Carl-Richard

It's the same as asking why don't most people shoot themselves in the face. Metaphysical Russian roulette is a risky business and even quite dangerous. It's hard to count how many threads have been made about people having an existential crisis about solipsism and that seem to suffer from their own abstract mental activity rather than the experience of Oneness. Conversely, very few seem to do the same for the words "Oneness" and "non-duality". The people who do freak out about those things mostly seem to do so because they are having the actual experience and actually underestimated how serious it is (because "Oneness" and "non-duality" sound so warm and welcoming). That's actually a problem in itself, but it's an order of magnitude removed from the solipsism problem.

A dolphin is better at swimming than an elephant.

I don't think people want to feel unique as much as they want to be themselves. Before we were social animals, we were simply organisms trying to survive, and in trying to survive, we feel compelled to express our innate survival instincts and organismic capabilities (competencies, skills, capacities). So as social animals, there can sometimes be a tension between wanting to conform to group and expressing oneself. The best is when the group supports or resonates with your innate capacities and allows you to be yourself to the maximum degree that is socially sustainable. And in fact, that is what we humans as social animals do in a fundamental sense. We form social groups that support each other's capacities and survival. The problems tend to arise when the groups that are formed are very abstract and start to clash with some abstract notion that the individual holds (e.g. likes, dislikes, interests, status, ideology). But feeling like you belong in these more abstract groups is also important, because you have abstract capabilities, and they need to find support and resonance in a group. That's why you are here, asking very specific questions related to your interests, beliefs and values, and not simply asking any random group about it.

What mostly happens at around 30 is that you'll have so many responsibilities that you won't have time to do many things, so you won't have much time to learn new things and thus you won't become as good at them. But if you dedicate all your time to something, there is no reason why you can't learn to do it well. It's just an advantage to start early because you learn a bit faster and you generally have more time (both spare time and lifetime). Besides, we have to be specific about what we're talking about. In terms of years onwards spent at high neural plasticity, starting at 25 vs. 30 is arguably not a very big difference, at least not in any fatal "you're doomed if you don't" way. But something like 5 vs. 30, that's of course a bigger difference. And also, that's 25 years of head start in terms of pure work time. Now, what is a little talked about but almost invaluable factor for learning is mentorship. The benefits of being older is that you have more knowledge and autonomy to get access to things like mentors and other strong factors for learning. Definitely use what you can to your advantage.

What about working on something else?

It's pretty logical up until Alex starts consistency testing it. "Purposely distort it"? He is asking it logically consistent questions in good faith. He is giving it a consistency test. If that's "purposely distorting", then I guess the best interactions on the forum is people "purposely distorting" each other. And even if he was trolling or gaslighting it by being deliberately inconsistent, that would also be a problem, because if you happen to be unwillingly inconsistent, ChatGPT will not just not help you with that but will also actively validate your delusions. The type of "nuance" presented by ChatGPT is the most surface-level type of "nuance" there is. I can only ever remember it giving the same mindless blanket statements that apply to every possible situation ever: "it depends on your point of view"; "if you value this, then that", "this might not apply to every situation". It's ironically incredibly unnuanced in its purported nuance. Now, being a nuanced thinker while also being routinely inconsistent is a bit like riding a bike before knowing how to walk. It is definitely the fault of the AI. You would never hold a human to the same standard. If you were to ask a human questions in good faith and they crumble under the weakness of their own answers, that's on them. The average person? That's even debatable. But sure, I won't regularly consult an 80 IQ person on the street for their theoretical or factual knowledge when they can barely string two thoughts together. But people who are experts in a field, who have spent 20 years immersing themselves in their field and pass every consistency test you throw at them, I will gladly consult them. And by "consult them", I mean listening to them and trying to understand their point of view while being open and extending charity, not "letting them think for me" (whatever that means). With ChatGPT, I do the complete opposite. Again, what does that even mean? If you ask ChatGPT questions about how a theory works, or ask it for facts about the world, you are letting it teach you how to think, and over time, especially if you are open to it (but even if you're not), you will start to think more like it. You're in a mentor-student relationship with ChatGPT, and the student's mind is shaped by the mentor.

