LastThursday

@aurum it's striking in that it's unusual for sure. My working theory is that the feeling of being one undivided individual is only a "convenience" for others socially, and so it is more habit than anything else. I think we're born without much of an identity and we grow an identity over time by copying others: mostly parents and siblings to start with. In that sense we are a pastiche of others identities' filtered through our own biology and perceptions (nothing is really ours). All those bits of identity get strung together and we say we have a "soul" or more rightly a "unique identity" that belongs to us. But there is no limitation in practice that says we must have one overarching identity, and so we get the situation in the video. Indeed, we can have bits of our identity that are in constant conflict with each other. I think the social aspect of identity has a strong influence here. People expect us to be consistent and roughly the "same person" over time because it makes for a lot smoother social interaction - we need to maintain mental models of others' identities and personalities and this is cognitively very difficult. It's a lot lot simpler if each person has one unique identity.

It's hard not to take the (my) conscious experience personally. It's all so very real isn't it? Deadly serious in fact. I seem inseperable from it too like the very notion of me is actual consciousness itself. Conventionally and according to others I end and begin between my head and my toes. However the closer and closer I look the less so it seems like that - others are wrong - it just simply isn't my experience. If I put on coloured glasses then the world seems yellow, no matter where I look. Likewise everywhere I look, touch and feel, the world is tainted and tinted with my essence. Maybe it's all the time I've spent in my own experience without others to tell me where I am constantly. It's allowed me to expand outwards and ooze into everything - where I always was - and I have resettled somewhat back into my natural state. The question naturally arises: is this world of my own doing? If I'm diffuse and absorbed into the very fabric of (my) existence then I must be existence iself. Like a nearly forgotten dream I remember the first time I became aware of this world, the first thing I saw was my mother. I strongly suspect I was the last person she saw before she passed away. The world I see around me is one of beautiful reflective symmetry. People and places, sounds and memories keep reappearing reflected in uncountable ways and juxtapositions. What makes this world familiar, and mine, are those reflections. They're all from that first image fractured and splintered indefinitely. That first image was always me. I often idly wonder what it would be to play a practical joke on a friend. One day in idle chit chat I stop time itself - only for me and him to still be animated. What would be his reaction? Would it occur to him that I was source of reality itself, or would he think some lesser thought? Would I terrify him for ever more and fracture his reality. Would he think me the best thing since sliced bread, some sort of trickster or angel. Why him? Because he is the most atheistic person I know. Idle daydreams only. I would only be terrifying myself in the end, and so the world keeps having its order and balance - whilst I keep up the prim pretense that I'm only in the world and not of it. If the tables were turned and I was approached by Jesus himself would I likewise point and call him a trickster or worse an imposter or simply just wrong? What if all this were a trick of the light and I was invented by this so called Jesus because he is the sole progenitor of my reality? Surely I'm deluded: I have no powers to speak of, other than to type with my fingers and create worlds that way only. There is no proof I am reality itself. It's possible there will be a break in this continuity of reality and when I finally die, this reality will die with me, only to be replaced with God knows what. Only then will I stop being intertwined with reality and the new reality it can go its own way.

Time and space are similar. Without space everything would be concentrated into a point or a singularity if you want. There would be no "room" for anything to exist in. The same for time. Without time everything would happen at once. There would be no "room" for stuff to happen in. I imagine that is what being God would be like: a singularity without space or time, everything would be "known", but it would also be a kind of "nothingness".

I had a few nitpicking epistemology questions: This presuposes that a mind is the product of the body. Is it? Is the mind in the body? How does the body convert itself into mind? How is it possible to know this? What experiment could you conduct to find out? Is there anyone alive that doesn't have this epiphenomenon and how would we know it? If you lose consciousness, how would you know this? If you regain consciousness and have missing memory, why would you attribute it to "loss of consciousness"? After all, I can't remember what I ate for dinner last week, did I lose consciousness last week? How would I know if I did? Isn't it true that we can only ever have a proxy for consciousness, since we can't directly experience the consciousness (or not) of an AI? The same applies to the consciousness (or not) of other people. We only assume they are consciouss because they behave like we do (i.e. a proxy). Only because the proxy we use for plants (movement, growth etc) is less similar to how we behave, so we must conclude that plants are not conscious like us (if at all). Have we proven that more complex things are more conscious? Why should complexity be connected to consciousness? Are there? Isn't it the case that we can only know one mind exists for definite (our own), the rest is unknowable? This is the crux of everything you're talking about. We need to know what consciousness actually is before we can recognise it. What exact does the word "consciousness" refer to? When I use the word, is it even referring to the same thing as when you use the word? If not then we can't proceed at all. What is this? Are there different types of consciousness? If so, why? How should they be categorised? Is it possible there is something outside of the different consciousnesses?

