Carl-Richard

Last night, I had a dream that I was being chased by several tornadoes. Then today I read about the tornado incident in Kentucky with an estimated death toll of 100 people, which is the worst tornado event in the history of Kentucky. About two weeks ago, I had a dream where PsychedSubstance got kicked out from his own house. Today he released this video: The night my dad's boss died from drowning, I had a nightmare where I was being chased by a ghost, fearing for my life. I usually never have those types of nightmares. What is this?

When things get sufficiently removed from oneself into the past, we start to view it more through aesthetic than the brutal factual reality. We see this with the Vikings, pirates, Romans, Spartans. We start viewing them as cool, even noble somehow, perhaps despite the factual reality, and we even identify with them. Look at the Norwegian football fans during the World Cup role-playing as Vikings with their "Ro!" chant. The Vikings were essentially what Islamic terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaida are today. Violent, ruthless killers, slaughtering everyone in their way, doing surprise attacks on larger cities and settlements. Norwegians are terrified of Islamic terrorists, yet they identify with the Vikings. The distinction is the separation of the far past and the immediate threat towards their survival. Remove the immediate threat to survival and you start viewing them in a different light. "But their ideology is different, that's why Norwegians don't like Islamic terrorists". Yes, different from their own, so it threatens their survival because it threathens them now. But is it really different from the ideology of the Vikings if you look at the pure structure rather than the content? Violent Islamic jihadism is not really that dissimilar from violent Norse paganism. Also, pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers, who couldn't be more different from oneself ideologically, also get the aesthetic treatment. There is even the idea that they were somehow enlightened or peaceful, living in perfect harmony with nature with egalitarian and matriarchical tribal structures, when that probably couldn't be further from the truth. This image crashes immediately once you replace "pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers" with "uncontacted jungle savages", and you see how when you meet these people in the present, you will end up with an arrow through your eye before anything else you can "gather" from them (talk about "aesthetics"). And of course, pirates get the Johnny Depp treatment, the Romans get the "every movie ever made about Ancient Rome" treatment, Spartans get the movie "300" treatment, etc. It wouldn't surprise me if 1000 years into the future and if violent Islamic jihadism has somehow become a thing of the past, Norwegians (or whatever they're called) start viewing violent Islamic jihadists as something cool, a bit like pirates, or the Vikings.

It's the distinction between identification (with form) and form itself. Ego death breaks the identification where some forms are identified as self and others as not-self, but after the break of the identification, form may remain. It's just all you. And if there is no form, that is also all you. In reality, there can only be said to be you, but when you want to talk about what has shape, what has form, what changes, what remains silent, you can talk about form vs formless.

IQ is probably more about thinking vs feeling in general (and also intuition vs sensing in general). But I could also go into extraverted/introverted functions (I do that at the end for thinking and intuition functions). Thinking (logically) is about stringing multiple things together, so it's quantitative, so more, faster, bigger, is a lot of what IQ is about. Feeling is more qualitative and you can just give an answer based on a feeling and that's it. Intuition (in the Jungian typology sense) is about seeing and "receiving" abstract patterns, a form of pattern recognition ("what links water/liquid and vapor? Phase transitions! (N) Because water/liquid and vapor are just different phases of the same substance (T)"). Sensing is just picking up on concrete information from the environment either directly or through memory, which also involves pattern recognition, but your thinking is embedded in that particular environment somehow ("we put that screw into that thing here, see, then it fits (S). Because the screw supports the weight of the leg (T)"). You could say intuition tends towards IQ more than sensing because it deals with often more complex patterns and just more patterns in general because abstractions don't need to be tied to something directly in front of you and can grow outwards like a tree and can connect to other things not currently right in front of you. So it tends towards more quantitative. As for introverted vs extroverted, I would bet on extraverted intuition as most conducive because it explores rather than reduces. And also introverted thinking because it's more concerned about consistency for its own sake rather than for some pragmatic or realistic real-world goal, so it can go exploring endlessly together with extraverted intuition in the abstract where most quantity is found. In other words, ENTP/INTP > INTJ/ENTJ > the rest (I wouldn't want to go into tertiary functions or extraverted vs introverted sensing or feeling functions for the sake of everybody's time).

But most people haven't unlocked those last 20% of health, sobriety and restedness "I'm not a health 'optimizer', I'm a health '-maxxer'" - C.M., 1994-2026 (adapted the quote of course ).

