LastThursday

@Joseph Maynor I saw Hiromi Uehara play live at a festival a few years ago, to a full tent. She's unbelievable and great energy. I really like stride piano too, reminds of black and white films I watched as a kid:

So simple, yet this piece of music always gives me the shivers. It's like Bach was channeling god.

@shahar uriel I know it's early stages but you should do it anyway. AI didn't learn from nothing, it learned from human coders. In fact human coders invented the AI in the first place. For some high level insight into how AI is affecting the industry then this is enlightening:

Threesome? Honestly, joking aside, who cares what we think. Go with your instinct. When I'm unsure about things, I just sit in a quiet place for as long as it takes to be still, and then ask myself the question "what do you want?", and then just let the answer come.

I can sort of see this. I get sick with cold or whatever less than once a year. 15 years is a bit of a stretch though. And of course you might be infected but show no or very minor symptoms. And people have various tolerances for what the deem being sick.

Put it this way, I'm voluntarily not working at the moment, and I'm not concerned about money.

You're right, the detail can be complex, but trust me, running a business you've got to know what's going in and going out, and how much it will cost to borrow money. Once you have the basics down, everything else becomes a lot easier.

From a systems point of view capitalism wasn't invented from scratch, but was an evolution of what went before. Inventing a new stable system from scratch, like Communism, is nearly impossible. Communism collapsed because it isn't workable in practice in the long run, even China has partially embraced capitalism. Capitalism will eat itself eventually, and it will evolve into something else, the best we can do is nudge it in the right direction.

Money is fundamentally simple you don't need a book. The rules are: have as much as possible coming in, have as little as possible going out, and there's no such thing as free money. Everything else builds on that foundation.

Consciousness is way trippy. An eye can't look at itself. But consciousness can look at itself, in fact it's its primary attribute. That being so, what does consciousness "see" so to speak? I think if there was no meaning making at all, then consciousness wouldn't happen at all. What consciousness sees is then all meaning and nothing else. If there was no meaning, you wouldn't go insane, you'd disappear into a void. Raising consciousness is then making ever finer and more intricate meaning from itself, this happens naturally as it goes about its business. There are levels of meaning, when you're sleeping a night dream has less meaning. You wake up and realise the dream was nonsensical.

Immortality, it's not just for Christmas (other religions welcome).

I'm saying nothing.

In my experience if you're interested then most women will realise your interest. If you persist enough they will generally let you know if they have a partner, often in a passing comment. In other words, there's nothing wrong with expressing your true intentions, how else will you progress things?

@Carl-Richard is this then an example of an organic change, one that happens of its own accord? Or is it moreso that there is an underlying potential change that eventually gets picked up on? I ask because this seems borderline between "stuff that just happens" and "stuff I want to happen".

Super briefly: Environment Social matrix Mental health / therapy Self-awareness Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Averitasia - a condition where someone is unable to experience Truth. Actualisationable (say it three times fast) - something or someone that can be made to actualise, eventually. Spirito-arguecringement - a one-sided hostile conversation about spirtuality that is about nothing in particular. Deusmaxxing - trying your best to look like a god. This is too much fun: Double-salad - an intellectual sounding paragraph that makes sense the first time you read it, but not the second. One more: Egomortgage - the thing you keep paying for until your ego dies.

It does. But saying it's one possibility out many doesn't explain it. Furthermore it doesn't explain the quality of this particular experience. It's not as if it's just a blank field of X, it's a chaotic, structured, "full" experience.

I could be provocative and say that god is just a construction of the mind or just a word. But I'm not going to say that. In the spirit of the question, god is the thing you fall back on when you run out of explanation. For example I look around me and there's all this stuff happening, I can come up with an explanation as to why all this stuff is happening, but I can't come up with an explanation of why this in particular. There seems to be complete arbitrariness about what I'm experiencing, I could have been any one of 8 billion people at any moment in history, indeed even an animal. So I invoke god. Once you invoke god, then you have to ask what is god's nature? And the only satisfactory answer (to me) is that it is exactly what I'm experiencing - the two are the same. So it's the other way round, me and my mind are a construction of god.

