Carl-Richard

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Posts posted by Carl-Richard

  1. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    A large part of letting go or deconstructing in meditation is becoming aware of cycles (of thought) or things you're attached to. For example, when sitting down to meditate, do you notice feeling some pressure to do something later that day or after stopping meditating? Simply tell yourself that there is nothing you need to do, let go of the need of having to do it. Trust yourself that you will do what is needed despite having let go of the need to do it. If you're acting from a place of presence, you will do what is needed when it's needed. You don't need to worry.

    Simply staying with presence is what you're after in meditation, but these cycles keep taking you out of it if you do not become aware of them. That's what deconstruction is about; allowing presence to unfold by letting go of your compulsive tendencies and attachment to things. And in the end, it's about letting go of everything you ever care about. If you really want to go all the way to Enlightenment, you can't take yourself with you. That's the harsh truth of Enlightenment. If you think you want Enlightenment, you are mistaken. Do you want to see the end of you?

  5. Posted

    On 11.7.2025 at 4:24 PM, Schizophonia said:

    For a few days, I had a slight craving, as if I knew I had some delicious pistachio ice cream in my cupboard and I was hungry, so yeah it's addictive, but it's ok.

    Pistachio ice cream in your cupboard? Do you live in an igloo?

  6. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    On 3.7.2025 at 0:09 AM, Nilsi said:

    Although engaging mainly in intellectual discussions on an internet forum isn’t necessarily a good reflection of a person’s overall personality, if you ask me.

    That's why I think it undervalues my Fi. I would have to give it an essay detailing my life and aspirations and values to really get that across. However, the real use for AI would be when you can download an app and it essentially collects data from everything in your life, including real life. That is also when you can create truly accurate models, not just scoring somebody on an existing model. And it could also give more personalized accounts that don't fit neatly into a four-letter model. "You talk to yourself in your sleep".

  7. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    On 10.7.2025 at 11:05 AM, Nilsi said:

    Because you were framing it as if meaning were absolutely (!) grounded in biology and all the things you were describing, when in reality you were just saying: „something is meaningful insofar as it serves my a priori commitment to a biological-realist conception of ‘health’.“

    Obviously, then, your a priori assumptions are what determine what you call “meaning,” so how is it “boring” to make that explicit? 

    I wasn't. I'm eternally aware that everything I'm saying at all times is a limited and compartmentalized perspective. But it indeed just becomes boring to repeat that all the time. Unless you have a specific injunction or alternative when pointing out the limitations of a perspective, it quickly becomes boring.

  8. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    I'll come back to you once I find out if it's legal xD

     

    14 hours ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

    Avante guard modelling and selling some art. 

    I'm super choosy with the photographer's I work with, and I won't just commission for anyone. So as much as it is a way to make cash on the side, I don't feel any pressing need to make more or push Art in that way.

    Sheee. I have an idea for an art project where I get a yogi or equivalent person to meditate while we film them in ultra HD with many static cameras in an empty room so we can capture the deep stillness and transmission associated with deeper meditative states. And I will plaster it on digital billboards and awaken everybody. I have zero photography experience so give me a call :)👍

  9. Posted

    34 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

    Sure, but I don’t accept the frame that we have to stay within some fixed frame to have a productive or interesting discussion.

    Obviously, I have nothing to add within your frame, because you know far more about this than I do. So how could we ever have a real discussion if you insist on keeping it there?

    But you were initially adding things within the frame, but then you jumped out of the frame instead of addressing the issue I posed within the frame. That's not fun. It's like we're discussing what to eat and then I press you on a food and then you're like "hold on hold on, you don't mean we have to eat, right?". Or it's like we're discussing Star Wars and then you get up and say "Star Wars is shit!"

    If you want to jump out of the frame, address what was said within the frame first and then signal that you will jump out of the frame. I like to do this by saying like "but if you want to drop x assumptions, you could say y instead". Or in your case, "I see your point, but let's say fuck science for a bit and [...]".

  10. Posted

    43 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

    And I knew you’d retreat into this scientific rebuttal lol.

    Ultimately, your mechanistic explanation rests on the assumption that reality is mechanism all the way down, and you know as well as I do that this is a fantasy. At some point in your argument, you’ll have to invent some imaginary foundation for all these elegant mechanisms you keep describing - and it will be purely arbitrary. Eventually, in building your philosophy or your life, you’ll collide with this gap. Don’t think you can sprint away from it forever.

