When you recall autobiographical memories, how do you perceive them? First person, i.e. from your own perspective, or third person, i.e. from an outside viewpoint?
This is true for me too, but the memories I have in third person are from things I was told/shown I did as a child. So are you sure those early childhood memories are from you?
They might be things other people told me, but I think they were things I told myself. I think the memory faded, becoming just a story in words, and then I reconstructed the memory from that.
"Field vs. Observer: Autobiographical memories can be experienced from different perspectives. Field memories are memories recollected in the original perspective, from a first-person point of view. Observer memories are memories recollected from a perspective outside ourselves, a third-person point of view.[1] Typically, older memories are recollected through an observer perspective,[7] and observer memories are more often reconstructions while field memories are more vivid like copies."
Mostly first person, but strangely, third person for particularly memorable or intense moments? That said, my autobiographical memory is atrocious (I take my family's word for it that I was a child at some point).
I'm kind of the opposite. Have vivid memories of dreams before I had language. I've been married 38 years and have been in charge of keeping my wife's family lore consistent for the last 20. "No Dennis was living in Silver City then." "Oh yeah. That's right."
This is interesting. I would guess that you remember things in third person, if you have an easy time remembering things about other people's lives as if they were your own. Is that accurate?
I worked for a while at the National Archives, and one of the hardest things was having to debunk people’s family lore. Like we’d have old men call us to ask about their Uncle Max who was a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt and who used to tell tales of his daring exploits to his little nephew. The nephew, now an old man, wants to put together a history of Uncle Max only to learn that there were only like a hundred Rough Riders, their Uncle Max was not one of them, and he wasn’t even deployed in Puerto Rico until three years later.
I also once had an old guy call the Archives trying to establish that MacArthur had secretly promoted him and a dozen other guys to Major after a clandestine operation in the Pacific. The story he proceeded to tell me did not have any corroborating evidence in the Archives, but did *exactly* mirror the plot of a Cary Grant movie from 1948. This old guy didn’t give the impression of missing any of his marbles, but I strongly suspect he had subconsciously blended some real events in with the plot of this movie to create a false memory about what he did during the war. Given how stressful and traumatic wartime experiences and memories can be, I think this might be more common than we realize. Maybe this explains Uncle Max’s tall tales, too?
It's actually quite common for people to have false memories of things that didn't happen, that were described to them! Elizabeth Loftus has done a lot of work on this, and this Scientific American article she wrote describes some of their experimental procedures for getting people to make up memories: http://staff.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm
Not the parent poster, but yes, I recall them abstractly and not visualized as either first-person or third-person. I get the meaning of what was said but usually not the exact words used (sometimes not even the language in which it was said) and definitely not voices, I get the "ideas" of the people and objects involved, not a picture of them (though sometimes the relative locations or directions are very strong when relevant to the memory, but again, in an abstract not visualised manner). If I try, I can put a face to the people involved, but that face is from other moments where I know that person, not specifically related to that particular memory. The internal emotional feelings can be quite vivid when recalled though.
To elaborate, the whole question seems a bit confusing to me - to me, the notion of "first-person" or "third-person" applies to e.g. experiencing a dream but for recalling a memory it's an attribute that has no meaning because recalling autobiographical memories for me does not involve "perceiving" them, perhaps an accurate description is like "acknowledging stuff".
I.e. if I now try to recall a specific memorable event (I won't go into personal details but note which details are in the memory and which are not), then I remember that thing happened *right there* in the next room, then I and another person was in that other specific spot, I remember my physical pose and emotions, I remember what I was *looking for* at the moment and the conclusion of what I saw, but not what I saw; there were some other people behind in the room but I have no idea who (I might reconstruct the guest list of that day to get a shortlist of possibilities, but that's not part of that memory), it was the day after Christmas (but not sure which year), I remember some of things that were said to me at that moment but not who told them or how, just their meaning.
I can try to intentionally imagine/fantasize/visualize a memory (which I usually don't) but that's something separate from remembering it, it's something done consciously *after* I've recalled it, and with a full understanding that I'm just making up stuff that I don't remember to something that might be plausible.
Yes. For example, I will usually have a very strong sense of where things were in relation to other things, but It's like I'm remembering a plan map; and for things that I don't have a strong memory of, I get a sense that they are less certain.
I am now trying to recall a parking lot on a camping trip from last year, And i get a very strong notion of where the entrance and exit were, but if I try to recall what cars were in what spaces, the information returns as (about half full with about half trucks) rather than anything visual.
First person, and I also experience books in the first person viewpoint even if the book is written in the third person.
In an informal survey of me and my roommates when we discovered this about how we read, I was always 1st person, one of us was always 3rd person, and one of us it really depended. All three of us were engineers, and one potentially interesting thing is that the most social of us was the one who read things most in the 3rd person and the least social of us (me) was the one who read things most in the 1st person.
Huh! Both you and bagel's comments are interesting!
I've always experienced first person viewpoint in books as no different than someone verbally telling a story. Sure, the person is saying, "I," but it's clearly a *them*-I, clearly not *me,* if that makes sense.
What happens when either / both of you are told a first person story verbally? Like, imagine a friend tells you about the car accident she had while she was driving ("I was on my way to Whole Foods to buy some Yumm Sauce. I was coming down Lincoln at 40 miles per hour when a goose crapped on my windshield right on my side of the car. It hit the wipers, but it just smeared it all around, and then I didn't see the moose coming out of the Whole Foods parking lot...").
Are you picturing yourself inside your friend's body while she's telling the story?
If there are multiple characters in a fiction book that's in third-person, which one is the "camera" you're experiencing in first person viewpoint? Or does it change based on which character's perspective it currently is?
If there's only one major character in the first part of the story it's theirs; if there a few it switches between them (but not between minor characters as well -- most of them will always feel like NPCs). Only if the perspective keeps switching among more than half a dozen characters since the beginning (e.g. Scott's " How deep the rabbit hole goes") do I take a God's-eye view.
BTW, on looking at "How deep the rabbit hole goes" again, I notice it's in the second person, which usually paradoxically makes me *less* likely to take the character's viewpoint than either the first or the third person, even if it's exactly the opposite of what it's intended to do.
First person for most memories. But the further back they go the less 'authentic' they feel. Possibly because they have been reviewed and re-remembered so many times?
