Jodistrict

If you want to take a deep dive into Shia Islamic mysticism, I highly recommend Henry Corbin. A good starting point is his book “Alone with the Alone”. He describes the imaginal realm as a concrete objective reality that sits between the physical world of the five senses and the Intellectual world of abstract concepts. It is the space where mystical visions, prophetic revelations, and spiritual journeys take place. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691058344/alone-with-the-alone

The ancient scriptures are actually deep expressions of the human condition. But they get turned into fomulas for the masses and become mechanical. I find the rantings of some fundamentalist christians similar in its shallowness to nonduality blabber. We aren't improving.

I agree. The progressives are coming out with some really impressive candidates. They are grounded, intelligent, articulate, and talking about bread and butter issues. This is the winning formula. They are a cut above giggling Kamala. Trump has been so horrible that the backlash has created an opening for new faces.

Yoga is better for your health than any of the gimmicks these influencers come up with. It’s like they just throw paint on a wall and hope something sticks. I continue to be surprised at the benefits of yoga. Recently, after a routine health exam, I learned that I had actually grown an inch, most likely do to all the spinal stretching and twisting.

This is actually a valid post. The same argument applies to Christianity, which also emphasizes community, marriage, and service to others, while providing concrete guidance on how to weather the tough challenges of life. For 99% of the people on earth, a dualistic system and Bakti yoga are the way to go. A true path of awakening, as was practiced in the ancient East, requires years of purification and maturation until nondual investigation is even allowed. It is an activity for matue adults. You can witness the foolishness, unbalanced nature and wild claims of those who are unqualified and not under the mature guidance of a teacher.

When I hear the word "nuance" in these discussions, I am starting to expect an avalanche of AI generated text. When does "nuance" become a code word for "obfuscation".

As you may recall, Obama already made a deal with Iran which was torn up by the idiot Trump. So the problem isn’t Iran. Now, whatever happens, Iran is going to have permanent control over the Straits of Hormuz. Under Obama, this was international waters uncontrolled by any nation. But then Obama is an order of magnitude more intelligent than Trump. Trump will probably end up spending a trillion dollars to get us back to a worse position.

Nothing to do with what I said.

Tampering with billions of years of evolution is not a healthy idea.

Trump finally succeeded in doing something real. He made Iran great again.

Psychedelics are overrated and the new shinny toy. He was right about the ego hijack (2) and the creation of more confusion than clarity (1). He also challenges the underlying assumption of American capitalism – “everyone has the right to their McDonald’s hamburger within 5 minutes” (4).

The same minds that believed decapitation would work, believe there is a nuclear option. The result: Failure.

No they didn't have that option. Russia and China have nuclear bombs too. The arrogant are being brought low.

They already tried annihilation and failed. They murdered all of Iran’s top leaders, betting on an instant collapse. Trump was the only president dumb enough to buy Netanyahu’s bullshit. The United States doesn’t have the power to defeat Iran. Professor Mearsheimer and many other former high ranking officials of the government were predicting this disaster from day one and say America has lost the war. The USA just needs to sign the MOU and get out. The USA lost to Vietnam and still managed to survive.

Alternative health is full of nonsense and unsupported claims.

Just search on the Internet. There is thriving enlightenment industry that will accept your dollars. Capitalism has heard your need and is willing to fill it.

Psychedelics violate the Fifth Buddhist Precept. They distort clarity and cause heedlessness. When the drug wears off, the state vanishes, leaving the user with an addiction to the experience, severe spiritual pride, or deep existential depression.

So it looks like these are basically 50 traps that happen to an advanced meditator that his ego uses to keep him from reaching enlightenment by tricking him into believing that he has already obtained it. The ego hijak (the trap) of a real accomplishment (the bait).

Marco Rubio would have to block the extradition and he wants to run for president. He would have to explain why he blocked an extraditon request of a respected legal system leveling multiple serious criminal charges. There is no upside for him to get involved in this. As for Trump, he will do whatever he thinks is in his best interest and the Tates are losing their influence and popularity.

Getting medical advice from wellness hype YouTube influencers could be dangerous. It’s like selecting Connor Murphy to be your heart surgeon.

LLMs are being extended to work with images. They appear to do visual processing quite well. https://sathishsaravanan.com/blog/how-llms-understand-images/ https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929

Massive respect to Iran for being the only ones in the world with the guts to stand up to Trump. Thanks to Trump’s duplicity and inability to honor his own commitments, the hardliners are now in control in Iran. They aren’t going to give Trump face-saving exit. They got the tyrant by the toe and they aren’t going to let it go.

The Tower of Hanoi game was solved in the 1970s using symbolic processing and search heuristics over a search space. It’s precisely the kind of problem LLMs aren’t good at, as well as even conventional algebra. Keep in mind that the LLMs can learn and have learning built into their architecture. This is the real advance. But, no, it is not AGI.

Right. The LLM builds an internal contextual model of the sentence it is interpreting. Natural language processing based on a syntactic grammar would only be able to interpret toy sentences.