Lucretius in De Rerum Natura in 50 BCE seemed to have a few that were just a bit ahead of everyone else, owed to the Greek philosopher Epicurus.

Survival of the fittest (book 5):

"In the beginning, there were many freaks. Earth undertook Experiments - bizarrely put together, weird of look Hermaphrodites, partaking of both sexes, but neither; some Bereft of feet, or orphaned of their hands, and others dumb, Being devoid of mouth; and others yet, with no eyes, blind. Some had their limbs stuck to the body, tightly in a bind, And couldn’t do anything, or move, and so could not evade Harm, or forage for bare necessities. And the Earth made Other kinds of monsters too, but in vain, since with each, Nature frowned upon their growth; they were not able to reach The flowering of adulthood, nor find food on which to feed, Nor be joined in the act of Venus.

For all creatures need Many different things, we realize, to multiply And to forge out the links of generations: a supply Of food, first, and a means for the engendering seed to flow Throughout the body and out of the lax limbs; and also so The female and the male can mate, a means they can employ In order to impart and to receive their mutual joy.

Then, many kinds of creatures must have vanished with no trace Because they could not reproduce or hammer out their race. For any beast you look upon that drinks life-giving air, Has either wits, or bravery, or fleetness of foot to spare, Ensuring its survival from its genesis to now."

Trait inheritance from both parents that could skip generations (book 4):

“Sometimes children take after their grandparents instead, Or great-grandparents, bringing back the features of the dead. This is since parents carry elemental seeds inside – Many and various, mingled many ways – their bodies hide Seeds that are handed, parent to child, all down the family tree. Venus draws features from these out of her shifting lottery – Bringing back an ancestor’s look or voice or hair. Indeed These characteristics are just as much the result of certain seed As are our faces, limbs and bodies. Females can arise From the paternal seed, just as the male offspring, likewise, Can be created from the mother’s flesh. For to comprise A child requires a doubled seed – from father and from mother. And if the child resembles one more closely than the other, That parent gave the greater share – which you can plainly see Whichever gender – male or female – that the child may be.”

Objects of different weights will fall at the same rate in a vacuum (book 2):

“Whatever falls through water or thin air, the rate Of speed at which it falls must be related to its weight, Because the substance of water and the nature of thin air Do not resist all objects equally, but give way faster To heavier objects, overcome, while on the other hand Empty void cannot at any part or time withstand Any object, but it must continually heed Its nature and give way, so all things fall at equal speed, Even though of differing weights, through the still void.”

Often I see people dismiss the things the Epicureans got right with an appeal to their lack of the scientific method, which has always seemed a bit backwards to me. In hindsight, they nailed so many huge topics that didn’t end up emerging again for millennia that it was surely not mere chance, and the fact that they successfully hit so many nails on the head without the hammer we use today indicates (at least to me) that there’s value to looking closer at their methodology.

“If you can’t beat 'em, join 'em.”

Gravity is where the whole continuous singularities are, so yeah.

Using a rubber band around the lid of a jar to open it effortlessly.

On a vacation when I was a teenager I taught my younger sibling the “SYN/ACK” game.

They still remember the TCP stack handshake protocol including resets and acks years later.

Quantum mechanics and relativity are, at least currently, incompatible theories. Relativity depends on continuous things, which is why it has singularities and what not. But quantum mechanics has minimum discrete units that don’t play nice with gravity and relativity.

Also, it’s still an open debate as to whether quantum mechanics is applicable to all sizes of things. There’s some consequences around that being the case and it’s one of the suggestions for an assumption resolving recent paradoxes around incompatibilities between the theory and our expectations for behaviors. If it does apply to larger objects, the consequences are basically that either there’s no free will and superderminism is true or else that quanta don’t actually exist until observed.

In fact, currently we haven’t been able to observe quantum behavior in anything large enough to measure gravitational effects from. Which may be where a fundamental limit exists, given the incompatibility between relativity and QM.

Relativity only relates to the relative shape of spacetime and movement through it.

So for example, things occurring faster for one inertial frame vs another, or something being closer to an observer moving quickly than for one stationary.

It’s exclusive to the combination of spacetime curvature and one’s momentum within it.

How do you think relativity does explain it?

That wouldn’t explain why the two results end up not agreeing sometimes.

I agree that it relates to how the observer entangles with the system, but you see this kind of error class occurring in net code all the time.

Player 1 shoots an enemy around the same time as player 2. Player 1 has a locally rendered resolution to the outcome of having killed the enemy and gets awarded the xp, and player 2 has the same result.

The server has to decide if it is going to let both local clients be correct or resolve in a way that reverses the outcome for one of the clients. For things that don’t really matter, it lets both be correct.

Here, each individual outcome is basically Bell’s paradox, where we know there needs to be consistent results no matter how each observer behaves. But in this case, when a second layer of abstraction is added, the results are capable of disagreeing.

It looks very similar to a sync error, and relativity doesn’t in any way explain it.

Like sync errors?

Information that we are in one would appear in weird ways? Like maybe side effects of simulating a continuous universe in a calculable way which would require quantization, but would leave the universe with a seemingly incompatible framework of continuous macro behavior (such as general relativity) and discrete behavior (such as quantum mechanics)?

There’s an amazing book about all this, called, The Gnostic Religion, by the philosopher Hans Jonas.

People should be aware that this book is severely out of date.

In 1998 the book Rethinking Gnosticism started a process of self-reflection over past work in scholarship and people started to realize they had their head up their asses with tautological thinking around Gnosticism based on significant propaganda from the church.

