LastThursday

Think of it in the same way as breathing. Is it possible to control your breathing? Most of the time breathing is outside of your conscious control, but sometimes you become conscious that you can control it. What about actors, can they conjure up feelings, how do they do it? And lastly, how many feelings can you feel at once, and does a new feeling crowd out an old feeling? BTW I like your "outwith", I'll have to start using it.

It's the same for something like law or medicine. Every discipline has its jargon, as @zurew says it's done for accuracy and brevity of conveying ideas. It's also used to signal being part of a group. I bet even in your immediate family you have distinct phrases and unusual words you use.

This is like saying a carpenter should understand ecology, because they work with wood, and being amazed they don't. Different domains of knowledge and experience. You can be an Einstein in your domain, and be clueless about other things.

Leo with hair and lipstick. I would.

Dealing with idiots. There are occasions when I get triggered by people on this forum. It can take many forms, someone says something innapropriate, takes things out of context, trolls someone else, is racist, mysoginist, puts someone else down, laughs at them for their difference, bullies, or is outright nuts. I get even more upset if it's aimed at me. But this sort of thing doesn't just happen on the internet, but in real life too. The struggle I constantly have with it is how to express myself in those situations. I get the impression that for a lot of people it's a simple equation: I'm upset, therefore I show I'm upset. There is nothing in the middle mediating the response, little thought or moderation goes into controlling "how should I respond best?". When I was younger my natural response to being upset was fairly simple: I would just be avoidant. For whatever reason I never felt comfortable just expressing the fact I was upset, don't get me wrong this did come naturally when I was very small, I would cry or very visibly show I was upset, but at some point this was knocked out of me. I think I learned that the best response for me was just to avoid the people that upset me, most probably because I felt helpless in those situations. It was worse if I couldn't physically get away, I would just give people the silent treatment. That strategy would stay with me for most of my adulthood. The problem is I learned is that it mostly doesn't work, it neither makes me feel better, or lets the person know that their behaviour is unacceptable. I needed a different approach. There is something to be said for the "I'm upset therefore I react" way of doing things. For one it's immediate and for another it's direct, the person behaving badly has instant feedback, and you yourself are able to express things without talking yourself out of it. It can solve both the problems at once, you feel better, and the other person knows where you stand. In my experience I've found that the other person will start behaving differently around you, but that it's unpredictable how they will react, sometimes they will get angry, sometimes they will double-down, sometimes they back down and go away, rarely, they might apologise. You can't control others. And that's where I get stuck, because "just reacting" isn't that good of a strategy most of the time: when whole nations do it they end up going to war. Very often questioning the other person's behaviour can work better. The "why did you do/say that?" response can take people off guard. In general asking people questions puts them into a position where they have to think. When you're working, just take note of how many times your manager asks you questions, it's a form of dominance and control. Even if the person doesn't want to answer the question, it can make them think twice when interacting with you in future. And, ultimately that is as much control as you can hope to have, it may be your inner desire to stop the person from behaving badly at all and make them realise the error of their ways, but people are both selfish and slow to change. I'd say questioning works better in real life if you have the stomach for it, and in my experience don't do it to your manager, you might get fired. What have I settled on? Mostly the indirect approach, I am after all British, but it also gels better with my avoidant nature, I can do confrontation but mostly I don't. I find that it's difficult for people to respond (annoyingly) when you're being indirect. I take the observational and non-personal approach. It's hard to explain, but the context makes it obvious who you're directing your comments to, but your comments don't explicitly name the person. The aim is to be as public as possible, but not directly challenging. It could be argued that being indirect is ineffective, but as I've said above you can't control people. And lastly, sometimes no response is the best response, some people (trolls, nutjobs) want the oxygen of attention, best not to give it to them, take a deep breath and move on.

Well done on your breakthrough. It must feel good to let yourself off the hook and take away that pressure. I've met a few charismatic people in my time. From observing them I'd say exactly what you've found out for yourself. They were good communicators with good social skills, they knew how to laugh especially at themselves, and they were confident and happy in their own skin. I'd say self-confidence would be at the top of that list, but not arogance. Having good social skills requires you to be "outward", to pay full attention to the people you're with, be non-judgemental, and not to be stuck in your own head. There's also a large amount of flow and improvisation. If you have performance pressure or worried about what you're going to do tomorrow, you're not in flow, and that kills social communication.

There is the obvious answer, but it's not very sexy: take action. I guarantee that it is 1000x more effective than not taking action. Use your God given arms, legs and mouth to manipulate reality.

@Joseph Maynor you've hit the nail on the head. Nobody thinks "statistically" for example, because it's hard to integrate. And, thinking "theoretically" isn't something that comes at all naturally to most. Nevertheless, it is possible to think differently, but as you say it isn't easy to integrate. My list was just a toy model, nothing more.

If you accept that there is a point to life, then love in all its forms is it.

@YIDIRYIDIR it's a good insight that behaviour is linked to identity. I would argue the converse (because I'm like that). People don't change behaviour because it threatens their identity. Change is uncertainty, and uncertainty is risk, and risk could threaten who you are. Also, there is nearly always some pay off for any entrenched behaviour, even if it's to the detriment of your overall wellbeing. To change then, requires a renegotiation of the pay off, which in itself can be hard to accept or work out.

