LastThursday

For you to ask the question? For a more Zen answer: because there's no other choice that this. Or maybe perhaps for pure unadulterated infinite creativity? The LOLZ? Or maybe.... I CREATED YOU. Bwahahaha....

Up until now I've seeked, sook, sucken (what is the past tense?). Suck peace and calm. But that was never it. I feel like I want to absorb EVERYTHING. Maybe that's not it either. Union might be closer. Or maybe non-separation is nearer. Magic! F**k I don't know.

My dreams can be weird. I had a whole slew of non-sequitur dreams just before I woke up today. In one a demon "baby" had been deliberately trapped in muddy water under some sort of wooden planking, and was creating angry havoc by using telekinesis on people in the vicinity. In another my sister was performing some sort of ritual to exorcise something from within her and it wasn't going to be pretty - I was outta there! I remember distinctly thinking if I was "far away" enough not to be affected by it. In another an artist with very long hair, was trying to sell me her artwork which seemed to comprise of maps, which I was well tempted with. But one of her side projects was making "goodbye" art. She also seemed to be part of an entourage of older erotic artists dressed in black. Phew. I like the idea of "goodbye" art. There seems to only be a few situations in which we formally say goodbye, and the rest of the time we just wing it, not really knowing what we're doing. In order of severity I can think of funerals, good luck cards and parties when people leave jobs, and just plain saying "goodbye" or "goodnight" to friends or colleagues at the end of the day. Why even do it? Personally I like to think I've never much been bothered about goodbyes. Either, in the sense of the niceties of saying goodbye, or being able to actually let go. I've always felt that most goodbyes are provisional and in some way a pointless activity. As I've got older so much stuff has passed that having said goodbye to every single one of those things would have been overwhelming - indeed there's still ambiguity over whether some staff has passed or not. When is the right time to say goodbye to people or places that change slowly over time? And yet, there's something deeply meaningful about saying goodbye and formalising it into some sort of ritual. With a funeral it marks a definite and fairly condensed boundary after which things are different. It's very similar to a wedding except that is a "hello" ceremony. A funeral is about the process of letting go of a whole bunch of stuff associated with someone close to you. Funerals and weddings are also about mutual acceptance and agreement around a new state of affairs. So it appears that saying goodbye, is both about planting a marker to indicate change and a mutual agreement to that fact. Fundamentally it's a psychological exercise. Without it we're left with ambiguity and uncertainty, both of which can cause suffering and perhaps an inability to let go of things that have passed. I think that we could make goodbyes into an art form. I find good luck cards you give work colleagues a bit crass even if the sentiment is correct. When I say art form, I don't mean a commercialised lowest common denominator art form. Maybe we could create art for ourselves mostly or those close to us and mark the passing of all that stuff that comes and goes in our lives. Art doesn't have to be drawing, but in any media and in any way that suits us at the time. Maybe even it's just a ritual that's done, perhaps marking the end of a day as the sun goes down. Or writing a short goodbye poem about someone you used to love and never let go of. Perhaps getting friends together and officially marking the fact that I'm no longer young and saying goodbye to youth. There are so many things we have to let go of and we ought to let go of. We should get good and comfortable at saying goodbye, and make it into art.

There's definitely an argument for having an exit option if you know you can live indefinitely. But we have a hard enough time with the morality of euthanasia as it is. I mean if you're 200 years old and fed up with being alive, should you have the option to exit then? What about at 150? Earlier?

I think the only two paths to immortality are to either "encourage" the body to repair and rejuvenate itself or to produce molecular type machinery (probably proteins) that will do it for us. I don't see any other way, but hey I'm no expert - at all. I think for either path there needs to be nearly a complete knowledge of the physics and chemistry of the body. We are nowhere near that. But AI could greatly accelerate that aim. How long will it take? Dunno. But change is exponential not linear. Already AI has "solved" the protein folding problem, this allows us (with the further help of AI) to far more easily design new proteins. The coding sequences for these new rejuvenative proteins can then be inserted into our DNA. Gene therapy is already a thing. I would say it has to be proteins, as they are completely compatible with our bodies in a chemistry sense. Death is the main driver of survival. Even if we are immortal, we can still die, a car could hit us. And even if we had immortality we still need to eat, so we still need to worry about survival and paying the bills. The only thing that changes, is that we have a huge amount of time to do stuff, and the pace of life would change. I for one have a million things I want to try and work on, I wish I had all the time in the world to do them! To me, that would be a more meaningful life, than one wracked with urgency and the spectre of bad health and death itself. At the moment,I could live another fifty years or die tomorrow. If I could guarantee another fifty or longer years instead, then that puts a totally different complexion on living.

