Carl-Richard

Give me your best explanation. Best explanation gets a cookie (laced with meth).

🐽 Pig nose makes me think of Plumbus.

What field?

Name just makes me think of Plumbus. I can't ever get it out of my head.

Hell no write them down if they feel important enough to write down, unless you care about literally nothing else than meditation, which you don't, or else you would be enlightened right now. It's also possible to click "save" in your mind or plan it for later depending on the insight. As an alternative, if something only occurs to you once or if it doesn't stick in such a way that you remember it essentially forever, maybe it's was not that important in the grand scheme of things anyway. Important things tend to pop up again. Then again, being a creative means you want to take anything and everything that might seem interesting and seeing where it can take you, so there is also that.

What

Prove what? That triggering a neuronal response tends to lead to desensitization especially if it's a hedonic stimulus and not a noxious stimulus? Here is a thing about studies: they don't actually "prove" anything. They provide evidence for or against. They update your priors. Finding a specific theoretical rationale based on more general connections between basic (strongly scientifically supported) concepts does fundamentally the same thing. It's all probabilistic at the end of the day. A specific study, or two, or three, is just one step further in the process. If your only approach to epistemology is to read the conclusion of one or two studies from Dickwad University with a crappy self-report-based correlative design and paper-thin sample sizes and barely <.05 p-values and mixed results between 10 comparative measures, that's your prerogative.

The orienting framework for this is the concept of "control", which can be deduced from the concept of autonomy (feeling like being in control of your actions) and competence (feeling like you're able to exert control through your abilities). These are cornerstones of feeling like you are able to exert control and influence over your surroundings and in your life in general. What happens when you feel like you lack control? You develop various symptoms of negative emotion and cognition: Anxiety: a state of hypervigilance, which may involve a worry about what may happen in the future that will lead to a bad outcome (or not happen the way you want it to go, the way you are willing to it go if you could control it). With worry, it's the feeling of lack of control projected into the future. It might not necessarily involve a specific (lack of) competancy but maybe a general one like inability to predict the future (i.e. uncertainty), which is a potent cause of anxiety. Rumination: thinking about something that went bad in the past, a goal you didn't achieve, or some problem you seem to be unable to get over or solve. It's the feeling of lack of control projected into the past (or the immediate past if it's happening concurrently, a.k.a. "now" but still in the form of a thought so still technically the past). Getting stuck in endless "problemsolving" that goes nowhere is a typical sign of rumination. Depression: which might involve helplessness (not knowing what to do or how to do it, and therefore not doing anything) or hopelessness (not thinking this will ever change). These are less operational forms of feelings of lack of control as they don't entertain or mobilize for action (unlike in anxiety and rumination) but simply cease or accept that no action will work. This manifests physically as (or is associated with) psychomotor retardation, low mood, low energy, the typical "immobilizing" symptoms of depression. You could think of depression in the form of helplessless and hopelessness as the extreme endpoints of negative emotion and cognition, because they represent the extreme endpoints of feeling of lack of control ("nothing works, nothing will ever work"), and because while anxiety and rumination might not necessarily involve depression, depression often involves anxiety and rumination. And how does mindfulness, spirituality, cognitive flexibility, deal with these issues of lack of control (e.g. meditation, letting go of identification, etc.)? You might simply accept the lack of control and thus gain control in that (i.e. you identify with whatever is happening and it's you, so nothing bad can ever really happen, nothing really needs to be controlled, because it's fine anyway whatever happens). Acceptance is the very pure mirror image of helplessness and hopelessness, because you are always able to let go and opt out of the need to control and therefore opt into absolute control (as opposed to being perpetually stuck). But do you want to let go? That is always the issue. That's the crux of all the world's problems. But still, it's a good thing to have in the toolbox, a good thing to be aware of, and a good thing to know that you can orient yourself towards when you perhaps realize everything else is hopeless (be it due to depression or simply knowing nothing in life will every fulfill you at the deepest level, will never alleviate your suffering at the root, only temporarily soothe it). Because, the cognitive machinery associated with anxiety, worry, rumination, depression, is always active to some degree as long you are identified with that which needs to survive. The brain and the organism evolved these things because it was good for surviving (predicting things in the future, keeping account of things in the past, honestly judging your feeling of progress and performance). So as long you identify with survival, that is what you will experience to some degree or another (unless you are in complete control and acting perfectly in accordance with your autonomy and competence, which is possible to a huge extent that many might not appreciate but is still a relatively rare and even fragile state: this is where the emotions and cognitions take on a highly positive and excited and passionate form like the creative and productive states you can get in while working on something meaningful or doing something you love; the self-referential machinery flips over to the self-transcendent and self-actualizing machinery). But you will probably keep doing that for a while more so it's good to know these things until then.

Ironically, he jerks off to offload the excessive dopamine from all the coke he spoons up his chute Coke and jerking off is like salt and pepper, bread and butter. Ask Joey Diaz.

Maybe jerk off more then Notice what is a statistically modifiable statement that can be filled in with whatever value or strength and what is a dichotomous black and white statement. You encountered the former and provided the latter as a response. This is really what sets apart scientific thinking from non-scientific thinking. Being aware of statistical nuances.

Frequency alone will decrease sensitivity, and thus deathgrip-like behavior should occur automatically at some part of the range.

