LastThursday

This. Most people I've known have nearly an irrational need to be coupled up at any cost - so much so that they will impose their irrationality on the single people out there (me). I find women on balance need this more than men, but only marginally so. Literally every woman I've ever lusted after has been attached. Hang on a minute... I've just had a huge epiphany...! let me write this down before I forget.

Yes I can do it on command. But it's taken me actual years of practice, probably about 15 so far. What has it taught me? That my internal monologue is an ingrained habit nothing more and it's possible to function perfectly well without it. I'd say I'm more present more of the time as a result and I find it easier to sleep. But reading without subvocalising still eludes me - gosh darn it. I started by exercising my peripheral vision whilst walking. So, you walk and look dead ahead but pay attention to what's going on to the sides of your vision or above and below. If you practise enough you'll realise you can actually see a lot more than you realise and you can get into "the zone" and start to see everything at once. The point is that it is actually hard to have internal monologue whilst doing this, try it. The meta-point is that focusing intensely on any task will reduce your internal monogue. Practising being focused intensely on what is actually happening around you will help. Lots of practice. Notice also that there will be a slight amount of tension in your tongue when you talk to yourself. Sticking your tongue out and biting down gently on it (I advise doing it in private) will have some affect on your internal monologue. Even hypnosis can work (although I'm quite suggestible): For earworms don't take tablets. I just go to my favourite music outlet and play the song that's going around and around in my head, it soon gets rid of it - but make sure you listen to more songs afterwards. The danger is you get another earworm though, hey ho.

I'm very in to this sort of thing. Here's a few videos to get you thinking: Incredibly precisely manufactured Egyptian vases: Evidence of machining in ancient sites: The mysterious stone nubs and knobs: Finely crafted stone blocks: I can't get enough of it!

It should be borne in mind that the horse has already bolted. It doesn't matter what anyone says, does or wants. It's like trying to stop an express train with your hand. Only two things may stop the train: an artificially engineered deadly pathogen or all out nuclear war. The pathogen would have to be extremely transmissible and extremely deadly. All out nuclear war will mainly affect cities, those in rural and remote areas will be less affected. It should be clear, I don't advocate either.

I get exactly what you feel. Being 22 should be a time for experimenting and exploring different avenues and having many different experiences. In fact your twenties should be for this. Don't get too bogged down in any one thing. When you're older you can settle more. Counterintuitively you should use your dissatisfaction to motivate you instead of letting it slow you down. Instead of spending energy trying to get rid of it, just accept that for a while you will be dissatisfied, probably with everything, even if the feeling is uncomfortable. The message of dissatisfaction is telling you directly that you should be trying something new: go do it!

@integral you raise a good point. Although, I don't think there will be millions or probably even thousands going "off planet". It'll be tens at a time. That would make the pioneer populations extremely vulnerable to going extinct for a long time as the populations slowly grow. They'll then have to contend with population expansion on a planet with no ecosystems at all - they'll be totally reliant on their technologies to cater for all their needs, which is a tall order. Not impossible, but very difficult to pull off.

I sit on the fence about this sort of thing. On the one hand humans are not totally divorced from nature, they very much rely on and more importantly are a product of nature. The level of population is natural. If you view the whole planet as a system then if the human population is unsustainable it will eventually collapse because resources run out, this is seen time and time again in ecology where populations yo-yo or go extinct. Life as a whole will never be extinguished on Earth because bacteria and viruses and other forms of life are extremely tenacious. So really, the concern should be can we stop ourselves going extinct? On the other hand, even one human needs a lot of resources to survive a lifetime. By accident or by design humans tend to wreck ecosystems, because they're not in the habitat they originally evolved in (the rift valley in Africa), they're completely disconnected from the way they originally lived (hunting and gathering) and because ecosystems are extremely delicately balanced. We're effectively an invasive species everywhere on Earth. Whatever happened that made us different from all other animals, has also caused us to fan out of Africa and "invade" ecosystems not evolved for us. It's a balance. We should try as much as we can to not disrupt ecosystems or to learn how to fix them when we do, but to say we're not a natural product of the Earth is not true. If we continue expanding in population we will eventually run out of resources and we'll pay the consequences, and in the very long term the planet will recover it's balance again.

@jacknine119 and @MsNobody it makes me sad to hear these things. If anything Leo's teachings are all about your humanity don't let go of that. Always apply your intuition first before Leo's teachings. Leo's teachings are tools for spirituality and self development, not a way of life. How much better it is to not only improve and enlighten yourself, but to also take the people around you with you, or at least give them they joy of your being.

