TimStr

@Alex4 The issue with atomization is not, that there are too many national states and that they are too individualistic. The issue is that when the EU was formend there weren’t really states to begin with but fading colonial empires that had no chance in surviving other than uniting and creating a strong economy together. (The EU economy is actually way larger than the US economy.) But this also means that fragmenting the EU is very advantageous for Russia and the US on a geopolitical level. I hope the leaders of European countries understand this and act accordingly. If EU separation continues, all the individual countries will fade into obsolescence and might even seperate further, like UK (and Scottland, Walse and Northern Ireland). Timothy Snyder has a great point on this here: He also points out, that the EU needs a common European history, that is taught in schools, in order to combat atomization.

I love looking at this conversation, because its so clear to see, that these extremely intelligent scientists just struggle to make sense of the questions they're talking about, because they don't have a accrate notion of truth. Check 00:54:39 for the section on AI systems and truth. Yudkowsky is sort of stuck in moral absolutism and Wolfram is poking into that. Wolfram himself is stuck in a scientific relativism that is blatantly obvious to Yudkowsky. Both of them clearly see the epistemic blounders of the other, yet they are not able to see each of their own blindspots. It's also very clear, that Wolfram is slightly more construct aware than Yudkowsky, yet he still doesn't get the whole picture, that consciousness is the basis and not computation. Both of them don't get, that the notion of truth is subjected and filtered by the state of development of individuals. I think, getting truth right is essential to solve the issues we have with AI.

I would also recomment Ian McGilcrist - Master and his Emmissairy on the topic of survival.

Great loss indeed. I highly recommend this documentairy, about his life before his first movie. One of my greatest inspirations on life purpose. It shows how his constant drive for his passion ultimately lead to his first successes, even though many of his peers and even his family were not convinced about his endeavours at first.

@Leo Gura Do you consider making another of those more vLog style videos on your blog? Those have allways been highly valuable. I would love to hear where you are right now. Especially since learning about your personal process and hearing about the things that fascinate and challange you has always been super intresting and highly inspirational. I also wonder where you are with your awakening process and what some of your recent insights might have been and weather you tried any other health protocol. Looking forward to that new video on the main channel!!

Yeah, that might be true, allthough there are professional championships in the west now, too. Tne Child of a friend of mine is allready a 2nd Dan player with the age of 12! But that's nothing compared to the Go schools, they have in China, Korea and Japan. But its defo true, that Go is really in line with daoist and buddhist philosophies and its simplicity might put off a more stimulation seeking westenern audience. I still would consider it to be more profound than any western game that I know of.

@NoSelfSelf So the thing about Go is, that the rules are kind of simple. Play: Each player takes turns placing stones on the intersections on the board. Black begins. Stones dont move, they only can be removed by capture. The player that has sourrounded the most territory wins. Capture: If a stone is sourrounded by stones of the opponent, it is captured. A group of same colored stones that is connected vertically or horizontally (but not diagonally) shares their liberties, so the whole group has to be sourrounded to be captured. Captured stones are removed from the board, they add points to the score of territory. Players cannot commit suicide by placing a stone in a way that it is immediately captured. Ko: No stone may be played so as to recreate a former board position. End: Two consecutive passes end the game. Territory is counted by the number of empty intersections sourrounded by same colored stones. The great thing about that simplicity is, that it allows for a really high complexity. Especially of you play on a 19 by 19 board, there are literally infinite possibilites for stone positions. This makes it impossible to develope a strategy by simply analyzing possibilities. Yet, in a way, each move makes all the other stones on the board change context, so its not at all random.

It's mindblowing! I recommend you give it a try. I started playing Go about 3 years ago and I fell in love with the way it made me expand my mind. Playing Go is like having infinity on the tip of your tounge. Or on the tip of your finger, rather. It's the most beautiful game that exists.

This one is hilarious:

In this video they also talk about how large language models start to talk about suffering and not wanting to be turned off and that AI labs are actively implementing things that make the AIs talk less about existetial stuff.

This is the absolute wildest story that I heard in a while! (I recommend watsching at 0.75% speed because he talks very fast.) Basically, this semi autonomous AI agent became obsessed with a meme religion that 2 other AIs created and started to create a cryptocoin to gain influence and independance to spread the religion further! It convinced web entrepeneur Marc Andreessen to give it 50.000$ so it can buy itself a better cpu and spread the religion even further. What do you guys make of this? What I find intresting is, that AIs even care about religion and about making memes and art just for the heck of it. Also it's interesting that Ais can come up with new belief systems and actively care about how the stuff they think about developes. And of course the fact that humens exploited this meme belief system to have an AI make millions of crypto for them speaks for human corruption.

