LastThursday

Another two for your list: Is the idea of God innate in you, or did it come from others? If you don't completely understand God, then how do you know what God is or what you mean by God?

Dear diary, how the devil are you? It should be no surprise but I like walking. Britain is great for it, there's a right to roam across the countryside (within reason) and cities and towns cater well for pedestrians. I enjoy both modes both urban and countryside. The number one thing I get from it is the sense of exploration or more fundamentally a sense of surprise. There's nothing better than turning a corner in a city and being met with the site of St Paul's Cathedral for example, like a giant skulking behind an alley. In the countryside there's the constant closing in of woods and then open fields, and the sudden transition into a village or town or back out again, it's like the expansion and contraction of breathing itself. Then of course there's the famous British weather. To a degree you can plan ahead for it, especially in the Spring and Summer months. But inevitably at some point you'll be caught by rain, wind and cold. So whilst I like to be super minimal in terms of preparation with nothing more than water and perhaps a sandwich in my rucksack (sometimes not even that for urban walking), it pays to pay attention to the weather and be a little prepared for it. But, especially in the open countryside the pastel grey skies and sound of rain can be quite beautiful to experience. I like to get a fair few miles in when I can, ten or more miles seems like a good amount of time and distance, I generally do at least two most days. For countryside hikes I will do circular walks mostly, either because I start from home or because I'll take the car. If taking public transport then I may start at one train station and walk to another. I only ever have a rough route for countryside hiking, because some of the joy is in navigating my way across the land, through fields, woods, along streams, over hills and through valleys. I navigate using Ordnance Survey maps on my phone, long ago I gave up on paper maps, mostly because unless you keep on top of it you can very easily get lost, but it's good to learn the art of map reading and reading the land simultaneously. Urban walking is similar. But I find that it's good to have a theme for a walk, like tube stations (in London) or parks, or churches. I use the landmarks like markers on my route and they're also interesting in their own right. It's also good to have a destination to aim for, but if I'm overambitious or the weather catches me out, I can bail early and go to a cafe or pub or just go home; sometimes the body is just not willing, even if the spirit is. Occasionally I come across a local market or some sort of festival: once I got caught by surprise in the middle of the Pride Festival around Oxford Street in London - those sort of surprises are what I love about walking. Some of the joy of walking is just to shut off my internal chatter and every day thoughts. I mostly try and walk in a kind of meditative state, it gives my ADHD mind a break, and it also makes me present and alert to what I'm actually experiencing. After a five hour walk of being in this state, I feel peaceful and relaxed, but also alert, it's a great feeling. Of course, this means I don't walk around listening to music or podcasts, or checking my socials every three seconds, what a distraction that would be! I can do that at home. In fact I will often put the phone into airplane mode, to conserve on both battery and distraction. I'm not the sort to chat to all and sundry as I walk, it's just not the British way. But I will strike up a quick casual conversation on the train or cafe if there's something interesting to talk about. And walking with others is a totally different experience that walking solo, I like both equally. But walking with others tends to be a little bit more planned, and so takes away just a little bit from the spontaneity. Time for my lunch time walk - there and back again.

I don't know, there's something in your question. Maybe it's the difference between what you believe yourself to be, what you'd like yourself to be, and what you think others believe you are? Three people in one.

There wouldn't be much to stop the two presidents secretly agreeing to be corrupt together. But there's something in it, in that they should keep each other in check, especially if each president had their own set of people under them. What if one party gets a LOT more votes than the other, should one president have more power then the other?

Materialists assume that everyone inhabits the same reality, and by extension that everyone is experiencing the same things in the same way. Science is built on this assumption. Materialism say that matter is made of energy, and energy is something mysterious that is basically the vibration of the reality. Seems quite mystic It's a bit more nuanced, there are also fields and forces and spacetime and quantum states. Quantum mechanics says that everything is ultimately disturbances in a field of some type. Energy is conserved and Noether's theorem explains why. So that aspect of energy isn't so mysterious.

The main point of misinterpretation is that it applies to individuals. It is actually a theory about society in general. Even if individuals make up a society, collectively people will have emergent behaviour, and this is what Spiral Dynamics is on about.

This is an interesting mixture of characters! Now I come to look at it, it's kind of an odd list. There's an all-knowing, powers, manly-man, goofy vibe to it. All things I've aspired to and probably still do. Good to ponder.

This is fun! Laurel from Laurel and Hardy Dirty Harry Magnum (PI) Dangermouse Gandalf Sir Isaac Newton Bugs Bunny Wonder Woman (specifically the TV version) I was conceived on Gallifrey.

@Elton it's clearly important to you from what you write. Some recognition can go a long way to feeling accepted and part of things. Maybe you want status and prestige. From my own experience I have been looked over for recognition a number of times in different jobs, despite working hard and consistently, sometimes when I demonstrably did better work than others. I remember being effectively fired from a job when they were slimming down their workforce, even though I got the highest score in their supposedly "fair" assessment tests. I don't want to be too negative, as I don't know the specifics of your situation. Most of it yes, does come down to office politics, and who likes whom the most - that's it. Often it'll completely fly under the radar and you won't even be aware of it - until you don't get that award. If your job is important to you, then don't worry about awards, the rewards of the work itself and that at least one other person respects your skill and judgement should be enough. If it's not so important, then change jobs, it can be a breath of fresh air.