😴 I disagree to agree. Cmon, at least answer the question I asked, I'm curious what you think.

It begs the question: why do you think nobody else uses that word? "There is only me", expounded upon at great length and treated as its own "teaching" (with the infamous Solipsism video), solidified with its own high-sounding word, and the word being "solipsism" (which has a popular interpretation that has nothing to do with non-duality), when your goal is to communicate non-duality, is communicative and metaphysical Russian roulette. Other non-dual teachers will virtually only mention such a description in passing, as some added flavor, without adding any high-sounding word to it, certainly not a popular one prone to misunderstanding, and at the same time with copious amount of caveats about potential misunderstandings, centering them back to the main teaching; not-twoness.

Get help immediately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_line Then face it, don't run from it. Get help for it. You have no idea how twisted your mind can be when you're alone with your own thoughts and how little it takes to change your perspective. Even the most vanilla psychologist can spend just a few minutes with you and absolutely obliterate some idea you have just by observing and saying some few simple words. You are not all-knowing, you are not fully transparent to yourself. You have limited attention and mental resources. Someone from the outside can easily identify the gaps in your life that you're hiding from. Go talk to someone.

"ChatGPT will start World War 3". That is my new slogan.

Nobody reputable who speaks about non-duality calls it "solipsism". This is purely an invention by Leo, and his entire community suffers as a consequence.

I've played around with the concept of syntactically vs semantically focused guitar players. The former is for example Allan Holdsworth. The latter is David Gilmour. Syntax is of course the structure of the music, the sentences, the paragraphs. What sort of musical ideas are being conveyed? How are they combined and conveyed together as a larger whole? How complex are the musical ideas? How long do they stretch over time, how many different notes do they incorporate, all while maintaining the sense of being meaningfully connected to each other? Semantics is of course the quality of each "unit" of the music; each note, each discernable sound; which may be delivered in many different ways (e.g. bends, vibrato, pauses, strength and subtlety of attack, mutes, pinch harmonics, tremolo picking, pick scratches, etc.). As for musical syntax, I think I've come across the most intense example of this in Allan Holdsworth's "Mr Berwell" from 03:10 to 03:20. There are what I interpret to be three "phrases" in total (also, you have to be ready, because the first phrase starts immediately): You distinctly notice that he is building on a theme with each phrase, taking one pattern as a starting point and then making slight modifications for each new phrase, and then finally ending with this amazing climax with the longest, fastest and most complex phrase, all while still maintaining the meaningful connection to the preceding phrases. It keeps blowing my mind everytime I hear it. It also really tests your attention span. Just immense syntax, also completely improvised. If you could measure someone's "musical IQ", Allan Holdsworth would be the Nikola Tesla of that.

And that's why we will topple over starting from the top. Factual errors by LLMs are so ubiquitous, I didn't even care to mention them in my little rant in the beginning of the thread. But the positive thing with factual mistakes is that they are simple to correct (if you're diligent): you just fact-check them. But with the other aforementioned problems (thinking, understanding, nuanced intepretations, logic), it's not so straightforward to identify nor deal with, especially when people treat LLMs (either through thought or through action) like they were made for these kinds of things.

