LastThursday

Well. If the people who are interested in the forum are equally distributed around the world, and the forum imposes the rule that you must communicate in English - then it's not so surprising that bilingualism comes out on top. Yellow thinking. But what can I say, I'm bilingual? Ha ha ha.

@Michael569 good to hear. There was me thinking there was a conspiracy. Sorry, I know that's a dirty word here. Anyway, Monaco and Leichtenstein are small, Slovakia and Czechia not so sure Keep up the good modding, much appreciated.

I woke up in a funk this morning. There is still definitely an undertone of not wanting to pander to the crap of life. I need a permanent escape from it. Anyway, that was the first time I woke up. The second time (after I had disabled my alarm) I was a lot brighter, and just got on with my daily routine. And that is something I have to keep reminding myself of. That however bleak things appear in one moment, they can seem completely different a few days or hours or weeks later. The feeling of doom and gloom ebbs and flows. And anything which is not permanent in life is hallucinatory. The doom and gloom is not "out there" it's all "in here". So thinking is the cause of bleakness, but it can also be the way out, or at least a stabilizing influence. I like to label it "wonky thinking". It's really because the process of thinking is completely relative to itself. As such it is ungrounded or can be, and left to its own devices can easily wind itself up into a tight spiral and go wonky. What stops the wonky thinking? Mostly wonky thinking stops with input from other people. Other people point out your wonky thinking and this gives you a point of reference, an anchor for your relative thoughts to tie themselves to. In other words your thinking is corrected by other people. But, it should be borne in mind that two people's relative thinking doesn't necessarily stop all wonky thinking, it may actually amplify it. But on average, there will be a smoothing effect. That is why having relationships is critical to good mental health - and why being open and receptive to criticism is also beneficial (you don't have a monopoly on being right). It doesn't need a lot, just that one person who is willing to honestly give you their two cents now and then. How scared a lot of us are to upset the balance of a relationship and not speak up, but that really is detrimental in the long run. We shouldn't tolerate the wonky thinking displayed by others, but aim to correct them and help them. So what is really causing my funk? Mostly a distinct lack of novelty, fun or joy, and just the self absorbed nature of all the people I care about. How can I connect to people that don't want to connect? I don't blame them, they just weren't the people I thought they were, or at least they changed along the way. So in a word: people. Getting out of the funk involves having some strong anchor points for my thinking, to stop it spiralling away. And that in turn will allow my sensible executive functioning to kick in and to plan a way out of and into something more desirable. I will need to connect with people who will be long term fixtures in my life, who will reciprocate my love, and who will correct me when I go wonky. From there I will have a springboard for a better more joyful life. Amen.

@Space I'm originally a Londoner and I know Greenwich too well @SirVladimir, good pie and mash there lol. In Tunbridge Wells now though. Do you have to be British to be a mod then?

There are some of us Brits floating around these here parts.

What pure survival looks like:

Ah Lori Singer in spandex BITD. Sorry, did I say that out loud?

You don't have a choice. You're always in the present moment. If older people have experience fatigue, then the only problem they have is lack of imagination, lack of self development, and being a slave to their circumstances. If you're fit and healthy, there's no reason not to keep on living and expanding your experience (so I keep telling myself).

Surely not, row row row your boat?

It's not simulations all the way down, it's consciousness all the way down. Consciousness is unbounded, and consciousness is aware of itself. The simulation hypothesis is a kind of recursion (like Matryoshka dolls). But recursion is already built into consciousness itself, not need to invoke anything extra like powerful computers etc. With recursion you get lots of things for free. You get copying (forms and concepts), imperfect copying (a.k.a. evolution), infinity (unbounded repeated recursion), fractals (copying within copying) and so on. So here we are in a structured, evolving, infinite, fractal reality.

Solipsism? Hmmm.....Naaaahhhhhh

And... they have blue blood.

@Twega I don't have answers or even a position as such, but I like to tug at different strands, to see where it leads. Imagine a story in which the main character is a novelist. In the story the novelist is hard at it, writing the next best seller. She writes about the entire life story of the protagonist in every detail. But for some reason or another her book never gets published. On her deathbed she thinks back to her early life when she wrote that damned manuscript. In a moment of clarity she realises the story she wrote was exactly the life she lead. So my point is, is the brain in consciousness or is consciousness in the brain? Taking it as a system there really is only three ways to view things: The entirety of reality is produced by the brain (and matter), and consciousness is just some emergent function of the brain's function. The entirety of reality is produced by/inside consciousness, and the brain is an emergent function of that. The brain (matter) and consciousness are two separate "systems" in a symbiotic relationship, and one cannot exist without the other. Take your pick I suppose. I've currently plumped for the middle one. So that being my position, then somehow consciousness has to explain the senses; as opposed to the first, where the senses have to explain consciousness. Or the last where we can explain nothing. That is the primary observation about the consciousness first idea. Consciousness somehow seems to be very well ordered and structured. We inhabit this persistent point of view and a consistency of experience which we label as sight and sound and smell. These in turn seem to be tightly bound to this hulk of flesh that follows us around, so much so that if we poke our eyes out, we become blind. Surely eyes are critical to our sense of seeing? But. If consciousness is well ordered as it is, then there has to be a chain of orderliness to everything. In other words there is always a reason for things having a structure. That is the very definition of a structure! This is as opposed to chaos - or complete disorder - which has no reason for itself at all. Now we're getting somewhere. It's clear that vision for example is structured: there is light and shade and different colours and positions and depth and a billion other elements to it. And lo and behold some of that structure is associated with these spherical appendages in my head. What I'm saying here is that vision includes eyes. The structure and order of vision includes the structure of my eyes within my consciousness. My sense of vision is seemlessly integrated with the consciousness of the existence of my eyes. What this says is that consciousness produces or brings forth or is responsible for everything it experiences including all the senses. Still. Consciousness does give itself some wiggle room and allows you to see and hear without being correlated to physicality - as in daydreams and memories of youth. A man who becomes blind may still dream. And consciousness is probably completely let loose by psychadelics. TLDR - Senses are in consciousness. Consciousness chooses to restrict itself because it's structured.

