LastThursday

The hardest decision I made was to be honest about a long term relationship I was in. My whole life was set up around being with this person and for the longest time I resisted facing up to the fact I no longer loved her. And then one day it happened, she asked me, and I said the words. She found a new partner, I found a new partner, but my boat had sailed, and I had to go and reinvent myself, find new friends and a new life, whilst she stayed ashore.

If something is suddenly seen as constructed in conscious awareness, does it stop existing? Or does its existence just change to a different type? When a child learns that Santa isn't real, what is actually happening there? (other than disappointment) It's not as if Santa suddenly goes *poof* and permenantly get erased from reality. Talking to myself is the first sign of insanity.

The gift of Santa is that it tells you that some types of existence are pure constructions. Nearly everything you think exists is a construction. Santa is no different from a chair or an electron. All objects are constructions, all actions are constructions. Your sense of self is a construction. Your dead great-grandmother is a construction. That isn't to say that these things are conscious deliberate constructions, a lot of it is automatic and unconscious. What isn't a construction? Raw, direct perception. That's a different type of existence. Then, by extension non-existence is also a construction - which exists.

I thought I'd talk about Chess. When I was a kid my grandparents had many board games and we would often play them when me and my sister stayed with them. One of the was Chess, and that was my grandad's game. I was facinated by the little characters of the pieces, but I was six years old, and my grandparents must have thought it was too complicated for me. A few years later my dad showed me how to set up the pieces and the moves. I was hungry to play games, but by dad unfortunately was disinterested. There were probably after school clubs for Chess, but I was never very proactive as a teenager. And so I never played chess again for decades, and after only then very rarely. But a few years ago I realised that I could actually play online for free. I also introduced a friend of mine and we've become addicts. We rarely play each other however, since my friend had a lot more practice as a kid and so has a good headstart on me. What makes Chess so good? I think it's a near perfect balance of piece movement, mechanics, and initial piece placement. Here's a little explainer. Movements are essentially either along the straights or the diagonals. Some pieces have long range movements and some short range. That creates a kind of tension whereby you have two different strategies at play. Long range movements are powerful because they cover and "see" large parts of the board, short range movements require creativity to make the most of them. So you both have to maximise and keep track of powerful moves, but also creatively use incremental advances. Chess mostly works by threat. If a piece can potentially move to a square, it effectively guards it, if your opponent's piece is on that square then it is fair game and can be "taken" or removed from the board. That is except for pawns that only go forwards one square, but can only take diagonally. This is genius because pawns can "reinforce" and protect each other by occupying diagonal squares to each other: a pawn chain. What should a pawn do once it has advanced all the way to the other end of the board? Chess allows it to be promoted to any other piece the player wants, usually the most powerful piece: the Queen. So there is a strong incentive as the game continues to get pawns to the other side and that means protecting them as much as possible. Pawns also make effective "shields" against powerful pieces. Indeed, at the start of the game, pawns shield all of the more powerful pieces. This is also genius, as they effectively force the player to be creative in unleashing their powerful pieces, as they have to get out from behind their own pawn wall. There are many strategies for doing this and these are called openings. There a hundreds of standard openings that give you advantage in different ways. Chess also works by protection. You can threaten to take your opponent's piece, but your opponent can also reinforce that piece with another: if you take a piece, they can take your attacking piece in retaliation with another piece. That tension of threat and protection creates a kind of matrix of protection throughout the game. Each player aims to exploit holes in the other player's protection matrix. Protection can be many levels deep, and indeed a piece can be protected with multiple other pieces. But you can also have multiple threats on the same piece. One aim of Chess is to calculate what happens if you play tit-for-tat and whether it is to your advantage. The aim of Chess is to checkmate your opponent's King. That means to directly threaten the King in such a way that the King can't move away from the threat. The King is a short range piece, so that means you must protect it at all times as more powerful pieces can easily get to the King. Protecting the King is done by blocking using other pieces, usually pawns. As the game progresses and pieces are taken off the board, the players' Kings have less and less options for protection and so checkmate is more likely. So again there is a tension between trying to remove as many of your opponent's pieces as possible, but also looking for opportunities to checkmate as quickly as possible. It may be possible to checkmate early in a game because too much protection restricts the King's movements. Again there is a perfect balance here. Knights are very interesting in that they are short range pieces, but can jump over blocking pieces. They also have an unusual L shaped movement of two squares across and one along. This means they are able to jump into positions that other pieces can't and that gives them power. They are generally considered to be worth nearly the same as a Bishop which is a long range piece. Rooks are stuck in the corners to start but are very mobile once out as they're another long range piece. They go along the straights and can get to any square on the board. But they tend to come out late in a game, because of castling. This is a relationship they have with the King whereby they swap positions so that the King can be better protected. Castling requires space between the Rook and King, and also that neither the Rook or the King have been moved so far. There are two Rooks in each corner for each player, so castling can happen in either direction. This also allows Rooks the space to get out from the corners, but to leave the corner pawns where they are so that they can protect the King after castling - genius. Bishops are always restricted to diagonals, and the checkquerboard pattern of black and white squares means that each Bishop is confined to a particular colour of square. A player has two Bishops and each on a different colour to start. Because pawns form chains on diagonals, and these will all fall on the same colour square (say a chain of pawns on a black diagonal), then a Bishop may be unable to attack these pawns if it is on a different colour. This can matter greatly in the latter part of a game, and one tactic is to maneouvre pawns so that they can be attacked by an opponent Bishop. Lastly Queens are the most powerful piece on the board, and have complete freedom to go either on straights or diagonal and are long range. However there is only one Queen per player. Most checkmate positions happen with a Queen and some other piece. However, Queens are often removed mid-game and normally by the opposing Queen. Once this happens you are past the mid-game stage and into an end game. In end games, the pieces are a lot more open and less protected (because most pieces have been removed), but there is a lot more freedom of movement. Most end games will have some Rooks and Pawns still on the board. The power of Pawns is crucial in and end game to allow you to "win back" powerful pieces by getting them to the other side and promoting them. Indeed, you can end up with multiple Queens, and these can be unstopable. In all Chess is a seriously good game, and has enough rules and quirks to sustain a lot of "tension" or "balance" between the players. It also forces players to use lots of tactics and strategy to gain advantage. And its freeform style of movement means that there's no limit to how skillful you can be in it. It is a truly great game.

