LastThursday

I do think we all vastly underestimate our ability to actualize ourselves. You can even see on here how most of us just sit in our own funk - me included. We don't know what we don't know. It's impossible sometimes to realise how much we can change and how quickly it can happen and just how much potential we have. Even if we think we are severely limited in certain ways, there's still a huge amount of room for self improvement. There's nearly always ways around limitation. Sadly, most of the time the only thing stopping us from actualizing is our own minds and beliefs or bad health. Are there limits? Of course there are. But we're not one dimensional. We can improve in a zillion different ways.

I totally get this. Some of my most depressing moments are when I'm looking inwards. When I'm out with friends or watching a film or walking or whatever I'm most happy. Always being in the moment and giving it your full attention is the ultimate goal. However, if you want to grow and develop as a person, introspection and self help are essential. A lot of self help is very practical and you should aim to have a 20% self help versus 80% taking action. Take a simple example: say self help tells you to look people in the eye when talking to them to have a better connection. In that case, taking the advice and actioning the advice is like 1% to 99%. All the learning is in taking action. A think a lot of self help can be depressing because you're constantly shining a light on your weak spots and ugly parts. Maybe making eye contact for you is very difficult (e.g.), so naturally this can feel frustrating and depressing - and taking action just feels awkward and difficult. Self help is not always easy. It's also easy to slip into existential rumination, "why am I here?" kind of thinking and this can cause people a lot of anxiety and concern if they're not ready for it - a lot of it is very unintuitive and weird and maybe even dehumanizing. It's also very easy to get stuck into thinking about the future or past and having regret and anxiety from it - but it's also necessary to plan and have goals, and to work through problems created in the past. Meditation can even cause depression: https://www.verywellhealth.com/mindfulness-can-be-harmful-researchers-say-5186740 The rule with self help is to take what works for you and reject what doesn't.

The story of my life: The guy is hilarious.

I like to think that when I do either I do so spontaneously and without intention to manipulate - I'm presenting myself as I am. But sure, smiling and crying is manipulation or more rightly signalling. Can you sense that this thread makes me feel uneasy? For a couple of reasons. Rant incoming. First there is the objectification, using beauty and the fact she's a public figure to justify doing so. There's a flattening of all the dimensions of the person into just a manipulated image to be held up and judged by all. I think most of us wouldn't like that to happen to us - so it shouldn't be normalised. Secondly, the image and the reactions it evokes are a tacit agreement that it represents an ideal that should be upheld. That's why I say the beauty is a projection, not everyone needs or wants to adhere to the ideal being presented. Maybe the ideal is actually untainable by most of us, and wouldn't that cause suffering? Thirdly. It's no different from a dog being confused and humping its owner's leg. We laugh at the dog for being confused and wonder how it can be so stupid. Are we really much different by looking at images that turn us on in some way, and then telling everyone about it? Rant over. Interesting article about objectification of women: https://www.cairn.info/revue-internationale-de-psychologie-sociale-2015-1-page-15.htm

Try staying alive without them.

I'm not saying it's fake at all. I'm definitely saying it will be modified. Even the dress and the makeup, the pose: it's all staged for effect. I'm sort of making two points: 1. You can't trust anything on the internet. And by extension you shouldn't completely trust anything presented to you as ground truth. Nearly everything in media is manipulated in some way to create some sort effect in the viewer. 2. Beauty is projected onto people and things, there's no inherent beauty in anything. Unless you're a hippy and you think everything is beautiful. 3. Boy I sound negative, but I'm not trying to be. Ok three points.

And I will get a bunch of images (which have almost certainly been manipulated in some way). Anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mave:

Use maths. The very basic behaviours of systems are either damping, exponential (growth) or oscillation. All of these are tied to solutions of differential equations. Essentially it boils down to combinations of exponential functions and complex numbers. The next level is combinations of those, i.e. damped oscillation and so on (think bouncing spring). Next is chaotic attractors. This is basically oscillation and/or damping with a certain degree of uncertainty or high sensitivity to initial conditions (see chaotic pendulum). A huge range of systems exhibit the above behaviours. For example animal populations, electric circuits, virus pandemics, planetary motion, bouncing balls, radioactivity, number of bugs in a computer program and so on. Almost all systems are non-linear (i.e. exponential in some way), and you have to work quite hard to make them behave in a linear manner. Whenever you get two opposing exponential processes, you tend to get oscillation. If one of the processes wins out, you get damping or runaway exponential growth. In practice unbounded exponential growth is not possible and usually some opposing process will stop it - and you will get the well known S shape. This happens in pandemics, animal populations and Moore's law in chip transistor density. And there ends my engineering lesson.