I think this is excellent. I had come across this before, but I only superficially took on the significance of this. If the theory is right, then ancient people went about their lives in a fundamentally different way from us. Everything is very "external" and physical for them. It puts accounts like the burning bush in the bible into the correct context. Also it kind of puts the modern phenomenon of grey aliens with big eyes talking telepathically to you into some sort of context too. I like the way the guy in the video talks about the large eyes on statues as a way to engage the right brain and encourage the voices, it's very intriguing. I do wonder if spiritually gifted people are naturally more right brain dominant and get communications and visions for that reason - they are more bicamerally minded.

This must be a German phenomenon, nothing like that in the UK. However, just wear headphones and play your own music, let them concentrate on the massage. Especially, if you're paying them. Edit. @Leo Gura snap!

That, does, not, compute, beeb boop. @Magnanimous Sllightly more seriously, I used to "Pure Dance" every day for ten minutes or two or three songs - mostly 80's coz I'm old but it's good to flail about to - for many months. I did it because I was always a crap dancer and figured that it was because I'd always been too embarrassed to dance in front of others. I stopped in the end because I think I was pulling my neck muscles. Still, I went to a party recently and got told that I was "A good little mover" QED.

Once you have an answer from contemplation, you can't unknow it again. In that sense it becomes part of you and is integrated. The more you contemplate, the more the answers start to make sense in relation to each other and the deeper the integration. It's like climbing a mountain one step at a time, and occasionally you can stop and look back at the view. That integration will naturally make you act differently in due course.

One aspect of consiousness is that it has a sequential nature. It moves its focus from one thing to the next. When it's focused on one particular thing, it excludes everything else. To some degree we all focus on the same things repetitively, making our sphere of attention smaller. We are then less conscious because we miss the chance to notice everything else around us. Addiction and lying tug on our attention repeatedly to the detriment of other things, bad food can make our attention foggy and unclear. We want to notice other things, because there's great intelligence there, which we should want to absorb and learn from - to increase our consciousness. Meditation and other activities are a way to pull our attention in a different way from normal, but also a way to train our attention so that we're actively in control of it, rather than passively.

Feeling is quite an overloaded word. You have tactile feeling, hot/cold, rough/smooth etc. You have bodily sensations related to anxiety, anger, fear, hunger or more generally emotions. Then you have feeling as a synonym for belief or certainty and other mental states. All of those are quite different things, so you have to be careful when using the word feeling. Different people also place varying importance on feeling. Some people may trust what they see or hear more than what they feel (emotionally), they have a different emphasis in navigating the world.

I think you're dead right. Ever been in the presence of a big animal up close? Even a dog say. It's hard to ignore its presence and there's something primal going on there, beyond thought and reason. You get the same with some people, a kind of animal presence that can't be ignored, male or female. With men it's nearly an instinctual recognition between themselves that "hey that bloke could kill me, seriously hurt me, or cause me serious issues, even if it isn't physical", and there's a whole super complex mental and subconscious game that plays out in order for those scenarios not to actually play out. But luckily most of us are whimpy, domesticated and non-aggresive - which we also recognise instinctively in others. But I like it. If you think about it there's a majestic kind of respect you have to give to animals that could kill you or that live by their own code and that isn't 100% predictable. It's no different for people. People are unpredictable by nature and can be extremely difficult to deal with, male or female, but that also makes them exciting.

How do you know you really understand a thing? Is it that you can write down or recount it or reason around it? It's not quite that I don't think. What makes a carpenter a carpenter is not the knowledge s/he has but the fact that they can make things with that knowledge. Is knowledge or intelligence or anything mental useful or really understood without application in the world? Although, I admit "application" can have a wide scope, which includes just imparting knowledge to others. It's also the difference between explicit and tacit knowledge or, knowledge taken on versus knowledge embodied. I thought about this in relation to consciousness. How could I prove to myself that I really understand consciousness? It seems in the same way a carpenter does: by making stuff. Can I, create a new consciousness from first principles? Is it enough for me to have sex, and bring a new child into existence, did I then create a new consciousness de novo? Is it only the tacit knowledge encoded in my body that is able to do this? It feels like cheating, that I'm none the wise as to how it fundamentally works. Ok, what about imagination? This is somewhat closer I think. I am able to conjure up thoughts and images and sounds and maybe even smells through mental effort, I have strong memories of my past. I mean it's a weak sauce version of consciousness unlike every day wakefulness or even dreaming, but nevertheless it's something. But the mechanism is inscrutable: the "urge" arises randomly for me to try to create something in my mind's eye, and then I try. Nowehere in that process is it clear how consciousness gets created. But there is something quite fundamental about these thought forms, precisely because they are both ephemeral and not quite like everyday consciousness. There's a platonic simplicity to them. As an example try and recall a face you see every day (your partner's or a family member), and then actually go find them and look at them - what a difference! We inhabit both worlds. So to truly understand consciousness you at least would have to conjure a concrete reality from scratch and interact with it. How would you do it?