Some co-student of mine once told me she qualified for Mensa (in a work group with others which was kinda "low EQ" if you can call it that), and I wanted to respond "if any of you really wanted to join Mensa, you most probably could" (implying you could practice a lot to become better at the tests or simply increase your IQ functionally in more organic ways).

IQ in a functional sense, as in the actual performance on the actual test were you to take it. Try taking an IQ test while constantly inhaling nitrous oxide, while you have pneumonia, diarrhea, haven't eaten for 8 hours or you just crashed your blood glucose or neuroinflamed yourself with cake, or you fried your fast food preservative-saturated leftovers to a black crisp in the worst PFAS-ridden leaky pan decimating your neuronal oxygen intake. But state over longer times leads to structure differences. If you are at 150 IQ functionally speaking and you engage with 150 IQ content, you will have structure that accommodates that after a while (not only as crystallized intelligence but also fluid intelligence structure as well). If you feed your brain what it needs to fire quickly (which is what diet, exercise, etc., does), and you teach yourself over time to engage in activities that makes it fire more quickly (which is e.g. what N-back does, or just reading or thinking complicated/complex things), naturally you will make structurally adaptations for it to fire even more quickly. And then when you miss a meal or some days of exercise, you will still have those structural changes there. We know doing things like meditation, N-back training does change brain structure, so doing it "better" (under more optimal conditions) would just change it more in that optimal direction. Lifting better increases muscles more than lifting worse; brain training better (using your mind better) makes it adapt in that direction more than brain training worse.

True. It also varies based on state, e.g. if you eat some trashy food or you stop working out for a while (or if you're really tired or you had a superb night's sleep). I'm convinced diet, exercise and brain training techniques like N-Back and of course meditation can bump your IQ up or down with 20-30%. If I were to rank it, probably N-Back and Sprint training / HIIT would be tied first place, then meditation and weight training and moderate-low intensity cardio, then diet (unless you're eating absolute poison, then it's #1).

IQ helps you see through people's bullshit. But it also helps you defend your own bullshit. You're easily bullshitted if you can't process a sentence efficiently (or simply hold larger pieces of information in your mind). IQ predicts things like reading comprehension. If you can't read a sentence without struggling to understand what it says, you have deficit in dealing with information, and no "EQ" or "true intelligence" will save you there. It's also a sort of false dichotomy to separate IQ from EQ. If you have low IQ, you tend to have low executive functioning, and that impacts your emotional regulation. I just watched a guy on an entertainment TV show do a math test, he also scored a two-digit IQ in an earlier episode, and when they revealed the results, even when he knew he was bad at math and has always been bad at math, he had an emotional breakdown when the other people on the show (colleagues) made jokes about him being dense. You would perhaps expect a guy with high "EQ" to say "yeah, I'm bad at math, whatchu gonna do?" and perhaps say something clever in response, being aware of their strengths and weaknesses, but instead, it was quite an embarrassing situation.

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).

He got Sneako to cosplay as a muslim for a living and now everybody wants to deport him 🫢

Just had a thought, I'll respond to you @Jirh later when I have time. We should be aware of how we can frame the same things different ways. For example, a healer who can put their hands on someone and seemingly speed up healing, in the materialist epistemic paradigm, they will say "the sensual touch induces endorphinergic signalling which synergizes with the placebo effect which increases the innate regenerative mechanisms of the body". It's a very roundabout and "inside/outside" way of putting it. Meanwhile, a psychic will say "the healing energy leads to healing". It's a more elegant way of putting it; both may agree on the underlying effect, but they describe it differently. Similar with explaining precognition or telepathy with "very subtle implicit memory which the subject is unaware of having but which affects their inferences". Again the inside/outside split and hiding the "non-localitiness" in concepts like "subtle" and "unaware of having". Compare it to simply "you picked up information non-locally", again, much more elegant, and it explains the same phenomena which one can agree that is happening. This "lack of elegance" of the materialistic explanations indicate they are "epicycles", i.e. sometimes desperate attempts of the paradigm to deal with anomalies that challenges it. They are at least honest and not 'too' deceptive unlike jumping to ideas like "every unlikely event should be expected", as if it doesn't defeat any epistemic paradigm that tries to make non-trivial distinctions (any epistemic paradigm that tries to engage with probability and uncertainty rationally instead of dismissing it, i.e. not pure non-duality, ultimate skepticism, epistemic nihilism). Same with the concept of "real" (in it being a frame). What we really mean by real (as opposed to "hallucinatory") is that it's somehow inter-subjectively corroborated and consistent. Notions like physical space "out there" and actual things happening in a localized matrix are concepts we use to "summarize" our felt notion of real, how most things we experience as real seem to relate to each other. It's fundamentally a frame. And like I've alluded to, there are other phenomena we feel like can touch on the "real" category as well, that break with these notions of space and locality, but still fit the inter-subjective and consistent qualities associated with "real". That's what I felt I uncovered with these three original dreams fitting the five criteria which notably includes being inter-subjectively corroborated in terms of place / time / type of events matching. And this was me being "nudged out of my sleep" so to speak (that's also a pun) in the sense that I was currently inside the materialist epistemic frame and I experienced a radical break with it. But then when you're open to the alternative frame, you're more open to simply use it where it seems to fit, because you're not trying to "prove" its existence or validity. You're just following your sense of what you think is real or not. That's what I did with some of my more liberal dream interpretations. But those I also qualify with what my level of credence is, i.e. the level of uncertainty I feel, like I do with all other kinds of observations and inferences.

