electroBeam

@Wisebaxter in my experience, spiral dynamics is a useful tool for developing your intellect in ways which develop and sophisticate your perspective, correct judgment and understanding of social aspects of society, but its not a magic bullet for teaching you how to master a specialized skill such as turning value into money. I think I resonate with your approach. I'm very idealistic, and because of that when I get an idea which really fascinates me I want to solve every problem through that idea. For example, I read this really cool book on shamanism. I loved the techniques in it so much that I tried to use them to cure every problem I had, including my low self esteem. Its just not gonna work. Unfortunately tools are tools, and they are suitable for some jobs and not others. Learning about and trying to embody orange stage personality traits will develop your perspective and understanding of life, but it will not miraculously turn you into a money making machine. Simply having a more accurate perspective in life, and better judgment will not make you a master at mathematics art or any other specialised domain, so why would spiral dynamics help you master money making? If you want to become a world class musician, the approach is to learn it and then practice. If you want to turn value into money, you got to learn it then practice. Also if you're having judgment problems, embodying orange isn't going to solve that. Like if you have an aunty you absolutely despise, seeing her more often isn't going to miraculously make you like her. I personally don't really know how to cure judgement problems apart from very intense awareness and focus on those judgments. If fact I would be inclined to say that if you have judgment issues its only going to be cured by mastering yellow. Judgments fall at the yellow stage, not orange. If you didn't understand something about orange (from a perspective/intellectual sense) then embodying it will allow you to understand it better, but its not going to cure your judgments, or turn you into a money making machine.

@Wisebaxter the world doesn't revolve around spiral dynamics. Its a model, a fantastical depiction of a few swirls in the ocean of sociology which a few guys jumped on and made a language game about. And now we got hippies like you trying to see the whole personal development game through this language game. Just by reading your post I can't convey how wrong the spiral dynamics model is for solving your problem. This issue isn't that you're yellow or turquoise or coral or that you need to embody orange hahahaha. The problem is that you don't have money and this is causing you suffering. End of story. You may not like the scientific method because its too 'orange' for you, but if the scientific method got 1 thing right, its that beautiful idea of solving a problem through making it simpler. Chuck out all that spiral dynamics garbage and focus on the problem: you don't have enough money. You can easily solve that in many ways, but for you that means (again something simple) providing value in the most authentic, honest and deep way. What skills do you have? Painting, music, programming? What did you do all your life? And even if you have no practical skills, one thing that shines through in this post in your love spiral dynamics and wisdom. Use your life experience of being a hippy to give value to people: make books, blogs, opinion articles, how tos on spirituality, yoga classes, etc heck I don't know what's best for you, but i know it exists. Go find it!

part of my job involves inventing AI algorithms. As part of my job, I discovered this paper that I thought I would share. A personal insight I have gained from reading this paper: human cognition and thought are not a product of neurons but a product of consciousness itself. Indeed the brain is inside consciousness rather than consciousness is inside the brain. Given that fact, psychological tools humans use are not useful (and derived from) the brain but rather are useful and are derived from consciousness. Therefore if we want to make AI smarter, build algorithms around psychological tools human beings use, like the ones in this paper. coolfuckenpaper.pdf