I'd agree with that statement. We retell/replay our memories to ourselves and distortions seem to insert themselves in the retelling/replaying. And I discovered much to my chagrin that when I started writing fiction that used autobiographical memories as a jumping off point, I discovered that the fictional embellishments began to overlay the original "clean" memories. I now have to consciously distinguish between what are "clean" memories and fictionally embellished memories.
I guess you mean where the camera is. For me in memories I am always the camera. In fact I would never have thought that there was another way - after all my memories aren’t always something that necessarily involve me as the prime player. That time my friend fell off the bike and broke his arm when I was 12 or the uncle was drunk at a wedding and fell into a table are memories that I saw but where I was a minor character. To recall either would be to recall what I saw from my own eyes.
If my memory instead puts me in a place where the “minds eye” is a camera watching me watching my uncle falling over a table then this wouldn’t be a recall but a reconstruction. And I wouldn’t trust that memory at all.
In dreams I can be first person, third person or (rarely) somebody else entirely.
I didn't realize there could be another way either, until a friend told me all her memories are seen from a third person perspective, complete with a mental reconstruction of how she looked at the time.
Interesting. I'm a first person dreamer as well as first person rememberer. I have a lot of control over my dreaming, and I wonder if that has to do with that first-person sense of self? Any active dreamers out there that dream in the third person?
I actually can't model how a memory could even be felt to be accurate / true * unless it was recalled from inside the body that was experiencing it.
For example, everyone who can see sees things from their own eyes, which are in their skulls and not from floating two feet over their own left shoulder or 20 feet away on the other side of the room. Their "camera" is mounted in their skull, so it's the only option to perceive anything visually and thus form a true* memory of it.
I can vividly *imagine* what I might look like from a perspective outside my body, but, give how often I'm disconcerted by photos of myself, it's clear my imagination isn't as accurate as what I actually remember seeing from my eyes inside my skull.
* with acknowledgment that memories aren't video recordings and that fidelity can devolve over time as people recall the recall, not the event, and thus no memory can ever be trusted to be fully "true / accurate."
My guess is that all memories are reconstructed from models, and even if they look accurate they aren’t actually anyway, and being first person doesn’t alter that either way. Does they seem likely, or are you very confident your memories are perfect like a video recording?
People might memorise things a bit differently, there are different eye witness accounts, but while there’s some room there for slight ambiguity it can be absolutely certain that a third person view is a reconstruction.
By and large I think my memories are accurate if not as clear as a video recording.
...I literally had a footnote disclaimer saying that "...memories aren't video recordings and that fidelity can devolve over time as people recall the recall, not the event, and thus no memory can ever be trusted to be fully "true / accurate."
But since the visual input for a human experience occurs in the eyes, which are on the front of the skull, that would seem to be the "original" feed, as it were, and thus more accurate to the actual experience than a reconstruction which alters the perspective.
Again, our eyes don't float two feet over our own left shoulder, so "remembering" an event from a third person perspective where you could see the back of your own head from two feet taller than you are is in itself automatically inaccurate to what actually happened and what you were seeing.
First person or third person, I think are memories are basically imagined constructs. For instance, I just ran through some memories I have from kindergarten 55 years ago. If I were to give you an offhand answer, I'd say they were pretty vivid visual memories with an audio overlay. But if I try to examine my memories in detail — i.e. pick out the faces of my peers, or remember a scraps of conversation — I cannot see/hear any of the details. It's as if I have abstracted placeholders for my teacher's face, my friends' faces, and what my teacher was saying. The memories *seem* vivid, but when I try to pick out the details, they aren't that vivid. Would I be able to recognize my Kindergarten teacher 55 years later if you put a photograph of her in front of me? I don't know. I don't think I could create a police sketch of her right now. Memory, at least for me, seems to be an abstracted construct that may or may not have much to do with the reality of the situation that I remembered.
This is the experience I have of memories too. It's not that my own, first person perspective contains more or more accurate information about the scene than a hypothetical third person perspective would. I mostly remember the location, the identities of the people talking, and the gist of what they said. Recalling anything more requires a greater effort and I have to draw from multiple memories to recall people's faces (easy) or the colour of the furniture (hard). So, if by some cognitive quirk I would recall these things in third person, I don't think they'd necessarily be more inaccurate than if they were first person.
Sometimes I recall a conclusion I reached, including where I reached it and (approximately) when I reached it, but I no longer remember why/how I reached that conclusion. Would you call that first person or third person? I think's it a mixture of both.
I have aphantasia, so I do not have any visual memories at all. This means they are not first or third person in the sense of asking if the camera viewpoint is my eyes.
But I do have a fairly good memory; it's just that my memory consists of a list of facts, as perceived from my point of view. Does this make it count as first person? Maybe, I suppose, because I would say "I took that action" if I remembered that I took an action. But I would guess that someone who recalled third person autobiographical memories would also say "I took that action"; it's just that in their visual memory they would remember a scene from a third person vantage point.
Because of this, I think that my answer is none of the above. My autobiographical memories are not first nor third person. (Though they do consist of a set of facts that I would later talk about using "I" pronouns.)
I’m convinced aphantasia is more of a quirk in narration about perception than “actual perception”, and that the same is true for many things people say about thinking and perception and stuff like that
I’m hypophantasic, mainly I remember the past as lists of facts. But I have a tiny amount of mainly spatial recall of some key events, and I occasionally have very bad weak mental images.
Because of this and people’s descriptions of it, I’m highly confident visual imagination is a skill to do with developing an actual imagined perception.
There are studies generally that try to show aphantasia isn’t just a lack of meta cognition (ie the visual processing is really not happening rather than just people aren’t aware of it)
For one, that is a priming study, and priming literally is not real. So that isn’t helping. SSC has covered priming studies before I believe. And I looked for replications and didn’t find any
What if what you’re saying is aphantasia is just not having “vivid hallucinations” (in general I don’t think any of the ideas in this debate are real, honestly), and everyone has “mild imagery” for imagination, and there’s just a lot of confusion in communicating it? That’s probably not exactly true but I sure can’t distinguish that from what’s happening with the idea of aphantasia
Just to be clear, as someone with aphantasia, I have no mental visual imagery whatsoever. I do not experience "mild imagery" nor any imagery of any kind while awake, unless I'm looking with my eyes.
I like the challenge from you, and reminder that verbal reports of this are really bad. Certainly, everyone describes this stuff differently, our vocabulary and knowledge of it as a society are very poor.
Sure. Reading a novel is a like a (really lo-fi) movie in my mind. Once I get going, I sometimes even stop "seeing" the words on the page--the reading becomes a subconscious activity--and my "sight" is entirely what's in my imagination.
