LastThursday

Some thoughts on drinking coffee. I've been accused of not drinking enough fluids during the day. This is both true and untrue. I'm a great believer in paying attention to what the body actually wants. Although, I do think people have different relationships to their bodies with varying degrees of bodily awareness. There is a strong fad the last decade or so to drink copies amounts of fluid in the day, I mean litres of the stuff per day. Before this fad people would drink normal amounts, which again varies from person to person. I suspect the underlying cause is bottled water companies pushing their wares. I think what my body needs in fluid may be below average or that I get plenty of fluid from the food I eat, but also I live in a cool country. Another fad is the meteoric rise of the chain coffee shops, especially Starbucks and the like. Cafes and coffee shops have always been around since the stuff was discovered. The first coffee shop in the UK was opened in 1652 (https://oldspikeroastery.com/blogs/blog/history-of-london-coffee-houses), so it's definitely nothing new here. What is new, is the sheer number and the culture around coffee drinking. I like the flavour of coffee, but I am very particular about what I like (just like with everything else!). Through experimentation I've plumped for latte and so that is my default choice. Results from different chains vary, Nero being top for flavour and strength. I like a robust flavour and good strength. Unfortunately, I don't tolerate caffeine well and so always have decaf, which again unfortunately is generally not as strongly flavoured as the caff version. None of the major chain coffee shops do decent decaf latte. The strength can also vary between take away and non-take away drinks - which is annoying, take away drinks generally being weaker. Another annoyance is temperature, with often scalding temperatures being served. I suspect this just varies per shop and barista even. I've learned to wait eight minutes with my take out from Nero (as hot as the Sun and the same amount of time it takes light to reach us from the Sun (nerd)). The last annoyance is just the sheer cost of the stuff, often being over £3 here, for what is essentially a cup of hot milk with a dash of coffee. And yet coffee shops all over are well patronised and even in my medium sized town. It seems incomprehensible, but then again I will regularly buy the stuff too. For me I just drink it on my lunch time walks, even though ridiculously I could just as well make the same thing at home for pennies rather than pounds. Why are the coffee shops so popular? Because they provide something that was sorely missing in our culture, a neutral place (indoors) were people can just hang out, and quite often meet up. Before the rise of coffee shops, in this country the pub served a similar purpose, and it still does in the evenings after coffee shops close. At home I have my beloved Bieletti moka pot, which makes decent coffee, just put in the ground powder, water and away you go. I gave up on instant many years ago. Although when I was a teenager instant was the goto, with the moka pot only coming out rarely, pre-ground coffee was a lot harder to get hold of back in the day. Some of my friends only have instant, which I drink sparingly, and begrudgingly (although I don't show it). I do also have a plunger affair for when I can't be asked to clean the moka pot which permanently sits on my stove top, it doesn't quite match the flavour of the moka pot though. My Nan always had Camp Coffee, which is a liquid coffee flavouring made from Chicory, I loved the stuff, I think it's still available in my local supermarket, I should try it again for posterity some time. Failing making coffee due to laziness and quickness, I will have tea, which is nowhere near as enjoyable as a decent coffee, but it serves a purpose. Some days I find myself drinking copious amounts of tea, but really it's just punctuation throughout my work day more than a desire for fluid. Ok, lunch time it is, time to walk the streets in search of expensive scalding coffee.

