Not an Actual Critic

@thecurioustales Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said it best: "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience"

🚨 The most dangerous discovery in human history would be understanding what we actually are. Every consciousness researcher faces the same terrifying possibility: we might not be what we think we are at all. The evidence has been accumulating for decades, but science keeps burying it under technical jargon and statistical noise. Near death experiences where patients with flatlined brains describe surgical procedures happening floors away. Remote viewing experiments producing results that would revolutionize physics if they happened in particle accelerators instead of psychology labs. The Global Consciousness Project detecting coordinated patterns in random number generators worldwide during major events, as if human attention creates measurable effects in physical systems. But the most unsettling data comes from quantum mechanics itself. The measurement problem reveals that particles exist in superposition until consciousness collapses the wave function. Without conscious observers, reality never actualizes from possibility into definite states. Information theorists have calculated that the universe requires conscious observation to transform potential into experience. We're not biological machines that evolved awareness. We're conscious beings temporarily animating physical forms. Think of it as cosmic method acting. You've been playing your character so convincingly that you've forgotten you're performing. The body, the personality, the entire human storyline feels absolutely real while you're immersed in the role. But what if you stepped back from the performance and remembered what you actually are underneath? The brain isn't generating consciousness any more than a television generates the signal it receives. It's a reducing valve, filtering infinite awareness down to the narrow bandwidth a physical nervous system can process. This explains why meditators who suppress brain activity report expanded awareness rather than diminished consciousness. Less neural interference allows more of the signal through. Ancient traditions understood this completely. They described reality as a drama where souls temporarily forget their true nature to experience limitation, separation, and physical existence. The forgetting is intentional. Without it, the drama couldn't function. But now science is accidentally rediscovering what mystics always knew. Consciousness studies are proving that individual minds are expressions of something vast and unified. Telepathy experiments show information transmission beyond known physical mechanisms. Studies of identical twins separated at birth reveal behavioral synchronicities that suggest non-local connection between minds. The emerging picture is radical: individual consciousness is like a wave that thinks it's separate from the ocean. The sense of being an isolated self inside a biological machine is the fundamental illusion holding physical reality together. And that illusion is starting to crack. As more minds recognize their true nature, the collective agreement maintaining consensus reality begins destabilizing. When enough actors remember they're performing, the entire production faces collapse. Maybe this explains why consciousness research progresses so slowly despite massive funding and brilliant minds working on it. Every major breakthrough gets explained away, buried in academic journals, or dismissed as anomalous data. The universe seems to have built in protection mechanisms against too much self awareness happening too quickly. Consider what would actually happen if consciousness got solved completely. If we proved definitively that minds are temporary expressions of eternal awareness, that death is simply changing costumes between acts, that reality is a shared lucid dream we're collectively constructing moment by moment. The implications would shatter every human institution. Economics depends on scarcity and survival fears. Politics depends on tribal identity and conflict. Religion depends on mystery and authority. Education depends on the assumption that knowledge accumulates in biological storage systems called brains. All of it collapses once we remember we're immortal beings playing temporary roles in an infinite drama. This might be why the mystery stays mysterious. The cosmic drama depends on the actors staying in character. Wake up too many performers at once, and you don't get enlightenment. You get the end of the show. Some truths are too dangerous for reality to survive knowing them. But the research continues anyway, creeping closer to the revelation that could either transform human civilization or dissolve it entirely. The question isn't whether we'll solve consciousness. The question is whether reality can handle the solution.

@aakashgupta And those images would make great thousand-piece puzzles.

The math on this project should mass-humble every AI lab on the planet. 1 cubic millimeter. One-millionth of a human brain. Harvard and Google spent 10 years mapping it. The imaging alone took 326 days. They sliced the tissue into 5,000 wafers each 30 nanometers thick, ran them through a $6 million electron microscope, then needed Google’s ML models to stitch the 3D reconstruction because no human team could process the output. The result: 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, compressed into 1.4 petabytes of raw data. For context, 1.4 petabytes is roughly 1.4 million gigabytes. From a speck smaller than a grain of rice. Now scale that. The full human brain is one million times larger. Mapping the whole thing at this resolution would produce approximately 1.4 zettabytes of data. That’s roughly equal to all the data generated on Earth in a single year. The storage alone would cost an estimated $50 billion and require a 140-acre data center, which would make it the largest on the planet. And they found things textbooks don’t contain. One neuron had over 5,000 connection points. Some axons had coiled themselves into tight whorls for completely unknown reasons. Pairs of cell clusters grew in mirror images of each other. Jeff Lichtman, the Harvard lead, said there’s “a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.” This is why the next step isn’t a human brain. It’s a mouse hippocampus, 10 cubic millimeters, over the next five years. Because even a mouse brain is 1,000x larger than what they just mapped, and the full mouse connectome is the proof of concept before anyone attempts the human one. We’re building AI systems that loosely mimic neural networks while still unable to fully read the wiring diagram of a single cubic millimeter of the thing we’re trying to imitate. The original is 1.4 petabytes per millionth of its volume. Every AI model on Earth fits in a fraction of that. The brain runs on 20 watts and fits in your skull. The data center required to merely describe one-millionth of it would span 140 acres.

