july 2020
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    For many people with Dissociative conditions such as Maladaptive Daydreaming, your own brain can do this to you. Maladaptive dreamers regularly become entirely lost in their own vivid daydreams for minutes, hours, or longer. It sounds awesome, but the huge downside is how highly addictive it is. That, and it doesn't always happen when you want. When a regular person gets distracted by a daydream on the job it lowers their concentration. When a Maladaptive daydreams they can get totally lost in their own world for so long and so deeply that they flat out lose that job because they spent half of it liberating the One Ring from Skeletor. It isn't clear what causes Maladaptive Daydreaming, but anecdotes range from oppressive boredom during a long chidhood illness to 'just born this way'.

    Philosopher Robert Nozick conceived of one of these in a discussion about utilitarianism. To this day Lotus Eater Machines are sometimes known as Nozick.

    For decades the Moral Guardians argued that television was one of these. But luckily we've been saved from TV's addictive effects by the Internet. Hopefully we can be weaned off the internet when virtual reality kicks off to full speed.

    This is essentially what computer virtualization is from the perspective of the operating system running on top of the virtual hardware. The guest OS and apps running therein don't "know" that they aren't running on physical hardware. its Network card? Emulated. The disk it boots from? Just another file on a real computer. RAM? An isolated section of a larger system's physical memory that can be dynamically expanded or shrunk as necessary. Everything it thinks it knows is a lie! Mwahahahaha! 

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rcvrd jan 2021