LastThursday

This sums up neatly the constant nagging feeling I've felt my entire life. I've never wanted to be a cog, and could never understand why other people were happy to do so, and worse, oblivious to it. More accurately, I've never wanted to be a cog in someone else's machine. But I do think that being ND is like anything else in life. With respect to the world of NT, there will be some things you will never be able to learn, and some things that are difficult but achievable. I will say that with ND there can be a disinterest in what NTs find normal and straightforward, and that in itself can be a hinderance to "fitting in", because you never have the motivation to go towards more neurotypicality. There's the argument that NDs should not make the effort to be NT, because their frame is just as valid as any other, but, the world is very much set up for neurotypicals, and relativism doesn't help you survive in such a world.

Here's my thinking process. I'd have to start with the basics. What is meant by consciousness? What is its nature? If you say consciousness is existence then from a purely language-centric view, you're setting up an equivalance between the words consciousness and existence. It's like connecting two different coloured Lego bricks and calling it it a "belief". When you resolve the words to what they actually refer to in actuality, it could be that consciousness and existence are entirely separate categories from each other. The point is that language is being used here to set up a new belief, that may or may not be ultimately true. Consciousness may not be existence (gasp!). If you take consciousness as a definition to be something like "all that I have already experienced". We're still playing the same linguistic trick, but at least "experience" as a word is more direct and tangible than "existence". If we examine experience then we can decompose it into various sensations (another linguistic equivalence), which can be categorised into sight and sound and touch etc. Individual sensations seem to recur, such as the coldness or roughness or brightness. Going meta we can lump all these categories of experience into one and call them "appearances", because despite the differences in sensations, there is something that connects them all: they are being experienced. Naturally, you would ask: are the appearances happening in or on some sort of substrate? Are they like projections on a screen at a cinema? Secondly, is there a something which experiences those appearances? There's a lot of leeway here to interpret things as you want, maybe there isn't a screen, maybe there isn't a watcher etc. Personally, I like to keep things as simple as possible. There is no screen, and there is no watcher. It's ALL just appearances. The appearances have the capacity to be aware of themselves (so to speak). Appearances just exist without support from anything else. If that is the case, then it's worth noting that "appearances" is plural. Why is it plural? Because it seems obvious that appearances are distinct and ever changing, that there is always a multiplicity of them at all times. This would seem to completely go against the idea of a unified monolithic consciousness. But, you could ask, what about the fact that appearances exist, doesn't that unify them all? It doesn't have to. Maybe appearance A has absolutely nothing to do with appearance B, maybe they are two incompatible forms of existence? Maybe it's existences, plural. If appearances are the base of reality, then there is no concept of existing in or of a separate consciousness container. It's just appearances. Another way to see it is, is the Mona Lisa a woman posing or is it all just brushstrokes that come together like "a woman posing". Is the Mona Lisa one thing, or a multiplicity of different things?

What is space? If space is a featureless, structureless thing, then it is not a thing at all. The only way to know about space is to look at the things in it, they provide the structure. In that sense matter/energy and fields (things in space) and space are complementary, you can't have one without the other. You could even say that space is exactly the complement of matter and vice versa. It's very telling that matter/energy warps spacetime, and that spacetime affects the motion of matter/energy. That is a direct consequence of this complementarity. If the amount of matter if finite, then so is the amount of space. We have no way to know if space is infinite in extent because light travels at a finite speed. Any information we have about space is got through observing matter, and observation is restricted by the speed of light. We can only ever observe a finite volume of space. Everything else is conjecture and philosophy. We can't know what is beyond the event horizon. One good question to ponder is to ask why space has extent in the first place? I like to think of it like oil spreading on water. In that way space could have a self-repulsion, each bit of space is fighting to differentiate itself to every other bit of space. If space were to start off in a state of zero-extent (a singularity), then it's easy to see how a self-repulsive mechanism could make it inflate wildly and forever. If it's a smooth inflation, then space is finite but ever increasing, if it's an instant phase change, then it could potentially be infinite. It's telling that fermions obey the Pauli exclusion principle, and maybe space is somehow fermionic as well. The curvature of the universe is basically a geometric measurement, it's either closed, open or flat. The current consensus is that it's flat, it can't be a mixture.

I so want to argue against this, but my thoughts are not totally clear on it. So I won't. But the teaser is that I'm not sure consciousness is a monolithic unchanging field: it seems to sit on the cusp of chaos and orderliness, unfication and complete splintering. Anyway, a conversation for a different thread. Humans definitely like to immerse and delude themselves into beliefs, and go to war and die for them. I find the unwavering absoluteness of people's beliefs incredible. They even like to tell themselves: "this is not a belief, it's a truth". Sure if you cross the road in front of a car, it will end badly, but if you've never carried it out, it's still a belief.

