Carl-Richard

Meta-meta-systematic reviews of double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trials, large-scale registered replication reports — only the highest level of scientific evidence on the matter.

Since Leo seems to be the main source of authority for you, Leo also talks (or used to, or at least alluded to when talking about SD Stage Blue) about the wisdom of tradition. If there is anything you should put authority on (other than yourself), it's the wisdom of a thousand men. Besides, nowhere is it written that spirituality must be practiced alone in your room where the only access to spiritual knowledge and contact with like-minded people is through a computer screen. That is nothing but a highly unfortunate cultural fluke.

Yeah. Meditate daily and keep going to class. You seem to need some space from your thoughts. Your thoughts are useful, but the intensity seems to be pulling you down. Take this from somebody who used to have so much anxiety, he almost couldn't initiate conversations with anybody except his closest friends.

@Brandon Nankivell Holy grave digging. Please make your own thread next time. Now people will respond to people who will never respond back. Did he actually say that? It seems like word salad. What outcome is he talking about? Is he concerned about the DMT experience being different for everyone? That's life.

I mean, considering how metaphysics and spirituality aren't exactly science, Actualized.org is at least not very scientific. That said, Leo doesn't present his claims about metaphysics and spirituality as if they were scientific, so it's not pseudoscience. If we're strictly talking about misinformation and inaccurate reporting, that would certainly apply to the forum. As for Leo's videos and blog posts, maybe not so much.

What the fook are you talking about?

I found out the 13 IQ increase guy was practicing using Quad n-back, not Dual n-Back. After getting to 83% success on Quad 2-back, I tried doing Quad 3-Back just now and it's so hard. The jump from 2-Back to 3-Back when you have to remember 4 different chunks of information all at once is aggressive.

I don't see the connection.

What do you mean by that? What concrete things makes you think there will be a clash?

@Gidiot We're not very good at predicting the weather, but we still have different names for different types of weather. An umbrella is only a symptomatic suppressant for rainy weather, but we still prefer using it when it's rainy. Nobody really starts speculating about metaphysics when the weatherman diagnoses the weather, and nobody really thinks that much about whether or not to take meteorology seriously. Again, I think people tend to get fixated on a critical view of something when it affects them personally. For people with mental illnesses being critical of psychiatry, it can be social stigma. For spiritual people being critical of say science, it can be scientists pushing back against their worldview. In both cases, the response is understandable, but it's largely driven by an emotional investment and sometimes plain ignorance of the facts. On the note of metaphysical speculation, the times people do invoke metaphysical speculations about the weather is more often when it affects them personally. For example, some Americans might think that God wanted to punish them when the tornado destroyed their house and nobody else's. But most people who observe that from the outside will think that it's of course primarily an emotional response rather than a logical one.

Like you, Leo apologized. Other moderators are still able to see the posts.

I looked at the article some more, and quite ironically, virtually all the points she brings up, I've heard been brought up from within the scientific establishment (or at least the education side of it). I feel there is a tendency for laymen to latch onto a critical view of some field they know very little about when it affects them personally (which is understandable) and to also think that they're the only ones to see what they're seeing. As I got futher into my education, I also started seeing Leo falling into this pattern to some degree. People give little credit to the actual scientists who try to provide solutions to these problems and want to go by rough extrinsic appearances that are 20 years behind the current frontier and tear down a strawman. But hey, sometimes the best critiques come from outside a paradigm. You still have to be realistic though.

But if you can't eliminate existing bullshit, you should try to polish it. And we can't eliminate the need to classify people as psychologically unwell, at least not in our current society.

@Danioover9000 My guy, my dude, buddy, we're not talking about waking up in the morning. Razard thinks saying "autism is just a theory" is a sign of mysticism and spiritual awakening

If you want my personal experience with the side effects of nofap (after several weeks and months): oversensitivity to sounds and textures muscle stiffness and aches trouble with falling asleep a feeling of being psychologically ungrounded and "on edge" emotional flatness and numbness zero sex drive ("flat line") but also overstimulation from just looking at a girl lack of social and physical finesse Some confounding factors might be that I was meditating at least 1 hour every day at that time, and that I had recently discontinued a long period of drug use.

Well, I don't believe you're literally Jesus Christ, and I don't think you will ever convince anybody on here that you are.

