Carl-Richard

So I was reading some of Hanzi Freinacht's The Listening Society some while ago. He went into how disillusioned he felt when observing the everyday interactions of otherwise quite brilliant people in his life and how cognitively not-complex they were, mostly situated around Level 10-11 Abstract-Formal in the Model of Hierarchical Complexity (MHC). Level 10-11 is essentially the cognitive equivalent of high-Blue to low-Orange in SD. In his book, he makes the distinction between cognitive complexity and symbolic code, and also presents the concept of downward assimilation. To put it as an example: it's possible for a cognitively Blue person to engage with ideas way above Blue (maybe even Yellow), because they have installed the language (symbolic code) of the higher stages, but they are engaging with it in a simplified way which is consistent with their cognitive complexity, "assimilating it downwards". So there is a big potential to fool oneself that one is more complex than one actually is. Now, most everyday interactions don't need to be that complex, and that's fine. You might talk about a concept or two (10 Abstract), or you might string some of them together in a formal relationship (11 Formal), but rarely, if ever, do you need to construct an entire new system of thought (12 Systematic), certainly not a new concept that connects different systems together (13 Meta-systematic). However, it would be good to know what you're actually capable of, and a good estimate of this is proposed by Freinacht: do you regularly produce original ideas at a given level? So I decided to test this on myself by reading through some of my own forum posts and seeing what is the most complex original idea I could find. At the moment, I've landed on this: Before I get my hopes up, while on the surface it looks pretty "meta" and big picture, if we are going to be strict, this is at most 12 Systematic, i.e. cognitively high-Orange. It presents a variety of different concepts with a variety of different relationships, i.e. a system. And it's not just a few isolated relationships presented separately (11 Formal), but rather the relationships are quite interconnected, and often structured and layered, like categories or levels, and often circular in some way. For example, a relatively simple system is a feedback loop (you have inputs and outputs and outputs that become their own inputs). Now, you can doubt that it's even original, but then I'll ask: have you ever seen that map before? While the concepts in the system are not original (e.g. being, meaning, virtue), the way they are being connected to each other seems original, or at least I don't remember ever consulting anyone for how to structure that map. It was something that came to me as an insight. Based on this, it should be classifiable as 12 Systematic thinking. So if that was just 12 Systematic thinking, then what is 13 Meta-systematic (cognitively Green-Yellow) thinking? Again, it's when you come up with an original concept that connects different systems together, extracting a common theme from the different systems. Now, you could argue that the different concepts in my map are by themselves their own systems (e.g. Being is based in Eastern spiritual thought, Meaning is Western spiritual thought, etc.), and that I could therefore be using 13 Meta-systematic concepts to connect the systems together. However, in that case, the only possible candidate for such a concept is "hierarchy" (from "most abstract", to "less abstract", to "more concrete"). I didn't invent the concept of "hierarchy" or "level of abstraction". I learned those from somewhere else. So no, I did not come up with my own concept that connects different systems, which means it's not 13 Meta-systematic thinking. But what would be a meta-systematic concept like "hierarchy", "level of abstraction" or "downward assimilation" that I have created? I actually can't think of a single one. Now, I think creating such concepts, regularly, on the fly, is ridiculous. Somebody who comes to mind is Eric Weinstein. I swear he has like his own wikipedia (theportal.wiki) where he offloads all of his meta-systematic neologism. Maybe that is why I think he sounds ridiculous sometimes when he speaks 😂 (I think it's also a stylistic issue, but anyways). But he also has his own Theory of Everything in physics, which is way beyond that, into 14-15 Paradigmatic–Cross-paradigmatic, so it's maybe not so surprising. Suffice to say, regularly operating at these levels of complexity is probably reserved to geniuses. But I'll keep digging for any meta-systematic concepts of my own. What do you think is your level of cognitive complexity? What do you usually operate at and what is your peak? Keep in mind the distinction between cognitive complexity and symbolic code. Have you ever created an original meta-systematic concept before? By the way, I think me and most people here operate at 10-11 Abstract-Formal most of the time, mainly because we don't need to do anything else to live decently well.

