LastThursday

So my sister contacts me out of the blue yesterday and says that she thinks she might have autism. Was she reading my mind? Was she reading my journal? Yikes! No. Nobody knows about my journal. NO-ONE. It turns out that she just took one of these pop psychology tests online, so it has to be taken with a pinch of salt. However she scored 20 out of 30, and she didn't seemed surprised by the result. I took the test and scored 10, which would mean I don't have it. Obviously it really isn't a clinical diagnosis in any way. But it does confirm my suspicions. She asked me an interesting question about whether I would have scored higher when I was younger. I would say that was a definitive yes. I've done a lot of work on myself since. Although, on the whole, I would say that my social skills have always been more grounded than my sister's. I keep wavering between feeling that I do have some form of Asperger's and/or looking for a problem where there isn't one. But I guess it's a spectrum and mine wouldn't be marked enough to cause me major problems. Strangely, over Christmas I got into conversation with a teacher friend of mine, where she has to deal with kids with autism regularly. I'm not sure how we got on to the conversation, but there was some implication that she realised that she herself may have some signs of it and she said her brother definitively has ASD. Perhaps she could sense that I would understand, or maybe was even tacitly hinting at me. Anyway, it was interesting. I will say that whether I choose to identify with a label or not really makes no difference. In a way I could use the label to get me off the hook for any social faux pas, but that's just abrogating responsibility and it doesn't push me to fix my problems. I have first hand evidence that I can fix my problems albeit with a lot of work. But I just see it as part of my ongoing self-development. Maybe if my "problems" were more severe I would think differently? I don't know. I suppose identifying with it would help it be "out in the open" and my friends and family would be more accepting of any weirdness I display socially. But to be honest, we're all weird at one time or another aren't we - HFA or not?

Yeah a lot of behavioural models are basically combinatorial in nature. You have several orthogonal axes where each axis represents either some sort of yes/no or polarity, possibly with a sliding scale. When combined together you get a space of possibility (or map). You can then be placed somewhere in the space and from that glean something new about yourself or track some sort of trajectory over time or compare yourself to others. The MBTI model is exactly that. The Stupidy model in the video is another simpler example. Spiral Dynamics is not combinatorial, it is effectively a one-dimensional model, but there is still a sense of location and being able to move around in it. I would say each stage in SD is a kind of polarity in itself.

I suspect accepting it is easier than knowing what to do about it. It's like you have to constantly be on guard against stupidity. Most of the time we probably behave like bandits, working in our own self interests, but not caring or understanding how it affects others. Sometimes it's a win-win sometimes not. I guess it's a very specific type of intelligence and stupidy that's being talked about - more of a game theory idea of intelligence and stupidity. I would agree that war at a macro level is stupid. Diplomacy would be more intelligent as that intentionally looks for a win-win.

@Roy that's the problem with generalised models, they don't translate easily into practice.

I do, but you might call them soft goals or meta goals. I'm largely past the phase of wanting to aquire material things and status. I mostly just want inner peace and serenity, I'm still fairly beholden to the ups and downs of my mind and want to escape that. Also I want to have an aesthetically pleasing life, with some sort of close physical community, both of which are lacking for me. By aesthetics I mean beautiful surroundings and weather, good high conscious relationships, simple lifestyle, using my body regularly and treating it well, only having to worry about the things that matter, giving something back to people and nature, working for myself, and better work/life balance.

Thanks. I came across the video and it just clicked with me. It's simple, but effective in categorising how people behave.

Good question. I think there's a notion of repetition here. I have a friend whose sister is consistently socially stupid with regards to money, and damages both herself and her relationship with her family because of it. In this case she is "being stupid". Maybe I mishandled my finances by lending a large sum money to someone who wasn't able to pay it back, and in the process I damaged both myself and the relationship I had with them. In that case I was "acting stupidly". Arbitrarily, I would say more than two times and you're probably "being stupid" - because you really should have learned from your stupidity the first two times. Yeah that's totally possible I'd say. The video kind of implies someone being stupid is being stupid in all areas, so I don't agree with that. Maybe you're good at throwing community parties that keep morale high (socially intelligent), but stupid with finances say. I guess the whole concept in the video hinges on actions being labelled either positive, negative or neutral. I would say most actions are either one or the other, some are both. There are definitely situations where there is short term negativity but long term positivity. Perhaps there are actions that are cumulatively bad, like ingesting heavy metals in your food or putting CO2 into the atmosphere, or behaving in ways that are socially tolerated but only for a while. I don't know, it's binary in a lot of instances, but less so in others.

Likewise. I like to excuse my past actions and just say I was impulsive and leave it at that. But I was actually socially stupid on those occasions, both unaware of the damage I was causing to myself and others. However it was never done out of spite, but more out of a lack of social awareness and calibration. I like to think I have a better handle on it nowadays and I too ask myself regularly: will this benefit others and will it benefit me?

