LastThursday

These are good guidelines for being a decent person. It seems like it's causing you some amount of confusion or trouble socially though. In practice these guidelines take work to maintain, it's easy to slip into behaviour that goes against them. The reason for having these guidelines in the first place, is that they are needed, it doesn't come naturally to many people. It all comes down to intention. If you intend to discriminate or to objectify or treat others in a way you wouldn't like yourself, then you're probably causing someone else suffering. So the more important guidline to follow is to keep asking yourself: am I causing suffering? The thing is, is that you will cause suffering to others at some point, we all do - and we may not even mean to. The best we can do is to apologise, help fix the suffering and not repeat our bad behaviour in future. The point is not to rigidly follow a set of rules as if they were absolutes, and make our social interactions rigid and inflexible. Instead work to raise your awareness of when others are suffering, and improve your social skills in not causing suffering in the first place or at least help in reducing suffering when you do cause it. This is what the term EQ is all about.

There is no forum, only This.

Yes. The best way is by interruption. When we have an emotional reaction, it's like our bodies are running an automatic program. Something external triggers our emotion and then a whole cascade of things happen. We have thoughts and feelings and behave in certain ways. Imagine someone had upset you, and you begin to have a strong emotional reaction. Suddenly, your smoke alarm goes off and you can smell something burning. Do you continue to have the upset emotional reaction, or do you panic and check if your house is on fire? The idea then, is to build up enough awareness that you're being triggered, and then interrupt the program yourself. There are many many ways you could do it. Maybe you get triggered and instead of sitting there and being upset, you go out for a run instead, or you watch an engaging film or whatever. Get creative. Basically, do something else that grabs your attention strongly. If you do this kind of thing enough, then your brain learns to re-program itself. Yes, it's a bit like being on holiday and trying to talk to someone in a foreign language by using a phrase book. It's very possible to observe without "using a phrase book" but it takes practice. Practice by observing, but let the sensations just wash over you without analysis. Observing happens "out there" not "in here". Constantly push your attention outwards away from yourself.

Here's some that immediately come to mind: When I use the word "consciousness" is it the same as your word "consciousness"? Is consciousness one thing or many things? If many things, are those things completely separate? If everything is consciousness how can consciousness explain itself? How do "things" in consciousness persist? What is the relationship between materialism and idealism? Why does altering matter (i.e. drugs, lobotomies) change consciousness? Is what "exists" only that which I'm aware of? Do things outside of my awareness stop existing? Is awareness consciousness or is consciousness more than awareness? There's plenty more lol.

You have ask yourself what you mean by "smart enough" or "incorrect". According to whose standard? If you really examine it it's always according to your own standard. It seems like disapproval comes externally from others, but the emotional reaction is always internal. To a large degree it's possible to control or regulate your emotional reaction. But it takes an awareness and lots of practice to do this. You can break those thought loops that keep prolonging the negative emotions. For the forum specifically, just step away for a day or two and let the emotion subside. Or, if you feel like stand your ground and fight back and give the emotions an outlet - do what comes naturally though don't force it. Realistically, it doesn't matter how smart you are, there will always be someone smarter than you. That's life, give yourself a chance. ASD is about dysfunction of theory of mind. Normies very quickly build up mental models about the potential thought processes and emotions of others - theory of mind - and they do this in real time. They even believe this mental model is "truth" and you hear a lot of "I know what he's thinking" as if mind reading were real. It's a spectrum, some people are better than others at reading people. In my own life I have noticed a marked improvement in my ability to do this, but it's taken a lot of work and observation and focus. This theory of mind is also reflexive, so you would have a mental model about what your own emotions and thoughts and actions mean. In other words, theory of mind is what gives you an identity and a strong sense of "self". It is ironic that many on this forum would like to achieve a state of "no self".

Don't worry, we all mask to some extent. There's countless threads about how to be more authentic, i.e. mask less. We only show the parts of ourselves that we think others want to see. I think as long as you're not being or saying offensive things, most people will just accept you as you are, especially once they get to know you more. If you get rejected by people then f*ck them, life's too short, find more interesting people! Ironically, being worried and sensitive and censoring yourself will make you appear less fluid in your interactions. That's because it takes mental effort to censor yourself when the mental effort should be going into the social interaction instead. It seems like you're very observant of others and this is a real plus for social situations. The best results for social interaction is to put all your attention into who you are talking to, and away from yourself - the more you try and control yourself the more people will notice.

It does take great maturity to be devoted to others' needs above your own. Most parents know this for example. The maturity comes because we are naturally selfish and to overcome this takes effort and learning. Maturity is seeing the bigger picture and supressing your own desires in support of that. But, you are a person too and so to exclude yourself and not serve yourself as well as others is imbalanced. Ideally, we would all serve each other, that would be real maturity. Realistically, you can only ever serve a limited number of people, so you still only serve the self-interest of the group, the selfishness isn't ever completely gone.

