I am starting to think that basic socialization is crucial for mental health

[zurew]

7 minutes ago, The Crocodile said:

That's why I said if a child grew up without being socialized out of mystical and magical experiences and without being lineated into a single fascistic perception, the child would be gazing off into other realms and interacting with entities and energies which are of a far superior plane. And there's no contradiction between this and human psychology and human biology.

Can you explain why would that be the case and what you are basing this on?

Whats the issue with saying that the child wouldn't develop spiritually on its own and that the child wouldn't care about spiritual development?

Edited February 15 by zurew

[The Crocodile]

@zurew I meant if a person grew up totally by themselves they would naturally spiritually develop, but because of the socialization we have they're forced into a particular low state of perception and unexpanded perception suitable to modern socialization.

[zurew]

5 minutes ago, The Crocodile said:

I meant if a person grew up totally by themselves they would naturally spiritually develop, but because of the socialization we have they're forced into a particular low state of perception and unexpanded perception suitable to modern socialization

Yeah I understand that, but I was questioning this premise: 

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if a person grew up totally by themselves they would naturally spiritually develop

What do you base that claim on? It seems to me that a person growing up totally by themselves would be just as likely (if not more) to get obsessed with survival and to not care about spirituality at all.

[The Crocodile]

41 minutes ago, zurew said:

What do you base that claim on? It seems to me that a person growing up totally by themselves would be just as likely (if not more) to get obsessed with survival and to not care about spirituality at all.

They would be able to perceive other worlds and entities, because they never would have "grown out of" their monster under the bed or Santa Claus phase, nobody to decondition them from it. And they would have less of an internal dialogue, so their perception would be less stunted and less limited.

The survival we had hundreds of thousands of years ago hunting, exploring, and camping is actually more conducive to seeing spirits. Because you're not fretting over all the horrible personal problems you have in your life and grievances with society, you're not pretending to understand reality using the intellect or science, you're just existing and discovering things. You just go into the forest, and the forest spirits are there.

[ivory]

Isolation is extremely unhealthy. We need love and connection to be whole. We need the challenge that comes from relationship in order to fully grow. Relationships are challenging which is why many people avoid them. But without challenge, life becomes dull and meaningless.

We get to help and be helped, we are offered opportunities that we wouldn't otherwise have, we get to play, love, learn, and exchange ideas.

Depression, anxiety, and addiction are all symptoms of loneliness and isolation.

I spent years isolated because I didn't fit in. This happened at various stages in my life. I suffered from all of the symptoms I mentioned above.

In my most recent stint, pre 2020, that I reconnected with people and came to realize the importance first hand. It took years of therapy to heal from those times. I have come to realize that relationships are the most important thing one can really have in life.

In sickness, you can lose everything. The only thing that will be there for you in hard times are the people you invested time and energy into.

Cultivating healthy, meaningful relationships is well worth the time and effort.

I don't buy into all this nonsense that we can navigate life or get through hard times on our own. We need others to both survive and thrive.

[zurew]

16 hours ago, The Crocodile said:

They would be able to perceive other worlds and entities, because they never would have "grown out of" their monster under the bed or Santa Claus phase, nobody to decondition them from it. And they would have less of an internal dialogue, so their perception would be less stunted and less limited.

The survival we had hundreds of thousands of years ago hunting, exploring, and camping is actually more conducive to seeing spirits. Because you're not fretting over all the horrible personal problems you have in your life and grievances with society, you're not pretending to understand reality using the intellect or science, you're just existing and discovering things. You just go into the forest, and the forest spirits are there.

Thats one hypothesis, but there can be a lot of other hypothesis that can explain the data of "seeing spirits" without concluding that it was natural incliniation. 

But all of this seem to be completely tangential to op's problem/question. Because seeing spirits is compatible with being miserable and with suffering. 

But its not even about how you grow up, the question is in the context of - given that one grew up in a society and lives in a society, can one live and be completely alone all the time and have good mental health?

But regardless what the actual answer to that question is, other than relying on our intuitions (that are informed by our biases  and by limited data that we are aware of) and providing just so stories, it would be more fruitful if people here would argue providing studies to back up their claims.

 

[The Crocodile]

2 hours ago, zurew said:

Thats one hypothesis, but there can be a lot of other hypothesis that can explain the data of "seeing spirits" without concluding that it was natural incliniation. 

It's not a hypothesis.

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Because seeing spirits is compatible with being miserable and with suffering. 

Not really, suffering is a result of not having real magic.

The modern state of socialization is not natural at all to humans.

[zurew]

35 minutes ago, The Crocodile said:

It's not a hypothesis.

