Carl-Richard

Interestingly, the sometimes wild cases of psychosomatic disorders (e.g. functional blindness, functional paralysis, dissociative seizures) seem to serve as a bridge towards psychic research in that it obliterates the notion that matter causes mind and not the other way around. As the speaker suggests, the stigma around psychosomatic disorders as being "not real" and "all in your head" is something that needs to change for medicine to be able to deal with these disorders adequately, and that puts us closer to the idea that mind's effect on the world has equal scientific significance to matter. By the way, my recent increased intrigue with psychic phenomena has indeed only awoken recently despite my rather extensive list of personal experiences with it and intuitive inclinations, which goes to show the level of strength of the grip that materialism has on the mind and which proves the indispensible value of people like Sheldrake and Kastrup. When the culture gaslights you about your experiences, it takes somebody to ungaslight you to not feel crazy.

As I was watching the Holberg debate live with Rupert Sheldrake, Anil Seth and Tanya Luhrmann, I was thinking many times throughout the debate that it would've been perfect if they had on a philosopher with a background in philosophy of mind as well as science to settle some of the philosophical terms straight and perhaps bring his own perspective to the questions (which of course would be Bernardo Kastrup). Speaking of the devil: I used to view Sheldrake as nothing more than Terrence McKenna's lap dog (and a slightly kooky one at that), but as I've listened to him more over time, I have to say that he is a truly well-rounded thinker, philosophically, scientifically and spiritually. The overlap between him and Kastrup is striking (which is not surprising as Kastrup has apparently followed him for 25 years). I came across a quote from Deepak Chopra saying something along the lines of "Sheldrake will be remembered the same way Einstein is remembered today for his revolutionary contributions to science" (referring to his contributions and activism around psychic research). I had a similar thought one time, albeit not as specific as that. I think there is something to the future of psychic research in the grand scheme of things.

I haven't done any complicated physics/math problems in years, so there would be nothing to compare. I think I've passed the newbie gains by this point, so I don't think I'll see any big changes from now, although we'll see when I decide to switch to 5-Back, which I think will be really soon (I'm consistently hitting 60-70% success rate in every session). There are studies on N-Back training that show a positive effect on IQ, but there are mixed results (which is basically normal in psychological research). If you think it sounds interesting, try it. If not, cool. I'm not trying to claim that it absolutely works. It seems to work for me though.

It should have a picture of goatse and the text "this is Moloch, this is what happens when you scroll on TikTok". I'm terribly sorry, I'm sleep deprived By the way, I wasn't really pooh-poohing your suggestion. My intention was to add a thought.

I’ll give some of my own insights into how I’ve started to do Dual-N-Back over time and what works and doesn’t work. It’s tricky to describe how your mind does these types of things, but I’ll try anyway. Also, I’m going to describe more what your mindset should be rather than what your mind is actually going to do, because your mind is always going to do things that you don’t expect. So don’t expect any type of perfection in what you’re doing or even in what I’m trying to explain. It’s at best a pointer. At the very start of a set, I try to focus on encoding and retaining a sequence (writing it into memory and holding on to it), which is the first N audio stimuli (e.g. first 4 letters in 4-Back), because that is what is limiting me, as the visual part seems almost automatic at this point (but it will be impacted if I fail to do what I’m about to describe). Then, when the 5th stimuli comes, stop trying to retain the first sequence in memory and simply repeat the process of encoding a new sequence of N letters while simultaneously waiting for a letter that you think matches a letter from the first sequence, which indeed is something you have to “wait for” and not put too much deliberate effort into doing. It’s the like the information or the feeling of “match” comes to you intuitively, even without currently "seeing" the letters in your minds eye so to speak. It seems like merely forming the intention of wanting to hear a match or creating a form of attention to do that is sufficient. What you want to avoid is rehearsing the first sequence of N letters as you’re encoding then next sequence (e.g. repeating the sequence to yourself in your inner voice or quietly to yourself). This will interfere with encoding, and also you’re not allowing your short-term memory to do the work for you so to speak, which is a part of the point of this game I think; to train your short-term memory capacity to store a decently long string of information, while also systematically changing out what you’re currently storing in your short-term memory, which would be the “working memory” aspect. I think this “encoding N-chunks” method is the most natural and maybe most efficient way of doing this. In other words, you should be able to identify a matching letter as you’re encoding the next sequence without thinking much about the previous sequence. I think this can maybe help people to advance faster, because all games need a strategy (some more systematic than others, but they all definitely need a strategy), and even though this is probably what most people end up doing naturally, it can help to become aware of what you're doing. As for how I approach the visual aspect, it’s much harder to describe, but it has something to do with eye movements and visualizing where the boxes have been and where the next boxes should land were they to be a match (and it all happens very quickly). But again, this is not usually the part that you'll struggle with if you're doing Dual with audio (and it's also the hardest to describe, so there is not a huge pay-off from talking about it).

The mistake is telling people you're enlightened.