I'm pretty much don't have visual images when I read. Now that I think about it, it's more like I'm having feelings which I think would be evoked by what's described in the story. I'm more tolerant of visual description than a lot of readers are.
I'm terrible at visualising while awake, but good at it when I dream. If you ask me to visualise an apple, it has no texture or colour, just a vague form. Sometimes when I manage to approximate something approaching lucid dreaming, I try to visualise an apple, and it has all the details one could want.
My personal suspicion is almost everyone has the capacity to do and does do most or all of the described things, but with varying frequency and with varying claimed awareness and that as these things are purposeful, rather than unique actions, there is wide functional diversity that isn’t capability but purpose based
> When you visualize, how much of your visual field does it take up? Smallish for me, and in the center
I mean that when I visualize with my eyes closed, most of my visual field is the usual roiling gray, but there's something without sharp detail in the middle.
Visualisation typically is described as happening "on a second screen", not in actual vision.
It is possible to alter the main visual screen, especially with eyes closed like you describe. But it is much less common.
Doing this with eyes open - voluntary hallucination - is called "prophantasia". Not impossibly rare but anecdotally few people do it.
bored-anon - I agree that most people probably have capability of visualising. Just as most people can in theory swim but not everyone learns to. I think I just never knew it was possible and nobody realised so I never tried to develop the ability.
> When you visualize, how much of your visual field does it take up? Smallish for me, and in the center
Visualization is happening in abstract mental space, but can be "placed"/imagined to be placed on sensory perception. If you have actual images on the back of your eyelids, these are hallucinations/prophantasia; but I am sure you "mentally place" visualized images there, as almost everyone does.
I have the same suspicion as bored-anon; some people are good at phenomenal description, and some are not - or some people have not discovered that corner of their mind. They may not connect to the visual module in their abstract mental space, but they may "imagine" using meaning, or using the tactile sense etc.
Yes. People being wrong about mental states and processes is essentially the rule, not the exception (see the entire history of psychology and religion and new age stuff - even if some of it is entirely correct, the other 95% is dead wrong...). “You’re basically telling a servant of god that their spiritual rock doesn’t exist? Rude.”
To not be rude though, it is just a suspicion, and I didn’t offer much evidence. But the diversity and evolution of people’s statements here across history, as well as the mild incoherence, does lead me there
Does this sort of condition affect your ability to meet a friend eg “at the same Starbucks where we met last time”? Do you recall that it was a Starbucks on the right side of the street outside the train station, or do you need to look up the address/location every time?
I’ve got some spatial memory and imagination so would probably remember where it was. Also when I saw it I would recognise it.
I wouldn’t remember a scene from being there with the person and what we wore and audio of what we said. I would perhaps remember the topic we talked about.
I also wouldn’t remember walking up to the cafe from the station or similar visuals
Usually first person, sometimes both first and third, rarely third person only. I have come to recognize that some of my early memories were affected/recreated by hearing stories or particularly looking at pictures of the events. In those cases, it is more likely that I view it as third person, even if I think I truly remember the actual events separately from seeing pictures later.
You can probably find some rationalist meetups near you on https://www.lesswrong.com/community . Also consider getting on David Friedman's mailing list for his South Bay meetups (I can't remember how to do that, but potentially email him at the address on the bottom of http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html ). Right now our local meetup infrastructure is pretty devastated after the COVID pandemic, but I'm going to be trying to rebuild it later this month, so watch this space.
Meet people through activities. Meeting people just 'around' is much less a thing than it was in college and before.
Go on group bike rides with a local club, show up to a board game night listed on meetup.com, volunteer for a workday at a local preserve, attend a Less Wrong meetup, join an improv group, take a tennis class through your park system...........whatever it is for you. You might show up and it's all weirdos. Try again a few times, you might find that the same basic activity has weirdo groups as well as chill, un-awkward groups.
+1 to this. I'll also note that it's personally been helpful to view going to groups full of randos as 'hits based friending' (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pfibDHFZ3waBo6pAc/intentionally-making-close-friends#Hits_based_Befriending). Most people you meet you will not click with and that's totally fine. If you meet 30 people at Friday night magic and the breakdown is 20 are terrible, 9 are OK, and 1 is coming to your next board game night because you hit it off, then that's a success!
A hot(?) take - the LW community section for the bay area has been fucking dead for fucking years, unless you're ready to drop everything and go to a meetup halfway across the bay on something like Tuesday 2pm, you'll just spend months waiting. ACX/SSC meetups are good, especially the ones David Friedman runs, but also rare. People I trust keep saying that EA communities are invariably full of interesting people, and at least prior to covid there seemed to be a fair number of weekly meetups, but somehow I never came around to check out, and now they're mostly gone.
Of the more general advice, there's to be a ton of hiking groups around, you may try your luck with those. I personally find a setting of a short hike to be nearly ideal to make this kind of connections - there's usually few enough people to get to know everyone, you're stuck together for a few hours, you have enough going on to make an occasional silence not-so-awkward and to provide conversation starters, but not enough to actually occupy a lot of attention, it's very comfortable to talk (as opposed to a noisy bar or when you're seriously exerting).
Also I'm in the same process of finding friends around here, so if you're interested and maybe if we can find one or two other folks to join in, I can take the lead in coordinating a small meetup.
There’s a weekly in-person meetup in the east bay (see Scott’s community page link and the linked google group) but otherwise ditto Kingsley’s advice. Meetup.com is the best resource in current year for meeting people in general.
I'm starting a post series on my blog called, "The Human Herpesviruses: Much more than you wanted to know." They're really quite interesting, and not in a good way.
Right now it doesn't quite live up to the title of "much more than you wanted to know", but believe me, I will deliver on this promise. I will publish my second post, about herpes simplex, sometime in the next few days.
I'm very interested, since I got the cold sore virus as a child from *somebody* (can't pin down which elderly relative who wanted a kiss to blame for this) and umpty-years later, it *still* kicks in when I'm run-down/stressed.
A couple of times on ACX, I've seen reference to the idea that nuclear energy failed to reach its full potential primarily due to regulatory burdens. That is, nuclear power plants were unfairly viewed as especially dangerous or harmful to local communities, which lead to the creation of onerous rules around the operation of such plants that made them noncompetitive with other energy sources.
