LastThursday

@YIDIRYIDIR it's a good insight that behaviour is linked to identity. I would argue the converse (because I'm like that). People don't change behaviour because it threatens their identity. Change is uncertainty, and uncertainty is risk, and risk could threaten who you are. Also, there is nearly always some pay off for any entrenched behaviour, even if it's to the detriment of your overall wellbeing. To change then, requires a renegotiation of the pay off, which in itself can be hard to accept or work out.

@Majed I find it weird that you find it weird. Novel things can be weird, but you get used them, and it stops being weird. Women on motorcycles is neither here nor there, they are neither lesser or more of anything for doing it. Maybe they don't like traffic or just like the wind in their hair or have a death wish 🤷‍♀️

It would be interesting to come up with a model of non-standard thinking. I'd say the default mode for most folks is social thinking: who did or said what to whom and why, how one person relates to another, what you feel about things. Here's a random bullet list pulled out of nowhere of different types of thinking: Social - you keep a ledger of interactions between things (people), you apply a value function (feelings) to those interactions Relational - you accept that nothing happens in isolation, everything affects everything else with varying strengths Systems - everything works like a machine with distinct interacting parts, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts Construct aware - you realise that every type of thing is an artificially constructed entity made of other things Causal - you know that if A and B happen, there are different scenarios for their synchronicity: A caused B, A and B were caused by C etc. Statistical - see @Carl-Richard Ambiguous - you accept that it is not possible to know the detail of causes for A and B and therefore have to conclude that A and B are equally likely even if contradictory. You know that knowledge and information are always lacking. Big picture - you zoom out or bring more of the world into the scenario in order to explain things, i.e. there a nearly always outside influences, outside of your knowledge. Meta - you constantly try and see problems from different angles, and through different paradigms, or by thinking laterally. Abstract - you use ideas not rooted in every day things to explain things: mathematics, language, symbols, geometry, numbers. I also wonder if there can be a distinct progression in different styles of thinking.

@Adrian colby I think with autism there is a weak "theory of mind". This makes it difficult to take social cues from a person, interpret those and create a mental model of what that person is thinking and feeling, in real time. This also applies to oneself. We have a theory of mind of our own emotions and bodily sensations and build an identity from it. I suspect those with autism have a more fluid or looser identity. Identity mostly comes from copying others, and applying that to ourselves, but if that process is disrupted then building an identity becomes harder. Anyway, don't take my words verbatim, just my ideas nothing more.

I had an argument with AI about a maths problem the other day. The AI was wrong. AI's are not infallible gods, they are robots that make shit up. I actually had to rephrase my maths problem for it to get the right answer. It was useful for me to argue with it, to clarify my own thinking, but I was aware of how ridiculous the situation was. The problem is, is you don't know what you don't know. If an AI is spouting knowledge about things you don't know about, then what are you supposed to do with that other than believe it is correct? And the whole reason for talking to an AI is mostly to talk about things you don't know about. You see the problem. What is needed, is AI training before using it and those AI companies should offer it.

There isn't one. The trap is thinking that intelligence is a one-dimensional thing that you can put a number against. There's also quite a blury line between knowledge and skill, and whether you consider those two things intelligence too. Are insight and creativity intelligence also? What about physical intelligence versus mental intelligence? Gaining knowledge and improving skill can clearly be done by anyone. Insight largely comes from deep domain knowledge and/or skill. Creativity can come from mastery of a thing. The idea that you can somehow download or access intelligence is the wrong way to think about it. If you want to improve intelligence, then you have to practise and learn on all fronts.

The compassion, generosity and intelligence of some, knows no bounds.

