Carl-Richard

@SQAAD I agree that genes don't have thoughts ? Remember that your idea of consciousness is probably very different from most materialists. When a materialist says "consciousness", they can mean anything from phenomenal consciousness (qualitative experiences), intentionality (private inner experience), sentience (survival-salient perceptions; pleasure, pain, emotions etc.), meta-consciousness (reflective self-awareness; meta-cognition) and more.

Btw, "Intelligent Design" seems to be associated with creationism. Unless you think God is some kind of human that thinks human thoughts and makes human plans, I would suggest that you're simply appealing to God as Oneness or non-duality, emphasizing the infinity of forms and God's self-contained and self-created nature.

Your journey sounds identical to mine. I stopped meditating for the same reason 2 years ago, and only in the last couple of months, I can say that I'm back to a reasonably stable sense of self (which also has its downsides of course). I learned some grounding techniques that I use when I feel like I'm slipping away: - intentionally walking with a kind of hunched over posture ("nerd neck") - slightly tightening the left part of my abdomen (as if you're making yourself thinner by pulling your stomach in, albeit on one side) - doing something on my phone (you know this one) Other than that, some decently sub-optimal lifestyle changes helped me also: - eating large meals, regularly - falling asleep on my stomach - masturbating at least 2-3 times a week - generally keeping my mind occupied As for driving a car, I would try to juggle some of these techniques. Nowadays, driving is not that bad for me.

Yup. The less sophisticated versions of religion and mythology often make scientific claims, and those are of course easier to debunk and discard, but when you scale out to the deeper metaphysical questions, then you're only left with logical inferences (if you're a naturalist), or direct experience (if you're a mystic), or dogma (if you're traditionally religious), and you can certainly make different cases for intelligent design in each of those domains.

So yes, that is what I mean by making the distinction between different types of randomness (specific vs broad; scientific vs. metaphysical). Creationism talks about a very specific type of plan, which can be tested scientifically and is debunked by Darwinism, and you can also say that all of it is not really random in a broader sense. So the type of randomness Darwin is talking about is in itself not metaphysical, but it's rather concerned with a particular behavior of nature, i.e. science, not what reality is in the most ultimate sense. However, there is indeed a broader view of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm (materialism/physicalism) that considers the whole of reality as a soulless mechanical clockwork or machine (not random per se, but simply dead physical stuff interacting by natural laws), and Darwin was certainly part and parcel of spawning that view. It gets confusing, because physicalists essentially mix up metaphysics and science into one jumbled mess, and what I'm trying to say is that it's possible to untangle that mess and carefully delineate which parts of it is science and which is metaphysical.

@Forestluv Hiii! Long time no see

The way I see it is that natural selection and the randomness of mutations is a part of the infinite intelligence, or one perspective on it, and that the parts we have not yet explained in analytic terms are either yet to come or impossible to explain within those constraints.

It's the highly stimulating effects that weakens your motivational systems if you do them frequently over longer periods. CBD doesn't have those type of strong effects, unlike THC. It's not as much about the immediate effects experienced during the high, but rather the long-term effects from the system adapting to the high stimulation. You're telling it that it doesn't have to work to feel good, which makes it less resilient over time (because you're less inclined to do work), and also, on the level of receptors, it adapts to the stimulation so that discontinuing use leads to a sub-normal endogenous activity (dependence and withdrawal), which also makes it less resilient. So you become weaker and more dependent, and the weaker you become, the more dependent you become etc.

What do you think about the Chinese room experiment?

+ feeling-based intuitions

I don't know what I'm supposed to get out of those words other than some vague association.

What does it do?

(Note: idiosyncratic use of words) Psychotherapy mainly deals with meaning (the techniques and methods to become a vital and resilient human being). Meditation mainly deals with being (how to experience the fruits of all that to the fullest extent). They interloop and strengthen each other: a psychologist will sometimes employ techniques grounded in being (e.g. mindfulness or guided meta-cognition), and a mystic will sometimes employ techniques grounded in meaning (e.g. faciliating trauma-release or solving neuroses). Even "technique" as a concept has a meaning component (procedural structure; the "how") as well as a being component (experiential content; the "why"), and different techniques emphasize each component to different degrees (e.g. a meditation technique emphasizes being over meaning, while a visualization technique emphasizes meaning over being).

@Cthulu It's not just about IQ or even structural changes in the brain. The cognitive-emotional and behavioral aspects are the most important. It's not just weed: any and all habituation to a hyper-normal reward stimulus that requires sub-normal to no work, is inherently anti-hormetic (it lowers resilience and systemic integrity). In other words, regularly pumping your brain full of reward chemicals without coupling it to any meaningful action, teaches you that meaningful actions are in fact not meaningful. It hijacks the most fundamental psycho-physiological mechanisms that sustains you as an organism. To think that this does not have severe side effects for your mind or body is absurd. The only reason it has become so accepted in society is because it has become OK to amputate your potential and do just enough to get by. In fact, dissociating yourself from meaning at this level has become a way to cope with the meaning crisis in our current society. We have to re-discover the inner divine strength of spirituality and the sacred collective practices of religion, so that we can have a truly sustainable opiate of both the individual and the masses.

Using weed regularly

If you get to the point where you buy a vaporizer, there are probably other problems you have to worry about.

Stoners will say "but you can eat weed", meanwhile most of them smoke anyway. They would certainly never turn down a joint ?

What Darwin was really arguing against is the anthropomorphized Christian version of God that has a sophisticated plan for every single event, specially with humans in mind ("humans are to reign over the animals"), not the kind of Brahmanic New Age pantheism you're probably accustomed to. The fundamental principles of evolution that were discovered by Darwin are not random. They're very structured. It's just that a part of it ("descent with modification", later known as "genetic mutation") can be described as random, and that type of randomness defeats the Christian creationist worldview. So Darwin is talking about a very specific type of randomness, while you're talking about a much broader type of randomness.

What does "evolution is not blind" mean?

No this is stupid. Evolution by natural selection and descent with modification is a demonstrable fact. You can study bacterial evolution in real time. Another example of naive skepticism.

Humor is found in flow: carefree, light, joyous enjoyment.

@blankisomeone If you have mental health issues, be very careful with psychedelics.

The longer you live, the higher the risk for cancer. So we'd essentially need a cure for cancer as well.

Once you start wandering outside what is purely essential, you're starting to move away from health.

It's just as delusional as mystics using metaphors to describe the indescribable. Once you see that all attempts at descriptions are fundamentally on the same level playing field, you can start to appreciate the different frameworks for what they can provide. The naturalistic frameworks are concerned with accurate explanations and predictions, while the mystical ones are concerned with inducing a direct experience of the Absolute. What you're really reacting against is not naturalism, but epistemic naivety.