LastThursday

I don't track my my calories. I eat similar food every week, so I know what's going in. Then again I don't generally snack or eat junk food. Could I clean up my diet? Absolutely: more veg and less processed food. But I know I'm neither gaining or losing weight over time, so the balance is correct in that respect. I have calorie counted when I was doing a 5/2 fasting diet because you have to for that. I started that because I'd put on a lot of weight (for me) and that was mostly because of having a sedentary job, and not exercising at all. But even on that diet, I just ate similar things on my fast days, so I didn't have to think too hard about calorie counting. The diet was brutal especially in the afternoons, but was effective for me. I'd do it again if necessary.

@Natasha Tori Maru yeah I did a some intensive NLP courses back in the day, sort of got into it by proxy via my Dad, who's even worked with John Grinder. I understand the power of rewriting memories first hand because of it. @Leo Gura there's no denying that some people have more accurate or fuller recall. Marilu Henner is an actor (look her up) who has nearly perfect autobiographical memory or hyperthymesia. She can recall what happened on any particular day just by giving her a date - which is astounding. But memory is quite a broad category. I'd say it includes autobiographical, visual, sound, touch, taste and so on. Also procedural memory, and memories "held" in the body, such as emotions and trauma. I myself have very good visual recall, and very good recall for abstract stuff. I vividly remember stuff from being a very young kid. But is it accurate? I'm not so sure and I have nothing to back up my memories other than asking immediate family and some old photographs. When it comes down to it, to know if your memories are accurate you have to compare them something else. Memories are a kind of abstract reconstruction put together from many different sources. To use a computer analogy they're stored in a very compressed lossy format, and during decompression you get artifacts and hallucination.

Being concerned about health is very valid even at 22. You should work on moving as much as possible if you have a sit down job. Go to the gym, or walk or run when you're not working, even half an hour of movement every day helps your health a lot. But also do the other obvious things: don't smoke, don't eat junk food, don't drink alcohol excessively, get proper sleep. Saying that, until you're about 40, I wouldn't worry too much about health, being worried all the time is also not good for health.

Memory is a lot more fluid than people think. The overwriting mechanism explains how to heal memories of trauma, and how bad situations can seem a lot less bad as time passes, or how two people can disagree on the same events. It's even possible to implant false memories by hypnosis, or even by just by exposure to photographs for example. It also explains how some of the therapy techniques in Neuro Linguistic Programming works, such as anchoring.

I'd say it's in the same category of question as do computer games cause violence? The answer to that one is is that most people can sensibly tell the difference between fiction and reality, and don't go around stealing cars and running over pedestrians in a big city. In the same vein I think most people can tell the difference between porn and reality. If you have or have had a sex life, then there's no comparison. In that case you only continue watching porn like you continue eating fast food, because it gives you an instant pleasure hit. Like fast food, that pleasure hit is addictive, and addiction is bad (so says society). There's a lot of moralising about porn, but if you strip that away, then porn could give you a disorted view of sex and how and why it's performed, especially if you're young and uninformed. The question really is then, does repeated exposure to porn cause a long lasting negative effect on libido, expectation, attraction and fashion in how sex is performed? Is faux strangulation and shaved genitals the norm now because of it?

@Ramanujan I'm sorry man being lonely sucks bad, loneliness is anti-human. Sort of what @Cred says, go find people to be with, that interact in a way that feels comfortable to you. There's so many different ways now to do that online, if face-to-face doesn't appeal. Think about your interests and go find groups online to express that interest. Probably even being on here helps to an extent I daresay.

In terms of attire there is a large element of tribal belonging. There is always a current fashion, just look at how people presented themselves in the 1970's to now. Even though there is always a wide range of styles, even in the 70's, there is a kind of zeitgeist that people lock in to. Looking good is in large part being part of the in group and conformity. But this also applies to the way you speak and carry yourself. In terms of genetics then it's parts sexual selection and evolutionary selection. We are unconsciously positively biased towards people who look healthy and strong, and we could breed with successfully or could provide good protection - and status as a side effect. Mostly, indicators of good genetics, that can be passed to offspring.

I'm not so convinced. There is also a lot of mathematics that doesn't correspond to anything in nature. So there is mathematics invented to model nature and existing mathematics that can be co-opted to model nature, and a lot maths that's nothing to do with nature. Although, it is cool that we can come up with equations that encapsulate nearly the whole of a phenomenon like Maxwell's equations. But even there those equations don't describe the photoelectric effect for example. In other words nearly never is a mathematical abstraction the complete picture.

