LastThursday

Come on let's be civil to each other, even if we disagree on things.

@Someone here good. You mother in direct experience doesn't exist either, she's just light and shade, splashes of colour, soothing sound and warm touch.

Which god, the Abrahamic one? Aren't we shaped in God's image? Anthropomorphising God makes Him easier to reason about and understand for the masses. In the Bible He's portrayed as very much the head of the household of humanity and male, because reasons. Away from conventional religions, I don't see a problem with having a personal god or gods (Roman style) and making them non-human or even something completely abstract. Why not.

I'm with your mum, definitely unsuitable watching, straight to bed young lady 👉 I'm derailing my own thread. Back on topic...

@Judy2 not to glamourise eating disorders, but someone having a cooking channel with an ED could be inspiring to lots of people in the same position. A USP of sorts, the human interest angle could work in your favour. You absolutely don't have to show your face or use your voice, plenty of YT channels without either, for example. Just be conscious from the outset and throughout that it may get emotional. Sometimes staring at pain directly in the face is the best way to overcome it. Go with your instincts.

But... but... @Mellowmarsh consciousness is not a thing 🤪

Caught red handed. I watched every second of the X-Files BITD @Natasha Tori Maru

Like any craftsperson if you're doing it day in and day out, you learn mastery of the craft. If you're laying potentially millions of blocks, you'll very quickly learn to master it. Especially so if you've already built smaller pyramids before, which is exactly what happened. And extreme mastery can look like magic or supernatural ability. I'm pretty sure this is the case with the pyramids.

@Ramasta9 Ah yes good old David Wilcock. I've read his book the Source Field Investigations, interesting stuff. The power of pyramids was already being talked about by Lyall Watson in his book Supernature. I think I even made a cardboard pyramid razor sharpner in my youth. I'm more intrigued by your direct experiences than a video with a bunch of anectodal evidence however. Maybe start a new thread explaining what you've witnessed? Sounds interesting.

Most likely. The Thunder Stone was 1,500 tons and took nine months to move into place. 80 tons is nothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Horseman @Ramasta9 as much as I love the idea esoteric technology (and I've researched it a lot), conventional technology is plenty magic already. But I have no doubt the Egyptians thought about building and technology differently to us. If you watch the third video I posted above, it explains that most of the pyramid is "infilled rubble", with the rubble being largish unshaped blocks. It would be a lot quicker to place those. Only the exterior and some interior structural "walls" where shaped and carefully placed blocks.

Here are my thoughts, just some ideas to play with. 1. A thought is a category of experience which by its nature is made separate from the category of "world out there". The stuff that happens that doesn't affect the world. 2. When you move your body is that a thought also? Can thoughts cross the boundary from one category to another? 3. Is thought just rational step-by-step goal oriented processing? 4. Does a thought depend on an internal voice? Does it need an auditory hallucination? Can you think in images, sounds etc? 5. Is a memory, thought? 6. Are hallucinations thoughts? 7. Are dreams thoughts? 8. Is reality thought? Why? Why not?

I agree but you're confusing limitations (aka boundaries). Counting numbers are infinite, because there is always a next number (i.e. no limit). But they are infinite only with respect to that lack of limit. Counting numbers are not letters, so they are not infinite in that sense, they are a category of 1, i.e. Counting Numbers. So the infinity is always with respect to some criterion. For another example a circle is both finite and infinite. If you mark a point on the circle then walk your way around it, it is finite in distance, when you hit that point again. But the number of times you could walk around the circle is unlimited, so it is infinite in that sense (trig functions rely on that sense of infinity). However, we're not talking about ordinary infinities here, but absolute infinities, which by their nature are unlimited in every aspect. Consciousness is supposedly such a thing. Nothing can limit consciousness, and consciousness can't limit itself (maybe?), so it is an absolute infinity. An infinity is always something, it is the lack of limit in some aspect - by definition.

@Inliytened1 anything without a boundary is infinite. In fact that is the definition of infinity. And it's also absolute by definition, because there's nothing to contrast it with, and so it can't be distinguished and hence it's an unchanging Truth. I 100% agree with you. Can consciousness know an infinity? There seems to be many finite things in consciousness, but how do you "know" you have an infinity without taking it on faith? Is consciousness infinite? Is intelligence infinite? Or does consciousness recognise infinities without using reason?

By that logic, there is only existence. Existence exists and non-existence exists. But I get where you're coming from. It could well be that intelligence is like existence in that it has no opposite or contrast or boundary. I'm open to that. But if that is the case then it's a binary condition, either it's intelligence or not, with nothing in between. Like, stuff either exists or it doesn't, there's nothing in between. Absolute intelligence if you like. If something exists and has no boundary, then it is absolute, monolithic, and unchanging.