Here’s Princeton’s Elaine Paigels (author of The Gnostic Gospels) on the subject from an email debate years after this:

The earliest editors of “Gnostic” texts thought that they were dualistic, escapist, nihilistic, involving “esoteric ideas about aeons and demiurges,” as you yourself write. As my former teacher at Harvard, Krister Stendhal, said to me recently about these texts, “we just thought these were weird.” But can you point to any evidence of such “esoteric ideas” in Thomas? Anything about “aeons and demiurges”? Those first editors, not finding such evidence, assumed that this just goes to show how sneaky heretics are-they do not say what they mean. So when they found no evidence for such nihilism or dualism-on the contrary, the Gospel of Thomas speaks continually of God as the One good “Father of all”-they just read these into the text. Some scholars, usually those not very familiar with these sources, still do. So first let’s talk about “Gnosticism”-and what I used to (but no longer) call “Gnostic Gospels.” I have to take responsibility for part of the misunderstanding. Having been taught that these texts were “Gnostic,” I just accepted it, and even coined the term “Gnostic gospels,” which became the title of my book. I agree with you that we have no evidence for what we call “Gnosticism” from the first century, and have learned from our colleagues that what we thought about “Gnosticism” has virtually nothing to do with a text like the Gospel of Thomas-or, for that matter, with the New Testament Gospel of John which our teachers said also showed “Gnostic influences.”

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The history of what was actually going on and how the ideas developed is pretty interesting to follow.

The long and short is you had proto-Gnostic ideas like found in Thomas which introduced duality as a solution to the Epicurean argument that naturalist origins of life meant that there was no afterlife. Essentially, even if the world was the product of Lucretius’s evolution and not intelligent design, as long as eventually that physical world would be recreated in non-physical form, the curse of a soul depending on a body would be broken. It suggests that we already are in that copy.

The problem was that by the second century Epicureanism was falling from favor and there was a resurgence of Platonist ideals, where for Plato the perfect form was an immaterial ‘form’ followed by an imperfect physical version and worst of all a copy of the physical. Through that lens, the original proto-Gnostic concept became that we were in the least worthwhile form of existence.

So in parallel to the rise of Neoplatonism you see things like Valentinian Gnosticism emerge which takes the proto-Gnostic recreator of a naturalist original world and flips it to the corrupter of a perfect world of forms. It goes from agent of salvation saving us from death due to dependence on physical bodies to a being that trapped us in physical form.

This debate and conversation goes all the way back to 1 Corinthians 15 where you can see Paul discussing the difference between a physical body and a spiritual one, and the claim that it’s physical first and spiritual second, not the other way around. (And indeed, that was the early heretical point of view, but where it differed from Paul was the idea that we were already in the second version and he was arguing we were still in the first.)

So you are correct that certain later groups previously lumped together as ‘Gnostics’ believed there was a version of Plato’s demiurge that corrupted pure forms into corrupted physical embodiments, and it’s great you are aware it’s not a monolith - but people should have a heads up if they start following up on your source that views on the subject changed dramatically around the start of the 21st century and are still evolving.

Actually, they didn’t mention any specific diagnosis. And you might want to read their post and history more closely, such as this line above:

I read that this is likely because the disease finally reached the part of the brainstem that controls breathing, and that if it gets worse, it may be fatal.

It really looks like OP is coming to their own conclusions by what they are reading online, not by what they are being told by a neurologist based on exam and tests, and is then being driven further into a spiral of seeing the condition as inescapable because they’ve convinced themselves of a worst case scenario.

This is probably exacerbated by their comments in the past of having normal test results and feeling dismissed by their neurologists in spite of their symptoms, which as I said is not all that uncommon. Most neurologists that don’t specialize in functional neurology don’t handle patients well that have normal test results, and may not even be familiar with the more recent research regarding functional neurological disorders.

Someone close to me is a neurologist who specializes in functional neurology, so I hear a lot about frustrations regarding the ways in which patients with normal tests but abnormal symptoms can be dismissed and feel unheard by their general neurologists, hence my recommendation OP seek out a subspecialist.

But the more pressing issue is that OP’s progress in their post history is very alarming with a number of red flags for potential self-harm in the near future (such as “hey Lemmy, how can I leave a permanent record for when I’m gone in a day”), which is especially frustrating given that what they have going on is likely treatable and their self-diagnosis and prognosis is unlikely to be agreed upon by a medical professional without positive test results, which they previously said they didn’t have.

Have your neurologists agreed with your estimate of impending doom, or is this a conclusion you have come to on your own?

Disturbance in sleep breathing such as you are describing could be as simple as sleep apnea which is fixable.

In your previous post it seemed like the way you discussed your relationship with neurology was that the institution failed you and that you had come to your own conclusions regarding your issues being the brain stem, and mentioning new symptoms of breathing issues as being why you thought your time was limited but not indicating this was feedback you were getting from your doctors.

My concern is that the language you are using in describing your situation has progressed over the past month to the point you are now describing your fears about further progression as a top concern in combination with your fatalism around the ultimate outcome of what you have going on, even desiring a way to leave a lasting mark in only one day from now, which seems very alarming in that you might try to take matters into your own hands.

That may end up killing you quite unnecessarily when your issues, particularly the latest symptom, may not be as intractable as you think.

You’d mentioned before that the tests performed by the neurologists all came back as normal. This disconnect between symptoms and tests isn’t uncommon, and you might want to look into finding a neurologist that specializes in functional disorders - if that’s what is going on it can be treatable but the longer it goes on without treatment the more difficult it is to treat.

In any case, you absolutely should not be self-determining prognosis without it coming from a medical professional, and should never take matters into your own hands based on a self-determined prognosis. If your doctors have only given you a short time to live, so be it - but I get a strong sense given the progression of what you’ve said in your posts to date that this isn’t the case and you may be in life-threatening danger from your brain, but not in the way you think.

TL;DR: Do your neurologists agree that your recent breathing issues mean you are likely to die soon?