Carl-Richard

I actually didn't understand anything you just said, again. Would you help an old lady across the road, and would you nuke her for 100k?

I'm an ex-full-time stoner. What can I say? 😺

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I don't understand what you just said. Would you push the button if it was your kid but you've never met them (you only met the mom once, you never saw her again and they won't know it was you)?

Caused by you? Who caused you to exist? The universe. So nothing is caused by you in the grand scheme of things. Probably 99.9% of all people will forget about you 2-3 generations after your death. No trace of your name will ever be acknowledged ever. That is how insiginificant you are, yet you feel entitled to take another's life for 100k (I don't think you actually said that, but let's assume you did 😃). Weehooo. I guess they're right when they say ego is the source of all the world's problems ☺️

No, they're an epitaph of all life on Earth, of the whole universe, you psycho 😂 Nobody cares about you. You're an insignificant speck of lint on the penis of an alien (quoting Adrian Belew 😆; somehow "epitaph" primed King Crimson in my mind or something). Sure, let's say they're an epitaph of you because your tiny speck of genes (6.25%) is sloshing around inside the nucleus of their somatic cells. Why the fuck does that matter? My sperm is an epitaph of me. My dead skin cells are an epitaph of me. My shit is an epitaph of me. "No, I won't flush my shit even if you pay me 100k". I'm obviously making a mockery, but still.

Why? You most likely won't see your great-great-grandkids ever. They're not different from a stranger in that way. The only thing that ties them to you is your genes, but so does all life on the planet. Why not see all life (or even all of reality) as an extension of you?

Why do you value economic power? Is economic power intrinsically valueable (something you value for its own sake) or is it extrinsically valuable (a means to obtain something else that is intrinsically valueable)? I think most people treat economic power as a means to serve something intrinsically valueable (e.g. their love for other people). Even among intrinsically valueable things, there is a hierarchy of value, so you'll value some things more than others. Is the only way to economic power to kill people? It's true that there is often conflict between values in someones behavior. The most ethical vegan kills animals indirectly through their consumer choices. There is arguably no way to be a perfect moral actor as a living being, but there are some things that are more obviously morally problematic than others, and you can determine this by asking yourself some questions.

@Schizophonia Would you push the button if it was some of your great-great-grandkids that died unexpectedly some day in the future because of you?

If you don't think so, that is fine, but values can be deduced from your behavior, in that you act like some things are more important than others. I bet you value logical consistency (you probably act like it's something important), and I bet you value other people (you act like you care about them, that you enjoy their company, that you don't want to hurt them, etc.). Now, all I'm saying is that if you truly cared about other people and if you were truly logically consistent, you would probably not push the button.

"Rational" depends on your values. I've been trying to show that it's probably not in line with most people's values and that it would therefore not be a rational choice (unless you don't care about acting in a way that is consistent with your values).

This?

Because meditation does not involve manipulating heavy pieces of information in your working memory at high speeds. Meditation does increase IQ, but it does so arguably by reducing the ADHD-like interference from self-referential thinking (or more generally task-irrelevant thinking). So you'll be more able to do your tasks uninterrupted, but your ability to do those tasks is in a sense not actually increased. For example, you can learn to play the guitar faster by practicing meditation, but to get better at guitar, you actually have to play the guitar. It's the same for manipulating things in your working memory. And the subjective effects on your awareness are quite distinct. It's a funny coincidence, but this actually happened just earlier today: I tried meditating a while before reading some article, and I noticed my reading got more smooth, but then I wanted to see how doing some rounds of N-Back affected it, and then my reading became more laser-like, more high-speed, more high-energy. And it's not surprising that engaging in different activities affects your mind in different ways. It's rather something to be expected. This goes back to notions like meditation being like a generalizable skill that translates to all skills, affecting the fluidity of awareness, not the contents of awareness, and how awareness is distinct from functions like attention, thinking, perceiving, feeling. It practices your ability to enter flow, not the activity of the flow. I heard from somewhere that some monks who lived in a monastery their whole life meditating had IQs of around 70. So definitely there are other factors involved. You have to use your mind a certain way to perform on an IQ test, and staring into a wall all day is not that.

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