To distinguish a thing (intelligence) it must have a boundary. Everything outside that boundary is not intelligence, everything inside is. If everything is intelligence, then it has no boundary (because it's everything), and therefore it can't be distinct. Only things that can be distinguished exist. By that argument there must be non-intelligence. "how much" just means that there is a graduation between intelligence and non-intelligence. All that's a long-winded way of saying to have a thing, you need its opposite for contrast. There are non-intelligent things in consciousness.

I want it to be some weird fantastical technology, I want to believe. But I think it will turn out to be just ropes and a lot of grunt work, and some very clever architecting. A tiny part of me wants to see it as incoherence in the fabric of reality. In other words, there is no rational explanation, it just is, or it was planted there just to tease us. But that's even whackier than fantastical technology.

Intelligence is like currency, it moves from one thing to another. Say someone teaches you how to tie your shoelaces, then that bit of intelligence has been transferred (or more accurately copied). If that's the case then intelligence moves and recombines from many different sources. If you keep tracing back where a bit of intelligence came from then in an idealist paradigm, the backstop is consciousness itself. Consciousness itself is the source of all intelligence. Is intelligence then no different from consciousness itself? Well that depends on whether any part of consciousness is unintelligent. That seems reasonable, not everything is intelligent, there's a lot of stupidity in consciousness.

The here and now is all there is. The ideas of future and past are constructs sitting in the here and now. Nothing from the future can hurt you now, and equally the past: they don't exist in the same way as the here and now. But it is paradoxical, because your constructions of the past and future do affect the here and now; they are the here and now, or at least part of it. However, as constructs, the past and future are malleable, so they don't have to keep affecting you in the same way in the here and now. Everything is interpretation at some level, because nearly everything is a construct at some level. This goes from conscious abstractions like the figure in my bank account, to unconscious constructions like the sofa I'm sitting on. My sofa is in fact just the interplay of touch, sight, sound and probably smell. The base of reality could then be pure sensations without interpretation, but I can't see myself getting to point of no interpretation, even though those absolute sensations are as plain as day. It's like the constructs have as much reality as the pure sensations. The question then is, am I a construct? And if so, how can a construct such as me reach a state of seeing reality without interpretation (i.e. constructions)?

I like heavy classical musical and banging house music in equal measure. Throw in a bit of Jazz or 80's synth as well. Anyway, melody and rythmn.

I don't need language to be able to distinguish a dog from everything else. I don't see a dog and then say to myself "dog". I don't confuse a dog for a cat, those are both different things. Naturally I can point to it and tell someone "hey that's a dog", or "oye, ese es un perro", the language is irrelevant, the experience is the same in both cases. There is a mental construct or template of a "dog". I have a bunch of perceptions, and those perceptions fit my template of a "dog". The words "dog" or "perro" are then attached to that mental construct, and I can use that to convey my experience to someone else. The crux of the thing is that the mental construct is not a part of language, it is entirely separate from it. I can navigate the world completely without using language. But I can't navigate the world without using mental constructs. These constructs or platonic forms or templates or whatever you want to call them, sit between language and perception. A "dog" or un "perro" are just visual symbols representing random sounds we make representing mental constructs representing perceptions.

What do you think a dog is then? And why's it different from a cat?

Do you think dogs exist outside of language?

This is an example of exactly what I said above. You're using language to say "stop using language" i.e. to point to something outside of language.

There is the theory of the Bicameral Mind, which says that hearing voices used to be the normal way people experienced the world. Auditory hallucination was one the ways the brain talked to itself. Self-reflective thinking was not the norm until more modern times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality How does the brain know if something is real or imagined? It seems it needs to hit some sort of threshold in intensity. It could be that some people's internal voices are strong enough for them to believe they're real, despite the fact there is nobody there speaking them. This article is about mental imagery, which is a similar phenomenon: https://www.quantamagazine.org/is-it-real-or-imagined-how-your-brain-tells-the-difference-20230524/ The brain is also very good at rationalising things away, for example calling the voices "commands from god" or "messages sent by a government agency". Cotard's sydrome or "walking corpse" is an extreme example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotard's_syndrome

@Someone here what you say is correct and agrees with what @Hojo is saying. However, language can point to things outside of itself, it doesn't always just point to itself. You could describe eating a hotdog, and get lost for ever in description, or language can point outside itself and say "go and eat a hotdog and find out". Equally with Enlightenment, language can't make you enlightened by describing it, but it can point outside itself and say "go meditate" or "go take psychedelics", "go on a fast" etc. Language can stack the Enlightenment odds in your favour. @Leo Gura has done this so often it's comical. Do the work!