It’s a pity we often cannot maintain our machines, not because we don’t want to, the OEM have made them impossible to modify or repair. Anything with software in it is becoming an absolute nightmare.

The self is synonymous with experience. It’s why the self is simultaneously a substantial entity and completely without substance. We remember what it felt like to be ten years old and yet every single cell that generated that sensation has long since been replaced by adulthood. People who receive traumatic brain injuries can become strangers to their family and even themselves. The self is a contrivance and an emergent property of a neural network. Ever changing, elusive and yet reassuringly familiar.

Doesn’t cruise control deactivate when you press the brake?

Whoever reprogrammed the engine management probably fucked the security system.

99 Corolla was a pile of crap. I bought it at 80k on the basis of a report that it was the car that has the fewest MOT failures on record. The doors clanged when I shut them, it felt gutless and cheap generally. I could live with that but the water leak into the passenger footwell had to be eliminated. Spent months searching for the ingress point, finally tracking it down to a poorly sealed door hinge. Around this time I was alarmed by the unusually high oil consumption, it required topping up between services. I asked Toyota and they said it’s normal to consume a litre of oil per 1000km 🤣 Needless to say, the engine expired a short time later with failed piston rings on cylinder 3 at 100k.

The last thing I will do is deny anyone else’s experience but it sounds like you want to do that, all the while unaware of where that impulse originates. As if it percolated up into consciousness completely unbidden or did you will it into existence?

I suspect the reason we can’t find the self is the same reason we can’t find the other conceptual objects in our imaginations. They feel real and they are useful but ultimately they are like money, religion, nation states, laws and insurance - purely conceptual and dependent on our shared belief in them.

I’m suspicious of the desire to lean too heavily on concepts such as the self and free will. Much of our societal structures past and present depend on their existence, how else can we accuse others of crime if the perpetrator didn’t have a choice? It wasn’t that long ago that we were prosecuting animals for the crimes listed in our statutes. Currently we don’t believe other animals are capable of this level of agency but nobody has presented any compelling evidence, either way.

I suppose it’s early days for neuroscience but many functions of the mind have been linked with areas of the brain, except the generation of the self. That self seems to come about as a result of time spent in the world and is shaped by it so why can’t we find it? Even if we do find a particular area of grey matter, it’s not as if we will find a self molecule and be able to measure it, that’s not how neural networks operate. The best we can say is the self is an organism with memory, a vehicle for genetic material that has become so complex that it’s unable to discern what it is made of.

If the average mortality continues to fall will we see a situation where the average home owner is a corpse? Half of Americans are already dead from neck upwards.

It’s already popular with a good userbase. Popular with idiots? Hopefully not.

It’s a huge problem. Software engineers need to step up and say no to creating artificial barriers between the user and the device. Electronic and mechanical engineers should be making devices that are repairable.

In my workshop I have switched to buying old industrial tools that don’t have embedded software. These machines were built in a time when people expected to repair their own stuff and keep it working.

It’s difficult to imagine a corporation whose ethics are more toxic than Apple but everyone seems to be following their lead and jumping on this mendacious bandwagon.

Fill to the brim with turds

Right. It’s perfectly normal to have difficulty sleeping. We often don’t know why and that’s okay too. In time it will pass, as all things do.

I’ve heard people advance the argument that since the self cannot be shown to exist, ‘free will’ is also absent and we can absolve ourselves of responsibility for our actions. I don’t believe in the Judeo-Christian conception of free will but I still want to be involved in my decisions and choices, even if that is limited to an awareness.

• Sleep and wake at the same time every day.
• Wake early.
• Avoid caffeine after mid day.
• Cool temperature bedroom as you go to sleep.
• Avoid stimulation immediately prior to sleep e.g. screens, intense exercise, arguments.
• Make the bedroom a place of rest exclusively, no screens, noise, etc.
• If sleep is elusive don’t stay in bed, go do something and come back later to try again.
• Worrying about sleep only makes sleep more difficult.
• Don’t use alcohol or drugs to help sleep except very briefly to get over a hump. Of the benzodiazepine class, zopiclone is effective for short periods to re-establish a sleep pattern.

The self as an illusion is an interesting concept to play with. We think of ourselves as identities so that we can operate socially. However when one examines the moment to moment experience of consciousness the self is nowhere to be found.

Delusional

It’s interesting because the guy looks like a genius but he’s doing something really dumb.

He fought back by blocking the fists with his face, who is the bigger chad?

It’s a good test when working with people that you don’t know, contractors, etc. In the automotive industry we work with a lot of electronic system suppliers and they deliver embedded software in the form of ECU. Software in this form can hide a multitude of horrors so the only way to keep track of it is to make release declarations, implying testing has been carried out. If that’s not present, you can’t trust it.