Please provide counters to this claim and I will see if answers arise that defend it. The only rule is no LLM assistance, at least for your first post. Only human thinking is allowed for your first post 🤓

"Sound justification" is the thing you like. If you drop that thing and all you have left is the things you don't like, then you will likely skew towards calling them a madman rather than genius.

Essentially what I'm saying.

If I drink orange juice, that alters my brain chemistry. Does that mean orange juice "isn't true"? You have to clarify your distinctions. What people generally regard to be "not true" (not real) is simply what is commonly agreed upon to be not real; any thing that is not "normal experience". If I hear voices that tell me to do criminal acts and 99.9% of people don't, then that is the reason they're called not real: virtually nobody else hears those kinds of voices. However, if you ask someone "are your thoughts real?", "are your emotions real?", "are your sensations and perceptions real?", they would probably be inclined to answer "yes", even though nobody else experiences their exact thoughts, emotions, sensations, etc. What they will think is not real is that which radically deviates from their own experiences.

I'm saying whatever distinction you make, and whatever you attribute to the genius as opposed to the madman, will be things you like. Sound justification, clarity and having at least a basic understanding, are things you like.

Because the truth (which is beyond words) has to be put into words and practice, and there are many seemingly conflicting ways to do this, e.g. cataphatic vs apophatic descriptions ("God is x" vs "God is not x"), restriction (e.g. ascetism, monkhood) vs indulgence (e.g. "aghori", tantra), sensory deprivation vs sensory stimulation, devotional vs focused practices, various ethical codes of conduct. Throw into that variation based on geographical location and local cultural history and the co-opting of religion for various survival needs, and you have an answer. And how to solve these apparent contradictions ("what should I do?"), if you are an intellectually awakened and pluralistically aware New Ager, is simply to try out different things and see what works best for you. Different people may respond differently to different things, simply because they are different, but also because they may be on different parts of the path. What may be appropriate for a newbie with 0 hours of meditation experience vs an experienced meditator with 1000 hours of experience and multiple awakening experiences can be quite "contradicting".

What do you have problems with in the RationalWiki article?

Many years ago, I had an intuition about a way to explain psychosis, which essentially goes like "more attachment = higher predisposition to psychosis". However, back then, I didn't have much of a theoretical or analytical rationale for the theory. It was really just an intuition. But now, I think the pieces are starting to fall together. I started thinking about the distinction between "rumination" and "reflection", which was essentially coined to resolve the apparent paradox that thinking obsessively (deeply and repetitively) about oneself is both associated with increased quality of life (through things like increased self-insight, intellectual depth, problem-solving, etc.; "reflection") and a decreased quality of life (through things like depressive brooding, mulling over past mistakes, or worrying about future events; "rumination"). While I haven't specifically looked at the literature yet, an "intuition" I had about this is that rumination concerns primarily unresolved goal-discrepancies (things not going the way you want or believe is right) with accompanying strong negative emotional reactions, and while reflection may also involve unresolved goal-discrepancies, it will not have the same strong negative emotional reactions (it will generally have a more positive, lighter or detached tone). Now, rumination predisposes one to a reduction of quality of life and mental illnesses, where psychosis is one possibilty (and arguably a logical conclusion or extreme end-point of mental illness; a disintegration of the normal functioning of the psyche). Also, in a paper on spontaneous thought (which rumination is a sub-category of), they speculated that the "funneling effect" associated with rumination where you focus obsessively on the self, could also be present in mania in bipolar disorder (where intense excitement and obsessive focus on quite particular topics produce thoughts at a rapid pace), which of course at its extremes lead to psychosis. Now, what could this "funneling effect" (obsessive focus or self-focus) and strong emotional reactions to things not going the way you want or believe is right, also be described as? Attachment. Now, during this insight about reflection vs. rumination, I also saw the connection to self-determination theory, in that self-determination is when your behavior is determined by what you want, or think is right or enjoyable, which is of course associated with positive and lighter emotions and motivation. So when reflecting about something deep about yourself, about something you want to do, or when reflecting is itself something you want to do, that will of course be associated with more positive and lighter emotions. Conversely, rumination focuses much more on things that you "don't" want (resistance), and even the process itself might be something you don't want (because it involves strong negative emotions). So self-focus + resistance creates stronger emotional reactions and stronger attachments. Conversely, when your emotions are lighter, you are more "detached", less emotionally reactive, more meta-cognitively aware; generally higher cognitive functioning. Two related concepts, "cognitive flexibility" and "psychological flexibility", more generally describe the ability to problem-solve in ways that are more cognitively functional in these ways, and for the latter, "acceptance" (the opposite of resistance) is listed as a sub-category. So reflection could be a generally more self-determined form of introspection while rumination could be generally less self-determined. Rumination is also specifically associated with decreased meta-cognitive awareness (awareness of thinking or that you are thinking), so the thinking is more outside one's sense of control and you might not even notice that it's happening before a long time. This is another way it becomes less self-determined. So in short: obsessive thoughts about things that don't happen the way you want or believe is right + strong negative emotional reaction = attachment -> reduction of quality of life -> mental illness -> psychosis.