@Majed I find it weird that you find it weird. Novel things can be weird, but you get used them, and it stops being weird. Women on motorcycles is neither here nor there, they are neither lesser or more of anything for doing it. Maybe they don't like traffic or just like the wind in their hair or have a death wish 🤷‍♀️

It would be interesting to come up with a model of non-standard thinking. I'd say the default mode for most folks is social thinking: who did or said what to whom and why, how one person relates to another, what you feel about things. Here's a random bullet list pulled out of nowhere of different types of thinking: Social - you keep a ledger of interactions between things (people), you apply a value function (feelings) to those interactions Relational - you accept that nothing happens in isolation, everything affects everything else with varying strengths Systems - everything works like a machine with distinct interacting parts, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts Construct aware - you realise that every type of thing is an artificially constructed entity made of other things Causal - you know that if A and B happen, there are different scenarios for their synchronicity: A caused B, A and B were caused by C etc. Statistical - see @Carl-Richard Ambiguous - you accept that it is not possible to know the detail of causes for A and B and therefore have to conclude that A and B are equally likely even if contradictory. You know that knowledge and information are always lacking. Big picture - you zoom out or bring more of the world into the scenario in order to explain things, i.e. there a nearly always outside influences, outside of your knowledge. Meta - you constantly try and see problems from different angles, and through different paradigms, or by thinking laterally. Abstract - you use ideas not rooted in every day things to explain things: mathematics, language, symbols, geometry, numbers. I also wonder if there can be a distinct progression in different styles of thinking.

@Adrian colby I think with autism there is a weak "theory of mind". This makes it difficult to take social cues from a person, interpret those and create a mental model of what that person is thinking and feeling, in real time. This also applies to oneself. We have a theory of mind of our own emotions and bodily sensations and build an identity from it. I suspect those with autism have a more fluid or looser identity. Identity mostly comes from copying others, and applying that to ourselves, but if that process is disrupted then building an identity becomes harder. Anyway, don't take my words verbatim, just my ideas nothing more.

I had an argument with AI about a maths problem the other day. The AI was wrong. AI's are not infallible gods, they are robots that make shit up. I actually had to rephrase my maths problem for it to get the right answer. It was useful for me to argue with it, to clarify my own thinking, but I was aware of how ridiculous the situation was. The problem is, is you don't know what you don't know. If an AI is spouting knowledge about things you don't know about, then what are you supposed to do with that other than believe it is correct? And the whole reason for talking to an AI is mostly to talk about things you don't know about. You see the problem. What is needed, is AI training before using it and those AI companies should offer it.

There isn't one. The trap is thinking that intelligence is a one-dimensional thing that you can put a number against. There's also quite a blury line between knowledge and skill, and whether you consider those two things intelligence too. Are insight and creativity intelligence also? What about physical intelligence versus mental intelligence? Gaining knowledge and improving skill can clearly be done by anyone. Insight largely comes from deep domain knowledge and/or skill. Creativity can come from mastery of a thing. The idea that you can somehow download or access intelligence is the wrong way to think about it. If you want to improve intelligence, then you have to practise and learn on all fronts.

The compassion, generosity and intelligence of some, knows no bounds.

I enjoyed the video, interesting to get a history of Mishlove. I've watched a lot of New Thinking Allowed. The one property of consciousness is that it's the thing itself, i.e. it has a kind of recursion built into it. Recursion can lead to a fractal or holographic structure, whereby the thing is contained inside itself. With a fractal it's a self-similar structure, with a hologram it's the entirety contained within itself - although the holographic principle gets abused, because it's only ever the entirety from a particular perspective. It's not then a difficult leap to think that consciousness expresses a brain, which contains consciousness and so on. A brain then is just a recursive structure in consciousness. Consciousness is never lost however, even with a blow to the head, because the person whose head it is, doesn't experience a loss of consciousness, but a discontinuity. And the person watching the blow don't experience a loss of consciousness either, just the person collapsing, i.e. consciousness is not "aliveness".

This is true, and it continues to be true no matter how close you get. But if you give it the benefit of the doubt, then you have a mutual synchronicity of experience, two mirrors looking into each other infinitely reflecting.

If you like the scratchings of a madman, then this guy's @LastThursday's journal might be interesting. There are some other good ones to on there though.

But I don't like ambuiguity, and riddles, in the name of God, I must know the absolute truth, right now, please tell me @Mellowmarsh.

Isn't "everything else" consciousness itself too? Confused.

Most definitely you're not an exception. There's a whole spectrum of gender from ultra male to ultra female, and everything in between. Biology, gender, sexual orientation, those things don't necessarily align, even if society wants to pretend it does. There's a higher chance if you're autistic that you're more gender fluid, but I forget where I read that factoid, some study or other. In short the tension you feel is between what you feel you are/should be and how society thinks you should be. To resolve that tension you'll need to engage with who you think you are more strongly. Start off gently, experiment, test the waters.

And "immediate non descriptive consciousness" isn't that a linguistic statement also? You see the problem. To me absolute means "all encompassing", "total", "dead certain", "without doubt or error", "irrefutably". What sort of truth is that, what is it about an absolute truth that makes it irrefutable? How can it be known, if it's not conviction or faith?

Unfortunately you can't get away from linguistics. What is absolute referring to, and is it just one truth or many of them?

I'd say this is an excellent insight. Most people run at the whims of their programming, and feel helpless to change it. Neuro Linguistic Programming is one set of methods to reprogram yourself, but there are plenty of others such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and therapy in general, and psychedelics of course. I would be wary of placing too much emphasis on the metaphors though, we're not machines in the conventional sense, and we're not computers either. The situation is paradoxical though. When you consciously choose to change or tinker with your programming, where does this idea come from? The system itself of course.