Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 3

I like sharing examples with you of the vast genetic diversity of humans, hence the topic of genetic freakery. So here's another example. There exist people who get zero pleasure from music.

Here's an article that studies this interesting case.

This guy devoted his life — thousands of hours — trying to answer the question of What is consciousness? He compiled a list of 325 different theories of consciousness. He makes an air of being scientific, rigorous, and objective about it. But in the end all his scientific logic failed him, as you can see here.

Skip to timestamp: 2:42:23

That's the stupid logic of scientism.

Smart people cling to science to avoid self-deception but this ironically makes them self-deceived and they have no awareness of this simple trap.

Yes, psychedelics are necessary to understand Consciousness. You cannot understand psychedelics by reasoning about them from your armchair. The one thing this guy needed to do to understand Consciousness, he did not do. The ego-mind is brilliant at making a show of understanding Consciousness without doing what is actually necessary to understand it. Studying and rigorously cataloguing 325 theories of consciousness sounds like it's a good idea, but it isn't. It's a distraction from the real work. 325 theories just ends up drowning out the Truth in endless human noise, but it looks impressive to a scientific audience. If you wish to understand Consciousness you have to be careful to do the stuff that actually matters and avoid all the stuff that doesn't.

One dose of 5-MeO-DMT is worth more than studying 325 theories of consciousness for 10 years. And you could easily demonstrate that to yourself by doing it. That's real science.

Clinging to science, logic, and objectivity will not save you. That's the key epistemic insight.

One of the things that annoys me the most is when people act scientifically rigorous but end up as clueless as if they has studied nothing at all. This is the real thing to be worried about.

Cosmic horror is a fascinating notion.

"Cosmic Horror is the realization that the universe is more vast and complicated than you will ever begin to comprehend, and nothing you, or even the entirety of civilization will do will ever make a big enough mark to matter. You're not special, and anything that happens to you is just random happenstance with no reason behind it because the beings we consider gods are so beyond our understanding that they don't even acknowledge our existence. The bacteria that die coming into contact with your body have more significance to you than the entirety of human civilization does to something like Chthulu.

Something so horrific that it's out of our realm or universe of understanding. Cosmic horror is about taking a peek just beyond the edges of reality, and getting a glimpse of that which cannot be understood by our limited knowledge.

It's realizing that nature is so big and so old that: you can't understand it. It doesn't need you and could destroy you without noticing. It's the realization that you don't matter and that you can't understand why. Picture a gold fish born in an aquarium in a pet shop. It's all it's ever known, it's not in control, and doesn't even have the capacity and the software to begin to understand why. That's us, on Earth, in relation to the rest of the universe.

The core of cosmic horror puts a horror spin on the idea that humans (and Earth) are a speck of dust in the vastness of space and time, that we do not matter in the universe. It personifies that with beings so immense and alien that we are like ants to them. Also, I think, a lot of the 'knowledge that makes you mad' is in a way, the idea of ignorance is bliss, but in a horror context. Learning this thing ruins you. There are other elements too, generally involving bending reality and physics, extra dimensions, messing with perceptions, etc.

The horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible.

A character is defeated when their enemy is the embodiment of the fear of the cosmos. It appears as a girl with her brains hanging out of her gaping skull who only says 'Halloween' but to this character she manifests in the form of a librarian of a library with an unfathomable number of books containing EVERYTHING. This cosmic horror then dumps the entire library and knowledge into her head until all she can say is 'Halloween' from the sheer weight of just knowing literally everything." — Reddit

There is a whole game based on cosmic horror, it's called Look Outside.

Why do I mention this at all? Because cosmic horror captures an otherwise ineffable aspect of Infinity. The vastness of Infinity is terrifying and difficult to communicate. Cosmic horror gives us some handle on it.

I have awoken to states of consciousness so alien, so incomprehensible, that they make human existence, all scientific knowledge, and even all human spirituality irrelevant. There exist states of consciousness that reveal the human experience of reality to be as small as that of bacteria. And then you have to live with knowing that.

I posted about Scorn when it first released, but these videos offer a better way of appreciating Scorn's artistry. Unfortunately Scorn is not as fun to play as it is to watch and admire from a distance. You don't need to play Scorn, you can just watch these videos.

Scorn is one of the best examples of how games can reach high art. The creativity in this game is seriously impressive. This is psychedelic levels of imagination & creativity. It is this kind of creative work that has always drawn me to video game design. To invent stuff as imaginative and as beautiful as this.

Oh, what things Consciousness can dream up.

I can imagine the Scorn world as existing as its own realm of Consciousness/life. Imagine that instead of human life, instead of being born as a human on Earth, life was about being born in Scorn. This really shows you the power of Consciousness. To a human this kind of life seems unappealing, but this is the kind of stuff God thrives on. It is an entirely new kind of conscious experience, free from the mundane constraints of human life.

There is an official Scorn art book for sale which offers explanations of its lore.

Elon Musk watches, recommends, and follows Whatifalthist.

It's so cringe how juvenile Musk's politics are.

I'd like to introduce you to Hearts of Space radio, an amazing collection of slow, contemplative, ambient music. Their slogan is: "Slow music for fast times". It's a timeless program started all the way back in 1983. They have an enormous collection of high quality ambient music and one smooth-talking narrator (Stephen Hill). This is an online streaming "radio" service, with new programs each week and an epic back-catalog.

I recommend you invest some time sampling their large collection to find gems that suit your particular tastes. They have over 1000 programs spanning 4 decades.

Here is a small list of their collections. It requires a paid subscription, but it's worth it.

This is high-quality stuff, an ambient music gold-mine.

I was recently walking through Freemont St in downtown Las Vegas when I discovered that there are now public shops that openly sell psychedelic mushrooms in glass display cases. You can just walk into a store and buy bags of mushrooms. I asked the store clerk, "How is this legal?", she said, "It's not legal but we do it anyway." Lolz. You can now just buy a kilo of mushrooms.

So if you're visiting Vegas, head on down to Freemont St and buy yourself a bag of mushrooms. Perhaps the best reason to visit Vegas. Although, don't get caught flying back home with them.

This is how they look like: