LastThursday

By that logic, there is only existence. Existence exists and non-existence exists. But I get where you're coming from. It could well be that intelligence is like existence in that it has no opposite or contrast or boundary. I'm open to that. But if that is the case then it's a binary condition, either it's intelligence or not, with nothing in between. Like, stuff either exists or it doesn't, there's nothing in between. Absolute intelligence if you like. If something exists and has no boundary, then it is absolute, monolithic, and unchanging.

To distinguish a thing (intelligence) it must have a boundary. Everything outside that boundary is not intelligence, everything inside is. If everything is intelligence, then it has no boundary (because it's everything), and therefore it can't be distinct. Only things that can be distinguished exist. By that argument there must be non-intelligence. "how much" just means that there is a graduation between intelligence and non-intelligence. All that's a long-winded way of saying to have a thing, you need its opposite for contrast. There are non-intelligent things in consciousness.

I want it to be some weird fantastical technology, I want to believe. But I think it will turn out to be just ropes and a lot of grunt work, and some very clever architecting. A tiny part of me wants to see it as incoherence in the fabric of reality. In other words, there is no rational explanation, it just is, or it was planted there just to tease us. But that's even whackier than fantastical technology.

Intelligence is like currency, it moves from one thing to another. Say someone teaches you how to tie your shoelaces, then that bit of intelligence has been transferred (or more accurately copied). If that's the case then intelligence moves and recombines from many different sources. If you keep tracing back where a bit of intelligence came from then in an idealist paradigm, the backstop is consciousness itself. Consciousness itself is the source of all intelligence. Is intelligence then no different from consciousness itself? Well that depends on whether any part of consciousness is unintelligent. That seems reasonable, not everything is intelligent, there's a lot of stupidity in consciousness.

The here and now is all there is. The ideas of future and past are constructs sitting in the here and now. Nothing from the future can hurt you now, and equally the past: they don't exist in the same way as the here and now. But it is paradoxical, because your constructions of the past and future do affect the here and now; they are the here and now, or at least part of it. However, as constructs, the past and future are malleable, so they don't have to keep affecting you in the same way in the here and now. Everything is interpretation at some level, because nearly everything is a construct at some level. This goes from conscious abstractions like the figure in my bank account, to unconscious constructions like the sofa I'm sitting on. My sofa is in fact just the interplay of touch, sight, sound and probably smell. The base of reality could then be pure sensations without interpretation, but I can't see myself getting to point of no interpretation, even though those absolute sensations are as plain as day. It's like the constructs have as much reality as the pure sensations. The question then is, am I a construct? And if so, how can a construct such as me reach a state of seeing reality without interpretation (i.e. constructions)?

I like heavy classical musical and banging house music in equal measure. Throw in a bit of Jazz or 80's synth as well. Anyway, melody and rythmn.

I don't need language to be able to distinguish a dog from everything else. I don't see a dog and then say to myself "dog". I don't confuse a dog for a cat, those are both different things. Naturally I can point to it and tell someone "hey that's a dog", or "oye, ese es un perro", the language is irrelevant, the experience is the same in both cases. There is a mental construct or template of a "dog". I have a bunch of perceptions, and those perceptions fit my template of a "dog". The words "dog" or "perro" are then attached to that mental construct, and I can use that to convey my experience to someone else. The crux of the thing is that the mental construct is not a part of language, it is entirely separate from it. I can navigate the world completely without using language. But I can't navigate the world without using mental constructs. These constructs or platonic forms or templates or whatever you want to call them, sit between language and perception. A "dog" or un "perro" are just visual symbols representing random sounds we make representing mental constructs representing perceptions.

What do you think a dog is then? And why's it different from a cat?

Do you think dogs exist outside of language?

This is an example of exactly what I said above. You're using language to say "stop using language" i.e. to point to something outside of language.