My boy Bernardo Kastrup, I just realized he is an ex-director of ASML, the largest company in Europe. And now he is about to land a 100m dollar fund for his new AI company Euclyd. Boy's brain is out of this world. 1:47:55 And how does he get that funding? Well, currently the leading chip manufacturer for AI is NVIDIA, and they make graphics cards designed for gaming. They were not designed with AI in mind, so they are very inefficient according to these startups that want to corner that market. Bernardo postulates their chips can reduce electricity usage by ~100x compared to NVIDIAs chips. Interesting times ahead not just for AI but for idealism and non-duality considering the seats of power and influence some of these people inhabit.

Consider how few things you need before you consider entertaining something as real (the car scenario, the sister lying scenario, the helicopter scenario) despite the statistical irreducibility of the universe. Then compare that with my five criteria. We're always just providing a few cents of epistemic currency in our everyday life yet we entertain it as real. So it's not surprising that when we have to push back against a multiple-century old culture that suppresses dissent through all possible shady means, it comes off as less convincing. But you just have to remind yourself of your actual epistemic standards that you use yourself in everyday life to see through that. Remind yourself of your "common sense".

You don't use common sense in a philosophical discussion (which is what I responded to, and now you added "rationality" for some reason as if I was responding to that), you use rationality. Nevertheless, instead of lecturing me on common sense and rationality, engage with the point where I claim to be rational (converging sensory streams). That's the crux of the issue. You did this later in your responses and I will address that. The reason I started entertaining them as real was because I had three of them in quick succession and they all matched the five criteria closely. I started to see some consistency to the phenomena. As for comparing it to "material phenomena", you could imagine someone seeing a helicopter once in a remote village, and if two or more people agreed on it happening in the same place at the same time, the fact that they both saw it adds credence to the reality of the phenomena when they tell it to the rest of the village. Then another time, they both saw a plane, and another time, they saw a drone. And by that point, seeing three cases of such machinery, they would perhaps start to conclude that somebody has built an airbase close to their village. So the reality of a certain phenomena was inferred based on three occurrences and involving convergence of sensory streams. Claims outside a prevailing paradigm routinely get called pseudoscience. That's nothing new, Kuhn has shown us that. Newton was called the equivalent of pseudoscience ("occult") for his "spooky action at a distance" notion of gravity; Galileo was dismissed as suggesting a "foolish and absurd" proposition with his heliocentrism challenging geocentrism. The fact is most people who call psychic phenomena pseudoscience don't actually bother to read the actual studies because they think the pseudoscience label (which they just got from somebody else, through perhaps wikipedia) basically already invalidates it (it's a very culturally strong and stigmatising label). Rupert Sheldrake has an interesting study on telephone telepathy you can read. That it's "the biggest" is a feeling you have, I don't think you have a number on that. Regardless, if it had happened to people I live in close proximity to and I only relied on say the local printed newspaper, would that change your mind or will you still default to law of big numbers? I could've lived in a nearby village in Kentucky where tornadoes did not touch down and I could be safely asleep, dreamt about it at night, then read about it in the local newspaper. My dad's boss I could've actually read in a local printed newspaper (had I been visiting my hometown); I just happened to read it online. "But global interactions make the statistics more likely". Yep. And many of the dreams that I interpret as likely psychic are also more local to my life. If a law says everything is possible, you can't use it to judge whether something is possible or not (whether psychic phenomena is possible or not). You can use it to account for everything and nothing and you have no standard for when it does not apply, so it's not possible to falsify when it applies or to falsify anything being possible with it. So it's a cop-out mechanism if you use it as a way to "prove" psychic phenomena cannot be the case. You have not specified why exactly it makes psychic phenomena not be the case, over anything else. So it can only be used as a way to weigh a proposition (and in a very vague way, not something you can actually count), not decisively disprove it. "Impossibly unlikely" is an informal way of saying "very very unlikely". "Pre-rational is when use rational argumentation as response but not when use condescending emoji and no concomitant explanation as response".