If this were true - that nuclear is a superior form of energy generation which was stifled in the US/Europe due to a bad reputation - then wouldn't we expect to see China leaning very heavily on nuclear as compared to other energy sources? They certainly do have some nuclear, but according to Wikipedia it looks like they only get 5% of their overall energy from it vs 20% for the US. I don't really have any background on nuclear power but I'd be curious to hear from other people who know a lot about it (especially those who are sympathetic to the view I referenced).
China is trying to expand their nuclear power, but they're not immune to post-Fukushima protests by the public. Even so, it's consistently increasing as part of electricity generation.
Stifling protests takes some amount of political power, of which they don't have an infinite amount. If an issue is not important but does face opposition then they'll probably give in so that it doesn't agitate the people and lead towards more serious protests later.
I don't know that that's the case for nuclear energy, but the CCP isn't omnipotent even with their horribly invasive monitoring software.
I agree that they have a lot of it. I'm not convinced that they specifically have expended it on protecting nuclear power, given that China does not have much nuclear power projects. Their amount of nuclear energy is increasing but it's still a tiny portion of their total electrical consumption (5% as of 2019, according to Wikipedia).
Agree. China can stifle any few popular protests they feel like, but it does mean an expenditure of a limited political capital. The party has to pick its fights, just like everyone else.
They aren’t. Protests and resistance from many groups still matters to them, and they still respond to it. There are millions of different ways one can oppose some aspect of chinas current actions, and the CCP neither can nor does suppress all of them.
The news media and its consequences has been a disaster for American citizens understanding of literally everything
China has plenty of criticism of the CCP internally, and many people who oppose some organ of the government on individual positions on some issues and remain unincarcerated and even sometimes win! Nuclear weapons is neither “democracy” nor is it “kill xi”, and many people opposing nuke does influence, via a variety of different sorts of channels, such as party officials (being people themselves) opposing nuclear, local government opposing it, or enough people protesting it that the political cost becomes too high (it’s not like all the political capital and time and people in the CCP will be spent on nuclear...). China does molest some of its citizens for dissent, but not all of them, and not for all forms of dissent including procedural, as you seem to imply. They do it more than here, but they’re not purging millions.
Reading 500 news articles about how China (1 billion people) is specifically oppressing the weegees or the ex British imperial colony doesn’t actually tell much about how China operates in other areas lol
To be direct, we were talking about anti nuclear sentiment and protests. You suggested they were immune to that, and like they’d actively suppress anti nuclear sentiment just because they’re evil and totalitarian. You then said that “if you criticize anything of importance to the communist party ... hello internment, brainwashing, public apology”. While they do that in some cases, and it’s considered “bad”, apparently, are they really suppressing everyone who disagrees with a single point on their thousand item policy agendas? That’s absurd.
Hopefully this will not get anyone I know brain washed, but I was working in China this past year, and spent a good deal of time with several Chinese people. In particular I was mostly with rich people, so maybe the rules are different, but they regularly complained about the government. They regularly had information that they were sharing get censored or otherwise restricted on WeChat(sometimes stuff disappeared off your phone, sometimes you simply could not longer forward it to anyone else). This did not result in any direct actions being taken against them as far as I could see. Even the middle class Chinese people that I interacted with often had at least some VPN access/foreign news/complaints about CCP.
Not being an expert in any way, my impression was that China used/uses lots of coal for power, which is probably cheaper for them. Another thing is that renewables like solar are a pretty good value compared to nuclear in the present, but that's only been the case for the last few years. It was possible to switch to nuclear in the 60s, but instead we've had an extra 50 years of fossil fuels, which is what a lot of people gripe about.
Consistently available is being deployed. Storage is getting cheap.
Civilizations have been run on far less rich energy environments. Can you not have a civilization without suv's?
Oil in particular is kind of iffy in terms of availability. Look at the price fluctuations everytime there's a hiccup in the Middle East.
Yesterday random person parked next to me gave me a ride in their electric Fiat. With even only 100 miles of range she loved it. Particularly the performance. Charges it from her rooftop solar. She seemed pretty civilized.
When you recall autobiographical memories, how do you perceive them? First person, i.e. from your own perspective, or third person, i.e. from an outside viewpoint?
First person for recent memories. Third person for some early childhood memories.
This is true for me too, but the memories I have in third person are from things I was told/shown I did as a child. So are you sure those early childhood memories are from you?
They might be things other people told me, but I think they were things I told myself. I think the memory faded, becoming just a story in words, and then I reconstructed the memory from that.
This is a common pattern:
"Field vs. Observer: Autobiographical memories can be experienced from different perspectives. Field memories are memories recollected in the original perspective, from a first-person point of view. Observer memories are memories recollected from a perspective outside ourselves, a third-person point of view.[1] Typically, older memories are recollected through an observer perspective,[7] and observer memories are more often reconstructions while field memories are more vivid like copies."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiographical_memory
But there's more complexity to it than just time.
Mostly first person, but strangely, third person for particularly memorable or intense moments? That said, my autobiographical memory is atrocious (I take my family's word for it that I was a child at some point).
I'm kind of the opposite. Have vivid memories of dreams before I had language. I've been married 38 years and have been in charge of keeping my wife's family lore consistent for the last 20. "No Dennis was living in Silver City then." "Oh yeah. That's right."
This is interesting. I would guess that you remember things in third person, if you have an easy time remembering things about other people's lives as if they were your own. Is that accurate?
No I remember the listening to the the telling of the stories. I pick up the discrepancies as they are told years later. It’s a bit creepy actually.
A “That’s not quite how you told it in 1988” sort of thing.
I entertained my classmates at our 50th high school reunion by going through the seating chart of the 30 kids in my 7th grade home room.
That feels like magic to me... I can't even remember what teachers I had!
Yeah, it was a kind of a parlor trick
It helped that they seated the homeroom alphabetically from 7th through 9th grade:
russ aho
jerry bayuk
perry brown
.
.
.
sue pouchnik
bill prada
.
.
.
robert vlaisavljevich
mary zbasnik
That's a very familiar conversation... My wife is our Official Lorekeeper.
I worked for a while at the National Archives, and one of the hardest things was having to debunk people’s family lore. Like we’d have old men call us to ask about their Uncle Max who was a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt and who used to tell tales of his daring exploits to his little nephew. The nephew, now an old man, wants to put together a history of Uncle Max only to learn that there were only like a hundred Rough Riders, their Uncle Max was not one of them, and he wasn’t even deployed in Puerto Rico until three years later.
