Ideally, we’d all stop…

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I’d add Agatha Christie to the Sherlock Holmes/James bond subcategory too

You get rid of thatcher. Seems like a good idea

That’s absolutely true. I’m now in Germany, where that’s the case, but it’s still a hell of a lot cheaper than $8k.

The post I remembered it in has been edited, but I could have remembered it wrong. If that’s the case, my bad. My point was that you dismissed an opinion about something that’s a matter of opinion instead of diving into the foundation of those opinions. “That you’ve been propagandized to believe otherwise is so you’ll fight in a war and not mind dismemberment,” doesn’t sound like you want a reciprocal discussion, but like you’re explaining a known fact, which is why I asked whether there’s an empirical metric for the physical location of the personality.

Have you ever worn a costume or played a part in a play? It absolutely affects your ““self”” to wear different haircuts etc. Wearing a George Washington wig feels different than Morticia Addams

Absolutely it does, temporarily. Most people wouldn’t be forever changed after having worn that wig, which is what I would find more interesting. Temporary changes in personality can be caused by all sorts of things, like temperature, weather, location. No arguments there.

If you had cancer, did you go to those support meetings? Do you remember the type of speech that happens around getting better? A lot of that is to instill a survivor sense of self - the cancer diagnosis itself causes people to feel like they are dying as part of their identity often (not trying to mansplain cancer here, sorry) so these support groups help with countering that identity with a different one.

I didn’t have cancer, my mother did. I also would consider the effect of the cancer diagnosis to be psychological, not physical, as it’s an emotional reaction to information, not a belief caused directly by the tumor.

Yes, souls and something being separate from our physical shells feels comforting because it means we can conquer death.

I don’t know what this is in response to exactly, but I don’t believe in a soul that exists beyond death. I think people use the word “soul” to mean a lot of things though, and I wouldn’t object to using that term for vitality or life essence or whatever you want to call the state of living. In that sense, the soul is extinguished upon death, but that’s not exactly a comforting thought.

I lived in the US until a few years ago. I take daily ADHD medication and took birth control for several years, but not always. Otherwise, I was pretty healthy and didn’t have much medical intervention, but I have bad teeth.

I got the most cost effective insurance plan for me based on that medical history available at roughly $240 per two-week pay period, with a $5,000 deductible. The medication I took cost about $300/month and I had to pay for monthly drs visits and urine tests, to make sure I wasn’t abusing it. I don’t remember how much those cost, but I generally spent about $11k a year.

As a healthy (if neurodivergent) person in my 20s.

If I hadn’t had insurance, it would have been much more expensive, which is nuts. I got a tooth pulled and an implant put in, which cost about $8k all told, of which $2k was covered.

When I was in my early twenties, I got a chemical burn on my eye which required lots of treatments in the emergency room which I tried to pay, but there were twenty different places billing me for it and I just lost track of it. I had no assets and a bad job and they went into collections, but never showed up on my credit report and I essentially faced no consequences for doing so, except for much increased stress. If I had tried to do that with the tooth, they wouldn’t have given me the implant without upfront payment. If my payment had bounced, I had a better job and more money than earlier, so they might have tried to garnish my wages or sue me for payment.

My husband would not describe himself as smart, but I think it’s probably because he never cared enough about school. He is pretty book smart and has a huge vocabulary in both his native and second language (his second is English, my native, and it’s fucking nuts to me that he’s got a wider English vocabulary than 70% of the kids I went to high school with), but he was just never into academia.

He is significantly smarter than he realizes though. He remembers every good tip or life hack he comes across, so he’s got a wide range of perfected methods for cutting onions, hanging pictures, keeping your place organized, etc.

He’s also very observant about me, to the degree that he literally knows me better than I know myself (I’m autistic and masked well my entire life until I immigrated to a new country and could really get weird without anyone stopping me). I tend to not care about things being right for me as long as they’re not wrong wrong. He’s noticed foods I don’t really like, routines I’m not aware of, and he is stupid good at turning me on (I tried lots of different phrasings here, I’m sorry it still sounds ick).

He DMs in dnd, and he’s so good at it. I tried dming once and realized that it was the equivalent of using your weekends to train for a marathon vs doing beer league soccer (dming vs being a PC). I just don’t want to work that hard while having fun. He has no issue keeping track of dozens of plot hooks or stat blocks and he incorporates new information from the PCs into his story as he goes. I don’t think it’s possible to be a really good DM without being smart (or at least about as smart as the players, and we’ve played with some pretty smart people and with kids, who are wayyy more creative/hard to predict than adults).

I want to go on, but at some point, he’d feel like this is TMI, so I’ll stop now.

I always looked for partners who were academically talented first (well, first for intelligence, I do think kindness is more important), and I’m so glad I was open to people who don’t make that their whole shtick, because I don’t deserve a husband this wonderful.

I got a perfect score on my SATs and I’m in my mid thirties and working in a bakery (not as a baker, I just sell bread and clean. It’s lovely).

