Carl-Richard

If you meditate to fall asleep, then you're supposed to be sleepy, so it's good. However, if you want to maximize your meditation ability, then you should do it at peak wakefulness.

I think in most cases, there is a much simpler explanation. If you haven't slept enough the night before, your body will cease the opportunity once your activity level drops, and one such situation is during meditation. A similar effect occurs if you meditate straight after a heavy meal, because your body will secrete prolactin (which is literally anti-dopamine), and most of your blood will be directed towards your digestive system and away from your brain, thus you'll experience a dip in mental clarity and energy levels. This is how to optimize your meditation habit (in order of significance): 1. Get enough sleep. 2. Have an almost empty stomach (but not too hypoglycemic) 3. Do it early in the day. 4. Be completely sober from any psychoactive substances (even caffeine). 5. Schedule your meditation (do it the same time every day and use a timer). Scheduling your meditation puts a weight off your mind both outside and during the meditation with regards to questions like "when is a good time to meditate?" or "how long should I meditate?" and expectations of progression like "I'm not feeling meditative yet" or "this is not working." Once you have decided to sit down for x amount of time, there is nothing for your mind to do but to be relaxed and focused, and you reduce the chances of terminating the meditation early or not starting in the first place. Besides, spending your day obsessing about meditation is not a good strategy for cultivating a meditative state of mind in your daily life.

The trailer threw me off.

Sentience is consciousness (of form). Sapience is self-consciousness (self-awareness). Sentience is when sensory input is represented within our minds as internal experiences (perceptions). At the most basic level, these experiences are simple, direct and concrete (e.g. sense of touch, smell, hearing etc.). These may be reconstructed independently of live sensory input in the form of mental images (cognition and imagination), and virtually all animals are thought to be capable of this to some extent. Sapience comes from the ability to abstract out symbolic/iconic representations from a set of concrete experiences. At an even higher level, this ability is expressed through an internal narrative structure, i.e. representing icons linearly across different contextual frames (situations and time frames; story-telling). This is what distinguishes humans from animals: we create narratives that try to explain ourselves and our environment. From here, complex language, culture and an individual identity is born (self-awareness).

Let's say you're a pre-rational tribal warlord and you say you want to understand something. What will satisfy your request? Maybe an animistic explanation like "the wind is the breath of the wind god." You also say you want a comprehensive explanation, but you don't know about things like the scientific process or reductionist-mechanistic explanations which are definitely more comprehensive explanations, and in your relative ignorance, you're satisfied with the animistic one. In a sense, you doesn't even know what he is asking about, and in a sense, you're this warlord right now.

You don't know what that means.

#O-gang

Genius

He allegedly grabbed a boob.

What does "figure out everything" even mean?

Haha nice.

Brilliant

Make snow angels ❄❤

The reason I could list all of those things and it struck you in some way is because I've been there myself. For me, the only way out was spiritual awakening, cutting out lies and establishing a trajectory of growth on multiple levels.

...OK? You trust cyanide? Ricin? Any other natural poison or venom? This is not a trivial point that you can just brush away. Let's stick to the potential and long-term here, as that is what we're so concerned about (and we might perhaps have an original discussion for once). The idea that the less lethal variants outcompete the more lethal ones is only true in a very local sense, because the dominant variant can always mutate to a more lethal one, which over the long-term will look like sporadic bursts as they get outcompeted again. Then in the super-long-term, you might get a hyper-lethal burst, and that's not good. I only wanted you to engage with these two points about long-term threats, but now you brough out a bunch of other points that have been brought up a dozen times already, which I have no choice but to respond to: mRNA vaccines limit the spread by reducing the likelihood of being infected. It's true that once you're infected, you will transmit it at basically the same rate, but infections are nevertheless reduced. The benefit in the long-run is that fewer infections leads to fewer new variants overall and that various systems like the economy and the healthcare system don't collapse. If you get infected while vaccinated (which there is a lower chance of in the first place), you will experience fewer symptoms. Long-COVID is still a thing, and the virus is known to cause various degrees of organ damage and neurological damage. Your choice. If your bar for whether something is harmless or not is set at the probability of having heart problems as a side effect from the vaccine, then you cannot say that the virus is harmless for younger people.

@BlackPhil On mRNA skepticism: you're concerned about potential long-term effects because it's a new technology previously untested in humans, right? Are you just as afraid of the same type of potential long-term effects from a new virus previously unknown to humans (COVID-19 infection)? If not, what is the distinction there? Also, what about the long-term potential for new hyper-lethal variants? On that note, if you really want to piss your pants, look up "viral recombination" and ponder the potential disastrous outcomes of that, if you dare ?

