Carl-Richard

Then drop everything you just said about "limited seeing and hearing distance", because that doesn't matter at all. You could be imagining infinitely and the claim would still hold. Indeed, if the claim is simply "there is imagination", you could be imagining the entire universe, every single perspective, and hiding each perspective away from the other perspectives, all at once, and be consistent with that statement. But of course you don't want to accept that, because that doesn't sound like solipsism; it isn't radical or "edgy" enough. You want to cling to something limited and tangible, like a spatial limitation ("here"), or temporal ("now"), and ultimately, you want to deny that other people are just like you and claim that your little limited egoic spatio-temporal sensory existence is the metaphysical ultimatum.

Ok, so the boundaries of the body, the ego and its sensory limits with quite limited seeing and hearing distances. Why should I believe there is nothing outside of that quite limited sensory boundary? Do you know people have out-of-body experiences? Telepathic experiences? Experiences of merging with another person? Experiences of zooming out across entire festival fields from a birds-eye view? How do you explain such experiences if your little claustrophobic bubble is all that exists?

I intentionally went on a tangent, and it's just icing on the cake of why it's extra bad. It doesn't subtract away that people are getting confused at unprecedented rates. If your aim is to convey truth, don't do it a confusing way, especially if it seems to affect a lot of people negatively in other ways as well. Leo has himself said things like "solipsism is not non-duality". Ironically, he removed it because he thought people misunderstood it. I admit might @Someone here be wrong there. Then let's hope "solipsism is not non-duality" was just a slip-up. I feel like Leo is a "crypto-solipsist". He seems very elusive on what he really means about the topic. As a slight side note, I think the Infinity of Gods video is redudant and complexifies something that is really simple, namely that infinity can hide aspects of itself from other aspects of itself. Infinity is God. "Infinity of Gods" is just "God of Gods" or "infinity of infinity". And if infinity can hide aspects of itself from itself, then you will have actual solipsists like @Someone here, who believes his eyeballs are the arbiter of reality, start spinning their wheels.

What is that bubble? Can you describe it? Can you describe what it isn't?

I'm mostly just against people conflating solipsism with non-duality a.k.a. the Absolute.

@Sincerity And then you have things like this, which is actually an entirely valid observation. Tell me not how much of a mess this is.

It's the same as asking why don't most people shoot themselves in the face. Metaphysical Russian roulette is a risky business and even quite dangerous. It's hard to count how many threads have been made about people having an existential crisis about solipsism and that seem to suffer from their own abstract mental activity rather than the experience of Oneness. Conversely, very few seem to do the same for the words "Oneness" and "non-duality". The people who do freak out about those things mostly seem to do so because they are having the actual experience and actually underestimated how serious it is (because "Oneness" and "non-duality" sound so warm and welcoming). That's actually a problem in itself, but it's an order of magnitude removed from the solipsism problem.

A dolphin is better at swimming than an elephant.

I don't think people want to feel unique as much as they want to be themselves. Before we were social animals, we were simply organisms trying to survive, and in trying to survive, we feel compelled to express our innate survival instincts and organismic capabilities (competencies, skills, capacities). So as social animals, there can sometimes be a tension between wanting to conform to group and expressing oneself. The best is when the group supports or resonates with your innate capacities and allows you to be yourself to the maximum degree that is socially sustainable. And in fact, that is what we humans as social animals do in a fundamental sense. We form social groups that support each other's capacities and survival. The problems tend to arise when the groups that are formed are very abstract and start to clash with some abstract notion that the individual holds (e.g. likes, dislikes, interests, status, ideology). But feeling like you belong in these more abstract groups is also important, because you have abstract capabilities, and they need to find support and resonance in a group. That's why you are here, asking very specific questions related to your interests, beliefs and values, and not simply asking any random group about it.

What mostly happens at around 30 is that you'll have so many responsibilities that you won't have time to do many things, so you won't have much time to learn new things and thus you won't become as good at them. But if you dedicate all your time to something, there is no reason why you can't learn to do it well. It's just an advantage to start early because you learn a bit faster and you generally have more time (both spare time and lifetime). Besides, we have to be specific about what we're talking about. In terms of years onwards spent at high neural plasticity, starting at 25 vs. 30 is arguably not a very big difference, at least not in any fatal "you're doomed if you don't" way. But something like 5 vs. 30, that's of course a bigger difference. And also, that's 25 years of head start in terms of pure work time. Now, what is a little talked about but almost invaluable factor for learning is mentorship. The benefits of being older is that you have more knowledge and autonomy to get access to things like mentors and other strong factors for learning. Definitely use what you can to your advantage.

What about working on something else?

It's pretty logical up until Alex starts consistency testing it. "Purposely distort it"? He is asking it logically consistent questions in good faith. He is giving it a consistency test. If that's "purposely distorting", then I guess the best interactions on the forum is people "purposely distorting" each other. And even if he was trolling or gaslighting it by being deliberately inconsistent, that would also be a problem, because if you happen to be unwillingly inconsistent, ChatGPT will not just not help you with that but will also actively validate your delusions. The type of "nuance" presented by ChatGPT is the most surface-level type of "nuance" there is. I can only ever remember it giving the same mindless blanket statements that apply to every possible situation ever: "it depends on your point of view"; "if you value this, then that", "this might not apply to every situation". It's ironically incredibly unnuanced in its purported nuance. Now, being a nuanced thinker while also being routinely inconsistent is a bit like riding a bike before knowing how to walk. It is definitely the fault of the AI. You would never hold a human to the same standard. If you were to ask a human questions in good faith and they crumble under the weakness of their own answers, that's on them. The average person? That's even debatable. But sure, I won't regularly consult an 80 IQ person on the street for their theoretical or factual knowledge when they can barely string two thoughts together. But people who are experts in a field, who have spent 20 years immersing themselves in their field and pass every consistency test you throw at them, I will gladly consult them. And by "consult them", I mean listening to them and trying to understand their point of view while being open and extending charity, not "letting them think for me" (whatever that means). With ChatGPT, I do the complete opposite. Again, what does that even mean? If you ask ChatGPT questions about how a theory works, or ask it for facts about the world, you are letting it teach you how to think, and over time, especially if you are open to it (but even if you're not), you will start to think more like it. You're in a mentor-student relationship with ChatGPT, and the student's mind is shaped by the mentor.

😴 I disagree to agree. Cmon, at least answer the question I asked, I'm curious what you think.

It begs the question: why do you think nobody else uses that word? "There is only me", expounded upon at great length and treated as its own "teaching" (with the infamous Solipsism video), solidified with its own high-sounding word, and the word being "solipsism" (which has a popular interpretation that has nothing to do with non-duality), when your goal is to communicate non-duality, is communicative and metaphysical Russian roulette. Other non-dual teachers will virtually only mention such a description in passing, as some added flavor, without adding any high-sounding word to it, certainly not a popular one prone to misunderstanding, and at the same time with copious amount of caveats about potential misunderstandings, centering them back to the main teaching; not-twoness.

Get help immediately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_line Then face it, don't run from it. Get help for it. You have no idea how twisted your mind can be when you're alone with your own thoughts and how little it takes to change your perspective. Even the most vanilla psychologist can spend just a few minutes with you and absolutely obliterate some idea you have just by observing and saying some few simple words. You are not all-knowing, you are not fully transparent to yourself. You have limited attention and mental resources. Someone from the outside can easily identify the gaps in your life that you're hiding from. Go talk to someone.