LastThursday

I refer you to my answer here:

What is reality? For starters it's not the word "reality". And therein lies the problem of explaining reality at all. What is the stronger truth? Words and explanation or the sensation of love? Is the "sensation of love" even a proxy for what is being actually experienced? Language is a finite algebra for a boundless experience. Silence is more descriptive of "reality" than words could ever be. Still, even in the silence words infect our perception filling the world with things and happenings. Try and throw away those things and happenings and what is left?

I thought I'd talk about my favourite subject: myself. Actually, I seldom talk about myself other than as "filler" for small talk. I don't particularly care about this, I have no strong need to divulge what's going on inside my head IRL. Even in this journal I do this mostly out of interest rather than need, and I definitely don't divulge everything. I learned a very long time ago that people genuinely don't care about your innermost needs and desires and mental drama. People just care about their own mental drama above all else and relate everything in the world to that. Giving it more than two seconds thought, how else could it be? Although, I do think this gets amplified by our very individualised Western culture. We only pay lip service to actually caring about what others are experiencing. In fact when someone is really on the edge and needs proper attention (I've been there), friends and family are utterly clueless. None of us have been socialised well enough to be able to deal with intensity of emotion or difficult needs. This is because someone in a vulnerable state pulls us out of our individualism, and we're immediately out of our comfort zone. There's a question on the forum asking why people are just not interested in investigating consciousness and reality. My immediate feeling was that it was like asking people to understand how computers work (computers being a good proxy for consciousness because they're ubiquitous and inscrutable). People take computers for granted (as they do reality), because they're always relating the world to their own mental space. Most people are highly interested in survival, mating, food and the soap opera of their ragbag collective. Asking people to understand how computers or even worse how consciousness works, is like trying to force first contact with an alien: it's terrifying and to be avoided. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it doesn't even cross most people's mind that the question can be asked in the first place! What does all this say about how people function? First and foremost you can't blame people for being disinterested in you or the big questions in life. Mostly, they're just firefighting and trying to stay alive and to have some semblance of positivity, if not happiness. None of us have been explicitly taught how to comfort and genuinely help someone in need - and how those skills are beneficial to us, and no-one has been taught that understanding reality can change our lives for the better. And, none of us have been taught that collectivism is necessary to balance out individualism and make us all a bit more human.

Is ignorance bliss or is ignorance suffering? Yesterday I was crossing a road on my daily walk. The road is a small junction onto a busy road and it's slightly uphill. There's always a car waiting to pull out of the junction, so people tend to cross behind the waiting car. If you drive a manual, then you know you have to keep good clutch control to stop the car rolling back down the hill before pulling away. Inevitably, there is a small amount of roll backwards. Enough roll to make contact with any pedestrians crossing immediately behind you. This in fact happened, and the pedestrian was slightly taken aback and glared at the driver in disgust. Who's at fault here? I'd say the pedestrian. His own ignorance caused him suffering, both in terms of being angry, but also the potential for being physically harmed. I'd like to think he's no longer ignorant. On the surface it seems that ignorance is a good strategy for living life. You only worry about the things happening in your immediate environment, and everything else is irrelevant or for somebody else to deal with. It allows you to be carefree and not be burdened worrying about things over which you have little control. We are all ignorant to greater or lesser degrees: we can't know everything. What about the things you ignore over which you do have control? The problem with ignorance is that you don't know what you don't know. It's possible there are many things you could do to reduce your suffering (e.g. keeping more space when cross behind cars), but you're unaware of them until something happens that brings them to your attention. This is how we all mature (by becoming less ignorant), we simply learn the hard way through experience and often by suffering. But the process of becoming less ignorant doesn't have to be completely passive. We can actively choose to reduce our ignorance, so that we can pre-empt and avoid future suffering. The main way to do this is through learning. I don't particularly mean formal learning such as a course in mathematics, but more informal curiosity driven learning. For example asking: why do cars roll backwards? And then doing a quick investigation. I would say that most people are not actively reducing their ignorance in this way. It all seems so frivolous and pointless. However, over time all these tiny reductions in ignorance amount to a big reduction in ignorance and potential suffering. The tiny learnings about how the world works often synergise with each other, and you end up with a deep understanding of things. This then affords you the ability to be strategic and actively avoid future suffering: you get X-ray vision and begin to see things others can't. To really deeply self-actualise you should actively and continuously choose to reduce your ignorance as much as possible. Ignorance is not bliss.