Why are you talking about other people? I'm talking about my ideas about psychic phenomena. Well, you're not really engaging with the points about why it can be rational (multiple converging sensory streams). You're invoking "common sense" and calling me "too smart to not know". Could call that pre-rational as well. Why are multiple converging sensory streams not a valid epistemic tool for you (or are they)? It's in fact also common sense that it is. Except in studies like those done by Rupert Sheldrake and others. Still, again, you default to the best explanation without using controlled experiments all the time. Yep, that's another thing to factor into the calculation. But people also believed in psychic phenomena 500 years ago. And for that, you will go to some other point which we will also have to factor into the calculation. But again, we're still just factoring things into the calculation. We're sharpening the level of credence we're giving to each hypothesis. Red herring / equivocating on "reproduce"? But ok. Yes, because most people agree that this is a good explanation. It's harder when you have to challenge their metaphysical assumptions and they start pulling up unfalsifiable auxiliary hypotheses like law of big numbers, selection bias, etc. (which again, can also be used to "doubt" your car explanation). And that's why it's an unfalsifiable hypothesis and it can be used by sophists to defend the biggest of turds (the law of the truly big turds). You can defend your turds with unfalsfiable hypotheses or you can start to measure one turd up against another, through ideas like converging sensory streams. Perhaps start exploring that discussion tree rather than repeating the unfalsifiable one. Using post-Popperian philosophy (and cognitive science) to defend one's view, is that pre-rational? What did Popper call himself? 🤔

Ok mr illusionist, but if we grant that we can call the balloon probably "more" real based on independent observers converging, then we can apply this to dreams as well. Again, it's not to say it "proves" it's real, but it adds credence.

Imagine I'm looking out from a window and I say I can see a balloon. Another guy looking out their own window say they can also see a balloon, in the same place, at the same time. Now, when the second person says they also see the balloon, we think that adds credence to the fact that the balloon I'm seeing is real (i.e. I'm not just hallucinating it). Meanwhile, when I dream about them seeing the balloon in the same place at the same time, I'm supposedly just dreaming something random and it's just a coincidence. I'm supposedly not accessing the actual reality. The fact that the person also saw the balloon in real life does not somehow add credence to the fact that the balloon I saw in the dream could be real. Because, I guess "sensory organs"? Ok.

Weird break in the chronology of the responses, and I'm not sure how that answers the question, but ok. When I feel like it. When I feel that I'm convinced, when I feel that it's the best explanation. Same as when I'm convinced somebody is lying or somebody stole my car. It depends a lot on the situation and it's not 100% knowledge. I'm not 100% certain. But there is a difference between feeling convinced and not, and I'm generally convinced psychic phenomena are real; I'm convinced they're the best explanation for many things. Explanations that jump to unfalsifiable cognitive science heuristics while clammering onto localistic assumptions like one's life depends on it, just to exclude all and any possibility of psychic phenomena, are not very convincing for me. The thing is I'm fine with using localistic explanations too, but not when they seem unreasonable. When you adopt the absolutist perspective, you tend to run into problems. I don't see the relevance. Perhaps you're schizophrenic. You can't necessarily reproduce somebody stealing your car but you will still default to what you think is the best explanation. Because again, we use other means of judging reality than "causality" or controlled experimentation. It's not just unlikely, like guessing the exact result of the World Cup final the day before or flipping heads 11 times in a row or something. It's something else. How many times has PsychedSubstance been kicked out of his own house? Perhaps it's never happened before in the history of the universe? So how unlikely is it to dream about something concrete like that at the same time as it is happening in real life when that thing has never happened before in the history of the universe? Impossibly unlikely. I'd like to hear why you think it's pre-rational and not post-rational, not just you asserting it. Interesting that your mind went to "post-rational" though. I'm not "psychic" but I know a thing or two about cognitive heuristics. "Common sense" does not qualify as an argument in a discussion about epistemology/philosophy. Why is causality important but not convergence of different sensory streams? Smart enough to not default to "common sense" (whatever that is) in a discussion about philosophy. Not defaulting to "common sense" in a discussion about philosophy, definitely "faulty reasoning". Expecting someone else to default to it, definitely "not" faulty reasoning.