I did, after the fact, because you seemed to not know the difference. If you can't judge what is a theoretical rationale / hypothesis and what is a scientific research result, that's on you. I said "so you want a mechanism?" (that can explain a relationship), not "so you want a scientific study that has been done on specifically that relationship?". But the thing about this question is unless there are some weird mechanisms I don't know about that come into play for porn and masturbation specifically and that are strongly antagonistic to the mechanisms I provided (which is in principle possible but probably in my estimation very unlikely), the mechanisms provided are so basic that specific scientific studies are most probably only testing the strength of the relationship; i.e. the relationship between porn/masturbation and lower energy probably definitely exists, but does it matter (or how much does it matter and in what contexts, in what way)? And if that is the case, my position of "it depends" is a quite justifiable position, because it says increasing the "how much"/"in what context"/"in what way" is what matters. I did, but it doesn't matter that much if it's not well-studied. What statement specifically are you concerned about?

When we think dualistically, we say the mind thinks it can not move, due to hampered feelings of autonomy, competence, control, and the body acts accordingly (or vice versa). And of course, when catching a virus or the flu, the tendency is to slant the explanation towards the physical side, as that is how we usually explain viruses and the flu. But consider that the hampered feelings of control (or feelings of the flu) are behavioral patterns of the body. It's what your body has been conditioned to do due to various responses. In this sense, the mind-body distinction collapses. What is depression in the mind is depression in the body. You can just choose to view it from different angles. Mind is essentially a lens onto especially the abstracted patterns of body, how it reacts to things, how it moves, how it responds to threats, rewards, stimuli, but also more passive states like interoception, propioception, senses generally.

By "mind" we of course generally mean human minds (unless we're talking about transpersonal psychology, i.e. God's mind, or animal psychology, i.e. non-human animal minds ☺️).

Studying the mind from a 3rd person perspective (which might involve looking at physical quantities as a proxy) vs studying physical quantities in and of themselves

Yeah ok, there are many epistemically retarded physicists (and perhaps other fields as well *erm* exercise science *erm*). But if you look at especially psychology where the scientists have always been insecure about and questioning the status of their field ("is it a science or is it pseudoscience?"), they are actually very aware of what it does and doesn't do. There are countless of times I've heard "psychology moved away from introspection as a method" in various methodology classes, and especially learning about qualitative methods, the insecurity and self-criticism comes up ("what is qualitative vs quantitative research, what are the assumptions, limitations, pros and cons?", "what are the assumptions and limitations of grounded theory vs thematic analysis?").

We're not talking about the law here, you're lost in a different discussion. We're talking about whether porn is harmful or not. Why are you concerned about the "burden of proof" in this context?

My guy, I was speaking from my understanding of basic concepts in neuroscience. If you want a source for that, there are various books on basic concepts in neuroscience. I gave you a theoretically plausible account of how porn and masturbation can lead to lower energy levels. If you want a highly specific empirical account, go to Google Scholar or something.

Goofy ass music video but the music hits me right in the feels, because of just everything about it (the song, the context, my nostalgia, everything).

It admits its blindspots and proceeds like they don't matter, until it's painfully obvious that what they are doing is suboptimal by literally everybody but a few old guys in wheelchairs.

Legal systems are also not about what is true, but about what is fair. But this is entirely besides the point. Why do you think somebody has a "burden of proof" if they make a claim but you don't?

MSc in neuroscience.

You want a physical mechanism? That's easy: excess prolactin from blowing your load constantly (prolactin is the "anti-dopamine" hormone), sexual arousal is also dopaminergic which in excess leads to downregulation of the dopaminergic system (and internet porn is bred like social media platforms to be hyper-salient so this effect is especially pronounced compared to mere circumstantial sexual arousal). Whether or not it is enough to be "substantial" is again up to the individual and the extent of use (and context like recovery time), but it's easy to draw a direct link from porn consumption, masturbation and lower energy levels through the physical mechanisms mentioned above. And it works very much like drugs in that it is hyper-salient, it is low effort and you can access it and redose very easily, and accessing it doesn't require things that build resilience (e.g. like lifting weights, highly dopaminergic but builds resilience and has a wide range of cascading physiological effects), and instead, the downregulating effects lead to a spiralling of resilience, which is consistent with the definition of addiction leading to detrimental effects in your life.

Prove what? That it's harmful? Or not harmful? My position again is it depends, and it's not about "proving" in the factual sense ("it's x% harmful"). It's about seeing the range of possibilities that exist and that people seem to report. If you watch porn multiple times a day and you struggle to get work done, that would be a harm. If you watch porn once or twice a week and you feel perfectly fine and energized most of the time, that would be less of a harm. Same with impact on relationships, same with anything. "Burden of proof" is essentially a meaningless philosophical buzzword that people use to avoid having to talk (or talk themselves in circles) instead of honestly assessing what they think about an issue. The universe doesn't change its factual state just because you refuse to open your mouth. You're perfectly able to state how something is not harmful (or harmful) if it truly is that. It doesn't matter who "made a claim" first.

"Burden of proof" makes no sense if you simply care about what is real. Either porn is harmful or it isn't. Whether somebody makes a claim about it or not changes nothing about the fact of the matter.