Desire is endless, but suffering doesn't have to be. Either a desire materialises or it doesn't. Say I suddenly have a thought that I want to own an expensive wristwatch. When should I start suffering? One second afterwards, one day, one week, one month or one year? Either I start catering to my desire at some point by saving up for the wristwatch - in which case why suffer - or I don't - in which case my desire won't materialise - so again why suffer? In short: If you never make any plans to service your desires, then they will never materialise, in which case suffering is pointless. In fact materialising some desires could actually make you suffer. Maybe I'm constantly worried about having my expensive wristwatch stolen or damaged.

As long as you've got the basics sorted out: food, water, shelter and some human contact. After that, happiness comes from inside of you not outside of you. But it can take a lot of work to realise that. Forget fatherhood if it's not for you, find happiness in other ways, the children you won't have will thank you.

@happyhappy mathematics is just symbolism and rules. A symbol is just something that stands in for something else. Numerology is bunk, because a number like 108 can symbolise anything you like and so it has no predictive power or meaning. Except for the fine structure constant though, that may explain the universe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant

@Barbara ah well, a man can ask.

@Barbara I gotta say I love your hair. Are you a mermaid?

Thanks. -- This went to pot last night. I had three separate unpleasant mini dreams. In the first I was living on Mars. I think I was having discussions about escaping or revolution, as if I was somehow enslaved or oppressed in some way. I looked down at my trousers and patted them to shake the Martian dust out, but had the sense that the dust itself was really coming out of my body. My patting myself was actually just trying to get the dust from inside my body out. Eughh. In order to start the escape I found I had a screwdriver in my hand, and when I was questioned by a superior (with potential of them finding out my plans) I had no choice but to drive it through his throat. There was no blood, but I could feel the give in his flesh. Again eughhh. Saying all that, it would make an excellent plot for a story. Next, weirdness: I was lying in a dark room and I could hear a radio station very clearly. I realised that it was inside my head, because if I moved it it faded in and out. The announcer (who called himself Churchill) was giving a monologue on climate change. I had the impression it was a talk radio show. The name of the radio station was Ali FM. And last: Again I'm lying in the dark in bed, and I suddenly realised a persistent hissing sound and the shadow of a snake on the wall. I mean it was B-movie style, it unnerved me, but I found myself saying "Stop it now!" several times. I actually work up at this point, overheating in bed. I generally find analysing my dreams pointless. But thinking about the screwdriver incident after I woke up made me think of skewering for some reason (which I guess it was). This is relevant because a skewer is a position in chess, which I've been playing a lot lately. Maybe the whole dream about Mars was really about chess? I'm still hoping the weirdness and unpleasantness stops in my dreams. I do think that I have always had the "if it can go wrong it will go wrong" feeling about life, because bad luck just seems to stick to me lack a bad smell. I'm sure that sentiment just translates into my dreams. If I was inclined in a particular way, I would even say that I've been cursed at some point. Any curse removal strategies would be gratefully received.

There are probably more sides to you, but these two are especially important to you. I would try and look for the commonality between the two sides. For example, your caring aspect might be about giving love to others; and your selfish aspect is about giving love to yourself. The commonality in this case is "giving love". I'm sure you can think of more things. Looking for commonalities is the way to resolve any conflict within yourself (or outside yourself).

