>your senses are the only way to interface with reality

This is technically true.

>and if you can't sense it it's not there

This is where it gets crazy.

What I find interesting about this is that you never actually have direct access to your senses. For example things in the corners of your vision are fabricated by your mind based on assumptions. See optical illusions. So anyone suggesting that things outside of your senses are not real should first accept that your senses as presented to your conscious mind are not even necessarily 'real'.

In fact your entire reality is fabricated by your mind which is making an internal model of the external world at all times (except when you are sleeping). You only ever see the model never the material world directly.

This is why science is so important. By observing things in controlled environments over and over from many perspectives we can build a more accurate picture of the material world than our senses would normally allow. In addition through the process of replication we can find a model of reality that we can all agree on.

Your senses in the most raw form your body will allow are usually only useful for tasks you evolved to do. Things like reading social cues, catching moving objects and sensing immediate danger.

When people take these senses and intuitions and apply them to complicated things derived from science like electromagnetic radiation (e.g 5G) they break down. But people keep doing it because it feels right, it feels natural. And it is natural just not useful.

For sure these people are quacks, but if you're curious to take the next turn down the rabbit hole, let me seed you.

Even the concept of senses and reality are concepts in your mind and consequences of the model you have accepted as reality. So the problem recurses on itself, too. Can you directly experience your mind? Is the feeling of your mind delivered to you through a sense you haven't realized is a sense yet? Can you trust that sense? Total radical skepticism lies below that. But it's only logical. You can't escape that tarpit at the bottom. Or maybe it's the screen isn't there for anything to be projected onto?

So we have to rebuild from what we can sense, sure. What is repeatable. We must develop an axiom that what is repeatable is real. That what we can understand, the system, the model, the prediction, is real. We believe the planets and stars are real because we can draw maps and pass them between us and furthermore make predictions about where the stars and planets will go based on our mathematical models. But even our models tell us that the world is too huge of a system to compute even the slightest more than the tiniest fraction of a smidgen of it all. We don't even have computers big enough to fold proteins. Yet they do. And what we don't have models for--we can't predict. Is it unreal, then? Where did our axiom go? What is real and isn't? I'm not so sure it's logic that decides that, after all. Because you gotta have faith that them there proteins are getting folded right, because you can't. fucking. check it!

You are over-complicating this. People are not infinitely deep; they have strange loops which make one level of depth look like many levels. Consciousness is a hallucination.

..and Haskell lists cannot be infinitely long?

So, take a second. We don't understand fully how the brain's memory system works. There are some people who have an extreme ability to recall autobiographical details about literally every single day they ever lived. What the weather was like, what clothes they wore, who they talked to, things that happened. That's far beyond most people. But that establishes that clearly the brain has both the capacity and wiring to this at some level, and it can actually be turned on. We only need to be open to the idea that perhaps all brains do this at some level, recording our whole experience at some level of fidelity, below our conscious mind. I say, "at some level of fidelity" because we don't really know how detailed our memories really are. If it was just a heartbeat counter, it would only take 33 bits (!); if it was a transcript of the words we spoke, it would fit in less than 100mb. Of course it is probably not a full dump of any kind, but a patchwork of cross-referenced, reinforced, compressed, maybe slightly damaged things. Sometimes just emotions. It really doesn't matter what format it is, because the following will always be true.

At some point in your life, there will come a "midpoint" where more you have already experienced more before that point than you will afterwards.

Before the midpoint, there are still more events in your future than in your past, so you are fundamentally not capable of imagining all the future events--not only their nature, but the weight of their existence. The fidelity of your memories really doesn't matter here; you cannot fully appreciate 20 years of experience when you have lived only 10.

After the midpoint, one of two things is true:

Either,

1. We cannot remember all of the details about our lives. We have a radically simplified and compressed form which pales in comparison to the real moment-to-moment experience (i.e. low resolution). 2. We can remember all of the details about our lives (i.e. high resolution), but we don't have enough time left to replay them all in full quality.

Either way, our past life, in its full glory, is beyond our capacity to imagine.

So that means before the midpoint and after the midpoint it is subjectively infinite; there is always more, even in our own experiences, than we can experience or re-experience.