There ain't no "we". Death will only reinforce that fact. Death is only the death of "us". Consciousness and awareness will be where it always has been.

Excuse the language: Good hair, good instruments:

I do think we all vastly underestimate our ability to actualize ourselves. You can even see on here how most of us just sit in our own funk - me included. We don't know what we don't know. It's impossible sometimes to realise how much we can change and how quickly it can happen and just how much potential we have. Even if we think we are severely limited in certain ways, there's still a huge amount of room for self improvement. There's nearly always ways around limitation. Sadly, most of the time the only thing stopping us from actualizing is our own minds and beliefs or bad health. Are there limits? Of course there are. But we're not one dimensional. We can improve in a zillion different ways.

I totally get this. Some of my most depressing moments are when I'm looking inwards. When I'm out with friends or watching a film or walking or whatever I'm most happy. Always being in the moment and giving it your full attention is the ultimate goal. However, if you want to grow and develop as a person, introspection and self help are essential. A lot of self help is very practical and you should aim to have a 20% self help versus 80% taking action. Take a simple example: say self help tells you to look people in the eye when talking to them to have a better connection. In that case, taking the advice and actioning the advice is like 1% to 99%. All the learning is in taking action. A think a lot of self help can be depressing because you're constantly shining a light on your weak spots and ugly parts. Maybe making eye contact for you is very difficult (e.g.), so naturally this can feel frustrating and depressing - and taking action just feels awkward and difficult. Self help is not always easy. It's also easy to slip into existential rumination, "why am I here?" kind of thinking and this can cause people a lot of anxiety and concern if they're not ready for it - a lot of it is very unintuitive and weird and maybe even dehumanizing. It's also very easy to get stuck into thinking about the future or past and having regret and anxiety from it - but it's also necessary to plan and have goals, and to work through problems created in the past. Meditation can even cause depression: https://www.verywellhealth.com/mindfulness-can-be-harmful-researchers-say-5186740 The rule with self help is to take what works for you and reject what doesn't.

The story of my life: The guy is hilarious.

I like to think that when I do either I do so spontaneously and without intention to manipulate - I'm presenting myself as I am. But sure, smiling and crying is manipulation or more rightly signalling. Can you sense that this thread makes me feel uneasy? For a couple of reasons. Rant incoming. First there is the objectification, using beauty and the fact she's a public figure to justify doing so. There's a flattening of all the dimensions of the person into just a manipulated image to be held up and judged by all. I think most of us wouldn't like that to happen to us - so it shouldn't be normalised. Secondly, the image and the reactions it evokes are a tacit agreement that it represents an ideal that should be upheld. That's why I say the beauty is a projection, not everyone needs or wants to adhere to the ideal being presented. Maybe the ideal is actually untainable by most of us, and wouldn't that cause suffering? Thirdly. It's no different from a dog being confused and humping its owner's leg. We laugh at the dog for being confused and wonder how it can be so stupid. Are we really much different by looking at images that turn us on in some way, and then telling everyone about it? Rant over. Interesting article about objectification of women: https://www.cairn.info/revue-internationale-de-psychologie-sociale-2015-1-page-15.htm

Try staying alive without them.

I'm not saying it's fake at all. I'm definitely saying it will be modified. Even the dress and the makeup, the pose: it's all staged for effect. I'm sort of making two points: 1. You can't trust anything on the internet. And by extension you shouldn't completely trust anything presented to you as ground truth. Nearly everything in media is manipulated in some way to create some sort effect in the viewer. 2. Beauty is projected onto people and things, there's no inherent beauty in anything. Unless you're a hippy and you think everything is beautiful. 3. Boy I sound negative, but I'm not trying to be. Ok three points.

And I will get a bunch of images (which have almost certainly been manipulated in some way). Anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mave:

Use maths. The very basic behaviours of systems are either damping, exponential (growth) or oscillation. All of these are tied to solutions of differential equations. Essentially it boils down to combinations of exponential functions and complex numbers. The next level is combinations of those, i.e. damped oscillation and so on (think bouncing spring). Next is chaotic attractors. This is basically oscillation and/or damping with a certain degree of uncertainty or high sensitivity to initial conditions (see chaotic pendulum). A huge range of systems exhibit the above behaviours. For example animal populations, electric circuits, virus pandemics, planetary motion, bouncing balls, radioactivity, number of bugs in a computer program and so on. Almost all systems are non-linear (i.e. exponential in some way), and you have to work quite hard to make them behave in a linear manner. Whenever you get two opposing exponential processes, you tend to get oscillation. If one of the processes wins out, you get damping or runaway exponential growth. In practice unbounded exponential growth is not possible and usually some opposing process will stop it - and you will get the well known S shape. This happens in pandemics, animal populations and Moore's law in chip transistor density. And there ends my engineering lesson.