    You’re operating in cartoon logic, like when a character runs straight off a cliff and keeps moving forward because they haven’t yet realized there’s nothing beneath them. It’s only when you finally look down that you plummet. All the while, the audience is already smirking, because they see exactly how this ends before you do.

    So this is happening which I will divide into two parts:

    1. Like in the previous discussion we had, you want to jump up a level and critique the frame.

    Here is the frame so we're not confused: physical activity in general is deeply beneficial for cognitive functioning (because the brain after all is a organ in the physical body and the brain correlates strongly with cognitive functioning). Thus higher intensity physical activity could be beneficial for higher intensity cognitive tasks.

    2. I said you were being reductionistic within this frame, focusing on a measure like heart rate, but then you jump up a level and call the frame reductionstic.

    If you have a problem with the frame, that's fine, critique the frame, but don't conflate that with the question I posed to you about you being reductionistic.

  11. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    1 hour ago, Nilsi said:

    I think you’re the reductionist here (and this isn’t a polemic - just genuinely how I would define the term).

    Ultimately, the experience is the ground, not the mechanism, no? Why is it that an actor can fully get into character and play out a scene as if it’s real, even though it’s empirically “fake”? What produces the response is the experience itself, not the reductionist, post-hoc mechanism.

    There is no mechanism to reality. Reality - experience - is the ground. The mechanism is always a secondary production that arises from an operational split (like the scientific method). Again, this is exactly Foucault’s point that we’ve argued about recently.

    So it should be possible to generate the response - the cognitive benefits - in the same way the actor gets into character: without an empirical mechanism. This is also Peter Ralston’s big idea in his work on mastery and consciousness - that there doesn’t have to be a mechanism or a path, that you can simply make it happen, willy-nilly.

    I knew you would do this mysticism response lol.

    You can reach max BPM while doing a jog and then slowly ramping up your speed. But it's not the same as a sprint. You have to look at the system as a whole. And it's simply the case that contracting your muscles produces a different response than thinking about it (although I've heard thinking about lifting actually can increase gains, but for most people, you probably won't become Mr. Olympia that way alone, put mildly). Anticipatory anxiety is not the same as contracting your muscles. Physical exercise is simply a different beast than sitting on your ass and thinking about scary shit.

  13. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    19 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

    What’s the difference? When your heart rate is maxed out and every neuron is firing, does it really matter?

    This isn’t a rhetorical question.

    You have to think about it non-reductionistically. Maxing your BPM is one symptom of straining your system during the work that is a sprint. Your entire body, your muscles, your lungs, your intracellular machinery, is exploding with activity in way that you don't get by sitting still (unless you use some magical machine). Anticipatory anxiety is a way you prepare for such an undertaking. I feel a kind of anticipatory anxiety (which is more conditioned rather than mental-discursive) before a sprint where my heart rate increases and my mind sharpens and I feel amped up, but it's nothing compared to the sprint itself.

  14. Posted

    20 minutes ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

    @Nilsi Do you perform this sort of training? I am assuming you do.

    I do also (probably have 17 years of fitness behind me) . And I work a job that requires the sort of high stakes negotiations and resultant tangible outcomes. Yes, millions of dollars.

    You describe what I would call an adrenalin rush and huge dopamine spike - very different to the long term effects of interval training: ie increased BDNF levels, better baseline attention, stronger stress resilience and adaptive hormesis. I find sprinting experienced as a sharp wave that clears the mind. 

    I really think @Carl-Richard is onto something with greater depth of benefit. And I don't think you can give a fair comparison in this way.

    Merely having a mentally induced stress response on its own, e.g. if you're thinking about some presentation that you will have but that you're not currently having, probably doesn't confer much benefit. And there is probably a lot of that going on in a business deal, as you're projecting many scenarios that might happen that maybe won't happen ("what if I say the wrong thing?", "what if they decline the deal?", "what if I make a fool out of myself?").

    It's when the response is tied to an actually difficult operation, e.g. doing a complex division in your head, or really digging into some difficult problem, that you see the growth benefits. It's when the response is provoked as a necessary resource for that specific operation as it's happening.