I mean those have all won earlier, yes 😆

Ascended as Top G, arrested as Bottom G.

Why? Ah, appeal to "common sense", the ultimate auxiliary hypothesis.

Why is "that doesn't happen usually" relevant? And "loosely resembling" is interesting: I gave you an analogy for the dreams I've experienced. I literally experienced 1. being chased 2. by tornadoes (and 3. the tornadoes literally sucked me up at times, and 4. I felt like I was about to die); all of these things happened in real life. I literally experienced 1. PsychedSubstance, 2. being kicked out, 3. of his own house, and 4. he was distressed; all of these things happened in real life. In the analogy, you were 1. driving a car and 2. you got a scratch on the paint and 3. you were distressed. Did the analogy not feel convincing? Imagine if I had been dreaming 1. you writing a math equation and 2. the math equation involved the circumference of a circle, and that actually happened in real life at the same time. What would you think then? How so? What level of consistency is that? What level of consistency is satisfying for you? I explained exactly the difference between classical cause and effect and the analogous concept I was suggesting; I did not suggest they were the same. The point is that we use causality to give credence to the reality of something, but that is not the only thing we use to do that (like with multiple sense streams being coherent). If I had instead said "I dreamt you writing something and I felt like that actually happened in real life" but we can't confirm it being temporally parallel and it's very generalized/vague ("writing something") and we can't confirm a match in emotional state, then of course there would be less credence, but the crucial point is exactly that: it's always just less or more. At what point it crosses the threshold of being believable or thoroughly convincing, that's up to you. And of course, you weigh it up against things like law of large numbers, base rate neglect, but that's a calculation you do. These things just add or subtract credence to something.

The problem is you have no standard for judging when it does. When you propose the reason for why your car is not in the garage or your sister allegedly lied to you, how does that escape the law of large numbers, base rate neglect, selection bias? If you have no standard for when your hypothesis is disproven or invalidated, you're just as bad off as the hypothesis you're supposedly invalidating. This is called an ad hoc rescue/hypothesization, and it's used regularly when paradigms like materialism are challenged: when your hypotheses seem less tenable, fall back on unfalsifiable auxiliary hypotheses.

@Jirh Imagine if I had dreamt you drove a car and then you found out you got a scratch on the paint and this was highly concerning to you, at the exact same time as this actually happened to you in real life. Imagine if I had never dreamt about somebody getting a scratch on their car before, and that when I dreamt it, I woke up when it got the most intense. What would you think if I told you that? Content - analogous/match. Content being a previous experience in the dream state (being more likely to come from my mind) - not the case. Time of occurrence - match. Emotional significance (you were highly concerned; I dreamt that you were highly concerned; I woke up as it was a nightmare) - analogous/match. These criteria start to resemble how you judge "normal" physical perceptual phenomena to be real. If you can confirm it through multiple sensory channels (the phenomena resemble each other and mirror each other temporally and behaviorally e.g. through sight and touch), you start to entertain them as real. For example, an increase in luminosity of an object corresponding to an increase in felt heat, you become more convinced that the object did indeed change state and it wasn't something you simply were imagining. So perhaps if I experience it through a dream at the same time as you experience it in real-life, from the perspective of God, us two being its two different sensory organs, God would conclude that its experience of reality is now more real than if only one of us had experienced it (given the human perceptual 'logic') 😆 We can also start to tease out an analogy for causality. Causality is inferred when you have two events ("cause" and "effect") that follow each other in time and the cause seems necessarily to imply the effect (or there is some mechanism or property that explains the relationship). Instead of the cause preceding the effect in time, we have the "cause" and "effect" being mirrored in time (parallel). Similarly, instead of a mechanism explaining a connection or relationship, the experiences are mirror images (they have the same content). So while we cannot think of causality in a more classical mechanistic sense, we can think of an analogous way of lending credence to the reality of the phenomena: A doesn't precede and explain B. A co-arises with and mirrors B.