She deserves an Oscar award for this 😭😭😭😭

@GeorgeRoush What if he hadn't been very well-behaved?

Left the door open at my old house. A field mouse snuck in and became trapped in the sink. He was very well behaved so I gave him a few pieces of ramen and carried him back out to the woods. Came back later and he was sitting on my doorstep waiting for me. I swear, every mammal wants to be domesticated.

@Shadaya_Knight Ask Dr. Zhivago's wife about all that

After Titanic the movie, The Notebook is another movie that is hyped as this great love story. It's beloved everywhere, but is it really a movie to be celebrated? Here's the plot; A girl falls in love with a guy her family doesn’t approve of She eventually leaves him, moves on, gets engaged to a good man Then she runs back into the ex So she cheats on her man Calls it “true love.” Women all over love this move Now flip the genders; A man: Leaves a woman who loves him. Gets engaged to another woman. Cheats on his fiancée with his ex. “Follows his heart.” That movie would be canceled, boycotted, and used in think-pieces for decades about how movies perpetuate misogyny Same behavior Different framing Totally different judgment So when people say “it’s romantic,” what they really mean is - it's okay for a woman to cheat

@TheUnaButters To be clear, I am not saying that Kathleen Kennedy is responsible for ANYTHING. Except for, allegedly, making a phone call.

@TheUnaButters ...ignored the law and three people died in a helicopter accident. (per Steven Spielberg A Biography - Joseph Mcbride, 1997)

>Michael Crichton wrote the novel to Jurassic Park >Michael Crichton wrote the screen play to Jurassic Park >John Williams made the score to Jurassic Park >Steven Spielberg Directed Jurassic Park >Stan Winston made the Practical Effects >ILM did the CGI But Kathleen Kennedy "made" Jurassic Park

@LivingLyer To be clear, I am not saying that Kathleen Kennedy is responsible for ANYTHING. Except for, allegedly, making a phone call.

WAIT! SHE WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE HELICOPTER DISASTER FROM 'Twilight Zone the Movie'?!? Man screw her and her enablers, Disney should've kicked her out years ago! 🤬💢

@9mmsmg Sex scenes can set tone. If I'm watching a crime drama and see a nipple in the first act I know the main character could maybe get departed in the third.

Movies really don't need sex scenes. I'm not even going to come at this from a morality stance either. They just do nothing for the movie and destroy the flow. No one is sitting there going, "Wow, this random dark four minute sex scene really made the movie." Instead, it's just two people being paid to have pretend sex on camera. It's like having a commercial in the middle of a movie. Who is really excited about it?

@FilmUpdates Weird ass list. There wasn't even a movie released called Best Wishes For All. Ever. There was a movie title Best Wished TO All that was released in Japan in 2022 and the US in 2023. Neither of those are 2025, you may notice.

Rolling Stone lists the 20 Best Movies of 2025 20. Weapons 19. Frankenstein 18. Caught by the Tides 17. The Phoenician Scheme 16. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl 15. Orwell: 2+2=5 14. Best Wishes for All 13. Universal Language 12. Eddington 11. Peter Hujar’s Day 10. Sentimental Value 9. Marty Supreme 8. Sorry, Baby 7. No Other Choice 6. It Was Just an Accident 5. Nouvelle Vague 4. Train Dreams 3. Black Bag 2. Hamnet 1. One Battle After Another (Source: rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-m…)

This character's first name is Ta, isn't it?

@CantEverDie Yeah, she's doing okay

rightwingers forcing sydney sweeny into far right memes is so funny like what a perfect way to unintentionally destroy her acting career forever

@JoedeNada @TheStingisBack Haha! Eventually, one of the monkeys will produce that AI video for sure!

A little factoid to celebrate 83 years of Casablanca! Humphrey Bogart was a master chess player and a tournament director for the US Chess Federation. The game Rick plays on-screen in Casablanca was based on a real-life game Bogie was playing by mail while he was shooting the film.

There's a parallel universe in which Brandon Sklenar starred as Maximus's son in a different version of Gladiator 2 and it was the best duology in film history.

Name you favourite Sam Neill role...

"Well, does he have a name or should I call him 'lawyer'?" RIP Udo Kier