Granted, it’s part time while I get a master’s degree, but I’ll be working 20 hours a week for mediocre pay when I finish, teaching adult language/integration courses for new immigrants.

Intelligence and ambition aren’t necessarily related, though obviously you get farther if you get good grades. Ambition is correlated with studying, diligence, and focus, so it tends to lead to higher SAT scores.

The difference between saying “you’ve been brainwashed” and “we’re all constantly subject to propaganda which affects all of our perceptions and none of us is immune” is very large. In the former, we eventually get to a conversation where I aggressively overshare and you reveal nothing, as below. In the latter, we could have kept it impersonal and talked about the nature of the propaganda affecting us.

My perceptions come from a combination of my experiences and beliefs, not more subject to brainwashing than anyone else.

The experiences that led to this belief were probably the multiple body parts my mother lost during my childhood (a decade of aggressive cancer and more aggressive treatment). A certain kind of pragmatism was instilled in me about what you actually need to keep going, and why that’s important (also we’re all autistic, which almost certainly has something to do with our attitudes about this).

So yes, some people have an altered sense of self after a bad haircut, but I do not. My head has been shaved and worn every type of mullet (I grow it out and then buzz it to donate every couple of years).

I once had a broken orbital, which made it painful to smile. I am a smiley person, so it was an adjustment (which means brain changes), but I started flaring my nostrils to my friends instead as an inside joke, and retained all of my smiliness after the orbital healed(not personality changes). I have had a pact with my sisters that we’ll get a mastectomy the second we have a tumor since before I had breasts, and I will keep it without hesitation. Hell, if my sisters both got breast cancer, that might be enough without my own symptoms (they’re older than I am, so I tend to get their health issues on a delay).

Perhaps a finger would make me a more withdrawn person, there’s no way to know until it happens. I don’t think I’d suffer significant long term personality changes though.

You’re just coming on a little strong with saying I’m wrong and brainwashed for being open to multiple perspectives on something for which there are multiple perspectives. I’m talking about what parts of a person give a person their personality, in their own and in the eyes of others.

I agree that some parts of a brain are unnecessary for this: Alzheimer’s isn’t suspected the second it starts affecting the brain. I believe this is also certainly true of some parts of the body (hairs and skin cells). Therefore, I believe there’s a critical mass of body and brain that is required in varying compositions for different people.

In a violinist, the finger might affect how they are able to express themselves in a way that changes their personality. It might also make any given non-violinist more withdrawn, insecure, or wary, but it might not. It would absolutely affect anyone’s brain, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to affecting their personality.

Is there a scientific consensus on the location of the sense of self? I ask because I’m approaching this as a philosophical perspective problem, and as I alluded, am not convinced by either side, but you don’t seem to be approaching it like that.

You can lose a lot of body parts and still maintain your sense of self (in fact, you’re constantly losing hair and skin cells without even noticing it), but taking drugs that change your brain chemistry the right way predictably leads to ego death.

I don’t know that I’m convinced, but that feels like a strong argument to me. I’m having trouble putting into words what I actually believe about the residence of the self, but I hope this is clear.

I think the self is a quorum of mind and body. It’s not specifically in a bodily location, but it exists as long as enough of the brain and body are functioning and together. If some parts are missing, it’s slightly different, but it’s still legitimately the self. When there isn’t a quorum, there’s still the potential for a sense of self, but it will be different.

If I lose a finger (due to infection or something non-traumatizing in itself), it would probably suck immensely, but not change my personality to the degree that people who know me would think of me as a different person before and after. If I lost part of my tongue, it might (I’m a passionate linguist; for an equally passionate violinist, it might be a different story). If I lost both legs and a hand, I think I would go through some immense personality changes that would make those who know me think I was a different person before.

He appeals to the billionaire voting bloc. They have small numbers (larger than I’d like) of direct votes, but for some reason, they sway elections.

It sounds like she’d either be very good or very bad on a podcast.

I’m from the US and I live in Germany, studying German (nothing to do with English). I once had a professor who was from 12 miles away from me and who went to the elementary school my mother taught at.

Imgur is just shitty; try reopening it. I get that message when I make the cookie selection, but once my preferences are saved, a reopen works.

And because it uses spoilers, when I click it to collapse the comment, it just expands

I’d say that everyone (except those on north sentinel island) is affected by Abraham or Ur, not just those from abrahamic religions/regions where abrahamic religions are common. Right now there’s significant global tension because of a religious conflict between abrahamic religions (which affects global trade and geopolitics), and going back over the last half millennium, Christianity was a huge driver in colonialism. Basically everywhere has a seven day week with Saturday and/or Sunday as the common free day for limited service institutions (government/banking type places) too.

Do you see it on lemmy? I’ve never encountered this and it feels weird to say that you’re combatting hypocrisy when you’re not in the arena in which it actually takes place.