I enjoyed the video, interesting to get a history of Mishlove. I've watched a lot of New Thinking Allowed. The one property of consciousness is that it's the thing itself, i.e. it has a kind of recursion built into it. Recursion can lead to a fractal or holographic structure, whereby the thing is contained inside itself. With a fractal it's a self-similar structure, with a hologram it's the entirety contained within itself - although the holographic principle gets abused, because it's only ever the entirety from a particular perspective. It's not then a difficult leap to think that consciousness expresses a brain, which contains consciousness and so on. A brain then is just a recursive structure in consciousness. Consciousness is never lost however, even with a blow to the head, because the person whose head it is, doesn't experience a loss of consciousness, but a discontinuity. And the person watching the blow don't experience a loss of consciousness either, just the person collapsing, i.e. consciousness is not "aliveness".

This is true, and it continues to be true no matter how close you get. But if you give it the benefit of the doubt, then you have a mutual synchronicity of experience, two mirrors looking into each other infinitely reflecting.

If you like the scratchings of a madman, then this guy's @LastThursday's journal might be interesting. There are some other good ones to on there though.

But I don't like ambuiguity, and riddles, in the name of God, I must know the absolute truth, right now, please tell me @Mellowmarsh.

Isn't "everything else" consciousness itself too? Confused.

Most definitely you're not an exception. There's a whole spectrum of gender from ultra male to ultra female, and everything in between. Biology, gender, sexual orientation, those things don't necessarily align, even if society wants to pretend it does. There's a higher chance if you're autistic that you're more gender fluid, but I forget where I read that factoid, some study or other. In short the tension you feel is between what you feel you are/should be and how society thinks you should be. To resolve that tension you'll need to engage with who you think you are more strongly. Start off gently, experiment, test the waters.

And "immediate non descriptive consciousness" isn't that a linguistic statement also? You see the problem. To me absolute means "all encompassing", "total", "dead certain", "without doubt or error", "irrefutably". What sort of truth is that, what is it about an absolute truth that makes it irrefutable? How can it be known, if it's not conviction or faith?

Unfortunately you can't get away from linguistics. What is absolute referring to, and is it just one truth or many of them?

I'd say this is an excellent insight. Most people run at the whims of their programming, and feel helpless to change it. Neuro Linguistic Programming is one set of methods to reprogram yourself, but there are plenty of others such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and therapy in general, and psychedelics of course. I would be wary of placing too much emphasis on the metaphors though, we're not machines in the conventional sense, and we're not computers either. The situation is paradoxical though. When you consciously choose to change or tinker with your programming, where does this idea come from? The system itself of course.

See it more as a Swiss Army Knife. You pull out a certain paradigm or set of beliefs for a given situation and act as if it were true. Every perspective has some truth to it anyway - you can use that to lean on. The problem isn't you, it's other people and their simplistic rigid beliefs, and dealing with them. But having a rich set of perspectives allows you to deal with lots of different people and meet them on their terms, so it improves your ability to navigate life.

For sure. It wasn't until I was 27 that I realised that caffeine intake was adversely affecting me, especially my sleep. Now I keep caffeine to an absolute minimum despite liking tea and coffee a lot. Even my sister can chug coffee before sleep without effect. But, caffeine is relatively easy to control. Short of full and intentional avoidance, how can you regulate what you're breathing in? And how do you go about pinpointing cause and effect, and so avoid the paranoia of thinking "everything is bad". Isn't that stressful paranoia also bad for health?

Traditionally a butterfly would be more normal

I think it goes both ways. People can become your idols because they reflect something already latent in you. Most of the people that have impacted me the most I don't idolise (consciously). Mostly the people that I've been in close proximity to: my parents, family, my close friends. Ironically, I have traits that I wish I didn't have that I have picked up from them. I've always admired people with skill and intelligence or beauty - more accurately those who create beauty. The greats: Picasso, Dali, Marilyn Monroe, Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, The Beatles, Nelson Mandela, Spielberg, Einstein, Newton, Euler, Gauss, Turing. The list is endless.