And that's just our own minds! If we aren't completely solipistic and believe all the rest of this vastly complicated world really does exist, then its doubly infinite, because every time we learn something new about how it works, we have to reimagine and reinterpret the complexities of the past with the new information. Like learning about people. Sometimes you seem them do things that make no sense; only when you get to know them later do you understand why they might have done that, and what they might have been thinking. Or looking at an old photograph you see someone you didn't know then but know now, and the past is even more detailed and rich than what you knew.

So I don't know who told you that consciousness is a hallucination, and that it must be meaningless and trite. Maybe they just lived a boring life, because TBH you're missing a hell of a good show as this whole thing unfolds.

Try LSD sometime.

I thought this was going to be a small 5G jammer.

In 2013 someone was jamming GPS signals near the London Stock Exchange's data center [1]. The Economist's expert believes it was a truck driver evading employer tracking.

My best guess is it was high frequency traders being shady.

[1] https://www.economist.com/international/2013/07/27/out-of-si...

Of course a 5G jammer would do so by emitting even more powerful 5G frequency signals, but I don't suppose that would occur to anyone believing this rubbish.

> Do people actually believe this nonsense?

Yes. I have moved past thinking we need to protect people from this kind of thing. If they believe it, let them buy it. The only harm their ignorance is doing is to themselves. They might even get some kind of placebo reassurance from it.

The problem is this came up because this device was recommended at a town council meeting. The representative even argued for the town getting a device to protect the whole area, so this is far beyond just a private issue. Also there have been several cases of these people damaging or destroying 5G equipment, which is infrastructure the public rely on and ultimately pay for (through fees, regulatory costs, etc).

In fairness, there are reasons [1] to be skeptical of 5G other than "it's a witch" or whatever the new theory is.

I think these people have a vague anxiety that new technologies do not further their interests, because every time a new one comes out it is used to depress wages or surveil people. They don't know enough about technology to formulate a sane objection, so they latch on to "5G is evil black magic."

Remember, for a lot of people in the world most technologies are magic.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/the-...

I don’t think that stands up. If they are distrustful of technology in general, how come they are ok with quantum nano time dilation beneficial frequency mumbo jumbo?

Some people have always been susceptible to quackery, there seems to be something seductive about the idea that you’ve found a wonderful solution the mainstream have rejected or don’t understand. I don’t think fringe claptrap is somewhere faulty logic leads them to, I think it’s the destination they are attracted to and the pretext they latch on to doesn’t matter that much.

> there are reasons [1] to be skeptical of 5G

Not there.

The claim is not supported by the article you cite. The article uses a lot of words about "security" but the truth is 5G has no worse security compared to 2G 3G etc.

The claims about 5G in China "used for surveillance" from the article are also false, as China started installing 5G equipment just very recently, like a few months ago, and the number of 5G-capable phones in China is minimal. Whatever they needed for "surveillance" they could have used the older technologies just as well.

Edit: To answer "Is your point..." question below: neither nor, to both of your constructs. The article simply doesn't support its major claim, because all the "problems" they cite (security, surveillance) are completely not specific to 5G, and their claims of existing relation to 5G technology are obviously false, just as I wrote.

Is your point that the New Yorker missed risks you do find meaningful, or that everything they pointed out is not meaningful to you and therefore 5G must be loved by all?

Either way, it misses the point of my comment.

I'm not advocating for eradicating stupid ideas to protect fools; but sometimes fools do very stupid things, and they don't just hurt themselves. See: the 5G arsons in the UK.

Well, prosecute them for arson. If they want to spend hundreds of pounds on a stick that's their business. All we can try and do is contain stupidity.

> The only harm their ignorance is doing is to themselves.

Is it? People might hurt their kids etc by not vaccinating them. And if enough people believe this nonsense, they are very prone to voting for other idiots, which should have an effect on all of us.

> It sounds like the kind of thing that Russell Brand was wittering about a couple of years ago - that your senses are the only way to interface with reality, and if you can't sense it it's not there,

Can you post a source for this? I listened to a few bits of Brand over the years, and on this subject he'd say that there's a lot more reality out there, but humans are simply unaware of it due to our limited human senses. Nothing non obvious or controversial.

> Do people actually believe this nonsense? It sounds like the kind of thing that Russell Brand was wittering about a couple of years ago

Probably.