It's really quite simple. Go back and relive yesterday. Go to bed, set the alarm clock and wake up yesterday. What? You don't know how to do that? The answer is simple, yesterday never existed. What does knowing that change? On the surface, not much. But imagine you were a time fugitive, where's the best place to hide? Now of course - they'll never find you there. More seriously, it allows you to disconnect yourself from the nasty past and the horrible future and live in the happy present. The past and the future are stories inside your head.

The senses serve to narrow down or restrict the conscious experience. Imagine that consciousness was disembodied, and so it had no eyes or ears and so on (no senses). What would the experience be like? Some possibilites could be: A jumble of this and that from different places with no order to it, No experience at all (except maybe the sensation of being aware of awareness but that's a moot point) Experiencing everything at once. If it's the 3rd one above, then it's clear that the senses are somehow "locking you in" to a definite viewpoint in space - and restricting consciousness down. Of course that presupposes that consciousness can expand out to everything at all. But maybe the proof of that is in psychadelics. Don't forget, that the experience of having "senses" is totally within consciousness, so there's circularity there. In a way consciousness (or whatever) has chosen to restrict itself by conjuring up eyes and ears. Perhaps it's like a radio, the antenna can pick up everything, but the circuitry tunes into (senses) one channel. I find it fascinating that biology and physics could be somehow messing with the fabric of consciousness itself, but that's very much from a materialist standpoint. Also, bear in mind that you have hallucinatory experiences, such as memories, and subvocalization which are not dependent on the senses. So this already gives you a clue that the senses are not the whole story.

That's never happened to me. That's despite me thinking about him every second of my waking life. What can a man do? But seriously now: My pet theory is that recognisable people you dream of regularly represent some sort of strong emotional drama that needs resolving. It's not necessarily attachment to that person per se - just what they represent to you. What does Leo represent to you? For years I've had dreams involving ex-girfriends (and trains). What does it all mean? Dunno, still working it out, but it's definitely emotional.

If it was an actual monolith - say a 25 ton smooth granite cuboid stone block, with no signs of activity nearby - then I'd say Occam was quaking in his boots. I'd be impressed anyway.

You are God taking a winding path through infinity. Each POV in every moment is one part of the totality. You will experience everything. The other points in your life are ghosts in your current POV. Since every moment is outside of time (time is also a ghost), you have in a sense already experienced everything.

The 11th Commandment: "Thou shalt not be distracted". If only I could always tell when I was being distracted. Ho hum.

@Keyhole sounds scary as hell (as all unknown things are), but I'm well up for encountering one of those. If you have any techniques available please let me/us know. As for the cheap welded metal monothings in the video, I'm sure aliens also have cost/benefit analyses. Shoddy workmanship is not disproof of aliens.

I thought that monoliths were made of stone. Still, why shouldn't aliens weld or have an artistic sense of humour?

Most computer programs are not compressible. In other words, you can only calculate the end result by running that specific program, no other program will do it for you. So there are many programs which can't be fast forwarded. The second problem is that the information content of society and evolution is immense, possibly even infinite. The best you could do with a computer program is to emulate a society statistically, no computer has the storage capacity you would need. Also with that amount of information, you would need a huge supercomputer, which would be a hungry power beast. Lastly, society and evolution is not a closed system. Do you include weather events, hurricanes, earthquakes in your simulation? Do you limit yourself to Earth, what about the Sun and space weather and meteorites strikes and so on? In fact do you need to simulate the Earth itself as well? Any simulation would be a chaotic one with infinite sensitivty to initial conditions. We can't even predict the weather next month with any certainty at the moment. The infinite mind is not a finite computer. In short the answer is sadly: no.

What is reality like? God, consciousness, awareness, You, are the infinitesimally thin film, with colours constantly shifting around. The bubble show started from nothingness itself; one uniform colour with no structure, that is non-duality, that is nothingness.

A young woman with passion and vision and awareness, there's hope for the future: I came accross her channel because of investigating tiny houses. On the other side of the size spectrum, this guy is unbelievable:

@MrWolf you say tomato I say tomato. I'd say we've both got valid observations.