There's a lot of esotericism to Leo's teachings, which whilst he's preaching to the converted mostly, a lot of what he says is either hard to grok or seems unattainable (without serious commitment) and is too easily misunderstood. This puts a lot of his stuff into the realms of "spiritual entertainment" rather than serious attainable work. However, that's just nitpicking, there's still a lot of stuff there that is attainable and directly relevant to everyday life - the Traps and Being Wrong videos are excellent for being practical. I think because there's a lot of room for misunderstanding, people will act on that wrong understanding and go do stupid things or begin having negative views of the world or people, especially younger people. It seems unavoidable and people are responsible for themselves, but there should be extreme clarity for information that could be easily misunderstood and abused - which is lacking - e.g.: In terms of style (more nitpicking), there's a fair amount of hyperbole which can be off-putting, and quite a lot of inherent defensiveness, which seems unnecessary. Videos are too damn long, many of the three hour videos could be condensed into an hour - but I think Leo addressed this in his latest video, saying he's going to cut the fluff in future - there's a balance to be had.

I'd say there are different forms of "exist". If you're looking at the tree then that's one form of existence. If you look away, then the tree enters a different form of existence. The second form is a kind of existence built up from previous experience and knowledge: you know that if you look back again, the tree will re-appear. In everyday speak the two types of existence are conflated. Note that in both cases the idea of a tree is just that, an idea or a thought form. That is to say that the experience you are having may invoke "a tree", for example a picture of a tree on a computer monitor. So "a tree" exists only as long as the thought form is being triggered. I agree with Berkeley that everything is an idea, but you don't need to invoke God for object persistence. What continues to exist is the idea of "a tree".

It's a dreary wet summer morning in Blighty. I was thinking about school assemblies when I first came back to England. This would have been in 1979 (fuck that's a long time ago). I think the headmistress - a woman in her sixties with short grey curly hair and thick glasses - wanted to instill some culture and love of music into the local working class brats. Music would be broadcast over the tannoy and we'd file in sensibly for assembly. We'd then sit down on the dusty hall floor in rows and face the piano at the front. The head would get out her music book, sit down and we'd sing along to "She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes" or "What shall we do with the drunken sailor?" and my favourite "Daisy, Daisy". What was played over the tannoy I hear you ask? The last one is interesting, the Sting version is three years after my assemblies, but this is exactly as I remember it! More rain. Humph.

@mmKay I prefer a flat earth pizza.

Eye eye

It's interesting to know if, specifically, there is a polynomial time solution to the travelling salesmen problem. At least in the 2d case where cities are on a co-ordinate plane and they are joined by straight lines. There are some heuristic arguments. The first is to start off with the base case of three cities, this is just a triangle whose solution is zero effort (just join the cities to each other). For each city you add to the mix, there clearly has to be a polynomial time solution to the problem. In the case of four cities you could make a triangle around the three outermost cities and then find the shortest distance from the remaining point to all other cities. Intuitively, it seems the way to solve in the general case is to start with a convex polygon which joins all the outermost cities (this is definitely polynomial time), and then "suck the air out" of the polygon so to speak. In other words with each iteration the deflated polygon "sticks to" more and more cities. The result is a radially spiky polygon whose edges are the solution. Each step is polynomial time as you just have to check which cities are closest to the polygon edges in the current iteration of "sucking the air out". As to whether this actually produces the shortest route is beyond my abilities to check! Anyway, just throwing it out there.

