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

Video games lack that “hopelessly lost” aspect. I mean, nobody mistakes them for reality and never comes back. (Right?). So I’m excluding them.

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.

Srsly. I can’t believe they went with “the alien looks like dad” bs and skipped the math thing

The carl sagan : contact

The movie is good but the book is better

Downloading both immediately

Thank you very much

Fiend Without a Face 1958

Vintage claymation

“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!

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?