Our government places pictures of diseased lungs and rotten teeth and statements like "smoking kills!" (as well as statistics if I remember correctly) on our tobacco products, but people still buy them How do you reliably give up something that is addictive, let alone collectively? It takes massive changes, psychologically, socially, spiritually. Speaking of individual actions, you can put up posters inside every university toilet, on every bus stop, on your mom's ass. Try fitting something like that on a poster without sounding like a 2012 doomsday lunatic 🤣

The metaphysical goggles of physical reductionism are deeply ingrained into most Western folks' facial grooves.

I'm not even joking, she looks identical to one of my lecturers from my bachelor 😹

Actually, I'll move this to the intellectual section. The post is 90% that. I actually didn't plan to make it about self-development (and I don't expect people looking for practical self-development device to read it all). It was just a good way to conclude.

Cosmogeny (astrophysical evolution), e.g. gas clouds to stars, to planets, to moons. -> Phylogeny (biological evolution), e.g. fish to amphibian, to reptile, to mammal. -> Ontogeny (individual development), e.g. child to adolescent, to young adult, to mature adult. -> Microgeny (moment to moment), e.g. seeing the raw visual data of an apple, to experiencing arousal, to forming some mental concept about it ("apple", "edible"), to thinking about the apple ("am I hungry?"), to planning to eat the apple, to executing that plan, etc. The principle that ties them all together is the interplay between two parts: selection and variation (Darwin), or "include and transcend" (Wilber). It's the interplay between what exists ("being", permanence) and what is to be ("becoming", impermanence), order and chaos, what is old and what is new, etc. Here is one way to tell the story (of the entire universe, from cosmos to human cognition): Somewhere at the beginning of the cosmogenetic level, hydrogen clouds clump together and form stars, which include hydrogen gas but transcends it in form and function (density, temperature, potential fusion processes, life cycles, etc.). These stars may form star systems, which include and transcend stars. These stars may collide with each other, or they may collapse and explode and form new heavier elements (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc.). You can then "select" (or "include") these new elements and create a new higher-order system, like a biological cell, which takes us to the phylogenetic level. A cell includes carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc., but transcends it in form and function (cell membrane, ion channels, intra-cellular structures, signalling pathways, etc.). Cells may form a multicellular organism, which includes and transcends cells. These biological systems will evolve by the same process as astrophysical systems: selection and variation, "include and transcend". It just becomes very visible in biological systems because these systems make copies of themselves with sometimes slight changes, through mitosis or meiosis (involving mechanisms such as genetic mutation or sexual reproduction), and these changes become very complex very fast. That is how you get organisms like fish, frogs, seaweed and trees, all originating from the same organism (most likely), over a rather short period of time. These biological systems have a life cycle, a bit like stars, where their structure builds up and complexifies, and then disintegrates and dissolves into more basic elements (while also creating new elements, like in supernovas, or new life forms, like in mitosis or meiosis, somewhere along the cycle). This takes us to the ontogenetic level. Taking humans as an example, you start out with a single fertilized cell which undergoes various types of cell division and cell differentiation, eventually creating a fish-like embryo, which then grows into a fetus, and then it gets born as a baby. Here you can clearly see the curious phenomena of "ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny", where the earlier stages of the life cycle shows distinct similarities with the earlier stages of biological evolution. In reality, this recapitulation happens across all the levels, but here the notion again becomes very visible. As the baby grows up, it goes through various stages of development as a child (e.g. Piaget's stages of cognitive development), then as an adolescent through puberty and additional cognitive development (and of course other types of development), and then further as a young adult, mature adult, etc. Here is where theories like Spiral Dynamics, Cook-Greuter's Ego Development theory and other adult development theories come in. Of course, some organisms are social and form social systems, which include and transcend individual organisms, which is where societal and cultural development comes in. Also, you get a variety of individual organisms by varying which environment or which situations they’re exposed to, which is more captured by concepts like culture and society, but which again illustrates the principle of selection-variation in evolution. Sticking to the individual level though, there is still a way to divide the evolution of the universe a bit further, and that is by looking at what happens as an organism interacts with the world, in the moments "between" the aforementioned stages of their life cycle, or "moment to moment", at the level of seconds, minutes, or even milliseconds; "microgeny". As mentioned in the description of microgeny earlier in the beginning, a good example is the process of interacting with an apple, here from a human perspective, but it could apply to any organism, or in fact not just an organism-object interaction, but any process in the universe, at the level of milliseconds, seconds, minutes, etc. For example, you could describe the crashing of a wave, or the evaporation of a water molecule, on the surface of a lake, which again happens "between" the ontogenetic stages of the life cycle of the lake (whether it dries out or experiences lake succession, etc.). Or to take it back to stars again, you can look at the process of solar flares or solar wind on the surface of the sun. However, the most interesting way to wrap this up is to look at human cognition, because of the connections to the other levels and the principle that ties it together: So again, you see the raw visual data of the apple, which is processed by your visual system (from the retina to the optic nerve to the visual cortex) at 80-100 milliseconds (represented by the P100 signal in EEGs, a way to measure brain activity), to experiencing arousal at 80-120 milliseconds (N100), to forming some mental concept about it ("apple", "edible") at 250-500 milliseconds (N400), to thinking about the apple a little later ("am I hungry?"), to planning to eat the apple, to executing that plan, etc. Now, there are of course other ways that human cognition unfolds, and some of it can also be placed within the selection-variation dichotomy. For example, the dual-processing relationship between the default mode network (DMN), responsible for mind wandering and self-referential thinking, and the task-positive network, responsible for focusing on task-relevant information and performing working memory operations, also seem to reflect this dichotomy. The DMN produces variation by throwing tangential or "task-irrelevant" pieces of information at you, i.e. insights, while the tasking network selects which task to work on or which complicated operations to perform. So similarly to how a biological species evolves by throwing variation into the mix in form of genetic mutation or sexual recombination of genes, your mind (or brain) evolves moment to moment by throwing variation into the mix. Now, when the relationship between the two parts of the dichotomy gets out of balance, you tend to get dysfunction, e.g. genetic abnormalities, cancers, psychic imbalances, neuroses, unconscious shadow personas, addictions. So if you think you have a problem, it might help to look to this basic principle of evolution: are you including and transcending, selecting and varying, in a balanced way? And who would've thought that this ties into the perennial wisdom traditions that celebrate virtues like balance and holism? We’ve known these things for a long time, in many places on Earth, and this is expected when you touch on something deep. Now, once you align yourself with the deepest principles of how reality evolves, then you’re bound to evolve in proper way. This is why philosophy and self-help, health or anything that you value as an organism, are inseparable, because understanding how things fit together is necessary, and the truth is that things do fit together. Reality is whole, evolving by the interaction of parts, but it's undeniably whole.

