Carl-Richard

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Do you have to smoke? Do you have to trip? What are you doing with your life outside smoking and tripping? Could you focus on doing that without smoking or tripping?

And now for my dangerously sharp reductionist razor that hurts only by looking at it: so Nietzsche essentially realized that the map is not the territory, and that instead of retreating back into the comfort of the map, he abandoned map-making/reading altogether? I feel like I'm @thisintegrated talking to myself in an alternate universe. Now, what does this have to do with solipsism being a result of individualism and urban structures again? 🤔

Day 2 of @Razard86 not answering my question 😴

I didn't ask ChatGPT about anything? 🤔

That's one possibility I've thought about, but it sounds like really tough. My main strategy must ideally be something that doesn't require too much energy. It's the same with handing out flyers by hand, I've figured I can only do that so many times a week. Oh well, thanks for the advice anyway 🙂 Let me know what you think about something I will send you in the PMs.

It's both cowardice and courage for different reasons. It's not one or the other. It's cowardice because you're trying to escape the pain of life, but it's also courageous because it's painful to do so. Immature statements tend to be black and white statements, pretending to be absolute when they are in fact not

If you focus on transcending without including, you might find that you only wanted to transcend because you didn't include. And you might find that actually transcending is not going your way either, and that you have to include at least something in order to transcend. So in this way, the personal development aspect of spirituality merges with the transpersonal aspect. It's actually the same project. It's usually only taken for granted, or in the case of the Puer Aeternus, neglected:

AI will be the end of us all 🙈 I only had a vague understanding of IFS from before, and now I spent 1 minute reading through the wikipedia, and this is my understanding: In IFS, the mind is conceptualized as many sub-personalities acting together like in a family relationship and quite logically uses lessons from systemic family therapy to inform that understanding. In other words, the "family" in this case is "internal" to the person (and is a "system"; a relationship between parts). Go to wikipedia or other "real" sources for facts and theories. AI will rot your mind and enable your biases.

I can like community and nature while also acknowledging the points of postmodernism. Isn't that what they call "postmodern Neo-Marxist" (or eco-terrorist) 😆? Ironically, I'm going to ask for the opposite with respect to meat on the bones. You're way beyond me right now. You're doing the Peterson; many references, fewer points (which is beautiful, when you understand it). Can I get just the outline, the bare bones?

I asked my advisor about this back when we started and he said I shouldn't worry about it (yet). It was only when we started talking about a specific type of research design for the brain measurements (posttest-only measurements) that I was suggested by another advisor to look into a more stratified form of sampling, but we probably won't do that anyway. I guess those are great for more normal advertising, but one problem with "advertising" research studies is that the messaging (as I've gleened from the general ethical milieu in research) cannot be too edgy or provoking. It has to have a relatively innocent, formal and neutral emotional tone, so that people do not feel "pressured" or "manipulated" into it. Also, in the general text of the materials, one should probably limit the use of exclaimation points or strong calls to action like "sign up today!". For titles especially, I think things like humor, wordplay and playing on absurdity is generally as far as you can go (for example, I saw a title of a poster at my campus that read "can we borrow your brain?", which was sort of funny). I'm using Canva It's pretty cool. I'm doing that with the designated poster pillars and public poster boards in our city and on campuses (hanging them up anywhere else is considered littering; Norway — the last Soviet state). I also got one of my family members to use their office as distribution outlets for flyers and hanging up posters there (and I can get one more, which I will save for when we advertise brain measurements). I've thought about setting up a booth once. Do you have any real experience with this or is it just an idea you had? My current poster/flyer has a sentence about how their participation could "contribute to a wave of new treatment methods for people with various psychiatric illnesses" (which is actually what my advisor said) and that "these methods could be used to help people in their local community" (which is a trick I got from some professor on YouTube talking about recruiting; highlight how it benefits them locally, not just some abstract ideal like furthering knowledge). It's also implied that they will learn these methods for themselves when participating in the study, which is of course a direct benefit to them (granted they are efficacious at all). I sense we are derailing the thread, so maybe only one last response (or drag it to PMs)

@Razard86 "I answer all the questions. Nobody answers as many questions as I do. If it's anybody who doesn't answer questions, it's you."