I will never recover from when I used ChatGPT the first month after its release to look up research studies for my bachelor thesis. It literally made up half of the studies. Then I meet fellow students, smart students, trusting ChatGPT like it's their prophet or personal guru. And when I tell them how many mistakes it makes based on actual statistics and facts, they counter with "ah, but this is GPT4, it is better", as if they somehow knew the statistics about how many mistakes GPT4 makes in comparison (they didn't). Then I watch a news segment on national television in my country about 16 year olds using ChatGPT to literally do everything and anything; learning how to wash a woolen sweater (which is not the greatest sin of course), writing a heartfelt apology to their mom, and writing a letter to a friend with mental health issues cheering them up. Of course, on the surface, everything looks positive and great. People are apparently learning things and making themselves and others happy. But I can't help but feel that we're getting slowly poisoned as a society by this epistemic toxin that gets slowly siloed in our environment, eventually culminating in a societal catastrophe. But I'm of course speaking as someone who got hurt, and someone who responds to that hurt by doubling down on obsessive ideals (that is something I've learned about myself, not from ChatGPT, but from myself). But also, what happened to technology? It's the same as with the internet and social media: it was supposed to enhance our minds and lives, not outsource our minds and lives to them and create deterioated and decadent versions of them. Instead we got TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and now ChatGPT.

The real problem is its very being is flawed. It's like being Tom Hanks on that island with that baseball and actually expecting it to talk back like a real human. It gives the appearance of performing logical reasoning; it doesn't actually do logical reasoning. It gives the appearance of understanding; it doesn't actually understand. It gives the appearance of thinking; it doesn't actually think.

Exactly.

If we are watching the same video, "agreeable" and "gaslit" are euphemism for being inconsistent. Alex was not being like some devil using logical fallacies to his advantage, trying to manipulate ChatGPT to say the one thing he wanted through any and all possible means. His logic was spotless. He wasn't being unreasonable in any way. He simply presented a story, a fictional one, but still a perfectly consistent one. And that's the danger. People can think they are being perfectly consistent with ChatGPT while ChatGPT is presenting them with inconsistencies which then poisons their thinking.

What Alex was talking about was simple and the logical contradictions he pointed out were simple. It wasn't complex at all.

Which is what Alex did. He pinned it down to making firm statements, then he showed over the course of the video how it is being inconsistent while many times asking it to explain its reasoning. The problem is just its reasoning is so simplistic and shortsighted and lacking in any overarching principle or framework.

No, they are simplistic and vacuous and consequentially systematically inconsistent as proven by Alex in this video and in a similar one like it. This is what I mean by that most people operate at level 10-11 Abstract-Formal. They are impressed by very localized analytic statements without tying them to a larger systematic context. It also equivocates unknowingly (e.g. in this conversation, the meaning of "direct"), another symptom of being vacuous.

No, for burning churches and stabbing his mate in the back 20 times "in self-defence", but also probably for talking semi-favorably about Anders Behring Breivik (except the killing kids part). Although this also happened recenty: leader of far-right party (which is actually the biggest party in the polls currently; so much for "left-wing Scandinavia") got harassed on the street by an angry pro-Palestinian mob (link). Interestingly, the lawyer who was interviewed about that incident was also interviewed back when Varg escaped from jail and hijacked a family's car by gunpoint in 1998. Varg was sentenced in 1994, and not long after, the Christian Democratic Party became one of the biggest parties; they nearly doubled their seats in the Stortinget (Parliament) between 1993 and 1997. He would probably mostly be harassed by those people, but also later by more proper leftists after his Breivik statements (2011 and onwards). You could definitely explain all of that with conformism, and it definitely is a thing here (The Law of Jante). However, it's not a very specific explanation. Hardanger, Geiranger, Jotunheimen. For any of those places, you would probably drop by Bergen anyway. I'm biased as a Bergen native, but Bergen is arguably the Norwergian city for tourists. It has the best overall history (Hanseatic League), WW2 history, the Seven Mountains.

But if you saw it on film, would you believe it?

I didn't think it was possible to view yourself from above your own head either one time. But reality surprises you.

Protect your skin, people

I remember one summer afternoon, I was about to go for a walk around the neighborhood and I wanted to take my straw hat which I bought on Jamaica because I wanted the 360 sun protection, but I felt like it would look weird (I've only ever used it on vacation abroad). Then my brother said "why the fuck do you care?". So I wore my hat