Raw Nature

What lucid dream did you have last night? Yeah I gotta have a mental relationship with my partner, if they're not as explorative as me mentally then its like shit let's just go virtual reality or a future robot woman (or just dating apps).

@arlin you have to train the prefrontal cortex, or rather more functionally, sentience. Sentience can be trained in a number of ways, the best way to explore and realise sentience is through experiential training. I make mention of a simple emotional shifting exercise at the bottom of this comment here that will give a real sense of sentience and subsequent personal empowerment which stands as your very real and tangible free will in this reality. Someone said as a reply to my comment that I'm yet to get to "what is sentience?", as a reply here it simply means what we normally refer to as self awareness without that internal chatter, instead the awareness of that. The next step would be training the frontoparietal network, or to simply say, the prefrontal cortex. This involves simply doing things that get one to train their reasoning, for a male in general I'd recommend spatial reasoning. Say lots of chess and then learning to transpose those skills into ones everyday life, that way the training will translate in and outside of chess. Chess can be very intimidating for people but if the end goal of improving sentience is kept in mind that can better enable sentience. Also the emotional shifting exercises themselves, if one wishes to practice, will make a considerable difference to someones ability in the realm of relieving oneself from depression. In fact I'd argue that if someone were to do 3 hours of training per day there's absolutely no doubt that they'd not only redeem any depressed condition they'd far exceed any ability they had here they previously thought possible. I personally do not train on the exercises myself, however I do train my prefrontal cortex, spending at least 2-3 hours per day and I find that in itself helps in the alleviation of any potential symptoms of depression as well as capacities to self regulate. The emotional exercises even if one doesn't want to consistently train there at a bare minimum allow someone to really experience what sentience is actually like, a feeling that I think many people have probably forgotten. And don't feel bad if you can't shift your state easily initially, I remember when I did properly train for about a week after the 4th day or so 1+ training I was amazed at how good I was getting.

You're not an idiot, your brain has enormous potential @arlin . All it means is that - although you're free to disagree as you please: We are dual authors with reality of reality and as reality, thus intrinsic meaning and subsequent purpose is the real deal. Our ability to create meaning means that the universe has intrinsic meaning and purpose. You cannot have one without the other.

@abrakamowse Great wisdom!

Sentience. Its important to recognise that sentience is an organisational principle, this is why we see a relationship between higher sentience and "self recognition" (i.e. mirror tests), thus higher sentience allows us to not only regulate our emotions better but also alter them in a particular direction at will with the appropriate training. This training and the extension of this potential is naturally to the full mapping of the entire brain where we can engender such ability. Meaning a maximisation of training will allow us to become sentient enough that we can regulate and control much more of our brain than we realise and thus affect growth in important areas, secondly, that if we were to induce a maximisation of optimising the parameters that govern the brains ability to change, i.e. neuroplastiicty, say through drug interventions (ayahuasca is implicated in improvements in neuroplastiicty for example, at least in specific instances though its broadness hasn't been well studied). Improve sentience, we improve our access. Simple emotional transference exercises where you even just say sit down for 15 minutes trying to change from 1 emotional state to the next changing to a new 1 every minute will reveal to you, very, very experientially, just what I mean by sentience, the feeling of sentience and the brains capacity for self intervention on state.

@ajasatya One more thing that you may find interesting to contemplate: None of us can contemplate or create so much as a thought without meaning, thus to say that life has no intrinsic meaning is an unsubstantiated contradiction Given the relationship between cognitive syntax and the syntax of reality, otherwise expressed as C->R, this also renders your statement as not only unsubstantiated but invalid. Ultimate meaning is the entire purpose of reality, without it, reality would have no purpose to exist. Existence requires purpose for purpose is the building blocks for reality, the organisational principle that allows information to establish logical coherence to the point it can talk with itself to build further purpose. Purpose is the precursor to all intrinsic meaning and all meaning predicates the purposes that will be derived from the perceptual syntax designed to infer it, i.e. us. where we're back to C -> R. C->R is the binding loop between realities simultaneous self representation and self configuration, this is also the dual framework for establishing the logical predicates necessary for free will both from the perspective of reality and the free will of a human. This loop in a nutshell, is sentience, an engine that allows for cognition to have selection boundaries serve self optimisation parameters, aka, from evolution to self actualisation. Just some thoughts to consider. The logic is flawless but you can have a go at trying to crack it.

@ajasatya You don't know that don't make stuff up. We don't build our own meaning there's no logical basis for that. Our cognitive syntax shares a symbiotic relationship with the syntax of reality, thus purpose is bound to the inferences derived in that loop. No offense, its just a sensitive topic that I think warrants accurate or open minded responses rather than statements without merit.

@arlin purpose is self referential, so you look at the purpose of a human, or in this case just yourself, and then you begin to extrapolate purpose externally. My purpose is to help save the planet. I arose out of it. I will likely return to it when I'm dead. I am more the earth than I am human, so I look forward to returning home when the time is right. Earth is constantly creating species of all various shapes, sizes, characteristics and subsequent purposes. Some have damaging purposes, some have healing ones, some have constructive ones, some have mere consumption based ones, some have mere reproductive based tendencies, etc, etc. Life, when the pieces are put together in the right order appear as obvious as ones reflection in the mirror, but if the mirror is broken or we never think to get a large enough mirror, we will never see that obvious picture of reality and think of it instead as something too complex to figure it out.