This isn't quite correct, while there may be some correlations between the behaviours of human beings and the properties of mathematical algorithms, and while it may be possible that an algorithm exists for some specific human behaviour, a human's behaviours are not generated or controlled by an algorithm strictly, but moreso by subjective, qualitative states. In other words, people fear death because of the 'feeling' and subjective qualia of death, not because of the laws of some possible algorithm. There is some sort of cause and effect going on (which is a property of algorithms) yet its states are qualia rather than algorithmic statements. There are some nuances here. Nuances that should be seriously considered. Its not possible to encapsulate the feeling of death into a symbol which can be used in an algorithm. I think this is obvious. We do not have a symbol which fully describes the feeling of fear of death. We cannot type into a computer if (feel_fear == true) { run } and expect the computer to know what feel_fear is, because we haven't defined it. Of course we could say if the algorithm is in a state where it could die, then feel fear (like in a video game), but notice that doing this doesn't fully encapsulate the feeling of fear. Human beings feel fear for many more reasons then just when they could die, they also feel fear with rejection from a relationship, etc. And notice that the amount of circumstances that a person could feel fear is infinite. Therefore we will always be infinitely away from fully defining what fear is for a computer. Even if we go the AI way of doing things, and show them scary pictures, and show them non scary pictures, the AI will never ever be 100% accurate, and we will never ever be able to show them an infinite amount of examples. On top of that we would need to do this for every single human feeling that is possible. So fearing that AI is going to take over the world like terminator is simply because people misunderstand what computers are, what human beings are and what psychology is. So as long as we are using algorithms, we will never get a computer which has the capabilities to perform as intelligently as a human being, because simply put, symbols are limited to how we define them, and we can never define a symbol as accurately (and for as many scenarios) as we would need. Next time you meditate, feel the feeling of fear, and notice how that feeling has infinite amount of information in it, and how defining that feeling in terms of if else statements (or alternatively NNs) is simply impossible. Or think about the amount of pictures you would need (or scenarios for a reinforcement learning algorithm) for an AI to understand all of that information which is contained in a subjective qualia like fear. Sure. My argument is that true AI is not possible with computers. Just because an AI generated a set of meaningful patterns on its own does not mean that the AI is in any way intelligent. It simply, strictly meant that it generated meaningful patterns which has solved a hard problem (a problem a human being finds hard to solve). Of course AI in the future has the potential to solve problems at any scale, it could be used to invent a superpowered death ray like the ones in starwars, or even thor's hammer, but still whatever this AI is, it will not exhibit the properties of a brain, but the properties of an engine. You put input in, and it will give you an output. It will generate some phenomena, whether that's a flying car, or a new more powerful nuclear bomb. Its important to be aware of this difference (that is the difference between a brain or an engine). The implications of this is, AI will give human beings dangerously great abilities to invent new things, or generate knowledge but the AI itself will not be an autonomous, self aware entity with a brain on its own and a capacity to do anything beyond what an engine does (put in input, get some predefined, limited, scoped output). The AI will only be dangerous because the people using it are deliberately (or undeliberately in some cases) trying to invent dangerous things. The danger will still be directly caused by humans only, not the AI itself. Nuclear power is a perfect example. The nuclear bomb killed thousands of people, yet it was because the Americans wanted to. In an undelibrate case, just turn to the 2 power plants that have exploded due to mis management or natural disasters. The power plant didn't explode because nuclear energy has a brain and mind and decided to intelligently try and kill humans, it happened because of natural physical laws. AI is no different, and will never be for as long as we are using computers in the conventional sense.

