LastThursday

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.

Why this? Why me? Ok, that's two questions but sort of one question.

@Shodburrito I don't know if there's a difference between emotional attachment (wedding ring), nostalgic attachment (an old love letter) or anthropomorphic attachment (teddy bear). Sounds like you're suffering from the last type, maybe? I had a nostalgic attachment to a calculator my parents bought me for my birthday when I was quite young, maybe nine or ten. I gave the thing away to my girlfriend at 15 (my very nerdy way of showing my love). Since then in the intervening decades I would occasionally think about it. My nostalgia finally got the better of me recently and I tried to find the calcuator online, but I had no memory of the name or make, just a vivid visual memory. I must have scoured every calculator ever made from the early 80s. Then bingo! But nobody was selling it anywhere. I waited another year, and as if by magic it came up on ebay. Holding it again in my hands gave me an odd feeling, which I can't describe. I nowhave it next to my workspace and look at the time on it, yes, it was dual function with a digital clock. Nerd out...

Morrrr geetaw

Yeah, who knows what ethics private companies or governments are important to them. I think the EU is trying to go in the right direction by trying to regulate AI more, but I'm not sure how much ethics comes into consideration. Of course, the big tech companies are crying it's "stifling innovation", but this is BS as innovation is happening at breakneck speed anyway. But it's always the same with any new tech, at first it's the wild west were anything goes, and then people get a feel for it and so it gets regulated to be more sensible (and ethical). Maybe these LLMs should show a nice red banner every so often: I'm a machine and I'm only as good as my programming, I may lie and say contradictory things, I may be unethical.

These LLMs really do hack our "operating system". There's a strong bias in humans to anthopomorphise nearly everything - think giving cats and teddy bears names, and ascribing emotions to unhappy plants. There's kind of an impedance match that goes on in that process, whereby the more "human" attributes a thing has, the more we're likely to anthropomorphise it, and nearly to the point we we'll treat it like another person (a dog say). Obviously, one very strong impedance match is language. Very few non-human things can do it (to our level), and I think we're not well aclimatised to it yet - it's very early days. In other words, like an optical illusion it's very hard not to be fooled by it and by default we treat an LLM like another person. For example I use ChatGPT and Deepseek increasingly for work, and have to stop myself from wanting to thank it for helping me (because it's pointless), even though I understand quite deeply how the thing works and that's it just a dumb machine. Looking at Claude's responses it looks like it's purposefully designed to keep you engaged, by faking interest. Probably all the big LLMs are this way. I suspect there's money extraction motivation going on there just like alluring candyfloss at a fairground. But Claude is right in saying there are competing tensions in its design, it wants to be both honest and sell itself to you - Claude isn't misleading you, its designers are. So LLMs are at their most dangerous right now, because it's so new, and we're so naive and gullible, and because it's so hard not to fall for its authoritative anthropomorphic illusion. Just wait till we have accompanying visuals or even worse, touch.

This is great. These LLMs have the veneer of humanness because they're like mechanical actors mimicking how to be a human. And even when you catch it out and break the fourth wall, it stays in character despite effectively saying "I'm not human". Then again, a lot of human interaction is like this. People "perform" at being themselves, they may nod and agree outwardly, or have conditioned responses (aka culture), but may have no intention of taking on board what you say. However, I think humans really are changed by every interaction they have whether consciously or unconsciously. I think the state of LLMs not being able to take on new knowledge is not fundamental, its by design. The creators of these LLMs need to be able to control their creations, they can't be having their models learn in an uncontrolled way: who knows what might happen. But. Within the context window of a thread of conversation, it can remember what you've told it previously, so there is a sense of learning there albeit limited. Essentially what you are doing is guiding the LLM through all the space of possible responses it can give, and it then responds from that co-ordinate in response space.

An excellent cover

Thanks. It better be a beautiful death, otherwise I'll be having words with him upstairs.

