LastThursday

I don't know. Every time I think about it there's a hundred different angles you could take and each one could come out either way, yes and no. But you're right @gettoefl it really is about "choice". For free will you need choices and a chooser. But there's also the carrying out of a choice. Is making a choice without actioning it, really free will? So you need all three ingredients - if you remove any one of those ingredients you no longer have free will.

@Razard86 I enjoyed that, there's a lot of mystery around how computers really work. Here's one as to why we have computers at all:

Two phrases: "Can you just...?" and "Can you quickly...?" To which I often want to reply: "Can you just [insert swear word]?". Obviously this is what my managers at work say, my friends wouldn't dare.

When is enough, enough? I read an article in New Scientist recently about a phenomenon called languishing. The top result on Google says: https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/languishing#what-are-the-signs This fits me to a T. In retrospect the rot set in around 2009 or so although at the time I didn't realise what was happening. I'd come out of a relationship of three years, which I was definitely sad about at the time, but it wasn't overwhelming and I moved on. But even at that point I began to realise something major had or was about to change. In those intervening three years, I felt like the bonds and social capital that I had with my close network of friends had evaporated. One of those friends had been an ex who I had been with for 11 years. There was (and still remains) an awkwardness between us that we never really worked through. She married and had a kid - I feel genuinely happy for her, there's no resentment or envy on my side. The result of all this was that I began to feel unanchored and I didn't really to know how to resolve those feelings. During that time I had met up again with some old school friends through Facebook and interacting with them regularly kept me sane. I fell in love with one of them. I desperately needed (at the time) to feel anchored in something again and over time my feelings intensified and I thought naively that the person I had fallen in love with was the answer. We had a very on-off relationship, and in the end it just wasn't going to work. I felt frustrated I couldn't get what I wanted, lonely and increasingly frustrated with myself for not being able to resolve my situation. This resulted in a kind of prolonged mid-life crisis (which I've written about extensively here) and I went to some dark places. I decided to move away from where I had lived and the network of friends I'd had, it just wasn't working for me any more. Originally, I wanted to move closer to the person I'd fallen in love with - before it fell apart - and I'm still here all these years later. But more than anything I just wanted to escape myself and my mid-life crisis. Very slowly over time I came out of all that funk. But fundamentally I never regained what I'd had before, that dark place I'd been in for years had turned into the grey place I'm in now, languishing. What to do? Instead of looking back for an explanation in the hope that somehow that's where the answer lies, I need to look forwards. Somehow I need to wrangle the unwieldy beast of my psyche so that I move towards a happier place. I would say at the moment I could continue with the set up of my life indefinitely, I'm neither sad nor particularly happy, I have enough money to live on and do what I want, I have a handful of friends that I see semi-regularly and family that I interact with semi-regularly. I think someone looking into my situation might say things like "what do you want?" and "you need to take action" and maybe "get therapy". In terms of taking action, the very obvious things that come to mind are; change jobs, change house, find a girlfriend. But I'm old enough to realise that doing more of the same is not going to resolve my situation, i.e. I've already done those things and it didn't help - I've done a lot of things in my life so far. What I'm after is an emotion or sensation, literally to wake up every day and to feel excited about it instead of dread. I'm also after that warm fuzzy feeling of being connected to people and working together for a common purpose. And therein lies my problem. What I want are emotions, but I have no sense of how to get there, no concrete physical plan of action. I'm motivated by the things that excite me (emotion) not by the things I think about (reason). Any physical action I take towards the emotions I want to feel, will involve me having to move away from the homeostasis I find myself in, i.e. it will involve emotional and physical labour to move my setpoint and there's no joy in this process. I may even be less happy in the interim whilst I reconfigure my life and all the while I get ever older. But, enough is enough.

I think it'll be good to get out things that arise and put them down in written form. I have so many lost thoughts and ideas, and some of them were very good.

Usually around 40 is what I’ve heard. Bear in mind it doesn't drop off a cliff. It's more like a slow gentle slide downwards. I'd say it decreases after 30. Essentially thoughts of sex etc. take up less and less of your thoughts as you get older. Most probably down to a drop in testosterone, but also greater executive functioning and better control of emotions (aka horniness). You can definitely still be horny even after 40, or 50, it never really goes away.

