LastThursday

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.

Reading that, just a couple or three ideas come to my mind. This is not meant to be advice per se, just what I might tell myself if I was in your situation: 1. Slowly build up a friendship group that has a mix of men and women. Learn to be comfortable with just being friends with women, no agenda. 2. The "I want to be recognised" pattern is extremely common. It is code for: "I want to be loved for being me". I find that this is also code for "I want to be loved in very specific ways". Very often people will love you, but just not in the way you want. It can be very hard to recognise and then accept other people's love: the way they express it. Also, apart from immediate family, people will only love you if you provide value to them. This sounds negative, or transactional, but it can also be extremely simple and joyful to do. Work it out. Even just being present can be enough. 3. When starting a new phase in life, it will always feel unsettling. It's can be like throwing dice and hoping for sixes. It can feel like you're losing control or are not sure of what is coming next. It is a very good exercise to live with the ambiguity and uncertainty and not force things too much, just let it happen. It is also an excellent time to actually choose who you want to be, and how you want to live for the next chunk of your life, there is a lot of freedom and joy in that.

If White to start then, Rxe8+, Rxe8, Nf6+, Bxf6, gxf6. Black's King is then very open, white's Queen is free to go to g4 to start the attack.

If you're constantly observing your own beliefs then that erodes your confidence in their truth. You will still go around holding beliefs, but you know are only partial truths. You carry on believing, but don't believe in your beliefs, you just know that they're useful like a screwdriver. <- hopefully that wasn't word salad. Dogs don't believe in screwdrivers, and you could live without one, but hell, they're useful for screws. In other words, we deliberately live in vastly more complex worlds than dogs do.

It's an interesting thought: do you need beliefs at all? I think beliefs allow you just to get on with living, without the burden of having to work everything out from scratch. Beliefs are heuristics for living. You can have good and bad beliefs, if you define them as being helpful for you on average, or from a more collectivist standpoint, helpful for your community in general. But beliefs can be more fluid, if you work at it. I think it's also possible to have context dependent beliefs (even if socially that seems odd), which naturally loosens what you hold to be true. You could even pick and mix beliefs as it suits you day-to-day. Although, I think it would take effort to live that way, it's far easier to be more rigid in your beliefs. I think it's probably nearly impossible to live without beliefs, because you have to live in a society with social rules and laws, and you need quick heuristics to judge what to do in many different situations and not get paralised with indecision.

The metric is the context. The OP says the average person is mediocre, so the metric and thus context here is mediocrity (albeit it is a very broad one). Mediocrity supposedly has an imaginary sliding scale and mostly everyone is in the middle of it, and much fewer are outliers, either exceptional or diabolical. But you're free to choose any sliding scale you like, the more you choose the harder it is for someone to get the bingo card at being average in all those metrics. By concentrating only on mediocrity the OP is cherry picking, and the category is so broad as to be nearly meaningless.

Somebody has to be average (by some metric). Isn't it so?

I disagree with your disagreement, obviously. Are aesthetic principles god given absolutes? What is a pyschological mesotrend anyway? There a slow trends and fast trends. I'd say a particular style is borne out of the current set of trends or takes elements from it at least. There may be other reasons for trends other than aesthetics (maybe money), but in art and fashion and design it's largely driven by aesthetics. New aesthetic values are invented, Cubism, Brutalism, Bauhaus, Sans Serif, Zen Gardens and new trends are started. One feeds into the other. The rule of thirds depends on the canvas or photograph which is nearly always rectangular, and so comes out of the constraints of a medium, rather than being inate or absolute as such. But we do like easy fractions and find them aesthetic visually and in music (fifths, octaves etc). I'm not trying to be a complete relativist however. We do have a predisposition to find things in nature beautiful, and so we consistently grab motifs from there and find it aesthetically pleasing. We also have inbuilt biases in our perceptual systems, and those come through in our aesthetics too: light versus shade, focal points, movement etc. And we especially are prone to finding human bodies and faces aesthetic, and they are indeed everywhere in art and fashion and advertising. So if we have an "aesthetic intelligence" then it comes out of these biases. And some of those biases are probably universal.