So when a given data can be accounted for by multiple different hypothesis , how do you disambiguate between them and how do you check which one is the case?

35 minutes ago, The Crocodile said:

Not really, suffering is a result of not having real magic.

The modern state of socialization is not natural at all to humans.

Yes really, there are multiple people who claim to see spirits and some of them are absolutely miserable.

If the reply is that those are not real psychics then thats not gonna be interesting because thats just gonna beg the question. 

 

Also I dont know why "naturality" is brought up, whats the relevance of what is natural and what is not? Its a loaded and vague term and it is often times used either in a meaningless way or it is used in a loaded way where it is assumed that everything that is natural is automatically good.

Edited February 16 by zurew

[The Crocodile]

19 minutes ago, zurew said:

Also I dont know why "naturality" is brought up, whats the relevance of what is natural and what is not? Its a loaded and vague term and it is often times used either in a meaningless way or it is used in a loaded way where it is assumed that everything that is natural is automatically good.

Case closed. Socialization being "natural" does not mean humans require it.

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So when a given data can be accounted for by multiple different hypothesis , how do you disambiguate between them and how do you check which one is the case?

A rock you're looking at is not a hypothesis. God is not a hypothesis.

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Yes really, there are multiple people who claim to see spirits and some of them are absolutely miserable.

If the reply is that those are not real psychics then thats not gonna be interesting because thats just gonna beg the question. 

There may be anomalies. Someone can have anger or sadness while experiencing real magic, but there's an underlying bliss always. It's not the suffering endemic to how people live nowadays.

The type of magic I mean they'll be gazing off into fully visible other realms, energies, and be in a totally heightened nonlinear perception that includes this one as a single perceptual point. Not that they're "visualizing" or fantasizing spirits. That's the distinction.

Edited February 16 by The Crocodile

[zurew]

40 minutes ago, The Crocodile said:

A rock you're looking at is not a hypothesis. God is not a hypothesis.

Sure nouns are not statements and they cant have a truth value (they are neither true nor false), but earlier you didn't just give a noun, you gave a declarative statement that has a truth value. Under my view a hypothesis is just a proposition (declarative statement that can be true or false) that is used to explain something.

So yes, under this semantics what you provided earlier was a hypothesis or more like a series of statements where each statement can have a truth value.

Edited February 16 by zurew

[The Crocodile]

@zurew The truth value is Absolutely True, ie. not subject to scientific thinking. Same thing with God. I could give techniques that could be used to verify it though, just like how somebody could verify God through direct experience.

[Carl-Richard]

23 hours ago, The Crocodile said:

That's why I said if a child grew up without being socialized out of mystical and magical experiences and without being lineated into a single fascistic perception, the child would be gazing off into other realms and interacting with entities and energies which are of a far superior plane. And there's no contradiction between this and human psychology and human biology.

I'm not sure if this is possible because such a scenario is to my knowledge unprecedented (a human growing up and surviving with zero socialization). We know that severe neglect leads to severe brain abnormalities and reduction in function, problems with emotional regulation, etc. But it's also hard to decouple those real-life examples from abuse and physical neglect (lack of nutrition, etc.).

But it's an interesting question indeed and maybe some mad scientist with zero ethical scruples could answer that question (not that I'm encouraging that, of course). But nevertheless, we're now dealing with the outmost extremes of human existence. Likewise, properly integrating mystical experiences, at least in this stage of society, is also at the extremes, and again, I can't find any real-life examples of that existing without some prior socialization.

So putting the extremes aside, socialization seems very central to creating happy, healthy and functional humans. You could of course go the first 15-18 years of your life socializing and then stop and not necessarily "die", but again, extremes aside, that too will probably lead to quite a few less-than-fortunate outcomes.

 

23 hours ago, The Crocodile said:

I don't think he wrote much. You're probably wrong and thinking of something somebody else wrote about him.

He wrote some things and then somebody else collected, translated and wrote about those things.

 

23 hours ago, The Crocodile said:

Yes. He's a conman and a scumbag, and a pretender.

which is not the same as being retarded in this case.

Edited February 16 by Carl-Richard

[Nilsi]

On 16.2.2025 at 3:14 PM, Carl-Richard said:

I'm not sure if this is possible because such a scenario is to my knowledge unprecedented (a human growing up and surviving with zero socialization). We know that severe neglect leads to severe brain abnormalities and reduction in function, problems with emotional regulation, etc. But it's also hard to decouple those real-life examples from abuse and physical neglect (lack of nutrition, etc.).