Great example. Also, thanks for introducing me to Gebser's ideas it's good stuff. If I was in a similar position, I would start investigating all about health just for the sheer interest of it. And if medical intervention were necessary then you would already have a base of understanding or you may realise that you need medical intervention. There could also be a solution already and you just need to go find it. Adversity is the best place for polymathy.

In my experience this can be subtle at times. It can be as simple as making a decision, and having prior knowledge changes what you decide to do - even if you thought you'd never use an idea or concept you'd picked up. Sometimes ideas from one area transfer over to a different area.

We are not just our thoughts, we are far far bigger than our thoughts. You may have heard that thoughts are like the weather, always changing, coming and going. Like the weather we don't really control our thoughts, thoughts just arise from nothing and disappear back into nothing. Sometimes it rains and we get our umbrellas out to stay dry - we should treat our thoughts in the same way. Instead of trying to control our thoughts, we should find better ways to react to them, take care of that. In the end the ego is also just a thought.

Even the nunchuck table tennis being fake doesn't lessen his mastery.

This is absolute insanity. I especially like the nunchuck table tennis. Are there another people with this level of mastery in any discipline?

There's a kind of presupposion here that it's a problem, it's a sort of odd question. I have multiple interests so: I follow them(?). But. As mentioned in the video I do find employment a problem, mostly because I spend a great deal of time being corralled into specific areas, and I'm not always "up" for churning out or thinking about software on any given day - in fact I'm mostly not. The edge is taken off a bit because creating software is varied and is largely problem solving, two things which I thankfully enjoy. Of course software is also one of my interests. The only other "problem" I see is in sharing my interests, I basically don't - because most people are not like me. Although there is the occasional overlapping interest from friends in one subject or other. I think the tone of this is wrong. You can learn as well as do and be - probably all at the same time. I find great joy in learning and that sensation when I finally understand something. And I would say a lot of what I've learnt has had real life use and given me deep understanding of how the world works. That's something to cherish. @Rafael Thundercat do you find it a problem?