It's just not happening this morning (work that is). So I'll spew some more words for entertainment (whose?). Headless Incense Burner I have a dark wooden incense burner which I rather like. I bought it in Brighton many moons ago, which is a hippy new agey place - not that that's relevant. On one end it has a tiny Buddha sitting there cross-legged forever contemplating the smoke. At one point or another I managed to knock Buddha's head off. Luckily I salvaged the head. If I were the sort to believe in omens I might have quivered in my boots. But I'm not. I did however laugh at the profound joke of it all: a headless Buddha contemplating the smoke. Are we not all headless Buddha's contemplating ephemeral smoke? Yesterday I glued his head back on and his identity came back. He's a very serious sort, he should take some hints from his jovial fat bellied alter ego. Dog In Heat I noticed that I'm super guilty of this. No, not of being an insatiable horny dog. But, of sitting in ignorance. Like a dog who lies there panting from heat exhaustion sitting directly in the midday sun until her owner admonishes her and tells her to go lie in the shade. Aren't we all like this? Ignorant enough and stuck in our ways, that we don't realise that relief is "just over there" in the shade. This is why I go for walks and listen to music and consume art and force myself to write, it's my way of not stupidly getting stuck in myself and dying of heat exhaustion. Jumping Through Hoops Notice how everything is so god-damned complicated? I very much feel that in my work writing software. Even doing the simplest thing takes effing hours to construct, test and push live. It's a matter of steps. There are a bajillion steps to most things in life. Even making a cup of tea has at least four steps. Inside of me is a small impatient child which sometimes manifests and gets frustrated at it all. It seems like what society really wants from us is to be performing thousands of steps all the bloody time, like headless chickens (which are very unlike headless Buddhas). The petulant child inside me wants to say "F**k right off" and then go and do something that doesn't involve behaving like a machine. What is that then? Listening to music and burning incense after a nice walk on a sunny day. I guess the irony is that going for a walk takes many steps.

Let's see if I can articulate this sensibly... A lot of what I write about here is shadow work. I don't particularly cling to that title, I mean it's really good old fashioned "working through shit", that is actually a better, more descriptive title. Maybe it's because I have a distaste of clinging to buzzwords that try and make me sound intelligent. Nevertheless, shadow work it is. Off the bat there's already a negative feeling to shadow work. Shadows are mysterious and deceptive, they only give you a sense of what might be lurking around that corner: it could be small and benign or large and terrifying. That unknown is itself unsettling. And so it is. When you start digging around and confronting memories and emotions you would rather not it can be overwhelming and instil fear in you or at the very least anxiety and embarrassment. Maybe most of us are not really courageous enough to confront ourselves. I for one have always consciously tried to have a very non-emotional and direct way of dealing with my problems. But I have found out (to my cost) that most of this shadow work stuff is pure emotion, and has nothing to do with rationality. My rationale in not confronting my problems has mostly been "out of sight out of mind". I 100% espouse this view. If I only have thoughts of a particularly horrific incident say once a year, then so what? What work is there to do here? None. This is what I call - for myself - the frequentist view of trauma. It's only when the frequency of a problematic thought or emotion crosses a certain threshold do you then need to do something about it. In other words, without prompting, the problem manifests enough to affect your every-day functioning. There is a nuance here. What happens a lot is that your shadows can be so frequent that they become enmeshed with your identity: "Hey Harry's a miserable so and so", "Charlotte's always so timid" and so on. Often the character descriptions people give you stick, and you start describing yourself that way: "I'm depressed". This makes it doubly hard to confront your shadows, because you're also having to chip away at your identity. There's this fear that if you were to suddenly become happy and problem free one day (by some miracle), then people wouldn't take you seriously and think you were being fake and inauthentic. No, it all has to happen very gradually and slow enough that people (and yourself) are not surprised by your transformation. Traditional therapy is supposed to be a long-drawn-out process for this very reason; not because it can't be a quick transformation, but because a quick transformation is too unsettling and fake sounding. Imagine a parent dying, you have therapy and three days later you're having a great time and you've never been happier! It's just not socially acceptable and it seems like a wholly unreasonable timescale and worst of all inauthentic. I know from personal experience however, that transformation and removing or resolving shadows can be very quick indeed. In most cases shadows are long lasting only because they're never confronted or understood well enough to resolve. Say for example I have a fear of organising events with friends. This fear stops me from ever doing the things I'm interested in and I end up unhappy because of this. How would you attack this shadow? It seems insurmountable. If you have no clue as to what specifically triggers the fear (and it may actually be lots of different things), then it's going to be impossible to fix. You end up with the label "unambitious" or "uninterested" or "dull" perhaps - maybe especially so in a workplace setting. My point for this post was that it's very easy to fall into the negativity trap. Transformation seems to always be a process of inspecting and then resolving negativity. How could it be any other way? It seems like you have to constantly trigger or deal with negativity within yourself in order that you can be negativity free. Seen that way it's an absurd process. It's like asking a depressive to be happy by going deeper into their depression. But it can be countered with positivity; there is a certain power to positivity. On the whole given the choice between a positive thing and a negative thing, most of us would choose positivity. We have to learn to transform ourselves by crowding out our negativity with positivity. This can seem a bit Pollyanna at first, but if the frequentist view of things is correct then it's very sensible. The idea here is that there is only a finite space for stuff in your mind and body to express itself. If you fill that space with positivity then the negativity has less space to express itself (it becomes less frequent). I literally mean here filling your life with: laughter, joy, connection, purpose, goals, pleasure etc. This has to be an active and conscious process, it takes dedication and stamina and an eye for knowing how to bring that joy in. Positivity is a habit.

