LastThursday

Understand is a perfectly good word and pretty normal. There's also "get it" and "grok". There's also the moment of suddenly understanding something: "penny dropped", "hit me", "realisation", "make sense", "become clear". Use all of them, why not?!

I'm nominally an unconfirmed Catholic. I wasn't brought up religious and for the most part I've been atheist most of my life, so I find using the word "god" a bit icky. The word also has heavy religious baggage, so I find it's best avoided in polite conversation. I've used it on here though because there's less confusion about its usage. But its usage on the forum has a different definition than the normal everyday definition. From a metaphysical level, I also have problems with what the word implies, that there is a single entity in control of things. I find that non-obvious. I don't think it's even really possible to capture much at all with the word, because a word always has a "semantic range", but supposedly "god" is everything without exception. i.e. the word is effectively meaningless. That makes believing in "god" difficult for me. But there's no doubt that my everyday experience is inexplicable in a number of ways, and that's what I attach the label "god" to.

There is a difference between the idea of a number and the representation of a number. The representation uses a finite set of discrete symbols in different combinations to map on to different numbers. That means you can have different number bases: decimal, binary, hexadecimal etc. But you could use Roman numerals, Mayan counting, algebraic notation and just about a million other ways. Mathematics also has negative numbers, fractional numbers, irrational numbers, complex numbers and a whole slew of more weird numbers. But you could call all those constructed or composite numbers in some way. If you're talking about positive integers (most people's idea of a number), then people can instantly recognise up to three things without counting, beyond that requires either counting or estimation. Mathematicians define numbers using set theory and a kind of recursive procedure of embedding an empty set into another empty set. This guy explains it well: Although I find it unsatisfactory, because it doesn't really explain anything, other than mapping numbers onto a tree structure. Nerd over and out.

Just some low hanging fruit to consider: Write your resume/CV well. Good spelling, grammar, easy layout. Be truthful about your skills and experience on there. For an in-person interview be reasonably well groomed, and be punctual. Hirers will be interested in your soft skills: do you have basic communication skills, do you show interest in the company or their products, do you partake in hobbies and other activities? For IT work hirers will want to know if you can actually solve problems. You should know the basics in the type of work you're applying for. If it's software, then you should have some coding ability and even better showcase existing work you've done. Even if you've worked in a different industry previously, then you can talk about the specific problems you helped solved there. Showing a logical and systematic approach will help you. Some hirers will show you around their offices during the interview, so you'll immediately get a vibe from that. Ask about any social activities or team building events the company gets up to. Ask about any personal development they might embark you on, or about the chances for promotion and about the general structure of the company. Ask about travel opportunities if you think it's appropriate to the job position. Ask about how much annual leave you get. Private health insurance, private pension etc. If you're new to the industry then realistically you'll have less leverage regarding compensation and benefits, but, generally this sort of negotiation will happen after the interview has taken place and if they say "yes". You will have more leverage and choice if you have multiple offers. If they're paying too little, then be firm about what you think you're worth, and if they don't budge then decline. Don't overvalue yourself however, expect the market rate in general for the level of your experience. A lot of what makes or breaks an interview, is who you're up against, and a lot of the non-verbal stuff, and whether the interviewer clicks with you.

Do you find that the last remaining speck of self is a constant thing, or does it come and go? I hope you don't mind all the questions.

@Sugarcoat it looks like it's been a positive process for you so far. If your sense of self has nearly dissolved, what do you think that self was for? Are you able to carry on normally in life, or does it cause you difficulties? Why do you think dissolving the self affects your sense of time, continuity, space and distance? What's the relationship there?

