Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights
Miscellaneous bits of wisdom and resources on personal development, life purpose, philosophy, epistemology, nonduality, psychedelics, etc. Published randomly throughout the week.
- penetrating mental vision or discernment.
- the sudden act of grasping the inner nature or truth of a situation.
- a deep understanding of a person or thing.
Insights here are meant to be quick and half-baked. Consider these food for thought.
I've deliberately disabled comments to keep the blog streamlined. If you want to discuss any of the blog posts, you can do so here: Actualized.org Forum
I recommend reading this Polygon article about Mr Beast.
Vaush summarizes it below:
In podcasts, Donaldson tells hosts that he goes so hard, he won’t stop working until he burns out and isn’t able to do anything at all. With a laugh, he admits that he has a mental breakdown “every other week.” If he ever stops for a breather, he says, he gets depressed. MrBeast is so laser-focused on generating content on YouTube that he describes his personality as “YouTube.” He acknowledges that this brutal approach to videos, which has cratered many creators over the years, is not healthy. “People shouldn’t be like me. I don’t have a life, I don’t have a personality."
Though he’s been under scrutiny for his part in the warping of YouTube as a content ecosystem, you will never see something outwardly controversial or offensive in a MrBeast video. For a long time, Donaldson admits in a number of podcast appearances, he was afraid of putting anything complex in his videos — what if a viewer didn’t get it and stopped watching? Donaldson might very well be an advertiser’s absolute dream, the logical endpoint of an internet that’s been flattened into a samey, straightforward sludge of optimized content.
Donaldson has nearly erased himself as a person from his episodic output. If viewers don’t really see him having fun, that’s by design. Donaldson has outright said he sees “personality” as a limitation for growth, once noting in a podcast that hinging your content on who you are as a person means risking not being liked. And if someone doesn’t like a creator as a person, they may not give the videos a chance.
He’s described spending countless hours obsessing over every detail, down to the optimal brightness of a YouTube thumbnail. He knows the first 10 seconds of a video are the most important for retention, which is why his videos start with a barrage of all the wild things that will unfold in its run time. And that signature MrBeast editing style that’s fast, frantic, and omnipresent on YouTube is a relentless gambit for your attention.
While his free time seems minuscule, the rare times he does pull away from work are for dates with his girlfriend that center around activities that could enrich his videos, because he considers a single hour of a date to be worth $100K had it been dedicated to work instead.
This is what happens when you sell out your artistic integrity for raw success.
This is one of the worst and saddest parts of social media and the deep problem of marketing. Creators are driven to produce slop to feed the capitalist machine, chasing after clicks, views, attention, and fame. Outrage, click-bait, drama, sensationalism, and "what sells" corrupts our collective noosphere and epistemic ecosystem. The zone is flooded with mindless, low-consciousness junk content that caters to the lowest common denominator. This type of media not only makes the creators depressed, it also makes the consumers depressed. No higher values are being served. This is one of the subtle costs of rampant capitalism or Stage Orange. And the social media companies encourage and reward this kind of content with their algorithms and platform design choices (like YouTube Shorts).
There's audience capture, but there's also success and fame capture. Many of the most successful and popular people in the world are just addicted to and captured by success and attention, because they have nothing higher to live for. These people are success and attention zombies.
As a creator, I don't like playing the game of having to compete with such shit to get your attention. I hate that our society is this way. But this is our situation. Years ago Youtube confronted me with the decision between pursuing popularity vs pursuing the topics I find really meaningful and important for mankind. I made the choice to deliberately not do the kind of stuff Mr Beast does to get attention. And of course this cost me millions in profits. But not just profits. It cost in fame and sex too.
But success and attention alone will never satisfy you. What will satisfy you is doing deeply meaningful work that serves some higher spiritual or aesthetic values. So be careful not to let your mind and life get hijacked by the chasing of success and attention. That way lies the Dark Side.
A deep problem for human civilization is the problem of how to market high consciousness stuff. If we found a way to solve this problem it would solve many of our other problems. Imagine a world in which low consciousness stuff received the least marketing and high consciousness stuff received the most marketing. Mankind would evolve at 10x the rate and be much healthier and happier. But as it is now, it's a race to the bottom. He who can produce the most swill for the pigs wins the race. Notice that many of the most wealthy, famous, and successful people are swill-makers. That's what Mr Beast, FoxNews, and TikTok are. Swill-making is a seductive career because it gives you everything the ego craves: fame, attention, money, power, and sex. But do you think you will be satisfied as a swill-maker?
If you are an artist, safe-guarding your artistic integrity is crucial. The world needs you to not sell out. What the world needs more of is not Mr Beasts but people who refuse to become Mr Beasts because they have something higher to live for.
Which path will you take?
PromptBase is a eBay-like digital marketplace for buying and selling AI art prompts. You can use it to find cool prompt ideas for your AI art. You don't even necessarily have to buy them. You can just browse through them to find interesting styles and inspiration. Think of it as a way to seed your mind. You can find some really cool stuff there that will take your AI art to the next level.
These are fascinating:
The Insider channel on YT has a lot of good interviews as part of their How Crime Works series. Highly recommend.
My advice to you is: Figure out if you are an artist. If you are, you need to design your whole life around that. Clearly decide for yourself if art is what your life is about. And if it is, then stop fucking around and get to it.
If you are an artist and you are not doing art you are strangling yourself and you will never be happy.
