LastThursday

@Jannes there are ways to resolve the inner conflict. NLP has various techniques under the name "Parts Integration". There's many videos on YouTube if you're interested. Here's a simple version to start with (the actual technique is explained from 2:54 onwards):

@Ramanujan looks like you're suffereing from not being focused enough. Ask yourself specifically "what do I want to win at?" (then go do it). None of us are winners or losers in generality. We're much more nuanced than that as humans and you're doing yourself a disservice by calling yourself a loser. You don't win at mastery, it's always an ongoing process of improvement.

Hey @gettoefl I appreciate you for saying that. It makes me feel happy that someone gets something from what I write, whatever that may be. As well as being more informed, I forgot to include that also saying "yes" to more things will open up unique experiences. I think many of us hold ourselves back out of fear of the unknown, inexperience or going against conformity. Get out there!

I missed the aurora borealis here in the UK the other night. I'm up on the second floor and I have a decent view of the sky from my windows. I also normally sleep by midnight, so the the thing would have been in full swing before I went to bed. A friend of mine was ill with a bad cold and he couldn't sleep that night. He chose to while away the hours playing chess on his mobile (he's addicted). He too missed the aurora happening outside his bedroom window. A few friends posted pictures that they'd taken and it looked breathtaking. I feel kind of gutted to not have seen it, it was probably a once-in-a-lifetime event for where I live. Amazing things are happening all around us all the time. Many times I've been with people and noticed things myself that the people around me have been oblivious to. But it seems obvious to me that I've also missed many things other have noticed too. How is it possible to be me more aware of what's going on around us? How can we not miss out on life? One way it to be informed. Simply knowing where to look and when to look can open up amazing experiences for us. Being informed does require a constant curiosity and active research - it can be done passively, but then you are at the whims and biases of others; I don't follow the news actively for example. Instead I follow my nose and read up and investigate stuff that interests me. Not everyone is like me, but a stronger sense of curiosity can be cultivated. Another is simply to be more present. By this I mean being less distracted and having your focus pulled tightly. We seem to live in a society that constantly wants to pull our focus this way and that, but more perniciously it wants to constantly narrow our focus on to this way of thinking or that particular product. Instead we should actively fight against this narrowing of focus and regularly do things that open up our focus. This can be from doing things which are out of our normal routine, to actively paying attention to things we don't normally. Meditation can help, even if just to quieten our minds and bring us back to the here and now more often. But it also helps to train our attention so that we're in control of it. Lastly is to see the bigger picture. We sit at the centre of an immense infinitude of stuff constantly happening to us and around us. It is possible to become more aware of the interconnectedness and magic quality of everything; that you are part of it. When we are more integrated and aligned with that immensity and we expand our focus outwards we'll notice a lot more once-in-a-lifetime events.

@stephenkettley one thing that materialism has going for it is that if you drop a brick on your foot, it will hurt. In other words the brick and the pain are real. The brick is made of stuff and pain is transmitted by nerve impulses. You could then say the sensation of pain is not material even if it has a material cause, and argue that the sensation of pain is made of dream-stuff and then eventually conclude that everything is actually dream-stuff. But even subjective idealism isn't the whole story, because it doesn't explain why bricks exist and why they should hurt. If mind and body were separate then one could be detached from the other and be free to go where it wants. Can your body go shopping whilst your mind stays at home? Maybe.

Go and have a relationship first, forget the worry about being hurt by girls - you'll deal with it just fine if and when it happens.

You have to be clear about what you mean by "success". Capitalism is a form of gambling. You put in capital upfront - money, work, effort, hours, infrastructure, stuff, investment - in the hope that you are rewarded with excess money in the long run (profit). That is primarily what running a business is about. You are successful if you are profitable. So in this model the profits come first. It's unsustainable if you keep putting in capital without any reward and so the business will collapse eventually. There are a million different ways to increase your likelihood of making profit and that's what makes business so complex. One of those ways is to provide great value to other people. In other words if your business provides something that other people need or that improves their lives, then they will buy your products and services. Not only that, they will pay more than it cost you to create the product, and you will make profit. Therefore making profit and providing value to other people are two sides of the same coin. But you aren't serving the collective necessarily, you are only convincing people to buy your products or services to make profit.

@blessedlion1993 she could have been intersex. More information below. But honestly if it didn't work for you, then just move on and don't worry about it. Or she could have just had big hands 🤷

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.