Carl-Richard

Yup. At some level, we're all immoral, biased, egocentric. It's just how far will you go? What kind of reasoning will you use?

I was just suggesting they may not have thought through the question.

No perfect moral agent exists, but things like that are difficult to think about and should only serve as motivation for seriously pursuing whatever you find most inspiring, beautiful and useful. Increasingly, yes, and probably yes. My current form is an absolute carebear, and it's only evolving.

In the question that was proposed, it's not just their life, but the likely suffering of their friends, family and community. It's in large part about the well-being of other people, not whether life should be protected at all costs. I don't know if this has been primed by the fact that I was recently in my uncle's funeral (a guy who I didn't get to know) and saw from a kind of outsider's perspective what the death of a person can do to a group of people (and also recently reconnecting with a part of my friend group who lost a friend to drug addiction 1 year ago), but I think I'm maybe able to connect with that aspect of the question a bit more than other people. And by the way, I'm not saying this doesn't apply to people in Gaza. It's just an observation of how people approach this specific question. I'm in luck because I'm aspiring to work with something related to mental health (hopefully primarily in the positive psychology sense, not the abnormal psychology sense), which I believe does save people from losing lives (prevents addiction, etc.), which improves the lives of people who are alive (increases meaning, etc.), and at some point will even stop wars from happening (yes). I'll be doing that in a way that supports myself financially and some day the people I will try to instill the same values as I have. I'll do this based on what I perceive to be my current calling or "dharma", judging by the experience of meaning and inspiration I feel towards it, which is a precious resource that has to be channeled the right way to be maximally useful. If I had experienced the same inspiration towards helping out in Gaza, I probably would've been there along with the other people who feel that way. Even if I had become something like a musician based on the same type of inspiration, that too would probably improve the lives of others in some way. Still, even if I was the same uninspired no-life I was a few years ago, I still probably wouldn't have pushed the button. And that says something, as I would even steal money from my family members. If you truly connect with the reality of the situation (which I believe many people aren't able to do), actively choosing to end someone's life for pure and utter financial gain is very bad.

When you're dead, what is the difference between your family members and a stranger? You don't see them, you don't feel them, and same with them. You're just a memory in their mind, like the stranger they saw on the street yesterday.

I actually didn't understand anything you just said, again. Would you help an old lady across the road, and would you nuke her for 100k?

I'm an ex-full-time stoner. What can I say? 😺

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I don't understand what you just said. Would you push the button if it was your kid but you've never met them (you only met the mom once, you never saw her again and they won't know it was you)?

Caused by you? Who caused you to exist? The universe. So nothing is caused by you in the grand scheme of things. Probably 99.9% of all people will forget about you 2-3 generations after your death. No trace of your name will ever be acknowledged ever. That is how insiginificant you are, yet you feel entitled to take another's life for 100k (I don't think you actually said that, but let's assume you did 😃). Weehooo. I guess they're right when they say ego is the source of all the world's problems ☺️

No, they're an epitaph of all life on Earth, of the whole universe, you psycho 😂 Nobody cares about you. You're an insignificant speck of lint on the penis of an alien (quoting Adrian Belew 😆; somehow "epitaph" primed King Crimson in my mind or something). Sure, let's say they're an epitaph of you because your tiny speck of genes (6.25%) is sloshing around inside the nucleus of their somatic cells. Why the fuck does that matter? My sperm is an epitaph of me. My dead skin cells are an epitaph of me. My shit is an epitaph of me. "No, I won't flush my shit even if you pay me 100k". I'm obviously making a mockery, but still.

Why? You most likely won't see your great-great-grandkids ever. They're not different from a stranger in that way. The only thing that ties them to you is your genes, but so does all life on the planet. Why not see all life (or even all of reality) as an extension of you?

