Carl-Richard

They are consciousness' way of telling jokes (to itself).

Would it be ethnic cleansing if Gaza ends up 100% Jewish "on accident"?

Show me one person who can do differential equations without ever reading a math book.

@Leo Gura You think more Love is what they need, when what they need is less fear? Love with fear is just terror.

That's what openminded people do. They actively seek out new perspectives. They actively try to challenge their own perspective. That's what is admirable about Alex. He is constantly challenging himself and actually listens to what people are saying. The alternative, where you sit basking in your own ignorance, drilling down into the isolated cave of your mind, can be useful for some things, but if that's all you do, you will eventually come off as a dull buffoon. Math is like the worst example you could've used. Essentially nobody does math they haven't read in a book. Some things you simply won't come up with on your own in a thousand years. You writing in English right now and using the words you are using is a result of thousands of years of people finding out things and building on prior knowledge. You either adopt that knowledge lazily, haphazardly, by accident, through your upbringing and culture, or you seek it out intentionally from a place of intellect and curiosity.

It's not as much an "ask what makes people experience meaning and make them rate the meaningfulness of their experience on a Likert scale and then deduce the underlying variables" as an "when organisms move, they're alive, they're functioning as they should; when they don't, they stagnate, they die". It's actually in a way more like philosophy than actual nitpicking empirical science. Again, even something as simple as waking up in the morning and eating food because you're hungry after a long night's sleep. Eating at that moment in time is experienced as meaningful. But then if you were to continue to eat after you were full, you continue stuffing food down your throat even though you feel like gagging and your tummy hurts, that is generally experienced as less meaningful. Human beings go through a long list of different ebbs and flows like this throughout a day, or week, or month, or year, and getting sensitive to those ebbs and flows and acting with them harmoniously is honestly the bulk of what meaning is about. But figuring out those ebbs and flows often requires something out of you, be it training your awareness up from the standard sleep-like state you've been conditioned into by modern society, or educating yourself about the principles of how the ebbs and flows work.

I just gave examples of models with three parts in them (bio-psycho-social). They point you to the different aspects of the human being that need to be addressed for the human being to function optimally. That's a start and way better than "meaning is when you do a task and it's fun, yay!". Then you go deeper from there, but the main point is that you should study how the human being works: literally study the science of the human body, study the science of the human mind and brain, study the science of human behavior, study the ancient philosophical traditions, study how religion works, study how spirituality works. Then apply it, and meaning will arise as a result. "But Alex O'Connor studied all that and he didn't say to study all that to experience meaning". Disagree. Alex O'Connor (obviously based on my knowledge of him) is not very knowledgeable of the human body, the human mind and the brain. But that's just my read.

It makes it simpler but not simple. I just laid out roughly what it means. It grounds it in mechanism, but the mechanism is not simple. Holistic means there are compromises, trades and balances. And it requires deep involvement, deep study of the human organism, or deep unlearning. It's true you can have "some" meaning and be not very holistically healthy, but on the aggregate, and if you quantify meaning on a scale, like Dr. K likes to do, I think holistic health is the answer. It could be a net positive. If your "kid slot" goes from 0 to 100 and your body slot goes from 100 to 80, maybe that's worth it.