I feel like writing; something. How does materialism fit in with idealism? At first sight it would seem that the two are at opposites to each other. Materialism posits a world out there of spiritless hard tangible stuff. It's the default mode for most us, I mean it's very difficult to get away from the often harsh reality of the material world. But maybe it's also blatantly obvious that the world has its own rules and ways of being and most of it has nothing to do with you or how you choose to see it. For example no matter how hard I try I cannot turn a house brick into a brick of gold, that's materialism's ultimate triumph: the world is rulebound and transformation only happens very specifically, and there is no room for anything else not even a god. Materialism's other triumph is that we all share in it, the brick I hold in my hand is experienced by anyone who cares to look at it. What about idealism? On the face of it subjective idealism seems alien to most. When it says that the world is encompassed only as subjective sensations and perceptions, this seems absurd at first. What about that experience we all share in called "the world"? How is it I can say that only my first-hand experience of that world is prime and that the ideas of materialism are secondary, it seems to be untrue; what about when someone else's report of their experience, tallies with mine? After a while of stewing in idealism however it starts to make much more sense. I really can't escape myself, in the sense that the experiences I seem to have appear to be unique to me. Even if the world is a shared experience I still have my own special viewpoint and everything is funnelled through that nexus. That realisation makes it difficult to explain anything at all without reference to that special viewpoint. In other words it is exactly as idealism says: subjective experience is prime. One subtlety of idealism is that it really is about unity. Since subjective experience is everything, it implies that "subjective experience" is in fact a monolithic thing. It lumps all the phenomena of perception together and says that those things are the only things in the world. But in that respect it is no different from materialism which posits a "world out there", in fact a monolith of a world out there with its types of matter and light and rules of interaction. The thing with all being just subjective experience is that there is a kind of passive flattening happening. Stuff is just "experienced". However much this lines up with what reality might be - that reality is just a screen to which is projected experiences for us to perceive - there is that nagging materialist doubt: but what about the stuff behind the scenes that isn't experienced but still seems to affect what is experienced? How is it the world seems to be composed of stuff that doesn't care about our experience of it? Why does the world appear to carry on even if we're not looking? I'd say that problem is acute for idealism. Yes, we can have experience of going on holiday to a foreign country, but idealism would say that when we return home in some real sense that foreign country ceases to exist: because we stop experiencing it in the now. Idealism says nothing about the consistency and permanency of the world, it doesn't even acknowledge a world as such, just an ever unfolding ongoing subjective experience. If you were to blink and suddenly find yourself in Italy (say), idealism wouldn't care, materialism would care very much. A middle ground. We can de-compose our subjective experience into nuggets called qualia. These are the units of perception so to speak, there are qualia for sight and qualia for sound, qualia for touch and so on. The fact that bits of our experience can be put in categories at all is interesting in itself. There's a real sense in which the perceptions of sight are somehow all linked together, there is a kinship between red and green, light and dark that persists all over our visual field and temporally. I would say all those gross qualia with which we're familiar seem obvious to us and that they are our lived in subjective experience. The idea of qualia can be extended to include more subtle experiences. There are qualia for "things" in the world. For example there would be a quale for chairs and people and bridges. Isn't it the case that when we see the car we own there is an instant recognition of it, we don't need to mentally calculate to experience it, it is very much like hearing a sound or smelling a rose, it is "just there". That's interesting because a car is a composite thing. It can be decomposed by our subjective eye into other parts such as wheels and metal and leather - all themselves qualia. But aren't qualia both gross and subtle just appearances to be passively recognised? Aren't they fundamentally ethereal and substanceless (in direct opposition to materialism), coming and going at their own whim? The quale of our car may appear to us once a day, but that appearance and disappearance seem nearly out of our control: we would have to stand in front of it indefinitely to constantly experience the quale. There's very much a staccato constantly disconnected sense to idealism. Could it be that qualia are actually deeper than they seem, in function? Maybe qualia conspire with each other to keep the world in check. Whereas materialism says that matter and light rules the world, and gives it substance and permanence, maybe qualia does the same for subjective idealism. Rather than being a passive function of awareness, qualia have a life of their own. Their comings and goings already give motion and time to the world, aliveness, but if they were to interact with each other they would also give it that missing ingredient: structure. What is this structure of qualia? Primarily it is a network of interrelatedness. Just as the quale of a car is composed of other qualia, the car is also connected to the other qualia in its environment, qualia are never solitary. A large part of our subjective experience is composed of interlocking contrasts; red is not blue, loud is not soft, fast is not slow. This interlocking network of qualia gives it a structure, not just the gross qualia of vision and sound and touch, but the more subtle qualia of objects, ideas and a sense of self. There is also a kind of stickiness to qualia, they have a pace to their comings and goings, everything is not happening at once. This stickiness is the ultimate cause of structure, for if it takes times for one quale to affect another to affect another, then structure can be maintained over time - all that's needed is a loop of interaction. This is what makes the world permanent. Even if we don't experience being in Italy right here an right now, it continues to exist precisely because there is this near infinite network of qualia communicating with each other in time, and it's this which scaffolds reality. Not all qualia are so obvious. Some are exceptionally subtle and nuanced, and barely in awareness, they are like near invisible strings holding reality together. In some sense we're aware of the universe all at once, and that is what keeps it around.