There's also a point to raise though, that a computer is made of hardware which works completely differently to neurons. So the configuration of neurons may not be relevant to computers. neurons are completely different to transistors. Furthermore we also need to acknowledge that human beings (biologists) were the ones to observe neurons in the brain. All humans have biases and distort the truth to a certain extent (and science believe it or not distorts the truth massively) and when biologists/neurologists were theorising about the human brain, they didn't do it in the context of AI but in the context of neurological diseases and previous theories about biology. This perspective may not be useful to AI scientists. But furthermore, what I personally believe is, its impossible for AI to ever be true AI as long as its limited to computers. Computers work on ALGORITHMS. What ever a computer is doing, its doing it an algorithm. Of course the algorithms these days are highly complex, artificial neural networks especially, but whatever it is, its an ALGORITHM. The fundamental philosophy, limits and ideas which are inherent in mathematical algorithms, will be inherent in computer software. And if you study the fundamental mathematical philosophy of algorithms, you will be aware of the limits of them. These limits literally stamp out true AI. We may make a very powerful machine in the future, but it will always be a machine/engine, nothing more, nothing less. Computers are engines, not brains. And we need a wildly different hardware or software platform if we ever want to make a true brain. Actually when I was in freshman university, I built an ai algorithm to control a group/society in minecraft. I tried to get the people in minecraft to mimic the levels of spiral dynamics. Again, this is really where I first discovered my insight about the limits of an AI, the fundamental problem with trying to get the AI to spontaneously evolve, was that the AI had no capacity to invent creative insight. This is because everything in AI is predetermined (it runs off a script/algorithm) and for an AI to truly evolve through those levels, this running off a script thing wasn't good enough to cut it. We need a revolutionary computer system which isn't told what to do (AT ALL! I.E. NOT PROGRAMMED) but is rather influenced. It's thought process needs to begin spontaneously and end spontaneously. I see quantum computers making this opportunity possible. Its interesting that you talk about a totalitarian regime. Yes AI in the context of computers would be algorithmic, so therefore the system we live under would have to be of an algorithmic nature. Honestly, while this is a dominant opinion among AI professionals, I see it as myopic. They are totally blind to the fact that computers are just machines/engines. They aren't some cool new magic spell discovered through an ancient archaic tablet of a race far beyond our universe. Computers are powerful, and AI systems are too, but only in the context of pumping out mathematical patterns, whether that's patterns in images (object detection, image classification, etc) or full decision trees (like AI in video games). There is a massive thick wall to what AI can do, and that wont be solved until we leave this algorithmic perspective. Also we needs to understand that human beings are just pattern pumping engines, or engines for that matter at all. Human beings are actually quite hard to predict, and seem to produce spontaneous insights which are simply not possible to produce on a determined, algorithmic system.

@Aquarius maybe the reason why you feel this way is because you're completely unaware of what karma is? study it. If somebody acts angry at you, its because you made them angry. You are in no way obliged to make someone angry, its only because YOU did something to make them angry. Ramana Maharshi didn't make his father angry when talking about spirituality, Rumi didn't either, so didn't many others. You can say things in a way that makes people angry, and say things in a way which doesn't There's nothing wrong with making people angry, but don't blame that result on the form of the universe, they are angry because YOU made them angry. They would not be angry if YOU didn't make them angry, and you have the potential to do that. You can tell them the truth, and its ok if they get angry, the love and appreciation you will get from god will far outweigh the petty reactions of the people around you. Keep shining that light, and forget about the angry responses it yields. Heck Jesus took this approach so far that he died on the cross.

@kieranperez what you're going through feels like its going to go on forever, that you will be hopeless and lost forever, that is for the next 60 years or so. But try and recognize that this is not a state that you will be in forever, but just a mental phase you are going through. These down periods are apart of life, they really are, not just on an individual level but a societal and planetary level aswell. The entire world was in world war 2 50 or so years ago, now its in a state where barely any wars are happening. And right now you are in an individual world war 2, but just like how world war 2 passed, so will this state that you are in. Life goes in cycles and that's ok, just recognize it and move on.

I'm finding that I'm having trouble being quite productive because I keep zoning out throughout my work. The problem I'm having isn't a result of fear, procrastination or anything like that, its bare bones mental fatigue. I try to push my brain to think about something and it just wont. Its sort of like pushing weights at the gym, but not being able to lift them because they are too heavy. I have tried visualizations, affirmations, self esteem shadow work. These techniques are not the right tool here. I need something else like brain training. What have you done to push your brain to the limits? Also I do suffer from chronic fatigue (both mental and physical) Doctors have no clue as to why I get it, and just blame it on depression. I personally think I have Hypothyroidism or sleep apnea (my symptoms resonate with those 2 problems the most).

@SBB4746 thanks! How long does it last? And how easily do you develop a tolerance to it? Like can you take 1 tab every working day and still not develop a tolerance to it?