I feel as though I should not let myself off the hook. That is I feel a compulsion to get my life fixed. I don't really know what this fixing entails, but there is a definite constant nagging anxiety that isn't going away. However, the sensation is complex. I've always been a "fixer". As a kid I loved to take things apart and sometimes put them back together again. I was curious about the mysterious stuff inside mundane objects: TVs, alarm clocks, computers, washing machines and on and on. And of course when stuff broke, I could sometimes fix it, because I wasn't afraid of that complexity inside stuff. What's inside me? Well, it's definitely not cogs and levers and wires and components. The last ten or more years I've had an insatiable appetite to understand people in the same sort of way as I understand a toaster say. Naturally, understanding people is really nothing at all like understanding a toaster. In a way understanding people is completely alien to my way of thinking, and yet I have an itch to scratch. Some of it is the fault of my Dad who has been into the people thing a long time. Early on in my teenage years I started to absorb this stuff by osmosis - NLP and models of behaviour and improving communication and personal development - but I never really cared much for it. Anyway. My modus operandi has always been that if I have a problem, I fix it. Until that problem is fixed I feel a constant nagging anxiety. This is one of the traits that makes me think I'm on the spectrum. It's both a blessing and a curse. When it comes to myself however, it's quite possible that I'm working from the wrong paradigm. It's possible that in fact I don't need to or can't really "fix" my life as I would fix a toaster. No doubt there are low hanging fruit and if I paid enough attention those things, it would be easy enough to resolve in my life: girlfriend, buy a house, live somewhere I want to. Those things are "fixable" even if they're not particularly minor. When it comes to fixing ordinary objects it's really a matter of assessing the problem and then reducing the problem to its components. It's then a matter of identifying which components are faulty and fixing those one-by-one. There are components to my life but the difference is that they're all intimately connected to each other and bleed into each other; changing one thing here affects everything else. So I get this sensation of overwhelm whenever I think about fixing or changing any part of my life, there's too many variables and subtlety going on. One thing I feel strongly about myself is a dissonance between the parts of my life. For example if I were to stop doing the job I do tomorrow, I would not miss it all or the people I work with. That lack of emotion tells me that I am in fact doing the wrong thing. I spend an inordinate amount of time pandering to something I couldn't care less about - and yet it is keeping me alive. I spend a lot of time following my interests which are hugely varied. One reason I'm attracted to this forum and to Leo's stuff in general is because of the polymathic nature of it. I've been the same since I was small. Again my Dad is a bit of a polymath, but I've definitely surpassed him in that department! My sister too. Being this way excites me, there's so much stuff to learn and get to know about. I find very few other people are this way, it's kind of a sad and so I tend to not share my interests, people honestly just don't care. I try on occasion but soon give up. Sometimes people are even suprised by my depth of knowledge on a subject, people that know me well. Another component is precisely the people in my life. I half heartedly maintain a set of friendships. I find inserting myself into their lives difficult, that is to say that they are less flexible than I am. If I give it any thought it's a strange dynamic I have with my friends and my family. I think the source of that strangeness is me (this is another trait which makes me think I'm on the spectrum). I can find people exhausting and difficult to handle, my introvert nature shining through there. And yet a lot of the time I feel most relaxed, happy and connected when I'm with people. I also spend a lot of my idle time watching people via YouTube for example. In that sense I'm fairly extroverted. So there is a constant tension I have to navigate between these two poles. (It's not lost on me that I should do an NLP parts integration process here, as I've suggested to someone else on this forum.) That self imposed lack of connection to people is causing me sadness and it's ridiculous. When I went travelling all I did was spend time with other people, albeit with the odd bit of me time, and I was happy on the whole. I love my friends, but they are super conventional and normal. I've ended up being super conventional, and yet I'm 51 not married, no kids, no pets etc. Again I feel a very strong tension between wanting to be super conventional and not being conventional at all. I blame my parents (why not?). My Mum married a foreigner and moved to another country, my Dad is 78 doesn't want to retire and wants to go live in China (FFS). Anyway, these shenanigans by my parents have rubbed off on to my way of being. In some way, I'm playing pretend at being conventional when my very being is rebelling against this. Some of the reasons I'm standoffish with my family is that their unconventionality irks me (very big LOL here). My sister married an American and lives in Delaware and left her three kids in the UK with their father (grrrr). Another polarity in my life is that between my mental and physical self. I'm very much thought heavy in my being and this is strongly connected to my introversion. I get a lot of enjoyment out of thinking and learning, by myself. But I do also like to use my body, I hike, I play some sports, I play musical instruments - and it gives me a lot of joy too. I feel a strong imbalance however, I'm very much in a sedentary mental space most of the time. The balance needs to be redressed. In an odd way I also associate being physical with my more extroverted side. So. Some of the things I need to fix are all these bloody opposing tensions in my life, they're exhausting and keeping me in limbo. Some of things are to do with purely re-aligning things: the way I earn money should be connected to the things that make me happy: people and polymathy and physicality. But I feel I also need to live somewhere that allows me to express those things more easily, a rainy cold country such as the UK is not conducive to going out and being physical or wanting to go outside the home; it doesn't fit my more extroverted nature. I need to escape this conventionality, lack of alignment and disconnectedness it's killing me slowly inside.