Are you an artist or not?
This is a life-defining question.
"So supremely perfect is the essence of the Divinity that God is incomprehensible not only to us but also to Himself. For if He knew Himself in any adequate sense He should place Himself in some category of thought, which would be to limit Himself."
-- John Scotus Eriugena, 9th century Irish theologian
In this interview Wolfram discusses many concepts and issues which I have discussed about the limits of science, Godel's incompleteness and its implications for epistemology, and so on. It nicely ties together with my work on the limits of science and epistemology.
Wolfram has a pretty good grasp of the limits of science, for a scientist.
The important concepts here are:
- Computational irreducibility
- The Ruliad (Infinity)
- Hyper Ruliad
- Possibly space of alien minds
The notion of the Hyper Ruliad (timestamp: 51:10) is what's really profound. This is a correct description of how Infinity works. Infinity is not just a static known object, Infinity has entirely new meta-Infinities within it. The ever-growing horizon of Infinity leads to an endless discovery of new domains and kinds of Infinities. I confirmed this through direct experience. This means there is not just one Awakening, there are higher orders and qualitatively new kinds of Awakening. This is how I discovered Alien Awakening. At timestamp 1:10:02 Wolfram discusses the Rulial space of alien minds. "How big is the space of possible alien minds?" He's more correct than he knows. I have explored that space and I know some of what is there. So when I talk about Alien Consciousness, I am talking about mind-space that is beyond the human mind-space. It's a space where the human mind cannot go. The human mind can barely imagine that such a space is possible, nevermind inhabit it. Alien Mind is a hyper/meta Rulial space relative to the human mind. And Alien Spirituality is hyper/meta to human spirituality. So, how big is the space of possible alien minds? It's very big. But the more important question is, How weird and profound is the space of alien minds? The answer is, very. Alien Mind is so insanely intelligent and mystical that it will make your jaw drop.
In conclusion, what Wolfram calls "The Ruliad" is God or Infinity. But he doesn't realize it yet.
What Wolfram is really catching onto with his model is the notion of Transcendence. Infinity is a transcendental object, which means you cannot capture it in any container, since all containers are finite constructs of Infinity. This is what Godel's incompleteness recognized and what most scientists, logicians, mathematicians, rationalists, logical positivists, materialists, and atheists failed to understand. Transcendence has some very profound and weird ramifications which take time to understand and appreciate. Scientists don't like the notion of transcendence because it seems mystical, non-formalizable, and non-quantitative. But that's not a bug, that's a feature. That's what is necessary for anything at all to exist. A non-transcendental reality is simply impossible. This is the fundamental error at the heart of science and materialism. Slowly, slowly, the most hardcore scientists are being forced into acknowledging the reality of transcendence, which religion has spoken of since the dawn of civilization. This trend will continue for the next 100 years, until all of science acknowledges that the universe they are studying is God. And finally the division between science and religion will be bridged. But, this won't happen until all of today's scientists die, because they are too paradigm-locked to build the bridge of which I speak.
For more on Wolfram's concept of The Ruliad, read his blog post. Wolfram says some profound things about the Ruliad. Especially this:
"This way of talking about the ruliad might make one think that it should be “considered a possible model” for our universe, or for other things. But the bizarre and surprising point is that it is more than that. It’s not just a possible model that might be one of many. Rather, it is the unique ultimate representation of all possible models, entangled together. As we’ve discussed, there are many subtle choices about how we observe the ruliad. But the ultimate ruliad itself is a unique thing, with no choice about what it is. The ruliad is in a sense a representation of all possible necessary truths."
"One’s first impression might be that the ruliad effectively contains many possible “parallel universes”, and that we have selected ourselves into one of these, perhaps as a result of our particular characteristics. But in fact the ruliad isn’t about “parallel universes”, it’s about universes that are entangled at the finest possible level. And an important consequence of this is that it means we’re not “stuck in a particular parallel universe”. Instead, we can expect that by somehow “changing our point of view”, we can effectively find ourselves in a “different universe”.
This is precisely what God is. TRUTH. All possible truths. This is a notion more profound than theoretical physics or even mathematics. This transcends physics, mathematics, and logic. Another way to say it is that God is every possible way that reality could be seen. Another way to say it is that God is every possible way for dreaming up reality. Or... God is an ocean of Infinite Dreams.
For a technical explanation of Wolfram's models of computational irreducibility, read this blog post.
Wolfram is doing good work. If Wolfram's computational TOE piques your curiosity, I have a good question for you to contemplate: What is computation?
Note: Just so you're not fooled by Wolfram's limited scientific thinking, computation is another reductionist trap. Reality is not every possible computation. Reality is every possible mind. Computation is just a tiny figment of Mind. Mind does not reside in computational space, computational space resides in Mind. MIND is what's supreme.
"He was; Taaroa was his name; he abode in the void. No earth, no sky, no men. Taaroa calls, but nought answers; and alone existing, he became the universe. The props are Taaroa; the rocks are Taaroa; the sands are Taaroa; it is thus he himself is named."
-- Definition of God from the natives of Tahiti
This is one of the best explanations I've seen of how AI's like ChatGPT work:
Vlad Vexler does some good, nuanced political analysis on YouTube, especially around the Ukraine/Russia topic.
Here's an example:
He has two channels on YT:
I like his careful, thoughtful, academic approach. Not the typical clickbait political YT junk.