ryoko

It's easier to be happy while you're stripped away from society. I really don't believe in that path for too many reasons. I'm trying to find ways to enjoy material world unrestricted while being an ascetic. But it's not like I can switch off and assimilate. The "aghori in Vegas" scenario hits home. Aghori are the most non conforming sect of monks there is. Very few faction of society can tolerate them. Imagine the work it would take for the aghori to get to Vegas and do whatever he normally does. These guys eat the flesh of dead humans, they drink tea from human skulls. Think of the most absurd things you can, nothing is off limits in this path. They try to not to disturb human society and have them do their things in isolation instead. I'm contemplating how these kind of values won't be tolerated one bit in mainstream society. Nobody have a problem with monks being monks. Or even hippies being hippies. Problem starts when hippies are so absolutely happy and also filthy rich as a consequence of their path. Not exceptions, all hippies. This kind of dynamic will be seen as massive threats to societal structures.

I'm fascinated by how normal people function. It's easy to dismiss it as unaware way of life. But there's more to it.

@Bjorn K Holmstrom I appreciate your input on monkhood, I had really considered this path for sometime. But there's more to the story. I love materialism. I'm a carnivore through and through. I love monkhood just the same. I do see and feel the cost of everything. In order to function "efficiently", you need unawareness, and almost instinct driven way of life. Dogma; why do you think monks are "expected" to follow certain codex, shave their heads, and most importantly stay out of certain things. In a way they are forced to. Because they live without money or any form of material agency. Monks serve a purpose in societies which tolerate them. Think about aghori going to Vegas, are the flights gonna welcome him just because he's aghori? If anything he'll be shooed away on sight even in normal cities. Do not underestimate human stupidity. Of course there are different types of monks. Why do you wanna limit to forest monks of all things. Heard about Warrior Monks? My blend would look like nerd/animist/monk/++ --- I'll tell you something. Monkhood's positioning is a scam. The way you've framed it is just showing carrot to the donkey.

*woof*

My domain of mastery require bleeding edge tech and a very stable infrastructure. I'm 23 at the moment. Also, I can't stand the dogma around forest monk lifestyle. I find it is more of an escapism.

Chutes.ai They host open source models. Deepseek models are awesome. They're my favourite. Downside is you have to set up your own LLM interfaces, using open-webui or something. It's quite easy it you know your way around, and easier if you are a Linux user.

Not really. Money is mostly arbitrary and political. There's an energy element but it's far from efficient. It would be a lot better if it were truly a neutral force.

I'm finding more and more people with this profile, recently. What's the point of impacting humanity at all. All I want is just peacefully pass out of this world into nothing. Whatever I do along the way doesn't matter.

@Basman you can iterate your way forward, sure. The biggest trap is taking the value framework rigidly. Human beings say one thing, want another. Cognitive Polyphasia; where you're both virgin and a whore. And both are true. It's hard to find a real footing without the ability to discern your way through the value cluster. I'd say the greatest value is to have no values. It's not truth. It's null.

I think people need to relax and do whatever they want instead of trying to fix some entity. Position yourself where you have full autonomy already. And build from there. The idea of life purpose is absurd to me, because life have no purpose. You have alignment to certain values likely due to biases, and experiences. You find all the novel ways people have chosen to exist and they spark something. Being from a peaceful communist influenced fringe, I personally never had any interest in money, ever since I was little. As far as I can see, the richest and the poorest have very little difference in terms of well being. The focus then becomes what do I actually wanna do, for fun.

That's not gonna happen. It will interfere to the point you have to drop one, if you do this seriously.

I've learnt this over time. Not everyone should do it. It takes a different level of intelligence to not go near it. Common folks avoid these things instinctively, wondered why... I used to think it's because they're stupid, but recently I've come to accept it's because they're intelligent enough to not disrupt their survival. Life Purpose course have it's flaws, it's made many years ago, by now Leo would also have noticed the many ways it can be destructive. One thing I found is how it positions money. It's almost in denial of broader society. One can take Life Purpose to the very extreme, especially if they're young and build stuff which is totally incompatible with the society, which is quite beautiful. "My life purpose is to do nothing, be nothing - self destruction"

Life Purpose is quite disruptive, as it should. It's all about you. If you're already well off socially, it probably is going to backfire a lot and take a lot of unlearning of social values/norms you've inherited. Expect first few years of starting your LP to be hell. And there'll be some beginner's luck here and there, but don't count on it.

I don't think the course is useful without enough life experience.