It's all a strange loop. The players are: consciousness, the stuff of consciousness or experience or appearances, materialism. There are all different views on the same thing. I'm calling it Ugg. First off you can collapse the duality between consciousness and appearances. They are in fact one. You cannot have consciousness without something to be conscious of. There's nothing more than appearance, no meta or beyond. Yes, you can tell yourself stories about what's beyond, but those stories themselves are appearances. Absolute Truth is also an appearance. Absolute certainty is an appearance. The nature of consciousness is that it is conscious of something, but the act of being conscious is the same as the thing it's conscious of (observer and observed are the same). Materialism is a more slippery beast, because it's a concoction of appearances, and stories about those appearances. There are no atoms making up matter, those are pure stories made up to explain appearances - all map, no territory. All you have are appearances that behave as if there were atoms orchestrating them, in other words there are regularities you can tease out of appearances which you can build a story from. Materialism isn't wrong as such, like a map of the world isn't wrong, it just isn't the world itself. You can crack someone's head open and see a brain yes, that's territory. You can measure it's electrical activity and prod and poke it. You can ask its owner what they're experiencing. You can see someone's personality change after a brain injury, and attribute it to the brain changes. But all that is map. Appearances behave as if there is an objective reality, the story of objective reality. Consciousness manifests brains, and then changes itself through them. Consciousness manifests eyes and then sees objective reality. Or more correctly it's all Ugg.

Science just keeps the stories that work, and throws away the rest. Even if a story is long established it can throw it away. Science also does deep elaboration, if you go to the top of a mountain the water will boil at 98 degrees. And science is not just a shopping list of facts, it is a web of concepts: the boiling temperature drops with pressure.

And that is exactly why being lonely is so painful, our biology tells us that being alone could mean death, it just does so indirectly.

Yes! One of those concepts is "the self" that is experiencing all that stuff. No self, no solipsism. If the self is a construct then so is solipsism. The other problem with solipsism is that reality isn't countable. Awareness (aka reality) is like water, there isn't one water, two waters etc, there is just water. From that point of view solipsism doesn't make sense either. To say "my experience is the only one", then there has to be an absolute self, and the potentiality for multiple experiences happening simultaneously - of which yours is the only one currently active. Solipsism is then tripping up in the semantics of language, not an actuality.

The confusion isn't mine, my response was to @theleelajoker's usage of the language. But the distinction is semantic, solitude and loneliness are the same, albeit one is maybe positive the other negative. Loneliness is not absolute in any case, but rather a sliding scale. We each have a set point of what constitutes getting enough human interaction, if it goes below that, then we feel the negative effects of it.

@theleelajoker a lot of lonely people don't choose to be alone and they'd rather not be. But if you are pulled towards it, or actively choose it, then it's not so much of a problem. Freedom is choice. I would be cautious though if you're having doubts, don't go cutting out people because of some idealistic ideas. Individualism is a paradigm, because it is based on its own set of ideas and beliefs. The basic idea is that we're all responsible for ourselves, and that we shouldn't be dependent on other people to fulfil us. Collectivism is also a paradigm, basically that we're better off doing everything together. If you look around you then, you're probably living in a city, which is in a nation. The very idea of a city or nation is a collectivist one. You probably work with other people to make a living, again more collectivism. In that sense collectivism has won out over individualism. Humans are not like a leopard that likes to go hunt and do everything for itself. If humans are supposed to be individualistic, then we would all be roaming around by ourselves literally hunting for our next meal like a leopard. No. As an animal humans have a collectivist bias, we like to do things together. Individualism goes against that innate bias we have, so it is wrong from that viewpoint.

Loneliness is the result of the triumph of individualism over collectivism. Loneliness pushes you into existentialism because you're forced to directly face the pain of it and to get answers. Socializing can't be dismissed as mere fluff, it's as important as water and air. Individualism downplays the role of other people in our lives, because... it has to. In that sense the paradigm is wrong.

The colours are regions no?

There's loads of different types of humour. Some things that spring to mind are: physical slapstick, pulling faces, silly voices, observational, word play, irony and sarcasm, dressing up (clowns), mimes, re-enactment (plays and anecdotes), telling jokes, absurdity and weirdness. It's endless. You have a wide choice of finding something that suits you.

It's probably not a popular opinion but it's masks all the way down. Any form of communication or social interaction requires a great deal of context to be understood. So already you have to pander to that context (i.e. wear a mask) to get anything done. In that way there is no real you that doesn't have the baggage of culture and language and need to fit yourself around who you're interacting with. You'll have a mental model of who you think is the real you. But there is also the actuality of who you are when wearing your social masks. The dissonance between the two can cause suffering. You think what is being rejected is the real you, but this isn't the case, what is being rejected are the masks you are currently wearing. Since wearing a mask is unavoidable (because of needing to fit in with context), you should seek to have better ones. For example, what's the difference between a good teacher and a bad one? The good teacher doesn't dumb themself down, they just find a better way to communicate, by understanding who they're communicating to better. That way they can more easily project themselves into the minds of their pupils. They adapt to their audience, instead of expecting their audience to adapt to them.