That's a good observation. Psychopaths are definitely a minority, and I can imagine psychopaths falling anywhere on the four quadrants to be fair. I think psychopathy would be orthogonal to social stupidity. As the video mentions, stupidity does not depend on conventional intelligence or social standing, and probably not on psychopathy.

@Leo Nordin Thank you for you story. My niece is 18 years old, and a friend of mine also has a 18 year old daughter. I suspect I'm nearly the oldest person on this forum as I'm 50 this year. I only mention this so you can get some perspective on who I am. Let me tell you my story and where I'm coming from. My niece is interested in getting some tattoos, as a birthday gift I gave her some money (what else do you give an 18 year old???). She has a boyfriend of at least three or four years or so, I suspect it's true love. I don't agree at all with her getting tattoos - I don't have any myself, nor does her mother - my sister. Nevertheless, I've encouraged her to go for what she wants. She moved out of home to Wales at 16 with her boyfriend and it ended disastrously, she's back living with her Dad in England. I wish she was a more confident person within herself overall. She's my sister's clone, always unsure of herself. My sister is the near female version of me, but somewhat more emotional, impulsive and wayward - less analytically minded and more artistic (which I wish I was at times). Only with hindsight do I know what it was really like to be 18 years old. What was I doing then? I was going out with a tomboyish auburn haired half Irish girl a year younger than me. She was a friend of my sister's, my sister being 18 months younger than me. I stole her from my sister. My sister has never talked about it, but I think me stealing her affected her greatly. But love is selfish. I loved this Irish girl very very much. Even now I miss her vitality and the youth we had when I met her at 15. Her family took me in when my family had already imploded. I'm forever grateful to them for what they did for me. When I turned 18 who took me out and celebrated? my girlfriend's Dad. I was sick as a dog after all that grog, but the love was mutual. They were my second family for a while. Her younger sister is on my Facebook, but I don't have the bottle to ask her how my old girlfriend is doing - I know they fell out later on. The reason I love music so much is due to her, I remember going to open air concerts with her perched on my shoulders drunk and chanting along! I didn't even touch spirituality until my forties. My Dad has always been an intellectual New Age Hippy since his late forties or so. He's 76 this year. I've been exposed to self help just about forever because of him. I'm the sort to just take in any and all information, and I suspect I have a degree of aspergers beacuse I remember things very clearly and easily. I also get obsessed and I love sucking in information. It's taken decades for me to get my social skills up to scratch. I think I can pass as a normie better than most normies apart from the odd glitch and social stupidty. Most normies are clueless anyway. I suspect quite a few people on this forum have aspergers but are in denial or ignorant about it. It's as clear as day to me who they are. So I'm telling all this so that you can see that you have plenty of time and space to explore yourself, there's no rush. On one level, being nearly 50 is not really so much different from being 18 - I remember it like it was literally yesterday. However in other ways being 50 is like having lived the life of three of four different people. You won't understand this until you reach my age. Imagine the sum total knowledge and experience of you and two or three of your friends, that's me. I thnk young people deserve every chance and guidance they can get (the world is fairly shit). I don't have children myself and it's not looking likely I ever will; but if by proxy I can help guide even just one person then I'm happy to do it. I have infinite patience, but not much room for stupidity, maybe that's my aspergers. So be it.

How to deal with the reality of a war? As a helpless onlooker I can't help but feel like a dirty voyeur if I subject myself to endless hours of newsfeeds. If I stop doing that and instead refuse to engage with it at all, then I'm simply sticking my head in the sand and refusing the reality of reality. There is no happy medium, there is no happy in war. That's the nature of knowledge. It's a ratchet that gets ever tighter. I can't undo the knowledge that war is happening in a democratic nation not far away from me. And yet what do I do with that information? I can neither react nor not react. That sensation makes me uneasy and is destabilising; double binds are never pleasant. If I show solidarity and yell from the rooftops at the outrage of it, for what benefit do I do that? If I do nothing and carry on regardless and pretend it has nothing to do with me, then isn't it the same as knowing a rape is happening and doing nothing? Am I truly so helpless, I don't even know, although I suspect the answer will be yes. I watched the incessant news on the Falklands war, the Iran/Iraq war, the Gulf war, the genocide in Yugoslavia, often for years and years on end. I've ignored other wars and great suffering in other parts of the world. I've seen enough wars from my armchair in my lifetime to make me sick of it. This war in Ukraine will be no different from all the other ones: great numbers of innocent people - no different from you or me - will be dead by the end of it. Putin will have what he wants and a new normal will take its place, he won't care one iota about those whose lives he wiped out - I suspect he will be pleased instead.

