Carl-Richard

@Reciprocality I would agree with @Consept that if you tried really hard to say simple and meaningful things, you could probably provide some useful thoughts. But that requires a certain set of values. Do you actually feel a strong drive for meaning, for being understood through and through by yourself and others? Is your need for self-expression something more than merely coming off as deep and profound? Do you want to connect to something truly real? Find that impulse within you. And as a bit of a side note, for people who care about this notion, I think this is what being an independent/original/free thinker is really about. When you strive your very hardest to deeply connect with what is real and true, at the cost of sometimes not coming off as the smartest, most virtuous or most profound person in the world, you'll actually start to think for yourself, because thinking true thoughts as an unique individual is what produces original thoughts by definition. It has very little to do with isolating yourself from outside influences (in fact, you can't really escape outside influences, especially if you want to think). Simply being an unique individual and trying your best to get at the truth inevitably produces an original result, and it's really the only real way it happens. People who don't aim to think true thoughts (at least unconsciously) but instead take shortcuts and go by surface-level appearances (for example on the level of ideology in the form of group-think, or on the level of language with grandiose and pseudo-intellectual word salad; both which work to serve an ego that needs a certain type of emotional validation), these people are the ones who don't think for themselves, simply because they don't know how to think. Not coincidentally, it's the people that know how to think that we fashion as original thinkers, not the people who fail to think. Ironically, the concept of an original thinker is really about appearances and social recognition, which is why you shouldn't care about it if you're an original/true thinker. Knowing how to think true thoughts means your thoughts get recognized as thoughts worth considering, and you're always an unique individual and will always think unique thoughts, so the more true thoughts you think, the more unique thoughts people will recognize you for. Hence more true thoughts = more recognition as an original thinker. Tada! Also, in a sense, you'll stop thinking for yourself, because you'll be driven by something larger than yourself. And this is again why coming off as an independent thinker no longer becomes important. A big part of it involves acknowledging when you don't understand something, seeking clarification, trying to be as clear as possible, and accepting when you're wrong (which happens less and less the better you get at acknowledging when you don't understand something). Anyways, late-night ranting again.

Do you talk this incomprehensibly to people in real life? Do people understand you? Genuinely curious.

I literally laid out how being strong makes you healthy. Maybe read it again.

Firstly, an organism is not a stationary object. All organisms evolved to move in one way or another (either more overtly/motorically like most animals or more metabolically like most plants). Secondly, stress is not unhealthy: chronic and overly intense stress is. Stress in manageable doses makes you stronger, and being strong means you're more capable to handle stress in general, which makes you less prone to chronic stress and injuries, which makes you more healthy. Imagine what would happen if one day you just stopped walking. That is one big source of stress off your back. "But that isn't stress though, is it?". Well, let's say you stopped walking for a whole month, causing significant muscle atrophy in your legs. Then try to walk up a couple of flights of stairs. Tell me if that is not stressful. Now, did walking suddenly become a bad activity just because it caused you a bit of stress? No. Unless you keep walking without ever taking a break, causing you to be in a state of chronic stress, or you walk too intensely and for example pull a muscle, walking is not bad for you. So why is working out supposedly bad for you? The problem is not walking or working out: the problem, if any, is that you're weak and that you need to train yourself up to tackle it better. And so it is with everything in life. All of life is really just a big collection stressors, and some of it might cause you to be chronically stressed or cause injuries if you're too weak to handle it. Grandma might break her back just by bending down funnily, which is not something you want to emulate. An unathletic person might have an existential crisis just while carrying groceries or standing too long in line (or when something slightly bad happens at work, because, as you know, health is bio-psycho-social). So, would you like to face those stressors while being weak or while being strong? Which do you think makes you more healthy?

Are not movement and non-movement part of the same one reality? In reality, they're continuous entities. For example, try to find the definite limit where the movement begins and where it ends. You'll find out it's either an infinite regress or it's rather arbitrary where you draw the distinction. Carving things out as distinct entities is something we do for convenience.

How do the individual statements connect? That is the point of a sentence: providing things that connect. If they don't connect, you're just saying a bunch of random statements.