I'm arguing for either/both. I don't in fact know if spontaneity of a particular type is inscrutable or uncaused. Conceivably, given enough information the causes of a spontaneous event could be elicited (scientifically or otherwise). But the nature of spontaneity makes this difficult. In general it is unknowable which it is. The above is just my opinion as to which of your points is which type of spontaneity. Except there is no particular reason why gravity is associated with matter. You either treat the system as a unity (as you have or Einstein did), or treat them separately and say that gravity is the spontaneous effect of matter on space itself (even possibly vice versa). Spontaneity here not meaning novelty as much as an effect that tracks the change in matter causing it (i.e. movement etc) in an immediate kind of way. This still doesn't explain why gravity happens, just what happens. Side note: gravitational waves are caused by a lag in this spontaneity - because the effect of spontaneity itself cannot be faster than the speed of light. There is an "active" kind of process happening between matter and gravity. Because you mention "sufficient similarity/proximity between experience and memory", suggesting that memory and experience are two different things albeit similar. I'm saying that they are the same, and if the essence of the mechanism is to be spontaneous then potentially it could be the source of all spontaneity.

Nah. You can walk from one end of London to other with your phone in hand and not see a single police person or get mugged. It does rain plenty though. Come visit, we'll only mug you for cash, a sandwich and a coffee? £10 sir.

@Jannes yes that's more of a classic technique, but there are other related ones. One I like is to have the parts be in different physical locations in a room for example, and you would stand and slowly walk between locations to "integrate" the parts (if I find a video I'll post it here). The main issue with the other techniques is that doing them yourself is tricky, they're often more effective if someone is guiding you through the process. I wouldn't worry too much about the intensity of feeling being related to the effectiveness. In my experience you'll notice changes or differences over the space of days or weeks, sometimes longer. Sometimes it will seem suprising, like "hey I realise I no longer do X" or "I haven't felt or thought about X for a while". There's always a period of subsconscious re-adjustment or re-alignment. Anyway, it's all good stuff, I'm glad you tried the exercise.

I'd argue that 2 and 4 are actually the same thing: that life is matter with an identity (and so has to be self-correcting to maintain that identity). What is the source of spontaneity? Spontaneity - as you've outlined - has the notion of "something uncaused", as opposed to "something inscrutable". Something uncaused then is pure randomness without reason or prior history and therefore not foreseeable or constructable. But it could actually be something inscrutable: there are reasons and prior causation, but there is no way to get at those. I'd say point 1 falls into the something uncaused camp. Points 2 and 4 fall into the something inscrutable camp, in other words life (and identity) can be accidentally bootstrapped from other processes - self-correction is actually a loop of information flow, these loops can spontaneously form but are not necessarily mysterious. Information does leak out of and into these loops, so identity is not fixed (a.k.a evolution). Every identity interacts with everything that is not itself, it's never completely isolated. As for point 3 I'd say the mechanism which creates an impression of the present (moment) is the same which creates memories of the past. The apparent separation of the two is only that of categorisation - memories of the past are in fact still the present moment - the difference is only in quality in some way. You could argue that this mechanism is the source of all spontaneity, and that the whole of reality is actually "something uncaused" every single moment.

@Jannes there are ways to resolve the inner conflict. NLP has various techniques under the name "Parts Integration". There's many videos on YouTube if you're interested. Here's a simple version to start with (the actual technique is explained from 2:54 onwards):

@Ramanujan looks like you're suffereing from not being focused enough. Ask yourself specifically "what do I want to win at?" (then go do it). None of us are winners or losers in generality. We're much more nuanced than that as humans and you're doing yourself a disservice by calling yourself a loser. You don't win at mastery, it's always an ongoing process of improvement.

Hey @gettoefl I appreciate you for saying that. It makes me feel happy that someone gets something from what I write, whatever that may be. As well as being more informed, I forgot to include that also saying "yes" to more things will open up unique experiences. I think many of us hold ourselves back out of fear of the unknown, inexperience or going against conformity. Get out there!