If you insist ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Diagnostic manuals for psychiatric diseases do have legitimate issues that are valid to question, and it basically boils down to the fact that it's hard to measure something psychological using quantitative measurements (the things that make us think physical sciences are more scientific). I won't disagree with that. I could've through this gone point by point, but I think this one quote is sufficient: But not the International Classification of Diseases (ICD)? The existence of many of these concepts predate both the DCM and the ICD. Maybe the better way to put it is that the DSM and the ICD help us define better what we mean by these terms and how we should diagnose and treat them, because what existed before was not better (i.e. some paternalistic psychoanalyst merely making the authoritative decision that based on their expertise and clinical experience with the patient, the patient has x disease). We should appreciate that there are attempts at making universalized systems for classifying diseases that holds the practitioners to at least some standards other than their own. But again, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to be better.

NO WAY! He did the solo in Konnakol: 1:56 Insane.

Do you agree or disagree with the following statements? Why?: 1. "Scientific knowledge is purely the product of social forces, power struggles, and politics. The natural world has no role in the construction of scientific knowledge". 2. "There is no absolute truth; true or false is always relative to someone's perspective, it's just a preference to believe certain things". 3. "Physical reality is a social and linguistic construct". 4. "The science of one society is no more valid than that of another".

But what is the message that Christ wishes to send humanity? (and can you say it in a way that does not invoke the image of Christ?) Are you using Christ as a metaphor or are you implying that you're literally Jesus Christ and that there is nothing else you're trying to say?

And the truth is?

If you read my elaboration above, the author was actually presenting arguments for why the bolded statements are unreasonable. My problem with him was not his arguments per se, but his overall conclusion (i.e. that you should adopt a realist language game: "theories are pointing at truth!"). My frustration is partially that I feel less and less that there is just one true way to talk about things, but also that I value the relativist language game a bit more. I do like to think of theories as "useful fictions", because it keeps our feet to the fire of the truth that we're inextricably intertwined with our theories, and the alternative makes you more prone to the worst kinds of self-deception.

He has one thread where he sometimes speaks from the absolute perspective. He doesn't seem to be shoving it in people's faces.

So this is from a book chapter I'm reading in philosophy of science that the author; while trying present the views of Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos; took the time to give his own personal take on why so-called "extreme forms" of relativism are rationally unfounded or logically inconsistent (the four points above were examples of those views). It reminds me of a similar book I read 3 years ago at the beginning of my studies where the author inbetween presenting different views on ethics and morality, had to give his own personal take on why morality is necessarily objective. Then, like now, I felt like closing my ears while reading it. I also find it funny that the first author essentially disagrees with the second author by clarifying that he is exclusively talking about epistemic relativism and not moral relativism (implying that the former is less defensible). As for my own personal opinion, I feel the objectivist/relativist or realist/anti-realist dichotomy is basically just about choosing the language game that you think emphasises what is most important. For me, I think emphasising that all truths depend on some aspect of ourselves, our constructions and thus deceptions, is more important than emphasising the fact that there seems to be a through consistency behind some of these constructions. For example, to call our scientific models "useful fictions" as opposed to "corroborated theories pointing at truth" helps to remind me of the fact that we're always a part of the picture and that you won't make that go away no matter how many logical contradictions you want to ascribe to some of the contigency of that way of thinking. In general, I feel that people's different language games become less and less appealing, even the ones I've been more fond of the last couple of years (like Bernardo Kastrup's "Analytical Idealism"), because I see the point in all of them, and none of them are exclusively "right". Simultaneously, I find it increasingly harder to follow what a single author even means by what they're saying, as there are so many different ways of interpreting words like "truth", "relative", "objective", etc., depending on the context and the background knowledge of the author. In one sense, it's freeing and simplifying, but in another sense it's disorienting and complexifying. Sometimes, I think back to when things were simpler and smaller, and how I felt I could understand things for certain (while sometimes running into a wall of "these people are just wrong", which I now probably understand as "this is complex"). To do a callback to Spiral Dynamics, I think this is what true "Green aperspectival madness" feels like (or aspects of it). It's one thing to grasp it conceptually, but it's another to live through it. Anyways, I did want to engage more directly with you guys' responses, but I had to get this off my chest first, and now it's super late, so I'll maybe get to that tomorrow

That's life for you. You can continue to view change as something scary, or you can choose (partially) to view it as something exciting. And starting university is exciting. If you miss your home, remember you can always visit. I visited my family frequently back when I studied outside my hometown (today, I study in my hometown so I can visit even more often ?).