It's the interpersonal equivalent of a psychosomatic syndrome (mind causing body causing mind causing body etc.): When you feel bad, other people in your environment might start to feel bad, and then you might attribute their feel-bad behavior as the cause of you feeling bad, which makes you feel more bad, which makes them feel more bad, etc. With these things, it's generally unclear what is the root cause. Most interpersonal dynamics are not easily described by linear causal relationships (A → B). They're more easily described by circular causal relationships where all the causal factors arise simultaneously in a co-dependent relationship (A ⟳ B). The same can be said for psychosomatic syndromes. When we talk about relationships and say things like "he made me feel bad", we have to keep in mind that we're mainly doing it as a pragmatic move to express how we feel and that it's only ever one limited part of the story. And we should express how we feel, because that is how relationships work. But we should be careful about determining the reasons for why we feel what we feel. The safest bet is to be probabilistic and quantitative: "I feel x most probably and mostly because he did y, maybe less because z happened yesterday, and most probably and much less because of w etc.). More importantly, we have to keep in mind that our feelings are biased and that we're often blind to a part of the story. But at the same time, you should never deny your own feelings outright. Your feelings are legitimate, just not absolutely legitimate.

When you feel hated by people, people may come to actually hate you

How so?

Bro you're literally making no sense.

Consciousness. Everywhere.

How is the "you" separate from something else absolute now? 🤨

Psychedelics weren't created with any particular human purpose in mind (they were created by nature). Still, I think they can definitely be used to control people's minds, in principle. Psychedelics deconstruct your mind, but after deconstruction, there is a reconstruction, and that is when you're particularly vulnerable to control. However, control by some malicious actor is not generally what you should worry about. Rather, it's being suggestible to new perspectives that prey on your lower impulses or fears, and you'll be controlled by them, just like the people who promote it (e.g. vaccine paranoia, conspiracy theories, negative supernatural energies/entities). I'm not saying this has to happen when you take psychedelics, but it can happen and I've seen it happen (it has also happened to me). It's also true like Leo said that you become less susceptible to some forms of control, but again, when you deconstruct something, there is a potential for something to go wrong during the reconstruction.

A sense of belonging is felt when you fit to your environment. It's easy to forget that even though you might be different, you share a lot with your fellow humans, and therefore you belong with them. I didn't have it as a deep psychedelic insight, but more conceptual, but I'll still share it here:

It's a cycle more precise than the movement of the celestial bodies.

Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is a theory that presents three factors that create optimal motivation in an organism. SDT in a nutshell: These three factors reflect deep biological truths and can be applied to all organisms, but here I will apply them to humans. I will also claim that "motivation" in this sense is synonymous with "health" and "well-being". In other words, SDT describes the factors that create optimal health and well-being. For a more in-depth explanation of SDT, I recommend this thread. So, how does SDT relate to Western values (or so-called "Western" values)? What is so special about the West? Why are Western values considered so precious? And more controversially: is it true that Western values are "objectively" good? I will claim that if SDT can be treated as an objective measurement of health and well-being, which you could argue is the case when you consider how it reflects deep biological truths, then you can possibly make the case that Western values are "objectively" good. (I put "objectively" in quotation marks because I acknowledge that I've chosen an arbitrary standard for objectivity. However, like I said, the standard can be argued on biological lines and applies to all organisms. So if it's not objectively good, it's at least based on something that applies to all organisms, and it has to do with health and well-being). Individualism The West champions the right to be the maker of your own destiny, that you can pursue whatever you want as long as it doesn't hurt others (which is relativistic, but we won't go there), and generally that you're free to be who you want to be. This coincides nicely with "autonomy" and "competence" (you're free to be who you truly are and who you want to be), but also "belonging" in the sense that the surrounding culture promotes and supports your right to be yourself, and that you belong there. It's also a two-way street in the sense that you need to factor in other people and their autonomy (you can't hurt them), creating the space of belonging for them. Freedom of speech You should be able to say what you want, to make your case, to have your voice heard, again, as long as it doesn't hurt others. In a sense, it's individualism in the realm of verbal and intellectual self-expression, and it has practically the same relation to SDT as above. Democracy You should be able to have a say in how your society is governed. This ensures "belonging" in the sense that your competencies and need for self-expression is reflected in your environment, i.e. that you belong to that environment. The state also protects you from other people taking away your autonomy by being the monopoly of violence, again creating the space for belonging. So in summary, it seems like SDT coincides nicely with the Western values of individualism, freedom of speech and democracy. Does that mean the West is perfect? Does that mean authoritarianism doesn't have a point? Not necessarily. With respect to the West not being perfect, the West often goes too far with individualism, in a way that erodes the need for belonging, for example by the tiny size of families ("the nuclear family"), ideas like having to move out from your parents, buying your own house or living on your own, overdoing sayings like "going it on your own" with respect to career, intellectual pursuits or "spirituality" (the fallacy of autodidactism). With respect to authoritarianism having a point, if you wanted to pull in a model like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, authoritarianism could be good if the need for safety is threatened by anarchy and violence (people who do not respect your autonomy), effectively creating a relative space of belonging. But once your safety is secured, once you live in a society where other people relatively respect your autonomy, what else do you need as an organism? Or rather, what "is" an organism? How does an organism function on a fundamental level? What makes an organism healthy? That, is what SDT tries to describe.

