Carl-Richard

When you're in the statistical worldview, - you are acutely aware that many things can influence one thing, and their relationship is statistical (quantitative). Some things can have a strong influence, other things less of a strong influence, and some things only a weak influence (e.g. the butterfly effect). In reality, there is a huge web of influences, where each influence is a particular node or string on the web, and each node is weighted with a certain strength of influence or statistical value. For example, ADHD can be influenced by beliefs, experiences, genetics, etc. Even if you think one of these things have a stronger influence, it doesn't mean it can only be reduced to that thing, and talking as if it can be reduced to that thing can lead to problems with accurately talking about and perceiving reality. Words like "partially", "mostly", "some of", "many", are often used. - you often say things are "probably so", "most likely", "less likely", "probably not". It does not preclude you from making firm and exclusive analytical statements (e.g. "given x and y, z is true or false, coherent or inconsistent"). But you are very acutely aware when something is statistical and probabilistic so you don't overstep or overgeneralize or oversimplify. - you realize a thing can be many things at the same time. There is often not just one way to do things, or one thing you can do at any one time. "Should I meditate every day or should I do retreats where I meditate more deeply?" Why not both? "That's the placebo effect". Why can't it be a real effect and placebo at the same time? "Trans is social contagion". Why can't some of it be real trans and some of it be social contagion (both within and across individuals)? "Yes — both" is very often realized to be the answer. The statistical worldview is a way to conceptualize nuance and holism, as opposed to black-and-white thinking and naive reductionism. It's also related to the modern scientific framework of putting numbers and quantities to these relationships. Modern science, especially human-oriented science (e.g. medicine, psychology), primes this kind of statistical thinking where everything is viewed through statistical associations (mediation, moderation, correlation) and ways of quantifying them (effect sizes, correlation coefficients, measures of statistical significance). If you do enough scientific thinking, in the right fields of science, you will eventually end up viewing a large chunk of the world this way.

So let me perhaps elaborate on the reasoning (about seeing without eyes "indicating" that maybe God could be possessing higher mental functions as a baseline without evolution being a preexisting requirement). When I used the word "indicating" (or "could indicate"), I did not imply increasing the probability of one hypothesis vs another. I simply implied that the hypothesis is now possible and that the probability increased from zero to non-zero (given the preexisting belief that you thought evolution was required). If you were of the previous belief that evolution is a prerequisite for all forms of higher mental functions, then seeing evidence against that removes that cap or limitation. It's now possible, the probability is above zero, but whether it is more possible than an alternative hypothesis (e.g. that God is still non-agential but seeing now happens through another mechanism than evolution), that has not been argued for. So your suspicion was maybe right that you had created a false dichotomy.

Seemingly the same problems as The Diary of a CEO. The presenter is essentially hired to do a job and the larger company makes the script. So anything you see is predetermined and rehearsed and any interest is ad hoc and surface level at best.

Bro are you ok?

If there was ever only one technique that could be described as "the key" to Enlightenment, it's the letting go technique he describes at 4:47:

The key point is identification drops. When identification drops, identification is with whatever that is. There is a complete openness in that. Then the body or mind may act out in different ways, and then a purification might happen over time where the openness is more embodied in the body and mind. But the identification with source is allegedly constant throughout.

Somehow they manage to replicate the atmosphere live.

They say that good music keeps you at the edge between familiarity and surprise. Too familiar becomes boring, and too surprising becomes hard to follow. Musical improvisation is the manifestation of this in real time, and you can usually notice when the player is engaging in well-established/familiar patterns ("licks") and when the player is creating something completely original. I'm used to improvising a lot on guitar, and I've noticed that I'm able to imagine impossibly intricate and original lines of improvisation in my head, but I'm in no way technically advanced enough to manifest that through my instrument. When I listen to the most complete virtuostic improvisational players out there, even though they can come very close many times, I always feel a tension between boredom and impenetrability. Of course, this desire I have of hearing the most hyper-creative lines of notes that I can possibly imagine is impossible to fulfill. It's completely relative to my unique conception of music, and I would probably never in a million years get to hear somebody produce even 10 seconds of those exact notes (which would be absolutely transcendentally orgasmic if it happened). Nevertheless, I know two players who come extremely close, and I'll try to weigh to which extent they're too "boring" ("musically conventional" is a better word) or too impenetrable (too melodically or harmonically complex) relative to my impossible standard of imaginative perfection. Guthrie Govan (obviously). It's tricky, because he is so versatile that he often fluctuates between too conventional (like bluesy bendy stuff) and too complex (like jazzy shredding stuff). I'll give an example for each player: Allan Holdsworth is notoriously known for being impossible to imitate by other players. For reference, Guthrie Govan can imitate virtually anyone but him. He often becomes too complex. I sometimes have to listen to his songs 30 times to understand what he is doing (like the run at 1:28 in the video below). (Btw things become more interesting around 0:40).