Some thoughts on consciousness. I periodically philosophise about this sort of thing. For me it's an odd exercise much like trying to paint a scene without being much of an artist. But much like an artist I have my cherished set of paints and brushes and my own style. Nobody else is any different in this respect, that is to say nobody can explain consciousness. And yet infuriatingly there it is in your face 24/7. My own particular style revolves around some heuristics I've stumbled upon over time. I'll cover the main points briefly: The word consciousness is just that. It's a placeholder for something that is actually indescribable. Much like using the word "river", most folks think they know what it means, but the actuality is not the word, nowhere near. In fact I can probably bet with high certainty that "consciousness" will mean different things for different people. It seems to be impossible to know if other people are conscious. Even if you could telepathically communicate or "see the world through their eyes", this would be no different from talking to someone. You would still be perceive their world through your consciousness; if you didn't then it would no longer be you. But all of this is moot, reports of this actually happening are zero. Say "I" became person X for a period (and I somehow went into some weird unconscious stasis), and then regained myself, I still could not prove the consciousness of person X. Even if I had person X's memories, they are now mine. It seems possible that there is only one conscious experience: mine. I alluded to this in my previous post. This also sort of follows from the previous paragraph as it would provide a solution to the paradox. In which case it's possible this is all for my entertainment. It also seems possible that consciousness is uncountable. What I mean by this is that counting implies subdivision, but conciousness itself is probably indivisible. One is in contrast to two and so on. So saying there is one consciousness doesn't have a logically sound base. So what then? Indeed. The upshot is that consciousness must be everything. If it is indivisible then it must represent some sort of totality. If there is another indivisible thing out there that isn't consciousness then it must be completely unknown to consciousness - and is itself another totality. Maybe consciosness is divisible and there are many versions of it. This would square more with our intuitions about what's happening here. Every person is (or living being perhaps) is conscious in some way to different degrees and aspects. In which case it's very hard to define what consciousness is, because it could be cheese to Mary and chalk to John. In fact may not even make much sense to have a word like "consciousness" as everyone's experience could be incompatible and utterley incomprehensible to anyone else. This seems counterintuitive, but could be true. Is the content of consciousness separate from consciousness itself? That's a tricky one. I believe, no. If consciousness is a totality, then even the content of consciousness is consciousness. Maybe consciousness is just content, much like the painting of the Mona List is just brushwork. This would make it nearly square with materialism which is just about content. Except materialism throws the baby out with the bathwater: it believes measurement and maths is the content. There is no observer and observed, they are redundant. Is there anything that is not consciousness? If it's indivisible then no there isn't. If it's divisible then potentially yes. Maybe you are not conscious, because what you call "consciousness" is no part of my consciousness, i.e. they are orthogonal and only interact through bodies. Maybe there is some sort of Nexus between what you have and what I have, which we both call the real world. If consciousness is insepearable from content, then is everything that could be recognised as content in fact a different thing? Is everything to the left of my field of vision a different consciousness to everything to the right? Are all these types of consciousness co-existing and interacting with each other? Is hearing a different consciousness from seeing? Could it be that consciousness is "tuning in" reality? This would be like getting a radio signal from all the static, i.e. finding structure and order in chaos. Maybe consciousness is that organising factor that cherry picks order out of the chaos of reality. Earth and people and animals and nature and all this could just be the organised parts of chaos that have coalesced from that original spark of whatever consciousness actually is. Everything else in that chaos has been "tuned out" and essentially doesn't exist, save for the occasional glitchy intrusion. Dreams are very much more in the realm of chaos and nebulosity: consciousness de-tuned.

Those things wouldn't even exist without other people. Anyone who says they don't need other people (in any senses) are utterly deluded.

Some sayings come to mind: Do not cast pearls before swine. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. Do not give a gift to someone who is not ready to receive it. It's not the fault of anybody. It's just if you're lacking context or experience for what you're being told the natural thing to do is either to ignore it, to rubbish it, or to re-instate your own point of view. Human nature. Very very few people will actually try to understand you.

The way attraction works is that on average you will attract someone with the same level of beauty or handsomeness as you. This is regardless of how attractive or ugly you think you are. There will be outliers and this will be through luck or bad taste or some other exceptional attributes - but it's not the norm. The most handsome men will always attract more attention (from all levels), however they will in turn be attracted to the most beautiful people, so the net effect is that the most attractive people will be more likely to end up with each other and so on down the ladder of handsomeness.

That's it exactly. We have a huge pool of potential identities that we can develop already available. Most of the time we're just in our most developed and default identity, because it feels comfortable and familiar and our neurology is most attuned to it. To use a clothing analogy, say we have a huge wardrobe of clothes we could wear, but we only choose to wear a couple of outfits because we like them and they're familiar and we feel comfortable in them. We did we get all these clothes from? We borrowed (or copied) them from the people around us. Blush. We Brits can be notoriously badly behaved abroad. Sorry.

My take is that identity is nothing more than storytelling. Some of the stories we've embodied unconsciously over time, picked up from culture or experiences of pain and joy. Beliefs are stories we think are true. Identity is like a character in a novel, it works in the same way except the character is you and the novel is your life. The character doesn't exist outside the novel and we're a lot freer than a character in a novel. We're freer than we want to believe. Identity has a weight to it, it's hard to push around and shift, because that is what an identity is a thing that resists change. I'd say it's not so easy as just willing yourself to change, a big weight needs a hard push, or many small pushes over time. My feeling is that to shift identity requires not better storytelling (although that helps), but for the identity to become more flexible and playful. Part of our identities are also maintained by the expectations of the people around us - the social matrix - so there's also the resistance of that weight to overcome. We can consciously practise being flexible. We can be morose and quiet one day, joyful and extrovert another day and so on. That way eventually we can pick and choose which identity to "wear" that best suits a situation or our disposition or just for the fun of it.