I missed the aurora borealis here in the UK the other night. I'm up on the second floor and I have a decent view of the sky from my windows. I also normally sleep by midnight, so the the thing would have been in full swing before I went to bed. A friend of mine was ill with a bad cold and he couldn't sleep that night. He chose to while away the hours playing chess on his mobile (he's addicted). He too missed the aurora happening outside his bedroom window. A few friends posted pictures that they'd taken and it looked breathtaking. I feel kind of gutted to not have seen it, it was probably a once-in-a-lifetime event for where I live. Amazing things are happening all around us all the time. Many times I've been with people and noticed things myself that the people around me have been oblivious to. But it seems obvious to me that I've also missed many things other have noticed too. How is it possible to be me more aware of what's going on around us? How can we not miss out on life? One way it to be informed. Simply knowing where to look and when to look can open up amazing experiences for us. Being informed does require a constant curiosity and active research - it can be done passively, but then you are at the whims and biases of others; I don't follow the news actively for example. Instead I follow my nose and read up and investigate stuff that interests me. Not everyone is like me, but a stronger sense of curiosity can be cultivated. Another is simply to be more present. By this I mean being less distracted and having your focus pulled tightly. We seem to live in a society that constantly wants to pull our focus this way and that, but more perniciously it wants to constantly narrow our focus on to this way of thinking or that particular product. Instead we should actively fight against this narrowing of focus and regularly do things that open up our focus. This can be from doing things which are out of our normal routine, to actively paying attention to things we don't normally. Meditation can help, even if just to quieten our minds and bring us back to the here and now more often. But it also helps to train our attention so that we're in control of it. Lastly is to see the bigger picture. We sit at the centre of an immense infinitude of stuff constantly happening to us and around us. It is possible to become more aware of the interconnectedness and magic quality of everything; that you are part of it. When we are more integrated and aligned with that immensity and we expand our focus outwards we'll notice a lot more once-in-a-lifetime events.

@stephenkettley one thing that materialism has going for it is that if you drop a brick on your foot, it will hurt. In other words the brick and the pain are real. The brick is made of stuff and pain is transmitted by nerve impulses. You could then say the sensation of pain is not material even if it has a material cause, and argue that the sensation of pain is made of dream-stuff and then eventually conclude that everything is actually dream-stuff. But even subjective idealism isn't the whole story, because it doesn't explain why bricks exist and why they should hurt. If mind and body were separate then one could be detached from the other and be free to go where it wants. Can your body go shopping whilst your mind stays at home? Maybe.

Go and have a relationship first, forget the worry about being hurt by girls - you'll deal with it just fine if and when it happens.

You have to be clear about what you mean by "success". Capitalism is a form of gambling. You put in capital upfront - money, work, effort, hours, infrastructure, stuff, investment - in the hope that you are rewarded with excess money in the long run (profit). That is primarily what running a business is about. You are successful if you are profitable. So in this model the profits come first. It's unsustainable if you keep putting in capital without any reward and so the business will collapse eventually. There are a million different ways to increase your likelihood of making profit and that's what makes business so complex. One of those ways is to provide great value to other people. In other words if your business provides something that other people need or that improves their lives, then they will buy your products and services. Not only that, they will pay more than it cost you to create the product, and you will make profit. Therefore making profit and providing value to other people are two sides of the same coin. But you aren't serving the collective necessarily, you are only convincing people to buy your products or services to make profit.

@blessedlion1993 she could have been intersex. More information below. But honestly if it didn't work for you, then just move on and don't worry about it. Or she could have just had big hands 🤷

These are good guidelines for being a decent person. It seems like it's causing you some amount of confusion or trouble socially though. In practice these guidelines take work to maintain, it's easy to slip into behaviour that goes against them. The reason for having these guidelines in the first place, is that they are needed, it doesn't come naturally to many people. It all comes down to intention. If you intend to discriminate or to objectify or treat others in a way you wouldn't like yourself, then you're probably causing someone else suffering. So the more important guidline to follow is to keep asking yourself: am I causing suffering? The thing is, is that you will cause suffering to others at some point, we all do - and we may not even mean to. The best we can do is to apologise, help fix the suffering and not repeat our bad behaviour in future. The point is not to rigidly follow a set of rules as if they were absolutes, and make our social interactions rigid and inflexible. Instead work to raise your awareness of when others are suffering, and improve your social skills in not causing suffering in the first place or at least help in reducing suffering when you do cause it. This is what the term EQ is all about.