    Again, the mind has various mechanisms of projecting and preparing itself for work but which is actually not work in itself, anticipatory anxiety. But it's the work itself that is important.

  15. Posted

    41 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

    Nothing enhances cognitive performance more than hopping on a high-ticket sales call or talking to a hot girl.

    This perfectly tracks with the logic you’re laying out here: intense, consequential engagement leading to massive neuronal recruitment and full-spectrum activation.

    I guess. Physical training is just one way of enhancing cognition. I also do brain training. But physicality is a power tool. Your brain is intrinsically tied to physicality.

  16. Posted

    9 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

    You're not quite getting it.

    It's not that Christians think Jesus is the GOAT, they think he is the ONLY son of God.

    Christianity is the belief that ONLY Jesus is God.

    A Christian does not consider any other enlightened master as God.

    To you, Jesus is just the same as Buddha, but to a Christian the Buddha is a satanic being while only Jesus is God.

    Christianity is literally a personality cult.

    There are post-rational Christians. But of course it sort of deconstructs the concept. But still, they call themselves Christian.

  17. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    IQ is like driving a fast car. It doesn't tell you as much about where you will drive, just that you'll drive there very fast (also depending on the road of course).

    There are many roads, and you can't drive them all. You are on a very particular road if you ended up here. And to think you needed a high IQ to end up here is ridiculous. There are many slow drivers around these parts 😂 (I heard they measured some monk's IQ to be like 70? 😉).

    Driving also depends on things like the skill of the driver (which is not the same as IQ), the sense of direction, passion and grit, obsession, potential roadblocks, good samaritans, the weather, the tires, the right guidance, the right maps. As Chris Langan once said, "IQ is not everything".

  18. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    I think I just cracked the code for my particular regimen. I tend to eat a kiwi with my eggs and bread for breakfast, but I tend to eat it after the eggs and bread as a kind of dessert. Then I realized what if I pair the multivitamin that I usually take before my breakfast with the kiwi (because I have noticed some GI discomfort from taking it on empty stomach)? It should be smart because a kiwi is mostly water and fiber and should not interfere too much with the mostly water soluble multivitamin (all of it is water soluble except vitamin E I think). Also, when you eat a kiwi before a meal, you'll have the special digestive enzyme in the kiwi ready to go (possibly helping to digest the multivitamin as well) and also the fiber ready to coat the digestive tract so that it limits the glucose spike from the breakfast. And the various phytochemicals and vitamins in the kiwi could also work synergistically with the uptake and action of the multivitamin. Nevertheless, I've never felt better in terms of GI comfort and mental effects from my morning meal than this. Imagine all the other things you could simply reverse the order of or alter some of the process aspect and completely fix a problem or magnify some effect.

  20. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    20 minutes ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

    I have trouble with Bryan. Some things good ... But then he does some things clearly for vanity. 

    Then there is the 'Dont Die' religion cult stuff he is pushing. 

    'My competitor is Jesus' 

    (He said that lol) 

    I feel like his previous hardcore Mormon upbringing is reflected in this 'Dont Die' stuff. 

    So in my little brain I see some good stuff, then I question his intentions due to all the additional WEIRD (Jesus comment, hair dye [aesthetics only??], new religion). Plus all the weird summits he has and hug dance parties. 

    He's just an odd unit hard to swallow 😜

    I have a strong weird radar and I have detected all this (except the mormon connection which is interesting). And this is when I will drop my "virtually everybody is weird, society is weird, humans are weird". The person who runs this forum, is weird. The mods on the forum are weird. The users on the forum are weird — except the lovely ones, they are lovely and weird.

  21. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    8 hours ago, Schizophonia said:

    If you have gut problem because of your diet or something else who generates brain fog you will benefit from extra stress hormones bring by sport.

    I was like "wut why are you talking about gut problems?", but sure. "Stress hormones" is one thing though; actually growing your body in response to stress is also a thing.

    There is a state I get into if I do a really good sprint (during it) that can only be described as ecstatic rage, where I literally feel like nitroglycerin is flooding through my veins. I wouldn't chalk that down to something like lactate for example, where you hit a ceiling of fatigue and you can't go anymore. It's more like the state of having absolute crushed some ceiling of performance and your body is trembling and surging with high-octane juices.