And wow, as a reflection of the highest form of self awareness imagine how much it would change your life if you aware of everything in existence at all times... (something I'll experiment with - see how much I can actually be aware of simultaneously even though the modelling is only predictive haha) This is why self education is so important, so you can build an accurate model of reality, simulate things in real time and then be able to make intelligent assessments about what you can best contribute to the world. Thus in this sense, not only is there a war against sentience, there is a war against self awareness (again ='s realities level of awareness of its contents - from our human perspective when it applies to our relationship there) given our level of self awareness determines how well our models align with reality and in doing so, the degree to which our decisions are for the best maturation of existence according to our greatest wills.

On the subject of words I really love the term sentience by the way, so much more clarifying than self awareness. In the literal sense all self awareness (from a humans perspective) actually means from a more accurate point of view is the degree to which reality is aware of its contents from the human subjective reference frame in any one moment - meaning modern references to the idea are incomplete and ultimately inappropriately split from reality. Sentience however has both really great practical and theoretical ground.

@Victor Mgazi It's a very fascinating scenario but just in a nut shell, its sentience corrupted that's all. Sentience is the thing that allows us to have free will. Most depression and suicide related symptoms (including fear) would be healed through a training of the prefrontal cortex and general self governance training. Most humans have been corrupted by mainstream "unregulated" (and therefore chaotic) culture, and because their social governance does not facilitate their internal governance the likelihood that people will fall victim to negative states of being is much higher. Try at least 25% of the US population, and that's because of the socioeconomic structure that governs consumer options and because most of those act as social malware, its a successful statistic because it fuels people to be more dependent and therefore reliable unthinking consumers. The biggest war being waged on humans right now is on sentience, thus the cure is sentience.

In answer to the question: "How did we screw up this subject (free will)?" Its rather simple actually and I made the same mistake in reasoning about it in the past hence determinism so easily deludes people. Instead of looking at the thing that was doing the contemplating we only utilised reverse engineering in thinking about the problem so we could only think in a reductionistic manner "well what created the thought? Then what created that? Then what created that?". But now that I've said what I've said that mistake has been successfully redeemed.

Prefrontal cortex training. Simply the case of use it or lose it. I mean think of how many years have actually been spent exercising your prefrontal cortex. Probably very little, you probably wouldn't be able to use up all your fingers in counting the number of days you've spent really working your mind overtime. You'd be almost super man if it were the opposite case. That's all laziness is in my experience. The more I improved my prefrontal cortex the more I improved will power, self regulation, awareness, etc. (anything else that contributed was only supportive - like weight training)

@Francis Trach Just my own 2 cents. For anything to have sentience it must have what can be termed "reality sentience". This means that to the extent that there is sentience, the person is aware of and can make adjustments to reality. This is the definition of free will. You are an aspect of reality, which is to the extent that you have sentience, free to transform reality. To this extent, you as reality, are responsible for every decision that is bound up and made within sentience, outside this, you are excused. Free will and sentience have a coupling which cannot be uncoupled, this is because sentience itself exists as a kind of freedom, this is why awareness appears as a kind of "nothingness", this is because this is the encasing by which contents can flow through and you can make changes to the universe through the synthesis that your consciousness engenders in its interaction with those contents. This doesn't mean we're "all powerful free will universal changing beings" of course, meaning free will exists on a spectrum and we exist somewhere to the right in the animal kingdom as well as individual differences existing right across the human population. Free will resides in the prefrontal cortex mostly, thus it is the place where people should concentrate most if they wish to improve their free will incrementally over the long term rather than have it diminish more and more with age due to misuse and lack of use. There's really no way out of free will unfortunately, and I seriously doubt anyone here would be able to logically falsify the statement. Reality exhibits ultimate sentience and therefore ultimate free will relative to that sentience, we are like tiny microbes as reality which have been granted with awareness to reconfigure along with reality in the larger picture of realities ongoing transformation and understanding of itself.

@Leo Gura In a nutshell, reality CAN'T be plugged into water, coal or fire it had to be plugged into an electrical socket and only an electrical socket in order for reality to turn on or for it to even exist at all. No matter how many political identity groups are created that petition otherwise, whether it's the petition that women can do it better, transsexuals should be allowed to plug reality into their genitals for it to work or political leaders want to use alternative possibilities as a means of campaigning for presidency, they're wrong. They're wrong and they have to not only be told that but forcibly stopped if they can't learn that this is how reality functions otherwise reality will cease to be or cease to ever exist at all. We have to look at, record and prove that reality can and does only function by plugging it into an electrical socket and then protect that knowledge from outside threats. Not all opinions are created equal in the eyes of reality even if they can all be equally loved by reality once it's plugged in correctly. Reality simply won't stand it, my radio, computer and phone simply won't stand me trying to plug it into ice cream or anything else other than an electrical socket (or equivalent). I'm out in the rain right now so I better move otherwise my iPad will stop working, it's functional reality will plug right out of existence.