LastThursday

From a more philosophical point of view, it's all projection. You only have the evidence of your senses and your past experience to go on. Having a good theory of mind just allows you to more efficiently predict people's intentions and motivations, but those motivations and intentions are still just projections coming from your own head. Projection is a feature not a bug - to steal a phrase from someone I know.

There's a strong connection between every different aspect of your being. Seen as a dynamical system all the various parts interlock and feedback on each other. The system has an equilibrium point, where opposing parts will balance each other out. This is good because it normally stops you from experiencing extremes. The point of equilibrium is itself dynamic, it's not a static point. It will shift around during the day and over longer timescales, it may cycle or jitter around uncontrollably. You may experience periods of highs and lows, energy and lethargy, focus and distraction. But there's an ill defined locus for all this dynamic equilibrium activity, this is your set point, your temperament. Because the system of you is dynamic it can be pushed and poked around. You can inject highs (or fear) by taking a rollercoaster ride or lows by thinking about all that is bad in the world. Unfortunately, your ability to move your equilibrium point is affected by the your system too. If you are unfocused, distracted and in low spirits, you become unable to affect yourself or take action; and you become stuck in that particular funk. There are so many ways to become stuck: depression, addiction, treating your body badly, isolation, gloom and doom thinking, helplessness. Sometimes, the only recourse is to force the equilibrium to a new point by taking SSRIs or by external means such as therapy or self medication. Once the equilibrium is shifted to a new place, it may be self-sustaining and you don't need the drugs or the therapy - that should always be the aim of any intervention. There are other ways of keeping your equilibrium in a more desirable zone. This is to increase self awareness over time and to build useful habits. Increasing self awareness starts of by taking in external knowledge. That knowledge teaches you about yourself and makes you more aware of aspects of yourself that were hidden before. For example maybe you start to realise that the day after drinking lots of alcohol you feel morose. Or, you realise that you allow yourself to wallow in self-pity after a break up. Once the awareness kicks in, you can consciously force your equilibrium point in a particular direction, by pumping up the parts of you that oppose your negativity. For example you go out and walk in nature every day after a painful break up. The idea is to move your equilibrium point and not to suppress this part or that part of your being. Building up habits allows you to automate keeping your equilibrium in a good zone. It may be that your natural genetic disposition makes you prone to depression or lethargy. Having habits such as exercise and a clean diet or a fixed sleep regime can push your dynamics in the right direction. It also frees up thinking space, your habits become a matter of course. Repeated habitual behaviour becomes a lot easier over time and can seem almost natural. You need good awareness here because you can also build habits that push your equilibrium in the wrong direction - and those habits you must crowd out. Maybe you're prone to the habitual reward highs of social media, so must actively build up opposing habits, like only engaging with social media in small amounts or at certain times. Since everything in your being is connected: taking exercise makes you think good thoughts and makes your body feel good and puts you in a good mood; it's relatively easy to shift your dynamics around. All it takes is increasing awareness and healthy habits. This is just self development by another name.

I just write the headlines, @Yarco writes the story.

Most of us are not car mechanics, we just drive cars. You don't need to be computer literate to live life. We learn enough to get by.

@patricknotstar the observation is a good one. But all it means is that the sleeping dream is linked to the waking dream. The linkage can be subtle though because being conscious is subtle. There are degrees of being conscious, some low, some high. For example, I always dream of water when I need to pee, maybe I'm swimming or maybe it's raining or whatever. I don't know I need to pee in my dream, but when I wake up I do. There is a link between the two things, because really there isn't a difference between them, all that changes is the manifestation. When I'm awake I have urgency in my bladder, when I'm asleep there's water.

