Carl-Richard

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

But Leo can turn into a lizard

Firstly, that's wrong. Secondly, it's a bit like saying it's strange why a famous bodybuilder has never been seen heading an activism campaign for My Little Pony. It's a highly unlikely combination. People who can levitate, like famous bodybuilders, are around 1 in 100 million. They have limited interests, and most of them probably don't even care to think about science (or My Little Pony), let alone having the idea to contribute to a research project or go through the practical aspects of doing that. Additionally, people with serious psychic abilities tend to not have strong ulterior egoic motives (like fame, recognition, status, money) that could drive such a decision. Add on top of that the general problem with funding and publishing due to the stigma around such matters, it's very understandable that you would think it hasn't been done before (which again, it has by the way). And of course, we live in a post-truth society where "everything is fake and AI-generated". So if you saw a video of a person levitating or read some study about it in some no-name journal, would you even believe it?

It would truly be insane to lock up a person sitting in profound stillness.

I think he just wanted to escape Norway which is a place he would probably get harassed on the street regularly and also live in an "European" country (and his wife which he met before he went to France is French). He was the front page of national news when he went to jail.

Clarity of thought and language most fundamentally boils down to making distinctions. Tearing down distinctions while still being clear is a luxury and has to generally be preceded by a long accounting of other distinctions. Constantly putting equation signs between words and moving quickly from one concept to the next is not that. Here is a distinction: reality "is". That is the Absolute. Anything else is relative. While what is meant by "reality is" can be unclear and easily misunderstood, it can be elaborated on with more distinctions. So making distinctions is the basis of making something clear, and elaborating with more distinctions is the process of making something more clear. On that, this is a good example of the power of making distinctions and elaborating on those distinctions. Notice how rich the examples are of each distinction, notice how illustrative it is, how it leads the person from confusion to clarity:

The way you use language and concepts lacks clarity. "You just fear insanity". Why do you "fear" clarity?

Progressive melodic death black metal 😍

That's perfect, but you see that it's before you create the physical universe that you can really say those things and it becomes really clear what you mean. Conversely, when you start creating the physical universe and things in it, like people, and you start making statements about those things and those people, that is when people get lost and start conflating You with those things, which is not the essence of You. The Absolute is simply isness, and it's hard to see what isness really is until you strip away the surface appearances (the physical universe) and all that is left is pure unobscured isness. Likewise, to say "it's only You" only becomes clear when you strip away the physical universe. Then it becomes harder to conflate the You with the little ego self and its machinations.

😂 I actually used to watch a few of his videos like 10 years ego. And I used to debate him in the comment sections, trying to convince him of something about multiculturalism. Then at some point, I hit a crossroads where I felt I had to choose between pursuing more ethnonationalist Alt-Right content vs embracing my more deeply felt leftist inclinations ("I don't actually hate colored people or immigrants, I don't want to exclude them from my society, I'm for compassion, empathy, equality"), and I chose the leftist route. But he and people like Sargon of Akkad almost got me down that road. But no, I love churches, but also, the concept of church burnings scratches some deep anarchical itch in me 😆 Also, I think more and more about survivalism nowadays with these new geopolitical changes ("maybe the lunatics are right?").

Any organism's attempt at sustaining itself will involve gas and breaks. The Left just has a particular configuration of those. It would only be weird if there weren't such "contradictions".