I walked in the footsteps of your shadows, never looking up, afraid of the light. When you stopped, I looked away, choking with tears. However hard I listened, I could never hear your voice, just the birds in the sky. Do you see me as I see you? How is it that you're in my heart and thoughts, even though I'm cleansed, pure? Some time I will walk away and see the light, bright and blinking, I think I hope. Then there will be no shadows, and all will be a beautiful cacophony, all will be love and laughter.

I think it'll be good to get out things that arise and put them down in written form. I have so many lost thoughts and ideas, and some of them were very good.

@Someone here you are of course, right.

@Franz_ with thinking the only fundamental limit is time and patience, thinking is a slow process, thinking about new things is hard. Thinking has a kind of ratchet effect whereby you commit new knowledge to long-term memory and thinking becomes easier because of that. Take someone like a mathematician, all they do is think, but they can learn new abstractions without limit. Mathematics is bigger than any one person can take on in a lifetime. With physical bodily stuff, the limits are absolute physical limits like strength, speed, endurance and so on. I think for those sorts of things you will hit your own limits if you push things far enough, and you'll have a very good idea of what those are. But still, you don't know what you don't know. If you were to try and run a marathon and you've never run before then you might mistakenly think that you've reached a limit of your abilities. Clearly if you keep practising then you'll realise you were wrong. But even with physical stuff it's not as if it's just physical limits, you also have a brain controlling things. I would say there's no end of nuance in how you use your body. For example sprinters train with a coach because there's a lot to master about exactly how you should be running, outside of pure speed and stamina. So you can reach a biological limit of mastery, but still improve on technical ability. To re-iterate the point I made before, nearly always a domain is not strictly defined, it's fuzzy around the edges and you're free to explore and improve around those edges.

Most people are hung up on survival and that often means doing things in their own self interest, often to the detriment of others. The bottom line is that if your interests don't align with others then you will chose yourself over them, otherwise you don't survive. The thing is, most of the time your survial interests do align with others' because we're all just human and have the same needs. You have your family, community, country. But culturally we're being indoctrinated into individualism, where everything that must be done and are responsible for is ultimately pinned on you as an individual. Fundamentally this idealogy goes against our collective instincts as humans, because in reality we can't survive without other people, both on a social level, and on a material level: we feel lonely.

I think there has to be an answer, but I don't know if it's yes or no. If consciousness is all there is (idealism), then what happens within consciousness is highly correlated with what is experienced in consciousness. For example if I press my finger hard into my ribs, it hurts. The pain is experienced in consciouness. A rock is still subject to physics, so if you press your finger into a rock, it's the same thing. It won't experience pain, but it will experience something. So you could argue that anything that experiences physics is conscious in some way. But that's just pansychism through the back door.

10,000 hours is just a rule of thumb not a hard cut off, so there is always more to add without limit. It also depends on the "something" in the "into something" you mentioned. The more time you put into something the more it will affect other areas - the skills and knowledge translate into other things. In the end it's not that you're mastering a particular subject, it's that you're levelling up everything, but with an emphasis in a particular area. There is a sense of diminishing returns though for a lot of things, you make a lot of progress earlier, but slower later, because everything becomes more complex or subtle or about fine tuning or at the limit of some faculty such as anatomy or thinking. Also when mastering a thing you don't know what you don't know, especially if no one else has done it before. You are always working things out for yourself, and that takes deep domain knowledge to come up with new insights, and time to pick things up. Even if others have gone before you, you still need to research their techniques and embody them yourself. It can feel like there's nothing more to learn, but that's not true most of the time, you just don't know what it is yet. It's endless because mastery affects many things at once, and you're free to shift your focus around, and because there is a lot of stuff already out there to learn.