Yes, that's an OK take, no big deal. Also it can be added that life in itself really doesn't have a choice, on some level it just happens (thinking more about chemistry here).
In the 90s, psychiatrist Rick Strassman proposed in his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule that large quantities of DMT (an endogenous psychoactive substance), are released into the brain upon death. I don't know that we have any clear evidence of this, but its certainly an interesting perspective on what might account for near death, and death experiences.
Traumatic events, like NDEs, tend to come with lots of adrenaline, stress hormones, and a cocktail of neurotransmitters that could have the secondary consequence of slowing overall monoamine oxidation, similar to MAOIs, resulting in longer effective exposure to any chemicals like DMT that would normally be transient.
You at most have around 250 μg in your system, you need at least 40 times that to get to the lower threshold of a psychedelic effect. If other factors are in play, and it doesn't get immediately metabolized because of everything else consuming the MAO supply, then it's plausible that there could be an effect.
If that were the case, then you're looking at a potential last-ditch survival mechanism, reinforcing the experience and "fuzzing" the memory for maximum impact.
There is evidence for a surge in DMT production in some rats upon death:
> In our previous studies, we have observed a marked elevation of some, but not all, critical neurotransmitters in rat brain during asphyxic cardiac arrest21, which we posit may contribute to the elevated conscious information processing observed in dying rats21,49. These data also suggest that global ischemia (by cardiac arrest, as in the current study), similar to global hypoxia (by asphyxia, as in21), leads to a tightly regulated release of a select set of neurotransmitters21. To test whether DMT concentrations are regulated by physiological alterations, we monitored DMT levels in rat brain dialysates following experimentally-induced cardiac arrest, and identified a significant rise in DMT levels in animals with (Fig. 4A) and without the pineal (Fig. 4B).
> The cardiac arrest-induced increase of endogenous DMT release may be related to near-death experiences (NDEs), as a recent study reports NDE-like mental states in human subjects given exogenous DMT50. Not all rats in our current study exhibited a surge of DMT following cardiac arrest (Fig. 4), an interesting observation in light of the fact that NDEs are reported by less than 20% of patients who survive cardiac arrests.
Right, the 250 microgram figure was the maximum amount that you might dump into your system in one go, normal DMT blood concentration is far lower. The bare minimum for a psychedelic experience is 20k micrograms, but many people won't notice anything overt until 35k+, and a full "breakthrough" experience requires 50k or more, generally speaking, independent of weight.
For such a tiny amount of DMT to have a significant impact, it would have to be 40 to 100 times more "effective" than usual, or be supported by the soup of other chemicals released in those situations in a sort of entourage effect, with MAO metabolism reduced, and all sorts of neurons firing that otherwise would be silent.
NDEs often overlap real events, where full-on DMT trips shut out the world, so the entourage effect theory makes the most sense to me. Your brain gets overwhelmed, and the dump of DMT all at once, with serotonin, dopamine, and adrenaline maxed out as well, contributes to a predictable psychedelic effect on subjective experience.
The interesting thing about DMT is that it’s an ego-stripper. You have no sense of self. You are non-corporeal. Time and space are irrelevant.
People who have taken DMT find it very difficult to explain what the visions mean when they flash before your eyes. “Flash” in the sense that they are so fast and from every conceivable direction simultaneously and you can see in all directions. And beautifully purple.
Since we are beings that have a conscious “self”, we attribute these moving images to “our lives flashing before our eyes”, but I believe that to be our egotistical selves applying that after the fact.
I now believe that the human brain acts as a filter to a raw stream of collective human shared consciousness, normally out of our grasp.
What people see there is a short temporary window into everyone else’s exact same moment in time.
It’s like a back door hack into god’s admin console and you get to watch the interconnected consciousness of human existence in real time for a few minutes.
However our brains aren’t meant to run unfiltered. Our brains usually optimize and filter as much as they can to conserve energy. We notice the differences and not the usual. Our brains fill in gaps. Eventually the brain overloads as the trip runs to an end and everything goes black. A complete void overwhelms you.
The brain finally reboots and coming back is like watching an old Linux machine reboot, loading its kernel and drivers before adding the OS layers.
First you question what you are, before then discovering who you are. It’s like a process of birth but coming out of hibernation mode for fast boot.
Maybe death is the same. Returning to the collective consciousness.
Like the ant that cannot comprehend the existence of the universe or the neuron that only understands its nearest neighbors, maybe there exists a plane above human individuals as an analogy to the neuron or the ant, that we too cannot not perceive nor understand, because our brains are too small to comprehend it. Only for those fleeting moments when we overclock the system.
Having spent a year trying to develop against dependencies only provided by a debian release, it is really painful in practice. At some point you're going to need something that is not packaged, or newer than the packaged version in your release.
It really depends on what you're doing. But yes, if you want to develop in "The NPM Style" where you suck down tiny things to do little pieces of what you need (and those things suck down tiny things, ad infinitum) then you're naturally exposed to the security risks inherent with depending on an unaudited soup of tiny things.
You don't get secure things for free, you have to pay for that by doing things like "import and audit software yourself" or even "write simple utilities from scratch" on occasion.
It’s just security theater in the end. You can just as easily put all that stuff in the package files since a package is installed to run code. You have that code then do all the sketchy stuff.
What’s needed is an entitlements system so a package you install doesn’t do runtime stuff like install crypto mining software. Even then…
A package, especially a javascript package, is not necessarily installed to run code, at least not on the machine installing the package. Many packages will only be run in the browser, which is already a fairly safe environment compared to running directly on the machine like lifecycle scripts would.
So preventing lifecycle scripts certainly limits the number of packages that could be exploited to get access to the installing machine. It's common for javascript apps to have hundreds of dependencies, but only a handful of them will ever actually run as code on the machine that installed them.
