LastThursday

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.

Definitely tricky, agreed. When you layer language into the mix it's difficult to disentangle what's going on. Say you hold two things, one in each hand. It doesn't require any language to - at some level - understand what's going on: you're holding stuff. The description in language "I'm holding two things" can be completely separated from the direct sensation of holding two things. You can argue that in fact you only ever experience one sensation with everything happening simultaneously. Although, the mere fact that you can make a distinction between what you're holding in the left hand and the right, means that the ability to distinguish things is somehow built in to direct experience in general. There is a perception of "making a distinction" separate from its use in language. It's the sameness/difference argument we both made above. You can say all perception is the same thing, or you can make distinctions and say that parts of perception are different from each other. You can then convey those distinctions using language.

@Osaid that's good. You could say that all phenomena have attributes. Similar to your example, tables have the attribute of having four legs, so in that sense they are all the same. But they also have an attribute of construction material (wood, plastic etc), so tables can be distinct from each other. In the end you can assign a bunch of attributes to any perception. For example red and green are distinct in hue, but the same in that they're both colours. You could say that all vision is the same monolithic inseparable thing or equally made up of perceptions of colours, shades, sizes, position etc. I would say that a distinction is a binary or digital thing: yes or no. It either exists or it doesn't. Once you make a distinction it automatically creates a boundary around itself. e.g. Once you create the country of France it naturally has a border with Spain - otherwise France wouldn't be distinct from Spain. In this case a distinction is a thing of the mind, you need a map to maintain it, there's no border in reality. The mysterious thing is what actually makes the distinction in the first place? Once I've learnt what a table is, I can't "unlearn" it. Does a table actually exist if I haven't made that distinction at all? I say no. Would anything exist if there were no distinctions?

Many years ago, I remember staying over at a work colleague's place after a heavy night. I woke up on the sofa bleary eyed, and the guy pokes his head through the door to check if I was awake. I said "morning" in a croaky voice. I then suddenly woke up again (for real), and at that exact moment, the guy pokes his head through the door again. Luckily I didn't wake up a third time.

You do know that teenagers think about sex right? I'd be more worried about red lipstick, maybe eyeliner, having long hair...

I've been listening to new old music. It's a bit like living in a town for years and then discovering an alley you've walked passed a million times, through which lies another part of town undiscovered. I only know Ultravox from Vienna and Dancing With Tears in their Eyes. I like the energy and of course the familiarity of the sound: I was just that much too young to investigate music for myself at the time, and getting hold of music was far harder when I was a kid. Cassettes and records (vynyl) it was and radio and TV only for the popular stuff. I didn't get pocket money. I only know Golden Brown from the Stranglers. But you can hear how good they are, even if it's of its time: I like The European Female, catchy.

I'm reminded of this interview: Definitely watch the whole thing if you have time.

How romantic ❤️ I think romance was invented by singing Troubadours: invariably men. But maybe that's just masculinity of the past.

@Razard86 are you linking romance with femininity? I don't get it. Surely romance is also masculine, doesn't it take two? I totally agree that femininity and beauty should be explored for its own sake though.

I'm only using God as a synonym for reality/consciousness/source/higher power whatever. As such God can do what it likes, it's not bound by any rules, God can bend reality to its own whim. You are a human, and bound by lots of rules about reality, you cannot bend reality as easily: you have to use your body to do so. Except fundamentally you're not really human, you're actually God contorted into a human (i.e. an abstraction of God). So, occasionally your God nature pokes through and weird stuff happens (the abstraction leaks).

@Rafael Thundercat spoilsport.

You first have to know what consciousness is. Consciousness by definition is pure awareness (of itself). What that awareness manisfests itself as, can be anything and everything. The awareness doesn't belong to anyone, because everything in reality is pure awareness (idealism). Does the water belong to the river or does the river belong to the water? Consciousness then, is manifesting a "you" who spins stories about "consciousness". Consciousness is the backdrop for everything: people don't "have it".

I like the idea of a leaky abstraction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_abstraction (I know, I know, I'm a programmer). You are god abstracting itself into a human form. But the abstraction leaks and manifests in things like the law of attraction and synchronicities. The law of attraction is the encapsulation of the observation that "weird shit happens". God is always there warping reality, because God cannot completely hide in the shadows: the human abstraction leaks.