How do you know the picture hasn't been edited and beautified? How do you know it hasn't been generated by AI. Has it all been staged to enhance her beauty. Does it matter? Is the beauty in the picture or in your head?

To stop this sort of thing, always whatever you apply to "other people" apply to "yourself" first. Ask yourself "what if I'm an autopilot NPC?". You'll get more philosophical mileage from asking that question.

We're all constantly playing one character or other and judging each other on it. Maybe what you're picking up on is that the character isn't being played well enough - it's an uncanny valley effect (?) Personally, I think she was absolutely fine, despite not aligning myself with her content.

@Magnanimous it's already here and you're staring at it. But I do get what you mean. This is interesting: If an AI can read neurons firing, it's not a stretch to do it in reverse. Instead of "downloading" information directly, we would "lookup" information using our handy dandy integrated AI/brain interface.

Here's some ideas: 1. Competence. For example, no-one is born being able to do maths, it has to be learned and it can be hard and unintuitive. Being competent in a thing will give you confidence in that thing. Being competent takes time, effort and commitment. 2. Focus. Nobody can be confident in everything they do. Work out very specifically what you want to be confident in. Is it confident with people, or confident with your physique, or confident with your intelligence. What specifically? Focus on just a couple of things and work on those solidly. 3. Practice and repetition. Sometimes there's no substitute for just practising the same thing over and over. But it doesn't have to be all grind and hard work. There's a joy to doing the same thing over and over and watching yourself improve. Try out variations and make it into a game. You were a kid once and all you did was make everything into play and games, but that was practice in disguise. 4. Seek a mentor. This can give you a real step up in your confidence, because a mentor will have been through the some of the same problems as you're facing, and they can give you guidance and reassurance, and impart knowledge to you. 5. Find a role model. Go find someone who you admire for their confidence and then copy them. Follow them, stalk them, put yourself in their shoes, pretend you are them. With the internet, this is incredibly easy to do nowadays. 6. Immerse yourself. Set aside a fixed time period where you commit to improving your confidence in a particular area. The idea is to fully let yourself go, and just do the work. Spend every waking moment investigating, researching, practising. Go on a retreat, take a course, talk to as many people as you can, go do the thing you were always too scared to take on. You will be guaranteed to improve your confidence this way. 7. Understand your fear. A lot of confidence is about being fearless (whether that is learned or not). Examine what it is that makes you fearful in the thing you want to be confident in. Maybe you fear being ridiculed in a group situation. Maybe you fear the consequences of talking to strangers who won't like you. Maybe you have trauma triggered by certain situations. Maybe you have low self worth and low self esteem. Work it out! Get therapy. Work on yourself and your mental health and your mental state. 8. Commitment. Just decide to commit to being confident in something, and go through with it no matter what happens. Confidence is incremental, not all-or-nothing. You will fail many many times, but you will also win slowly but surely. Each win will give you a guaranteed boost.

We all exist. It's just that we're side effects, not the main event.

Consciousness and awareness has you and everyone else. The logic has to be switched around. Consciousness is not given to, or possesed by you. Instead you and the rest of us are manifestations of consciousness and awareness. The illusion of ownership is strong, but it's just an illusion. It's extremely difficult to get a grip of, but consciousness just isn't a thing that can be counted. There isn't one consciousness or many, it just isn't an attribute it has. Consciousness is literally everything. Every single word and concept you could ever use is a product of consciousness and awareness - that makes words and concepts useless in capturing its totally, except to satisfy the thin sliver of consciousness that wants answers couched in language and logic and equivalences.