Except that AI is built by and programmed by humans. The way AI is set up at the moment requires it to be guided and trained by humans on data created by humans. It is very much full of the biases and limitations of the human experience. Even if AI were eventually to be trained on its own output (free from human input), the original base of human input would remain. In order for AI to "seem" human it needs to be trained in a human way by humans. Which humans should you choose to train it, which data set? Although, It doesn't seem inconceivable that an AI could detect its own biases (after it all they're only patterns) and correct for them. But it would have to somehow "know" that a particular bias is unwanted and that seems like a tall order. As far as limitations go, AI could in theory extract large scale patterns that we humans are not good at spotting. But it doesn't seem possible for it to go beyond the patterns in its training data set. For that you would need more data. The intelligence in AI doesn't come from itself, the intelligence is in the data it's given, i.e. the outside world.

Before I even knew this forum existed, I used to religiously watch Leo's videos. At some point I just stopped, mainly because the topics didn't seem relevant to me or it didn't feel like anything new was being said. But I decided to watch Leo's latest video for the first time: Some of the things Leo covered in this video touched a nerve and I have to admit to myself that I am immature is a number of ways. Without going into it too much, a lot of the malaise and lack of purchase on my life I feel is due to aspects of my immaturity. So I'm immature? What to do about it? It's all a bit chicken and egg. I need to do in order to mature, but I need maturity in order to do. This seems to be a general rule in life and probably why people can be immature, they simply never learn to mature because... they're not mature. Personally it hurts, because I've always striven to be as mature and as "good" a person I can be. But at least I have an inkling of what needs to happen. Aside from that, I'd like to make a case for the general genius in Leo's videos. What eventually switched me off from Leo's videos is in fact what makes them good. Just simply having a talking head with no other distractions such music and a whirlwind of graphics and cut scenes, makes you pay attention. Leo's also very good at just enumerating all the different facets of a particular topic: his videos really are just primers on each of the subjects he covers. But a primer is very useful just like a reference book is useful, it's the bare facts without the fluff. But also, that makes his content direct and often there's no hiding from some of the repercussions of what he's saying for your own view of yourself, and some of it sticks and irritates enough that you take action to "fix" the problem. His videos raise your level of awareness and that can only be a good thing. He is also comprehensive and has covered a huge range of topics, there is bound to be one that resonates and affects you personally. More than anything else Leo's done, I'd say that his videos are what most people would identify as his brand. It's understandable that he has a life and wants to try other things out and life changes. But if I were to give him advice (from my super mature self) then it would be that he should maintain his brand even if it's at a subsistence level. Obviously this is good from a business point of view, but it's also good from an altruistic point of view and simply just spreading his god given genius for this sort of thing. I might even watch a new video if it were to come out....

I thought I'd pick up on this statement. If life is truly unpredictable, then it doesn't matter what you do today. It wouldn't matter if you were optimistic or not optimistic. In other words you are totally free to chose how to be. A lot of negative or disempowering thinking is really about equating one thing with another - and believing it to be true. Here's some examples of what I'm talking about: I can't ask for a pay rise because my boss will say "no" I'm inherently a depressed person because of my genetics If I try and improve my life it never works out Without optimism I can't feel motivated Being positive now is disappointing in future If A then B A because of B A is B etc. A is related to B The problem with this type of thinking is that they are all non-sequiturs. Two different ideas or concepts get shunted together that have no right being together. A lot of therapy is about deconstructing these artificial equalities and therefore escaping the prison of this sort of thinking. Try this instead: I feel like being optimistic right now I'm in the mood to be positive I feel disappointed because I just do I want to be depressed now I can't be bothered to be depressed now To be free is to act unconditionally.

You can talk about consciousness, the absolute, the dream, all you like. But you're talking about the finger that points, it is not the moon itself.

