My mind: objects of curiosity
Some questions that crossed my mind in the course of a recent day until I forgot about it, probably extremely biased by knowing that if I became curious about a thing I might write it down:
If you have had some underpants since 2015, will you have them for your entire life? What will happen to them in the singularity?
If your feelings are partially felt as tightness in your stomach, do you have different feelings if you regularly work out your stomach muscles?
What if some of my experiences are valuable in ways that nobody else ever experiences, and it is down to me that humanity knows that such value can exist? One hopes that in the future we understand value so totally that it doesn’t matter if nobody had ever seen the best and brightest things—that even unconscious robots would one day realize that they must build consciousness, and that unloving algorithms would one day infer the merit of love. But that requires a high degree of scientific completeness and insensitivity of our trajectory to pre-completeness views. Insofar as my research causes me to read history, I have the sense that things are lost more than I would have naively thought.
How can I make probabilistic predictions about my life in a maximally streamlined fashion? (My current method is writing them in a spreadsheet when I remember and feel like it)
What should I give my brother for his birthday?
If people are inefficiently likely to use a thing they are given, should one give something one thinks the other person would not choose but will benefit from being led to use, or should one respect the other person’s autonomy more and give them something they would have chosen?
How do other people keep track of things? What is it to keep track of things? What are things? If I properly understood what things were, could I keep track of them better?
What is this brand of obsession I have for investigating the discontinuousness of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, with so much care and diligence? It’s not clear that I want to know the answer that much, and yet I stay up past 4am, skipping breaks, poring over eighteenth century export records, moved and delighted by careful civil-war era efforts to empirically understand the merits of different available cotton gins. Is that what it is like for people when work is good? I suspect not. I suspect the best way for obsession to be ties it more tightly to intense curiosity about the answer.
(I have a vague sense that everything easily slips to not being about reality, and can often work pretty well while being slightly disoriented like that, but that the best version has its pick planted steadfastly in the real ground. Is this true? Do I think it because of anything to do with reality, or is it all some pleasing game of sham-wholesome concepts I have?)
Is there some way I can shoot arrows at things without having to do anything annoying like going in a car?
If Alice loves Bob, and Bob loves Carol, is Bob missing out on much in the ‘loving and being loved’ category by the two parts not forming one reciprocal pairing? Is the the thing he is missing a more deeply important part of the human experience than ‘a stable source of reassurance and self-esteem’ or ‘an absence of longing’ or ‘an emotional prerequisite for doing a bunch of nice things together’?
Pain can come with suffering or not, and it seems the bad thing is the suffering, not the pain. Positive feelings seem—to me at least—to be more diffuse than pain, e.g. it would be weird for one’s finger to feel really good. (I think sexual feelings might be different, though mine are still mostly more diffuse I think.) Is there a thing like pain with the opposite of suffering, that would be as intense-seeming as suffering-pain is, and have the same basic searing/aching/stinging/etc nature, but be good?
(What do you wonder about, really?)