Hegar

This is objectively within the bounds of “normal” human experience. It’s seen in primates and other mammals too.

Sleeping in the same bed as your family was the norm for a long while, across many cultures. It was also perfectly normal for say a noble to sleep in the same bed as some of their staff, or for merchants or other traveller to share a bed while on the road.

Most people in many western cultures would probably find it weird, but they’re the weird ones for needlessly sexualizing the act of sleeping.

A vast patchwork of incredibly different lifeways that you can flee to whenever then taxman and his goons come round.

nothing gets out of your brain on its own, except heat.

I heard a recording of a song made by reading a brain that was thinking that song. It was far from perfect, but you could tell which song it was. I’m no neuroscientist, but if that information can already be plucked from a brain, surely that’s proof that reconstructing thoughts is possible to some degree?

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/neuroscientist-pink-floyd-music-brain-activity

If it’s a nation state, it’s already not a democracy.

The idea that choosing which particular rich people sit in a fancy building is somehow democracy is quite funny.

Free will.

It’s hard to accept, but free will is just not compatible with reality. It’s like geocentrism. It seems obvious on its face because of our limited perspective, but nothing else in the universe makes sense if it’s true. We live in a mechanistic universe and cause and effect doesn’t suddenly stop when the atoms are part of a human.

I freaked out for about a week once I came to realize how much of our society is based on a scientific impossibility. Redesigning justice, ethics, healthcare, the very concept of blame, etc. to account for this is a daunting fucking prospect.