Coffee. I didn't think I was a coffee snob. That is until I saw this guy's reaction (@ 6:40): Whenever I visit friends I desperately try and avoid any form of instant coffee, because it frankly tastes like shit. I'm not a big tea lover, but I will drink it because it's quick and easy to make, so I tend to fall back on that especially at friends'. Except; I don't tolerate caffeine. Tea is less caffeinated than coffee, but after two cups I start feeling spaced out and sweaty, yuk. I've trained one set of friends to switch to decaf, so there is hope in the world. I also own (and use) a Moka pot, yes a Bialetti. I've had friends round who said I was "posh" for having such a thing. WTF do they expect, I live in the heart of middle class England and I'm half Spanish! Yes, I suspect I'm a coffee snob: "How many sugars would you like in your coffee, mate?", "If it's that instant shit, I'd prefer salt.". The irony being that until I identified with aspiring middle-classness (thanks Uni) all I drank was instant. --- Now for the serious half of my post. Is it ok to sit in limbo? I mean is it ok to have nothing going on but just being? What's an acceptable amount of time to live like this? Days, months, years? There is a strong drive in Western society to be constantly heading somewhere, to be busy. You've got 40 productive years, the clock is ticking, go go go! Then it's a constant scramble to get things in order and to have a trajectory, to play the game that society has layed down. A lot of us hit a brick wall around age 40 or so. You've bought into society's game and completed all the easy levels. You reach a point where you can indefinitely coast and survive, you have the house, the car, the family unit, the job that pays enough, the annual holidays. But this brings on an existential crisis, because you've been going somewhere all along and then suddenly you realise the same featureless road just carries on and on into the distance without end. That lack of destination is really hard for us Westerners to digest. It was hard for me to digest. I'm conflicted. I can't help but look at my peers and think Nope. Not because I don't love them, but because conventionality is not for me. Equally, I look at my peers and think, why shouldn't I have that? they seem happier and more fulfilled than me. It's a torment. Am I really so different and special that I should fight against it? Why don't I have a house, wife and kids, I'm a pretty down-to-earth normal bloke. Also, I have known friends who in a million years I wouldn't have thought would have gone for conventionality, and yet, they too succumbed to getting married and having kids; they're probably happy enough. Happy enough. Now there's a phrase. Should that be what I'm aiming for? Given Western society's dictats that I should try and maximise everything, isn't happy enough just a cop out? And is it really all about happiness and the level of it? It seems one-dimensional to me. On the other hand should I be getting lost in potential? There's a million potential things I could do with my life going forward (how I hate that expression). I could indefinitely think about what I could potentially do without ever doing any of it. Maybe the better option is to plump for something that I can actually get traction with, and go for that for all it's worth and exhaust it - whether it brings happiness, wealth or anything else. Maybe purpose is all it needs.

I agree and all models are limited, I suppose that's what makes them models. You can rise to any level of sophistication with them, but reality will always outsmart any models. What you see a lot is attachment to particular models as explaining everything - everyone has their pet theories. SD could be made more sophisticated by getting rid of the stages altogether and having something like traits. So just like weaving a Persian rug, a new coloured thread would be woven in and becames part of the ongoing pattern. Each thread is a new trait, for example: I use force to get what I want; and then: I use negotiation to get what I want; and then: I think about whether I want something or not; and so on. If you think about each SD stage as a cluster of traits each different from other stages, then they are kind of polarities - but of course each new trait runs up through all the subsequent stages. You can then state that particular traits come online at particular moments in development. This would make SD multi-dimensional. I think what's nice about very simple models, is that they're easy to understand in one go and it's easy to see where you fall in them. And it's probably easier to see how you would move around the "space" of a model and improve yourself. Looking at the Stupidity model, it's obvious that we want to move towards the Intelligence quadrant and spend more time there. In that sense it's a good and useful model.

Just have a rolling quota per most recent 24 hours or recent 7 days. Say no more than ten or twenty in a day. Of course any changes to they way the forum works will cost $$$, so it has to be easy to implement, so there's that.

I can get behind that, just have another section for Philosophy and all the navel gazers (including me) can go there. I have no idea what you mean by this. What do you mean by this?