But it's an interesting question indeed and maybe some mad scientist with zero ethical scruples could answer that question (not that I'm encouraging that, of course). But nevertheless, we're now dealing with the outmost extremes of human existence. Likewise, properly integrating mystical experiences, at least in this stage of society, is also at the extremes, and again, I can't find any real-life examples of that existing without some prior socialization.

So putting the extremes aside, socialization seems very central to creating happy, healthy and functional humans. You could of course go the first 15-18 years of your life socializing and then stop and not necessarily "die", but again, extremes aside, that too will probably lead to quite a few less-than-fortunate outcomes.

 

He wrote some things and then somebody else collected, translated and wrote about those things.

 

which is not the same as being retarded in this case.

I once watched a documentary about a girl who had been severely neglected, along with about a dozen siblings. They all lived in their parents house, but the parents would only return every few months to restock food. In the meantime, the children were left to their own devices playing together, relieving themselves wherever they happened to be, and even eating grass and dirt to survive.

She described her experience as an existence without individual identity, where she and her siblings functioned as a single, undifferentiated entity, immersed in filth and survival. It was a state of being that was almost psychedelic an altered consciousness born out of deprivation, where the boundaries of self dissolved into a collective, primal existence. In a twisted way, it had a kind of mystical quality, as if they were experiencing reality in a raw, pre-individualized form, stripped of social conditioning or personal agency.

I think it was somewhere in this documentary: 

 

[Letho]

On 08/02/2025 at 10:10 AM, Something Funny said:

I just went bowling and then went to a bar with my co-workers. Nothing crazy, just spending time together and chatting about random things.

And I just feel like living now. It is like I am filled with natural motivation for life.

I was hesitant if I should go, I was actually regretting promising to go and wished that I could just spend some time at home as usual. But now I am super happy that I did.

I didn't even contribute to the conversation all that much (although I've contributed more then I usually do, and I think I did really well in general).

If someone reading this is struggling with depression and anxiety, I think this might be a super simple, almost magic pill solution to it. You don't need to become a pickup artist and turn it into some crazy self-improvement journey. I think that simply finding people to go out with once in a while, in a casual, friendly way, can be life changing.

 

 

@Something Funny

So I don't know the research on this however the pattern I've noticed between homeless people and their perceived "Craziness" (i.e. talking to themselves as if they're talking to others - imaginary voices but not necessarily schizophrenia) is loneliness or rather the absence of socialisation. 

My connections tend to be spot on so we'll just go with it. 

We are a social species, this means that the dominant metrics of what determines the evolutionary pressures of 'psyche' and its order versus order will be inherently social. Simple rule, more socialisation will lead to a greater stratification of psyche and less socialisation weakened complex structures that increase the likelihood of anomalous regressions that lead to outcomes that mirror increasingly abnormal behaviours especially when they're not countered by comparable orders of pressure. For example, there's going to be a completely different biosocial outcome to psyche between a twin study of one twin that has increasingly less socialisation with zero evolutionary pressure in another direction and another twin that has the same increasingly less socialisation but has by orders of magnitude greater mental stimulation. In the second case, from schizoid to autism to other forms of schizotypal byproducts we can sometimes see even positive outgrowths connected to this alternate evolutionary pressure.  In the first example though in returning to my theory, the very fact of the regression resulting in 'talking to imaginary voices' is implicative of the social areas of the brain malfunctioning and slowly weaking its distinction between self and other, as well as imagination and reality, as such, this outcome becomes so obvious as to be incidental, rather than a grand revelation even though I'm the first person I know of that's come up with this interpretation. Which I have no doubt, is spot on. 

Increasingly more intelligent socialisation exercises the distinction between areas and their symmetry, aka empathy, which is the bridge to the continual unification of the distinctions between self and other, imagination and reality, the generation of meaning in the increasingly more layered relationship between objectivity, subjectivity and phenomenological connection to other. More simply, we rely on socialisation to exercise our relationship between our internal and external world, that without, most do not have the mental independence to train what has evolutionary become our only means of establishing a 'truth loop' with reality. That, without this feedback, internal adaptation wanes and the lack of evolutionary pressure for internal perceptions to draw feedback from external testing results in increasingly more disorganised outgrowths of our 'inner self-talk' that overlaps with our biological processors where we internalise our social worlds into bonds that forge our sense of identity. 'Crazy' becomes the only thing that makes sense because 'making sense' at the end of the day, is purely the objective overlap between the mergence of these processes that we subjectively experience as 'truth'. 

Moral of the story?

Go out and social.

Be one of the cool one's and train your brain in unique ways outside the social norm as well.