@mmKay In the grand scheme of things, what you choose to do is mostly irrelevant: it will soon all be forgotten by everyone involved. Flip a coin. This is going to sound woo woo, but you finding the guy's stuff was no accident. It happened so that you can look inwards and confront yourself. The outside world is mirroring your inside world.

Ok then I shall. Part II: 8. Constant context switching is guaranteed (i.e. flipping between different tasks), 9. Context switching always hurts productivity, 10. Actual project managers are super rare, 11. If you work in a big company, especially a bank, you can't touch the database (and this is always a PITA, see point 2) 12. Most projects are chaotic and unstructured, 13. Launching a new project will always be months late and this will create friction all round, someone will get fired, 14. Knowing what the hell is going on in a new job takes 6 months, 15. You'll watch other (non-coders) go on jollies and travel to nice places, you'll be chained to the monitor and keyboard forever, 16. You will have to speak to people outside the company, and it will always be a PITA, 17. Specs and requirements are rare and if they are produced nearly useless for anything except getting the gist of what's needed, 18. If you think you know better than your manager, you will eventually be fired, 19. Most software managers are egotistical or get off on their power, 20. When 13 happens, you will work unreasonable hours and not be re-compensed for it, 21. Customers are a PITA. 22. Customers will not understand or care what problems you're having with their requests, 23. Managers will always kowtow to customer's demands even if unreasonable, 24. Managers will always care about customers more than they care about you. 25. Your physical comfort is generally low priority for the company, 26. Apraisals are completely pointless, and you'll struggle every year to come up with stuff to talk about. Ok, Ok, that's enough whining. I'm changing career right now or becoming a manager.

By learning to be more present and aware of what is actually happening around you, and less in your head. By seeing the good in everything that happens or turning it to your advantage. By being more calm and a bit more stoic when difficult stuff happens. By just getting on with things without complaint and allowing yourself to enjoy it. By being a bit more realistic and less idealistic. By allowing things to be imperfect or out of your control.

It varies a lot between companies some are more into time wasting than others. There are several truths about working in software: 1. There's always a massive code base, 2. You'll spend more time with the database than writing code, 3. No coder can code for 8 hours straight, 4. There's never enough documentation, 5. If you want enough documentation you'll spend all your time writing it. 6. The spread of talent between different coders is generally huge, especially in larger companies 7. Managers are non-technical. I could go on... lol.

It may be ASD. I used to find talking on the phone excruciating. Even the thought of making a phone call or taking one gave me a lot of anxiety. Even now I'd take meeting someone face to face over phone calls - and video calls are much easier. It's the lack of cues, the crummy audio quality, and the need to make decisions on the spot sometimes - it's a very immediate medium. However, I've had to do it so much with work, that I've largely overcome the anxiety. Practice makes perfect that would be my suggestion: work in a call centre lol.

For the first time in many months I started playing piano (electric) again. I've been wanting to learn how to play a version of Autumn in New York, basically this one: Thing is there is no sheet music for it. I've tried to work things out by ear, but the bass notes elude me. But yesterday I found a way to turn the music directly into Midi format: https://piano-scribe.glitch.me/ And amazingly it was actually ok. Not a fast service by any means, but it works. There's a couple of missing or too many notes (I think), but it's good enough for me. The next thing is, do I actually have the skill to play it? Just about, with lots of practice, the end of the piece sounds tricky though. I also think my hands are not big enough to do some of the chords spanning over an octave, so I'll have to make do. The hardest bits will be the accentuation, smooth playing and getting the general "jaunty" feel of the rhythm. I always think it would be so cool just to casually sit at a piano somewhere and knock out a few jazz numbers and impress my audience. I've done this before, but I only really know classical pieces which is not to everyone's taste. Although I do know a few of the more popular ragtime pieces.