I also based it on Darwin (selection and variation). Neither "selection and variation" nor "include and transcend" (the way I used it here) necessitate the concept of levels or sequences. It just follows easily. So that's a Wilberian idea (or my use of it) that is compatible with both arborescent and rhizomic ideas ;D

@Nilsi Some things can be described as arborescent and others as rhizomic, or sometimes you can describe the same thing in both ways. I don't see much of a problem. If you are to describe something, you have to describe it in some way. As long as what you do is compelled by your sense, that is what matters. You can choose to view the evolution of the universe as having nothing to do with levels or sequences. You're free to do that. This is why I think pragmatism is the ultimate worldview ;P

My point with this thread is that personal development needs intellect

That belongs in the spirituality section

That shows the dangers of spiritual bypassing. Spiritual bypassing is an example of when "transcend" gets imbalanced, repressing the "include".

True. It's at least more whole than not integrating anything, or not trying to do so. It's a bit like how most forms of psychotherapy seem to work, largely irrespective of the particular tradition. Merely attempting to build an alliance and looking inward in a systematic way seems to be better than not doing so. So merely attempting to produce a worldview that makes sense of the world, that creates a sense of coherence and structure to the world, is better than not doing it. So even nazism is in a sense better than nothing. Whether nazism is better than anything else is of course more subjective. That said, I think there are arguments to be made against nazism along the lines of the type of holism proposed here (which is grounded in perennial wisdom and therefore has cross-cultural value and thus a level of "inter-subjectivity", aspiring to objectivity), in the sense that building your society on scapegoating, hate and repression is neurotic and thus dysfunctional (maybe I'm strawmanning nazism as an ideology and ignoring their proposed utopia given that their project would've succeeded, but this is at least the historical basis of its existence). Such emotional expressions are appropriate as stress responses (short-lasting states that occur when a system is strained and trying to re-establish a functional baseline), but it shouldn't be the baseline existence (unless you prefer existing in a state of stress). Seems fun. Do it

This is something for example Jordan Peterson has commented on as well, but I recently came across a really interesting example of this from a scene in Ice Age 3. It blends bonfire stories (deeply archetypal), the hero archetype and curiously our evolutionary past as small mammals having to survive the age of the dinosaurs (obviously deeply archetypal) into an extremely captivating and clever scene that touches you somewhere deep. You could imagine that seeing this scene awakens some deep-seated memories from our mammalian ancestors. Also, nothing beats adult jokes in children movies Feel free to post any examples of archetypes in children's movies that spring to mind (or point out any archetypes that I missed from the clip above). I think children's movies that use wild animals as main characters (like Ice Age) are more likely to display this extensive use of archetypes.

That and a lack of moral reasoning that would counter such a position We can rise above our mere instincts 😇

@Yimpa Looks like a ladder.

Evolutionarily mismatched environments, activities and things

I guess you only read the title.

I'm arguing it's bad if you value human beings, and most likely, you do value human beings, just a limited selection, which is an arbitrary selection as you would probably have trouble drawing a definitive line (as demonstrated by the thought experiment). That is really what I mean by "a principled stance"; some principle by which you can establish a definitive standard for justifying your behavior.

Liv Boeree is 🥰

Work?