I'll keep going till you get bored with me. How do you know that only biological agents possess feelings?

How would you know that someone or something possesed memory and prediction?

How would you know that someone or something possesed memory and prediction?

You're missing the point. Clearly you do exist. It would be better worded as "a you is not necessary for existence". You can remove yourself (the subjective experience of being an observer) from the equation but existence carries on anyway. This is because you (the observer) and reality (the observed) are one thing and not two separate things.

What is everything I think and yearn for pointing to? I find it very easy to get lost in the labyrinth of my own thoughts and sensations, I'm a sensationalist (new meaning freshly minted) by nature. Often this sensationlism has taken me into hedonism, clubs, drinking and ending up in strangers' flats. Is there a word for that one particular meaning of a word like "set" for example? Nuance, nope, aspect, nope, trope, nope, uh dunno moving on... What I often lack is that bird's eye view but sometimes it comes together. I've gotten into the unenforced habit of doing an hour of hypnotic relaxation and then doing my old Tai Chi warm up exercises. This completely loosens my body and disolves tension, and also quietens my ADHD mind. I get a mild (dopamine?) buzz from it too, which is great. Who needs drugs. What I yearned for hit me this morning after doing my routine, I'll try and describe it. It's the sensation you get when you first open the shutters to your windows. In Spain when I was young the windows had wooden door shutters to keep out the heat and bright sunlight in the mornings. I always had this sensation of joy or whatever when those shutters opened and the light and sound came flooding in. I get the same feeling waking up in a hotel room on holiday and sliding open the balcony door and just sucking in the essence of the morning and its goings on. There's a kind of excitement about what the day ahead will bring. I might get a taste of that "first light" sensation here in the UK, but it never quite hits the spot for me. I'm always super disappointed when the whole day is overcast and/or wet, like deep down in my soul. It feels like over time that soul-disappoinment has taken root permanently and there's no way to excoriate it. How do I get back to joy? I suspect my strong need for nostalgia is also a way for me to re-experience a more joyful state I used to have. I watch the old cartoons and TV programs of my youth and old music. It's only a temporary salve. All the moments of excitement or joy seem so fleeting to me and I can never seem to hold on to them. I can see the same need in other people with their constant need to get together and socialise. I disparage it so much, because it always feels so shortlived and I get disappointed when it stops. And, I can see straight through to that need, which feels more like an addiction and duty than a genuine desire to be together. I can't blame people for this, I too am exactly the same. We can't genuinely be together because there are too many other distractions and obligations to being an adult. Instead we have this poor cloying substitute. All that is to say that my mind and body is screaming at me and knows exactly what it wants - I want to be someone else and somewhen else and someplace else. Yet, I'm too paralysed to do or know what to do about it. Those obligations and distractions are too strong and I'm stuck fast in the spider's web, and the spider of disappointment is slowly cocooning me, ready to devour me.