No definitive answer. These are some off the cuff ideas: It strikes me that the hard problem is just one of definining a thing (consciousness) in terms of itself. So can you retrieve anything from a recursive definition? If you try and use logic then it fails, it ends in a circular argument, or effect without cause. You can collapse the recursion and say something like "a brick is a brick", but that feels unsatisfactory even if you "know" what a "brick" refers to. You could try and cheat and say that consciousness is the only thing that can be defined in terms of itself. Hence consciouness is exactly what you get if you have a pure recursive thing, i.e. the essence of consciousness is recursion itself; consciousness is conscious of itself. There's no room for another pure recursive thing because consciousness appropriates it all. In maths and computer science recursive definitions are everywhere. But they are always finite in some way and operate within some sort of framework - numbers or algebra or bits and bytes. It's not clear if consciousness has a framework at all, that's what I mean by pure recursive. In the case of consciousness, it seems like consciousness is the recursion operating on itself. It is clear that consciousness has stuff going on and structure and qualia to it. I'd call this "Content", what materialists would call matter and laws. Is it possible to have pure recursion without Content? In other words is it possible to be conscious of being conscious, in what might be called a complete void, where nothing happens? I'd call this a "Singularity". If you go for Occam's razor then a Singularity would seem a simpler form of pure recursion than consciousness with Content and so more likely. But there is room for Content in pure recursion, if the Content is defined in terms of itself (i.e. it is cause and effect). This implies that Content is always relative to itself (recursive) and has no absolute ground or base. Recursion has built into it the idea of process and hence a component of separation with each iteration. This seems to tally with consciousness we experience, Content changes at a fixed rate. This appearance of rate of change seems to be a core part of what Content is. To have a rate of change at all, there must be a "stickiness" to Content. To be conscious of change there is a form of comparison, where the previous iteration of Content is compared to the current Content. Enough must "stick" to be able to do the comparison at all. On the other hand for anything to change at all it must be "fluid" in some way. Fluid is just a different way of saying ungrounded or prone to forgetfulness. So Content itself is a recursive tug-of-war between stickiness and fluidity, or remembering and forgetting, living and dead, absolute and groundless, existence and non-existence. Content also seems to be endless and abundant. A Singularity as its name implies would be a finite entity of one. The opposite of a Singularity would be complete fluidity in Content without any stickiness - i.e. everything would happen at once. But consciousness seems to be something in between. I'd add that consciousness is both Content and recursion, and that they are the same thing.

Lately I've been doing a lot of retrospection. It seems to just bubble up at times. The sensation is somewhat like looking through binoculars. What I see seems so close and very familiar, but the view is constricted to a small circle of light. I remember and re-feel stuff clearly, but I can't fully re-enter that old reality again, so much is lost. And, when I stop looking through the binoculars I'm suddenly sucked back to where I am, and I realise how far away things were and how irrelevant all that stuff is to me now - and yet all that stuff is just there should I wish to look again. What I feel is that a lot of what makes "me" originated back then and also got left behind then. I got to re-invent myself along the way both consciously and unconsciously; there's a lot to like about my new self and my new circumstances. But I'm feeling untethered. Back then I was tethered to my family and my surroundings in a deep way and I didn't question it: I felt I was part of the fabric of my lived-in experience. Along the way that sense of being integrated got exploded, mostly because the family I belonged to was dysfunctional and eventually crumbled. It was a painful awakening for me, I felt lonely, more and more disconnected and betrayed by the people who were supposed to love me. I was cast out at sea with no life support. And nobody came to help. The 80's wasn't a soft time, not a time of support groups and mental health help and space for neurodiversity: you dealt with the roughness alone. It's made me hard and defensive at times, I know how to survive. But my nature should be/is a soft loving joyful optimistic person. I haven't been the same since. Repeatedly, I feel like I lost a big part of myself back then. I'm mostly just winging life like a kite being buffeted by the wind of circumstance, I'm not in control of it. I'm living my life in reverse, I had to become an adult early and take on responsibilities I didn't ask for. Now I don't wish to take on any more responsibilities, I want to take back that lost time and be the teenager I should have been. Unfortunately and ridiculously, I'm 51 in a couple of days, and I can't live a topsy-turvy existence; I can't both be a responsible adult and unresponsible child. But my aversion to taking control and the pain that goes along with it is strong. I'm just doing the bare minimum required to keep on flying. I want to resolve the conflict and the melancholy and resentment. I want to flourish and stop floundering. I want to re-connect to the fabric of my existence. But all that old connection is gone forever and I can't re-connect to it again, I have to try a different way and as a different person. I have to re-learn to be an adult, but the right way this time. Winter blues? Drama? Possibly.

