LastThursday

Thing is, science has been more succesful than just using intuition alone. That's why science is done. The problem with gaining knowledge intuitively is you don't know if you're deceiving yourself.

So illegality is not a red flag for you and for the consquences of being open about sourcing in general?

Sure I'm with that. You do the spadework and look for connections and generalities which emerge out of that. Maxwell realised that light was an electrogmagnetic wave off the hundreds of detailed experiments done by others. I don't think this holds in general because of emergence. For example the laws of thermodynamics emerges from the individual behaviour of atoms moving around - or spiral galaxies emerge from the interaction of gravity, angular momentum and matter. The thing about emergence is that it's hard to predict the behaviour of systems with a large number of interacting parts. The three body problem for example is the best that can be done exactly using mathematics, after that you have to use statistics and you start getting emergent behaviour. Personally, I think general relativity is an emergent phenomenon because all mass comes down to subatomic particles and their forces: so whatever gravity means at the subatomic level, then emerges at a bigger scale as general relativity. It could be that the distortion of spacetime by mass emerges out of the interaction by a large number of entangled particles at the subatomic level.

I think the problem between general relativity and quantum mechanics is getting experimental evidence for the relationship between the two. They both work at vastly different scales and because gravity is so incredibly weak at the quantum level, its influence (at the subatomic scale) is hard to work out experimentally. The one thread that links the two is light and the speed of light. Both QM and GR involve or affect light, although in different ways. If a TOE is going to be found I reckon it will have to be there. You can only understand the universe in generality, you could never know the specifics of every single particle etc. So theories aim to be as general and wide ranging as possible - theories get ever more general with time as connections are found and experiments get carried out. In that sense maybe eventually there will be a TOE. But my own intuition is that no theory will ever be complete, because there is infinite nuance to nature.

Nothing beats a bit of Bach:

The one danger I can see is that if sourcing is openly discussed, people will become lazy and there is danger for confusion. Say you post a way to source X drug, which is legal in the poster's country but illegal in other countries. Some noob who hasn't researched their country's laws, then buys from the source and gets into (serious) trouble. At least if sourcing isn't discussed, then potential buyers are forced to research for themselves which keeps them safe. One help maybe to have a dirtly long list of drugs and which countries each drug is legal in stickied somewhere - it might help.

This kept coming up my recommendations, so in the end I clicked on it. I'm always intrigued at the story behind and told by paintings, the little plaques on the wall in galleries never give you much backstory:

I enjoyed that. Well narrated and researched and learned something new. I'm glad you didn't put any background music in! Any more videos in English coming up?

I've taken to dancing in the morning. I put on my fancy headphones that block out the world, put on something danceable and move around like a loon. It certainly loosens everything up and pumps out those endorphins, it's also very cathartic, but I also love music for its own sake. I've always felt that I'm a crap dancer, I just feel so stiff and uncoordinated. I even took Latin dancing lessons a few years ago, and boy was I bad, but I did manage to burn through my self consciousness! What I've realised is that I can move and flow it just takes practice. In the end I think it will teach me to reconnect with my physicality, improve my walking gait and posture, and hopefully help me move better at Badminton. I never thought of myself as a graceful mover ha! I've always known I'm a loon though.

I remember that my Dad built me a circular train track on a big wooden board, with a little tunnel for the steam train to go through, man I loved that thing and spending time with my Dad. My Mum would send me to sleep by stroking my hair. Me and my my younger sister were inseparable and would play outside all the time. I felt that she always looked up to her amazing (lol) brother. I was a huge computer nerd and when I got my first one for Christmas from my parents I was overjoyed (I nagged them for about a year!). I always loved visiting grandparents and cousins which my Dad would always organise. I always enjoyed the food my Mum cooked and kept me in touch with Spanish roots. The few times my Dad took me and my sister to his work, I felt so excited, it was like an adventure - I still like the smell of tomato plants and peppers - he worked in greenhouses. My Dad used to brag about how clever I was, because I learned to read (Spanish) in just a few hours. My Mum was immensely proud (and envious) of me when I got my degree and she went to my graduation ceremony. My elder half brother was really chuffed that I also invited him. My Mum was always a very tactile person and that always made me feel loved. My Dad would always patiently answer all my incessant questions and explain things so I could understand them. Trigonometry at 5 years old? No problem. My Dad always had loads of nicknames for me, which I always liked. But he mostly used Wink (kind of short for William the English version of my name) - which I miss even now. My Dad's silly wordplay type of humour which always made me happy. My Mum's slapstick and piss taking type of humour. ---- BAD STUFF ---- My Mum got angry with me and my sister easily, especially for making a mess. My parents argued constantly. My Dad was always working and was never home. My Mum relied on me to do anything complicated for her - she never learned English when she lived in England. My sister would always get me into trouble (on purpose) by crying at anything she didn't like. My Dad always wanted me and my sister to calm down all the time - when we just wanted to play. When my parents split, my Dad moved over 200 miles away - that really got to me.

Do lots and lots of it, but also study your artform in depth. What exactly makes a for good melody? What makes it memorable? Find out. There's also the U shaped learning process. This guy explains his learning process (at 3:40 mark):

That's the problem with ideas. An idea is only useful if you use it, not if you just remember it. Try out one idea at a time, until it becomes a habit. For example, I take a cold shower every morning, at first I had to force myself to do this. Now it's becoming a habit. Is it a useful idea for me? Well, now I've tried it for a while probably not, it actually makes no difference to me. But at least I have embodied the idea and it's not just in my mind.

There's already enough entertainment (and drama) on the forum without having another section for it. Greater controls on journals would be great, especially blocking everyone/specific people from commenting on your journals (although personally everyone is welcome on mine). And an automatic status in the title indicating that it's locked for commenting. I don't see much point in making journals completely or partially private either.

I'm going to moan about words and how much of philosophising seems to be hot air around definitions. What I've noticed is that there is a lot of this: take a word (e.g. love) and put forward your opinions and thoughts about it. The method is to hope that something new pops out of the woodwork and you end up having a different slant on the word than everybody else has - or at least your aim is to be deep and insightful. Whist this process can be good to garner greater understanding about seemingly everyday words, to me, it seems like a limited exercise. It's rather being like a talking dictionary, informative but somehow unsatisfying. Some of the watchwords that go through the mill (on the forum) are: love, spirituality, god, sexuality, being, infinity. I guess I'm being a little disingenuous, all these watchwords are really concepts, but my sentiment is the same. There is a reality out there that doesn't neatly fit into the confines of concepts. This is why philosophy is so convoluted, because in reality there are no boundaries to the concepts that are being expounded upon: love bleeds into spirituality. If you're a novice in the process of philosophy it's very easy to get tangled up and lose your way. What is a concept? (I'm doing philosophy now bear with me.) A concept is like a machine with interlocking parts that together perform a function. Words then get attached to the concept so that we can talk about them or at least refer to them. Words have a very definite feel to them as if they're made of solid stone, and that is their function: to make communication easier by reducing complicated concepts into short verbal utterances. Words are a shorthand for concepts. But concepts are also a shorthand, they carve out a space from the infinite permutations of reality to make it more manageable. So there's a two step process of reduction here from reality to concepts to words. For "reduction" read "distortion". Words and concepts are really a distortion of reality; love and sexuality don't actually exist at all. This is why I feel philosophy can unsatisfying. But if you tell someone "love doesn't exist" they will probably argue strongly with you that it does, or think you're suffering from insanity, or that you're having a hard time and need more "love" yourself. All this explains why it is impossible to definitively answer questions like "what is god?" or "what is gender?" or "what is the meaning of life?", because all those words and concepts are imaginary and ill defined. If you want a pretence at definiteness try mathematics. Never trust anyone who says they have the definitive answer.

