LastThursday

I hadn't heard of Harry Mack, but he's phenomenal.

I tried again with Miles and a better mic this time and had a lot smoother conversation. It still misunderstands and goes off on a tangent, so you kind of have to interrupt it and guide it back on track. I can definitely see using it for bouncing ideas around.

I have a whole list of these I enjoy on my journal here:

@integral I tried it for ten minutes or so. It was very good, but still not quite there IMO. I did feel quite awkward talking to a machine especially since the tone was super upbeat and American (sorry Americans) - like a happy puppy. It wasn't helped by the bot misinterpreting what I was saying, maybe due to a bad mic or just an accent thing. I found that if I didn't talk cleanly to it (no hesitation or mumbling) it would misunderstand me and start going off on a tangent. All in all: awkward. But it's still science fiction come true.

If the system allows the by-pass then it's there for a reason, take advantage of it. If you're concerned about eligibility, but not convinced by the people you've spoken to, then speak to someone higher who can definitively say yes or no. Also, do you have a tutor you can talk things over with, can they find out for you? And, if you're still not convinced after all that, then don't take the option. Either way, a year or the extra effort may seem like a lot now, but in the bigger scheme of things it won't seem like much. An extra year would give your more experience and knowledge and better grounding, or putting in the effort now will rob you of time and peace, but it's only for a short period.

It's no coincidence. AI is made in our image. What the technologists are hell bent on doing is creating a facsimile of a human. Why? Because machines are tireless, don't complain and don't get ill. But we are also intrinsically fascinated by ourselves, it is an indulgence for men to create a person from wires and electricity and pure logic.

Probably Donald Hoffman or possibly Daniel Dennett or Anil Seth. Being an AI is just the modern version of Rene Descartes "Evil Demon", an all powerful entity that creates a deceptive reality for us, and try as we might we can never be certain that we're not being deceived. We can't have "certain knowledge" about anything at all. On the face of it your question has no clear answer. Then again, the only AI is the AI we have now, and it's taken 70 odd years to get here, and it's very clear that it's nowhere near the level of capability to simulate our reality. So if you're basing your question on our current AI (anything else is a fantasy), then no, we're not AI. The problem with these sorts of questions is that you have to find the "Evil Demon" or catch him out, to prove or disprove the question. You may as well replace the word "AI" with "God", it's the same difference.

Some of my random analytical thoughts. You could say that "feeling empty" is just a figure of speech or stock phrase, and so it just stands for something not connected to its literal meaning: there isn't some sort of emptiness. Maybe then it's just a general malaise whatever that might be, some negativity, so nothing special there. On the other hand, if you take it in a more metaphorical way, then just look to its opposite: "feeling full". Full of what and what is being filled? I guess that's fairly nebulous, but you could substitute in any number of things like joy, excitement, stimulation, emotion, fulfilment of goals and so on. You are the container being filled with these nominalisations, like a bottle being filled with liquid. Feeling empty then is not being filled with those positive things, a metaphorical lack. I think the common everyday usage of it though is just as a way to describe a generally overwhelming emotion, say "feeling empty" after someone's death; or, when the fun stuff in life has been taken away, or when there's nothing meaningful going in life in general. In short a lack or removal of something positive. It is fascinating how much metaphorical language is taken in a literal way. People go around acting as if there are actual hurdles to jump over, and mountains to climb, and bottled up rage ready to explode. It goes to show how much abstract ideas and emotions need to be grounded in more concrete things even if it's just in our heads. Consequently, one way to do therapy is to play with that metaphorical language: "if you were to feel full, how would that be?" and so on.

