That might be okay. But I reserve the right to refuse to treat any possible "mind" that does not participate in the arrow of time as though it did not exist.

A while back, I decided that any theory of cosmology that implies that I'm a Boltzmann brain is almost certainly wrong.

Something like that!

I've heard that, in Las Vegas, if you put yourself on the government's "compulsive gambler" list, you can still walk into any casino, give them your money, and place a bet - the only difference being that, if you happen to win, the casino keeps your money as if you had lost.

I think it should work the other way around, making it the casino's responsibility to avoid accepting bets from self-proclaimed problem gamblers - if you're on the list and the casino doesn't stop you from betting, the casino has to give you back any money you lose.

It's also trivial to make a perpetual motion machine with Portal portals. Just have a portal in the floor that teleports you to the ceiling directly above it, then drop a ball into it. It'll fall forever, accelerating until it hits terminal velocity (at which point all the gravitational potential energy goes to heating the air it falls through).

If you don't want to just throw out conservation of energy, using a portal to "lift" things would have to take the same amount of energy as lifting it through normal space does.

Sometimes I remember having had the thought "this is a dream" while dreaming, but doing that doesn't really give me any extra "conscious" control over what happens - all it does is let me "decide" to wake up.

What about the other way around?

I have yet to be able to successfully make a Google search during a dream - what I "intend" to search for is never what appears in the box I'm trying to "type" the search query into.

Jacen Solo became an evil Sith because the people in charge of the Star Wars franchise at the time thought having the brother named Anakin Solo be the one to do it would be too ridiculous. The rest is writers trying to make the decisions of a Pointy-Haired Boss make sense.

I think I've probably spent the majority of my 42 years of life in a laziness death spiral. ☹️

In other words, aggressively run away from your goals, and reflect on how miserable it is to live that way. The reflection is crucial: if you’re self-forgetful / not mindful about it, you’ll risk staying in that state. Do it for a week or two, reflect on how much it sucks, and in doing so you’ll condition your mind to view the goal as a valuable opportunity to escape that misery (which it is).

When I do this kind of thing, it tends to be called "depressive rumination". Rather than decide "not doing the thing sucks, therefore I should go do the thing", some part of me assumes that "doing the thing" isn't actually an option (because otherwise I would have done it already) and I just stay miserable. On a more general note, I also somehow managed to live for 42 years without gaining the capacity to do something at a time I don't "feel like" doing it, even though a lot of other people tried very hard to instill that capacity in me through force and threats.

In a different context, I once gave a deliberately exaggerated example of one way my motivational system actually works in practice:

Guy with a gun: I'm going to shoot you if you haven't changed the sheets on your bed by tomorrow.

Me: AAH I'M GOING TO DIE IT'S NO GOOD I MIGHT AS WELL SPEND THE DAY LYING IN BED PLAYING VIDEO GAMES BECAUSE I'M GOING TO GET SHOT TOMORROW SOMEONE CALL THE FUNERAL HOME AND MAKE PLANS TELL MY FAMILY I LOVE THEM

Guy with a gun: You know, you could always just... change the sheets?

ME: THE THOUGHT HAS OCCURRED TO ME BUT I'M TOO UPSET RIGHT NOW ABOUT THE FACT THAT I'M GOING TO DIE TOMORROW BECAUSE THE SHEETS WEREN'T CHANGED TO ACTUALLY GO AND CHANGE THEM

The other problem I have is the same one I've had for much of my adult life - I don't know what to do wity my life other than live in a laziness death spiral, because a lot of the common alternatives also seem terrible and I do not know what I want.

You see, 10-year-old me was a hedonist, and probably had a relatively sophisticated philosophy of hedonism for a 10-year-old. He divided the world into "fun", defined as "pleasurable things I do because I choose to, such as play video games", and "work", defined as "anything I'm being forced to do, such as schoolwork or laundry," and his goal in life was to maximize "fun" and minimize "work". He resented school for keeping him away from his video games and thought that having a 40-hour a week job, the way most adults did, must be an even worse fate than being a child in school, because you were still doing "work" on behalf of other people instead of doing the thing that's the most pleasurable, and it takes up even more of your time than school does.

I still have a view of paid employment that equates it with misery and coercion. I don't know how much I can blame my father in particular for this, and I also tried my hardest to avoid internalizing a value system that said that someone who was capable of working for money but preferred not to was a worthless person, but I also spent a long time living under clouds of sentiments like "your parents aren't going to be around to support you forever" and "people who don't work end up homeless and starving" and "people won't respect you for being good at things that don't make money." Instead of working, I spent most of the past 20-ish years as an unpaid family caregiver for sick relatives. I didn't have any close friends I saw in person on a regular basis, and I didn't think Hello, my name is ----, I'm unemployed and live with my parents would actually work on a dating site profile, so I spent a lot of time lonely and feeling bad about myself.

Perhaps ironically, the thing that actually did help me - besides the antidepressant medication I've been on since high school - was when a woman reached out to me online after a brief encounter and ended up becoming my first girlfriend ever and, later, my wife. That was about ten years ago. I couldn't motivate myself on my own behalf, but I could do it for her, and that was enough. Was, because she died last March and I once again am left drifting without a purpose in life. Sigh...