How do you go about not letting the past define who you are as a person? And, why would you even want to jettison the past like that? It seems that the younger you are the more disproportionately you are affected by your environment - that is especially true for the people you grew up around. This strong imprinting in your younger years carries through to you right now. We are defined by a collage of different experiences both good and bad. A lot of this imprinting is subconsciously (despite me not liking the word) expressed in the body: our mannerisms, the way we use our bodies, our fears, our emotions, joy, sadness and so on; the rest is expressed as episodic memory and thinking. When you're told to "let things go" we attempt to simply stop thinking about some past event, or to try and think about it differently. Often this fails because we in fact don't know how to "let go" fully, or even we're too attached to our past and we don't really want to let go of it. This gets to the heart of the problem of changing ourselves and stopping suffering. Most of the change we experience as adults is just window dressing. I asked a friend of mine recently out of curiosity: "Do you think I've changed?" - he's known me for about 25 years - "No you're exactly the same". I found that kind of depressing because I know for a certain fact that I've done a lot of work on myself; I think he meant it as a compliment. But it confirms to me that most of the change I thought I had experienced is not noticeable to others - I feel like a different person to the one 25 years ago, but on some level I'm not. As a thought experiment if you were sat in a lab and a mad scientist with his fancy gadget offered you the chance to selectively wipe your memories (and associated behaviours), would you do it? I suspect that most people would be terrified and say no. We are our memories, we are our behaviours. We cherish those as our identities, even the ugly bits. It is completely possible to wipe your memories however. More precisely it's possible to change the way our bodies expresses trauma. Memories in themselves have no emotional content, it's our bodies that supply the emotion and feeling of constantly "reliving" our past. The past is gone of course, which makes this process perplexing: what is the point of all this reliving and suffering? Wouldn't evolution have been such that we just live our lives from moment to moment without a care for what already happened? Yes, we need to learn from our past mistakes and our past achievements, but once learned why do we often continue to have all that attached emotional baggage? Personally I'm sick of my own behaviours, not because they're bad or evil per se, but because they just don't gel with who I want to be, they're counterproductive. And most of those less-than-ideal behaviours are rooted in my past and younger years. But because they're imprinted into my body and emotions, I can't just think my way out of them. I've mostly done the work of thinking and recontextualising most of what already happened to me as a kid - in that sense I've already let go and forgiven - what needs to change is how my body expresses itself right now. When my coach says to me: "go set up a meeting with X" and I get the tightening feeling in my chest, that is what needs to change - no amount of thinking will change that reaction. The irony about all of this, is that I already know exactly how to change these bodily reactions. This is what NLP taught me. In the story The Electric Ant by Philip K Dick, an android realises that he's an android and starts playing with his own programming tape, and experiences a change in his reality. This is the feat I'm trying to achieve. Having someone external (a coach e.g.) can help a great deal, but ultimately the sensations are in your body not theirs, and only you can really understand them and change them. Every time a traumatic or negative reaction arises in your body, it gets reimprinted with your current context. So even the simple act of continuously engaging with trauma can change your body's reaction to it (this is how exposure to phobias can help cure them e.g.). So the trick to speedy change is to reimprint your reactions in the right way and strongly. NLP does this by triggering a strong positive reaction simultaneously along with the negative one - and this is nearly guaranteed to change the original negative reaction. This is how to play with your own programming tape. The only difficulty is doing this on yourself, because you're trying to do two things at once, and having someone else (an expert) help you do this is far more effective. But even if you know how to change your own bodily programming, would you want to? I find that even identifying my body's reactions to situations is hard to pin down, let alone change. And my body is very attached to all that trauma... damn it.

An overview of how gender and womanhood is intertwined:

More here:

@Realms of Wonder it's natural when you change your lifestyle that you start feeling like a different person. You're not going insane, you're just realising that who you are is more flexible than you thought before. Once you taste freedom from your old self, there can be a tendency to over indulge in that new freedom. You're just experiencing a period of readjustment and it takes time. Let things take their course, but just keep steering yourself in the right direction. It looks like you'll be ok:

I'm guessing what's lacking yet is the realisation of unity. You are everything. Everything you do and say affects everything and everyone else.