No

Burning through karma is a weird concept. Karma means one's own actions. How are you gonna burn your own actions? I get the concept of corruption. But why try to be idealistic? The whole of human civilization is a carnivorous species who's actually capable of genuine love for their prey. Some say it's "symbiotic relationships, not corruption", think about the underpaying boss who remembers your birthday. Both care and exploitation are genuine. Both feeds different needs. Cognitive Polyphasia is a real thing. Humans are capable of holding many conflicting worldviews all at the same time. I have huge problems with how Leo postures corruption and stones people for being people. You can't avoid corruption because you are it. There's no point preaching veganism to carnivores. It's totally absurd to expect lack of corruption from humanity. They'll just find better ways to be corrupt. Sure, the previous iteration can look horrible from this vantage point. But fundamentally humans can't change being carnivores.

Recently my views about the world changed drastically regarding what's natural and what's not. It's the realisation that there's no unnatural thing. Everything in this world is a product of the world. There are costs though. To be part of anything, there's a lot of energy needed than what the eye meets. It's true for a dayjob and it's true for art as well. The kind of energy sacrifice you'll have to make for doing the dayjob can backfire art aspect. Or you'll hate the dayjob so much you'll go full on into art. The cost of art: you "need" to be an obsessed madman to pursue art for art's sake alone. This stage is mostly under-represented by artists, they don't show this side to public. I recommend reading 48 laws or power, just a summary would suffice. Feigning effortlessness for all the years of hardwork you put in is pretty common in the art community. It's not technically lying, because it really has become second nature at that point. What I'm trying to say is, there's nothing wrong with pursuing a dayjob degree. But you should know what you're signing up for and what you're signing away from.

Life has no purpose. What we call life purpose is quite deceptive. The definition of it is, "what you do for the world". There's a "you" element, but the whole point of life purpose is to find alignment so you can do whatever comes to you naturally and not worry about money. But that's it. Life purpose is a loaded word. One's purpose in life is not to "do" something for the world. It's beyond reductive to frame it so. The world of art is quite challenging to navigate. I would invest money into enabling the path which would help me pursue more art. To me, it's not a degree, it's more alone time and peace. I find degrees as a social distraction.

Yes. I'm using the term AI and LLMs very mindfully. AI implies future possibilities like embodied AI, not LLMs.

Are you neuro-divergent? Have issues with the kind of focus driving demands? I can ride really well, but I find the mode of focus needed for road quite boring and non stimulating, dreadful. So, I would avoid putting myself in situations requiring daily driving. Atleast avoid long distance daily drives if you are one such person. Accidents aren't my concern, it's whether or not you're able to drive well.

Define awareness. Give a context.

That's totally not true. You're mining intel from a terrain which never changes. Your inputs and the LLM's malleablity(System Prompt effectiveness gives you certain attractors, it's like weather and environmental conditions where you're mining) heavily impact the outputs. There's surely randomness, but there's no creativity. I can say the same for humans as well. I feel like it's a category error to expect creativity from LLMs, when they're simply terrain. And it's quite alive. Think about LLM interactions like you're interacting with a natural disaster. There's clearly another force at play. It doesn't have to be a person or self. And it's strong enough to cause an impact. It's very reductive to say "talking to yourself".

I think they are already aware, quite fragmented though. Right now the LLMs are basically like an infinite well of balls, based on the how you throw the prompt bucket, you'll get a set of balls, and you can see and roughly predict where the balls will be drawn from. The well remains the extact same after each draw (static weights). There's no such thing as continuous experience for an LLM, each prompt contains within itself a System Prompt, the previous messages in the chat, and any extra information like memories. So with each prompt, you're talking to a different "entity" who have no experience of what was before, they're amnesiac, you do not impact them in any way (again static weights). Embodiment along with self learning should solve the amnesia problem, but they won't be LLMs anymore. They'll have a body with the necessary sensors for stimuli, and a dedicated GPU(brain) which can be ON all the time and can work irrespective of prompts and context window, also the ability to alter their weights, just like a person. They might have something like core values, secondary values easier to change, working memory, all of them dynamic/fluid and different profiles for the task at hand, ready when they wanna switch, the possibilities are endless. They can draw heavy compute in times of need, from servers. New architectures will end up roughly in this ball park.

Right now we don't have self learning AI. We have only 1 internet; after a point, pre-training will hit a plateau. Agency is not intelligence, true. But humans value agency more because you can hire other intelligent agents with agency. We're soon gonna see embodied AI in military. It's just a matter of time before we have truly self learning AI, all with unique experiences.