping. LSD and shrooms are fairly well-studied. Mescaline acts similarly and may be easier to find. Morning glory seeds are legal and contain LSA which is similar to LSD. Salvia acts differently than any of these, often leading to bad trips, but is generally legal. None of these are addictive, but may be risky for people with certain mental illnesses.

There are a variety of legal and grey market stims that can improve mood, but they may have harmful effects and addictive potential. You’ll find a bunch of them if you browse nootropics boards, but keep in mind anonymous comments are not scientific and may undersell risk and negative effects. Nootropics boards will also discuss other supposedly cognitive enhancing substances. Lions mane is a common one. Some are natural supplements or things your body already produces (though this doesn’t guarantee they’re safe or pure). Many are addictive, many are probably snake oil. Search a drug/supplement on pubmed before trying it.

Adjacent to nootropics and more dangerous is research chemicals. Half of them are attempts to make “legal” but identical/similar analogues to illegal drugs. Some are novel. Almost none of them have been studied and purity is never guaranteed. I Honestly don’t recommend unless you’re at a point where it doesn’t matter. At one point for me it was “find a happy chemical or commit suicide” and I think that’s the only level this kind of experimentation is truly justified. But well-studied psychedelics are preferable.

The key to the thought experiment is perspective: we make everything identical materially to try to isolate a conceptual difference. We make the two clones identical in every way, and from nearly all perspectives they are identical (but distinct) entities. The sole difference in this scenario is the perspective of the clones, who have two distinct consciousnesses. Looking at your clone, you don’t see yourself, you see someone who looks like you. Because when we distill it to its pure essence, the one thing that is uniquely you is your perspective, your present conscious experience. You are looking through your eyes, thinking your thoughts, as is this entity materially identical to you. But it’s not seeing and thinking as you, thus it is something different.

There’s something that ties your pure essence to its material composition, such that even a molecularly identical entity wouldn’t have your consciousness (just an identical consciousness, removed from your own).

We can explore the bounds of this experiment by tweaking variables: you teleport a la star Trek, whereby your old body is disintegrated and a new identical one is immediately constructed. Or maybe you upload your consciousness when you die, so the list of variables that in theory comprise you are preserved. But in all cases, the essence that is you, your continuity of perspective, doesn’t transfer over. When you die, everything goes black, and that’s it. It’s only from external perspectives that “you” continue. But the you that is you, you as you experience yourself, is gone.

Well, it would be you, from every perspective except your own. The schism would be (non)experienced at conception, imo.

Like if this replica were created in another room, another planet, whatever, without your knowledge, you wouldn’t be aware of it, despite this new entity being you, for all intents and purposes.

I think (on a subrational level) that there’s some essence of personhood or consciousness that seems to transcend its material fabric, becoming more than the sum of its parts. “Transcend” is too strong a word, since by all appearances there’s no static being that isn’t still largely a result of and dependent on its makeup; as the foundation deteriorates so does the consciousness that results from it. That spectrum of functionality seems to undermine the possibility of a true soul that exists independent of its body.

But the word certainly signifies an actual thing, I think. Take a thought experiment: if we were to somehow make an exact replica of you, down to the molecular level, it would from all perspectives except your own be you. But the essence of what is you to yourself, your continuity of perspective, would (probably) not inhabit that new body, it would still inhabit your current one. The Star Trek / Prestige problem of conscious continuity suggests there’s something there, at least conceptually.

The fact that there’s still a lot about physics / the universe / consciousness that science doesn’t understand leaves ample room for conjecture, for now.

I mean, a person’s senses aren’t supposed to be infallible, but I see no utility in elevating baseless conjecture above them. The “brain in a vat” problem is fun and all but it’s based on zero positive evidence, just a lack of negative evidence. On the other hand the senses are giving us continuous and reproducible and interactible information about the world around us, which despite its inherent subjectivity can be communicated with other people’s perspectives to approach and approximate an objective understanding of things.

Now when you start shifting from abstract to concrete epistemology, things like symbols and language games and power structures and ideology become important facets to examine. What filters and tensions are influencing a person’s perspective? What mechanisms might be elevating or silencing their perspective socially?

We can and should be skeptical of our senses, but in a productive or dialectical manner, testing them against reality and other perspectives in efforts to approach a more concrete understanding.

I was impressed by how streamlined and intuitive EndeavorOS (with Plasma) is out of the box when I threw it on a friend’s computer. Will probably switch to it myself shortly.

Selfishness may have been selected for tens of millions of years ago in our evolution, but as pre-humans became social animals it’s clear that selfless or other-centric thinking became strongly selected for as well. You otherwise couldn’t have a species that’s almost entirely other-dependent, throughout the whole life but especially for the first 10-15 years of it.

Humans can’t sustainably exist outside of a society.

Adhd

I have a few dozen books. A third I’ve read all the way through, the rest I’ve picked up and put down or skimmed.

It helps to have a lot of options so that I’m more likely to find one that clicks and holds my attention for longer.

Plus I frequently reference books for specific info or quotes.

Empathy is probably your best bet as far as a single variable goes. But otherwise we’re talking about something that’s incredibly complex on multiple levels, making it near impossible to address as a whole.

I like to envision human behavior and consciousness as a network of tensions and influences. (Perceived) material interests are one such tension, a particularly strong one. Strong enough that I feel confident saying that in general, people will tend to drift towards approximating an ethic that aligns with their material conditions.

The archetypes and behaviors modeled for us in our childhood and throughout our lives are a sort of structure that these forces interact with. We may have empathetic or selfish responses modeled for us by our parents, so those are the responses that spring to our minds when decisions arise. Good behavior modeling could mean the inherent tension towards self interest may be mediated or tempered by the limits of behavior we think to enact. Parents have a big impact on this early on, but so do later role models as well as media portrayals of people.

Social cohesion can be a big tension on people, incentivizing them to not act outside of group norms out of fear of being ostracized. Or on a more subconscious level, perhaps acting out of a “self” interest that benefits the social group, because the lines between Self and Other become blurred. Extending beyond the small self to consider the well-being of the large “Self”, sometimes even at the expense of the small self.

Critical theory may be of interest to you.

deleted by creator

it’s either that or something chromium-based

i mostly degoogled years ago

firefox just works most of the time. still have chromium installed for edge cases

Regarding the latter concern, I think a lot of this type of thinking comes from misconceptions about how evolution works, largely perpetuated by our culture to be fair.

But most people think evolution is an external pressure on the level of the individual. Which, it is, kinda-- that’s one scope of evolution. But evolutionary pressure happens on all levels in different ways: one family against others, one tribe against others, one social group against others, one species against others, etc. And networks of cooperation are just as influential as networks of competition, all happening at the same time in a churning mass of energies.

So rather than thinking that individual humans are losing hardiness to evolution, think of it as our species gaining hardiness through specialization and technology, evolution taking place outside of our individual bodies. It’s why we have language instead of tusks.

I mean, malevolent to the degree that their interests are diametrically opposed to our interests. To the NSA, more avenues of data collection are good, so they will do what they can to expand. To Amazon, more profit is good, so they will sell as many devices as possible and sell as much private information as possible for as much money as possible. To police and federal agencies, more arrests and more political control is good, so they will use information gathered by these devices to the extent allowed by law (and further).

If you’re someone who values privacy and freedom then those entities’ actions could be called malevolent, even if they’re just acting in their best interest. If you don’t care about those things then it’s probably no big deal I guess.

Honestly sounds like a high school argumentative essay lmao