There is a possibility that mathematics is so flexible that it bends itself to the patterns in nature. Anything with some sort of pattern, can be modelled by maths. Indeed maths has been invented just for specific physical theories such as quantum mechanics. There's also lots of approximations in mathematical modelling going on, take the Ideal Gas laws for example, which are statistical, there's plenty of that sort of thing. Mathematics isn't always about precision. There's also the question of calculation. Even if you get equations for something in nature, they can be intractably hard to either solve or plug real numbers into. How spacetime behaves around most types of black hole, has differential equations that are unsolvable. The three-body problem is unsolvable. But nature doesn't care about mathematics and just gets on with it. But, one link is that both idealism and mathematics are in a sense both about non-material Platonic forms - so they share that in common. @Lazarus93 do you have any ideas or thoughts about it?

Indeed. And the normals will call you insane or at least keep well away from you. Most can't bear the idea of that sort of separation from the flock. So they don't even start.

These people are trained for their job, which is to be on TV. There is also bias because TV people are cherry picked to appear on there, so you only get the most articulate, most intellectual, most attractive, most funny etc.

You're born into a society and culture and indoctrinated from a young age. It's super hard to break out of that programming - even if you wanted to - everything is against you. Philosophy, epistemology and all that stuff is very hard to learn and understand, and most people don't see the utility of it, it doesn't help them survive. I wouldn't underestimate how indoctrinated you yourself are either, work on that, let others worry about themselves.

God(s) isn't rational, we are. Plurality or singularity are the same to God. Fundamentally what is being experienced is both irrational and arbitrary. There are patterns in that irrationality and order in the arbitrariness, so you could argue about why this and why not this for ever; there is no ultimate answer.

@Hojo maybe language has been directly altering my perception all the time, but I just haven't noticed before? My experience would seem to go against the idea that language is just "pointing", and more that language is strongly intertwined with perception.

It all happened a few years ago when I was listening to some hypnosis stuff on YouTube. Specifically one video that programmed my mind to "love the colour pink" - don't ask. But I probably listened to that quite a few times over months. Suddenly, one day when walking down the street I noticed that anyone wearing pink or anything with pink seemed to "pop out" in my vision. It's hard to describe but was something like turning up the saturation in Photoshop. The colour wasn't brighter, but somehow thicker and the effect was quite jarring. Over the next few days I noticed that purple (dark pink?) was also affected in a similar way. Eventually, the effect went away. However, being me, I tried to consciously mess about with this. I would pretend to have various "saturation dials" in my mind and turn up various different colours. Trying this over an extended time of months, eventually I was able to affect other colours in a similar way to pink. Again the effect went away again eventually, after I stopped messing about with it. I tried again recently, and for a week now my colour perception has been messed up. It mainly affects strong bold primary colours, and especially blues this time, more mute colours don't seem to be affected at all. Thing is, I seemingly have no way to "turn down" the effect, other than to just wait it out. My question: what's going on here? How does language affect perception directly?

That sure is a big vision. To do that you'd have to understand all the systems that make up Western culture. All systems have leverage points: places where a small change can tip the system into a new state. Think things like Covid stopping normal working practices, or the blocking the Strait of Hormuz stopping oil movement. The main problems are finding leverage points you can affect with a small number of people, and the other is the uncertainty of tipping the system into a new state, it's not deterministic. Every other revolution will take sustained effort and is most likely futile because you're working against billions of people's entrenched habits and world views.

@Carl-Richard a good unpacking of what I wrote there, thanks. Isn't most cognition of a narrative style? I mean, the whole of science is narrative, but it doesn't appeal to all minds. It's definitely more to do with the content of the narrative, and the most memorable, lowest common denominator content wins out, which is where conspiracies sit. People are extremely prone to believing stories of all shades. Most of them are harmless because people "know" they're just stories, but the dangerous ones are the ones people don't recognise as stories, but as "reality". I think even very sensible even-minded people can slip from one state to the other.

@Someone here a good unpacking and critique of my ideas by ChatGPT there: I would disagree strongly with ChatGPT about that point. Can something actually be true if no information about it was ever captured? How can truth be distinguished from falsehood if there is nothing to go on after the fact? In other words to validate truth, it must persist long enough to be validated. And validating truth requires phenomenology. Otherwise, absolutely anything could be true, but argue that we could have just forgotten about it. There's a deep point here. Either: truth sits as a one-time fact that holds forever (ChatGPT), or, truth is a continuous process that needs refreshing every time we dip back into it (me). In reality though, all truths have side effects in the world at large and are not forgotten. Most truths cast a shadow, and we look for the thing that cast it.

