Carl-Richard

What do you think about the Chinese room experiment?

+ feeling-based intuitions

I don't know what I'm supposed to get out of those words other than some vague association.

What does it do?

(Note: idiosyncratic use of words) Psychotherapy mainly deals with meaning (the techniques and methods to become a vital and resilient human being). Meditation mainly deals with being (how to experience the fruits of all that to the fullest extent). They interloop and strengthen each other: a psychologist will sometimes employ techniques grounded in being (e.g. mindfulness or guided meta-cognition), and a mystic will sometimes employ techniques grounded in meaning (e.g. faciliating trauma-release or solving neuroses). Even "technique" as a concept has a meaning component (procedural structure; the "how") as well as a being component (experiential content; the "why"), and different techniques emphasize each component to different degrees (e.g. a meditation technique emphasizes being over meaning, while a visualization technique emphasizes meaning over being).

@Cthulu It's not just about IQ or even structural changes in the brain. The cognitive-emotional and behavioral aspects are the most important. It's not just weed: any and all habituation to a hyper-normal reward stimulus that requires sub-normal to no work, is inherently anti-hormetic (it lowers resilience and systemic integrity). In other words, regularly pumping your brain full of reward chemicals without coupling it to any meaningful action, teaches you that meaningful actions are in fact not meaningful. It hijacks the most fundamental psycho-physiological mechanisms that sustains you as an organism. To think that this does not have severe side effects for your mind or body is absurd. The only reason it has become so accepted in society is because it has become OK to amputate your potential and do just enough to get by. In fact, dissociating yourself from meaning at this level has become a way to cope with the meaning crisis in our current society. We have to re-discover the inner divine strength of spirituality and the sacred collective practices of religion, so that we can have a truly sustainable opiate of both the individual and the masses.

Using weed regularly

If you get to the point where you buy a vaporizer, there are probably other problems you have to worry about.

Stoners will say "but you can eat weed", meanwhile most of them smoke anyway. They would certainly never turn down a joint ?

What Darwin was really arguing against is the anthropomorphized Christian version of God that has a sophisticated plan for every single event, specially with humans in mind ("humans are to reign over the animals"), not the kind of Brahmanic New Age pantheism you're probably accustomed to. The fundamental principles of evolution that were discovered by Darwin are not random. They're very structured. It's just that a part of it ("descent with modification", later known as "genetic mutation") can be described as random, and that type of randomness defeats the Christian creationist worldview. So Darwin is talking about a very specific type of randomness, while you're talking about a much broader type of randomness.

What does "evolution is not blind" mean?

No this is stupid. Evolution by natural selection and descent with modification is a demonstrable fact. You can study bacterial evolution in real time. Another example of naive skepticism.

Humor is found in flow: carefree, light, joyous enjoyment.

@blankisomeone If you have mental health issues, be very careful with psychedelics.

The longer you live, the higher the risk for cancer. So we'd essentially need a cure for cancer as well.

Once you start wandering outside what is purely essential, you're starting to move away from health.

It's just as delusional as mystics using metaphors to describe the indescribable. Once you see that all attempts at descriptions are fundamentally on the same level playing field, you can start to appreciate the different frameworks for what they can provide. The naturalistic frameworks are concerned with accurate explanations and predictions, while the mystical ones are concerned with inducing a direct experience of the Absolute. What you're really reacting against is not naturalism, but epistemic naivety.

Both rely on threat sensitivity (actual, perceived, potential), and anxiety skews to the perceived and potential end, which is mostly mediated by neuroticism (emotional lability and negative emotion). If there is anything that lowers neuroticism while keeping "objective" threat sensitivity intact, it's meditation.

The rule for pizza is the more dough it has, the less healthy it is. It's almost pure flour (> 4x more calories than potatoes).

Good. All of his tweets were toxic as fuck.

Please be mindful of how you use charged words like "mental issues" and keep the discussion to the topic and don't make it more personal than it has to be.

I'm not telling you which definition you should adopt. I'm telling you which one I prefer to use for myself, inside my internal world. Again, that does NOT mean that I will purposely reject your preferred pronouns. If it's not a circular definition, then no. My definition is merely convenient, and I'm not pushing it on anyone. True, but don't expect me to use a circular definition. My internal definition of a word, which I don't push on anyone, and which I will easily concede in a social situation, is at the expense of human rights. Ok. You're entitled to your opinion. Just know that there are many opinions on what transphobia is, and that the self-ID definition is only one out of many, and that there exists trans inclusive philosophers who prefer the bio-essentialist definition. I think the issue here is how do we balance those views with our community's views, with the moderators' views, and with Leo's vision for the forum. On top of that, I think that completely shutting down critical discussion on a topic is unhealthy, but yes, we need nuance there as well (we can't have trolls who spam "hehehe trans women are not women, get lost losers").

@bejapuskas Ok. What do you suggest we do from here (not just in this thread, but in general)? Because I don't see it as a feasible outcome that one moderator ends up banning half of the forum (judging by the opinions in this thread alone), including most of the moderators (judging by the opinions of us here and those who responded to your old thread about this exact issue in moderator discussions). There is a definition problem here about what transphobia even is, and I think that me having to explain how a circular definition is not a definition is somehow indicative of this larger issue. As far as I'm concerned, there is one major point that we need to get straight: Should warning points for transphobia be given on par with other phobias, i.e. something analogous to a charged statement that places said group in an overtly negative light and in a non-thoughtful manner (e.g. "women are less smarter than men — end of story"), or do we need to take any specialized measures for transphobia? I've been waiting to hear your opinion on this, because again, I have not yet seen a clear counterargument being presented towards the majority view in the aforementioned thread.

Do the Mike Tyson method (just never swallow it). I don't know

Don't post while high or drunk, certainly not drive