"I'm the only authority on this matter and you can leave but then you will waste your life chasing something that is not absolute truth." -> pressure to conform. "And the way you find out what is true is by finding it out yourself. You shouldn't listen to me, that's not how you get to the truth" -> manipulation to justify the conformity. "But if you speak against me based on what you have found out, I will say that you don't know what you're talking about and that I'm the only authority on the matter" -> pressure to conform. And the cycle continues. The reason why you and @Inliytened1 don't feel pressured by these things is because you don't believe it to be true. You see beyond the bullshit. Imagine if you don't.

14 men and 14 women each live on their own deserted island in the tropics and have to survive for 5 weeks. WhO hAs wHat it tAkes to sUrviVe? I've watched three episodes so far and it's pretty fun. I can't be asked to join the "haha lol women" thing before I've watched the entire thing. But there are some differences of course, as you would expect. If I was stranded on a deserted island, I would take @Natasha Tori Maru as medical grade shelter builder and @integral as contamination specialist I would be the jungle shaman or whatever; let me spend some time meditating and I'll maybe give some intuition-based navigation tips or just some wacked-out shit. When watching episode 3, I randomly came up with a possible hunting technique for sting rays that were swimming in the shallows on the beach and some of them tried to catch (if you're interested and you're ever on a deserted island without food ):

Gibberish distinction without a difference. I will not talk to an AI, thank you.

@Jirh Ask it to only treat the statements as false if they are categorically false (and not "so small to be insignificant"). Because me and @integral will immediately jump on that as "but there is something there".

Being more attuned to presence can make you sort of fine with being fractured, because you can always loop back into presence when you discover the crack. But paradoxically, it can also make you better at identifying the cracks and how to solve them. And if you also realize that the endless looping is actually less conducive to presence than smoothing out the cracks, you will hyper-fixate towards fixing the cracks. Because once the cracks are fixed, it becomes smooth.

Cringe. Be an uncouth hobo and attract the 10s with nerfs. Only half-joking. Aside from perhaps basic personal hygiene and bare minimum knowledge of social conventions, people trying to hack social interactions is to me like when somebody uses AI to think or write for them. At some point, you just realize there is nothing there and it's completely inorganic and hollow like a metal tube.

Would "I'm the only authority on epistemology" (or awakening for that matter) and "you don't know what you're talking about" qualify for this? What more would you need?

If you can imagine experiencing anything in a pre-self-reflective state, be it gripping a ball, or feeling pain or any sensation localized to your body, what stops you from imagining experiencing an emotion? What self-reflection seems to do (among other things) is it ties the experience to an abstract experience of "me". But so it does with anything else. It's "me" who is gripping the ball, it's "me" who is experiencing pain or any sensation in the body. But what if you can have just the experience of gripping the ball, just the experience of pain and other bodily sensations, or just the experience of feeling and being moved by the emotion?

Norwegian Symphonic Black Metal has an atmosphere and darkness that is entirely unique in its magnitude and depth. I will never forget when I discovered Emperor. There is an artistic vision and visual and imaginative quality that comes with the entire sound that is so elaborate and well-conceived.

I mean, the self-aware self in humans arose as far as we can tell only between 30-70k years ago. There weren't even any anatomical changes attributed to the change. It's quite mysterious how it happened. So if there were no salient anatomical differences between pre-self-aware humans and self-aware humans, do you think pre-self-aware humans had emotions or not? Imagine talking to (I guess they didn't have complex language yet) or meeting such a human. Do you think they would show signs of anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness? How do you know a person is angry? They will show it to you. Look at any animal, perhaps mammals are the best examples, e.g. a cat or a tiger. Are you going to tell me you've never seen an angry cat? "But antropomorphizing". Really? What about a growling bear, or a growling chimpanzee, or a growling... human. "Lol, calm down bro".

