this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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Showerthoughts
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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.
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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!