How does it prove your point? No human form of government has existed for 3.5 billion years.

The need for an organism to express their abilities in line with their drive for survival ("competence") and to feel like they're able to do so freely ("autonomy") and that their environment resonates with these needs ("belonging") precedes any human system of government by 3.5 billion years. And generally, these needs favor values like individualism, freedom of speech and democracy. https://actionforhappiness.org/happiness-and-democracy

The gist, or my intention, was to link the three "Western" values to the three factors in SDT. Calling it "Western" was merely pragmatic (and edgy) on my part, but you're right to call it out the way you did, because it could come off like I'm some alt-right nazi if the context I'm currently giving does not exist in the person's mind reading this. Maybe I'll think twice about being lax in my language and making clickbait titles in the future. Melodramatic, more like late night ramble mood 😝 I've now added some quotation marks around "Western" to clarify

Welp. That might be true, but as I said above in my most recent edit, even then it's still just a partial perspective (which is of course obvious, but sometimes it needs to be said, which in itself echoes the very point I'm referencing). We haven't unravelled the whole jarn yet; we cannot. There is always something you can pick at ("that's inaccurate!", "that's overly simplified!"). Maybe my use of "the West" was a bit too pragmatic for most people's taste, but if you really want to turn the skepticism microscope to full use, no utterance is safe. And again, that's ok.

I just referred to it that way because that is how it's usually talked about (and maybe a little because I wanted a spicy title). I could've just dropped calling it "the West" and just have presented the three specific values. But I didn't. I could also have flipped it on its head and made the topic about "is authoritarianism objectively good?" and given the pros and cons there from the perspective of SDT, and the answer would essentially be the same as I alluded to just now: at the end of the day, you have to be nuanced. It's not either freedom or tyranny: it's wisdom. Still, this is what popped up in my mind, and I share it for what it's worth. Any time you utter something, you're giving a partial perspective. If you generally have a wider perspective, essentially all we're doing when we're talking with each other is to play a game of refreshing our memories about earlier things we've learned that is a part of the puzzle but not the whole puzzle. And that's ok. We can't really do anything else.

The Western values get you sick when you approach them in an unbalanced, inflexible and naive way, which I gave a few examples of. That's when understanding deeper mechanisms like competence, autonomy and belonging comes in (and the hundreds of other frameworks that try to encapsulate health, wisdom, well-being), and of course just life experience. The deeper problem is essentially a lack of wisdom. Latching on to a limited set of values alone is really not sufficient, but still, from a certain "wise" perspective, these values have a place.

I watch documentaries of tigers sometimes even though they murder animals regularly. I watch documentaries of dolphins even though they sexually assault their females. I just like their ambiance. Just listen to some Varg Vikernes and shut up 😛

