Well, good and bad does not exist in an absolute sense, but they can be local truths, and ahimsa is a fine choice. The only bad systems are those that don’t work out. It’s a bit of a low hanging apple but I consider communism to be such a system. While we can create our own subjective reality, there are natural laws which restrict the set of workable realities.
Most ideals are impossible, we can only approach them, not reach them. It’s fine as long as we recognize this, but I find that unreachable ideals sometimes turn people bitter because they make reality seem flawed in a way which is impossible to solve. Comparison is the thief of joy, so it’s dangerous to compare to perfection (which, of course, is the reason perfectionists are less happy in general).
Truth is defined in a way which implies “one truth path”, but there’s no such thing. I’m really just explaining the pros and cons of various choices that I’ve made, so that you can know the consequences of integrating them into your worldview in advance.
I think anger is the easier ‘poison’ to defend, one often becomes angry about injustice, and so anger can be used for good. Malice is harder to defend, but at the very least, every poison is its own antidote. The more alcohol you drink, the higher your tolerance will be. If you grow up in a bad environment, you will be more equipped to deal with imperfection than somebody who did not. Even exercise is a poison which makes us more resistant to the consequences of even harder exercise. In this case, the tolerance you’re building is muscles. Traumatic events are poisons which strengthen the mind. Life has a quality in which it grows under that which threatens it, and all fatality occurs when the rate of adaptation is too low, or the threat is too sudden. So it’s a fight between “rate of adaptation” and “rate of change”.
You’re decribing mechanisms in which the damage accumulates—trauma which is never overcome, grudges which are kept forever, stress and cynicism which just slowly gets worse and worse until they destroy a person. I might have to concede here—let’s see. There’s poisons which one cannot build tolerance towards (a lack of sleep seems like one), and poisons which only some people can use for their benefit while others are destroyed. Finally, I mentioned earlier that natural laws prevent some things from succeeding, and we can call such things immoral. It’s very possible that malice is similar to communism in that natural laws prevent it from being used for good purposes, which makes it “objectively bad”. But I’m not yet convinced that this is the case.
You’re right that some things can only exist as exceptions to the rule, but this class of things are countless. Society wouldn’t work if every job was “baker”, or if every person alive was a child. So differences are absolutely vital, and we cannot prove the qualities of a person by their rarity, or by the ratio of such a person that society can tolerate before it collapses. I’m afraid this is another argument in favor of “the dose makes the poison”, or at least “Balance is good and evil is that which is out of balance”.
I agree that the average and the true middle are different. I agree about the importance of trust too. I’d put it like “The maximum stable size of a group is governed by its coherence, which is the cooperation and trust of its parts”. But since the need for coherence threaten the unique qualities of the individual, I think we should de-globalize and have more communities rather than bigger communities. Very bad things happen to social dynamics once the network density gets too high. It’s more pleasant to be in a group of 5 than a group of 50, and it’s more pleasant to be in a community with 1000 members than a community with a million, and I think there’s natural laws behind this as well.
That will allow you to reap benefits in healthy society
Yes. So the limit of how healthy I can get away with being depends on the health of my environment. It’s no good to be a naive person in a malicious environment, just like it’s no good to be a malicious person in a good environment. My self-improvement is being limited by society because I’m being “pulled” towards the average. The more out of alignment you are with society, the larger any “correction” will be. A naive person in a extremely hostile environment will undergo experiences which rapidly makes them less naive, but somebody who is 98% in alignment will have to work hard in order to find the tiny difference which puts them 99% in alignment. But I do reap rewards for my mental health, like those who do Yoga reap rewards from their physical health!
What protects things against changes? Against tending towards the average? I find that it’s isolation, gate-keeping, detachment, illegibility, hierarchies. Even shibboleths and such. A sort of entropic protection against updating towards a worse (or just different) state than one is currently in. How do you stay pure around perverts, sensitive to noise around people who yell, optimistic in the face of failure? Researching this is another hobby of mine.
Magnanimity is a strong virtue
Some would put it in the category of delusion, but I think that it’s often a self-fulfilling state. Sort of like how people who consider themselves lucky find more opportunities. This sounds a bit like spirituality, “belief can move mountains” and all that, but it seems true. A kind of placebo which actually affects physical reality.
All-permeating tranquility and glorious silence
I suppose that the lower only hurts through comparison. It can be freeing as well to update ones point of reference downwards because everything else seems better after. But the human sense of aesthetics does protect against that which is bad. If I lived in India, I’d have other standards of hygiene than I do now, but something inside me resists lowering these standards, and I think that’s for the better. About people, I’m conflicted. One should accept people precisely as they are, but on the other hand, I find it beautiful when people work hard for the same of appearance, be it grooming, having manners, remaining positive, or polishing their image. I’m influenced by Nietzsche who defined art as “deception with good intentions”. The quote I sent a few comments ago called rational people “inartistic” and I’m making the same criticism for the same reasons. Truth seeking and disillusionment conflicts with meaning-making and aesthetics. Aesthetics and meaning both add value to things, so they protect against nihilism and life-denying attitudes.
While I think it’s a shame to focus on the screen, you do you. The insights I share should still be helpful in reaching such a state, even if you sometimes have to do the opposite of what I’m recommending. I’ve used two means to get where I’m at, both with limited success. The first is tricking the elephant into wanting the thing that I also want. The other is considering life to be a video game (why can some people be in the top 0.1% in a video game and yet in the bottom 5% in life? If they experiencedf life as a game, wouldn’t they suddenly do well?). I don’t think I’ve shut down the DMN, but I’m slowly learning to live with ADHD, somehow.
I’m curious why no futures are good enough. I’d have to get out of my comfort zone to achieve my dreams, but there’s always a path. If somebody else took over your life, would they also fail at achieving any good ends? If no, I think you have self-imposed limitations you can remove.
When “I am” is followed by other words, it’s a self-imposed label. You could even call it a sort of roleplay. But the world does not work without roleplay. In the structure of a company, each person plays a role over which they are responsible (this also mirrors software engineering principles, and probably generalizes to other fields which I’m no familiar with). Even physically, in a car for instance, each component has a role and a protocol for how it interacts with other components. It’s the same biologically, each of our organs have a specialized purpose and is capable of signaling the components which are relevant for them to interact with. Thus, roleplaying is not merely social pretence or the ego investing too much into an idea, it’s a principle which apples to creations which get things done in reality.
You say “I experience it”?
Got me there. The lazy answer is that self-awareness allows me to experience myself. A proper answer is more complicated. Do you think a corporation is many things, or just one thing? What about a human body? A car? If they’re multiple—how do you decide the level of recursion at which you stop dividing? If they’re just one—what is the limit for seperation before the cohersion of the structure is so low that you consider it multiple?
You’re asking questions which makes one doubt the I. But you can ask these questions about anything, and make anything seem unreal. I don’t think it’s the ‘I’ which has to prove itself in front of these questions, I think these questions have to prove to the I that they have value at all, that questions have value, that theory is allowed to propose the idea that my experience of myself is wrong.
I know the purpose of asking me these questions, but I’d personally rather anchor my concept of self more strongly than reduce it. I’m trying not to be enlightened, as I enjoy being a fool
Well, good and bad does not exist in an absolute sense
I consider some processes like a festering wound. Is a festering wound good or bad? Ultimately it’s neutral, just a natural process at work, but we still would like to be free of it. Otherwise, it leads to dire consequences. So processes with intention to harm another is like festering wounds. If not taken care of, they escalate and lead to more serious consequences.
It’s only as a rule we solve such processes unskillfully by isolation and liquidation of the person who is making the harm. What would a skillful process look like? I don’t know, but it seems to me that prescribing psychedelics (psilocybin and DMT to be precise, as they were proven to shut down the DMN temporarily and proven to work on people with addictions to alcohol, e.g. a good read about psychedelics, Drugs Without the Hot Air by David Nutt) in order to shift the perspective of the person would worth a try, also trying other anti-psychotic medicines, perhaps even experimental. As most issues of such kind are due to neural imbalances of sorts. So it’s not just about reprogramming the rider, it’s about rewiring the elephant. And we even have tools at our hands we just stubbornly avoid using them. But it’s a difficult topic to handle for a layman as one tends to generalize un-generalizable. The direction which seems to be promising is experimental medicine, not just plain old isolation.
Comparison is the thief of joy
Comparison is more evil than it seems as it involves division. And the divided mind is more confused not less so. What I meant by having examples who had different relations to the world was something akin to emulation, rather than imitation. What’s the difference? In imitation we compare and imitate behavior. In emulation, we reverse-engineer the processes down to the principles and then apply the principles in our life. Which may even lead to completely different behavior than that of the example, taking into account our conditions. A good example doesn’t come to mind. But I think one can deduce what I’m trying to express. It’s not comparison that works, but underlying principles behind the behavior. One can say that’s a way to initially gamify one’s experience and potentially transcend it.