I'm digging the Brit, Aussie, American accent.

Simple questions don't always have simple answers. If you want a simple answer then @Atb210201 has given you one.

There is a surface level and a deep level to everything. An analogy would be like the difference between looking at waves on the ocean and diving deep into the ocean. When it comes to galaxies we can only ever look at the surface features, basically light, we can't actually go there and dive into the details of gas, rock and plasma. Every single deep feature of astronomy has to be guessed. If god is responsible, then it may choose to just project surface features at us. Maybe we see an ocean of galaxies, but there's nothing deeper going on, i.e. there is no gas, rock and plasma at all, it's just a trick of the light. This is basically the idea behind the simulation hypothesis. God could be the simulator. In which case god only needs a fancy algorithm to generate all those surface phenomena, and a bit of imagination to come up with the algorithm and the hardware. The upshot is that we can't know the deep level from the surface level for certain. We can build a coherent story about the deep level, that tries to explain the surface level, but that's it. You should look into the Chinese Room thought experiment: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/. That is another example of surface versus deep level. Essentially, can we know if the person inside the room is a native Chinese speaker or not? Can we tell what's going on at the deep level from the surface level interactions of symbols being passed to and fro?

It's not my style to comment on my own posts. But when I posted the following: "Things could be even weirder. My first order distinctions may be totally incomprehensible to another person's first order distinctions. What you call colour, I may not even recognise as part of my experience. It's totally possible that if you suddenly become me, you wouldn't be able to understand my first order distinctions at all." This made sense of something else I've pondered. Why am I me? I mean why are things experienced just from this POV and why can't I seemingly escape it? In short, why can't I choose to inhabit someone else's reality, why do I not spontaneously flip into being someone else, someplace else? It could be because of the above self-quote. That what you experience in consciousness is fundamentally incompatible with my experience. In other words even if both my reality and your reality are happening simultaneously, I don't have access direct to your reality because I don't understand it. I'm in my own universe with its own flavour, you in yours. To begin to understand your universe I would have to be continuously exposed to it, so that your experience becomes comprehensible to my consciousness. To use a radio analogy, we are on different frequencies. The world's radio is coursing through you right now, but you're totally unaware of it, because you don't have the consciousness to decipher the electromagnetic waves of those radio stations. You need a radio to convert those waves to something your consciousness understands. And so it is with people. So there is Consciousness (big C), which is a spectrum of all consciousnesses, yours and mine (a collective consciousness if you will). But we're permanently tuned into only one station, ours. There is a type of conversion that is going on however. We call it the real world, it's a shared space we're we can "see" each other, where each sub-Consciousness can have access to others' albeit in a limited capacity. The question naturally arises: can we change the channel at will? Any person's consciousness is simply an ongoing state of Consciousness we don't understand or "lock on" to, it is still happening along with your own consciousness, just like all radio stations are playing simultaneously. In reality there is only one Consciousness, which hives itself off into many parts. There are in fact no walls between all the consciousnesses, it's just that we've become habituated to our own niche. It may well be that people naturally have varying degrees of looseness in their experience of other's consciousnesses. Maybe drugs or practice or magick or meditation can loosen the narrow tuning we have. Maybe telepathy is nothing more than this unrestricted tuning, it's a feature of there being only one Consciousness. However, even if we can de-tune away from our own consciousness, we'd have to re-learn someone else's consciousness, just like learning a foreign language. There's a common sensation that other people's experience are broadly similar to our own, your red is like my red - I think everyone's consciousness is wildly different, my red is totally unknown to you.

@Davino whoop whoop congrats man.