@Judy2 Reminds me of my Uni days doing write-ups, shudder. Since you know the subject well and have lots of notes, you will have an idea of the most important points you need to get over. Those will absolutely need to be covered somewhere in the final thesis. You should work on those first. The less important points you should see as a bonus to include. That means if you run out of time or space, you should ruthlessly drop those less important points, it's ok to do that. In terms of structure, you have your five main sections as you mentioned. You should further subdivide those sections into subsections, of two or more parts (but probably not more than 5). If the final thesis were to have 50 pages, then that would be 10 pages per main section, then each sub-section would be roughly about 3 or less pages. That makes writing the subsections more manageable. Even if you write a modest two pages a day, that's 25 days or a month's effort. Maybe a subsection a day is a good aim? As you say there is no right or wrong way to slice up the information, dividing something big up into parts is always going to be an arbitrary process. Creating an outline, is the way to make something flow and hang together well. Choose a way, stick to it, and only at the end you should move stuff around to make it better, because by then you'll have the finished work to play with, instead of it being in your head.

In terms of personal finance, it is actually pretty simple. I like the bucket with a hole analogy. If you pour water into a bucket, it will keep filling up. It will fill up at the same rate your pour water into it. Seems obvious right? If you make a hole in the bottom of the bucket, then things are different. As long as you have water in the bucket, you will keep losing water at a constant rate. If you don't pour any water in, then eventually your bucket will be empty. If you start pouring water in faster than the you lose water, then the bucket will start to fill up. If you pour in water slower than you lose it then eventually your bucket will be empty. That's it. Pouring water in is your income, the hole is your outgoings, the water in the bucket is your savings. What people get wrong with personal finance is not keeping track of the rate of what's going out, against the rate of what's going in. There's several ways to do this. But the easiest is to check how much water is in the bucket at the same time month to month (if you're paid monthly), If it's going down month on month, then you will go into debt eventually.

@Schizophonia that's a well know lucid dreaming trick, wake back to bed: https://www.reddit.com/r/LucidDreaming/comments/28x5fj/how_to_wbtb/ Another is to have your feet higher than your head in bed. But never tried that. I have varying degrees of lucidness regularly, but can't induce it on purpose. I have had some success at "priming" myself before sleep. For example I have a lot of indoor dreams, and wanted more outdoor ones, so I regularly asked for this before nodding off and eventually it worked. If I have unpleasant stuff in my dreams and I remember it, I will mentally paint a big red cross on it to tell my unconscious not to do it again, it does work eventually.

@MoonLanding I think it's a great idea. It'll be a trainwreck and a vipers' nest of drama. But, definitely good fun, much better than this pickup nonsense.

Thanks @sujaykc-01 I've come accross George Berkeley, but haven't investigated his ideas deeply, I'll have to dig a bit deeper.

Thanks for reading @sujaykc-01. My ideas are kind of fluid. I have a few intuitions about how reality could be, but I don't hold on to anything particularly strongly. Here are some of my heuristics: What I'm conscious/aware of is the only thing I've got. In that sense I should have no choice but to be an idealist. I find the word "consciousness" very problematic. The reason is that a word always has limited scope in capturing a thing, and also because two different people may have different ideas about what the word means. It's also problematic because what I'm experiencing can be viewed either as a unity or as a composite thing. The word "consciousness" normally implies an all encompassing unity, but if what I'm experiencing is actually a composite experience then consciousnesses (plural) may be more apt. If it's composite, then there is the problem of comparing different consciousnesses to each other. It's also very possible that your consciousness is completely incompatible with my consciousness. I can see that all the arguments against materialism can be flipped and equally applied to idealism. Materialism struggles to explain how consciousness arises from matter. I think idealism struggles to explain how matter arises from consciousness, but nobody ever seems to notice that. Why shouldn't consciousness be chaotic and completely structureless? There seems to be no reason at all for structure, time, persistence etc. I can see that all you need for consciousness to work is awareness. If you collapse the observer and observed into one, then consciousness is really about awareness of "stuff". ChatGPT had a problem with this saying it was a circular argument, but it came at it from the wrong angle, because it "believes" that the observer and observed are separate. I see conscious awareness like a bar magnet with only one pole (monopole), which seems like an impossibility. The modus operandi of consciousness is awareness, and therefore it must be aware of something, and that awareness is what "populates" reality with appearances. I can see "consciousness" itself arising like the flicking of the "awareness" switch, as soon as that switch is flicked then the whole of reality pops out. Anyway that's some of my thoughts.

@Breakingthewall I thought it would be interesting to get ChatGPT's take on our conversation. Here it is in all its glory (I don't want to clog up this thread with a wall of text):