The only way to change how you act is through introspection and self awareness - which is what you're doing. When your anger is triggered by whomever, it triggers a programme of set behaviour (i.e. a habit) within yourself. That happens because nearly 99% of the way we act is automatic. So you have options: cut the link between the trigger and response (behaviour), or change the behaviour itself, or just avoid the trigger. Since you learnt the behaviour over time, it can be unlearnt. One way to unlearn a habit is by pure repetition: every time you find yourself overacting angrily, you force yourself to calm down or behave differently in the moment - this is doable but takes time and patience and good self-awareness. Another way to unlearn behaviour is by interrupting the automatic programme. You can do this by doing something completely different in the middle of the behaviour: hug your father for example or walk out of the room, start dancing, go for a run, the choices are endless. The point is to interrupt the pattern every time it happens. Over time the behaviour will be weakened or "unlearnt" - and as a bonus you will find other ways to cope with your angry emotion. I'm not pulling this out of nowhere, this is what NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) is all about.

@Ninja_pig classic Escher. @trenton your link didn't work.

You could also take the intent angle and ask yourself does "sober living" align with your intent? Nearly all of us carry on living without any strong intent, and we end up relying on what society provides to give us meaning: news, social media, streaming, junk food and on and on. All those things can be quite exciting or strongly stimulating and a way to fill time or to feel like you're taking part in society. And, we end up being neurotic because we start relying on that stimulation to feel "normal". Without it we feel lost or detached from society, and without the distraction we start looking inward at all the bad things about ourselves. To re-engage with loving life, you need to build up strong intent in how you go about things. In other words you actively choose what you want for yourself, instead of being spoonfed by society: a life purpose. But a good start, is to cut out the time wasting distractions, so you can at least give yourself time and mental space for working out what you want out of life.

Rant: I have to congratulate you on actually engaging with your own question, many on the forum make a post but don't bother to actually engage with the answers. Rant over. I suppose you could look at it from the other end. What does being gullible involve? Such a person would take anything they're told to be true. They will go about their day acting as if X fact is suddenly now true. Maybe they believe they're God, or that they'll reincarnate when they die, or that the world will end in 2027, or that eating peppers is bad for the gut, or that you can survive on air alone and so on. Maybe all of those things at once. Applying your heuristic, then you could fairly say that the aforementioned are all wrong, and you'll then need to wait patiently for proof of each of them to come along (or look for proof proactively). Some things you may never know until it actually happens, for example the end of the world, effectively making the belief unfalsifiable - you can neither say it's right nor wrong, and you can't take a position at all (logically). If you do proactively look for proof, then you're admitting a more neutral position: why waste your effort if it couldn't possibly be true? I think it's this that you're arguing not wasting time on. My point then was that discernment works better than proof. If a belief is unfalsifiable, then you just move on, and cut the potential BS at the root. If you do have a modicum of belief then your discernment should kick in first. For example, is reincarnation real? Well, you have to look at the numbers of reports of it compared to the number of people in the world (or who have ever lived), hmm it's probably BS, since that ratio is near zero. Another example, do mobile phones give you brain cancer? That's less clear, but you can still be discerning, i.e. radio waves don't travel well in water, and your brain is mostly water, it's probably BS then. In short most of us have some ability to discern things and judge whether something is true or not. Gullible people just choose not to be so discerning, they want to be believe, because it's exciting or through wish fulfilment or it makes some sort of sense, or they just "know" it's right. They are actively guillible (if not consciously so).

I don't know, it feels as though there's more nuance to openmindedness. There is a process of discernment which comes with having knowledge and experience and this allows you to cut through most BS. It's also quite possible to hold a neutral or ambiguous position towards things, and then fall to one side or the other as you get more experience or knowledge around it, or even flip-flop over time. I would say that you're free to take whichever starting point you want, wrong until proven right, right until proven wrong, or something more neutral, because in the end you may change your mind in any direction. But, if you're not very discerning in the first place, then wrong until proven right is a helpful heuristic.

I believe they're also called Alsatians, Alsace being in France (now). Sorry couldn't resist.