My mum was a New-Age type, so I grew up with homeopathic pills explicitly labelled as “sodium chloride”, “silicon dioxide”, and “titanium dioxide”, while being told my brother and I were “typical” for our astrological star signs. She was big on dowsing with wands and pendulums and thought crystals had personalities and could jump out of your hand. When I was young she expressed sadness that my older brother no longer believed in chakras, and the last time she met my (now ex) girlfriend, she expressed sadness to her that I didn’t believe in Orgone energy. She was also taking Bach flower remedies for memory right up until she got Alzheimer’s.

Sorry to hear about your mum getting Alzheimer's and not getting proper treatment.

While everything else (crystals etc) is bull I'd like to point out to readers that chakras have some utility. When meditating they are good positions to focus on and can make it easier to drop your thoughts. Also if you pay attention to your emotions in your body they often occur at these points. I assume they were derived from this internal observation of emotions and then people expanded them to include all sorts of higher unsubstantiated theories.

Ooo, slight misunderstanding: since she got a diagnosis, the rest of us have been making sure she gets proper treatment.

I was just trying to illustrate how convinced she was by her magic potions.

And sure, I’ll agree any focus for meditation is cool regardless of what it is, but she thought it was a bit more than that.

Ohh sorry, glad to hear she is getting proper treatment.

I understand what you were getting at just thought I'd give my 2c about chakras because I thought some people would bundle them in with healing crystals when they can be separated out as tools for meditation.

this sounds like a proper novel!

Table salt, sand, and food-grade white pigment respectively.

Also: Sorry you went through that decline at the end. :'(

> table salt, sand, and food-grade white pigment

But it's often not in dangerous quantities, because homeopathy believes that the less of something is present somewhere it works better, and it's called "dynamization" or "potentization" by the producers, diluting the material sometimes to the point that in thousands of sold pills, counted together, there can't be more than one single molecule! The process then practically guarantees that there aren't dangerous substances in the pill or "solution". Heh.

The "less potent" pills or solutions can actually have some amounts of the stuff named on them, beware of those.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathic_dilutions

"24X 12C 10−24 Has a 60% probability of containing one molecule of original material if one mole of the original substance was used."

"26X 13C 10−26 If pure water were used as the diluent, no molecules of the original solution remain in the water."

Edit: regarding the 5G issue, an article where about Glastonbury Town Council report, where the 5G USB "solution" was mentioned by "Non-Councillor Advisory Committee Member" (I have no idea what that means):

https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/news/health/5g-coronavirus-bi...

> the 5G USB "solution" was mentioned by "Non-Councillor Advisory Committee Member" (I have no idea what that means)

I understand that the Council set up a 5G Advisory Committee, and the person mentioning these anti-5G USB sticks is a member of the advisory committee but isn't an elected councillor.

Beyond that, the stuff is often badly made and might accidentally have much larger amounts. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hundreds-of-babie...

> homeopathy believes that the less of something is present somewhere it works better, and it's called "dynamization" or "potentization" by the producers, diluting the material

Did you hear about the homeopath that died of an overdose? He forgot to take his pills.

>Do people actually believe this nonsense?

people shove pebbles into their vaginas, of course they believe in 5G usb tr^^transmuter

If it interferes with radio transmissions, an fcc (or equivalent for your country) complaint is in order?

It does not; it's a sticker on an USB stick

So I wonder about legality of it - devices that interfere with wireless communications are illegal....so what about a device that says that it does, but in fact it does not? I guess the description is crafted in such a way that it doesn't actually say it interferes, just that it "harmonizes" the fields, whatever that means.

It may potentially be illegal, given that "deliberate interference" is a criminal offence contrary to section 68 of the Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006. [0]

~~~

(1) A person commits an offence if he uses apparatus for the purpose of interfering with wireless telegraphy.

(2) This section applies—

(a) whether or not the apparatus in question is wireless telegraphy apparatus;

...

~~~

Obviously, the "purpose" of the person using the anti-5G USB stick would need to be established. Given the law doesn't mention anything about having any effect on wireless telegraphy, presumably as long as mens rea is established the offence is made out.

There are also other potential offences around consumer misselling, false advertising, etc.

---

[0] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/36/part/3/crosshead...

I assume there's no law in the UK against "harmonising all harmful frequencies into life affirming frequencies" since that's not a real thing.

Laws against false advertising on the other hand...

It's does absorb the field and change its shape.

Not very extensively, but such is life.