Carl-Richard

☺️ Nice. Remember that he one time took 10.5 grams of mushrooms and freaked the fuck out. One of the insights he took from that was (paraphrasing) "I don't think I value truth if it's not in the interest of my survival". So he closed himself to spirituality and went into politics instead That could be something to prod him on if you're feeling frisky.

@Little Aurobindo What about depression? Is that also not really real?

I really don't.

So nothing in reality shows a certain threshold of hyperactivity and hypoattention?

A definition, whether it's of consciousness or ADHD, is a construct. When reality behaves a certain way, you call it ADHD. When reality behaves another certain way, you call it consciousness. It's true that ADHD is defined in a certain arbitrary way, like having a certain score on a certain number of symptoms, but so could be said for consciousness vs. unconsciousness (or "levels" of consciousness).

Honestly that would turn into Dr. K x10.

"Consciousness" isn't really a real thing either.

If that's so, it did before it was given a voice, because the initial conceptualization of the test involved text-generation only, although you could conceive of a Turing test for voice generation as well. But also, whether it passes the test at all is debatable. At this point, I'm confident I could pick out a ChatGPT-generated string of text vs. a human string of text over 90% of the time, given a sufficiently long string. But I bet Turing didn't think of the scenario of getting familiar with the quirks of LLM responses and then picking it out based on that. If you take someone who is completely unfamilar with LLMs (and is generally not very tech-savvy or into the right academic fields), then maybe it could pass the Turing test for that person (for a while).

Why?

Joe is ironically probably the #1 podcaster who is most receptive to his ideas but also the hardest to get to.

There are neural correlates though.

He's banned for being a duplicate account.

Why can't therapy be done on your own?

Even Northern Europe?

It's because you're not a yes or a no and you're growing and everybody is on a on different path and different places on the path.

It won't be as interesting as there won't be much to bridge. What Frank Yang says is what most people say here. Jordan Peterson will be an interesting challenge. If you mean Alex O'Connor, I'll seriously echo that. The guy is super openminded and infinitely good faith. He had serious conversations with William Lane Craig four years ago when he was only 21.

Shit. Jking.

By the way, I don't doubt hyperfocus is a thing, but as a general observation, people with ADHD are more restless and less able to focus.

Lol. It's the first one.

There is variability within that as well. A friend of mine tends to play bass for 20 minutes, then does something else, then goes back to playing bass for 20 minutes, and repeats that cycle for maybe 3-5 times a day. When I play guitar, I tend to play for 1-2 hours at a time and usually only once a day. When another friend of mine plays piano, he plays for up to 6 hours at a time. Guess which one of us has generally more symptoms of ADHD.

John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series. It's 50 videos, one hour each. If you're into science and metaphysics, try Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal. I recommend the ones with Bernardo Kastrup and John Vervaeke, both together and solo.

Nah. They just can't focus very long on one thing.

It's possible, with some consciousness, to choose what your mind does on a very fundamental level (and to a significant extent), and if your goal is to "design your mind", it's useful to know how (and also what is healthy vs. unhealthy, in my view). For example, you can choose which thoughts or feelings to dwell on and which not to dwell on; technically to repress or allow what is arising. Now, if you're going to do this in practice, balance is important, and finding that balance can be not so simple, but actually doing the thing itself is simply a matter of intention. Again, balance is important, because you don't want to close your mind entirely, or conversely be crippled by information. You want to be open to the information that the mind gives you (through thought, intuition, feeling or the senses), because that is how you interact with and ground yourself in the things in the "real world" (they are your sensors for survival). But you also want to be discriminatory with what information you choose to put your attention and whether it's in alignment with your own goals and values (the world that you create). In order to find that balance, you indeed need to become clear on what your goals and values actually are, which in itself is part of designing your mind. For this, I strongly recommend crystallizing them in text format by writing them in as clear and detailed terms as possible. Personally, I've been at both extremes of the spectrum (of allowing and repressing), and both could've been avoided if I had crystallized my goals and values and had kept balance in mind (in fact, balance itself is now one of my core values). You might question the term "repression" and whether it can actually be a good thing. Repression and allowing is a fundamental mechanism of how the mind functions from moment to moment, and it's always running in the background unconsciously. All I'm saying it's possible to take conscious control of this mechanism to a certain extent. And on that topic, I believe it's the generally the unconscious forms of this mechanism that end up being problematic. Unconscious repression is what you often see in men. They're very quick to disallow any thought or emotion that doesn't seem to fit with their values or goals, which in severe cases can lead to a type of emotional stuntedness, stubbornness or closedmindedness, even a lack of creativity. Conversely, unconscious allowing is what you see more often in women. They're more prone to worry and anxiety, self-doubt and self-criticism; generally entertaining the things that enter one’s mind. As long as you approach your own mind consciously, structure your goals and values, and have balance in mind, you'll be less likely to suffer from the unconscious versions of repression and allowing. Another point is that your mind is very responsive to rather subtle intentions. One example is Andrew Tate's "depression doesn't exist" which people like to make fun of. You can actually choose to embody this intention and it will have very specific (and even quite visceral) effects on your mind. One time, I formed the intention "your feelings are not real", and it lead me into a kind of dissociated, emotionless state where I felt immense freedom to do exactly what I want, but the thought of the potential unforeseen consequences of being in such a state ironically filled me with terror ("what if I'm missing out on crucial information?"). This is also ironically when I decided to form the opposite intention of intensely entertaining all my feelings, which is how I started escalating down to the other extreme, and I became a bit oversensitive and emotionally unstable. As you can see, what I was missing was balance. I've also been on the extreme end of repression one other time, and it was back when I had just gotten into spirituality and had gotten the idea that all thoughts are bad and that I should strive for a thoughtless state, and to me, that meant to repress all my thoughts. It turned me into a kind of rock-like person. I became unable to have "trains of thought", and I would rather frequently not know what to say in conversations. So going to this extreme is probably not very good either, unless you want to be a rock. As a side note, if you want to achieve a thoughtless state in a more healthy way: simply meditate one to two times a day, and when you don't meditate, just be a normal human being. Your thoughts will reduce naturally (primarily «task-irrelevant thoughts»), and you'll not just continue to be a lively person but become even more lively.

He sounds exactly like Leo in this 😆

We all need help on the path sometimes.