No real solid advice as such, but I have some experience in managing teams. It looks like you might already know what needs to be done, since you mentioned your old manager dropped the ball. Half the job is then just to constantly keep on top of the logistics and the non-people side of things: managing stock, deliveries, selling etc. i.e. the mechanics and admin of the position. The fact that your boss has confidence in you is a very good sign, and you can use them as your ally if difficult situations crop up. The other half of the job is the people side of things, and this is where most managers trip up. It's a matter of approach. First is to respect the people around you at all times, even if they're difficult or disrespectful themselves, and treat everyone equally and fairly. Second is to listen to the people who do their particular jobs day in day out, they may have good ideas for improvements, take them seriously and take action on them. Third, act on any transgressions or bad behaviour as quickly as possible, and discipline if necessary (in private), or at the very least be firm about what is not acceptable. Fourth, trust people to do their jobs without constant supervision, delegate when possible to show people you trust them. There is a more psychological side in terms of perception and keeping your distance. You should aim to pitch in with the people you manage when it's necessary, i.e. be seen to do things that are not strictly your role from time to time. You should be punctual for meetings, and early to arrive and late to leave. You should avoid being mates with people you manage, because this makes it very hard to treat everyone equally, and can lead to favouritism and make it hard to discipline them. You should bring on side the "troublemakers" as soon as possible, by listening to their ideas and showing them trust. The age thing I wouldn't worry about too much, if you're a decent manager, people will accept you for who you are and not worry about your age. As a manager there will always be a mix of people younger and older than you. Good luck!

I'm not sure I believe that a supernaturalist tendency makes you more prone to be a conspiracy theorist. I think anyone can be drawn to it, and even change their minds over time. I think most of it comes down a confluence of things, such as how naturally paranoid or anxious one is, or how much one believes what others tell them. Also, it comes from ignorance of how things actually work in real life; conspiracy theorists are uninformed in many different areas and so draw wrong conclusions. There is often an esoteric or weird vibe to conspiracy theories, in the same vein as folk tales, and that does make them stick in the mind more. In other words it's survival of the fittest conspiracy theories, the ones that stick around are the most memorable, weird and wacky.

Your hair like the dark of the night, Your skin like the light of the moon, Your eyes like the stars that twinkle, Your five o'clock shadow like...

You could just as well say you incarnated as everything. It's a matter of framing. If you take the literal sense of the word as being "in the flesh", then you have to ask the question, why have you incarnated as an entity that only believes their flesh is what they are?

Depends on the situation. But whatever the situation you're just exchanging information through chit-chat and getting those small dopamine hits. If you're looking to pull, then both parties need to exchange just enough information to say "yes" or "no", and then escalate the situation quickly, if it's all systems go. A lot of that exchange is non-verbal, so self-confidence, energy, interest, laughter, touch, smell and a million other non-verbal things come into the mix, some of which you can control and improve on, some of which you have no control over.

Truth requires some amount of persistence of some aspect of experience. Persistence is just a kind of memory. A truth which is always persisting is an absolute truth, by some measure of "always". A lot of what can be understood in experience are constructions (or interpretations) in experience: chairs, people, sky, air, food, self. The constructions are a kind of truth by virtue of the fact that they are a kind of memory. I understand a chair, and chairs exist, because the chair construction persists as a form of memory, and that construction is applied whenever something in raw experience matches the "template". Constructions are fluid and so don't persist absolutely: chairs are not absolute truth. Constructions given to you by other people, are not absolute truth either. To get at a different truth then, you have to deal with the non-constructed parts of experience. One such thing is that experience exists all the time, it's hard to deny that something is there, something is happening; it is an absolute truth. I would say it is potentially impossible to know if you're dealing with a construction or not, maybe everything in experience is a construction, it's hard to tell. Is the colour red a construction or not? Certainly the word "red" definitely is, but is the direct experience of it a construction, where does red start and end in experience? What about, nearly red? Anything that delineates reality, is almost certainly a construction of some type. But isn't reality just distinctions?

That is also an identity. I have nothing against people using their brains and having their own concepts, I applaud it, we need more of it. What irks me is people who don't bother to explain what their new concepts are, and then use obscure word salad to make it sound fancy or mysterious or intellectual. It's a lot more overt in America than in the UK for sure. We're hugely more tolerant of diversity here, however, there is a strong underlying tension against that diversity in many places, especially outside of major cities. Brits are obsessed with "migrants" and always have been, but we do live on an island. We are even wary of Europeans, hence the whole debacle with Brexit. I'm sure they're either confused or just roll their eyes at us or just shrug their shoulders and just carry on without us. Race is strongly tied to Western imperialism. Imperialism requires a strong sense of identity so that you can justify subjugating anyone you come across who you want power over. The Nazis misappropriated Darwin's theory of evolution to "prove" their theories about race - and ever since race has been talked about in the same breath as genetics. People are still confused. But I'll say it again for effect: race has nothing to do with genetics.