I also once had an old guy call the Archives trying to establish that MacArthur had secretly promoted him and a dozen other guys to Major after a clandestine operation in the Pacific. The story he proceeded to tell me did not have any corroborating evidence in the Archives, but did *exactly* mirror the plot of a Cary Grant movie from 1948. This old guy didn’t give the impression of missing any of his marbles, but I strongly suspect he had subconsciously blended some real events in with the plot of this movie to create a false memory about what he did during the war. Given how stressful and traumatic wartime experiences and memories can be, I think this might be more common than we realize. Maybe this explains Uncle Max’s tall tales, too?
It's actually quite common for people to have false memories of things that didn't happen, that were described to them! Elizabeth Loftus has done a lot of work on this, and this Scientific American article she wrote describes some of their experimental procedures for getting people to make up memories: http://staff.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm
1st person
Same here. It's a bit like I emerged from the womb at age 14.... My family often tell me stories featuring me as a horror.
Mercifully, I don't remember any of it.
I might envy you a little bit. Was there any event that caused you to finally hold on to memories at that age?
I remember them like I am processing a very detailed report on an event with diagrams, notes on what I was feeling, etc.
So you're saying you recall them abstractly and not visualized as either first-person or third-person?
Not the parent poster, but yes, I recall them abstractly and not visualized as either first-person or third-person. I get the meaning of what was said but usually not the exact words used (sometimes not even the language in which it was said) and definitely not voices, I get the "ideas" of the people and objects involved, not a picture of them (though sometimes the relative locations or directions are very strong when relevant to the memory, but again, in an abstract not visualised manner). If I try, I can put a face to the people involved, but that face is from other moments where I know that person, not specifically related to that particular memory. The internal emotional feelings can be quite vivid when recalled though.
To elaborate, the whole question seems a bit confusing to me - to me, the notion of "first-person" or "third-person" applies to e.g. experiencing a dream but for recalling a memory it's an attribute that has no meaning because recalling autobiographical memories for me does not involve "perceiving" them, perhaps an accurate description is like "acknowledging stuff".
I.e. if I now try to recall a specific memorable event (I won't go into personal details but note which details are in the memory and which are not), then I remember that thing happened *right there* in the next room, then I and another person was in that other specific spot, I remember my physical pose and emotions, I remember what I was *looking for* at the moment and the conclusion of what I saw, but not what I saw; there were some other people behind in the room but I have no idea who (I might reconstruct the guest list of that day to get a shortlist of possibilities, but that's not part of that memory), it was the day after Christmas (but not sure which year), I remember some of things that were said to me at that moment but not who told them or how, just their meaning.
I can try to intentionally imagine/fantasize/visualize a memory (which I usually don't) but that's something separate from remembering it, it's something done consciously *after* I've recalled it, and with a full understanding that I'm just making up stuff that I don't remember to something that might be plausible.
Yes. For example, I will usually have a very strong sense of where things were in relation to other things, but It's like I'm remembering a plan map; and for things that I don't have a strong memory of, I get a sense that they are less certain.
I am now trying to recall a parking lot on a camping trip from last year, And i get a very strong notion of where the entrance and exit were, but if I try to recall what cars were in what spaces, the information returns as (about half full with about half trucks) rather than anything visual.
First person, and I also experience books in the first person viewpoint even if the book is written in the third person.
In an informal survey of me and my roommates when we discovered this about how we read, I was always 1st person, one of us was always 3rd person, and one of us it really depended. All three of us were engineers, and one potentially interesting thing is that the most social of us was the one who read things most in the 3rd person and the least social of us (me) was the one who read things most in the 1st person.
That's interesting. Books written in the first person always felt dissonant when I read them when I was younger.
I think it was because the 'I' in the book was not the 'I' who was doing the reading.
It was worst with fiction and more tolerable with autobiography where the authorial 'I' was clearly another person.
However it's become more acceptable as I have gotten older. This may say something about the development of my sense of self. Or possibly not...
A bit off topic, but I really got thrown for a loop the first time I read a book that begin "in media res".
Huh! Both you and bagel's comments are interesting!
I've always experienced first person viewpoint in books as no different than someone verbally telling a story. Sure, the person is saying, "I," but it's clearly a *them*-I, clearly not *me,* if that makes sense.
What happens when either / both of you are told a first person story verbally? Like, imagine a friend tells you about the car accident she had while she was driving ("I was on my way to Whole Foods to buy some Yumm Sauce. I was coming down Lincoln at 40 miles per hour when a goose crapped on my windshield right on my side of the car. It hit the wipers, but it just smeared it all around, and then I didn't see the moose coming out of the Whole Foods parking lot...").
Are you picturing yourself inside your friend's body while she's telling the story?
Damn lack of editing. That goose crap story should be, "I hit the wipers."
And then what happened???
Interesting. I vastly preferred first-person fiction since I was old enough to read.
> First person, and I also experience books in the first person viewpoint even if the book is written in the third person.
Me too; often I don't even *notice* whether a book is written in the first or the third person
If there are multiple characters in a fiction book that's in third-person, which one is the "camera" you're experiencing in first person viewpoint? Or does it change based on which character's perspective it currently is?
If there's only one major character in the first part of the story it's theirs; if there a few it switches between them (but not between minor characters as well -- most of them will always feel like NPCs). Only if the perspective keeps switching among more than half a dozen characters since the beginning (e.g. Scott's " How deep the rabbit hole goes") do I take a God's-eye view.
BTW, on looking at "How deep the rabbit hole goes" again, I notice it's in the second person, which usually paradoxically makes me *less* likely to take the character's viewpoint than either the first or the third person, even if it's exactly the opposite of what it's intended to do.
First person for most memories. But the further back they go the less 'authentic' they feel. Possibly because they have been reviewed and re-remembered so many times?
I'd agree with that statement. We retell/replay our memories to ourselves and distortions seem to insert themselves in the retelling/replaying. And I discovered much to my chagrin that when I started writing fiction that used autobiographical memories as a jumping off point, I discovered that the fictional embellishments began to overlay the original "clean" memories. I now have to consciously distinguish between what are "clean" memories and fictionally embellished memories.
First person. Visually. No narrative.
I guess you mean where the camera is. For me in memories I am always the camera. In fact I would never have thought that there was another way - after all my memories aren’t always something that necessarily involve me as the prime player. That time my friend fell off the bike and broke his arm when I was 12 or the uncle was drunk at a wedding and fell into a table are memories that I saw but where I was a minor character. To recall either would be to recall what I saw from my own eyes.