    Because to be clear, I don't do the "sprint til failure" method to maximize lactate. I do "sprint as fast as you freaking can", maximizing speed and performance during the exercise. This I believe is the main driver of the cognitive enhancement, or which pulls it to the next level. It's when you absolutely disintegrate your ceiling of performance.

    And if it's not clear, I haven't checked, but my heart is definitely max BPM after the sprint. And (I believe) my breathing is much heavier than if I do a 4x4 (unless the concominant feeling of fatigue makes it feel that way). Your body is truly pushed to the limit, and that has to do something to your brain, be it biochemically (acutely) or structurally (in the long run).

    And this state of rapture is also something I believe you will only achieve with running sprints, because you need that biomechanical edge to push you into that perfect flow state / state of rapture.

  22. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    7 hours ago, RendHeaven said:

    That's a dumb exaggeration on his part. You're gonna age. It's just a matter of how fast.

    Indeed if you're interested in slowing the rate of aging, then brian is carving a strong path.

    He'll the very least be the Newton to some Einstein of aging. And stopping aging is not impossible in principle. I don't know where you got this from. It's partially a scientific challenge and partially an engineering challenge, and Bryan is one such engineer, maybe an early one, or maybe not (big daddy AI is presumably around the corner).

     

    7 hours ago, RendHeaven said:

    only!?

    It's nothing if you have personal assistants and don't doomscroll your life away. How long is your daily health protocol on average (including time spent on food, cleaning, errands)?

     

    7 hours ago, RendHeaven said:

    This is absolutely false. If he ate meat, many of his pills would become redundant.

    He supplements everything that he gets from plants as well. Many of his pills are already "redundant".

     

    7 hours ago, RendHeaven said:

    This is downright insulting to sunlight lol. Sunlight has a cascade of synergistic benefits which no pill can replace 1 to 1 (vit D is NOT a complete sunlight substitute)

    Enlighten me (kek).

     

    7 hours ago, RendHeaven said:

    Good point.

    Clearly he does what he does because he loves it.

    Just saying it's not for me

    One time in life, I only smoked weed and played videogames and thought that was the thing to do.

    I would personally love to sit in a hyperbaric chamber and chug pure oxygen while working. But that's just me 😂

  24. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    18 hours ago, RendHeaven said:

    I like bryan johnson but I would never elect to live like him.

    the neurotic planning and scheming strikes me as autistic as fuck and I would personally find it suffocating.

    He is on a mission to actually stop aging. That's incredibly noble and exciting. He doesn't care about merely feeling good. He wants to elevate humanity to the next level. It's a bit like Leo having truth as his number one value. The level of meaning he experiences probably outpaces any of the things he has to do 10-fold. And it's only a 5 hour protocol. So many people spend 5 hours pissing away their life on their phone doing nothing and destroying their brains. Also, his protocol is probably unmatched in terms of healthspan. The only knock you would have against it is that it's 5 hours long.

     

    18 hours ago, RendHeaven said:

    I also think it's silly that he could just eat meat and go get sunlight, but instead he goes for vegan + 100 pills + TRT + expensive light therapy

    The fact that he is vegan doesn't change anything, he would still take 100 pills. "Just get sunlight" is like one pill.

    Quote

    As a doctor who treats patients who have melanomas, I want the general public to be advised that under no circumstances can the use of a tanning bed or tanning in general be justified on the basis of vitamin D. Take a supplement instead.

    https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/vitamin-d-myths-debunked

    When you're at his level of wealth and power, maximizing your healthspan and longevity this way is arguably the smartest thing you can do. You can easily adapt to a 5 hour protocol. People are completely blind to how complex and specific their habitual life already is. If you were to make Bryan adopt your "simple habits" at this point in time, it would be incredibly "hard" for him. It's changing a habit that is the hard part. Keeping it is easy.

  25. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    21 minutes ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

    I think around his use of steroids.

    He refused to release some biomarkers indicating exogenous steroid use.

    I think he eventually came clean about it after. Genuinely struggling to remember - I could be wrong!

    Hmm. I only know he took steroids at one point to offset the effects of calorie restriction, but now he has upped his calories and I think he also went off the steroids(?)