Why do you value economic power? Is economic power intrinsically valueable (something you value for its own sake) or is it extrinsically valuable (a means to obtain something else that is intrinsically valueable)? I think most people treat economic power as a means to serve something intrinsically valueable (e.g. their love for other people). Even among intrinsically valueable things, there is a hierarchy of value, so you'll value some things more than others. Is the only way to economic power to kill people? It's true that there is often conflict between values in someones behavior. The most ethical vegan kills animals indirectly through their consumer choices. There is arguably no way to be a perfect moral actor as a living being, but there are some things that are more obviously morally problematic than others, and you can determine this by asking yourself some questions.

@Schizophonia Would you push the button if it was some of your great-great-grandkids that died unexpectedly some day in the future because of you?

If you don't think so, that is fine, but values can be deduced from your behavior, in that you act like some things are more important than others. I bet you value logical consistency (you probably act like it's something important), and I bet you value other people (you act like you care about them, that you enjoy their company, that you don't want to hurt them, etc.). Now, all I'm saying is that if you truly cared about other people and if you were truly logically consistent, you would probably not push the button.

"Rational" depends on your values. I've been trying to show that it's probably not in line with most people's values and that it would therefore not be a rational choice (unless you don't care about acting in a way that is consistent with your values).

This?

Because meditation does not involve manipulating heavy pieces of information in your working memory at high speeds. Meditation does increase IQ, but it does so arguably by reducing the ADHD-like interference from self-referential thinking (or more generally task-irrelevant thinking). So you'll be more able to do your tasks uninterrupted, but your ability to do those tasks is in a sense not actually increased. For example, you can learn to play the guitar faster by practicing meditation, but to get better at guitar, you actually have to play the guitar. It's the same for manipulating things in your working memory. And the subjective effects on your awareness are quite distinct. It's a funny coincidence, but this actually happened just earlier today: I tried meditating a while before reading some article, and I noticed my reading got more smooth, but then I wanted to see how doing some rounds of N-Back affected it, and then my reading became more laser-like, more high-speed, more high-energy. And it's not surprising that engaging in different activities affects your mind in different ways. It's rather something to be expected. This goes back to notions like meditation being like a generalizable skill that translates to all skills, affecting the fluidity of awareness, not the contents of awareness, and how awareness is distinct from functions like attention, thinking, perceiving, feeling. It practices your ability to enter flow, not the activity of the flow. I heard from somewhere that some monks who lived in a monastery their whole life meditating had IQs of around 70. So definitely there are other factors involved. You have to use your mind a certain way to perform on an IQ test, and staring into a wall all day is not that.

Interestingly, the sometimes wild cases of psychosomatic disorders (e.g. functional blindness, functional paralysis, dissociative seizures) seem to serve as a bridge towards psychic research in that it obliterates the notion that matter causes mind and not the other way around. As the speaker suggests, the stigma around psychosomatic disorders as being "not real" and "all in your head" is something that needs to change for medicine to be able to deal with these disorders adequately, and that puts us closer to the idea that mind's effect on the world has equal scientific significance to matter. By the way, my recent increased intrigue with psychic phenomena has indeed only awoken recently despite my rather extensive list of personal experiences with it and intuitive inclinations, which goes to show the level of strength of the grip that materialism has on the mind and which proves the indispensible value of people like Sheldrake and Kastrup. When the culture gaslights you about your experiences, it takes somebody to ungaslight you to not feel crazy.

As I was watching the Holberg debate live with Rupert Sheldrake, Anil Seth and Tanya Luhrmann, I was thinking many times throughout the debate that it would've been perfect if they had on a philosopher with a background in philosophy of mind as well as science to settle some of the philosophical terms straight and perhaps bring his own perspective to the questions (which of course would be Bernardo Kastrup). Speaking of the devil: I used to view Sheldrake as nothing more than Terrence McKenna's lap dog (and a slightly kooky one at that), but as I've listened to him more over time, I have to say that he is a truly well-rounded thinker, philosophically, scientifically and spiritually. The overlap between him and Kastrup is striking (which is not surprising as Kastrup has apparently followed him for 25 years). I came across a quote from Deepak Chopra saying something along the lines of "Sheldrake will be remembered the same way Einstein is remembered today for his revolutionary contributions to science" (referring to his contributions and activism around psychic research). I had a similar thought one time, albeit not as specific as that. I think there is something to the future of psychic research in the grand scheme of things.