It's difficult for sure. For me authentic could mean one of two things. Either, the person you are in private when you're away from everyone else. Or, some ideal version of yourself that you would like to be all the time. In that case being inauthentic would be to not match up to that authentic version of yourself. The suffering comes from making the comparison, and strongly negatively identifying with it. Instead, recognise that you're naturally a different person on different days and in different situations. There's a fluidity to what you are and you should lean into that part of yourself a lot more. And, enjoy it. Saying that, if the people you're with are not allowing you the freedom to be what you want to be, then go find people that will. But in my experience I've found that it's a bit both, you can also change and be accepted for it, it just takes time and a bit of courage.

@Breakingthewall thanks for the response, but you missed my meta point: that there are always different ways of looking at a thing and you should be happy to play with all of them, even if they don't feel right. But I understand why you answered how you did, thanks.

I'm out. I'm tagging back in @PolyPeter

The best strategy is slowly build up over many runs. I used to add 100 metres to each run, and I only ran once a week. I think once you get to 5k comfortably without too much effort, then you can increase much more each run. If you can run 10k comfortably then 21k is completely doable if not tiring. I would also advocate short stops at defined distances to recover, just one or two minutes, say at 5k then 10k. You'll be surprised at how much further you can run if you do this. Once your fitness increases, you will need to stop less. I wouldn't advocate going ironman and running as far as possible. You'll be more likely to damage something or get an injury (because fatigue messes up your running gait). Pacing is also super important, start quite slow to warm up, then slowly ramp up pace until about 5k, then maintain, you'll naturally slow after 10k, let that happen. You will have a natural running pace, due to your anatomy, running at that pace is optimal. I find that my natural running pace requires me to be quite fit to maintain however. I love running, I must get back into it!

Hugging's one of those Marmite love it or hate it kind of things. I'm a hugger, but I don't see it as any different from a handshake or saying "hi how are you doing?". I'm quite happy to hug even close male friends, but generally they're not. I don't force hugs on anyone - except my dad. I always hug my dad even though he's totally uncomfortable with it (don't analyse me). My sister's not a hugger either! What can I say? They're missing out. My advice. Ignore that inner voice and just hug everyone, you'll soon find out who's comfortable with it and who's not. Go from there.

@Olaf it's possible to drop identification with being a character at all, that's what being authentic means. Once that happens you can choose to play a character because it's fun or useful to you. You separate out performance from identification. Inauthentencity is just lack of choice.

I don't know. But you can attack the question either top-down or bottom-up. The anthropic principle is top-down: it asks what would it take for the universe as it is to be true, and works backwards. Inflation is bottom up, it says such and such happened, produced the substrate of of the universe and we are a consequence of all that. Metaphysically, you could say for example God wants to experience itself, and so it has set everything up so that can happen (top-down). Or you could say, God created the seed of reality by breaking a few symmetries, and the rest just unfolded itself (bottom-up). I'm not religious, so I don't give a damn about the word God BTW.