That was just a fancy way of describing getting so stoned that you're completely useless as a human being. It's one of those times where you come back from a long break and get sent into another dimension. The thing you're describing just sounds like the general deterioation of cognition that happens when you're a full-time weed couch potato: hyper-prolactin state, inflammation and no resilience-inducing stimuli (controlled exposure to stressors): fapping to porn all the time, overeating shitty food, smoke damaging your respiratory and circulatory system, no physical exercise, no mentally stimulating activities.

That is where therapy comes in.

Good insights. I'm Norwegian. English is my second language. True. It's easy to discard any push-back from "mystics" once you completely disregard the legitimacy of their view. Yes, like I said: people who pursue self-help or spirituality, even relatively healthy ones, are more predisposed towards such problems. You can appear to be healthy in one moment but become sick in the next. Probably. MHC is a meta-theoretical model, which is a so-called "model about models". At the lowest level, a model is a system, and therefore the simplest type of meta-theory would be meta-systematic. There are more complex types of meta-theories that try to understand the more simpler meta-theories, and there are even more complex meta-theories that try to understand the more complex ones again. Then MHC tries to understand all of that, which means it's at least at a level above that, which means it lands at the highest level of complexity (meta-cross-paradigmatic). The highest level includes a caveat ("performative-recursive"), and the way I interpret it is that there is really no highest level. It can go on forever. So in a sense, MHC seems to model itself, infinitely. Meta-theories are notoriously self-referential, and MHC truly takes the cake in that aspect. The lowest level are the easiest to study quantitatively, but they're so simple that they're not that interesting. Surveying children goes into qualitative studies, and those are always difficult, but yeah even more so with children. I think it's most helpful to use it when trying to understand abstract systems themselves, i.e. scientific hypotheses, theories, meta-theories, paradigms etc., rather than trying to specifically understand cognitive development. For example, how complex is the paradigm of evolutionary biology compared to the paradigm of biology? What about cross-disciplinary approaches? Though of course, you can use it to assess your own or somebody else's main mode of operation in your daily life. I think it's particularly useful to explain the different levels of context awareness, construct awareness and theory pluralism (see my topic on Systems thinking), or in other words the ability to see a larger perspective, having high self-awareness and openness to different views. How to accurately pin yourself on a stage just boils down to the willingness to investigate your own psyche. Not in a strict physiological sense, but other than that, it's up to you. If you like to party, sure. Phytochemicals is a humongous class of substances; basically anything that comes from a plant. It includes everything from poisons like cyanide and ricin to narcotics like morphine and cocaine to medicines like Aspirin and Aloe Vera. What I meant is that the word "chemical" usually refers to something synthetic in everyday speech, but from a chemistry perspective, everything has a chemical basis. It's modelling the level of complexity of cognitive operations, so in a sense yes. Misunderstanding a chemistry question isn't necessarily a sign that your mind is too simple and that the level of analysis is to complex, but maybe that you're just not identifying the correct level (i.e. it's be much simpler than you think). That is usually the insight people get after they finally get the answer: "was it really that simple?" Getting the answer might be simple, but that doesn't mean it's not complicated.

The systemic communication theorist Gregory Bateson calls this "context", which is your interpretative framework, and everybody has a different one based on previous experiences. His work is all about showing how communication is not a straightforward thing.

Read slower, breathe, feel

Try not smoking weed Take it from an ex- full-time stoner.

Now we have another non-mRNA vaccine "Novavax" made especially for you

Being sober means you only consume what is essential. I'll define drugs as non-essential substances that produce a pronounced pharmacological effect. You have essential amino acids, fats, minerals and vitamins etc., which all have pronounced downstream pharmacological effects, but which are required for optimal, organic functioning of the system. However, it's possible to consume an unbalanced amount of those, and this goes back to the aspect of physical health (healthy, balanced diet). Once you start going outside what is merely essential, you're into medicinal territory, which has its place if you for example get sick, but it's generally not for daily consumption (unless you have some incurable chronic ailments where you decide that the positives outweigh the negatives). There are some atypical non-essential substances that complicates things. For example, the way I view psychedelics is that they can increase resilience and vitality over time given the right conditions. Sometimes the conditions just aren't right (like with our friend Adam), or maybe there are no current visible signs of progress at that moment (not all growth is linear or determinable within a specific time horizon). Psychedelics also have an atypical pharmacological profile and are non-addictive, so they don't easily fall under the category of hedonic drugs. Other non-essential substances with less pronounced psychoactive effects like polyphenolic phytochemicals also seem to be beneficial for health, but some are also detrimental. It's also possible that we lose some of the bigger picture by taking the analytical lens of pharmacology and looking at single compounds. For example, polyphenols often come from fruits, and a fruit is a whole package deal. There is lots of complexity there that we can't unpack analytically but which we can only test for ourselves. An important point here is that all of our bodies are different. This is generally my advice for optimizing resilience and vitality: find out what works best for you: what does your body like to eat? It's also not just about diet: generally learn to listen to how your body responds to different stimuli, both short-term and more crucially long-term. Let the intelligence of your body be your guide.