It's definitely hard to be aware of something you're not aware of, even if someone tries to make you aware of it. The thing is solipsism isn't even useful, it explains nothing and gives you nothing in return, except existential angst.

The crux of the (my) argument is that solipsism is a viewpoint not an absolute. It's a viewpoint because there has to be an observer to realise "I'm the only one" or "my reality is the only reality that exists". But if the observer or "I" is actually just a construct within reality (which seems likely), then the observer is not an absolute. What you're then left with is just bulk "reality" without observers and that isn't solipsism, it's something else.

Alice: you're the only solipsist. Bob: no you're the only solipsist. Zara: wait... I don't exi

I suspect this thread is just a honey trap for the philosophers on the forum... I don't know, there's a lot of words being thrown about as if we really comprehend them and that we have a common understanding of them - we don't, so we end up going around in circles. But that's fun, like a merry-go-round. My personal intuition is something like: 1. Consciousness/reality can introspect itself. So even a void could be aware of itself or "know" itself or "comprehend" itself. 2. This introspection can ramp up in complexity, to the point where a flower is recognised. It's something like awareness can tie itself into ever more complicated knots. 3. There's no difference between the ability to introspect and the thing itself. Reality/consciousness is simply "knowing" in all it's glory, and nothing else. Time for breakfast.

Can you actually have "not knowing", what would that be? Take radio waves as an example. I have no direct knowing of them, all my knowing of radio waves are indirect, mostly through a radio, or theoretical knowledge.

There is a direct knowing without mind like @gettoefl says. When you look at or touch a flower, there is an effortless knowing that it is a flower. There's a conceptual knowing which is a set of relationships and causes and effects: which requires thought and effort. The fundamental difference between the two types of knowing, is that one is direct and the other indirect. For example you can look at a car engine and know direclty it's a car engine, or you can have a conceptual knowing of how it's constructed and what makes it work, and what makes it an engine. Maybe a car mechanic after several years, would have a more direct knowing of a car engine and its parts. Despite having effortless knowing, there still has to be learning. We still have to learn what a flower is at some point. Something has to happen in order for us to know something, even if its direct. I would say that "direct knowing" is a primary function of consciousness, even if it can be fluid. Have you ever held something with eyes closed and not "known" what it was until you opened your eyes? I would equate direct knowing as being one and the same as creating distinctions out of the unity of consciousness/experience (see the other thread on distinctions). In a sense we carve out and hence "know" objects from the flow of perception. Because knowing is fluid, we can know a thing in more than one way. When we look at a family member, we instantly and directly know them in many different ways.

Bang on, I say. And yet, here you are describing it in language. "infinity" is a word, so it surely points to something we can experience or think about.

I would try and bypass infinity and say that truth is something that persists. If something persists forever then it's an absolute truth. For example you could say the sky is Truth, because it's always there, it persists. Maybe consciousness is Truth - it's always there. The problem is you can't know with your finite experience if something will persist forever. Actually you're right, you can't know infinity. But it's funny how there's a word for it: infinity. How can we have a word for something we don't understand? What game is being played here?

I think this is where our arguments are distinct (sorry). I'm saying that experience can separate itself and also point to itself. Even a simulation would have to bootstrap "pointing to itself" from nothing, how would it do it this? Could a blind person simulate the ability to see? No, they must be able to see in the first place. Can experience simulate the ability to make distinctions, without it already having the ability to make distinctions? I would say the primary attribute of conscious experience is precisely that of "pointing to itself". That's what existence actually is. There's no need, but that is what happens. We inhabit a world full of distinctions. The fact that we can talk about such things, proves the point. There's no inclusion as such. There is no separate monolithic "experience" separate from distinctions within it, they both exist simultaneously. If it's a thought then it's a very strange type of thought. I can not think my table into a stack of cash, it's very stubborn that way. I also can't unthink my table. I could re-think it as firewood, but then it would still be a table as well. So it doesn't appear to be "my thought" causing and maintaining distinctions in experience. Isn't any sort of thought happening in experience in any case? Isn't thought a distinction in itself? That's another facet of consciousness/experience. It has the ability to make things persist. It has a certain stickiness to it.