I haven't done any complicated physics/math problems in years, so there would be nothing to compare. I think I've passed the newbie gains by this point, so I don't think I'll see any big changes from now, although we'll see when I decide to switch to 5-Back, which I think will be really soon (I'm consistently hitting 60-70% success rate in every session). There are studies on N-Back training that show a positive effect on IQ, but there are mixed results (which is basically normal in psychological research). If you think it sounds interesting, try it. If not, cool. I'm not trying to claim that it absolutely works. It seems to work for me though.

It should have a picture of goatse and the text "this is Moloch, this is what happens when you scroll on TikTok". I'm terribly sorry, I'm sleep deprived By the way, I wasn't really pooh-poohing your suggestion. My intention was to add a thought.

I’ll give some of my own insights into how I’ve started to do Dual-N-Back over time and what works and doesn’t work. It’s tricky to describe how your mind does these types of things, but I’ll try anyway. Also, I’m going to describe more what your mindset should be rather than what your mind is actually going to do, because your mind is always going to do things that you don’t expect. So don’t expect any type of perfection in what you’re doing or even in what I’m trying to explain. It’s at best a pointer. At the very start of a set, I try to focus on encoding and retaining a sequence (writing it into memory and holding on to it), which is the first N audio stimuli (e.g. first 4 letters in 4-Back), because that is what is limiting me, as the visual part seems almost automatic at this point (but it will be impacted if I fail to do what I’m about to describe). Then, when the 5th stimuli comes, stop trying to retain the first sequence in memory and simply repeat the process of encoding a new sequence of N letters while simultaneously waiting for a letter that you think matches a letter from the first sequence, which indeed is something you have to “wait for” and not put too much deliberate effort into doing. It’s the like the information or the feeling of “match” comes to you intuitively, even without currently "seeing" the letters in your minds eye so to speak. It seems like merely forming the intention of wanting to hear a match or creating a form of attention to do that is sufficient. What you want to avoid is rehearsing the first sequence of N letters as you’re encoding then next sequence (e.g. repeating the sequence to yourself in your inner voice or quietly to yourself). This will interfere with encoding, and also you’re not allowing your short-term memory to do the work for you so to speak, which is a part of the point of this game I think; to train your short-term memory capacity to store a decently long string of information, while also systematically changing out what you’re currently storing in your short-term memory, which would be the “working memory” aspect. I think this “encoding N-chunks” method is the most natural and maybe most efficient way of doing this. In other words, you should be able to identify a matching letter as you’re encoding the next sequence without thinking much about the previous sequence. I think this can maybe help people to advance faster, because all games need a strategy (some more systematic than others, but they all definitely need a strategy), and even though this is probably what most people end up doing naturally, it can help to become aware of what you're doing. As for how I approach the visual aspect, it’s much harder to describe, but it has something to do with eye movements and visualizing where the boxes have been and where the next boxes should land were they to be a match (and it all happens very quickly). But again, this is not usually the part that you'll struggle with if you're doing Dual with audio (and it's also the hardest to describe, so there is not a huge pay-off from talking about it).

The mistake is telling people you're enlightened.

Our government places pictures of diseased lungs and rotten teeth and statements like "smoking kills!" (as well as statistics if I remember correctly) on our tobacco products, but people still buy them How do you reliably give up something that is addictive, let alone collectively? It takes massive changes, psychologically, socially, spiritually. Speaking of individual actions, you can put up posters inside every university toilet, on every bus stop, on your mom's ass. Try fitting something like that on a poster without sounding like a 2012 doomsday lunatic 🤣