You do know that @Leo Gura is pushing philosophy most of the time? Is it a surprise it's so prevalent on the forum and that folks want to emulate him?

@Mason Riggle lol. Ok. Not separate from what? lol again. Anyway. I'm out of these shenanigans on this thread. Enjoy!

Cool. So the self and experience are one and the same thing. When Solipsism says "my experience is the only one [experience]" this is a tautology, because "my", "experience" and "one experience" all mean the same thing. The only juice coming out of this definition is the word "one". What does "one" refer to here do you think?

That's a tighter definition of Solipsism, so that's good because it worries less about brains in vats and simulations - which should really have nothing to do with Solipsism. In fact the looser definition of Solipsism would exclude simulations and brains in vats. But again if there is no "my" then there is no Solipsism. Solipsism relies on there being a "my". If you take a "my" as given, then that's faith and belief. You could just as well take it as the experience of being a self and not the self having an experience. With the former this fits in better with having experience itself as the stage on which everything happens.

I would say that under Subjective Idealism it's just a distraction. If you were suddenly unplugged, Matrix style, then your subjective experience would have a discontinuity in it, nothing more. The nature of that subjective experience wouldn't change, just the content of it. But I fail to see the connection with Solipsism, what do you think the connection is?

That is exactly my point. I disagree. Why would spiritual circles even have a idea of "no self" if it didn't have some validity? I really do think you've got your feet in both camps: materialism and subjective idealism and you're struggling to reconcile the two. They're not completely mutually exclusive: they both agree that reality exists. But they're very different in their approach to reality and existence. You really do have to be a contortionist to hold both views at the same time and you should allow yourself to keep them separate when necessary.

However, Solipsism does have a definition. That is that my experience is the only one. But if you remove my from the definition, then Solipsism can't hold - by definition. It really does hinge on there being a self to experience something, i.e. the self "owns" its experience. If there is any doubt at all that the self carries on continuously without interruption, then that puts Solipsism into doubt too. My definition of Truth is something that continues to exist without interruption. I would say that the self isn't a Truth, and anything that relies on a self for its definition also isn't a Truth. The argument about Solipsism is really an argument about truth, existence and the self. The problem with this sort of thinking is that you've got nothing else to go on other than your experience - there's nothing more or less than that. The higher likelihood is that the notion of having "senses" is wrong and is what is actually causing the confusion.

@Someone here at the root of it all is what is meant by the words existence and real. You could simplify things and just say that everything that is real exists. So what is existence? Even if you have doubt, that is still a form of existence: the existence of doubt about something. So even thoughts exist. Does Harry Potter exist? Yes, as words on a page and in the thoughts of readers. The thing with the self is that it doesn't exist continuously. Ever get lost in a good film or book? Where does the self go then? It sort of disappears and reappears again when you suddenly get hungry or tired. The thing that doesn't ever seem to disappear is the experience of existence/reality. So it would seem that a "self" isn't necessary for existence to exist. Without a self you can't have solipsism because then existence doesn't belong to anyone or anything. If there isn't a self, then there aren't any other selves either.

So my sister contacts me out of the blue yesterday and says that she thinks she might have autism. Was she reading my mind? Was she reading my journal? Yikes! No. Nobody knows about my journal. NO-ONE. It turns out that she just took one of these pop psychology tests online, so it has to be taken with a pinch of salt. However she scored 20 out of 30, and she didn't seemed surprised by the result. I took the test and scored 10, which would mean I don't have it. Obviously it really isn't a clinical diagnosis in any way. But it does confirm my suspicions. She asked me an interesting question about whether I would have scored higher when I was younger. I would say that was a definitive yes. I've done a lot of work on myself since. Although, on the whole, I would say that my social skills have always been more grounded than my sister's. I keep wavering between feeling that I do have some form of Asperger's and/or looking for a problem where there isn't one. But I guess it's a spectrum and mine wouldn't be marked enough to cause me major problems. Strangely, over Christmas I got into conversation with a teacher friend of mine, where she has to deal with kids with autism regularly. I'm not sure how we got on to the conversation, but there was some implication that she realised that she herself may have some signs of it and she said her brother definitively has ASD. Perhaps she could sense that I would understand, or maybe was even tacitly hinting at me. Anyway, it was interesting. I will say that whether I choose to identify with a label or not really makes no difference. In a way I could use the label to get me off the hook for any social faux pas, but that's just abrogating responsibility and it doesn't push me to fix my problems. I have first hand evidence that I can fix my problems albeit with a lot of work. But I just see it as part of my ongoing self-development. Maybe if my "problems" were more severe I would think differently? I don't know. I suppose identifying with it would help it be "out in the open" and my friends and family would be more accepting of any weirdness I display socially. But to be honest, we're all weird at one time or another aren't we - HFA or not?