True… I do a lot of server or universal code. But don’t trust browser code either. Could be connecting to MetaMask and stealing crypto, running mining software, or injecting ads.
And with node you get files and the ability run arbitrary code on arbitrary processes.
I would expect to be able to download a package and then inspect the code before I decide to import/run any of the package files. But npm by default will run arbitrary code in the package before developers have a chance to inspect it, which can be very surprising and dangerous.
PHP composer does the same, in config.allow-plugins.<package> in composer.json. The default behavior is to prompt, with an "always" option to add the entry to composer.json. It's baffling that npm and yarn just let the scripts run with nary a peep.
Finally sane solution. When I was thinking about package manager design, I also thought that there should be no scripts, the package manager should just download files and that's all.
Purely anecdotal, but most of the kids in my son's cohort, early 20s, have received what would be considered by most to be a good education, but don't read for pleasure. I find that worrying.
I also didn't read for pleasure in my 20s and even much of my 30s. Forced reading in high school (of material I didn't enjoy, in quantity, and frequently fell behind on, and felt bad about failing) ruined it for me for about 15 years. But the trauma faded with time and now I read some 10-30 books a year. So maybe it's not permanent for your son's cohort either.
I second this. I hated (perhaps not consciously) being forced to read books in high school, however recently I’ve gone back and started rereading those books I was assigned and have loved it!
Don't we though? My generation is also known for watching hour long youtube videos (video essays), and even if that's not all of us, that's more than past generations (of course). And we are known for listening to hour long podcasts. Even if these podcasters are not necessarily as informed or as rigorous (same for youtube), I think my generation still in some ways shows a curiosity for information
That said I mostly agree with this and think for one, if foreign language was appreciated more here, maybe people would read more
The amount of words even an average reader can consume and understand in an hour is vastly higher than what one can gain from a video essay, even if played at 2x speed. For high performing readers, it's not even close to be remotely comparable.
I don't know. Watching x amount of quality videos and reading x amount of quality written works is surely better than just reading x amount of quality written works. And finally, of course the content of those words matters. I could read a 200 page academic work and if the work is poorly written then I haven't gained much.
> Watching x amount of quality videos and reading x amount of quality written works is surely better than just reading x amount of quality written works
Why surely?
The reason I'd push back on that simplification is it's much easier to simply absorb--without engagement--information from video. The struggle that comes with reading not only measurably increases retention. It also increases the chances that you're going to notice you're not dealing with a quality source.
There are far fewer dumbfuck textbooks on almost any topic than negatively-informative videos on YouTube, for example.
> I could read a 200 page academic work and if the work is poorly written then I haven't gained much
Could you give an example? Not of a work that's wrong. Just poorly written.
Plenty of classical sources are, by modern standards, incredibly poorly written. Yet there isn't a substitute for reading the originals.
One can learn from videos as well as from written sources. But it's harder to do right. Easier to do wrong. And you'll have put yourself in a silo from experts, who tend to communicate via and thus reference writing.
Thanks for the nice reply. I think it's harder to skim a video and say you understood than it is to skim a long book and say you understood, and I know countless people who do this. So if I watch a video on a topic and someone else reads a paper on a topic, but they may have skimmed, I see merit in watching videos because of this. I would think blind people feel similarly. Can you even skim videos at all?
And yes, I do agree, Youtube can have false info. On the other hand, it can also have info that hasn't been written about yet, and I think there's a lot to say about the fact it covers stuff that otherwise might not get written about, but of course that's a separate topic.
To be honest, there are lots of bad books. I guess we'd have to measure what types a book a person reads, not just how often or how much they read. A local bookstore to me has a ton of westerns. Even if I read them all I'd be worse off. In fact I have read some, lol.
Sorry to throw raygun under the bus, but I think her paper is a fantastic example.
And you're right, many classical works are by modern standards bad. I have read some of the norse sagas. And I do agree with you, it is important to read the originals!
Harder to do right? Again, uff. I don't know. Books certainly are more informative and more thought out, and more detailed. I think I agree there, and I too hate that people don't read for entertainment.
But reading generally, outside a certain type of books / texts, I think there is still risk. But I do agree, there's lots of bad video / podcast content.
To pile on, You can learn a tremendous amount from reading difficult sources, specifically due to their difficulty. Nobody reads classical fiction for the facts.
It is an exercise in cognitive flexibility and challenge. It builds the capability to understand complex ideas and challenging contexts. These are important skills in navigating a world that is in fact complex and nuanced.
If someone can only understand short sentences and bullet lists, they will struggle in the real world and be vulnerable to manipulation.
Oh, I agree. And by the way, I speak two languages and learned the second primarily through youtube. That was difficult, and difficult topics can be covered there. Certainly reading is harder! Of course I agree with that. I still couldn't read classical sources in that language. I just think we shouldn't altogether knock getting info in the form of audio.
For what it's worth, we all know books can be this way too. I am just saying it can be productive to get information over video / audio, and I am not trying to say necessarily that Youtube for example is as reputable
Podcasts are horrible content slop that are appealing more because one can enjoy the parasocial relationship it offers rather than because the podcasters are insightful or informative.
It's probably not a good education. If your kid is in an average public school they were probably not taught to read phonetically. Unless you as parents taught that separately, all these kids are handicapped.
The Hungarian poet George Szirtes, with no prior translation experience, translated his first two novels, over a period of many years. I can’t speak Hungarian, but both the Melancholy of Resistance and Satantango remain my favourite novels of his, and I think I can partially attribute that to Szirtes‘s translations.
In a similar vein, the novelist/film maker collaboration between Kobo Abe and Hiroshi Teshigahara was very fruitful, and produced some beautiful films.