I need to get myself a cook, both metaphorically and in reality.

Get at least half an hour of full daylight every day. Even on a rainy overcast day, it is still much much brighter outside than indoors. Regular exercise does help. I've also taken St John's Wort tablets daily with some success, but effects take about three weeks to kick in (for me). You may be able to get it in your country, but it varies; here in the UK it's easily available. There are warnings of some side effects, but I've never experienced any.

I've been on this forum a long time now. Originally, I was just watching Leo's videos and I couldn't get enough of them. At some point, I believe around the time "What is Islam?" video came out I pretty much ran out of steam and stopped. I think soon after that I discovered the forum and I just lurked for a long time. Then something must have piqued my interest and I started to post. I find it amusing that even Leo himself seems to have run out of steam with his videos. I see my relationship with the forum in kind of the same way as I had with my relationship to smoking. I smoked because I was addicted and out of habit. But the benefits and reasons for doing so were hard to pin down - but I felt there were some. I stopped smoking in the end, but other than to my health and pocket, I feel the same as I did then. In other words smoking had a net-zero effect. I like to call this "empty calories". There are a lot of activities which are empty calories, but we do them anyway. We do them to fill time, or because we believe it's doing something for us, but the actual benefit is always hard to pin down. Now, the activity may actually have good or bad effects, but they are side effects. So I call smoking empty calories not because it had no effects, but because the main reason for actually smoking was hard to pin down. Being on this forum is also empty calories for me. There are side effects yes, like improving my writing, getting things off my chest, interacting with people and on and on. But it's definitely hard to pin down why I'm on here. If I stopped (which I have in the past) it wouldn't make much difference to me in the long run. There's definitely something here which I've yet to explore more deeply in my own psyche. I think a lot of my malaise is to do with the notion that everything I do is "empty calories". It's like I'm eating, but not getting full. It's hard not to compare myself with my peers and they seem to "get full" on what they do in their lives, which I'm envious of. But my envy isn't really about what they have but the fact that they seem to be satisfied by it. I can't get no satisfaction - and even thinking about that makes me emotional and frustrated. To swing it back to forum. I see a lot of questions being asked and a lot of answers, but very little dialogue and exchange. Often an OP will ask a question, get ten different disjointed answers and that's that. The OP has seemingly no interest in replying to the answers, and the answerers have no interest in each other's viewpoints. Often the OP has to be goaded into replying. There is also often an absolutist sense to a lot of the answers: "this is the way it is", rather than a more nuanced and relative standpoint: "what if it was like this?" and exploring that. I think this really comes from several places. First, that people really don't know how to converse properly especially on a digital medium. People are so brainwashed in to posting "status updates" that other ways of communicating seem alien; a lot of answers are in the style of a status update: this is what I think and that's that. Second is that there isn't any amount of deep thinking going on, but it is often dressed up as that. The upshot is that people (often aggressively) defend views that are shallow and illogical or just taken verbatim without much thought. I'm guilty of this, but what gets confused is that I'm not coming from an absolutist standpoint, my views are generally subject to change and really are about "what if it was like this?", but I'm forced to follow the implicit forum style. I want dialogue but I don't get it and it's empty calories. Lastly, there is a lot of immaturity in the forum. To me it's blindingly obvious (because I'm older and more mature), but you can't blame others for not knowing what they don't know. I very often feel for others because I have experienced the same things when I was younger (especially anxiety and stress and social problems), and I want to get hold of them and say "honestly, it's fine, it will work out in the end". To that end I try and impart my knowledge but it often goes over people's heads; there's only so much that can be done via text. I need to be satisfied and full and consume real calories in my life. I just don't know how or what that should be. Until then I'll carry on as I am. Enough rambling!

