The artist doesn't necessarily know why something is new though, even if they have a lot of experience, it's just a primal response they get to a new piece of music they are working on for example, and then they can try to analyze it after the fact. Most artists I know aren't as methodical as the way you seem to describe, it's a lot more intuition and experimentation, and then because of their vast listening experience their brains are adjusted so that they aren't satisfied with existing stuff

For me personally the cell phone is a bigger problem than the internet, since people get annoyed when I don't pick up the phone, but I also notice I need to stop clicking endlessly all night on web sites to calm my mind down to get to that mental space for creativity.

Basically the best periods I've had were when others were on vacation or I was, and there was some natural unbroken few days where there was no anxiety at all about being interrupted. The question is how to make it happen. I basically just turn off my phone, close the browser, go for a walk, try to get the nerves calmed down, and hopefully something comes out of it that night.

It's really quite annoying though, because 7 years ago it wasn't like this. I don't want to be a recluse, I just want to balance the two things and have that be okay.

Well, sort of. I think first you need technological innovation, and then the middle- and working class fill the labor to maintain that technology, but they for the most part didn't create it. They are users of it. Companies do investments and allocation of capital to produce that technology. Without a central source of capital, it would be hard to get the investments needed to research and produce it. I think technology (in all its forms from basic to advanced) is what enables the motion of society and individuals and the freedoms.

And also civilized society is just as much about daily life and consumption of information and perceived oppression or unfairness as it is pure work. It feels like a lot of modern arguments are about these perceived unfair situations, but on a personal level rather than systematic level. This leads to systematic "macro" chaos but predictable individual "micro" movement in the system (based on emotion and current view of the world). As long as the technology and resources can be maintained, there will be some order in the basics in society, since everyone needs food, shelter, clothing, security and so forth, so I would say, the whole system is what keeps the civilized world going and then some day, something fundamental breaks in some way, due to the accumulated macro momentum of micro scale movement, and then the macro breaks, or something like that.

Edit: also as an addon, these micro movements are decided today, by so called "thought leaders", and so these thought leaders are also responsible for the civilized world in that sense. An idea or representation of something has a huge effect I think.

I like your needles - hyperdimensional record analogy. I would say mathematics encodes for and predicts a certain set of constraints, but we can never be sure we have observed or found the most fundamental constraint, and so to us, an incomplete mathematical 'law' will look like it needs energy added or removed to fit with the real world, but in reality it's just a constraint somewhere that we haven't seen that will readjust the series. All of this is kind of written on a whim, I'm not sure I thought it through enough :

This is just not true. I find that the people who say that actually eat a lot less calorie wise than they think. Eat 4500 calories per day for 2 years and see if you stay skinny. McDonalds 2 times a day is more like 2000 calories at the very high end. It takes time to eat 4500 cals per day, most skinny people can't do it at all but it's easy for fat people. Eating only unhealthy food every day doesn't really say anything about energy in vs energy out

Mm yes this is a conspiracy theory waiting to happen

Rather than being complex computation, intelligence is about flexibility, but it may be that due to the complex nature of our biology, all that flexibility is just a lot of inputs and outputs, in which case we're back to square one and the limitations of the body etc. In some odd way, intelligence is quite disappointing

2. The metabolism and appetite changes drastically. Instead of getting a break and waking up in the morning after a good night of sleep not needing food, you are constantly sugar crazy 24/7. You never get a break from the appetite and blood sugar mayhem. This makes it really difficult to change eating behavior.

The best solution is to get as many people as possible a CPAP machine so they can feel well rested and reset their system, and then they will have a much better starting point for losing weight. And yeah, you can be skinny as hell and still have sleep apnea, a bunch of people do.

Another aspect is consumer responsibility and the way we tend to buy what we want but not think of the large scale consequences. People use gmail and facebook out of habit. They buy groceries in a big store out of habit. We use products dependent on petroleum yet expect someone else to fix global warming. Being interconnected and living in a rather fragile world where systems affect each other is not a responsibility us as individuals are ready for, and I haven't even touched on civic responsibility and the need for everyone to almost be lawyers and critical thinkers for law to function. There are so many complex interconnected parts and we always fall victim to the movements of the herd

It doesn't make sense to me personally why we need subjective experience, nor what it is in a physical sense. We can have agency and variability of choice without it, but at the same time we know how powerful it is in humans. Until we know exactly how it functions, i don't think anyone can claim with any certainty if it will happen, or how far away it is.

Edit: although, of course they'll need some intelligence on the surroundings to identify surfaces and stuff. But imagine like re-decorating your work room, adding scifi textures or something, and maybe pipes or whatever ;p