Are you stupid? Do you like the smell of paper? I found the following video totally fascinating. Here's a young woman who's deciding that she's had enough of being stupid - and her process for becoming less stupid. From a philosphical point of view in many ways we're all stupid. Although, ignorant or inexperienced might be better words. But how is it that we can get to know something that is unknown to us? It's like being parachuted into an mysterious land and then trying to work out what to do with little or no prior information. How do we bootstrap ourselves? The fascinating part of the video is exactly that process of bootstrapping being explained. But she also explains why it is that she (thinks she) is stupid. From a personal perspective, it's interesting to get an insight into the thought processes of a person who is the antithesis of me. I've always been driven by curiousity and never been afraid to learn stuff, complex stuff, difficult stuff. Largely, I think I've been lucky to have always had that drive. Who would I have been if I hadn't had that? To a degree my sister is like the woman in the video, she was always afraid of or shied away from academic learning, despite her intelligence and talent; it was an identity she clung on to. With some coaxing from me, my sister did start a first degree in languages and sociology in her later years. She never finished it, but nevertheless I think it made her realise that she was more than capable of "not being stupid". Fundamentally, I think she didn't complete it because it directly confronted her deep seated identity with being anti-academic and in a way anti-learning. I hope it loosened things up for her. I would caveat that being academic is not the only way to be intelligent (!). The real process for not being stupid starts with awareness, awareness that something is off and needs to change. But I do think the trigger for that awareness is ultimately mysterious. Yes, you could be told directly "you're stupid", but that may not trigger awareness to do something about it: it's quite natural to just think "no am not!" or "yeah whatever" or "I'm naturally stupid, why bother changing it's impossible?". There's great intelligence in that awareness and that is the seed needed for bootstrapping yourself. In some ways this video speaks to my directly. I have a strong awareness that I myself need to bootstrap my way out of my current situation. But I'm stupid and have no idea what needs to be done. I need my equivalent of learning to read books; to enjoy the smell of paper!

+1 for autonomy. But sometimes it can be fun and freeing NOT to think for yourself and be in someone else's flow. I reckon your Romanian friend is just more extrovert than you, which in itself is neither here nor there, just a difference in style. Most relationships involve some sort of compromise (romantic or not), I would say tolerate what you can tolerate and no more than that. And, sometimes it's fun for other people to be in your flow and you lead.

I remember being a young teenager and talking to my uncle. I don't know how we got on to the subject, but I said to him "life seems to get harder, but it also gets easier". I think for a fulfilling life we need constant expansion. We take on the hard stuff and it then becomes easier over time and we keep on levelling up. But this can make it feel like we're going nowhere. I think we have computer games because they reflect something deep about our psyches. It's not just about enjoyment and skill and escapism, it's an existential thing. We know that we're just playing a game called "real life". For comedic value go here: https://www.reddit.com/r/outside/ @CARDOZZO there is only one way to know that we're in a simulation and that would be to look for glitches and inconsistencies. By definition, no simulation is perfect.

I have to agree that humans are an extreme outlier as an ape. We are unique as an animal in general. I think with Neanderthals (and probably with Denisovans) there was a messy dynamic with humans, some level of competition, some interbreeding and lots of other factors - maybe overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers. But the fact that humans migrated into Neanderthal territory and not the other way around is telling - they were simply more adaptable to new environments and that probably gave them the edge. Evolutionarily, you only need an edge over a long enough period to become the dominant organism, basically it's "survival of the fittest". You're right that humans and chimps say, occupied different niches and so chimps survived. But humans overlapped with wolves for the same prey, and they ended up domesticating them - but no doubt wolf numbers are less as a result of humans. It's a damn shame that there aren't more species of humans around, perhaps they'd keep us in check? But we'd probably keep them as pets, servants, or show them off in zoos or put them into ghettos, or force them into reservations, so it's probably just as well.

I don't know, a gorilla is not a chimp, is not a human. These biological categories are ultimately based on similarity. You could say that humans are the least similar in the group of apes, but they definitely have similarities in behaviour, form and genetics to other apes. From those similarities you can conclude that all apes had a common ancestor. It's also a matter of definition. The category of apes includes humans, so humans are apes. You could just as easily make up a different category that excludes humans, but includes chimps and gorillas. The story with Neanderthals is not just about extermination, humans nowadays (especially Europeans) have a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA, which means that humans also interbred with them, so some of us are partly Neanderthal. In any case Neanderthals were possibly going extinct due to climate change at the time. Humans also kill by drastically altering habitat or passing on diseases or wiping out part of the food chain, i.e. incidentally. In that sense we're "out of place" in the ecosystem balance of the planet. But invasive species and the mass spawnings of locusts do the same sort of ecosystem damage, we're not that unique I suppose.

A couple of weird throwbacks

@Leo Gura if you have a cure, let's have it. My tinnitus is most probably caused by going to too many loud clubs in my youth. It's a constant very high pitch whine, which I sort of ignore most of the time.

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.

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.