Here are two minutes to sum it up:

The way we advertise it is starts like this (roughly translated from Norwegian): "do you have a smartphone and often think negative thoughts? We are looking for participants for a study that tests whether new smartphone-based methods can help reduce negative thinking". It lasts for one month and they use an app to collect data while out and about in their daily lives. And that's pretty much what the study is about as far as what the new participants get to know. In reality, we are comparing a "music with mindfulness intervention" with an active control group (some Cognitive Behavioral Therapy video course) and a passive control group (no intervention, just collect data with the data collection app). We are in principle looking for people with a high tendency towards negative thinking (or more specifically "rumination"), but in terms of recruiting efforts, we are targetting everybody we can (no specific target group), because it's assumed that the people who are interested in the study will self-select based on high negative thinking. They also have to be over 18 years old, have no history of psychiatric illnesses, and have to be available to meet physically in my city for one meeting (or two, when we finally get the ethical approval for the brain measurement part of the study 😴). I should maybe have mentioned this in the beginning, but anyways, we are currently not advertising it as a brain study, only a behavioral study (because that is what it is so far). Nothing, nada. We only mention that the participants in the passive control group who do not get to use any of the methods during the study itself, are offered access to the methods after the study is over.

If you keep going, you can expect big transformations to happen. But it's not a joke, which you might already have realized. You either keep going or you stop when you get to that point or stop entirely.

Omg true. Any advice on hanging up posters and how to approach people during flyer distribution (or other recruitment ideas)?

Immediately refer him to suicide helplines: https://www.unitad.un.org/content/suicide-prevention#:~:text=If you are struggling with,or Text TALK to 741741.

You use your sense. Imagine what an emotionally mature person is and try to embody that. For Red specifically, some useful concepts are proactive vs reactive aggression. Are you able to say "no" when somebody is violating your personal autonomy, e.g. violating your personal space or want you to act against your values? That's reactive aggression. Some of that is needed to survive. But remember to always couch it in nuance. Generally, don't make aggression your go-to solution. Mostly, it should to be a last resort. Rationality should lead. Are you able to do things that might cause discomfort to somebody else but which might be right in the bigger picture? Are you able to step in and say "no" to somebody who you see is violating somebody else's personal autonomy? Are you able to assert yourself and claim situations, things; to reach out and take? That's proactive aggression. In my personal experience, this one is more tricky to calibrate in a way that does not discount some other values you hold. I would therefore also suggest additional caution when dealing with it, as it can have some definite consequences if done indiscriminately. The trick for many people who feel they lack aggression is that they habitually repress the feeling or aim it inwards towards themselves (internalization). So a part of the job for those people is to learn to identify when the aggression arises and then intentionally express it outwards at the intended target (externalization). This might require some experimentation and testing to calibrate, but over time as you unwind the habitual repression and/or internalization, you can focus more on applying it in the right situations.

I will reveal my little trick: I asked a relative question, and you gave an absolute answer. Here is another relative question: if you close your eyes, do you stop seeing the flower vase in front of you or not? What answer will you give here? Will it be absolute or relative? I would bet it will be relative. So why were you unable to answer my original relative question with a relative answer? I think it's because it's a tricky one and it goes right at the heart of the issue of the thread: people conflate the relative with the absolute when it comes to solipsism. They think concepts, ideas and assumptions that point toward solipsism are absolute when they are in fact relative. But wait, in the very next sentence, you actually gave a relative answer! Because what is "current"? Is current absolute or relative? Can "current" exist by itself without "not current"? The answer is: no. It's relative. So let's recap: in the first sentence, you gave an absolute answer, but in the very next sentence, you gave a relative answer — without warning, without clarification, as if you were still talking about the absolute. It's almost as if you conflated the relative with the absolute. Is that what happened or are we missing something? Will you tell us or will you not answer the question? So in summary, when you pull in concepts like sense perceptions (colors, sounds, smells, etc.) or time ("current" vs. some other time) while purporting to speak about the absolute, you are conflating the relative with the absolute.