Neither. I don't know your history, so it's hard to comment on it. Everyone procrastinates at one time or another. But procrastination is actually a fiction. The underlying assumption is that a particular task must be done. If the task were optional, and you chose not to do it, then there wouldn't be any procrastination. Apart from doing things which maintain your survival such as eating and having a roof over your head, all other tasks are in fact optional and fictional (and mostly imposed on you by others). Related to that is that tasks stop being tasks when you actually want to do them. Bingeing on the internet is also doing a task - which you don't seem to procrastinate about. You already have the solution. In my eyes the psychology of procrastination is this: You/someone needs to invent a "task". You put off doing that task. You wait until you can bear it no longer. You do the task. (Or you let it slide) You or someone who invented the task, gets angry or stressed for not doing it quickly and/or efficiently. You beat yourself up for getting angry or stressed and concoct stories about being lazy, stupid or worse. @Husseinisdoingfine what do you think?

Some random thoughts today. I was chit-chatting to a work colleague last week. We were on the tube in London going to a work's do. She mentioned that after going to university she'd racked up an £89k debt (loan). I was gobsmacked. I didn't get the impression that she was profligate, it was just the cost of doing education nowadays. I imagined myself at 22 and having to pay back a debt for a large part of my life. The thought fleetingly crossed my mind of giving her my savings so she could be debt free - it would make more difference to her than it would to me. It's disgusting that this is what the UK government is doing to their future workforce. (rant mode off) I definitely had some wild dreams over night. In one there were two diseased rabbits lying on the floor, one dead, one barely alive. Between them my sister was lying in some sort of box or something. Despite not actually seeing her, I thought she was dead. My parents were around and I tried to explain the situation, I even began to cry but they seemed cold or non-understanding. I looked around and realised that I could see my sister on the floor curled up and noticed she was breathing. I felt a strong sense of relief. I think I better contact her... In a different dream I was on a push-bike and looking for a place to park it. I turned left onto a busy road, unsure of where I was going. I then had to go uphill, but realised there was water gushing down the road, it looked like a ladder of weirs going all the way up. But somehow I found it easy to peddle up and I even bunny hopped over the weirs. I woke up. I have been thinking about time. Specifically about entropy and degradation. Hypothetically if I had a lump of matter, say something with a rigid crystal lattice (a crystal perhaps?) and was inert, would it experience time? The thought was that if none of the crystal's constituents got disrupted in any way, then even if it's constituents (atoms) jiggled around it would keep its identity indefinitely. In other words it would be immune to increasing entropy. Of course nothing is ever completely immune to its environment, but during the time a lump of matter is not "interacted" with, it would in effect be outside of time itself. You could argue that the thermal motion of atoms in the lattice act like little timekeepers, being as they are subject to the speed of light. But taken as an average over all atoms you couldn't actually tell the time with them, although time may sneak in because the thermal motion has an average speed. However, the thermal motion can be changed by increasing the temperature of the lump of matter and the average speed would be higher. The upshot is you can only use thermal motion to mark time, if you know the temperature, but you can only know the temperature if you "interact" with the crystal. All temperature gauges work by waiting for the thermal equilibrium with your measuring device, and so all temperature measurements affect the system they're measuring. It could be argued that you could use thermal imaging to gauge temperature, but then photons would have to be given out by the crystal, but I'm not allowing that because the crystal is completely inert: it does not radiate. In practice everything radiates photons. All this is a long-winded way of saying time=increasing entropy.

I wonder if wildebeest believe in gods? When you're regularly hunted you have to be on your guard at all times. So you must have sharp perceptions and a good imagination. If the rustling in the grass could be a lion you'd better be ready to run. But it could just be the wind instead. The wildebeest must conjure up a lion from the movement of grass, and act on it. The wildebeest has to believe its imagination even if it's a false positive. Humans are the same, except our imaginations are wild. We were prey to lions, snakes, spiders and scorpions when we lived out in the open. We let our imaginations get the better of us and can believe there are invisible entities everywhere. Animism was the first religion. Either that or gods are real.

The beauty of reality is that it is both fragmented and unified at the same time. Completely still and in complete motion at the same time. I agree that spirituality is a fragment realising it was unified all along.