Thing is, how can understanding itself be understood, without being self-referencing?

Me neither. It only has to be convincing enough to appear like it has consciousness, which will happen eventually. What is really happening with lifelike robots and AI is that intelligence is being imported into them from their environment. GPT3 for example, doesn't reason for itself as such, it just has a huge database of "intelligence" to draw from. Equally, our bodies are intelligent because evolution has imported this intelligence from the environment (or universe if you like). You could make a self-sustaining robot/AI that seeks out intelligence (aka curiosity) from its environment and sucks that data in to improve its abilities over time. In a way that is what Tesla does with its self-driving cars, sucks in a huge number of different scenarios and information from the roads to make their cars intelligent enough to be autonomous. Still. Intelligence is not consciousness just one aspect of it.

It's a misunderstanding that the under in understand means below. It actually means between, as in the prefix Latin inter. Inter/under see? So more like "standing between" with a connotation of being in the middle of things. Understanding is just a sensation.

And technology is a product of humans. We're just imbuing our technology with our own innate humanness. So definitely in time we can create automatons that are indistinguishable from humans, because we shape technology in our image. It will be a moot point whether they are conscious or not, or think like us under the hood. Only their outward appearance and behaviour will be relevant.

I'm a big fan of the Matrix movies. I think the amalgam of action and existentialism draws me in. Are we living in a simulated reality? The whole idea of a simulated reality is predicated on being able to escape it; that it is actually possible to do or even desirable. Neo finds out it is possible to do despite finding it undesirable at first. If the desire increases enough then it will reach some threshold whereby there is no going back: a choice has to be made. Is it the red pill or the blue pill? I think that, already, if you know that it is possible to escape reality because you've glimpsed it, then the choice is already made and you've swallowed the red pill without knowing it. The other idea behind simulated reality is that it is being simulated by someone totally outside of the simulated reality. They are like the Gods on Mount Olympus whose soap opera has consequences for their creations. But unlike the Greek Gods our simulator overlords are shadowy and cryptic. Hope is not lost however because once we unplug from the simulation we become one of those Gods and we too can play with the simulation itself. It's the difference between being the user of an app and being the programmer of the app. The parallels with Enlightenment should be obvious because we are looking to "wake up" from reality. Once we have glimpsed the ox's tail we have already taken the red pill. One of the biggest drawbacks of the simulation hypothesis is the possibility of infinite regress. What if the simulators themselves are being simulated? How many levels of simulation could you wake up from? The unspoken problem here is the assumption that Thomas Anderson is Neo or knowing if Chuang Tzu was a human or a butterfly. If and when you awake from the simulation, do you in fact get to keep your identity or do you wake up as someone else? This idea is at the heart of reincarnation whereby some essence of you lingers when you wake up into your new body and reality. And this leads on to asking if consciousness itself persists after death or does the whole world (simulation) disappear with you? It may be that when Enlightenment occurs the old you will simply disappear and be thoroughly forgotten. But. Neo can always jack back into the simulation when he likes and he effectively lives in two different worlds. Enlightenment is not a one way street, you could have a foot in both worlds. This is what the quote "Before Enlightenment carry wood chop water. After Enlightenment carry wood chop water." means. The idea of infinite levels of simulation may also mean that there is not just one Enlightenment but many awakenings available to you. This actually seems sensible. There should be nothing special about where you wake up to, except maybe becoming a God comparatively. In fact in Neo's case his "real" reality is quite miserable and tough despite being a kind of God in the Matrix itself. What if there is no simulation? Until you awaken you won't know.

Exactly it. A question of epistemology. @Gesundheit2's third point is on the money. You have to flip things around. None of us have consciousness, we are all manifestations of consciousness. Although thinking that way can seem completely alien to most people.

And how would you know that? What experiment or questions or observations would you need to carry out to know that a robot is having having an "inner subjective experience"?