Scotland and Wales are already countries. Countries are imaginary. The European Union is just an admission of this fact and in lots of ways acts a de facto country in world affairs, especially economically. There's benefit to having divisions at lots of different levels, humans are good at dealing with a certain amount of organic chaos. People should be free to able to choose when to be separate and when to be together at any level they see fit. The one serious downside to countries (nations) is that the division it creates can increase the sense of separation, protectionism and induce potential conflict. But, fundamentally the Earth itself belongs to no-one and no one person has any more right to a piece of land than any other. Do animals care about international borders?

Having a vision is only a means to an end. The crux of it is somehow building up a strong positive emotion in yourself that will propel you forward. A vision is just a good story that gets your emotions going, if there isn't a vision that does that for you, then you'll need to try other things. Another way is finding your Zone of Genius, basically, all the things you're good at. The reason for doing that is because there are already positive emotions attached to the things you're good at. Concentrating your efforts around those things focuses your time into positive emotions. I could be wrong but that is essentially what Leo's Life Purpose course taps into. Other things you can do is to research. Learning new things can open up avenues that excite you. If you're a people person, then collective activities may inspire you instead. So rather than focusing narrowly on having "vision", you should be focusing on "what produces strong positive emotion within me?" and that will carry you forward.

Fundamentally most telecommunications is based on light, electricity, computers and materials technology. But each of those things in themselves are huge areas of physics and engineering. I'm not sure there's any one channel that covers all those things, it really depends on how much depth and technology knowledge you're after. For example this video covers Maxwell's Equations which are to do with electromagnetism (light): But that might be too much information? Anyway, any of the science channels I posted in my journal will be of interest to you (towards the bottom of that page): I short you'll have to look around for stuff that matches the level you're interested in.