@integral the dose makes the poison. Yes there may be nanoscopic blobs of medication floating in the air, good. Will they have any effect whatsoever on you, ehh..... Don't get me wrong some VOCs may make you temporarily unwell, but again, it's the dose that makes the poison and some VOCs are highly toxic. Medicine is mostly designed to be effective at doses taken orally or intravenously or whatever, and is tested for human toxicity at those levels; the levels in air will be many orders of magnitude smaller and their toxity near zero. I would be much more concerned at non-medicinal things in the air, including UV, ionising radiation, car pollutants, Covid. Then again what can I do about it? Roughly nothing, short of living on top of a mountain away from all the riff raff below. (note ionising radiation and UV is higher on top of a mountain)

If someone criticises you for something you enjoy doing, then either ignore them or politely tell them to f*** off. I find journalling fun.

Levels of violence: 1. What is this shit post? 2. I totally agree where's the fucking episode? 3. Chill wo/man what's the problem? 4. You seem to be angry about something, want to talk about it?

I'm going to go meta. "Who am I?" is the perennial question isn't it? The main thrust of your OP is really to do with identity more than anything else. The confusion with identity is that it's not some monolithic abstract entity. Instead, it is the sum of all those parts that jostle with each other for attention. It is all your thoughts, behaviours, emotions and bodily sensations, right now. What a therapist enables is no different to what a doctor does in a hospital, and that is to prepare the environment well enough that the body heals itself. It can be done more or less well, a doctor that doesn't wash their hands before cutting you open is going to make things worse. But on balance, having a therapist is better than not having a therapist, you just have to find a respectable one. It is not impossible to heal yourself. The remarkable thing is that it's possible to observe the different parts of your identity at all. That observer does exactly the same thing a therapist does. A therapist works because they are detached from the melange of your identity and are able to re-align those parts that are not working together, mostly through observation and careful questioning. You've shown above that you are well able to "step outside yourself" and observe what is going on. Isn't that strange? You have all this stuff going on, and yet some part of you is able to detach itself from it. Aside from the mental and narrative aspect of identity, you have bodily reactions. To a large degree the body is an automaton that is programmed through repetition and extreme circumstances. Given a trigger in the environment or through thought it will consistently react in the same way. All trauma has already happened and no longer exists, yet the body is "programmed" by that trauma and continues it indefinitely. It does this as a protective survival mechanism. This is often the bit talking therapy doesn't get at. Sometimes no amount of talking can change the body's programming. But, that programming is not permanent, it can be changed (e.g. CBT). Often there is a lot of mental elaboration around what the body is doing instinctively to protect you from harm, which doesn't address how it can be reprogrammed.

@trenton this sounds like a mentally and emotionally complex situation you have going on. I don't have direct any answers, just observations on what you wrote. The consequences of sex for men and women are assymetrical. Women are the ones who get pregnant and carry to term, and very often are the primary caregivers of the child. Men can and do walk away without much comeback from society. That's a heavy burden for women, so they have to be picky and make sure first before engaging. Basically, men and women have different sexual strategies. I would question this assumption. For a man, disinterest after climax, sure, euphoria after climax, sure. Repulsion and shame don't ring true. Indeed it's harder to understand feelings both your own and others'. Essentially, feelings can't be reasoned out, most reasoning that normies have about feelings is post-hoc elaboration. But there is a tacit understanding of what feelings are signalling, and I would say this is harder for someone with autism to get to grips with: you have the feelings but don't know what to do with them. I'd say this is a more modern worry. I would say that men naturally express vulnerability a lot less than women, and wouldn't be expected in all relationships. But expressing vulnerability is really just talking about yourself and what's going on in your head, which judging from your post you're more than capable of doing. It's a shame @Emerald isn't around a the mo, she would know what to say about shame. Otherwise therapy is one way to go, in order to heal your traumas and negative associations. But in short: There is a wide spectrum of standards. The joy of that is that there is someone for everyone. The trap a lot of people fall into is worrying about how they will be judged, instead of simply expressing who they are. More outwards, less inwards.