Carl-Richard

Haha that's cool 😃 You still play music? I've only been "hired" to play in three family-related birthday parties (I was not paid in cash, only in honor, or laughs 😥).

That's not a problem. Meaning is often like that. You're looking for a special kind of meaning, an absolute meaning.

@Agrande I see. I'm happy that it ended well for you. It's not clear how SSRIs work to alleviate depression, but one hypothesis is that it causes neurogenesis in the hippocampus. The hippocampus can get damaged by excess cortisol (which is a factor in depression), and the hippocampus is involved in inhibiting the HPA axis, which effectively decreases the production of cortisol. It could be that taking SSRIs for a year restored some of your damaged hippocampus and thus dampened the chronic stress response associated with your depression.

Physicalism sounds elegant in comparison 😆

Can I ask why you started taking it and why you stopped taking it?

No.

You mean ancient?

Other than literature on systems theory (e.g. F. Capra, G. Bateson), I don't, I'm sorry. Systems theory is essentially a hyper-generalized version of what were talking about. Other than that, most of these things I've gleaned from people like Vervaeke, Peterson, Kastrup, Wilber.

🤓 Fundamentally, I believe the correctness of a frame depends on your goal (pragmatism); frames can be more or less correct (useful) relative to that goal. But it becomes a bit more complicated when you enter meta-theoretic territory. For example, could realism and skepticism be useful for different things? Does using a criteria like convergence (how often something pops up in different places) for ranking the "trustworthiness" of something, make you a realist, or are you still a pragmatist if you say it's merely useful to do so? Does showing skepticism towards most knowledge claims make you a skeptic, or are you still a pragmatist if you say it's merely useful to do so? What if these realist and skeptic tendencies co-exist, then what are you? A meta-theorist? (😉) The thread "The Four Epistemic Naiveties/Pitfalls" touches on this:

A picture tells more than a thousand words. Reality tells more than a thousand pictures.

Hehe, well, technically, I'm dropping it every time I'm posting 😉 But also, I don't feel the need to just use one frame all the time 😛😆 Also, it's really synonymous with eudaimonia which was mentioned earlier. It's just a particular concretization of the concept that I like

So that's one frame, a very skeptical frame (containing a lot of negations with little actual affirmative content). It's also a generalizing frame ("energy", "identity" and "dream" are more general than "happiness"). What about a more affirmative and concretizing frame? After all, you're using many words right now that supposedly have a specific meaning, or else I wouldn't be able to understand anything you're saying. Could you define those words for me in a rich and concrete way, i.e. actually describing what they are and not leaning so much on negations and generalizations? Or could you just do that for happiness?

"Happiness = apparent movement of the unknown" sounds a little vacuous, doesn't it?

What's energy?

I assert we can only assert what we think it is, using whatever frame we prefer. It's not a matter of absolute knowledge.

Then of course, self-improvement does produce significantly improved individuals as well where you notice a significant difference, as you've rightly intuited. However, those individuals are probably relatively rare. Most self-improvement people have either just started their journey and experienced little to medium progress, or merely show interest in it, or even wear it as an egoic garment. And again, all these people were probably a little more neurotic (conflicted) than the average person on the street when they started. So all in all, you probably shouldn't expect a big difference in either direction.

We're suddenly counting words now?

Now I know why I always loved this song <3

The safest bet is to not do it, but the next safest is to try very small doses in the beginning. It's usually the larger doses that trigger acute psychosis, but smaller doses can increase the chance of psychosis developing over time. Be aware that also meditation can make you respond differently to psychedelics than other people.

Who left the carrots out? 😮‍💨🐇🥕

Hedonism vs. eudaimonia. Don't do more of the same things: do the right things, at the right place, at the right time, in the right way. That is what virtue is, what balance is; flexibility, functionality, health. The trick is that eudaimonia requires facing your skeletons head on, tracing every step your mind makes to justify its behavior, and catch it before it escapes into its addictive cycles again. That requires some awareness, deliberation and repeated experience of seeing how the hedonism strategy fails. But until then, it might seem like it's Easier To Run: (I'm in love with this song. It's probably not the last time I'll be quoting Linkin Park songs btw).

You just described remote viewing.

In that case, if you want to fix yourself, don't you first have to be broken? 😉

I've gotten the habit of opening way too many tabs at once because I see something that I don't want to miss, and then I feel compelled to finish them all. It takes way too much time and feels like a chore, so I've decided to implement a three-tab rule (max. three tabs at once). That would also force me to watch higher quality videos. That said, I only really watch videos while eating, and I go for a walk after eating (and I feel like I have to when my blood sugar is rising), so that's a good way to break the spell. This curiously only started happening after I started with brain training and cardiovascular training (more blood flow to the brain). I guess a faster brain can be a curse 😂

An open forum is not much different from people on the street. Not much to contemplate there, unless you got some burning insights like you seem to be implying 🤐