How is it we can fulfill our potential? There's two main strands to this idea: one environmental and one mental. Environment matters immensely for allowing us to engage with our potential. By environment I mean everything that doesn't fall into the mental category. This is the physical environment: where you live, the things you own, the work you do, the people you know, the country you live in. This is important to actuating your potential because there are plenty of things that can hold you back from being able to do that. Let's call anything that holds you back from your potential "friction". I like this analogy because anything you can find that "lubricates" that friction can help unstick you from your current situation. The effect environment on being able to reach your potential can be very much underestimated. As an example, say you have a project in mind that you think will help increase your income in the future. You start off optimistically and produce something meaningful. But nearly every day you find that you are distracted by other things, your mother is ill and needs looking after, you can barely pay for all your living expenses so you work overtime, your job is stressful and it makes you tired and emotional, you find that you drink so that you can relax, but that affects your sleep, and that affects your ability to be motivated and to think straight. All the while you believe that you just don't have the right attitude or aptitude to do your project or to reach your potential: that it's all on you. That's the downside of environment, it can make it seem like you are the failure and it can steal your energy away and it can distract you. There are a huge variety of scenarios that can play out that will stop you from being able to actualise your potential. People, your friends and your family, may even blame you for not improving yourself and re-inforce your own mistaken belief. Health and your own physicality can cause a large amount of friction to actualising. Bad health of any sort can temporarily or permanently stop you from doing many things needed to reach your full potential. Maybe it's seemingly something minor like a broken finger, that stops you from driving, or writing or typing (I once had a fractured rib and I couldn't open doors or get into a car). Maybe you have chronic fatigure syndrome and some days you can't even get out of bed. Maybe you suffer from periodic migraines and you can't think of anything except your pain. It goes on. What about all that stuff that isn't environmental? What's in the "mental" category? Imagine you look a photograph of someone - you don't know them. What's that person's potential? It could be anything, right? And you would be right in saying well "it depends on their drive and ambition". This is the conventional side of potential, what self help aims to improve; that is, the psychological aspect of your being. Potential in the mental realm comes down to a few fundamental aspects: good story telling, embodiment and motivation. Briefly, motivation is what allows you to affect your environment directly; embodiment is being or becoming the person that is motivated; a good story tells you who to become. That your mental state can affect your potential is no doubt a lot more obvious than the argument for environment. It's the West's mantra of individualism: that you yourself are responsible for your life (a.k.a. your psychology), instead of the more alien concept of collectivism (a.k.a environment). What's not so obvious is that it is extremely difficult to alter your psychology "from within". The analogy is like sitting in the middle of one of those playground roundabouts that spin and spin, and trying to make it stop spinning through sheer force alone, the struggle being to get off the thing before you can even begin to think about making it stop. This what it is like playing with your own psychology. Your environment could be absolutely benign and perhaps even beneficial to your actualising your potential, but your mental drama creates a large amount of friction that stops you from getting there, or the more likely scenario wherein you don't even know where to start. When you don't know where to start, it's important to collect good stories. To some this comes naturally, a thought enters their head and they are excited by it, and they carry it out. A lot of CEOs and managers and motivated people I've interacted with seem to fall into this pattern. They tend to be haphazard, but productive because they're always carrying out their thoughts (or getting others to do it for them). Emotion is important to a good story, when you hear a good story it pulls you somewhere that you want to go, not by rationality but by bypassing it directly with emotion. This is essentially the hero's journey, it is ultimately an emotional story about actualising your potential. A good story exposes your natural inclination to want to go beyond your current boundaries, because spirituality speaking you know you are more than the sum of your body and your circumstances. Triggering that emotion allows you to connect directly with that spiritual yearning to be free and to go beyond. Once you have a good story, then begins the process of embodiment. A story has a plot or an arc, and that means you have to become the character in the story you've decided to take on. To couch it in less flowery terms, say you always wanted to be that ninja you watched in martial arts films (the story), it connects with your emotion, and you decide to take up a martial art. That process of making the story "come to life" is the process of embodiment. Embodiment comes with its own problems, because to become a character in your own story, you will necessarily have to give up the character you are now, you have to kill off the identity you have now. I think much potential is lost this way, because indeed it can be a big ask kill the person you are now. Of course, it needn't be as brutal as that, and you can slowly slowly become the character you want to be: that is the path of mastery. But in the end you can never regain that old character again and that is the price of potential, something is always lost. Once you have mastered the story and begin to master embodiment, then motivation naturally drops out of this. I think much self help fails because the steps are in the wrong order. There is a heavy emphasis on motivation in order so that you can live your dream (story), and become the person you want to be (embodiment). But motivation is a natural consequence of being well embodied as the character you want to be in your own story. After all what does a gardener do but tend their garden? I include motivation, because to a degree it can be cultivated as a habit, it's not pure consequence of story and embodiment. In reality that triumvirate of story, embodiment and motivation is a dynamic system, each part affecting the other parts in a feedback loop. The real trick is to get the system to keep running like a perpetual motion machine. Passion, energy, drive and productivity being outputs of the machine and not the fuel for the machine itself. The important linkage between the mental realm and environmental realm is exactly that of motivation. If you think about it, motivation is the physical manifestation of your thoughts. Even if thoughts could affect matter directly, physicality is about a million times more effective at doing so. You will never reach your potential through thoughts alone. This is why motivation is critical in the process, but motivation doesn't stand alone. If we reduce it right down, we effect in and affect the world primarily through our hands, feet and mouths: that is our interface for motivation, our hardware. Our software is our mental realm. Upgrading your environment (through directly changing it) can have huge benefits in lubricating your potential making machinery. Top of this is health and making sure that this is always foremost in your mind. Second is the people your surround yourself with; if you are constantly being sucked into their dramas and negativities then this will create a lot of distraction and negative emotion (i.e. friction), but conversely surrounding yourself with positive, inclusive, and actualised people can reduce friction enormously; even being less isolated can help enormously. Next is money and financial stability, because a lot of the day to day stuff of life is to do with money, and having enough of it to keep the basics up: if you can barely afford to heat your home, this will create a lot of friction. Last is materiality, the tangible things that make easier to live, the mobile phone, the car, a comfortable bed, an entertainment system, the internet, the clothes on your back. Materiality shouldn't be despised too much, it really can reduce friction greatly. With all that said, this is the short version of the above: to fulfill our potential we must find a good story, embody that story, which will motivate us and then which will improve our circumstances. And all those things will feed into each other, incrementally shifting us to where and who we want to be.