What is it that makes you think you are wasting your life? What is the alternative? What are the values you are striving towards?

No, that's just people who live on Actualized.org

But why? 😆 Do you have any ideas why that is or are you completely clueless?

Sure, let's derail this ancient thread with a debate on telepathy: 1. Telepathy does not have to "cheat evolution" but it could be limited in its scope and occurence just like any other sense or cognitive faculty. 2. Why do you think telepathy isn't already everywhere? Why do you think other species don't have telepathy?

And before you know it, your life that you thought was amazing was fragile like a house of cards. The supremacy of ignorance, unpredictability, impermanence and change.

Theories are meant to categorize, so that cannot be the sole critique of stage theory in particular. A valid critique of stage theory and SD in particular is that the categories are less applicable or less justified in some situations than others. Particularly, stage theories and their many historical examples, according to my knowledge, exclusively skew in favor of describing Western society. I can't think of one example of a known stage theory as a whole that applies either equally or more to non-Western societies.

I think the dream I had last night which I wrote about above came as if you had ordered it 😆 Talk about psychically communicating with the universe 😆 But yes, I've had a decent amount of personal experiences that, even if most aren't "100% proof", if I grant psychic phenomena to be possible, they just become so much easier to explain.

I once made a thread about some prophetic or rather spatially non-local but temporally parallel dreams I had. I think I just had another one, and this one is probably one of the weaker ones, but it's still interesting so I'll share it: Firstly, all these dreams are nightmares which end with me suddenly waking up. I seldom have such nightmares, and I can't remember the last one I've had. And all of them seem to happen temporally parallell to the real-life event (so while I'm dreaming, the event is happening). So in the dream, me and two people I know are in a garage. One of them is standing on what looks like a skateboard, but instead of a wooden board, it's this thin, red, carbon-fiber-like but also spandex-like fabric that is stretched out really thin, and it has a tiny hole in it, maybe two centimeters in diameter, near one of the corners. They are very inexperienced with skating and are barely able to keep balance. They slowly skate over to this low (probably 30 centimeters tall) non-mortar brick wall consisting of decently sized natural rocks. Then they lose balance and fall ontop of this wall of rather pointy, sharp and unwelcoming rocks. They really hurt themselves and lie there screaming. Me and the other person walk over to see if the person is alright. The person starts shouting really fast and desperately while in intense pain, saying "Call 911 now! Call 911 now! Call 911 now! Call 911 now! Call 911 now! Call 911 now!" etc., and they just keep going. And the other person starts supporting one of their legs which seems totally broken, almost missing parts of it. In general, their legs were really badly broken. As their voice becomes more and more desperate, I wake up from the dream. It also turns out I had overslept (the time was 1 PM and I had to rush to get to a meeting). Anyways, I found out later that day, as I was asleep and starting at 12:30 PM, there was a school shooting in Sweden, the worst they have ever experienced. This reminds me of one of my earlier dreams that occured during one of the worst disasters that particular area had ever experienced. Now, the overlap here with the dream and the real-life event is obviously people getting hurt, lying on the ground, probably some of them screaming for help, possibly somebody screaming to call 911, and possibly somebody having their legs severely broken and not being able to get up. But then as I'm writing this, I just thought about something else: why was the skateboard made out of red fabric? Why was there a tiny hole in it? I feel like I'm really stretching it here, but you simply cannot not ask the question: is it a bullet hole? Is it red because it has something to do with blood? Or danger? That last detail is not really the main attraction that drives it home for me, but it makes you think.