Yeah a lot of behavioural models are basically combinatorial in nature. You have several orthogonal axes where each axis represents either some sort of yes/no or polarity, possibly with a sliding scale. When combined together you get a space of possibility (or map). You can then be placed somewhere in the space and from that glean something new about yourself or track some sort of trajectory over time or compare yourself to others. The MBTI model is exactly that. The Stupidy model in the video is another simpler example. Spiral Dynamics is not combinatorial, it is effectively a one-dimensional model, but there is still a sense of location and being able to move around in it. I would say each stage in SD is a kind of polarity in itself.

I suspect accepting it is easier than knowing what to do about it. It's like you have to constantly be on guard against stupidity. Most of the time we probably behave like bandits, working in our own self interests, but not caring or understanding how it affects others. Sometimes it's a win-win sometimes not. I guess it's a very specific type of intelligence and stupidy that's being talked about - more of a game theory idea of intelligence and stupidity. I would agree that war at a macro level is stupid. Diplomacy would be more intelligent as that intentionally looks for a win-win.

@Roy that's the problem with generalised models, they don't translate easily into practice.

I do, but you might call them soft goals or meta goals. I'm largely past the phase of wanting to aquire material things and status. I mostly just want inner peace and serenity, I'm still fairly beholden to the ups and downs of my mind and want to escape that. Also I want to have an aesthetically pleasing life, with some sort of close physical community, both of which are lacking for me. By aesthetics I mean beautiful surroundings and weather, good high conscious relationships, simple lifestyle, using my body regularly and treating it well, only having to worry about the things that matter, giving something back to people and nature, working for myself, and better work/life balance.

Thanks. I came across the video and it just clicked with me. It's simple, but effective in categorising how people behave.

Good question. I think there's a notion of repetition here. I have a friend whose sister is consistently socially stupid with regards to money, and damages both herself and her relationship with her family because of it. In this case she is "being stupid". Maybe I mishandled my finances by lending a large sum money to someone who wasn't able to pay it back, and in the process I damaged both myself and the relationship I had with them. In that case I was "acting stupidly". Arbitrarily, I would say more than two times and you're probably "being stupid" - because you really should have learned from your stupidity the first two times. Yeah that's totally possible I'd say. The video kind of implies someone being stupid is being stupid in all areas, so I don't agree with that. Maybe you're good at throwing community parties that keep morale high (socially intelligent), but stupid with finances say. I guess the whole concept in the video hinges on actions being labelled either positive, negative or neutral. I would say most actions are either one or the other, some are both. There are definitely situations where there is short term negativity but long term positivity. Perhaps there are actions that are cumulatively bad, like ingesting heavy metals in your food or putting CO2 into the atmosphere, or behaving in ways that are socially tolerated but only for a while. I don't know, it's binary in a lot of instances, but less so in others.

Likewise. I like to excuse my past actions and just say I was impulsive and leave it at that. But I was actually socially stupid on those occasions, both unaware of the damage I was causing to myself and others. However it was never done out of spite, but more out of a lack of social awareness and calibration. I like to think I have a better handle on it nowadays and I too ask myself regularly: will this benefit others and will it benefit me?