I wholeheartedly agree. That thread was popular for quite a while and brought people together. Maybe there's enough interest to sustain a subforum, although you'd have to have stipulations about AI art I reckon, but I don't know. I love your painting by the way, it has a crisp and dynamic quality like the plants are jostling with each other for attention.

There is of course this thread:

Evolution and growth starts with detachment. You have the ability to step outside yourself. If you saw someone else being a devil, what would you do? Maybe shout at them and call them a devil! Later you might explain to them why they're a devil. You may then try and guide them and show them what they need to do not to be a devil. Maybe in the end you might just lead by example, by showing them what it's like not to be a devil - that's love.

I've got nothing concrete, but I get it. Where to start? There's a thousand and one different aspects to attraction and to "a relationship". Getting all those things to line up isn't ever going to happen, so a lot of different aspects of a relationship are going to be asymmetrical between you. Maybe they do love you more, and want to settle with you more, but they themselves will have other qualities which keep you interested in them, i.e. you provide more than they do in other ways. Really, it comes down to, can you satisfy each other enough in your own different ways? Is it "good enough" for each of you? I would see a relationship as a spectrum, from purely platonic to full blown marriage with kids, and everything in between. A situationship is just some point on that sliding scale and you'd be at different points depending on the person. In a way, it's not personal, it's not all you, it's them as well. I think what we're interested can change over time depending on how deep you are into the relationship. Maybe your M.O. is to prize attraction at first, but it could be that that changes once the relationship is established in some way. Attraction is normally multi-dimensional in my experience, you may logically prize certain things, but your body may want and guide you in other ways, sort of under the radar. This maybe is why you're posting about this at all, because there's some dissonance between your what your body desires and what your logical mind desires. In other words, you maybe overthinking things. No. Keep going until you find someone that floats your boat enough that you'll escalate. You'll probably know it instantly when you met the person. Anyway, that's my two pennies' worth.

I'd hate to do your homework for you, but, here are some to start you off with: Dali: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swans_Reflecting_Elephants Escher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_and_Water_I Monet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Artist's_Garden_at_Giverny Tromp l'oeil examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompe-l'œil

The obvious ones that spring to mind are Salvador Dalí and Maurits Cornelis Escher (M. C. Escher). Escher's tiling's are a good example of how we extract meaning out of perception, where one form morphs and interlocks into another in a gradual manner. And Dalí is a trip into the subconscious mind and how dreamlike reality is. The impressionist Claude Monet is also good for deconstructing reality, in that it's not made up of clearly defined stuff, but lots of amorphous colour and shapes; we just interpret those to give us a definite sense of the world. You can also look up artists who employed Tromp-l'oeil in general (like René Magritte), this is a way to produce three dimensionality on a canvas. The idea being that our three dimensional world is a construction or a "trick of the light".