I'm not being a victim, and that's why im asking for advice here. Just saying 'try harder' doesn't solve the problem, you need a method or tool to solve it. Being a victim isn't the problem here. No, do you find nootropics to be quite effective with this sort of stuff? I think drugs can be effective, but I would like a more permanent, deeply rooted resolution first before deciding to rely on drugs.

people who say this statement are actually correct. Mental states ARE physiological reactions. but what are physiological reactions? what is physiology? Its atoms bouncing around in a set order. What are atoms? Spherical balls What are Spherical balls? A mental construct as far as I'm concerned. (well whatever you believe they are, you cannot say they are material, because they are underneathe material/built ontop of material) What is a mental construct? A phenomena (we don't know of what, we can't say its a materialistic phenomena because this phenomena is underneathe materialism) Ahhhhh atoms are undefinable phenomena (or if you keep questioning, they are actually illusions). So materialism isn't WRONG (unlike what Leo and others here try to make out) its just a self consistent layer ontop of the truth. Its like a high level programming language. Python/java/c# etc are not wrong, they are just built on top of assembly lang.

why not do both? Master a craft that you are passionate about?

it might be possible to actually not be aware of voidness during those blanks, if you were not prepared (as in you were not meditating) There are many times where I would zone out and voidness would be present, but I would not notice it, yet when I'm meditating and zone out it would be clear that voidness exist. Maybe you need to actually be looking for voidness when you blank out. An analogy is pain. Everybody feels suffering and pain, but does anyone actually inspect and observe what pain is actually made of? If they did they would realize pain isn't actually pain, its something totally different to what they thought it was, it looked different when you didn't inspect it, when you inspected it now it looks like ordinary phenomena like everything else. This is how illusions work. another analogy is this: imaging looking at your window, thinking its dirty, now imagine the owner of the window says 'that window is made of diamond' now you will be shitting yourself. But both before and after the other dude said that, the appearance was the same. Voidness and pain are the same, the appearance remains the same but awareness is like the dude. It shines an understanding onto that appearance.

but that thing doesn't exist. How is that at all related to everything? EDIT: actually it does exist, a better word is undefinable. EDIT 2: actually, that's energy

@Serotoninluv in fact, there is a teacher who taught mathematics non-dually. look here He came to the conclusion though, in one of his books, that language can arouse spiritual insight, but it can never be it. He obviously thought that mathematics is a great way to arouse nondual insight, and so that's why he taught it. He felt like mathematics could provide very high levels of thought, which almost reaches non duality (well at least reaches non duality much more than english) but it never ever can contain all of it, for that would defeat the whole premise of a language itself. You're sort of asking, can a toy car every replace a real car? Sure you can add bigger wheels to the car, maybe give the toy car a toy engine, but for the toy car to ever be as useful as a real car, it needs to be a real car. This perhaps is probably one of the only true absolute, existential laws that exist out there. If you want a mathematical equation to be a non dual insight, it has to be a non dual insight, not a maths equation. Although mathematics gets very close, much closer than english. But there's a tipping point, and tipping point simply is not reached symbollically.

+1 +1 nice share thanks! Yeah abstract thought (the thing underneathe mathematics) feels a lot like post rational insight to me rather than typical scientific information. Maybe there's a link going on? In fact franklin merrel wolfs book has a lot of detail on abstract thought and its relationship to deep existential insight/absolute reality. Of course you always get frustrated because reading things like this though, because no matter how hard you contemplate, and no matter how close you get, you never get to the answer. Its like a pot at the end of a rainbow.

@graded24 interesting points, especially the last paragraph. Wow, if what you are saying is true, that's very strange to me. Maybe I am assuming something that isn't actually true. I'm definitely aware of chaos theory though. A pendulum behaves appropriately with newtonian physics, but when you do something like add a double pendulum, newtonian physics stops predicting the right thing. But if quantum mechanics is predicting things more accurately the closer you zoom in, then that's the opposite effect of newtonian physics (newtonian physics predicts more accurately the more you zoom out). Yeah its a tough one, why is mathematics aligning with empirical knowledge? Like why? What is so special about the laws of mathematics? Surely you can't just make up a formal system like mathematics and expect it to have the ability to predict empirical phenomena?