There is the theory of the Bicameral Mind, which says that hearing voices used to be the normal way people experienced the world. Auditory hallucination was one the ways the brain talked to itself. Self-reflective thinking was not the norm until more modern times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality How does the brain know if something is real or imagined? It seems it needs to hit some sort of threshold in intensity. It could be that some people's internal voices are strong enough for them to believe they're real, despite the fact there is nobody there speaking them. This article is about mental imagery, which is a similar phenomenon: https://www.quantamagazine.org/is-it-real-or-imagined-how-your-brain-tells-the-difference-20230524/ The brain is also very good at rationalising things away, for example calling the voices "commands from god" or "messages sent by a government agency". Cotard's sydrome or "walking corpse" is an extreme example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotard's_syndrome

@Someone here what you say is correct and agrees with what @Hojo is saying. However, language can point to things outside of itself, it doesn't always just point to itself. You could describe eating a hotdog, and get lost for ever in description, or language can point outside itself and say "go and eat a hotdog and find out". Equally with Enlightenment, language can't make you enlightened by describing it, but it can point outside itself and say "go meditate" or "go take psychedelics", "go on a fast" etc. Language can stack the Enlightenment odds in your favour. @Leo Gura has done this so often it's comical. Do the work!

Don't get confused, that's @Hojo's word not mine. I was merely responding using their terminology. Good. It's a process at least. I wonder if it has a structure or if it's totally random and chaotic? And if it has a structure I'm sure it can be written down and discussed.

Probably some direction is better than no direction, unless you spontaneously awaken, but then hoping for that becomes faith. But I get your gist, that awakening is not the result of some mental process, or even a process at all. The Ox Herding pictures be damned. In that case, awakening is only something that can be discussed in retrospect after it spontaneously happens and even then it's fruitless to talk about it because it can't be transmitted to someone else. All that can be said is "I have awoken!" and that's the end of it.

@Miguel1 yeah! I've learned not to panic. I just have to wait twenty minutes and get the browser to resend, normally works. That's if I remember to do that before I accidentally close the tab, which is actually the problem.

We will not awaken at all from a forum. The best it can do is point us into some sort of direction. Theorising has its place.

Thanks, my curiosity is satisfied. I must remember not to write a long post at 11am ever again...

It's worth thinking about whether writing is just a system for representing spoken language or if it is a separate from of language. I'd say it was the latter, writing is a visual language like sign language. What you're reading here is a visual dialect of spoken English. Often writing and the spoken word get conflated.

I'm not sure if it's in that particular Curt Jaimungal video. They talk about the reasons LLMs seem intelligent, and why we've managed to so succesfully model language. It's because it somehow captures the essence of what language is, which is it's a prediction machine for the next word. It encodes a huge amount of facts and relationships about the world, and then predicts the next word in the sequence using that information. When LLMs do seem stupid or make mistakes, it makes clear that humans have something LLMs don't; we run a language model in our heads yes, but we are able to reason outside of language. Some of our intelligence comes from language itself, the rest from somewhere else.

To sort reiterate what @Hojo said, everything is coherent and hangs together (as a human) but it's completely arbitrary. Having two arms and legs and a head is completely random and not related to anything absolute. You could have been some other entity and be asking the exact same question. You could argue that there is something absolute about us, but it is definitely not our form or way of being.

What was that like and how did it happen? I'd say it was models, plural, many thousands of them. We have direct experience and that is Truth, but we always immediately cast a net over it and capture fish. We couldn't survive and function without relative truths. But, even the sensations of relative truth sit inside direct experence, that's how the trick is done.

What happens between 11 and 11:15 UK time daily? Some sort of maintenance? It's always down then.

@saif2 I'm itching to know. Have you looked outside your room?

Never mind the looks. What does she feel like?

Thanks @Natasha Tori Maru I should add, that when I wrote "emotional dysregulation" I only meant for this to be something to be aware of. Pathologising bad behaviour can be a dangerous thing to do, because in the the worse case it can be used to diminish and not take seriously someone's needs, which is not the basis of a good relationship. There are always genuine reasons behind someone's behaviour and in 99% of cases it's not pathological or a mental health issue. This is a decent video on the subject of non-violent communication: