RendHeaven

Yes piccolo we see the fit

It is.

Cancer is overwhelmingly environmental, so it's a bad disease to pick as a supporting example for your case. Humans are rarely, if ever, born out of the womb with cancer pre-installed, or genetically predestined for early cancer. And if they are, then that comes from birth defects that come from the mother's poor environment prior to conception. The simple proof of this is the sheer rarity of cancer prior to the industrial revolution. Yes, cancer did exist thousands of years back, so you still have a point (random mutation IS real, and genetics do have an influence on probability), but given that 99%+ of cancers are environmentally triggered, it's just not sensible to use it as a touchstone for distinguishing genetics vs environment (If even 1% of cancers were truly spontaneous or unpreventable, we'd expect ancient texts and preindustrial societies to show similar incidence. They don’t.) your blog example of conjoined twins is a much stronger case for genetics, but most people will dismiss the significance because they don't see how the ramifications circle back to their own personal health predicament

good shit (once again) emerald

y r u gae

I agree

Hey don't count us out just yet

I only follow hot people!

I have post after post after post across page 2 and 3 with elaborate detail I agree

No. Sure, if you close your eyes and use your imagination

lol yeah noticed that too Hopefully the whole book doesn't explicitly antagonize "science" and "rationalism" the whole way through because new agers, christians, buddhists, and even genuinely wise tier 2 thinkers are mired in sanity-maintenance while calling it truthseeking. It's not just logical thinkers. The problem with the snippet shared so far is that a new ager might read it and start agreeing just because they're turned off by rationality, and the passage promises to debunk rationality. My hope for you Leo is that you more holistically antagonize everybody! diversity and inclusion, but everybody can catch these hands!

Yeah this is common

The answer is no. They would rather sink the ship because they know they have first access to lifeboats. They'll find a way to survive. And we won't. And they know that. So this trajectory will continue.

could it have a genuine emotional function? I'm not convinced that masculine rites of passage can be entirely chalked up to neurotic archaic arbitrary convention maybe the feeling of being a man and not a boy is something that a male needs to distinguish internally to have healthy emotional self esteem. And this distinction is only made through wrestling with the tangible, material, and physical with real stakes on the line. I've never heard of a boy becoming a man through passivity, abstraction, and non-consequence.

I think the onlyfans-meta with independent creators slowly replacing industry and studios and contractors is a huge triumph from the perspective of actress safety and sovereignty

@Emerald Hey I completely agree with you. I'm not against urges or fapping at all. I touch myself all the time without porn. It's awesome In fact, believe it or not, I'm not even against porn. I personally think porn is beautiful (too beautiful!). What I'm against is the unconscious habit loop of needing screens as a crutch for your masturbation. And then furthermore not being self-honest that you have a dependency on screens. It's this lack of self honesty which creates further isolation and fragmentation and tangible societal harm down the line. believe it or not, this is becoming more and more the norm. You really think young guys jerk off with their eyes closed, indulging in rich vivid imagination in 2025?? they can barely get off tiktok. The problem is that pure, genuine urges for release and pleasure are merging and defaulting into digital hyperreality, a supernormal stimulus that is addictive by definition. I only sound anti-porn because I'm purposefully beating the drum on how reward mechanism hijack is built into porn by default. The only point I'm protesting is the idea that porn is benign as though it were just another youtube video that you could simply turn off and choose not to watch. This misunderstands what porn actually is to a young lonely horny man. I am pro fap.

@soos_mite_ah of course not lol. way too much pride to walk into a doctor's office and declare my "porn problem." hetero men are stubborn like that, you should know that by now you don't need a doctor to tell you that you compulsively cannot stop a behavior. It's a very simple test. You say "i'm not gonna do x" and then you watch in horror and amazement as your body defies your mind and you start doing x while rationalizing why this time doesn't count. True. but all horny men are birds of a feather For a guy to not be susceptible to porn, he either has to have no sex drive/physiological disinterest in sex, or he has to already have his ideal sex life IRL. hopefully we can agree that the majority of men are in the middle - they do have a sex drive but are not living their ideal sex lives IRL What you're missing is that they don't want to be honest to themselves. Being a porn addict means not letting YOURSELF find out. this is really deep, please try to steelman this before you challenge it

@Leo Gura I acknowledge this if you take a snapshot of the past few decades in a vacuum but to really answer the question of "net positive" vs "net negative" with emphasis on NET, you have to look 100 or more years into the future. It's not so clear to me that more and more men being pulled into digital hyperreality is actually good for humanity long term. Sure it saves us from potential human rights violations right now by blunting male fangs - but the trade off is that men and women en masse are losing the ability to relate on a basic sexual level. This will contribute to population collapse and severe mental health issues on both sides. Furthermore, now that standard porn has been unleashed with no checks and balances, it can only snowball more out of control from here. I don't foresee a future where right now we need porn because we're not conscious enough, but one day we will suddenly become more conscious and no longer need porn. No. We're just going to have more and more and more porn, and it's going to become dynamic and AI and VR and unstoppable. The genie is out of the bottle. Ultimately we cannot really know net positive VS net negative because we are not omniscient future-seers. I tend to vote net negative because I have a cautious skeptical personality, but that is bias.

mm also keep in mind that article was published in 2019. you can't discount the impact of covid lockdowns in 2020. If majority of men were not porn addicts in 2019, then you sure as hell must believe many of them changed during the span of 2020. And society opening up in 2021 doesn't revert you once you've established a pattern of easy reward.