Things could be even weirder. My first order distinctions may be totally incomprehensible to another person's first order distinctions. What you call colour, I may not even recognise as part of my experience. It's totally possible that if you suddenly become me, you wouldn't be able to understand my first order distinctions at all. This happens with cochlear implants for the deaf people for example, they have to learn how to hear over time, i.e. they now have the first order distinction of "sound" but it's meaningless to start with. What matters with distinctions is their relationships to each other, not their absolute "value". It's worth noting that first order distinctions are in constant flux. That's why you could see a white and gold dress one day, and black and blue the next. And last thought. A chair is a first order distinction, in that it is recognised instantly and without thought, but the construct of a chair has to be learnt over time, we aren't born with the chair construct already there. So in some sense a chair is of a lesser order of distinction than a colour. But we may have latent constructs for faces, trees, sky etc.

Growing up I've always felt very self-conscious. I'm not sure when it really started, whether it was when I was a young kid or a teenager. The general sensation I've had most of my adult life is that I'm being watched. I don't mean this is in a tin-foil-hat kind of way, but rather that if I'm somehow not conforming to some social standard or other, then I'll be caught out, and it will be awkward or I'll have to explain myself. It's extremely hard for me to explain without sounding like I'm paranoid (maybe my signature is correct?). I could provide some examples, but they're so minor it seems ridiculous to go into any depth about them. There are several potential sources for my self-consciousness, they might be: Growing up with a very particular mother, and not wanting to do things "out of line" Being just more self-aware than the norm, or at least focusing on myself more intensely than is the norm Some form of autism, and not quite being able to judge what is acceptable or might be deemed weird, i.e. avoidance of awkwardness A form of hyper-vigilance stemming from growing up in a rough neighbourhood and having to always look out for myself Not being very good at explaining myself when put on the spot, and avoiding that sort of thing at all costs Having some sort of issue with self-worth over the years There's been pros and cons to this, let's call self-consciousness. A strong pro is that it has given me the ability to introspect and look at myself from a kind of detached viewpoint. I think this stems from constantly putting myself into someone else's shoes and judging "me" from this external viewpoint. And I very often use it as a way to correct myself when I go wrong: I behave impulsively, or hurt someone else, or I behave out of spite or whatever. Or someone tells me as much. I use to grow myself and I get clarity from intense introspection. A strong con is that I'm constantly having to course correct my behaviour and appearance, "just in case". It can be mentally tiring, and inauthentic. Sometimes I just want to be an unkempt slob in public and not worry about it. Or, just say what's on my mind without having to curate what comes out of my mouth. At times my mask slipped and it's got me into trouble, but compared to the times that hasn't happened it's insignificant, mostly it ends up being a neutral reaction from others, or better no reaction at all. And, the one thing that has changed in my later years, is that I've realised that most of the time people don't give a damn about what I'm doing. I've let myself off the hook a lot more. I see others doing and saying things completely unconsciously, where I would definitely need to check: "is that ok to say? is that okay to do?". There's still plenty of work for me to do to be completely comfortable with being "myself", but at least I'm aware, I'll get there.

¡Más música!

Love comes in many forms. Some you may not even recognise yet. Be curious and let yourself be open to them all.

When was he a mod? Must be before my time...

@Michael569 if you slip me more compliments (and some cash) my thoughts might change. Jokes aside, some of the other guys you mentioned would make great Mods. My vote goes to any of them, make it so!

Ralston isn't wrong, suffering can be dropped. But he does say it in a very blasé nearly dismissive way; he's doing that for effect however, the effect being that you should consider it possible to do. Most folks wouldn't even consider that suffering can be stopped or lessened. What he doesn't cover is the detail on how to do it. How is it possible to stop doing anything, if you've never stopped doing it? How can you bootstrap yourself into non-suffering? In this way he's being disingenuous, because he's glossing over that bootstrapping process. In a sense you have to catch yourself in the act of doing, realise it, and then not do it. Even the act of noticing takes a lot of dedication and awareness, which most people don't start off with. It's very hard. And, physical pain and hunger is still physical pain and hunger, you can't stop it.