If my memory instead puts me in a place where the “minds eye” is a camera watching me watching my uncle falling over a table then this wouldn’t be a recall but a reconstruction. And I wouldn’t trust that memory at all.
In dreams I can be first person, third person or (rarely) somebody else entirely.
I didn't realize there could be another way either, until a friend told me all her memories are seen from a third person perspective, complete with a mental reconstruction of how she looked at the time.
Interesting. I'm a first person dreamer as well as first person rememberer. I have a lot of control over my dreaming, and I wonder if that has to do with that first-person sense of self? Any active dreamers out there that dream in the third person?
Same here, you said it better than I would have.
I actually can't model how a memory could even be felt to be accurate / true * unless it was recalled from inside the body that was experiencing it.
For example, everyone who can see sees things from their own eyes, which are in their skulls and not from floating two feet over their own left shoulder or 20 feet away on the other side of the room. Their "camera" is mounted in their skull, so it's the only option to perceive anything visually and thus form a true* memory of it.
I can vividly *imagine* what I might look like from a perspective outside my body, but, give how often I'm disconcerted by photos of myself, it's clear my imagination isn't as accurate as what I actually remember seeing from my eyes inside my skull.
* with acknowledgment that memories aren't video recordings and that fidelity can devolve over time as people recall the recall, not the event, and thus no memory can ever be trusted to be fully "true / accurate."
My guess is that all memories are reconstructed from models, and even if they look accurate they aren’t actually anyway, and being first person doesn’t alter that either way. Does they seem likely, or are you very confident your memories are perfect like a video recording?
People might memorise things a bit differently, there are different eye witness accounts, but while there’s some room there for slight ambiguity it can be absolutely certain that a third person view is a reconstruction.
By and large I think my memories are accurate if not as clear as a video recording.
...I literally had a footnote disclaimer saying that "...memories aren't video recordings and that fidelity can devolve over time as people recall the recall, not the event, and thus no memory can ever be trusted to be fully "true / accurate."
But since the visual input for a human experience occurs in the eyes, which are on the front of the skull, that would seem to be the "original" feed, as it were, and thus more accurate to the actual experience than a reconstruction which alters the perspective.
Again, our eyes don't float two feet over our own left shoulder, so "remembering" an event from a third person perspective where you could see the back of your own head from two feet taller than you are is in itself automatically inaccurate to what actually happened and what you were seeing.
First person or third person, I think are memories are basically imagined constructs. For instance, I just ran through some memories I have from kindergarten 55 years ago. If I were to give you an offhand answer, I'd say they were pretty vivid visual memories with an audio overlay. But if I try to examine my memories in detail — i.e. pick out the faces of my peers, or remember a scraps of conversation — I cannot see/hear any of the details. It's as if I have abstracted placeholders for my teacher's face, my friends' faces, and what my teacher was saying. The memories *seem* vivid, but when I try to pick out the details, they aren't that vivid. Would I be able to recognize my Kindergarten teacher 55 years later if you put a photograph of her in front of me? I don't know. I don't think I could create a police sketch of her right now. Memory, at least for me, seems to be an abstracted construct that may or may not have much to do with the reality of the situation that I remembered.
This is the experience I have of memories too. It's not that my own, first person perspective contains more or more accurate information about the scene than a hypothetical third person perspective would. I mostly remember the location, the identities of the people talking, and the gist of what they said. Recalling anything more requires a greater effort and I have to draw from multiple memories to recall people's faces (easy) or the colour of the furniture (hard). So, if by some cognitive quirk I would recall these things in third person, I don't think they'd necessarily be more inaccurate than if they were first person.
And I should have added, that the first or third person point of view in a memory may just be the way a person creates those abstracted constructs...
First person. At least, I tried just now to remember a few recent things and a few childhood things, and they all came back in the first person.
Sometimes I recall a conclusion I reached, including where I reached it and (approximately) when I reached it, but I no longer remember why/how I reached that conclusion. Would you call that first person or third person? I think's it a mixture of both.
All first person.
I have aphantasia, so I do not have any visual memories at all. This means they are not first or third person in the sense of asking if the camera viewpoint is my eyes.
But I do have a fairly good memory; it's just that my memory consists of a list of facts, as perceived from my point of view. Does this make it count as first person? Maybe, I suppose, because I would say "I took that action" if I remembered that I took an action. But I would guess that someone who recalled third person autobiographical memories would also say "I took that action"; it's just that in their visual memory they would remember a scene from a third person vantage point.
Because of this, I think that my answer is none of the above. My autobiographical memories are not first nor third person. (Though they do consist of a set of facts that I would later talk about using "I" pronouns.)
I’m convinced aphantasia is more of a quirk in narration about perception than “actual perception”, and that the same is true for many things people say about thinking and perception and stuff like that
Maybe. My internal voice and my actual thought process are definitely two separate things - the former is much slower than the latter.
I’m hypophantasic, mainly I remember the past as lists of facts. But I have a tiny amount of mainly spatial recall of some key events, and I occasionally have very bad weak mental images.
Because of this and people’s descriptions of it, I’m highly confident visual imagination is a skill to do with developing an actual imagined perception.
There are studies generally that try to show aphantasia isn’t just a lack of meta cognition (ie the visual processing is really not happening rather than just people aren’t aware of it)
eg https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29175093/
Why are you convinced otherwise?
For one, that is a priming study, and priming literally is not real. So that isn’t helping. SSC has covered priming studies before I believe. And I looked for replications and didn’t find any
What if what you’re saying is aphantasia is just not having “vivid hallucinations” (in general I don’t think any of the ideas in this debate are real, honestly), and everyone has “mild imagery” for imagination, and there’s just a lot of confusion in communicating it? That’s probably not exactly true but I sure can’t distinguish that from what’s happening with the idea of aphantasia
Just to be clear, as someone with aphantasia, I have no mental visual imagery whatsoever. I do not experience "mild imagery" nor any imagery of any kind while awake, unless I'm looking with my eyes.
Thanks for that! I'm not a long time SSC reader, so useful.
Is this the kind of SSC article on priming you're talking about? https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/05/if-you-cant-make-predictions-youre-still-in-a-crisis/
I'll have to do a bunch more reading.
Another starting point reference for whether varying reported phantasia experiences is just meta-cognition is this using fMRI: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945217303209
I like the challenge from you, and reminder that verbal reports of this are really bad. Certainly, everyone describes this stuff differently, our vocabulary and knowledge of it as a society are very poor.