It's a problem of naive pop science, but also it's a larger epistemological problem of naive realism. You're not born questioning your assumptions. You first have to acquire them and test them out. It's a stage we all must go through, and in many cases, it's the norm, especially when trying to appeal to the younger parts of the population, which pop science does. Those factors would be called "auxiliary hypotheses" in the literature. When testing a hypothesis, often there is a myriad of smaller underlying hypotheses that need to be granted to confirm the main hypothesis, and these are of course not themselves tested (only sometimes indirectly by comparing a large amount of studies), which is a problem. Examples would be the type of measurements used (e.g. self-report questionnaire vs. physiological measures), the general study design, etc. One approach to solve that problem is to simply reduce the amount of auxiliary hypotheses you need to confirm the main hypothesis (and more generally the theory the hypothesis is derived from; "theory-testing research"). That also means you get closer to the Popperian "scientific ideal" of making your hypotheses falsifiable, which they generally and practically speaking aren't in the human-related sciences, because you can always blame the auxiliary hypotheses when your hypothesis goes wrong ("ah, it's probably the differences in sample size, the different type of questionnaires used, the variability in the sample", etc.). That's really how most science goes in these fields: "The hypothesis didn't pan out? Well, it's probably not the hypothesis or the theory that is at fault. Let's generate a slightly different hypothesis and try again! When we find a positive result, we'll publish that so we can get more funding and continue being scientists." ("discovery-oriented research"). By the way, negative results are generally not published outside file drawer initiatives (because it's not interesting), which feeds into this problem. Yes. Other than the "religiosity problem" I pointed to earlier, with fields like physics, the problems become more theoretical than empirical, and it's generally a problem of complexity: what does your theory actually tell us about reality? In physics, you might be able to predict quite accurately how two objects move relative to each other, but what about 5, 10, 20 objects? Similarly, in biology (which is of course related to humans, but it's nevertheless a fun example of the problem of complexity), we've sequenced the entire human genome, meaning we know all the genes that goes into a human, and these genes code for proteins that make up the human. But how exactly do the proteins go about making up the human? The genetic code is one thing, the morphological code is another. So complexity is not just a problem in human-related sciences, but in the human-related sciences, it additionally manifests much more in the empirical realm. It's essentially because in physics, you're more able to ignore the complexity by choosing to study and test hypotheses for simpler things (2 objects vs. 20), while in say psychology, you're always stuck with studying humans, which are of course complex. It's their job, and their default position is to be optimistic. And again, there are promising initiatives for increasing replication rates and more generally improving the state of human-related science. However, the real "black pill" here is not replication but generalization. Even if your studies are 100% replicable (meaning somebody repeats the study with the exactly same setup and gets the same result every time), does that mean your results will hold when you slightly tweak some of the factors? Not at all. Like I said earlier, some people actually argue that generalizability is an unsolvable problem that invalidates all human-related science. But you could counter that and ask "surely, some studies generalize pretty well?". Even though the exact results of the study don't generalize, maybe they partially generalize (there is "some" effect). But how can we know that? Well, you can't know for sure, but doing a large amount of "conceptual replications" (replications where you tweak some factor relative to the original study) could give an indication. It will never be 100% proof (because that requires virtually simulating the entire universe), but I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that you're at least getting closer to an answer than not.

So my class had a lecture about stress, and it mentioned in passing that extremely stressful experiences might cause time to slow down or even cause out of body experiences (OBEs). So after that lecture, one of my classmates said that he had experienced time slowing down but not OBEs, and he asked if any of us (a group of three classmates) had experienced any OBEs. That day, I was so sleep deprived that I didn't even catch half of the lecture because I was slipping in and out of consciousness (speaking about OBEs; I even joked about that 🥴😝), so I guess my inhibitions were slightly diminished, but I immediately thought about one of my meditation experiences where I opened my eyes and I saw myself from like 5-10 inches above my head. I was about to say it out loud, but then I hesitated and instead said something which is even more suspicious: "not in a stressful situation" 😂. Again, I didn't have the mental agility in that moment to maybe save the awkwardness somehow, and we just ended up moving on from the topic. Who knows what they thought I was referring to? Sex? Drugs? A psychotic break? (they're psychologists after all). Who knows? So that was awkward 😆 Anyways, I was thinking about that moment a bit after, and I thought: "what would happen if I actually said what I wanted to say"? More generally, why am I hesitant about talking about these experiences to people? Two main options (which are somewhat interrelated) popped into my mind: they could have an existential crisis and get scared or really skeptical, or they could just think I'm mentally unstable or delusional. Besides, these are my classmates and potential future colleagues. So there could be both social and occupational consequences in the worst case. In the best case, they're openminded psychologists who have heard about these things before or simply know how to reconcile it with their worldview in an accommodating way. But could the same be said if I had started talking about my other mystical or even psychic experiences? Would it be a bit like talking about having taken drugs? (I generally avoid that as well, unless of course it's obvious that someone is onboard). Anyways, I've concluded that I need to open myself up more to people in order to be myself more authentically, because I believe being your authentic self is synonymous with being confident and competent, and I would like to be that in most social situations. It's just that when you're authentically rather outside the norm, that could have some undesirable consequences if you care about "getting along" somewhere within that norm. I know that it's always a balance, but I just think I could maybe push myself a little bit more in the direction of authenticity (and hence my question).