LastThursday

I don't need language to be able to distinguish a dog from everything else. I don't see a dog and then say to myself "dog". I don't confuse a dog for a cat, those are both different things. Naturally I can point to it and tell someone "hey that's a dog", or "oye, ese es un perro", the language is irrelevant, the experience is the same in both cases. There is a mental construct or template of a "dog". I have a bunch of perceptions, and those perceptions fit my template of a "dog". The words "dog" or "perro" are then attached to that mental construct, and I can use that to convey my experience to someone else. The crux of the thing is that the mental construct is not a part of language, it is entirely separate from it. I can navigate the world completely without using language. But I can't navigate the world without using mental constructs. These constructs or platonic forms or templates or whatever you want to call them, sit between language and perception. A "dog" or un "perro" are just visual symbols representing random sounds we make representing mental constructs representing perceptions.

What do you think a dog is then? And why's it different from a cat?

Do you think dogs exist outside of language?

This is an example of exactly what I said above. You're using language to say "stop using language" i.e. to point to something outside of language.

There is the theory of the Bicameral Mind, which says that hearing voices used to be the normal way people experienced the world. Auditory hallucination was one the ways the brain talked to itself. Self-reflective thinking was not the norm until more modern times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality How does the brain know if something is real or imagined? It seems it needs to hit some sort of threshold in intensity. It could be that some people's internal voices are strong enough for them to believe they're real, despite the fact there is nobody there speaking them. This article is about mental imagery, which is a similar phenomenon: https://www.quantamagazine.org/is-it-real-or-imagined-how-your-brain-tells-the-difference-20230524/ The brain is also very good at rationalising things away, for example calling the voices "commands from god" or "messages sent by a government agency". Cotard's sydrome or "walking corpse" is an extreme example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotard's_syndrome

@Someone here what you say is correct and agrees with what @Hojo is saying. However, language can point to things outside of itself, it doesn't always just point to itself. You could describe eating a hotdog, and get lost for ever in description, or language can point outside itself and say "go and eat a hotdog and find out". Equally with Enlightenment, language can't make you enlightened by describing it, but it can point outside itself and say "go meditate" or "go take psychedelics", "go on a fast" etc. Language can stack the Enlightenment odds in your favour. @Leo Gura has done this so often it's comical. Do the work!

Don't get confused, that's @Hojo's word not mine. I was merely responding using their terminology. Good. It's a process at least. I wonder if it has a structure or if it's totally random and chaotic? And if it has a structure I'm sure it can be written down and discussed.

Probably some direction is better than no direction, unless you spontaneously awaken, but then hoping for that becomes faith. But I get your gist, that awakening is not the result of some mental process, or even a process at all. The Ox Herding pictures be damned. In that case, awakening is only something that can be discussed in retrospect after it spontaneously happens and even then it's fruitless to talk about it because it can't be transmitted to someone else. All that can be said is "I have awoken!" and that's the end of it.

@Miguel1 yeah! I've learned not to panic. I just have to wait twenty minutes and get the browser to resend, normally works. That's if I remember to do that before I accidentally close the tab, which is actually the problem.

We will not awaken at all from a forum. The best it can do is point us into some sort of direction. Theorising has its place.

Thanks, my curiosity is satisfied. I must remember not to write a long post at 11am ever again...

It's worth thinking about whether writing is just a system for representing spoken language or if it is a separate from of language. I'd say it was the latter, writing is a visual language like sign language. What you're reading here is a visual dialect of spoken English. Often writing and the spoken word get conflated.

I'm not sure if it's in that particular Curt Jaimungal video. They talk about the reasons LLMs seem intelligent, and why we've managed to so succesfully model language. It's because it somehow captures the essence of what language is, which is it's a prediction machine for the next word. It encodes a huge amount of facts and relationships about the world, and then predicts the next word in the sequence using that information. When LLMs do seem stupid or make mistakes, it makes clear that humans have something LLMs don't; we run a language model in our heads yes, but we are able to reason outside of language. Some of our intelligence comes from language itself, the rest from somewhere else.

To sort reiterate what @Hojo said, everything is coherent and hangs together (as a human) but it's completely arbitrary. Having two arms and legs and a head is completely random and not related to anything absolute. You could have been some other entity and be asking the exact same question. You could argue that there is something absolute about us, but it is definitely not our form or way of being.

I can't get enough of this stuff. One day the whole thing will be explained.

What was that like and how did it happen? I'd say it was models, plural, many thousands of them. We have direct experience and that is Truth, but we always immediately cast a net over it and capture fish. We couldn't survive and function without relative truths. But, even the sensations of relative truth sit inside direct experence, that's how the trick is done.

What happens between 11 and 11:15 UK time daily? Some sort of maintenance? It's always down then.

@saif2 I'm itching to know. Have you looked outside your room?

Never mind the looks. What does she feel like?

Thanks @Natasha Tori Maru I should add, that when I wrote "emotional dysregulation" I only meant for this to be something to be aware of. Pathologising bad behaviour can be a dangerous thing to do, because in the the worse case it can be used to diminish and not take seriously someone's needs, which is not the basis of a good relationship. There are always genuine reasons behind someone's behaviour and in 99% of cases it's not pathological or a mental health issue. This is a decent video on the subject of non-violent communication:

No. This makes perfect sense. But the conclusion is not necessarily true. People are suprisingly bad at predicting the future. My prediction is that we will switch energy sources to fusion and that will ramp up. But it will come too late (it probably already is), and climate change will force huge upheavals in how we live. But what those will be is entirely unknown. The video is totally correct in saying that everything is dependent on energy and that currently comes from oil. The industrial revolution has produced two things in abundance: CO2 and plastic, and both things are choking the planet.

No. There's a wide spectrum of good relationships out there for you. You shouldn't. It would seem either like emotional dysregulation, or unconscious power play manipulation. I wouldn't advocate tit-for-tat, but I would advocate confronting the bad behaviour. Either, therapy is needed for emotional dyregulation, or the behaviour needs to be directly challenged every time it happens. This gives the signal that its unacceptable to you. You can do this by asking cool and level headed questions about what they are feeling and thinking and their reasons for it. And what they would like you to do about it. Just listen. However, it is acceptable if you yourself have behaved badly, so the first thing to do is ask yourself: did I do wrong, and is their reaction justified? If so, then you will need to change your behaviour first.

Doesn't the knower know it exists?

Yes but that is a different sort of existence. You can't eat the theory relativity. Logic will not bring an apple into existence. Logic has to be converted into direct perception by doing. In fact, logic is grounded in sensory perception, that's where it comes from, that's where the intelligence is.

There are different types of existence. There is the existence of the inside of your room, the stuff you can directly perceive. Call it direct existence. You know that if you look outside your room, something will exist there. There is never non-existence. But until you look you can't know exactly what will be there. Call this unknown existence. You can build a model in your head about what might be there and trust that model, but whatever, it is not direct existence. If you hear a noise from outside your room, then that is direct existence, but it's not the full experience of the outside of the room. There is a sliding scale between unknown existence and direct experience.