I have Aphantasia. Until I learned about my condition it never even occurred to me that reading a book could cause anyone to see mental images.
I do fairly well on most kinds of tests except for tests concerning mentally rotating an object which seem ridiculously absurdly hard to me.
Does anyone claim to “see mental images while reading”? What do they say? I don’t think that’s a real concept tbh
Sure. Reading a novel is a like a (really lo-fi) movie in my mind. Once I get going, I sometimes even stop "seeing" the words on the page--the reading becomes a subconscious activity--and my "sight" is entirely what's in my imagination.
Second this experience.
I'm pretty much don't have visual images when I read. Now that I think about it, it's more like I'm having feelings which I think would be evoked by what's described in the story. I'm more tolerant of visual description than a lot of readers are.
I'm terrible at visualising while awake, but good at it when I dream. If you ask me to visualise an apple, it has no texture or colour, just a vague form. Sometimes when I manage to approximate something approaching lucid dreaming, I try to visualise an apple, and it has all the details one could want.
I don't agree-- my ability to visualize is there, but very limited compared to a lot of other people's.
When you visualize, how much of your visual field does it take up? Smallish for me, and in the center.
How vivid are the colors compared to the real world?
To what extent can you visualize motion?
My personal suspicion is almost everyone has the capacity to do and does do most or all of the described things, but with varying frequency and with varying claimed awareness and that as these things are purposeful, rather than unique actions, there is wide functional diversity that isn’t capability but purpose based
> When you visualize, how much of your visual field does it take up? Smallish for me, and in the center
I have no idea what that means
I mean that when I visualize with my eyes closed, most of my visual field is the usual roiling gray, but there's something without sharp detail in the middle.
Visualisation typically is described as happening "on a second screen", not in actual vision.
It is possible to alter the main visual screen, especially with eyes closed like you describe. But it is much less common.
Doing this with eyes open - voluntary hallucination - is called "prophantasia". Not impossibly rare but anecdotally few people do it.
bored-anon - I agree that most people probably have capability of visualising. Just as most people can in theory swim but not everyone learns to. I think I just never knew it was possible and nobody realised so I never tried to develop the ability.
> When you visualize, how much of your visual field does it take up? Smallish for me, and in the center
Visualization is happening in abstract mental space, but can be "placed"/imagined to be placed on sensory perception. If you have actual images on the back of your eyelids, these are hallucinations/prophantasia; but I am sure you "mentally place" visualized images there, as almost everyone does.
I have the same suspicion as bored-anon; some people are good at phenomenal description, and some are not - or some people have not discovered that corner of their mind. They may not connect to the visual module in their abstract mental space, but they may "imagine" using meaning, or using the tactile sense etc.
You're basically telling a person with aphantasia that they don't have aphantasia and offering zero evidence. Rude.
Yes. People being wrong about mental states and processes is essentially the rule, not the exception (see the entire history of psychology and religion and new age stuff - even if some of it is entirely correct, the other 95% is dead wrong...). “You’re basically telling a servant of god that their spiritual rock doesn’t exist? Rude.”
To not be rude though, it is just a suspicion, and I didn’t offer much evidence. But the diversity and evolution of people’s statements here across history, as well as the mild incoherence, does lead me there
First person.
I mostly recall memories in first person (sometimes distant memories are in third person), but imagine future events in third person.
I have a Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM) and don’t remember scenes from a viewpoint.
There are one or two rare exceptions where I have a spatial memory and then it is third person I think.
Instead I remember facts about events, things that events made me learn, emotions I felt at times, and locations where things happened.
Does this sort of condition affect your ability to meet a friend eg “at the same Starbucks where we met last time”? Do you recall that it was a Starbucks on the right side of the street outside the train station, or do you need to look up the address/location every time?
I’ve got some spatial memory and imagination so would probably remember where it was. Also when I saw it I would recognise it.
I wouldn’t remember a scene from being there with the person and what we wore and audio of what we said. I would perhaps remember the topic we talked about.
I also wouldn’t remember walking up to the cafe from the station or similar visuals
Usually first person, sometimes both first and third, rarely third person only. I have come to recognize that some of my early memories were affected/recreated by hearing stories or particularly looking at pictures of the events. In those cases, it is more likely that I view it as third person, even if I think I truly remember the actual events separately from seeing pictures later.
Almost always 3rd person for anything outside of what I'd describe as short-term memory.
That being said, my memory is generally pretty abnormal.
I wrote about how the culture war is just a recap of the Habermas-Gadamer debate : https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/hermeneutics-or-critique-of-ideology?r=8nz8&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=twitter
This is god
Mega thread on Franz Rosenzweig and the relationship between philosophy and theology
https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1420830864775290883
I recently graduated from college and moved to the Bay Area. I don't know anyone here, so I'm looking to meet people and make new friends.
Any advice? I am open to any of Bay Area-specific advice, rationalist community-specify advice, and generic young person in a new city advice.
You can probably find some rationalist meetups near you on https://www.lesswrong.com/community . Also consider getting on David Friedman's mailing list for his South Bay meetups (I can't remember how to do that, but potentially email him at the address on the bottom of http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html ). Right now our local meetup infrastructure is pretty devastated after the COVID pandemic, but I'm going to be trying to rebuild it later this month, so watch this space.
Meet people through activities. Meeting people just 'around' is much less a thing than it was in college and before.
Go on group bike rides with a local club, show up to a board game night listed on meetup.com, volunteer for a workday at a local preserve, attend a Less Wrong meetup, join an improv group, take a tennis class through your park system...........whatever it is for you. You might show up and it's all weirdos. Try again a few times, you might find that the same basic activity has weirdo groups as well as chill, un-awkward groups.
+1 to this. I'll also note that it's personally been helpful to view going to groups full of randos as 'hits based friending' (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pfibDHFZ3waBo6pAc/intentionally-making-close-friends#Hits_based_Befriending). Most people you meet you will not click with and that's totally fine. If you meet 30 people at Friday night magic and the breakdown is 20 are terrible, 9 are OK, and 1 is coming to your next board game night because you hit it off, then that's a success!
A hot(?) take - the LW community section for the bay area has been fucking dead for fucking years, unless you're ready to drop everything and go to a meetup halfway across the bay on something like Tuesday 2pm, you'll just spend months waiting. ACX/SSC meetups are good, especially the ones David Friedman runs, but also rare. People I trust keep saying that EA communities are invariably full of interesting people, and at least prior to covid there seemed to be a fair number of weekly meetups, but somehow I never came around to check out, and now they're mostly gone.
Of the more general advice, there's to be a ton of hiking groups around, you may try your luck with those. I personally find a setting of a short hike to be nearly ideal to make this kind of connections - there's usually few enough people to get to know everyone, you're stuck together for a few hours, you have enough going on to make an occasional silence not-so-awkward and to provide conversation starters, but not enough to actually occupy a lot of attention, it's very comfortable to talk (as opposed to a noisy bar or when you're seriously exerting).
Also I'm in the same process of finding friends around here, so if you're interested and maybe if we can find one or two other folks to join in, I can take the lead in coordinating a small meetup.
There’s a weekly in-person meetup in the east bay (see Scott’s community page link and the linked google group) but otherwise ditto Kingsley’s advice. Meetup.com is the best resource in current year for meeting people in general.
I'm starting a post series on my blog called, "The Human Herpesviruses: Much more than you wanted to know." They're really quite interesting, and not in a good way.
The intro is here: https://denovo.substack.com/p/the-human-herpesviruses-much-more
Right now it doesn't quite live up to the title of "much more than you wanted to know", but believe me, I will deliver on this promise. I will publish my second post, about herpes simplex, sometime in the next few days.
It's not a bad article so far. I sat through the whole thing. Good job.
I'm very interested, since I got the cold sore virus as a child from *somebody* (can't pin down which elderly relative who wanted a kiss to blame for this) and umpty-years later, it *still* kicks in when I'm run-down/stressed.
I posted the HSV post yesterday: https://denovo.substack.com/p/answering-your-burning-questions
The herpes presentation was well done. I feel like it gave me a good elementary grounding in the topic. Looking forward to your future posts.
Thanks for writing this! Really looking forward to the next parts. Particularly interested in VZV (due to suffering from it myself occasionally).
You should post these on DSL, it would make a great effort post series
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php?board=1.0
A couple of times on ACX, I've seen reference to the idea that nuclear energy failed to reach its full potential primarily due to regulatory burdens. That is, nuclear power plants were unfairly viewed as especially dangerous or harmful to local communities, which lead to the creation of onerous rules around the operation of such plants that made them noncompetitive with other energy sources.
If this were true - that nuclear is a superior form of energy generation which was stifled in the US/Europe due to a bad reputation - then wouldn't we expect to see China leaning very heavily on nuclear as compared to other energy sources? They certainly do have some nuclear, but according to Wikipedia it looks like they only get 5% of their overall energy from it vs 20% for the US. I don't really have any background on nuclear power but I'd be curious to hear from other people who know a lot about it (especially those who are sympathetic to the view I referenced).
China is trying to expand their nuclear power, but they're not immune to post-Fukushima protests by the public. Even so, it's consistently increasing as part of electricity generation.
Stifling protests takes some amount of political power, of which they don't have an infinite amount. If an issue is not important but does face opposition then they'll probably give in so that it doesn't agitate the people and lead towards more serious protests later.
I don't know that that's the case for nuclear energy, but the CCP isn't omnipotent even with their horribly invasive monitoring software.
I agree that they have a lot of it. I'm not convinced that they specifically have expended it on protecting nuclear power, given that China does not have much nuclear power projects. Their amount of nuclear energy is increasing but it's still a tiny portion of their total electrical consumption (5% as of 2019, according to Wikipedia).
> Their amount of nuclear energy is increasing
As opposed to much of Europe, where there are active commitments to phase it out in favour of ~~braunkohl~~ ~~Nordstream II~~ solar and wind.
Agree. China can stifle any few popular protests they feel like, but it does mean an expenditure of a limited political capital. The party has to pick its fights, just like everyone else.
They aren’t. Protests and resistance from many groups still matters to them, and they still respond to it. There are millions of different ways one can oppose some aspect of chinas current actions, and the CCP neither can nor does suppress all of them.
The news media and its consequences has been a disaster for American citizens understanding of literally everything
China has plenty of criticism of the CCP internally, and many people who oppose some organ of the government on individual positions on some issues and remain unincarcerated and even sometimes win! Nuclear weapons is neither “democracy” nor is it “kill xi”, and many people opposing nuke does influence, via a variety of different sorts of channels, such as party officials (being people themselves) opposing nuclear, local government opposing it, or enough people protesting it that the political cost becomes too high (it’s not like all the political capital and time and people in the CCP will be spent on nuclear...). China does molest some of its citizens for dissent, but not all of them, and not for all forms of dissent including procedural, as you seem to imply. They do it more than here, but they’re not purging millions.
Reading 500 news articles about how China (1 billion people) is specifically oppressing the weegees or the ex British imperial colony doesn’t actually tell much about how China operates in other areas lol
To be direct, we were talking about anti nuclear sentiment and protests. You suggested they were immune to that, and like they’d actively suppress anti nuclear sentiment just because they’re evil and totalitarian. You then said that “if you criticize anything of importance to the communist party ... hello internment, brainwashing, public apology”. While they do that in some cases, and it’s considered “bad”, apparently, are they really suppressing everyone who disagrees with a single point on their thousand item policy agendas? That’s absurd.
Hopefully this will not get anyone I know brain washed, but I was working in China this past year, and spent a good deal of time with several Chinese people. In particular I was mostly with rich people, so maybe the rules are different, but they regularly complained about the government. They regularly had information that they were sharing get censored or otherwise restricted on WeChat(sometimes stuff disappeared off your phone, sometimes you simply could not longer forward it to anyone else). This did not result in any direct actions being taken against them as far as I could see. Even the middle class Chinese people that I interacted with often had at least some VPN access/foreign news/complaints about CCP.
Not being an expert in any way, my impression was that China used/uses lots of coal for power, which is probably cheaper for them. Another thing is that renewables like solar are a pretty good value compared to nuclear in the present, but that's only been the case for the last few years. It was possible to switch to nuclear in the 60s, but instead we've had an extra 50 years of fossil fuels, which is what a lot of people gripe about.
Consistently available is being deployed. Storage is getting cheap.
Civilizations have been run on far less rich energy environments. Can you not have a civilization without suv's?
Oil in particular is kind of iffy in terms of availability. Look at the price fluctuations everytime there's a hiccup in the Middle East.
Yesterday random person parked next to me gave me a ride in their electric Fiat. With even only 100 miles of range she loved it. Particularly the performance. Charges it from her rooftop solar. She seemed pretty civilized.
that "pipe dream" is smoking.
https://www.edf.org/energy/energy-storage