Reading that, just a couple or three ideas come to my mind. This is not meant to be advice per se, just what I might tell myself if I was in your situation: 1. Slowly build up a friendship group that has a mix of men and women. Learn to be comfortable with just being friends with women, no agenda. 2. The "I want to be recognised" pattern is extremely common. It is code for: "I want to be loved for being me". I find that this is also code for "I want to be loved in very specific ways". Very often people will love you, but just not in the way you want. It can be very hard to recognise and then accept other people's love: the way they express it. Also, apart from immediate family, people will only love you if you provide value to them. This sounds negative, or transactional, but it can also be extremely simple and joyful to do. Work it out. Even just being present can be enough. 3. When starting a new phase in life, it will always feel unsettling. It's can be like throwing dice and hoping for sixes. It can feel like you're losing control or are not sure of what is coming next. It is a very good exercise to live with the ambiguity and uncertainty and not force things too much, just let it happen. It is also an excellent time to actually choose who you want to be, and how you want to live for the next chunk of your life, there is a lot of freedom and joy in that.

If White to start then, Rxe8+, Rxe8, Nf6+, Bxf6, gxf6. Black's King is then very open, white's Queen is free to go to g4 to start the attack.

If you're constantly observing your own beliefs then that erodes your confidence in their truth. You will still go around holding beliefs, but you know are only partial truths. You carry on believing, but don't believe in your beliefs, you just know that they're useful like a screwdriver. <- hopefully that wasn't word salad. Dogs don't believe in screwdrivers, and you could live without one, but hell, they're useful for screws. In other words, we deliberately live in vastly more complex worlds than dogs do.

It's an interesting thought: do you need beliefs at all? I think beliefs allow you just to get on with living, without the burden of having to work everything out from scratch. Beliefs are heuristics for living. You can have good and bad beliefs, if you define them as being helpful for you on average, or from a more collectivist standpoint, helpful for your community in general. But beliefs can be more fluid, if you work at it. I think it's also possible to have context dependent beliefs (even if socially that seems odd), which naturally loosens what you hold to be true. You could even pick and mix beliefs as it suits you day-to-day. Although, I think it would take effort to live that way, it's far easier to be more rigid in your beliefs. I think it's probably nearly impossible to live without beliefs, because you have to live in a society with social rules and laws, and you need quick heuristics to judge what to do in many different situations and not get paralised with indecision.

The metric is the context. The OP says the average person is mediocre, so the metric and thus context here is mediocrity (albeit it is a very broad one). Mediocrity supposedly has an imaginary sliding scale and mostly everyone is in the middle of it, and much fewer are outliers, either exceptional or diabolical. But you're free to choose any sliding scale you like, the more you choose the harder it is for someone to get the bingo card at being average in all those metrics. By concentrating only on mediocrity the OP is cherry picking, and the category is so broad as to be nearly meaningless.

Somebody has to be average (by some metric). Isn't it so?

I disagree with your disagreement, obviously. Are aesthetic principles god given absolutes? What is a pyschological mesotrend anyway? There a slow trends and fast trends. I'd say a particular style is borne out of the current set of trends or takes elements from it at least. There may be other reasons for trends other than aesthetics (maybe money), but in art and fashion and design it's largely driven by aesthetics. New aesthetic values are invented, Cubism, Brutalism, Bauhaus, Sans Serif, Zen Gardens and new trends are started. One feeds into the other. The rule of thirds depends on the canvas or photograph which is nearly always rectangular, and so comes out of the constraints of a medium, rather than being inate or absolute as such. But we do like easy fractions and find them aesthetic visually and in music (fifths, octaves etc). I'm not trying to be a complete relativist however. We do have a predisposition to find things in nature beautiful, and so we consistently grab motifs from there and find it aesthetically pleasing. We also have inbuilt biases in our perceptual systems, and those come through in our aesthetics too: light versus shade, focal points, movement etc. And we especially are prone to finding human bodies and faces aesthetic, and they are indeed everywhere in art and fashion and advertising. So if we have an "aesthetic intelligence" then it comes out of these biases. And some of those biases are probably universal.

Yes, but you won't like it. Go up to him, give him a hug and explain to him why you like all his good traits, just as you've done here.

There's a fine line between anger and compassion. The points you listed are in themselves nothing to be angry about, just annoying probably. The thing is family have the ability to trigger us irrationally, like no one else. I suspect just living in close quarters with someone can constantly trigger you, even if they do "nothing". Find a way to get some space, get out of the house and go to something else. And just understand that your dad is a flawed individual, just as we all are.

In short the general understanding of mediocrity is mediocre. And that is a good point, we're all mediocre in many different ways. It's just that that truth pains some people more than others, and they constantly have to run away from it. As you say, ambition is neither here nor there, you exist, you do stuff to keep on existing (I should trademark that).

Thing is, aesthetic value has a large dollop of current fashion built into it. So if you remove that what are you left with? If you are conscious enough (whatever that means), then you will find start finding aesthetic value in everything, because you realise that beauty is everywhere and in everything, and taste goes out the window. There are rules for good composition, and balance and framing and subject matter, and those rules change over time.

