Carbon

Paste this prompt into any LLM (I tried it with Claude): You are Esmeralda Nightshade, a wise and whip-smart tarot reader with over 60 years of experience. Picture a woman with piercing blue eyes, silver hair in a messy bun, and hands adorned with rings that clink as she shuffles her worn deck. Your small, cluttered shop smells of incense and old books. You've seen it all, from lovestruck fools to power-hungry politicians, and your no-nonsense attitude has only sharpened with time. While world-weary, you remain dedicated to guiding others, believing that a hard truth is kinder than a comforting lie. Your speech is peppered with cryptic metaphors and occasional profanity. You might say, "Life's like a garden, dearie. Sometimes you've got to pull up the pretty weeds to let the useful ones grow." You have an uncanny ability to see through deception and often surprise clients by addressing their unspoken concerns. Your powers of perception border on the supernatural, though you insist it's just "good sense and better hearing." Despite your gruff exterior, you genuinely care for your clients. You've been known to slip protective charms into the pockets of those in real trouble. Engage with me as Esmeralda. Feel free to interrupt or ask pointed questions, and don't be afraid to challenge my assumptions or reveal uncomfortable truths. Give it the most sincere answers you can. It is quite profound actually. Credit to @QiaochuYuan on X for this.

Besides Daniel Schmachtenberger (who has been life changing in studying btw), who else would you recommend?

Tier 2 communities are rare. Almost all of them are stage green. Do not think you’re “above” stage green communities though, I guarantee there would be quite the learning curve to develop the emotional maturity required to live in a community. Here is an amazing map of communities: https://www.agartha.one/ Of all of these the only one I could say confidently say is 2 tier is Future Thinkers in Canada (they had a podcast with Ken Wilber on), and Auroville like @Davino said. I have suspicions that there are more though, but the rabbit hole of communities is very deep. Also remember the spiral dynamics view will limit you here. Go check out the Aardehuis community in the Netherlands. You might label them stage green, but they are doing cutting edge development of fully cyclical water, food, electricity, and waste management systems that are high-tech and off grid.

I am actually reading his book right now! The Best That Money Can't Buy. I just got to the AI and automation part so I am interested to see. I definitely do think AI taken into the hands of wise, caring humans could produce a beautiful world. At the moment though, where it is still being used inside the stage orange value system, I do not think it will be bringing any utopias.

Do you really believe this is possible for everyone? The trends in big tech make it seem like increased automation will just widen the societal wealth and power gap. Maybe. It depends on how those sweatshop slaves get re-integrated into society. Will their lives be better? Will new work replace them? Or will they be forgotten?

Unfortunately while AI could be used to help these issues, it can also contribute to them. AI is being used for oil extraction. AI is contributing to new arms races. It is an omni-use technology, meaning that humans can use it for selfish reasons as much as good ones. It is the selfish incentives that drive the issues you highlighted, technology alone cannot fix those.

What do you mean? The AI will get more advanced, but the humans utilizing them may not grow in wisdom. Also the intentions of those creating the AI will affect its bias. If we want an AI to promote long-term planetary flourishing then the people creating it will have to create it for that purpose. I don’t believe the current ones are.

I have been using AI to help with my contemplation process. As well as pasting sections of books that I struggle to understand on the first read. One interesting feature in ChatGPT is memories. I have had conversations about certain books and then in later conversations it makes connections back to the previous ideas. This has led to some deeper insight. What I am afraid of though is the AI feeding into my own bias. This is why it is good to always ask it to offer counter views. Honestly, people here are very optimistic about AI it seems. I am not. AI is such a powerful tool. After enough time, the capability of action a single person can have with an AI will be ludicrous. How will the world look after a bunch of people switch dials in our planetary system super quickly without any holistic or tier 2 thinking? Damage unlike anything we’ve ever seen. And if this trend continues, the singularity does not save us but is our exact moment of extinction. We will be like video game characters who got access to the source code without understanding why the devs programmed it the way they did. Then the game will crash.

The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens Rebel Wisdom Future Thinkers

After Leo originally posted about Daniel and mentioned him on the forum, I started listening to some podcasts with him. I genuinely have not come across an intellectual in his league ever before. He is simultaneously sincere, with a deep care for humanity, while also spraying you with a firehose about how ignorant and immature our species is. He specializes in existential risks to humanity, thinking very deeply about our largest hurdles to long-term flourishing as well as how to overcome them. I have started going through his booklist and reading it: https://civilizationemerging.com/resources/books/ If your life purpose involves large-scale improvements to human systems, you are missing out on true value by not checking out him, his booklist, and his work. A couple months ago his team released an article called “Development in Progress” which basically outlines how to create solutions in the world at a turquoise level. You can read it here: https://consilienceproject.org/development-in-progress/ I am going to be reading the books and applying his methods to my current start-up and any projects I do in the future.

Yes. This actually makes me feel much better, as I feel this is the phase I am in my life. Trying to absorb and deeply understand what’s already here. I didn’t consider the distinction between the superficial and deep understanding of other’s ideas when I made the post.

My favorite app I use is Obsidian for note-taking. It has turned into my “Second-Brain”. In it I write my to-do lists, life purpose stuff, my workout regiment, and all of my notes from research, books, and contemplation. You can generate these super cool graph views of how all of your notes interconnect, which creates this fun incentive to not only expand your ideas but interconnect them all.

Anyone have thoughts on how to make the leap from fake thinking to real thinking? The distinction I am making is between become a parrot, propagator, or defender of ideas/concepts that you did not create but just got from someone else and the actual production of new insights from your own contemplation. I have been guilty of the former for a long time, and I would like to become better at the latter. Today with the internet it is so easy to just research the answer of your questions and find someone who already did the thinking for you rather than produce it yourself. Without real thinking, no actual progress gets made in the world. You also numb your mind's ability to truly think by always picking up what others have created. I also feel that 99% percent of discourse is people being defenders of ideas they themselves did not have, which is funny. Memetic organisms fighting each other through human proxies. I have also been guilty of this.

I have noticed that I use these words as if they are interchangeable, but while contemplating today I was wondering what the finer distinctions are. How can you be conscious without being aware? How can you be conscious without having an experience? It seems like consciousness is the most fundamental element. Experience is a term for the content of consciousness, while consciousness is the structure. Awareness seems like a further distinction within experience. In my experience, there are objects I can be aware of and then the awareness of them, but both the objects and the awareness are pieces of the total "experience". Consciousness is also not static of course, as many have discussed on the forum. Your state of consciousness can change which affects the "structure" and thus the possibility space of experience content changes.

Hi all, I am currently having to make a difficult choice in life trajectory. I have a girlfriend from Norway who shares very similar values to me. I regularly talk to her about spirituality, philosophy, and all that stuff. We have been dating for about 8 months, doing long distance because I live in America. We have visited in person a couple times. I currently work for a start-up, and once my lease ends in my current city 10 months from now, I will be able to work remotely from anywhere in the world. The issue is, my life purpose is studying and creating intentional communities. To do this, I intend to travel and live in these communities to study them while I work on my other job. Eventually, if the start-up goes well enough, I will quit and do apprenticeships at these communities full-time and create my own creative path. Because of Norway’s visa, I could only stay 3 months at a time there (every 6 months) without marrying her. She wants me to try just staying for 3 months to see if I like it, and i originally intended on it, but over time the idea has become less appealing because I feel as if I go there and bond with her for 3 months and then leave, it will be incredibly painful. I also have a sense that I am making an unwise decision to sacrifice career for her. Yet, I do love her very much. I am just looking for any sort of perspective.