this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
448 points (93.1% liked)
Showerthoughts
38382 readers
541 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah, I think I see where you’re coming from. It’s a fair point, and we need to be very careful not to loose sight of reality indeed.
The idea of the Universal God is very tolerant towards “fantasy” so far as it exists in the minds of people, yet it also prescribes to align such belief with a scientific understanding. So the thing I’m trying to say is: believe what you want to believe, and so long as it’s a rational and tolerant belief, it’s fine. But it does explicitly recognise there are limits to what science can do for us, so it provides the idea of Universal God as kind of a North Star for those in search, but then it doesn’t really prescribe what this Universal God must look like. I don’t see it as a religious god, but more a path towards a belief in something beyond ourselves.
In the book I also take effort to describe how this relates to Buddhism, Taoism, and Abrahamic religions, and attempt to show how they are all efforts to describe similar concepts, and whether we call this Nature, Tao, or God, doesn’t really matter in the end. So long as we don’t fall into nihilism and believe in something, I believe we can find common ground as a people.
I can understand a desire to find something beyond ourselves but I'm not driven by it.
That's exactly where Descartes lost me. I was with him on the whole "cogito ergo sum" thing but his insistence that his feelings of a higher being meant that it must exist in real form somewhere made no sense to me.
That’s fair too. I mean, feelings are real, but they are part of a subjective reality that’s not measurable from an objective perspective. But that alone is sufficient to say that science cannot answer all questions, because scientific measurements are inherently limited to objective reality.
Of course there are those that say there must be a single objective reality from which all subjective experiences can be explained, but that’s a huge assumption.
Personally, I think it’s also a dimensional thing. Reality extends beyond the dimensions of time and space, this much has already been scientifically proven. Unless you somehow believe there is a finite limit on the number of dimensions, there will always be dimensions beyond our grasp that we cannot measure or understand (yet).
And bringing it back to the discussion of LLMs, they are inherently limited to a 4-dimensional reality. If those dimensions are sufficient to create consciousness, my position would be that it’s a very limited form of consciousness.
Feelings are certainly real. That doesn't mean that they provide any evidence beyond the existence of the feeling. The standard thought experiment around that is to think about dreams. In a dream, everything I feel can be completely convincing and I have no way to know it's a hallucination. Once I wake up that reality becomes clear and I know that the feelings I was 100% certain of a few moments ago, were false. That suggests that even complete certainty in our feelings is not indicative of underlying truth.
The extra dimension thing is a bit tricky. The standard 3+1 are widely accepted. There are several conjectures that involve more dimensions but we haven't found evidence to support them. All of those are still physical dimensions. They generally fall into 2 categories; testable and not testable.
The non-testability is why everyone looks down on string theorists. Their models "explain" everything by piling on more and more dimensions but non of it is testable.
Since none of the dimensions above 4 are measurable, I'm much more comfortable believing they don't exist than that they do. I don't see why it would make sense to fill a void of non-knowledge with arbitrary guesses. I don't see a problem in not knowing if it's possible for AIs (or humans) to be conscious.
I can respect that. Appreciate your thoughtful responses!