They touched upon meaning and purpose and said many different things, e.g. "meaning is connecting to something greater outside yourself", "people who experience trauma can have their sense of meaning destroyed", "meaning is significance and flow in the moment", "meaning is to have a task that you think will fulfill you when you get it". The fact that you can say so many things about it, is indicative. I think meaning and purpose can be understood as synonymous with health. And health means "whole", so to understand what makes a healthy organism, you have to understand the "whole" of the organism, how it works and the different parts of it. Dr. K already touched on this, but I have my own spin. There are many theories throughout history that have come in parts of three. For example, Plato's "man, lion and beast"; Freud's "id, ego, superego"; the Triune brain (neocortex, limbic system, basal ganglia). All of them reflect a bio-psycho-social split (which is in fact its own model; "the biopsychosocial model of health", not coincidentally). But arguably the most illustrative model of this split is in my opinion indeed Self-determination theory (which Dr. K talked about). Self-determination theory (SDT) is presented as a model of motivation (motivation, health, meaning; different words, same thing). For an organism to be optimally motivated, they must act within their Competence, i.e. their adaptive capacities conferred to them by survival. The very act of movement is an expression of competence. You were conferred the capacity to move so that you can survive, and when you survive, you are rewarded, not merely with survival itself, but through the action itself. It's intrinsically rewarding, it feels intrinsically good to do. This is where significance, flow, internal motivation comes from. The task is rewarding in itself, it's fun in itself, you do it for its own sake. Because being competent, or acting within your competence, feels good. Also, the organism must have an experienced sense that they can choose their actions, that they have a sense of Autonomy and that they can act how they want to act. And when they are able to do this, they will naturally act within their competence. Nothing kills an organism more than limiting their competence, as well as their perceived ability to express that competence (in fact, you might call it synonymous with death). Thirdly, you must have an environment which supports your competence (Belonging/Relatedness). You must belong to your environment, and ideally, the environment must be surrounded by other people, and ideally other people like yourself, which harmonize with your values, your competence, which support what you care about, what you are, how you want to act. The very fact that they are human like yourself means they are matching your competence somehow; we are social animals which create bonds, which rely on each other, which feel pleasure by being with each other, which brains are shaped for being with other people. Alex also brought up how our models and theories for making sense of the world provide us with a sense of meaning (and that when we encounter a great deal of them through the modern world through telecommunications, our worldviews have a tendency to collapse into relativism, which we experience as a kind of death). Firstly, again, interesting how "death" is seen as the antithesis of meaning, a bit like how "death" is in a big way the antithesis of health. Secondly, no wonder we experience meaning from our models and theories and generally intellectual engagement with the world, because this is a part of our capacities as human beings. Just like we have the capacity to move as organisms, we have the capacity to move through abstract, simulated, conceptual realms. And logical reasoning, language, really all forms of thinking we do, are riddled with notions of movement ("getting to" the point, "arriving at" a conclusion", "moving on" to the next point). It's no wonder why very logical people like Alex can find a lot of enjoyment by simply "going through" lines of logical reasoning, because that is what is within his competence, as a human being but also particularly for him as an individual. Even people who are supposedly very narrowly focused on reductionistic notions of health like longevity and "biological age" like Bryan Johnson, still serve to illustrate how health and meaning are intertwined. Firstly, to follow his rigorous protocol, he has to study in-depth how the human mechanism works: how the circadian rhythm works, how nutrition works, how the body works in terms of the skeletal-muscular system. He has to be very particular about the ebbs and flows of the human body and mind. And not coincidentally, he experiences a lot of benefits from it in terms of physical AND mental health. He says he has never felt better, never felt more capable, never felt more alive, and I would posit, never felt a greater experience of meaning. Just like how trauma (which is essentially damage to your system) can zap your experience of meaning, carefully cultivating a healthy body and mind, reducing damage caused by aging (which is generally caused by chronic strain, a kind of slow trauma) will drastically increase your experience of meaning. I can go on and on about this, but the crux of the point is that while we can talk about how "vacuous" and simultaneously "complex" and hard to grasp meaning and purpose seems to be presented as, if you simply re-frame the issue as a question of what makes a healthy (holistically healthy) human being; and that to understand that, you need to understand how every part of the human being looks like when everything is working as it should; getting a grasp on meaning and purpose becomes a much more simple and straightforward task.

If your intention is to communicate and not simply defecate, be aware of your tone.

If the argument is that it's not a genocide because the immense starvation, displacement and death is "not intentional", there are a few problems with that. "Our intention was to deliver 3000 calories of food per day per person to Gaza, but Hamas steals 80% of it". Ok, if you fail to give them food, you recognize that you fail to give them food and why it's happening, but you continue the war, is that not intentional? It's like if they used trucks where they knew that 80% of the trucks would break down before the border, but they continue the war and blame the truck manufacturers, wouldn't you say they are now intentionally starving the people? You have to be very critical of the frame-setting where blame is shifted towards the opponents. Because as long as you're actively taking action in a direction, no matter the blame of others and no matter how seemingly justified you make it appear by referencing Oct 7th, there is always blame there from your side.