Firstly, I think where we are disagreeing here is our understanding of what mathematics is. The materialist paradigm is an ideology. It contains properties commonly found in ideologies, because it is one. Its a system that contains a bunch of assumptions (called definitions) and rules for which these assumptions can interact with each other. The whole reason why quantum mechanics isn't working is simply because these definitions and rules are not conforming to empirical evaluations. What I'm saying is, and this is where we may disagree, mathematics is also an ideology. It contains a set of rules that must be followed, and a set of definitions. Where the beauty comes in with mathematics is that its a highly flexible ideology. It can describe many things because it's definitions are not constrained to specific physical gross phenomena, unlike the materialistic paradigm. you can allow x = a position, amount of apples you have, qualitative features like somebody's mood, etc. This is why Plato loved mathematics so much, because it was so flexible that he mistakenly confused it as the language of god. But its still an ideology. Really what I am asking is, does mathematics, with all its rules and definitions, really have the power and right form to explain quantum mechanics consistently? Of course you could twist your way into making it true, to some extent at least, by coming up with weird definitions like matrices describing a position, but is this because reality is adhering to the laws of mathematics, or because you want it to and so you're putting in the effort to twist reality into the mathematical paradigm? Also yes the mathematical formulas and models may be working in quantum mechanics, and may be giving you the correct results, but the whole point to having a theory is so that the human race has an understanding of how reality is working. Abstract thought (or 'mathematics' as you are using the term in your responses) do not provide this understanding. They provide results, and instructions for how to get those results, but this is simply just observing thought phenomena, this is not understanding anything.

@graded24 but the mathematical language is definitely not 'fuzzy' either. The mathematical language is a typical formal system which inherents clearly defined, consistent sets of rules for how a particular idea is to behave. From what you are describing in the 'fuzzy' sense, it seems like the electrons are performing inconsistently, and unclearly. Furthermore, as you said above, this is not due to our inability to measure precisely, but because the very nature of the system itself inherets inconsistency and undefined behaviours. Quantum physcicists try to get away with this problem by using the theory of probability, but see I personally believe they are using the wrong tool for the wrong job. Probability was designed to define things which we couldn't measure accurately, in quantum mechanics this is not the case. Am I wrong in these assertions and if so why?

A Scientist and an Artist Walks into a bar... The scientist is socially awkward, got scraggly, untrimmed hair which never ceases to go beyond the imagination of the people around him. He triumphs forth with his chemical cups and flasks, and as confident as an alpha ape, gets out his equipment and takes very precise, measurable data on the phenomena he's looking at. He believes that the power of the universe is in understanding reality as deeply as possible, he's a post rationalist, and makes his living giving lectures about deep epistemological insight about reality. He cared about his work so much that he called it a secret name, a name that sounds spiritual to remind him of how deep his work is. He called it 'CHIT'. Yet there was one problem, his best friend was dying of cancer, and all he did and cared about was pray to Jesus. No matter how much the scientist proclaimed to his friend "jesus is an illusion in the mind, all there is, is the one omnipresent god, do not pray to jesus for he is an illusion" it had no effect on the best friend's mental state. The wise old scientist felt depressed. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't cure his friend. Then a woman with long, very straight, very curtailed hair walks in. she's wearing a spotted vest, full of paint. He clothe's are ragged but beautiful, sort of a wabi-sabi style. She believes the point of life, rather, is to make life highly emotionally/feely energetic. She makes emotionally captivating paintings about god, how beautiful her body is, how compassionate his heart is, how wise his mind is. Everyone cries at the sight of her paintings, so much so that their worlds disappear, and bathe in the beauty of the energy. She cared about her work so much that she called it a secret name, a name that sounds spiritual to remind her of how deep her work is. She called it 'ANANDA'. Yet there was one problem, she was so creative, that she was starting to loose her mind. She couldn't tell right from wrong, truth from falsehood, she felt like she was turning schizophrenic. The scientist spots the woman, drawing on a canvas, for what he couldn't see as it was facing her and not him, and laughs "how do you waste so much time drawing bullshit on a canvas" he disgustedly proclaimed. "All you do is draw delusion after delusion, when will you grow up?". The woman proclaims "how are you so cold and harsh! All you do is measure and measure, yet do you even know why you measure?, I'm drawing heart and soul, and this is my greatest painting yet!" The main arrogantly smirks, and for curiosity, looks to see what she's drawing. He first giggled at the sight, but then contemplated closer. It was a brown haired man, slightly tanned. The scientist had no choice but to admit, it may be bullshit, but it was the most beautiful bullshit he had ever seen, he couldn't resist but to drop a few tears. "Its Jesus" proudly explained the woman. The scientist gave a few tips, "you know, if you add a few more wrinkles to his face, you could make the painting look that bit more realistic and ..." the scientist continued on. The woman was delighted to get such sound advice! The conversation got so deep that the woman even asked about her psychosis and how to resolve it, of course the scientist knew all about delusion, and so he explained. The scientist also had a brilliant idea to show this picture to his friend dying of cancer, which made both him and his friend feel profoundly fulfilled in life. They ended up living their life together, feeling complete. The woman and the scientist ended up marrying and having 1 child, later known as the buddha. He use to sit under a tree a lot meditating, so they called him 'SAT'. He was the union of both, ANANDA and CHIT, the perfect balance. 'the end' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satcitananda