No no. There is no "someone", a stone exists that's it, and it has the property of "awareness" because it it exists. Being human with awareness is part of the same continuum of the inate awareness of existence itself. The awareness doesn't come from us, it comes from existence itself. We are composed wholly of the appearances of existence, that's why "we" are aware.

The nature of consciousness is that it exists. For something to exist there must always be an awareness of it, the two go hand in hand. You could go two ways here. You could say that something has to be aware of something else, which is your argument. Or the more counterintuitive way is that awareness is existential, awareness is exactly the same as existence. Consciousness = Existence = Awareness. Awareness is a bad word, because it's easy to get tripped up in language. To be aware is a transitive verb, so has "twoness" built into the word. Stuff exists, no matter how you want to describe it. What stuff exists is exactly what is being made aware of. Having a screen is over complicating the description though. Where is the evidence for a transcendental unchanging reality? All is change, all the time.

It's not an exact counterpart however, the Pauli Exclusion applies specifically to Hilbert Space, which is a mathematic abstraction in Quantum Mechanics. Bosons can occupy the same Quantum state, so by extension can occupy the same position in real space (think photons). But I can see that space is definitely something to do with exclusion, one bit of space is not the same as another bit of space. Space is also locally connected, typically there aren't wormholes that directly connect far off bits of space together, or space doesn't loop back onto itself (if it did then anything falling into the loop would be trapped in the loop) or other weird geometries. Black holes might be the exception for weirdness.

Yeah I wouldn't take the analogy too literally. Maybe more like a balloon, space expands its own extent. It doesn't expand into anything, it just defines an ever-growing boundary (like the rubber of a balloon). There is actually nothing on the other side of the boundary. So yes, inside only, no outside. It's not so bad, because the starting state of space is a singularity, which is a nothingness. So if you wanted something the other side of the of the boundary, it would be the originating singularity. It's a mind bender for sure, since the singularity has no extent or structure.

I think within here means inside, no? Consciousness wouldn't be the container, it is the thing itself (there is no screen). If consciousness has neither an inside or an outside, then it has no boundary (as you say). But is it consciousness singular or consciousnesses plural? If what you experience is a plurality of consciousnesses then yes there can be an "outside" to a particular instance of consciousness, i.e. it's another consciousness. In my idea above, consciousness is synonymous with appearance. See it like this. Say there is a left and a right "appearance" in your vision. My argument is that the left appearance is distinct from the right appearance, and you may as well call each of them a separate consciousness, because they are in fact different. That's because I'm collapsing consciousness and appearance into one thing. There is nothing in principle stopping you from defining consciousness this way, just as there nothing in principle stopping you from defining consciousness as "one thing". I think what gets in the way is that most people have a sense of a unified "me" that experiences things "out there", and it's hard to see through that.

Emptiness is yet another appearance. There's nothing outside of appearances. Distinctions are another appearance. In fact the nature of distinction is at the heart of appearances themselves. Distinctions are everywhere; left, right, bright, dark, red, blue, loud, soft, rough, smooth. Appearances are distinctions (<-more language equivalence). How is circularity avoided though. What is distinct from what? Since distinction is a self-aware appearance, then there's no ground left to explain it, a distinction just is. Effectively appearance, distinction, awareness, existence, reality are synonyms for the same thing (more equivalence). My idea is that it isn't. Existence is exactly reality, the same thing. Appearances are not manifested by some process, they just are. There are correlations between appearances at many many different levels (distinctions). But those correlations are yet more appearance. So, there are distinctions of "sameness" and "difference", cause and effect, dependent origination. Yes because there is no ground to existence, nothing to "anchor" appearances in place.

I suppose that includes self-diagnosed?

I don't know. I don't particular like labels either for any number of reasons. I think neurodiversity as a label is overly broad, and it's also going through a bit of a fad at the moment, the world and their brother want to be ND as a way to explain themselves and as a badge of honour. DSM doesn't help by being overly general and broad in their definitions. Saying that, society does operate with the average person in mind. That means average in many ways, such as cognitively and socially, those are your NTs. i.e. it's the largest category, that of average people. Society is then settling on the average over millions of people calling that "normal".

Exactly what a ND would say.

The "you" there would not fit in with my line of thinking, if by "you" you mean "a something that watches". I'm happy with a "you" being a construction of a multitude of appearances however. But that would mean "you" by my definition is a plurality like the brushstrokes in a painting. And that would point to multiple simultaneous existences. I find existence as a word difficult, because it's like trying to grab a cloud. Existence becomes an easy word if you assume that there is just one quality that defines it, i.e. it is not a multiplicity, but I don't assume that.