@Michael569 thanks man, I appreciate your vote of confidence. As much as I would like to see my name in green, being a Mod is not for me, others would do a better job. And, I have my Sigma Male status to maintain and curate.

It's far more subtle than just labels, which is just language, but the idea is correct. It's more like mental constructs than pure language. The mental constructs act like templates and we match perceptions and happenings to these templates. So you have a mental construct for "luck" as well as the label for that mental construct. Having a label doesn't make the label happen, it just makes it possible to realise when the label hapens. Say you had no idea what "luck" was and no label for it, then luck would never happen. But you learn the label "luck", and now things that happen can be matched to your new mental construct, and you can call it luck. The mental construct is just a different type of perception than a sound or a colour, it's all within consciousness. Mental constructs are built from other constructs and so you can share them via language (which is all constructs).

At the bottom of a lot of addictions and depression is a lack of basic human needs being met. It could be that the isolation is out of your control, but maybe it isn't and it just takes a lot of difficult work to get out of it. You probably know that drinking isn't fixing those basic needs. We do have other needs though, such as pleasure, so your drinking does meet that need. There's also a need to "step outside ourselves" now and then, and to have relief and a break from the hard stuff of being a person, and drinking also meets that need. I also enjoy drinking for exactly those reasons, I have never abused alcohol, but I drink far far less than I used to, maybe once or twice a month. There are many other healthier pleasures in life to try. There are many ways to meet new people. If you think you can be disciplined, then try to clean up other areas of your life, the usual run of: regular exercise, cleaner diet, good sleep, some sort of mindfulness practice.

A triple bill.

Orange isn't real as such. It's just a label we use to communicate with. You could argue that Orange points to something out there or a perception, and so even if it's a label it is still real in a sense. But it could just as well be the other way round, and the perception points to the label "orange" instead. And maybe not just one perception points to Orange, but many different types of perception: dark orange, light orange, yellowish orange, an orange coat, orange paint on a wall, sunset orange, juice orange and so on. When you think about all the possible oranges then you realise that the label Orange isn't so clearly defined. Orange is a kind of ill-defined template we have. Your Orange is not my Orange. Orange is not an absolute. The screen analogy is useful, but it may not be true. Maybe there are only images but no screen, only perceptions themselves, not perceptions happening within consciousness.

Same. But sometimes being "forced" to look at subjects you wouldn't have done otherwise can open up new avenues of interest. And, even if you're not that interested it may still have utility in future.

The answer is that there is no figure, just idea. That idea isn't fixed however, it get continuously updated according to the perception. It's a feedback loop. The idea comes (from somewhere), perceptions get matched to the idea and we project out the idea onto the world of perception. Over time the perceptions slowly drift outside the bounds of the idea and so the idea must drift with it or the idea stops matching the perceptions altogether. It's no different than seeing shapes in clouds: the shapes are in our minds not in the clouds. Where do ideas come from? They are largely given to us by others, or by nature itself. For example it's very important to have an idea of a "face" embedded within us. Incongruence can happen, for example by meeting someone you used to know, again after many years. They are the person you remember, but not wholly, they have changed, so you must update your idea about them. Bearing in mind that "person" and "them" are ideas.

Both genius and madman are social constructs and not inherent in someone's make up. It's the whims of a society that confer these statuses on people. In the case of insanity the person is often removed from the pool or neutered by drugs in order to either protect society or to make the person conform to the norm. At one time in the UK homosexuality was considered a mental illness, and treated with chemical castration. Someone could be a self-confessed genius, but really there has to be a general societal consensus that labels the person as a "genius", often post mortem. At one time people weren't geniuses but had genius, the implication being that the genius had entered the person via some means. The word genius is related to genie, jinx and jinn. A genius and a madman are completely separate things, the only commonality is that they're both divergent in the eyes of society.

In my experience nothing is ever wasted. There are always side benefits to learning anything in more depth, even if the subject itself doesn't seem directly useful at the time. The biggest benefit is improving your ability to learn new stuff. The more you do it the easier it gets. Even in the workplace you'll have to learn new stuff all the time nowadays, this is an advantage if you can be ahead of your peers. If you want to work for yourself, then you'll definitely have to learn new stuff constantly. If you can do this efficiently, the pay off is obvious. Another is that different subjects cross over into each other as @Shane Hanlon says. Anything new you learn also crosses over into other areas of your life, even if you haven't studied those other areas. Even a basic grasp of things like maths can help with understanding your finances and money better, especially so you don't get hoodwinked by others. The last point is quite important. If you want to take control of your life, you'll need a good BS filter, and you can only get that by educating yourself well in lots of different areas.

Nothing. I mean you shouldn't change it. Why not reframe what you're feeling as a positive thing? You're clearly very into your girl, otherwise you wouldn't feel the way you do, tick. She could be testing your reaction (maybe without knowing it), so a bit of jealously is a good signal to her that you're still into her, tick. You yourself can of course virtue signal by NOT looking at other women (at all) when you're with your girl, and just be wholly focused on her, tick. Call her bluff by inviting the guy she's eyeing up over? Probably too much, but clutch. Basically, exude annoyance, but not insecurity. After all she is still with you and not them.

What is an object or a thing? I often come back and think about this problem. Why's it a problem? Because objects and things are not static, they break, deteriorate, slowly change over time, lose bits, get bets added on, change form and on and on. If you identify an object as such and such a thing, then if it changes over time does it continue being that such and such a thing? This paradox is exemplified by the Ship of Theseus, whereby a ship has all its parts exchanged over time, until none of the original ship remains: is it still the same ship? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus. I was always confused by this paradox, because it attacks the idea of object permanence in the world. It's clear that if you wait long enough (and that can be a very long time), that nearly all objects will change in some way. How is it then, that we can confidently identify things in the world and give them lasting names? How do things persist in the world? Why is it when I wake up in the morning, I identify it as the same place as when I went to sleep the night before? A partial answer came to me recently, and it was blindingly obvious. Objects don't exist "out there" in the material world, they are simply conventions, ideals and simplifications we use to navigate the world. The Ship of Theseus never objectively exists, but wholly subjectively exists. That's why it can have its parts replaced and still be called the same thing. If a person loses their leg in an accident, they are still a person. The persistance in the world seems to be wholly in our subjective experience or more accurately a choice is made about the permanence of a thing, whether that be consciously (as in naming something) or unconsciously (as in the idea of a chair). I say partial answer because we can all agree that even if everything in the world changes, your sofa is still your sofa and seems to continue being so over time - it never seems to suddenly disappear one day and reappear the next. And giving your sofa a different name or calling it a chair, seems not to make much difference to its existence: i.e. it appears to objectively exist "out there". But we can continue the thought experiment. Say your friends play a trick on you one day, and when you're out, they replace your sofa with an identical looking one (bear with me). You return and none the wiser you assume it's the same sofa. It's the Ship of Theseus again, the whole sofa has been replaced, and yet you think it's still the same sofa. How does that happen? Because the existence of the sofa is wholly subjective. Maybe after a while you realise something's up, the sofa seems fresher and more plump, and then you realise it's not your sofa! How does a sofa suddenly change like that? Because it's all in the mind. We largely recognise the permanence of things not in isolation but in relation to all the other things around it. When we go out we know it's our neighbourhood because the buildings, roads and other things form a net of interrelationships with each other. There's a kind of snap-to-fit to recognising things in the world. Our sofa continues being our sofa because we have a platonic form or subjective template of our sofa, and when we receive stimuli in just the right configuration it snaps-to-fit to that form. When we navigate around the world we walk through that net of interrelationships, snapping-to-fit as we go. We see our friend "Victoria" and recognise her as such, because all the stimuli are close enough to her platonic form that it's good enough - and she's also in the right place at the right time (i.e. in relation to everything else around you). She may be having an off day or wearing new clothes, but it's still her isn't it? Maybe she has a twin? Yet, it's not a complete answer, because somehow even if we're existing in a platonic snap-to-fit world, stuff just keeps on coming back, and not only that that set of interrelationships between things in our environment seems to be quite stable. There seems to be this conspiracy in our subjective experience to create a stable world seemingly separate from it. Why?