@Leo Gura I'm heavily experienced with setting up computer/electrical equipment. Let me know if you want to get a webcam/live video system setup, I would be glad to help.

Ahhh, the devil once again is giving me fools gold. What I think Truth is, is actually Maya. Thankyou for your compassionate words winterknight.

@Ampresus of course it can, Try finding abstract patterns and relationships between the qualia of the tree and other qualia experienced in reality: the tree has a root and branches, like a hierarchy of a company it has root and branches trying to reach a sun, like a meditator trying to reach enlightenment it has the root and branches is like a pathway leading to something, like a road or ant trail it has oval shape trees, like the oval shape of an old sailing boat from the top down view some leaves are clumped together, other leaves are spread out, like the human, animal, etc population spread throughout the planet its shape (including the trees) are messy but have form, like clouds .... make 1000 more yourself.

Are illusions Real, with a capital R? How does one get deluded, if the thing that is deluding them doesn't exist?

Firstly, I will just brielfy summarize my opinions about the use of psychedelics, and then further clarify my question based on my beliefs. Some personal observations I have noticed with people who DO take psychedelics are that: - people who have never heard of spirituality before, tend to at least develop a tiny bit of motivation to meditate after having the experience. They also get shocked, provoked, and tend to misrepresent their experiences massively (which is of course expected). Yet they mostly remain completely clueless and fail to develop a regular meditation habit for at least the next 5 yrs if not for their entire lifespan. - people who do regularly meditate, and are on 'the path' and take psychedelics, tend to have quite amazing experiences during the trip, and they develop very interesting and alternative memories about reality, yet they usually completely fail to integrate the experience to levels necessary to really take full opportunity of the experience. Also psychedelics usually do not, in my experience, supercharge somebody's meditation experience if they have been regularly meditating. If they are a 'noob' and meditate once a week, then psychedelics supercharge their experience massively. But if they already meditate for at least 30 minutes to 1 hour a day, their meditation practice usually doesn't get supercharged, and apart from the cool memories, the person's spiritual growth remains unaltered. From these opinions/observations, I pose 3 questions: - Are my observations correct? If not what am I observing incorrectly? - If psychedelics do not have much of an effect of changing your brain's synaptic connections that much, then what is the point of taking psychedelics? Why are they useful? - Is there a meditation type system out that which very wisely and methodologically uses psychedelics to supercharge a person's spiritual growth? And if so would you kindly point me in the right direction (NOTE: I have looked at various south american shamanic practices, yet the ones I have seen do not particularly enhance your spiritual growth, but rather your ability to heal through non ordinary reality. There is a subtle difference to what I am looking for, I am looking for Atman/Brahman not non ordinary states of reality). Thanks!