I've been socially stupid to the detriment of myself and others many times. I like to think I won't be again, but who knows? The theory in the video seems to imply that some people are consistently one thing or another - I'm not sure about that so much.

i think that's a terrible argument though how were things like the "Nazis" possible if it's so hard for people to agree and find common ground? Obviously people can agree and collaborate and share ideologies, the world is full of nations, organisations and religions and so on. But let's say you and I wanted to control the world population because we think there's too many people in it. How would we do it effectively? Just two people? Even if you scaled it up to a thousand people secretly conspiring to reduce world population, the task is so ridiculously large and nuanced that it's impossible to agree on how to do it effectively. Maybe we eventually decide to release a deadly engineered virus from a lab: how effective is that? Perhaps only 0.01% effective? You see, you wouldn't even bother to collude in a conspiracy with figures like that. Not only does it it take agreement, but it takes a very strong set of shared beliefs (Nazism), and a very strong motive (domination of Europe), and a large threshold of people (hundreds of thousands if not millions).

Thinking, working my day job, hobbies, personal projects, creating music, socialising, writing stuff on this site, reading a shitload etc. But other than my work hours, I don't have a schedule - and since I'm working from home, even my work schedule is pretty flexible. You could take one view and think that I'm just wasting time because I'm not working towards anything as such. There's a kind of truth to that, but I've never quite been sure what exactly I should be working towards. If anything, it's living comfortably and not being stressed, which I've achieved. You can get stuff done even if you don't have a schedule to enforce it, you just do it more organically. I suppose it's a personal preference, I've never liked treating myself like a machine just churning stuff out. Each to their own I guess.

Conspiracy theories are like crack. The best ones survive because they go viral and are very good at implanting themselves into the minds of the populace. If you don't want to fall for the bullshit then just believe that organised collusion is bullshit. It's hard to get two people to agree with each other let alone a bunch of people to nefariously control the world - just look at this forum. No. What you really have instead is good old fashioned ignorance, corruption, greed, warmongering, and "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" mentally between governments, rich people, corporations, the military and science and research, all fuelled by capitalist greed and globalisation.

You're right, consciousness can do what it likes.

There is no unconscious. Consciousness itself is infinite. It reminds me of the old maps that say here be dragons: here be unconsciousness.

I'm not and I feel like a King. But don't let me put you off.

@soos_mite_ah it seems like you already know the sources that trigger your negativity. Plan out your sleep as well as your eating and be strict about it - when it's necessary.

What do you mean by exist? What does it take for something to exist? Why are moments finite?

@ExistentialMuse I'm sorry you feel the way you do. I'll just pick up on the use of the word illusion here: It's easy to get tripped up with this and confuse illusion for not existing or not being real. I can state for a certainty that others exist and are real, and you should think of them and interact with them with that in mind. Illusion is just a pointer. It says that the everyday notion of "others" is not what you thought it was. That's not so strange. When we look inside a car, we see an engine made of zillions of parts and oil and wires and so on. Normally, we just drive and press the brakes and the gas pedal and look out of the windows. A car in a sense is an illusion, because it normally hides all the complexity away from you. Once you look inside a car, you can't undo what you've seen, but you still drive the car and believe the illusion. Nothing changes except your knowledge.

The creator is the same as the subject like two sides of the same coin or like one's a chicken and the other's an egg.

My dreams are going in the right direction, I had an outdoor dream where I wanted to go swimming at the beach. It looked a bit precarious in that the beach was made up of largish rounded boulders. Also, I didn't have appropriate swim wear and no sunspray. If I remember a dream, I've got into the habit of mentally overlaying a big green tick or a big red cross over the things I like and don't like - hopefully Unconscious will get the message eventually. Anyhooo.... I'm going to talk about that which can't be mentioned (it begins with S and ends with ISM and has a P in it). One of the most profound pieces of art I know of is this one: I've never thought much about it until recently. It always seemed to just be kind of a joke by Magritte. Obviously it's a pipe and obviously it's not a real pipe duh. But it does a good job at looking like a pipe doesn't it? Magritte breaks the fourth wall by explaining his trick. Notice how the pipe is a disembodied pipe with no context, it's pure pipe. So much for artists and their conjuring tricks. Let's go more abtract. What about the word "pipe"? Ok here's my version of Magritte's joke: the word "pipe" is not a pipe. This goes to show what a sham words are. I may as well have said "this statement is false". You see how subtle Magritte's joke is? Not only is the picture not a pipe, but neither are the words saying it's not a pipe! What about we snap a photo of a real pipe? Can we now say that that is a pipe? No of course not. Even a photo is just a representation of the world. A photo is just coloured paper or pinpricks of light on a screen, it has nothing to do with the objects it takes pictures of. Alright, how about we go out, buy a pipe and fill it with tobacco and smoke it? That surely must be a pipe, right? Yes. How about we make a pipe from thin papers stuck together and fill it with tobacco. Is that a pipe? No not really, it's a rollup. What's the difference? The problem here is that a "pipe" actually has a fair amount of leeway in the real world: different colours, shapes, sizes, styles, meterials, fashions and so on. So when we use the concept "pipe" or even paint a pipe like Magritte, we are somehow drawing on an idealised template for what a pipe should be (the disembodied pipe). Already you should be questioning reality. A "pipe" lives inside our heads and not out there in the real world. It's just that some objects out there coincidentally match with our mental templates and we happily tag those objects with names such as "pipe". Let's move on to people. (Sorry Leo my condolences) Imagine you were wearing a dumb VR headset that always just projected whatever was in front of it. It's so good at its job, that you have no trouble going about your business and doing all the normal thing you can do. But; the lawyers have got involved and every 15 minutes it must flash up the message "this is only a representation of reality we are not liable for any death or injury caused by using this product". The question now is, is what you're seeing through the VR headset reality or not reality? It's the same joke as Magritte's. How is it that we can understand the representations on the screens in the headset as reality? Are the people we see in the VR headset actual people or just representations of people? Or is it again just that we have a mental template for a person and that objects and things out there just so happen to match our templates? In a sense we simply take our idealised templates of pipes and people and project them onto we reality. We make the stuff of reality snap-to-fit our expectations. That's the deep message from Magritte's painting. Let's go one removed from people. What about consciousness? First things first: the word consciousness is not consciousness. Be that as it may, I'll carry on as if you understand what I mean by me using these letters: consciousness. If you do know what consciousness is, then you must be experiencing it right now because that's part of its definition (or mental template/concept) and if you're experiencing it then in a sense it must belong to you. I use "belong" in a fairly loose sense here, but because consciousness is a special concept it encompasses everything in your experience. Experiences belong to you, don't they? If all experiences are captured by consciousness then by extension consciousness must also belong to you. We can take the next logical step and say that if you're experiencing consciousness (or consciously experiencing) then surely all other objects out there that match your mental template for a "person" must also be experiencing consciousness. Surely, if even the logic is tenuous here, we can always confirm our suspicious and just ask the person "are you conscious, what are you experiencing?" and they will reply as if they're having experiences. Whoa hang on. I've already said that words are a sham and can't be trusted. Is there another way to see if someone is conscious? Maybe we just observe their behaviour over time and conclude that: yes, they behave like I would and so must also be conscious. But aren't words and behaviour only a representation of potential consciousness? We could just as well read a novel and conclude that Harry Potter is a conscious person. The only thing I can trust with absolute certainty to be conscious is me. Everything else in the world is just a representation like Magritte's picture - no matter how convincing. Consciousness is worse by virtue of the fact it's once removed; at least with people we can see them, touch them and smell them. With consciousness we can only get secondhand reports at best. It seems like there is one consciousness at least and all the other potential consciousnesses may or may not exist. What if we turn the flashlight of Magritte's insight back on ourselves? Is it possible that like some sick-twisted artist having a joke, that we too are just representations on a canvas - but without the convenient warning "ceci n'est pas une personne". In this paritcular case the canvas and the paint would be consciousness itself. There's no reason to treat ourselves any differently from other people: if they are simply mental constructs, then so must we be (and vice versa). In reality, there is a template of what a person is, and consciousness applies it to its experiences and makes it snap-to-fit. You are as much a mental construct as the pipe is in Magritte's painting. If you are in fact just such a construct (or concept or mental template), then any sense in which things belong to a "you" is also a construct. It follows that you cannot say that consciousness or its experiences belong to "you". Consciousness has no owner(s) and as a side effect it cannot be counted. For conciousness to be countable it would have to be put into a one-to-one correspondance with the natural numbers: 1,2,3,4 and so on. But since consciousness cannot be attached to anything, it isn't countable. Solipsism is fundamentally wrong if the self is a constructed entity, because there isn't one consciousness or even a you to experience it. Magritte refutes solipsism and refutes the self, that's why it's such a profound piece of art. Why can solipsism invoke fear? This is purely an emotional response to having our survival threatened. If there are indeed no others to fall back on, we are truly alone forever and extremely vulnerable. We are left to wander the wilderness by ourselves with only the jackals and cactuses to talk to. We have to survive by our own wits and possibly fall into madness and delusion without knowing that we are. Maybe we already are insane. We escape solipsism by escaping the self, we are not people, we are consciousness pretending to be people. That is even more scary because in that case we truly don't exist and all this is is is... what is it? (P.S. I couldn't resist: it's all a pipe dream).

Notes to self: Representation (this is not a pipe) Projection No self and construction of the self Counting perspectives and conciousness, the set of all things Survival and fear of being alone And tying it all together.

So you say. Consciousness however doesn't care about self. Self is an epiphenomenon if you like; you can have consciousness without a self.