Carl-Richard

Do you think if you fast for 18 hours and then eat a gummy candy and a chocolate Müsli bar that you will have trouble focusing or not? ADHD meds are dopaminergic (usually reuptake antagonists). Zinc is a dopamine reuptake antagonist. B-vitamins, vitamin D are involved in dopamine function and synthesis. Protein sources (L-tyrosine, L-phenylalanine) give you the precursors for synthesizing dopamine in your brain. Eating inflammatory foods (e.g. rich in glucose, low in fiber, low in anti-inflammatory compounds) inhibits dopamine synthesis and functioning. The thing about ADHD being a statistical thing and that we're all on the spectrum is that even if you think diet is a minor thing (which it generally isn't), unless you've already optimized for and tried different diets, you might not actually know whether all it takes is to change your diet to no longer qualify for a diagnosis. You could be looking at relatively minor symptoms and you could also be responding more to diet than somebody else (that's also a spectrum).

My friend who hopped on ADHD meds was into intermittent fasting. I watched him break fast with a fucking candy hamburger (a type of gummy candy) and a tiny chocolate Müsli bar. And then he asked me why he felt like shit 30 minutes later. Diet impacts everything, certainly psychological states.

I will bet I could score an ADHD diagnosis if I were to eat 90% of my calories in carbs (and not eating any fruit or greens), perhaps especially from wheat and refined sugars.

I've now seen schizophrenia being treated with diet, so it only doubles down on my notion that you should try to adapt your diet before doing any pharmacological interventions (unless you currently belong strapped to a bed in a hospital). I have a friend who is the most picky eater ever and he jumped on ADHD meds before I could tell him. Optimizing anti-inflammatories, fibers, macros, micros, maybe trying keto.

You weren't very specific about what kind of advice you wanted.

May I introduce you to Maya? 😁

Diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (and the ICD) are fundamentally statistical constructs. If you have five apples in the basket, you don't have it. If you have seven, you have it.

I disagree. Pure being doesn't care about bathrooms very much. But ego minds (and their perceptual engagement) might. You can talk about Leo or you can talk with me. If you want to talk about Leo, we can talk about Leo.

@JoshB You are now using equivocating language. It's unclear what you mean by "you" (or "your mind"). Start using for example "personal you" or "personal mind" for the illusory ego self and "transpersonal you" or "transpersonal Mind" (or Consciousness, the Self) for the ultimate reality.

Bathrooms don't exist. You are labelling an apparent perception (which is itself a label). An apparent perception part of an apparent field of perception (which is also a label). The Absolute is pure being at its root, and the relative seemingly springs out like flowers (which we conveniently label "perception"), and then you label the perceptions with concepts, words. Only then, a notion of a " bathroom" can exist. And the notion of a bathroom being "the only thing that exists, ever, at any place, any time" does not follow from it springing out from the Absolute. Any form imagineable can spring out of the Absolute, anywhere, at any time. It's like looking inside your bathroom and saying only your toilet brush can exist. Why are you drawing a boundary at the toilet brush? Likewise, why are you drawing a boundary at the bathroom?

I have a theory (not a conspiracy theory): the people who get strongly drawn to conspiracy theories are the same people who get drawn to supernatural ideas, like God creating the universe from their own predetermined plan (not simply evolving spontaneously through "natural law"). They are fine with explaining reality top down through an elaborate narrative. There is a seeming plan behind everything, behind world politics, behind alien invasions, behind wars, behind ancient history, and they all connect to a grand meta-narrative of control, of manufacturing, of conscious creating, rather than natural systems acting spontaneously. Those who criticize conspiracy theories point out how that level of organization, of top-down control, is unlikely if not impossible, because of the natural tendency towards spontaneous order and the infeasibility of controlling complex systems. In the "naturalist critique", everybody is a victim of systems, even the supposed people in power, while in the conspiracist's mind, the people in power are the controllers of the systems and the powerless are the victims. Whether one is more correct than the other is actually hard to say, and a naturalist that claims otherwise would then become a conspiracy theorist in their own right, thinking they have the level of insight and knowledge to be able to predict complex systems. As for myself, as a general predisposition, I've noticed I'm fine with either (naturalism or supernaturalism). While for example Bernardo Kastrup says he is strongly opposed to supernaturalism simply as a personal predisposition (which is why he says he sees no point in doing philosophy if nature is not simply naturalistic; no "God" at the top planning it all, intervening into nature and changing the natural course of things). But I would also challenge this idea of naturalism, that you could still try to deduce the "laws" behind God's planning so to speak, and it won't be a completely pointless endeavour, simply a more interesting one. Like trying to understand the psychology of God rather than the "physics" of God.