Cuz awakening, morality and street cred often go together. People generally like you when you're high consciousness. It's just sometimes people don't like or understand what you're saying. But they like what you're doing.

When you find out what you really want to do, what you really value, what you really feel drawn towards doing, that's meaning, and when you construct your life around that, that's your life purpose. People who do this are driven by their very nature and can achieve great things if they keep going down the right track. However, life is filled with challenges. There will be people, experiences and environments that might make you doubt yourself, your abilities, even your values. And when this happens, you might feel lost, confused, disappointed, disillusioned and discouraged to keep going down what you think is the right track. And while you might learn a lot of new things about yourself when that happens, a core thing to remember is: persevere. We often underestimate what we are capable of, what is possible and what opportunities and lessons may lie around the corner as you persevere and keep yourself on the right track. Emotions like fear and anxiety want you to close off and reduce uncertainty, because uncertainty is often associated with danger. However, it's also possible to tap into the opposite predisposition, of persistence and perseverance, and also reduce uncertainty: I have set my goals, and I will keep going. But also, here uncertainty is not seen as purely negative, but again, as a source of opportunities. Doing this is not the same as being blindly optimistic or unrealistic or not willing to deal with cold hard facts. You should be willing to open yourself to everything that may provide you valuable information that can help you pursue your goal. It's simply that when things look dark and you start doubting, you keep pushing forward. Because before you know it, you'll break through to an ocean of light on the other side. How But how do you practically do this? How do you practically tap into this feeling and awaken it within yourself? You simply need to look at what is possible, particularly the stories of other people. There are potentially endless examples out there, but one that struck me recently and which awoke this insight within me is this woman, Kate Tolo, the co-founder of Project Blueprint. She has a fascinating story going all the way back to her childhood, but in short, she was 21 when she stumbled upon Bryan Johnson, started contacting him trying to get hired, got ignored but kept contacting him for years, eventually landed a job interview, got rejected, contacted him again and got rejected again, then essentially begged him, and finally she got hired and soon became the co-founder of now one of the most rapid-growing businesses in the US (Project Blueprint). In the video I linked at 34:09, she is asked what is the best advice that she has ever received. She doesn't answer the question but instead gives the best advice she could ever think of giving, which is itself a huge sign that this is something deep, because she can't help herself but to share it. And for me, it was. And just like I've been stating, here is what she said: When I heard this, I thought "cool" and I felt some sense of inspiration, but only later, it really dawned on me what the ramifications of it truly are. And when it did, I was filled with a warm feeling of love in my chest, a feeling that I was now allowed to express what I truly felt. Because it turns out, despite having extensively explicated my values and life purpose, I've been discouraged, had doubts, seen some of the dark, and all I needed was some little boost and encouragement. There are again many other examples that could inspire and awaken the feeling of perseverance in you. One funny but a bit trite example is Andrew Tate's response to the media about him trying to become the next British prime minister: When I heard that, I was like "wow, this is a guy who just doesn't give up". I also get the same feeling when watching my country's politicians speaking on TV, particularly our prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre and our now soon-to-be ex- Secretary to the Treasury, Trygve Slagsvold Vedum. When I watch them, I get the sense that no matter what challenge, tension or scandal is upon them, they are so driven and focused to get to a solution and keep going forward, without losing their step or their ability joke or smile. No matter what you do, and no matter how persistent or flaky you are about it, merely doing it is itself an act of perseverance. If you for example are typing an e-mail but the internet cuts out and you can't send the e-mail, you might spend quite a few minutes trying to fix the internet, and when you do, you can finally send the e-mail. It might've been a minor challenge, but you persevered. And you couldn't have been sure that you would be able to fix the internet, but you tried, and it worked, and you could send your e-mail. So you are persevering in many aspects of your life all the time. What I'm suggesting is that you can become more conscious about it and also apply perseverance in a general and long-term perspective, and it will bathe you in a warm blanket of love for your goal and yourself, reinforcing the drive and meaning you feel from your life purpose. I have experimented with other types of "catch-all" values or mindsets that augment your mind in a way that seems valuable, but many of them seem to subtract something from you more than they add anything to you (for example, "your feelings are not real"). You can operate extremely efficiently from such a mindset, but you might also become very ungrounded and lost very quickly (as you get dissociated from your feelings). The value of perseverance simply amplifies an already existing value, your highest value, your life purpose, and that's really it. Other aspects of yourself, except doubt, uncertainty, fear and flakiness, are kept mostly intact. And it doesn't only amplify a part of yourself, but it amplifies who you truly are. And even if you experience doubt, uncertainty, fear and flakiness, perseverance doesn't actually negate or repress those feelings. Perseverance mainly deals with what you are "doing" (in terms of working towards your goals), not how you should feel or respond to a particular thing (in contrast to "your feelings are not real"). You keep doing the right things, but you don't stop yourself from feeling. However, when you're doing the right things, those feelings will rarely arise. So what perseverance fundamentally does is it emboldens you to stand up for who you are and not back down too easily from a challenge. And that's why it's also a Stage Red virtue, because it emboldens your core sense of individuality. With that said, if your values and life purpose are aligned with something other than Red, don't be afraid that you will "become Red" by emboldening your sense of individuality. Your individuality is core to who you are, no matter if you're Red, Blue, Green or Yellow. So be yourself, and persevere.