When you're doing self development, it's important to have some sort of sign or signal that you're actually developing; otherwise you're just spinning your wheels. This happens a lot. There's a fair amount of experimentation whether that's self imposed or from external sources. It's often dressed up as something other than experimentation though: formal therapy, heroic life goals, serious serious stuff. That's not to denigrate it, experimentation is just fine with me - and mostly you need those external sources to inspire different ways to experiment. Experimentation requires being truthful to yourself, playfulness and a fair dose of courage. Signals. For me one of the primary signals of change is lightness. All the times I've had major shifts or breakthroughs I've felt like a weight has suddenly been lifted off me. This is telling, because it's my body that is feeling the release. Most change happens in the body and with how you feel moment to moment. How does the body know how to feel release? I find that super interesting, because it implies the ability feel "released" was there all along, it's not something the body dreamt up in the moment. I mean it could be, but the release is positive and feels good, the body already knows how to do those things. I would argue that feeling "released" is the baseline or tabula rasa for the body. The body also learns to feel tense and knotted up, as life throws bad experiences at you. It does this as a form of self-preservation, it's fight or flight. With enough stimulus the body encodes the fight or flight directly into its neurology, and you're permanently in tension. Despite that, the body still knows what it is like to not be in tension, it just choses not to express this. The acquired tension, then manifests in any number of ways, with aches and pains, recurring illness, and bad mental health. Once you have a breakthrough, that lightness feeds into everything else. You find yourself behaving and thinking differently from before, and sometimes you even think "why the hell was I like that before?" - even better you don't care about how you were before, you just enjoy being your new self. Thing is, you can keep releasing indefinitely, and each time it feels better, and that's because you're slowly returning back to your authentic baseline. That is what "authentic" actually means: nothing is impeding your natural expression. For me, I have a lot of hang ups about how I should be expressing myself. It's all very controlled, and all very much in the name of self-preservation. I'm embarrassed at myself when I do express myself openly, and I find myself always having to pretend I'm not embarrassed. I feel that expressing myself is always way OTT. And I have to constantly soothe myself by saying: "look you really didn't have to worry about it, you were just fine". This kind of toing and froing is exhausting. The answer is to release it all, and embrace a new and joyful normal.

Try this with subtitles on: And for something different:

I often wake up with tunes going around in my head. This morning it was this: I didn't question it. But I did put it on the laptop and had a little dance. This is unusual since I'm no dancer and I'm not a morning person. Oh, and my brain's stuck in the 80's...

Futuresight Our mission is to build a sustainable future for our planet, by using systems approaches to tackle some of the most intractable problems we now face. We see ourselves as catalysts for change by taking many ideas and viewpoints into consideration. Open positions: Director of Sustainability and People (Sus) Responsibilites for exploring long term sustainable options in all areas of people, technology, agriculture, energy, environment and finite resource use. Director of Polymathy and Creativity (Poly) Responsible for pulling from many different resources, facts, ideas, meta views, big picture, systems thinking, and synthesising new ways to solve difficult problems. Director of Arts and Technology (Artech) Responsible for putting all aspects of technology to use in solving problems. Visioning and advertising, problem modelling, promotional material. Directory of Chronology and Storytelling (Chron) Responsible for visioning, mission statements, advertising, social media, media, lobbying, bringing groups together and finding new ways to work together. Responsible for planning and executing on those plans. How we work: We have a flat organisational structure, where each department works very closely with each other to bootstrap a future we all want to live in. This is a typical work flow: Sus will take a problem such as how to create sustainable transport. It gathers statistics and does impact modelling both now and going into the future. It will identify problem areas and end goals. Poly will then take these results and pull in information from related areas of the "system" in which the problem lies, for example the impact to people, culture, wildlife and use of resources and come up with many scenarios and solutions. It will work closely with Artech to vision the feasibility of those solutions technically and with Sus to ensure long term sustainability. Once best working solutions are in place, Chron will build a vision and narrative and get agreement at all levels, then create a plan to execute on. This process iterates throughout the lifetime of the project. The first problem is bootstrapping the organisation from nothing.