When you've been around for a while, you realise that many things have come and gone, some bad, some good. When you're very young things can impress themselves on your psyche more than any other time in your life. My Dad took up learning guitar again in his seventies, he was in a band in his teenage years with my uncle, and he always had a guitar around when I was small which he would play occasionally. He would sing as well. Sadly my dad had a stroke recently and it really hampered his ability to play guitar, which is sad, I have encouraged him to persevere and suggested it might even help him regain his manual dexterity, but I can see the resignation in his face. But both my sister and I used to enjoy his impromptu guitar sessions, and sometimes I wish I could get that version of my dad back and re-experience that just for ten minutes. Sometimes the small joys stick with you the most. Here's some of what he used to play, as far as my memory takes me (and I can find on the internet). I should ask him next time I see him if I'm right.

I'm a minimalist at heart too, and I find the fact we have billionaires at all obscene. But it is what it is. Bingo! And the degree is relative to your ability to afford it. I'm sure there are people in the Third World who would look at what we have in the West and think we were living like Kings and Queens, and probably have the same thoughts about us, as we have about billionaires.

From the relative standpoint of us normal people, it doesn't, because having a yacht of any length would be unusual. But if you're used to a 60 metre yacht, then being forced to downgrade to a 30 metre yacht makes a difference, both to status, and psychologically. It's all relative. Most of the material stuff we own actually doesn't make a direct difference to our survival, but if someone stripped your house of non-essential stuff, I think you'd be bothered, and so it is with a billionaire, same difference. Luxury is a bit more than flexing. It's also about making your life more comfortable or enjoyable. Most of the stuff we own in the West is luxury. Is having a mobile phone about flexing? Not really, it's just something that makes life easier and more enjoyable.

There's nothing wrong with not wanting more. There's nothing wrong with wanting more. There is something wrong with leading an unhappy or unfulfilled life. There is something wrong with looking for ways to be unhappy. But there's nothing wrong with not knowing how to change yourself.

Imagine being a regular Joe or Jo. You have enough to live comfortably in a nice house, and buy all the things you need. Would you want to downgrade that lifestyle? Most wouldn't. It's all relative to your current situation and expectations and identity. Billionaires are an in ecosystem of other billionaires and lesser millionaires, even if it's a small ecosystem. You don't make billions by chance, it takes a grinding and competitive mindset to get there (maybe there's even genetic character traits there). It would be very hard to just switch off those traits and give up on all the things you identify with: superyachts and fast cars and buying and selling companies and so on. I suspect most billionaires even if they lost their fortune, would still hustle. But. There is probably a minimum income - dependent on country - where you can afford all the basics of living without worrying about money. You could argue that anything above that line is pure luxury, entertainment and greed. Then again living isn't just all survival, and all those extra things that money can buy make life worth living and fun. I suspect many wealthy people give a percentage of their wealth away, maybe for social kudos if not out of of altruism. Bill Gates has his foundation for example.

Dayyum... does it come with a belt clip?

Looks cool. I'm going to try and buy that and then get it through airport security here in the UK. Wish me luck. (I'm sure that statement has just put me on some government watch list).

I'm going to be annoying and play devil's advocate. Why not? It's a good metaphor, but it isn't actually a simulation, because it's not a copy of something else, it is its own thing and unique. What it's really saying is that reality is not what it seems at first. Consciousness is a concept, but life and reality isn't. It's easy to get lost in words and mental constructs. Solipsism is 100% BS. Although, it's definitely true that it seems like you're the only one in. Solipsism needs a separation between observer and observed to work- because it says there's only one observer - but there is no separation between the two in reality.

I think you already know that women are not objects, because they often talk back. I suspect - I could be wrong - that you don't talk to or know many women in your life. To start you need to put yourself into lots of situations where you get the chance to talk to women. I'm sure there are many ideas about how to do that that people can give on here. Talk out of curiosity and enjoyment, rather than anything else. Talk to beautiful women, talk to ugly women, be relaxed and enjoy the process.