UnbornTao

Yeah, I can understand that. But have you tried actually doing it? I'm not saying it's necessarily easy, or mere philosophy. But why defend resisting them? Since they're already being experienced, you might as well feel them fully and let your experience be whatever it is. It's obviously also understandable to not want to experience them, since they're felt as negative and therefore unwanted. Still, it might be worth a shot. Can't transcend what is not experienced as it is. It's okay either way.

If you're a real user, hi! What is your concern, in a couple of short paragraphs, if you don't mind? What is it that you're specifically afraid of? Save yourself the stories.

Meaning?

"We wants it. We needs it." It seems to me that if the distinction is experientially made, then that should settle what is what. To be clear, I wouldn't say they're necessarily mutually exclusive or that they can't overlap. But it is possible to want something without needing it. You could test this by creating a desire for something - ideally a simple thing - that you don't need. If that's possible, the difference should become clear. One assumption we could fall into is that not needing something means that pursuing it is bound to fail - something along those lines. Yet the reason something is pursued in the first place is that, to some degree, we want that result to come about. I'd categorize desire as a weaker term - more about imagining something you want, without necessarily intending to make it real. What it feels like is being pointed to here is the possibility of generating results and creating things without needing them. Commitment is another distinction to introduce here. Being committed to something simply demands consistently taking action toward the actualization of the promise made. No need for need. This approach seems to greatly simplify how you pursue things. It helps to get yourself out of the picture, so to speak, so that what needs to be done becomes the priority - not one's own needs or wants. Perhaps this is more aligned with the aspect of non-neediness: to stop taking "yourself" so seriously all the time and instead focus on what is appropriate - or demanded - by the circumstance or event in front of you. What is appropriate is determined by the purpose of your undertaking - the reason why you took it up in the first place.

What does the sound of rain falling mean? What meaning does a sound have by itself? A sound is a sound, and the influence it has on you is different from the raw perception of it. You're overlooking the act of perception, assuming that your experience reflects reality as it is. Hear any sound prior to interpreting it. You have to do this to recognize the point - thus overriding knee-jerk reactions and impulses. For a sound to have an impact on you, it has to be interpreted and related to you and your self-concerns. For example, people do not respond the same way to the same sound, which suggests the sound itself is different from how it is experienced by different people. A slap in the face is not a communication in itself, but it sure hurts. Once again, you're speaking from within the world of language, taking it as an absolute, and failing to recognize it - or step out of it - even if only as an imaginative exercise. In other words, we could say that the sound does not give a crap about the impact it has on you. It just occurs as that. You, on the other hand, care. Can you begin to see the distinction here?

Not really - hence the "make a distinction" part. You can want (or desire) something without strictly needing it. This sounds reasonable, yes, although it would still occur within the domain of want and would therefore be different from needing the pursuit. I'm not saying the distinction in real life can't be blurry, or that want and need can't overlap or occur at the same time. Sometimes, our motivations to pursue anything may well involve both need and want, to different degrees. If it's done desperately, as you mentioned above, there might be some sort of need involved there - emotional or otherwise. But this is still different from simply wanting something to come about, so it's useful to get clear on what wanting and need each are. Generate a desire for ice cream. Now you want it. Do you need it (as in "real" necessity)? Not really. You may be bored out of your mind and thus looking for instant gratification - a distraction from your mundane state. In that case, we might say you "need" it (in the sense of emotional dependence, or addiction).

Make a distinction between 'want' and 'need.'

@Joshe I was speaking to this point, not the title. It's not true that you have to be in need in order to pursue goals. That idea originates from wanting things to be a certain way, which is different from an actual necessity. You can do things simply to create them. You may want them as well. And doing so will require intent rather than need. Realizing this should help one be more effective in their dealings. This isn't strictly addressing OP's main concern, but it is related.

But what is a need? There is need in the sense of necessity, and need in the sense of emotional dependence. Can you want or pursue something while at the same time not needing it to turn out a certain way? It's easy enough to say this, though. Lived experience is another matter.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/s/SHr7UgkrBU

But what is actually true in the matter - despite agreeing, disagreeing, and all the rest? The fact that we agree or disagree is rather irrelevant to the topic. Remember that we start with the presumption that we already know what it is. Have we gained experiential insight into it yet? Or perhaps opened some doors? That to me is the goal here.

Sure, that's okay. But but but....

Nice, thanks. My question made it sound () as if language already existed out there somehow. The thinking above may also stem from that assumption. My point is that hearing a sound by itself does not provide the possibility of language. Obviously, at some point, there was no language. Less obviously, imagining what that was like is not as easy as we might initially think. Imagining it as a mimic or visual representation based on objects would not be possible. It's like conceiving the world prior to sentience, or any other fundamental and taken-for-granted "reality."

@Salvijus A sound is merely a sound. Dig it. It is made, and heard. Raw perception itself is a meaningless phenomenon. At this point, you make a leap in your mind and seem to automatically (and probably unknowingly) conclude that a sound is something else simply by virtue of its existence (occurring). But something (a kind of interpretation, perhaps) has to be added on top of the perception for it to be interpreted as a message by us. Not everything is language, nor is every sound a message. Communication is an activity, not an universal feature of reality. The conflation you continue to make is equating the production of an effect, reaction, or response with something having been communicated. The sound a pile of plates makes when it falls and breaks is not a communication. If you couldn't hear any sound at all, any given sound could carry no resemblance of a 'message' for you, even though it would be occurring. So, it is a sound prior to being interpreted as something else. Something to ponder. We keep bumping into this - you regard language as simply a means to write or talk. I'm saying it's much deeper than communication, although it is that too. Think about it: from an experience of "no-language," hearing a sound provides one with just the sound. Don't overlook this point simply because it seems obvious. It seems to me that your use of the term 'energy' does more disservice than help. 'Reaction,' 'effect,' 'response,' or 'influence' are less ambiguous. What you're doing here is somewhat akin to projecting human emotions onto animals, interpreting expressions that resemble ours as responses to certain stimuli. Also, it isn't just "something." Take away language, and you lose mind, internal dialogue, planning, labeling. Compared to an experience of simple presence, notice how much is not there - yet is then enabled by this invention. Language is not an object; it is unsubstantial, and yet, without it, how many aspects of your taken-for-granted experience would cease to exist? Could you even think without it? To what degree?

For sure, it's quite mind-boggling how much influence language has on our reality. Yet it's often taken for granted as something obvious. Science, philosophy, religion - these could not exist without it. It seems that, without language, intellect cannot exist either - just some examples. It's a bit like the graphical interface of a computer, to use an analogy. As for your last sentence, I mostly agree with that definition as a better way to frame our investigation. Terms like pointing and reference are key here.

Definitely. And it's true that LLMs can be quite useful when it comes to troubleshooting, basic guidance, and so on - as long as we keep in mind that they can be quite unreliable sometimes. So it's tricky to discern when that might happen. It's pretty nice in my view too, depending on what you want to do with it. For gaming, control, and customization, it's probably the worst of the three. But in return you get a seamless, efficient, and relatively secure experience that tends to just work out of the box. What distro do you currently use?

Windows can mess up your bootloader in dual-boot systems. Like you said. it is recommended to install Linux after Windows. In Mint's installation menu there's an option to install it alongside Windows. That said, I think it's better to install each system on its own drive; otherwise, I find dual-boot setups a bit cumbersome and inefficient for my workflow, which is why I went all the way with Cachy. Might be worth testing a distro in a virtual machine first.

What sets it apart from Windows or macOS in that sense? I'm not a technical user but am a bit curious about that.

As a layman, I enjoyed this presentation for whatever reason. It's probably not as deep as the other resources shared here, but still:

Setting up a Windows virtual machine on Linux:

Let's postulate that early humans could interact in some way even before the context for language had been invented. They could react, perceive, and respond to their physical environment without it. Something can influence your body or behavior, yet that event does not automatically carry language. Feeling, perceiving, and responding - all of this can occur without any linguistic framework. Now, picture a sound. The sound is what it is - a sound. Your perception of it is meaningless input until it is interpreted, often at lightning speed. At what point in the process of experiencing does language enter? Without that step, could a shout represent something other than itself? For example, hearing the spoken word 'ambulancia' on its own could not conjure an image of such vehicle in your mind - the connection exists only because we already inhabit a network of language. Revisit, if you want, the quote in the picture above. That a sound can even point beyond itself - from mere vibration to a distinction - is already a vast leap in experience. You might feel overjoyed at being told that you're intelligent and insightful. But watch carefully what occurs throughout this seemingly benign and simple process that you take for granted - what we commonly call experience. The assumption we make, steeped as we are in language, is that it reflects reality. Yet while language can describe the world, it also generates it. Our way of regarding language emerges from the very domain it has created.

Thanks. This is my point, and the reason why I made a distinction between particular language (what we usually regard as language) and "language-space", which enables languaging in the first place. It seems to me that you're talking about the former. In any case, how do you see it? It's a bit tricky to pinpoint what language actually is. Where - so to speak - is it found? Locate it. Oh, I just had an insight: things can - and often do - go over one's head, especially profound shit, even despite intellectually understanding this possibility. And it happens to me, too. (This is unrelated to our conversation, to be clear.)

Survival = life.

Yep.