More metaphysical wrangling. I can't let go of trying to understand consciousness and its relationship to matter. I find myself thinking that there must be an answer to the riddle of that relationship. Does matter cause consciousness or does consciousness cause matter? I feel that the answer lies in a combination of both ideas. When you have correlation between two things you can always ask: does A cause B or does B cause A; but the third case is to ask is both A and B caused by C? In so doing you explain the correlation because both A and B are products of C or have cause C in common. There is a fourth case which gets close to logical self referencing is that: A and B cause each other. Taking the third case into consideration, then you might posit that God causes both material matter and consciousness, and that is why they seem closely linked to each other. You might also posit that some other unseen mechanism gives rise to both matter and consciousness, and maybe they are cousins of each other. The fourth case is interesting. There are actually instances of this in science, for example electromagnetic radiation (clue's in the name), where there are both electric and magnetic field components in relation to each other making up light. You might say that the reason light propagates at all is that the two fields are causing each other to oscillate, and that oscillation must occupy space and cause a sense of motion; A causes B causes A causes B and so on. Another case were this sort of thing happens is with gravity. John Archibald Wheeler's quote summarises well: ""Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve". Again causation is happening in both direction, between gravity and matter. I quite like the idea of this reciprocal relationship between consciousness and matter. It's not that either one is responsible for "producing" the other, but they are both in symbiotic relationship. In essence both are two parts of one thing, like having a head and a tails on a coin. You could argue that on the face of it consciousness and matter are completely orthogonal to each each other: the sensations and perceptions of qualia actually have nothing to do with matter itself, because matter is insensible to our perceptions of it, it carries on regardless of whether we "look" or not. And that the machinations and rules of matter interaction have no reason to produce subjective qualia, because it can well carry on without them (Occam's Razor). But it's blindingly self evident that however divorced matter is from the subjective experience, it definitely lives in the realm of subjective experience; a subjective experience we cannot ever escape from. However, it seems quite evident that people's subjective experiences can leave them albeit for short periods like during sleep or being knocked unconscious, and those moments are highly correlated with what's going on in the world of matter: I take a blow to the head and my conscious experience momentarily disappears. We should be careful though with saying that matter affects consciousness, because it's really an argument about consistency: we know we've slept because it was dark before lost consciousness and light when we regained it, even if the intervening loss of subjective experience wasn't actually experienced. Likewise when observing others doing things like sleeping, we can never know what another person's subjective experience is, even if we wire up electrodes to their brains and ask them about it afterwards, we can only ever got a proxy view of it. So what about it then? Is consciousness in a reciprocal relationship with matter and what is the makeup of that relationship? To examine we can give up on the notion of the contents of consciousness (qualia etc.) is separate from the mechanism of consciousness. It's not that consciousness "gives rise" to subjective experience, no. The content of consciousness is in fact consciousness itself, without content there would not be consciousness. I mean content in a very broad sense here, for you could have consciousness devoid of all qualia except maybe one quale (that being the sense of existence or being itself). Imagine taking away each subjective perception one by one, and still being left with a sense of there being "something", but I would still call that content. That way of seeing consciousness helps, because material matter also lives within the content of consciousness. Consciousness is not just base perceptions built up like bricks into a house of reality. Not really, consciousness is at all levels, both at seemingly simplistic atoms of perception like the smell of a rose, but also the sense of your friend Tom or the sight of Mount Fuji. If you get under the skin of consciousness there aren't levels or a hierarchy of phenomena at all, it all just happens in real time. The world of matter is happening in real time "within" consciousness, it is wholeheartedly the content of consciousness, and by extension is also consciousness itself (by the reasoning above). It looks like then that consciousness is matter and matter is consciousness. How then does something like a blow to the head or taking a drug like LSD cause our subjective experience of consciousness to change drastically? How does the normal experience of matter reassert itself afterwards? The content of consciousness obviously has a huge amount of structure and permanency to it, it's not just a random assortment of disassociated perceptions, there is a strong coherence and consistency to it. I believe that these traits are not inherent to consciousness or its contents, just that consciousness has chosen it so to speak, it's a kind of habit that the content of consciousness behaves in this way. Materialism is just the name we give this habit of consciousness, but materialism isn't the only mode of its being, and drugs offer us alternatives. It seems like materialism is real and constant, but actually this is just a very strongly ingrained habit of consciousness. Consciousness has infinite abilities to be in any mode it likes and infinite awareness and scope inside those modes, it can very easily maintain the entire cosmos without effort: it could very easily forget all that and do something else instead. In some way it has given itself escape routes precisely through those drugs and that very matter it imagines consistently and by dreaming during sleep. But consciousness is not primary, because consciousness is itself its own content and not outside of it.