It was really just a way to explain the ubiquity of solipsism, but sure, I like community and nature. What if I say "yes and I'll take both"? It's an interesting phenomenon, and I think I've commented on it before in my "relativity of meta-lenses" thread from back in the day. It was back when I started to undermine the perceived infallibility of Spiral Dynamics (Sacred-cow Dynamics; excuse me for including that forced joke):

Ok, Donald Trump. Yes. Now answer the question. I will re-phrase it and make it more specific: Is it possible that the colors, sounds and smells you currently are perceiving (perceptions), are not the only perceptions that could be perceived, and that some perceptions could be currently hidden to you?

I can see that, but those are surface level things (forms). It's the Shakti, the pure energy underneath all that. And like Jan talks about, it requires not just openness but love and devotion to really open yourself to it. When I talk about the times I managed to tune into his state, I treated it like an intensely focused and love-filled meditation. You really have to sit there and try to merge with what you're looking at. And you have to not listen to the words and focus fully on the sensual aspects and the energetic response you feel in your body. I like that approach and commend your impassioned speech. But here again, I would propose the Rumination-Reflection Questionnaire (and others like the Ruminative Response Scale), brain measurements of Default Mode Network activity at rest, maybe even endocannabinoid levels. These are relevant "actions" or behaviors of the relative person who is after my book (and Jan's and others) enlightened. Maybe you are more interested in what Jan calls "sainthood", i.e. where the personality structure has been significantly molded (from repeated mystical experience or other factors) to represent these more virtuous actions (actions proper). But that takes time and is rare if it's indeed authentic and not just a facade of spiritual ego or repression. It's in a sense easy to play the saint if you really try hard at it. But you'll just feel horrible and after while you will crumble in some way and lash out or have a breakdown. That's the story of many cults. Definitely, sainthood is better than simply being calm or blissed out when in the company of your own mind or silence. But also definitely, the former is a big step towards the latter. The speed with which you become a saint while in a blissed/calm state is arguably uncomparable to any other thing, outside superb grace.

I think solipsism could largely be a product of modern society and specifically large-scale cities and urban environments. Take the experience of walking through a city. Due to individualization, people already don't care about you. And in the city, large masses of people walk anonymously without interacting or talking to you or even seeing you, and seemingly on autopilot, like drones or zombies being directed by some outside force like the 9-to-5 job. It creates a feeling of disconnection from other people and as if other people are not real people, as if they are merely props, with no personal drive or agency, no personal warmth; hollow appearances of humans. On the other hand, if you had lived in say a pre-modern tribal society, you would've known everybody personally, everybody would've greeted you and looked you in the eyes, shook your hand and patted you on the back, shared their thoughts, feelings and experiences with you. You would've felt deeply connected to them and felt them to be similar beings to yourself. As for urban environments, especially in the US or other places where the underlying terrain is very flat, you rarely see more than a few hundred meters infront of you. The sense of your everyday world is very local and boxed in, claustrophobic even. Meanwhile, if you walk on top of a mountain range and look across the vast landscape, or look up at the clear nightsky unsullied by the light pollution of the city, and if you really get out of your constantly distracted and wandering mind (also fed by city life), you will get the sensation that you are essentially nothing in this grand cosmos. You will get the sensation that your experience of life is just a tiny speck out of a much larger reality way beyond your local experience of everyday life and your personal theatre. To then think that your puny little mind is all that exists becomes exceedingly unthinkable.

I asked Gemini about psychological tricks to use when recruiting participants for my study. Safe to say, asking LLMs about psychological tricks is like asking a janitor about mathematical hypergeometry. I think that may extend to some other forms of psychology as well, especially subtle theories like SD. In general, be skeptical of going to AI for an accurate presentation of facts or an in-depth theoretical understanding. It's very easy to use words like "system" and "integration" and feign an understanding of the topic ("downward assimilation"), and that is certainly the case for AI. The more abstract something is, the easier it is to bullshit about it. Maybe try to really pin it down on what it thinks Yellow is. Make it provide a large sample of concrete examples across different contexts and see if it computes. But maybe my cynicism with AI is too hastened and I just have to become more clever with my prompts.

@Razard86 You really like avoiding answering questions. Solipsists became real quiet when this one dropped.