Again, I brought up materialism vs idealism as a rhetorical device (which I maybe should have made more clear) while you actually started talking about materialism vs idealism. That's not really what the discussion is about. Materialists tend to be skeptical of psychical phenomena, and that informs the discussion, but I wasn't intending to evaluate materialism as a metaphysical system (and weigh it up against idealism). Sure, those are valid explanations. I would re-iterate that I'm open for all explanations, but also that virtually all cognition is fundamentally psychic and that we're talking about a spectrum. When you have extremely little learned information to go by (especially unconscious information), but the right answer just "occurs" to you and you can't really explain why, then that is on the far end of the psychic spectrum. This is likely the times where Rainbolt acts surprised and turns off the camera (he has no idea how he got it right). Meanwhile, the times where he thinks or vocalizes a particular reason for why he picked what he picked (which is what he most often does), he generally seems less surprised, like "yep, that is what I thought". But even that is on the psychic spectrum, because why his mind produced exactly those answers is still mysterious. For the cases that are closer to zero learned information, you would have to find clips like the one I just posted above. But again, such clips are not "proof" of anything. If you want "proof" (which is of course also debatable), go read actual scientific studies on psychic phenomena. When Rupert Sheldrake attended a panel in my town, he mentioned that there is a vast psychic literature of replicated experiments with overwhelming statistical significance (the names of the institutes and journals escape me; I haven't read them because I don't need convincing 😆).

Just listen.

I would start at improving my health.

Thanks for perservering and reading through the entire thing 😃

She is not his girlfriend 😠 They co-founded Project Blueprint together as business partners 😊

If you wanted to beat death, where would you start?