You're talking about bathrooms and drawers.

It just came off as completely artifical and inorganic, ungrounded, meaningless for the intended context. If you got a conspiracy theory, tell us about it, don't try to construct it after the fact based on some standard of being as milquetoast as possible. Because clearly it ended up being completely artificial and not even fitting the term "conspiracy theory". It's like you fear your father is going to beat you if he finds out you're a bad boy but you want to also sound like you're a bad boy and then you say "I could have probably been a bad boy sometimes". No, you're not a bad boy. Way too nice, way too constrained. A conspiracy theory tends to be a specific narrative, not "something vague might have happened and it was covered up". Something very specific happened and it happened because of this specific reason and covered up for this specific reason. It has some power in the claims it makes, it actually makes a difference if they're true or not. An epistemically responsible approach to a conspiracy theory is to be consistent with the level and strength of evidence, and if you're for example a whistleblower with a lot of inside information, then you might have an epistemically responsible position thinking it is true. Same with how all the Epstein claims have tons of evidence now while before you had Alex Jones and essentially nobody else talking about it.

A life purpose.

That's the most impotent "conspiracy theory" I've ever heard. It's like calling yourself a rapist for thinking about sleeping with the teacher for 1 second.

Sure. The thing is just I can explain your experience too in a way that is consistent with the "narrowing" frame. That doesn't mean you yourself should/would prefer using that frame, because ironically, you're fixated on the mind-expanding aspects (or they're more relevant for you, and you're fixated on explaining your own experience, not other people's).

Then how do you explain why weed often makes people emotionally numb or indifferent? Or why it screws with their short-term memory and also parts of long-term memory? Or why the endocannabinoid system is intimately involved in habit formation and maintenance?

It's like you're not even reading what I'm writing. But that's ok. Had any weed lately? 😂

If you actually inquire into the effects weed has on your mind as you're on it and in the ways I mentioned, I don't think you would disagree with what I said after that. If you go into expanded states, you are narrowed out from narrow states (e.g. negative emotion or mind-racing obsession), get it? This is not just a word game: it explains why sometimes or in some ways you experience a seeming narrowing and sometimes you don't. If you get locked out from your Default Mode Network or long-term memories or your short-term memory goes to complete shit, that's a narrowing, even if it leads to an expanded sense of awareness in another sense. "I feel at one with everything" can still be narrowing if you also can't remember your name. "Then aren't other psychedelics also about narrowing?". Not necessarily as much, because you don't see people on psychedelics as much lying on the couch eating cheetos every hour of the day (habitual narrowing) or indeed getting addicted to it and having to puff it everyday. The incredibly tricky part of weed addiction is that you can get fixated on weed itself, and it gets exacerbated by the cognitively fixating effects of weed, which creates an evil reinforcing loop.

I've been in both camps: using weed everyday like a crutch and using weed once and then having a full blown ego death experience. Weed is good at magnifying whatever is there (other psychedelics are too but in their own way, and they're perhaps more rude sometimes pulling the rug from under you). If you're a manic guy stuck in his mind, weed will magnify that. If you're a couch potato stuck in your couch, weed will magnify that. If you're a non-dual or psychedelically expanded guy, weed will magnify that. What weed seems to do is it narrows your cognitive lightcone. Your access to memories becomes less wide ("dissociation"), your focus becomes less fluctuating (unless you are in a state of paranoia or mania, which weed will magnify by focusing in on that paranoia or mania). It is associated with the neurochemical system of habit, which is by definition a narrowing of cognition. So whatever is there, or whatever you focus on, or whatever habit you have, weed will focus in on that. And as for the emotionally numbing effect of weed: the way negative emotions work is they are supposed to break habit, interrupt usual processing and make you shift your focus. "Look here, danger — fear, move, retreat", "look here, a problem — rumination, access memory storage", "look, uncertainty — anxiety, predict future scenarios", "look, an obstacle — engage anger, focus on obstacle and eliminate it". Weed just makes you like "whatever man". Most of these things receive a general dampening, unless of course you get focused/fixated (obsessed) on any one of them.

Have a goal that never gets fulfilled.

It's like my friend said: you become a bit like a grandma.

Ego grasping for what it thinks is the ultimate until it dies.

AI allows for laziness because it's so powerful, but you can use AI in a not lazy way. And imagine how powerful that makes you.

If I were to point out corruption, I would never shut up.