@Monke what do you want it to say about you as a person, what is your aspiration here?

Other than the negative physical effects of alcohol and how it personally turns me into an insufferable idiot, I would say that there is some spiritual dimension to it. The thing I take most from it is the dreamlike quality of the experience when sufficiently intoxicated. Whatever it does it removes some of that rational veil to how we perceive reality, and in some sense we can experience things a little more "as they are". We are living in a dream all the time.

Motivation is hard. It's shouldn't be a surprise how much being ill can affect your mental state. I've had a head cold since the end of last year and it's dragged. Today is probably the first day where I don't feel too bad. I know enough to know that all the symptoms I feel: migranes, head and neck ache, copious mucus, trouble swallowing, lethargy, brain fog, sleepiness, are all caused by my body's reaction to the virus or bacterium, not by the things themselves. The question then arises, why is my body sabotaging me so much and for so long? It's a combination of things. But the main thrust of my idea is that these symptoms are strongly negative motivators, they are very hard to ignore. For example, I feel lethargic because being still and not using up energy is precisely what my body needs to pour resources (energy) into overcoming the infection instead. But why trouble swallowing? Because my throat is sabotaging the infection's ability to take hold in the moist warm environment that it likes, it takes away the moistness and makes it dry and scratchy, it inflames the area and floods it with histamine and heats it up so that my body's own cells go into overdrive and kill off the infection. Notice how good the body is at (anti) motivating you just when you need it. The symptoms of disease have largely nothing to do with the disease itself, it's all your body. Only in cases where the disease causes outright bodily damage is it different. How amazing would it be if the body actually positively motivated you? What would this look like? I think you only have to look at how most children are: running around expending vast amounts of energy, exploring the world, making up realities and getting to know how to be human, exploring themselves and experimenting in the world. Now imagine the adult version of that. But who do you know that is like that? Nearly no one. Everyone seems locked into their particular life circumstances and everyone seems to be suffering one way or another. A lot of that suffering is exactly like the symptoms of disease. Subconsciously, your energy and vitality are being sabotaged by your body, mostly enacted via your mental state. But what is the disease exactly? It's a whole plethora of factors, including nutrition, exercise, sleep, level of connection with others, the social matrix, the grind of work, stress responses to money and status and obligations. All of which mostly occur with adulthood. It's like we have a chronic illness but we just don't realise it. It's only when we begin to dig into ourselves with self-help and spirituality that we realise what's up. Some amount of mental re-programming and awareness can help alleviate the symptoms of our suffering. Understanding what humans need: sleep, good food, movement, the support of others, can also help. But ultimately the "disease" is systemic in the way we're plugged into society at large. And largely there is no escaping it, because our body's symptoms sabotage our attempts at escape. And society also doesn't want us to escape. Masking the symptoms ultimately doesn't help rid us of the disease. Only awareness and very strong motivation can do it.

My father could easily have died recently when he was hospitalised. The thing he appreciated the most was just my constant daily presence throughout the whole ordeal. Yes I spoke to him, and asked him how he felt and what he was thinking, and I gave him some advice, and joked around with him about the hospital food and about doing laps around the ward with his movement therapist. But just being present and having that connection there is the most important thing, everything else is a bonus.

I totally get it. You seem like the type that needs constant stimulation just to tread water. Tell me if I'm wrong. It does get to the point where whatever you do everything seems "the same" and it gets repetitive and boring, because you've done the exciting stuff already. I think what you call passion is just what I call stimulation. We all have different thresholds for stimulation. But nearly all activity in life is passionless, it just needs to be done to achieve your goals. I need to buy a car, I have absolutely zero passion for it, but I have to do it. And so it goes on. Aim for big passionate goals in life and then do all the boring drudgery to get there - at least there's a payoff at the end. That's the only sustainable way. Maybe on the way you'll stumble upon something new to be passionate about.

Solipsism depends on the unity of experience, yet that unity can’t be established without an external vantage point. From within experience alone, plurality and unity are indistinguishable. And solipsism denies the certainty of an external vantage point. It seems like solipsism only has the certainty of one experience and experiencer, and everything else it uncertain. But solispism itself can't verify its own claim. But yes, it's still a useful idea as a basis for good ethical conduct. We should give uncertain things the benefit of the doubt.

My first self-aware memory was of me being picked up by my mum and tucked into my pram, with her looking down directly at me. It's interesting because supposedly you don't form solid memories until you're about two years old. But I guess there's wild variation between people. My next memories are of me walking about, so there's definitely a gap of at least half a year or more.

What can be learnt from the idea of solipsism?

Master of understatement.

Connection between people is a beautiful thing. First and foremost let yourself enjoy the connection. Is it better to capture a butterfly and study it, or to watch it fly?