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The thing that constitutes the "I" that you are is just patterns of ideas and thoughts and behaviors in the form of electrical / chemical impulses in a brain. You spend your whole life transmitting those patterns to the people around you by communicating with them. When someone "gets to know you" they are building a simulation of you in their mind. The more time you spend communicating and observing each other, the higher fidelity that simulation becomes. Importantly, there is no true difference in "kind" between the patterns-and-thoughts-and-behaviors you hold in YOUR brain and call "I" and the patterns-and-thoughts-and-behaviors others hold in THEIR brain and give YOUR name. It's not a perfect copy, but it's also not NOT a true version of YOU. That means when you die, you *literally live on* as a distributed simulation inside the brains of everyone who ever met you and came to know and love you.
(This is my poor paraphrase. Check the link for relevant excerpts)
Mar 17, 2025
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💭We process things by telling ourselves stories, but what happens when we consume things with no need for imagination? What’s happening with our brains when we even commodify our memories, the way we store them, the way we share them, our connection with language, images, and ourselves?
Jul 18, 2025
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🕳I think I spent most of my life thinking I had a specific lack, i.e. that I was less "real" than the people around me. Only in the last few years did I realize that our general conditions produce what feels like a personal failing... we are awash in information but not meaning; the conditions of our lives feel disconnected from a shared history or struggle; the tools or vocabulary by which we can bring "ourselves" into being keeps getting thinner and more trivial. If you feel like you're waiting for yourself to arrive, waiting to be alive to yourself in a way that makes you aware that you are free, I recommend Kierkegaard. He's lowkey a funny troll, also.
Nov 5, 2023
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Everything above 100% is true btw^
All things considered I think I have a pretty normal interior landscape. Songs get stuck in my head. I daydream & I fantasize & I ruminate & I contemplate. Sometimes my mind is busy, sometimes it is totally quiet. Memory is something that constantly fails me-- it's closer to propaganda than documentary to me. And the projectionist who plays the propaganda to me is this blind, deaf, volatile schizophrenic intent on making me, the rememberer, as deluded & ill informed as possible. Sometimes I'll have this strange feeling that I've received a memory from the future in a dream, even more rarely I'll get this sort of memory in the waking world. To understand what I'm talking about, click the link I've supplied. But really, honestly, outside of that I like to daydream a lot. Today I was thinking about visiting Georgia & daydreaming about being a young Russian nobleman in the 19th century, the son of some diplomat or something, laid out in some Tblisi opium den. I'm faded as fuck & I'm staring at the rug and the ceiling & then rolling over facedown in the naked breasts of some Georgian woman. She is perfumed & her arms are fat & she pets my hair and coos-- this is incredibly disgusting to me of course. Sometimes I think that Consciousness is a curse. Free will was given to us by God, but Knowledge of Good & Evil was something that we were tricked into taking up by the serpent (ouroboros). Not a coincidence that all great sages exhort those who seek wisdom to cease with their perception & their perception of perception & their perception of perception of perception. Meta-cognition is the flattened out ourobouros (serpent) that traps the thinker in Hell.
All things considered I think I have a pretty normal interior landscape. Songs get stuck in my head. I daydream & I fantasize & I ruminate & I contemplate. Sometimes my mind is busy, sometimes it is totally quiet. Memory is something that constantly fails me-- it's closer to propaganda than documentary to me. And the projectionist who plays the propaganda to me is this blind, deaf, volatile schizophrenic intent on making me, the rememberer, as deluded & ill informed as possible. Sometimes I'll have this strange feeling that I've received a memory from the future in a dream, even more rarely I'll get this sort of memory in the waking world. To understand what I'm talking about, click the link I've supplied. But really, honestly, outside of that I like to daydream a lot. Today I was thinking about visiting Georgia & daydreaming about being a young Russian nobleman in the 19th century, the son of some diplomat or something, laid out in some Tblisi opium den. I'm faded as fuck & I'm staring at the rug and the ceiling & then rolling over facedown in the naked breasts of some Georgian woman. She is perfumed & her arms are fat & she pets my hair and coos-- this is incredibly disgusting to me of course. Sometimes I think that Consciousness is a curse. Free will was given to us by God, but Knowledge of Good & Evil was something that we were tricked into taking up by the serpent (ouroboros). Not a coincidence that all great sages exhort those who seek wisdom to cease with their perception & their perception of perception & their perception of perception of perception. Meta-cognition is the flattened out ourobouros (serpent) that traps the thinker in Hell.
Feb 14, 2025
Top Recs from @heumann
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🏢i love hearing that girl sing her heart out in the shower through the bathroom vent. or the guy hocking insane loogies all the time. the alternating smells of delicious homemade chinese food or something totally burning in the oven… am always wondering if its the same kitchen!
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🗣i still read hyperbole as “hyper-bowl”