How strict? Give us your definition. What about scholars? Things started collapsing as soon the implication that the cause of the energy had to be removed from the Earth somehow had been made. The moderation practices occurred up to that point. After that point, I'm not sure any moderation practices occurred in any structured degree. It was sort of like the rug was pulled from beneath the picnic party and people's bare asses landed in the dirt and the ants started crawling and people started fleeing.

It was a quite structured practice of readers (like moderators) ensuring a minimum level of quality of the members. I'm giving the position that gives credence to the common crowd of people who make such videos as above and also the scholars (the majority) who say the same thing. If you want to somehow make it more strict for some credence of, I guess simply being strict, or perhaps downplaying the different things that may occur in a "weak definition" of a cult, then that's your prerogative. But if you ask me, I don't think defining the Discord described above or the forum described as similar to it as "weakly defined" changes the fact that they may have various dynamics which may warrant some caution and perhaps a label (if not the label "cult" as is).

Leave / take a break (until you get a clear reading, that was a practice as far as I can remember). A bit like if you post while drunk, you get moderated. A bit like if you break the guidelines, you get moderated. A bit like if you get moderated enough times, you get kicked out. Replace "Discord" with "forum" and "harmful energies" with "non-duality" and "one of the most advanced members" with Nahm and you have the ousting of Nahm and other events (Leo's 30-day 5-MeO experiment, Leo's "mean phase"/"psychosis", the fractioning into an accused faction who left to establish a different community and the rest who stayed, Leo's eventual apology for being mean). The difference is that here, the leader and members are still active. If you feel compelled to call what I described a cult, then you might sympathize with the person in the video above calling this place a cult. It essentially boils down to "look at these weird people with these weird beliefs" (which is essentially what most scholars define cults as anyway: social groups with deviant beliefs compared to society, often with a religious nature).

Once upon a time, there was a Discord server lead by a charismatic spiritual person. People talked together about spiritual stuff, had group meditations, things were going great. Then the leader had a series of psychedelic experiences that radically shifted their perspective. Then they started to believe that harmful energies were pervading the server and that they had to find a way to eliminate them. They started screening people for their energy (through readings) and if you had what was considered bad energy, you had to leave or take a break (you certainly couldn't join as a new member). The energy problems worsened over time according to the leader, until they "realized" that one of the higher-ups and most advanced members were purportedly the cause of the energy. Not only that, the leader said that if the energy would not be stopped, it would eventually spread to the entire world and that would be the end of the world as we know it. And when asked how the energy could be stopped, he answered "you know how..." in a somber tone. After that, the Discord fractured and some went with the accused faction, others stayed with the leader, and eventually it all fizzled out (as far as the official server was concerned; who knows which offshoots still exist, and mercy be on their soul) and the leader later re-surfaced in a YouTube video saying they were sorry for the pain they had caused and that they had entered a psychosis at that moment in time. Everybody was free to leave, nobody had to pay anything, nobody was sexually abused (as far as we know; it was an online Discord community). The leader could be challenged, the leader was always open to discussion (as a default, perhaps it deterioated a bit at the end). Was it a cult?

It makes a higher amount of angry expressions in response to a failed/blocked goal compared to a fulfilled goal is what they found in that 2006 study. You're maybe underestimating the complexity of 4-month-old cognition (they can orient their attention, move, grab things) and also that evolutionarily speaking, the self occurred later (way later, millions of years) than emotions. This tracks with the evolution of the cortex "out from" what we today consider the limbic structures. I've argued that cells could have behavioral modes that resemble anger (energy that faciliates breaking through a blockade or boundary), but that would of course not be mediated by a limbic system as in humans. But I guess the question you can ask is are most animals capable of anger? What humans do with their self-reflective ability is they reflect and magnify and echo and reverberate emotional states, such that emotional states can trigger other emotional states through interaction with thought and interpretation. That doesn't mean the emotions are necessarily always born from the reflective capacity. They just often tend to occur in conjuction with them.

I don't know about the nuances here. Anger is frustration on speed dial.

The way causality is claimed for a statistical relationship is when you can determine the timing of the cause and the effect (the cause must precede the effect) and you have a plausible causal mechanism that rules out other potential causal mechanisms. The problem with medicine is that the latter is rarely achieved. You usually at best get competing causal mechanisms. I'm not reducing it to a "scientific lens". But what's a statistic? If I say "ADHD has been especially linked to 32 types of events", or "it's been shown that young boys have a 31% probability to be diagnosed with ADHD in school", what's that called?