Fridge Horror/Real Life: Difference between revisions
again a few more in-depth considerations of what's already there
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* [http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/1932594019.html This] series of experiments performed on people who have had the connecting structures between their right and left brain hemispheres severed. Excerpt here:
{{quote|Experiments on split-brain patients reveal how readily the left brain interpreter can make up stories and beliefs. In one experiment, for example, when the word walk was presented only to the right side of a patient’s brain, he got up and started walking. When he was asked why he did this, the left brain (where language is stored and where the word walk was not presented) quickly created a reason for the action: “I wanted to go get a Coke.”}}
** The horror? Aside from a severed corpus calloseum, these split-brain patients are ''completely normal.'' As in, their brains do all the same things that ''your'' brain does. Case in point: there is a little man inside your head who's job it is to explain your actions, and he will make up ''utter horseshit'' to do so. To make things worse, that little man (known in some texts as "the Interpreter") may be the only thing keeping all of your thoughts and feelings tied up together in a package known as "me". Without him, you would be a collection of disjointed senses and reactions all doing things for their own reason, none of which necessarily rely on the rest of the body's experience. The Interpreter, by continually making shit up, is giving each of your actions a unified reason and thus giving you a sense of self. Be sure to think of this the next time you shift positions. Why did you do that? Just remember, whatever your Interpreter tells you has been entirely invented in the span of a few
* Any war footage of a vehicle being destroyed probably involves someone dying at horrible death; every time a fighter spirals out of control in gun camera footage from WWII, you can be reasonably sure the pilot died with his plane. Worth remembering any time you watch a history documentary on TV.
** Even worse, DVDs of those documentaries (I'm thinking specifically of "World At War") [[Snuff Film|are available for sale]].
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* This reality is it. Space, time, physics, you, God, any kind of afterlife, atoms, molecules, whatever there is, there is nothing else. Take a moment to really ponder that, really let it sink in. If you're anything like this troper, you have a moment of deep profound cosmic horror before your brain quickly pulls the mental curtain over that. Until you think about it again...
** This is a bit like the 'imagine if there's nothing after death' scenario. Our brains are too feeble to truly comprehend that sort of thing, and so it doesn't scare us...
** To make things worse, you only have a limited number of senses to percept what is there. Whatever you have a sensory organ for, you can percept, other things you can't. Sure, you can use artificial sensors for the latter, but this is not the same as what you would truly feel if you could process all that information yourself. Plus, [[Transhumanism]] approaches to get this sensory input right into your brain are likely to result in [[Sensory Overload]] - your brain hits its data processing limits, making the extra sensory experience rather distressing because you're not used to it.
* Any sci-fi story related to sentient supercomputers become this when put into the context of the 21st century. Take "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream", commonly considered one of the most terrifying stories ever, where an incredibly powerful supercomputer designed to fight World War III becomes sentient, kills everyone on Earth except for five people, and then tortures those five people for over a century, whilst keeping them fully immortal. It was written back in the late 1960s i.e. before the internet or even e-mails had been invented. The story only becomes more terrifying when you consider just how expansive the internet is now - the fabric of society in the Western world ''needs'' the internet and computers in order to survive. And if one computer or artifical intelligence, ''just one'', becomes sentient, they may well manage to infect every other computer in the world, and they could bring humanity itself to the brink of collapse.
** Most science fiction writers don't realize that most actions humans would consider to be "evil" (rape, murder, theft, the intentional infliction of suffering) are simply artifacts of evolution, brought about through years of natural selection in a competitive arena of limited resources. An AI would more likely not have these ultimately irrational impulses, or any fear of mortality whatsoever. A purely logical and infinitely deliberative mind would most likely be more trustworthy and non-threatening than the vast majority of the people youve ever met, and certainly moreso than almost any human world leader, who necessarily reached their positions through a calculated combination of ambition and rabid self-preservation. The worst threat would be from society becoming too dependent upon an AI, and an unforeseeable, self-replicating computing error causing a sudden and widespread loss of needed services. A communicable disease, if you will. Man's eternal enemy.
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** Made worse because the worst of these things are going to happen decades from now in the future. Who knows if you are still alive by that time, anyway?
** It gets more difficult when it comes to rising sea levels, but here we can still say we're not 100% sure that the climate change is manmade. There is a small chance that a similar climate change would also occur without us. Or we're just worsening a phenomenon that is already there independently of us. So at least we can deflect the blame and see the disasters that happen as the victims' "fate".
*** And even if humankind is 100% guilty, it's not only ''you'' - it's everyone to varying degrees. So why should you feel motivated to restrict your lifestyle in any way? If you're among a small minority who does this, it will be pretty useless.
** The current mass extinction biologists over the world are seeing - also most likely human-made - is the same sort of thing. What's so bad about not having bees around us any more? They're annoying, anyway. ...Wait, without bees we won't have honey. But we would survive that... But who or what is going to pollinate all those plants that currently rely on bees? And if only some of those plants die out, what about all those animals which rely on them? And... [[Explain, Explain, Oh Crap|Oh, Crap]]! [[Disaster Dominoes|That could get nasty]].
* Think about all mistakes that you have ever made, and how your life could have been different if you hadn't made all those mistakes. All the nice things that you could have achieved, and all the bad things that you could have avoided. And how much better your living situation could be today.
* Are you proud of your "free will"? Well, that thing is probably just the result of a complex interaction between your DNA and your environment, with a few random processes like sporadic decay of radioactive nuclei added into the mix. No matter if you give in to hedonistic drives or resist them, it's always the result of what these three factors do in your brain, not your "free decision".
{{reflist}}
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