@soos_mite_ah I really appreciate your effort to understand in an unbiased manner. I don't trust self report in the slightest. The moment I read "self reported" in the title I stopped reading. Do you know how long I pretended to verbally not have a porn addiction while jerking it to a flickering screen in shame every night? and I was a self-proclaimed truth-seeking Actualized.org follower who was educated on self deception lol. And yes, my sex drive is very high, but that doesn't make my behavior an outlier. literally every single one of my highschool and college mates were frequent porn watchers (I interrogated them in the past lol). you think they would cleanly say "yes I'm addicted to porn" on a questionnaire? You are very generous towards the words of men. This is probably a good thing. Don't become cynical like me

@soos_mite_ah But this take assumes that porn is values-neutral, which is not true. Porn rigs and hijacks reward incentives from the outset, and if you're a lonely horny guy (aka 90% of guys lol) you're fighting a crazy uphill battle. It's like telling a guy that he should simply moderate his heroin use. That overlooks how heroin is designed to override your free will and deplete you long-term. No addiction is healthy, and I would bet that porn addiction is the #2 collective addiction of all time only following social media. I think women grossly and severely underestimate how much porn has ensnared modern men. We all hide it so there's no reason for you to suspect anything, but try walking around town; the grocery store; the gym; work - and imagining that literally every single male (young boy and elder alike) you lay eyes on beats his meat to pixels when he's all alone. Imagine that every man who tells you he doesn't watch porn is ESPECIALLY watching porn. Now you have a slightly more accurate picture of the reach that this thing has (I'm not saying this is literally the case, I'm offering a mental exercise to deliberately challenge the idea that only a certain irresponsible subset of men are consumptive addicts. you have to realize that by the nature of this topic, this will be one of the most under-reported addictions of all time. Internet traffic numbers is a better metric for getting a big picture than what men self-report) No, chatGPT is wrong and is mirroring your view back to you because you asked a leading question. I can easily say "chatGPT give me reasons porn is scientifically inherently addictive like heroin" and it will appear to take my side. If you unironically think that endless, simulated (i.e effortless) depictions of naked, 99th percentile beauties is not INHERENTLY PHYSIOLOGICALLY behavior-warping, you're not thinking. This captures the most primal reward seeking incentive for hormonally healthy heterosexual men. Yes, not all people get addicted, but that doesn't mean there isn't a bell curve distribution where the bulk of men are in a compulsive consumption loop. Another issue is at what point you decide to call it an addiction. Many people engage with porn frequently but are convinced that they are not addicted. I consider them addicted and in denial.

@Eskilon if you take a water droplet and plunk it into the ocean, you lose it forever. you're never getting it back. you're basically asking: why can't we have the water droplet in the ocean, but it's preserved AND we also get the whole ocean too? the answer is: you just get the ocean. that's it. if you want to preserve the water droplet, it has to be cut out of the ocean. the moment you drop it back into the ocean, it gets swallowed, and there's only the ocean left.

@Eskilon This is a really good question that I don't fully know the answer to yet so I'll try not to make definitive claims In theory, you would think that yes - infinity should be able to do anything at all (by definition). There's nothing that infinity can't do (by definition). This means that, in theory, infinity should be able to be fully lucid of its role as progenitor without collapsing the reality of solid finite structure. And yet, here's the mindfuck/paradox - there actually are non-negotiable, hard trade-offs that come with finitude. Finitude, by definition, involves the rejection/forgetfulness of infinity. You actually metaphysically cannot have any finite thing which has not rejected or forgotten infinity. The moment infinity is fully recollected and remembered, all finite things must perish. And so in a really inexplicably twisted way - infinity DOES have a limit. Infinity is not able to simultaneously be infinite and truly finite. Infinity CAN simultaneously be infinite and mock-finite, yes. But to ACTUALLY be finite necessitates the renunciation of infinity. What distinguishes mock-finitude from actual finitude is whether or not infinity has memory of itself So to answer your question: you would think it should be possible, but I'm not convinced. Infinity has many tricks - it could conjure a semi-infinite hyperobject and split itself in crafty hybrid ways to feign simultaneous singularity and duality - but this would NOT resemble human life on earth which we so cherish. For you to be on this planet, you must, to some extent, have forgotten how you got here. That's my current understanding but I could be wrong. this requires more testing @Leo Gura would appreciate your input here if you have anything to add

@Eskilon I don't think "afraid" is charitable but certainly attached. A zen/advaita master who claims to be completely liberated but has solid floor under his feet = consciousness being attached to form and solidity with a story about liberation nested on top for you to have feet at all; for there to be a floor at all; infinity has to reject infinite possibilities and crystalize into a single partial instantiation, and crucially, it must forget that it's doing this. If Infinity remembered how it was stitching together the floor out of thin air, you would stop believing in the floor, causing a chain-collapse of belief in all physical things, which taken to its ultimate conclusion, would terminate humanness altogether.

literally 4D chess right here ugh