I had better luck. ChatGPT says: "The lengthy passage explores a philosophical and metaphysical view of reality, suggesting that physical 3D space does not exist. Instead, it posits that everything is a series of ideas or concepts overlaid and interconnected in a complex, multi-dimensional way. Key points include: Ideas as Reality: Everything we perceive, such as walls, colors, or relationships, are merely ideas layered upon each other. Our brain and senses process and integrate these ideas, creating a seamless experience of reality. Dimensional Overlay: These ideas exist in different dimensions, overlaid exponentially, making it difficult to comprehend and navigate beyond our perceived 3D space. Brain Function: The brain is described as a hyperfractal structure that automatically integrates and makes sense of these dimensions, enabling new behaviors and insights. Stress and emotional responses arise from the brain's efforts to maintain consistency. Ego and Consciousness: The ego and self-awareness are seen as constructs that help us interact with this multi-dimensional reality. Fear, coping mechanisms, and the quest for understanding are all part of this process. Belief and Reality: The text suggests that belief can influence physical reality, and that ideas have objective existence as dimensions. The interconnectedness of ideas and the physical manifestation of neurons in the brain are highlighted. Spiritual and Mystical Elements: The passage touches on themes of awakening, enlightenment, and the possibility of higher dimensions beyond physical existence. It suggests that love, belief, and imagination play crucial roles in navigating these dimensions. Integration and Expansion: The integration of experiences and ideas leads to self-expansion and unity with a larger, infinite consciousness. Psychedelics and other experiences can facilitate this process by disrupting old patterns and creating new ones. Infinite Possibilities: The narrative embraces the infinite nature of ideas and consciousness, proposing that everything is interconnected and continuously evolving through fractals and patterns. In essence, the text is a complex exploration of the nature of reality, consciousness, and the interplay of ideas and dimensions, emphasizing the power of belief and the infinite potential of the mind."

Instead of moving hands I prefer thinking about breathing. Seemingly I can willingly control my breathing, but it also happens without my will. Maybe will is a manifestation or signal that something is perturbed from its "natural" action. If I breathe without will, then it adjusts itself automatically to the situation, but any perturbation from that automatic behaviour results in me thinking that "I did it"?

I like to think about this sort of thing in terms of a triangle of causation. The points of the triangle are the events, the edges are the direction of causation. Each edge can have a direction which implies that one event causes the other. If two events don't cause each other, then there is no direction of causation. An event is something like: hand moving or conscious intent or automatic imagination. So, how many ways are there to draw this triangle? Quite a few, and each represents a different way of seeing things. Some combinations are: Conscious Intent (CI) causes the hand to move (HM) - automatic imagination (AI) does not cause anything. AI causes CI which causes HM. HM causes CI (i.e. you move your hand and attribute it to conscious intent after the fact), again AI does not cause anything. AI causes HM which then causes CI. AI causes both CI and HM simultaneously - this is interesting because it gives automatic imagination all control. AI, CI and HM are all independent and do not cause each other. My favourite case. This implies that reality is simply one big coincidence. Maybe every time your hand moves and you have a conscious intent, they just so happen to line up by luck not by causation. So as you can see you could argue for any one of these triangles of causation as being true.

If I had more than 24 hours, I would like to go and sit in a small sandy cove on Rakiura and watch the sea and dig my fingers into the sand. But I've only got 2 hours - in which case I'd like to listen to some beautiful music and write a small personal note to each person I know and why I love them. Call me a (dead) soppy romantic.

For sure it's a gross simplification. Still it's a interesting exercise to try and come up with some sort of explanation, I find it totally fascinating. To use an IT analogy: I see it like software (soul) being on hardware (body). For most people, there's one integrated program running albeit it's made up of lots of different parts. But in the video there are two well delineated programs running simultaneously. The operating system engages one or the other program mutually exclusively, although the two appear to share some information between them. They're definitely not acting in my opinion - although I would say there are strong parallels with acting. We are well able to learn to take on different personas. The fact that we can do this at all (i.e. the average person), indicates that different personas can inhabit the same body or at the very least different traits are expressed in different situations. I just think the video shows an extreme case of this. I do think that the social pressure to be "one person" shouldn't be underestimated. But you're right even in the privacy of my own home I'm still feel like one person, even if I were to express different things than I would in public. Cool post, I'll watch the rest of the videos.