LastThursday

I don't track my my calories. I eat similar food every week, so I know what's going in. Then again I don't generally snack or eat junk food. Could I clean up my diet? Absolutely: more veg and less processed food. But I know I'm neither gaining or losing weight over time, so the balance is correct in that respect. I have calorie counted when I was doing a 5/2 fasting diet because you have to for that. I started that because I'd put on a lot of weight (for me) and that was mostly because of having a sedentary job, and not exercising at all. But even on that diet, I just ate similar things on my fast days, so I didn't have to think too hard about calorie counting. The diet was brutal especially in the afternoons, but was effective for me. I'd do it again if necessary.

@Natasha Tori Maru yeah I did a some intensive NLP courses back in the day, sort of got into it by proxy via my Dad, who's even worked with John Grinder. I understand the power of rewriting memories first hand because of it. @Leo Gura there's no denying that some people have more accurate or fuller recall. Marilu Henner is an actor (look her up) who has nearly perfect autobiographical memory or hyperthymesia. She can recall what happened on any particular day just by giving her a date - which is astounding. But memory is quite a broad category. I'd say it includes autobiographical, visual, sound, touch, taste and so on. Also procedural memory, and memories "held" in the body, such as emotions and trauma. I myself have very good visual recall, and very good recall for abstract stuff. I vividly remember stuff from being a very young kid. But is it accurate? I'm not so sure and I have nothing to back up my memories other than asking immediate family and some old photographs. When it comes down to it, to know if your memories are accurate you have to compare them something else. Memories are a kind of abstract reconstruction put together from many different sources. To use a computer analogy they're stored in a very compressed lossy format, and during decompression you get artifacts and hallucination.

Being concerned about health is very valid even at 22. You should work on moving as much as possible if you have a sit down job. Go to the gym, or walk or run when you're not working, even half an hour of movement every day helps your health a lot. But also do the other obvious things: don't smoke, don't eat junk food, don't drink alcohol excessively, get proper sleep. Saying that, until you're about 40, I wouldn't worry too much about health, being worried all the time is also not good for health.

Memory is a lot more fluid than people think. The overwriting mechanism explains how to heal memories of trauma, and how bad situations can seem a lot less bad as time passes, or how two people can disagree on the same events. It's even possible to implant false memories by hypnosis, or even by just by exposure to photographs for example. It also explains how some of the therapy techniques in Neuro Linguistic Programming works, such as anchoring.

I'd say it's in the same category of question as do computer games cause violence? The answer to that one is is that most people can sensibly tell the difference between fiction and reality, and don't go around stealing cars and running over pedestrians in a big city. In the same vein I think most people can tell the difference between porn and reality. If you have or have had a sex life, then there's no comparison. In that case you only continue watching porn like you continue eating fast food, because it gives you an instant pleasure hit. Like fast food, that pleasure hit is addictive, and addiction is bad (so says society). There's a lot of moralising about porn, but if you strip that away, then porn could give you a disorted view of sex and how and why it's performed, especially if you're young and uninformed. The question really is then, does repeated exposure to porn cause a long lasting negative effect on libido, expectation, attraction and fashion in how sex is performed? Is faux strangulation and shaved genitals the norm now because of it?

@Ramanujan I'm sorry man being lonely sucks bad, loneliness is anti-human. Sort of what @Cred says, go find people to be with, that interact in a way that feels comfortable to you. There's so many different ways now to do that online, if face-to-face doesn't appeal. Think about your interests and go find groups online to express that interest. Probably even being on here helps to an extent I daresay.

In terms of attire there is a large element of tribal belonging. There is always a current fashion, just look at how people presented themselves in the 1970's to now. Even though there is always a wide range of styles, even in the 70's, there is a kind of zeitgeist that people lock in to. Looking good is in large part being part of the in group and conformity. But this also applies to the way you speak and carry yourself. In terms of genetics then it's parts sexual selection and evolutionary selection. We are unconsciously positively biased towards people who look healthy and strong, and we could breed with successfully or could provide good protection - and status as a side effect. Mostly, indicators of good genetics, that can be passed to offspring.

I'm not so convinced. There is also a lot of mathematics that doesn't correspond to anything in nature. So there is mathematics invented to model nature and existing mathematics that can be co-opted to model nature, and a lot maths that's nothing to do with nature. Although, it is cool that we can come up with equations that encapsulate nearly the whole of a phenomenon like Maxwell's equations. But even there those equations don't describe the photoelectric effect for example. In other words nearly never is a mathematical abstraction the complete picture.

There is a possibility that mathematics is so flexible that it bends itself to the patterns in nature. Anything with some sort of pattern, can be modelled by maths. Indeed maths has been invented just for specific physical theories such as quantum mechanics. There's also lots of approximations in mathematical modelling going on, take the Ideal Gas laws for example, which are statistical, there's plenty of that sort of thing. Mathematics isn't always about precision. There's also the question of calculation. Even if you get equations for something in nature, they can be intractably hard to either solve or plug real numbers into. How spacetime behaves around most types of black hole, has differential equations that are unsolvable. The three-body problem is unsolvable. But nature doesn't care about mathematics and just gets on with it. But, one link is that both idealism and mathematics are in a sense both about non-material Platonic forms - so they share that in common. @Lazarus93 do you have any ideas or thoughts about it?

Indeed. And the normals will call you insane or at least keep well away from you. Most can't bear the idea of that sort of separation from the flock. So they don't even start.

that was my point. Nice, making a point by stating it's opposite. Must be rhetorical or something...

These people are trained for their job, which is to be on TV. There is also bias because TV people are cherry picked to appear on there, so you only get the most articulate, most intellectual, most attractive, most funny etc.

You're born into a society and culture and indoctrinated from a young age. It's super hard to break out of that programming - even if you wanted to - everything is against you. Philosophy, epistemology and all that stuff is very hard to learn and understand, and most people don't see the utility of it, it doesn't help them survive. I wouldn't underestimate how indoctrinated you yourself are either, work on that, let others worry about themselves.

Romance and Truth are totally separate, you can chase both if you like. Romance isn't all consuming, you can have hobbies.

God(s) isn't rational, we are. Plurality or singularity are the same to God. Fundamentally what is being experienced is both irrational and arbitrary. There are patterns in that irrationality and order in the arbitrariness, so you could argue about why this and why not this for ever; there is no ultimate answer.