This sums up neatly the constant nagging feeling I've felt my entire life. I've never wanted to be a cog, and could never understand why other people were happy to do so, and worse, oblivious to it. More accurately, I've never wanted to be a cog in someone else's machine. But I do think that being ND is like anything else in life. With respect to the world of NT, there will be some things you will never be able to learn, and some things that are difficult but achievable. I will say that with ND there can be a disinterest in what NTs find normal and straightforward, and that in itself can be a hinderance to "fitting in", because you never have the motivation to go towards more neurotypicality. There's the argument that NDs should not make the effort to be NT, because their frame is just as valid as any other, but, the world is very much set up for neurotypicals, and relativism doesn't help you survive in such a world.

Here's my thinking process. I'd have to start with the basics. What is meant by consciousness? What is its nature? If you say consciousness is existence then from a purely language-centric view, you're setting up an equivalance between the words consciousness and existence. It's like connecting two different coloured Lego bricks and calling it it a "belief". When you resolve the words to what they actually refer to in actuality, it could be that consciousness and existence are entirely separate categories from each other. The point is that language is being used here to set up a new belief, that may or may not be ultimately true. Consciousness may not be existence (gasp!). If you take consciousness as a definition to be something like "all that I have already experienced". We're still playing the same linguistic trick, but at least "experience" as a word is more direct and tangible than "existence". If we examine experience then we can decompose it into various sensations (another linguistic equivalence), which can be categorised into sight and sound and touch etc. Individual sensations seem to recur, such as the coldness or roughness or brightness. Going meta we can lump all these categories of experience into one and call them "appearances", because despite the differences in sensations, there is something that connects them all: they are being experienced. Naturally, you would ask: are the appearances happening in or on some sort of substrate? Are they like projections on a screen at a cinema? Secondly, is there a something which experiences those appearances? There's a lot of leeway here to interpret things as you want, maybe there isn't a screen, maybe there isn't a watcher etc. Personally, I like to keep things as simple as possible. There is no screen, and there is no watcher. It's ALL just appearances. The appearances have the capacity to be aware of themselves (so to speak). Appearances just exist without support from anything else. If that is the case, then it's worth noting that "appearances" is plural. Why is it plural? Because it seems obvious that appearances are distinct and ever changing, that there is always a multiplicity of them at all times. This would seem to completely go against the idea of a unified monolithic consciousness. But, you could ask, what about the fact that appearances exist, doesn't that unify them all? It doesn't have to. Maybe appearance A has absolutely nothing to do with appearance B, maybe they are two incompatible forms of existence? Maybe it's existences, plural. If appearances are the base of reality, then there is no concept of existing in or of a separate consciousness container. It's just appearances. Another way to see it is, is the Mona Lisa a woman posing or is it all just brushstrokes that come together like "a woman posing". Is the Mona Lisa one thing, or a multiplicity of different things?

What is space? If space is a featureless, structureless thing, then it is not a thing at all. The only way to know about space is to look at the things in it, they provide the structure. In that sense matter/energy and fields (things in space) and space are complementary, you can't have one without the other. You could even say that space is exactly the complement of matter and vice versa. It's very telling that matter/energy warps spacetime, and that spacetime affects the motion of matter/energy. That is a direct consequence of this complementarity. If the amount of matter if finite, then so is the amount of space. We have no way to know if space is infinite in extent because light travels at a finite speed. Any information we have about space is got through observing matter, and observation is restricted by the speed of light. We can only ever observe a finite volume of space. Everything else is conjecture and philosophy. We can't know what is beyond the event horizon. One good question to ponder is to ask why space has extent in the first place? I like to think of it like oil spreading on water. In that way space could have a self-repulsion, each bit of space is fighting to differentiate itself to every other bit of space. If space were to start off in a state of zero-extent (a singularity), then it's easy to see how a self-repulsive mechanism could make it inflate wildly and forever. If it's a smooth inflation, then space is finite but ever increasing, if it's an instant phase change, then it could potentially be infinite. It's telling that fermions obey the Pauli exclusion principle, and maybe space is somehow fermionic as well. The curvature of the universe is basically a geometric measurement, it's either closed, open or flat. The current consensus is that it's flat, it can't be a mixture.

I so want to argue against this, but my thoughts are not totally clear on it. So I won't. But the teaser is that I'm not sure consciousness is a monolithic unchanging field: it seems to sit on the cusp of chaos and orderliness, unfication and complete splintering. Anyway, a conversation for a different thread. Humans definitely like to immerse and delude themselves into beliefs, and go to war and die for them. I find the unwavering absoluteness of people's beliefs incredible. They even like to tell themselves: "this is not a belief, it's a truth". Sure if you cross the road in front of a car, it will end badly, but if you've never carried it out, it's still a belief.