I do think the mental health figure is strongly linked to the economy here in the UK. This is interesting for a deeper dive:

It's very sad to see my home country nearly at the bottom of the list. I can only think that Covid and Brexit has driven huge inflation here and people are miserable as a consequence, survival is hard here for a Western country. The Dominican Republic looks enticing.

I'm sure there's a term for this, but I thought I'd capture an observation which I'll call "loss of context". For some context, imagine you're in a place you regularly frequent. You do whatever you do in that place, maybe just driving through say. Your mind wanders for a while and then you suddenly snap back to where you are. But on this occasion the snapping back fails "lock on" and you feel disoriented or confused about where you are. Eventually you find something familiar to reorient yourself. In another example you're thinking back to a different time and place and you're mentally re-experiencing what was happening then. But eventually you snap back to where you are now, but for a short while you still feel different, the way you felt back then. Then soon your current context reasserts itself. Maybe, you go on holiday and the weather and culture is very different. You spend a week or two there and become aclimatised. Then you're yanked back home when the holiday ends. For a short while you're still in holiday mode, in that context, before normal life reasserts itself. What does this mean? I think it means the context in which you find yourself is actually quite fluid. By context I mean the overall feel, thoughts, circumstances, people, worries, that you're in or with or at. You maintain this context by a process of continuity, one moment leads to another, one place leads to another. The same things happen repeatedly and this also helps to maintain and reassert your context. But every so often, you lose the continuity through distraction or unfamiliar events and when you "come to" you scramble to reinstate a context that fits: you feel confused or disoriented. All this shows that you're actually a lot freer than you believe yourself to be, it's only the comfort of familiarity that keeps you locked in. You can actively shift your context, by doing new things, learning new things, behaving differently, thinking differently, or simply being somewhere different. More importantly, the context of "you" is not fixed, and you can change rapidly if you wanted it.

I'm glad we're converging on consensus @Hojo. I'll sleep soundly tonight.

@Hojo we're straying off the original topic and it's making me emotional. Nevertheless. You're view is just too simplistic. Emotions arise for all sorts of reasons. There are inate desires like wanting sex and eating food, and emotions get triggered by those things to motivate us to do something about it. We then plan and take action using logic, to varying degrees to fulfil those needs. Our actions then trigger further emotions, in an endless cycle. Emotions are not the source of all motivation, you can well be motivated by pure reason alone. Emotions are just a signalling system that directs our attention towards certain things, and they arise because of other things. Emotions, thinking, desires, needs form a complex interlocking feedback system, that ensure you stay alive and that you get what you want. A robot could "stay alive" without emotion, it just needs excellent planning and very good interaction and knowledge of the world. But, people are not robots so they're not comparable, emotions are very intertwined with our existence, but they're not everything.

This video explores the idea of words in terms of emotions

I think I have more and more clarity every time I ask myself metaphysical questions, but I've never stuck a pin in anything and said "that is Truth". I sort of envy people who have that conviction, but I also think they're utterly deluded. The only truth is that which isn't couched in a metaphysical story. The truth is that I'm typing on this laptop looking out onto a clouded evening sky, everything else is fantasy.

I agree with you. But the actual mechanics of fulfilling that want or need requires logic and planning. For example the dating section here is full of pickup this and pickup that, all that is pure logic and transaction and planning and learning. The driver and motivation may be emotional, but the act of fulfilment isn't. If it was all emotion we'd be like wild dogs on heat going after anything with a pulse, and this thread would be redundant.

@Hojo of course there's logic. You want a potential partner and/or regular sex, it's not all pure emotion. Dating is one way to get that. And, I was pointing to the fact that dating is largely transactional, and asking questions of each other on a date is not unreasonable. Yes there is emotion involved, but there's also logic.