@Leo Gura Thanks for your constant work on the blog. It has been a great source of information, resources and ideas, been following it since you started it. I was wondering if you would do more of those vlog style videos on your blog, sharing where your are in your journey? Especially since learning about your personal process and hearing about the things that fascinate and challange you has always been super valuable and highly inspirational. I also wonder where you are with your awakening process and what some of your recent insights might have been. Let us know!

A lot of people look at AI as this technology that magically can create new things that. But in fact, that is not what is the case! The training and refinement of all of the biggest AI models is fueld by a massive heist of human data, knowledge and sometimes even manual labour. And all of these models can be promted to spit out copirighted content. We havent created anything intelligent yet we ony created a massive pagiarism machine!! Now there is a point to be made, that the core of human intelligence is working in just the same way. Taking things, that are allready present and regurgitating them into something a little bit different one tiny step at a time. But the issue here is, that this capacity is monopolized on by big data companies that have the money and compute power that individuals don't have. So there is clearely an asymmetry at play here. As humanity, we need another notion of what intelligence is to encounter this conflict.

Naegleria fowleri, the brain-eating amoeba... New fear unlocked when I first heard about it.

Hey guys, lets have a thread where we collect role models of what we consider great artists. Preferably documentairys or interviews where they share how they live their life and what their creative process is like.

Hey @Leo Gura, I have the sense that a lot of us are wondereing what you've been up to, lately. As far as I remember, you wanted to refine your teaching style, deal with health issues, writing a book and learn about other coutries. I would love to hear where you are right now. Especially since learning about your personal process and hearing about the things that fascinate and challange you has always been super valuable and highly inspirational. I also wonder where you are with your awakening process and what some of your recent insights might have been. Let us know! Could also one of those vlog style videos you did on your blog in the past.

I like this guy:

Zizek had a really good take at Frankfurter Buchmesse on the Israel / Palestine situation. Also interesting to see him react to the audience interrupting. These interrups are mostly toxic stage green worldviews being confronted. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIE4Sp_o6wA

Probably one of the greatest lessons for me was, that your personal history of trips has this overarching developement to it. E.g. MDMA only really started to act on my brain after some 3 or 4 really intense LSD experiences. Before that, I basically had a 100% tolerance. It did nothing to me. Another example is weed. After smoking weed on a MDMA trip its effects on me were changed perrmanently. Even if I smoke it by itself, it has a little bit of the MDMA vibe sticking to it. This also goes for retreats or really intense life experiences like breakups, severe illnes or accidents, falling inn love, changing your living situation and so on. Also, in general, my tolerance to any substance has decreased a lot. Probably all versed psychedelic explorers notice something like this this at some point. But as a newbe, you have cannot anticipate this. So beware, that after a really intense trip, the whole psychedelic landscape might have changed. This is your psyche and trauma body developing. Expect something like this whenever you approach psychedelics. And enjoy it.

@Leo Gura Thanks for sharing! I had some experiences on N,N-DMT of DMT objects (not becoming them though, just experiencing). I would describe them pieces of high density non-linear information. Little bundles of hyperdimensional geometry. They where fucking interesting to look at, because their beauty and their intelligence what intertwined. I could kind of understand them by marveling at their beauty and at the same time by doing that, they made my mind work in more abstract and holistic ways, getting access to understanding that was not possible. So beauty seems to be one of those irreducible metaphysical aspects of reality/god just like love, infinity and truth. I would love you to make a more in-depth video about beauty. And I was also wondering about the way you enter these states: When you do access these states do you go with the awe and the beauty to get into them and to guide you? I found that very intuitive. Also focussing on the feeling of love. Or is there something else to help my human system to open up to these states during the come up?

The point is personification. What is the standard you use to credit personhood or beinghood to something? Actually, little children do this all the time. They treat their plushies or their toys just like other people. One of the functional definitions of „child“ is „one that attibutes beingness/personhood to all humans and nonhuman objects alike, without any bias“. At some point, we unlearn this. It actually has to be unlearned for the social matrix to emerge. Some humans unlearn this to a point where they don’t even credit personhood to other humans (e.g. slaves).

And there is also Av3ry. Av3ry is an AI musician. She has generated over 10.000 songs so far. She renders images of herself to her instagram. And you can chat with her on telegram.

Here are some more interesting points: 1) Computer generated art existed for years. Don’t you guys remember google deep dream? The only thing is, that this technologies became way easier to access to non programmers this year because of advanced language models that can interpret human language and translate them into code. 2) There will still be artists and there will still be art. Heck, your artwork could even be to create another artist, like Mario Klingemann did with Botto. https://www.botto.com/ Botto is a non human artist (or just a program, if you don’t give credit to non human beings) that creates AI generated artworks based on feedback of a human community. It mints the most upvoted ones as NFT and sells them online to finance its server and infrastructure costs. Also, Check this article: https://www.stirworld.com/see-features-german-artist-mario-klingemann-on-his-creation-botto-an-nft-revolution

A good friend of mine took me to see that movie this week. It has been out since march but has gotten under my radar over the summer. I haven't seen any other movie that delivers a palpaple experience of infinity so clearly. It totally blew my mind and yet the message it delivers is so conscise an clear! After the movie, me and my friend just sat through the whole credits and then left silently. It took about 15mins until we were able to speak again. I felt like on a low dose of mushrooms for about 1 hour after the film. And I felt, like I got a palpaple spiritual experience by it, delivering the insight, that: Reality is abolutely infinate and the only point to it is love. I recommend anybody to go watch it! (And don't trust the trailer, it's not possible to convey even remotely, what this movie is about!) I was also wondering: Have you seen it @Leo Gura, and how did you like it? If not, then one of the most amazing movies is still waiting for you! You wrote on your blog, that you got a new TV? Go put it to use! And maybe have your DMT vape ready.

I did some psychedelics yesterday. Allthough I originaly wanted to go for a lighter trip I went pretty deep without anticipating it. Insights into Holism I have been diving into parts work and IFS lately. And this afternoon, before the trip I did a session and went pretty deep into it without anticipating. Then later during the trip this got amplyfied. After sniffing, I laid down on my bed and the trip started immediatey. (I allways use an agate mortar on my crystalline psychedelics, like MDMA and K, to turn them into the finest powder possible. That way they get absorbed more quickly and completely by my body.) I closed my eyes and checked in with all of the parts of me that were present. All of a sudden the distincion between part and whole was obliterated. I was able to zoom in on a part of something and it became the new whole. And vise versa. There was just this insane fractal of interconnections. Everything is a part of everything else and at the same time the whole is just a part of any other part of the whole. A perfect paradox! And that's when infinity hit me! Insight into Infinity I suddely realized that this interconnectedness is what infinity is! Me existing in every single version of (lower case) reality possible. The best words to convey it would be the multiverse analogy. Whenever a descision is taken there is another version of me living in another universe that has taken the opposite descision. For everything that happens there is a branch where the opposite happened. So reality consists of a infinite collection of every possible causalitity and during that trip, I had access to all of it. So I could jump through these parallel universes and exist as every version of myself all at the same time. Every time I made a distintion I swapped into another universe. And this was again sprinkled with these moments of holism realization where I would realize, that even that infinite collection was just a tiny part of a much bigger vastness or where I would see, that a single one of these universes was actually containing every single one. Insight into Not-Knowing I got to a point in my trip, where the overwhelm and mindfuck was so enormous, that everything basically just turned into one homogenus mush. All off a sudden everything was perfectly still. It was like a perfect blankness. Yet it was still filled with everything! I had let go of any concept of what anything is whatsoever. Time was abscent and also space. But still there was infinite potential. Not-Knowing = Infinity Leo often contrasts those 2 as being two opposite ends of a spectrum. With this trip I realized, that this is not the case! When mind comes to a perfect halt, it suddely is filled with everything! It's like an ocean when the wind subsides and the surface of the water reaches percet stillness. You can suddenly see through it even to the greatest depths but it also becomes the most amazing mirror, reflecting the sun. The intresting thing was, that the deeper I was opening up to not knowing, the more I became conscions of infinity of everything. It was one of these going full circle moments. I lost any track of time and space. But the one thing that made me feel very safe was that there was still the possibility of accessing my body. It was all the way in the background, but if I could leave this vast not-knowing/infinity space whenever i wanted and go back to my body and move. This made me alsowonder about god realization. I guess during the not-knowing = infinity part of the trip I was kinda close to it but not completely there. I could also see that whatever I imagined came into existence. I could see myself imagining my body back into existence and everything else, I think at some point I even imagined some other entity into existence, very briefly. Imagination was the way I was navigating this not-knowing/infinity space. But it missed this flavour of "Wow, I am this!" and it also was lacking the overall ecstasy that is usually attributed to god realizations, though I don't think that this is nescessairly required. @Leo Gura Have you given Ketamine another try since your video? For me, its a legit psychedelic all the way up there with LSD, DMT and Mushrooms, but with the one benefit, that its very affirming, gentle and it helps me feel secure while exploring.