How do you know the picture hasn't been edited and beautified? How do you know it hasn't been generated by AI. Has it all been staged to enhance her beauty. Does it matter? Is the beauty in the picture or in your head?

To stop this sort of thing, always whatever you apply to "other people" apply to "yourself" first. Ask yourself "what if I'm an autopilot NPC?". You'll get more philosophical mileage from asking that question.

We're all constantly playing one character or other and judging each other on it. Maybe what you're picking up on is that the character isn't being played well enough - it's an uncanny valley effect (?) Personally, I think she was absolutely fine, despite not aligning myself with her content.

@Magnanimous it's already here and you're staring at it. But I do get what you mean. This is interesting: If an AI can read neurons firing, it's not a stretch to do it in reverse. Instead of "downloading" information directly, we would "lookup" information using our handy dandy integrated AI/brain interface.

Here's some ideas: 1. Competence. For example, no-one is born being able to do maths, it has to be learned and it can be hard and unintuitive. Being competent in a thing will give you confidence in that thing. Being competent takes time, effort and commitment. 2. Focus. Nobody can be confident in everything they do. Work out very specifically what you want to be confident in. Is it confident with people, or confident with your physique, or confident with your intelligence. What specifically? Focus on just a couple of things and work on those solidly. 3. Practice and repetition. Sometimes there's no substitute for just practising the same thing over and over. But it doesn't have to be all grind and hard work. There's a joy to doing the same thing over and over and watching yourself improve. Try out variations and make it into a game. You were a kid once and all you did was make everything into play and games, but that was practice in disguise. 4. Seek a mentor. This can give you a real step up in your confidence, because a mentor will have been through the some of the same problems as you're facing, and they can give you guidance and reassurance, and impart knowledge to you. 5. Find a role model. Go find someone who you admire for their confidence and then copy them. Follow them, stalk them, put yourself in their shoes, pretend you are them. With the internet, this is incredibly easy to do nowadays. 6. Immerse yourself. Set aside a fixed time period where you commit to improving your confidence in a particular area. The idea is to fully let yourself go, and just do the work. Spend every waking moment investigating, researching, practising. Go on a retreat, take a course, talk to as many people as you can, go do the thing you were always too scared to take on. You will be guaranteed to improve your confidence this way. 7. Understand your fear. A lot of confidence is about being fearless (whether that is learned or not). Examine what it is that makes you fearful in the thing you want to be confident in. Maybe you fear being ridiculed in a group situation. Maybe you fear the consequences of talking to strangers who won't like you. Maybe you have trauma triggered by certain situations. Maybe you have low self worth and low self esteem. Work it out! Get therapy. Work on yourself and your mental health and your mental state. 8. Commitment. Just decide to commit to being confident in something, and go through with it no matter what happens. Confidence is incremental, not all-or-nothing. You will fail many many times, but you will also win slowly but surely. Each win will give you a guaranteed boost.

We all exist. It's just that we're side effects, not the main event.

Consciousness and awareness has you and everyone else. The logic has to be switched around. Consciousness is not given to, or possesed by you. Instead you and the rest of us are manifestations of consciousness and awareness. The illusion of ownership is strong, but it's just an illusion. It's extremely difficult to get a grip of, but consciousness just isn't a thing that can be counted. There isn't one consciousness or many, it just isn't an attribute it has. Consciousness is literally everything. Every single word and concept you could ever use is a product of consciousness and awareness - that makes words and concepts useless in capturing its totally, except to satisfy the thin sliver of consciousness that wants answers couched in language and logic and equivalences.

It's definitely hard to be aware of something you're not aware of, even if someone tries to make you aware of it. The thing is solipsism isn't even useful, it explains nothing and gives you nothing in return, except existential angst.

The crux of the (my) argument is that solipsism is a viewpoint not an absolute. It's a viewpoint because there has to be an observer to realise "I'm the only one" or "my reality is the only reality that exists". But if the observer or "I" is actually just a construct within reality (which seems likely), then the observer is not an absolute. What you're then left with is just bulk "reality" without observers and that isn't solipsism, it's something else.

Alice: you're the only solipsist. Bob: no you're the only solipsist. Zara: wait... I don't exi