It's your tone man.

My impression is that high quality YouTube channels, that got something to offer and don't do things only for views, very rarely care about other YouTube channels. On the top of my head: Veritasium, Vsauce, Essentia Foundation, Alex O'Connor, HealthyGamerGG, CrashCourse, Kurzgesagt — in a nutshell. The moment you start caring about other YouTube channels, you likely start caring about YouTube channels that care about other YouTube channels, and you enter the space of vacuous, dead, parasitic content.

@PurpleTree I guess you could call hostile profanity directed against a group of people racism, and profanity against a group of people is of course especially antagonistic. Regardless, the problem is the profanity.

@PurpleTree Had they made the point without profanity, they would have said "white people oppressed Jews for 2000 years and then white people have the nerve to tell Arab people not to oppress Jews, is that not a bit ironic?" The "is that not ironic" part here carries the condemnation ("you fuckers"), without the profanity. True racism here would be "white people are simply more violent and oppressive as a people, it's in their nature", not simply describing historical happenstance.

"Whites oppressed blacks in history". Is that racist?

They're making a historical point about a people oppressing another people, not denigrating a people for an immutable characteristic. It's the profanity that makes it seem racist.

@Twentyfirst Watch yo profanity.

The experience isn't a concept. The thought about it is.

"I'm completely alone" is a thought. It's an egoic projection trying to make sense of the experience (or triggering the experience like a pointer). It's one possible projection out of many, but you usually don't get many at the same time because you can only project so much at a time, and you tend to get fixated on one at a time because of their seeming profoundness in describing the experience.

To be clear, this has definitely not been established in the science. See my point about ecological validity. If you want a brilliant study, study bodybuilding competitions, interview all the participants about their workout regime and see whether "science-based lifting" correlates with competition placement (it doesn't just have to be those who place #1 where you will blame genetics; you can use linear regression for all placements). It happens for many reasons (balance between skill level and difficulty level, actions giving immediate feedback, believing you can succeed, etc.), and it overlaps with concepts like mindfulness and focused attention, all of which show individual variation. I touched on flow in my bachelor thesis 😆 Again, tapping into flow is in a sense synonymous with performing at your best. And it just happens that the way your body performs at its best is dictated by indeed your body, so you have to listen to the body to tap into that. Some people are better at listening to their body than others, even among atlethes.

There is no "solipsistic awakening". It's the ego reacting (in this case with fear) to non-dual awakening, projecting (in this case clutching onto) its preconceived notions like other minds and bodies, and because of resistance, what would be bliss turns into terror and despair. Non-dual awakenings are inherently blissful, but you can also have energetic discharges and processes (kundalini) which are supremely blissful. But there too, if there is resistance, bliss turns to agony and terror.

@Natasha Tori Maru One time, me and my buddies were smoking (not cigarettes) on the top of a mountain (not big), then we decided to drive down to McDonalds to eat. The guy who drove the car (who I'm pretty sure was the one who suggested it or was at least very hyped for it), after stopping in the parking lot at McDonalds, said he was too scared to go in and order food. It was late in the evening, dark outside, and not really many people inside. And we had been at McDonalds in the same state many times before. I had to literally give a pep talk and go through a whole ass therapy session before we finally went in. The mind is peculiar thing.

I felt like posting a response to a YouTube comment under Mike Israetel's new video responding to Sam Sulek's critiques of "science-based" lifting: Ecological validity is a MAJOR problem for behavioral science (and yes, exercise science is a behavioral science). To use scientific studies that lack ecological validity to decisively declare what is "optimal" and "the best option", is a metaphysical commitment, not a scientific one. The science doesn't say that; it doesn't prescribe what is best for you working out as yourself in your gym, in your gym session, in your flow state. It's the Church of Science-Based Lifting that says that.