Ok, here is a weak example, I don’t eat meat. Many sages didn’t eat meat as well and prescribed sattvik diet. Is is imitation? No. I don’t eat meat not because sages didn’t do it and I’m trying to imitate that behavior. I don’t eat meat because I cannot eat something from which I personally cannot take life. It’s a principle which I came upon in reflection and which feels right to me. As I don’t think anyone should follow this principle, but only those who resonate with it, I don’t expect people around me to follow the same rule. So I don’t compare people who eat meat with sages who didn’t eat it and allocate respective judgements. I believe it’s a personal business of an individual and it doesn’t by itself reflect “the level of malice” of individual. As a person may not have ill intentions towards living beings, yet follow the rules imposed to him by surrounding society and circumstances. So it’s not the comparison that works in that case but reverse-engineered principles. It matters that a person comes up with ahimsa out of personal reflection and not just parrots what sages did. So in my case it works only because I came up with it myself. And I don’t think it should be applied as a universal rule (about eating meat).
Traumatic events are poisons which strengthen the mind.
You see, I don’t think that traumatic events strengthen the mind at all. It’s true that strong mind will come through them more easily. But comparing them to exercising the muscles seems odd to me. First of all, exercise is a feasible controlled challenge, overcoming which gives one a pleasure. While traumatic events are unpredictable uncontrolled shocks that shutter the nervous system. They introduce an unsurmountable contradiction, “I love her, and she is gone.” Which starts up the cycle of self-rumination (in which the DMN is prevalent) which saps up all the energy from the constructive channels. It’s true that one has to learn to overcome that grief, and eventually some process will shift the network from the default self-ruminating mode to the tasking mode. But the shock divides the mind through contradiction and will in one way or another sap its energy (even when one seemingly shifted from the initial shock).
An example. Having a psychotic break after an existential shock doesn’t make you stronger by any means, it even makes you more prone to more psychotic breaks. That is like uncontrolled entropy growth. And one cannot reverse that process so the feedback-loop is degenerative. It makes one more vulnerable to vicissitudes of life and doesn’t teach anything of value. It’s a lose-lose situation. The only upside of such an event can be the understanding that one has no control over life and attempt to cut the dispersion to different directions of thinking, i.e. simplification. But whether it’s healthy or not in a highly complex environment it’s hard to tell.
How do you stay pure around perverts, sensitive to noise around people who yell, optimistic in the face of failure?
Yes, that’s a difficult topic. The only solution that I have found to work when you are in such conditions is turning inward instead of outward. That is, all the time it is possible to do it. That’s also why I believe spirituality works, as one’s odds of success are miniscule and one is basically operating on faith alone.
Aesthetics and meaning both add value to things, so they protect against nihilism and life-denying attitudes
It’s funny that I think that the very process of meaning-making (if meaning taken as intrinsic) leads eventually to nihilism. When one is thwarted and doesn’t get what one wants, the very meaning one was invested in turns against him and feeds life-denying attitudes. The only solution that I found to this is the Buddhist middle way, which basically denies intrinsic meaning, stating that all meaning only made up, i.e. relational, local. In that model I tend to de-emphasize the meaning making apparatus. But that’s not nihilistic, as relativized meaning is accepted. It’s like saying, it works, but don’t forget that it’s only local and not absolute.
If somebody else took over your life, would they also fail at achieving any good ends?
Positive here. But I don’t despair, because all the conditions and circumstances seem to direct me in the direction of liberation. Everything else will not suffice. In games’ jargon, only epic win will suffice, everything else is half-measures that would not hold ground. I’m certainly not guaranteed of that, but it creates a somewhat healthy dynamics.
But the world does not work without roleplay.
It’s not a problem if one takes it to be only a role. But deeply is not identified with that role. Some people used to call me a mathematician or a programmer, but those were just functions I performed, not what I am deep inside. I am neither limited nor defined by those functions. All I can say, I, indeed, simply am.
I think these questions have to prove to the I that they have value at all
You seem to want to build a theory of mind (a good read on the topic by Joscha Bach, Principles of Synthetic Intelligence). And it may serve a valid purpose. But what I try to share with those questions is deep inborn childlike curiosity (that I myself get from them). Granted those questions may not be “your” questions and you may resonate with different set altogether. It’s actually good that you don’t have such a theory of mind, as you feel unprepared for their rawness! They are not meant to be answered by the mind, they are to lead the mind into impasse from which it cannot move, where concepts cease and silence prevails. That silence (albeit temporary) is the goal. It’s the data-point that the mind learns after asking such questions. Once it gets enough data-points of silence, it starts to prefer that state over the default one. For some it may take few months, for others—years of practice. There is a good post by Gary Weber that uncovers this process, Self-inquiry vs the egos/Is—How it works—the neuroscience.
Actually, from the theory of mind perspective self-inquiry is meant to get rid of the SRIN. So if one is tired of incessant self-talk one will look for any means to stop it. But the “I” will never agree to that deal as that would mean its own dissolution… Therefore the process of self-inquiry is itself paradoxical. You are either attracted to it or not. That includes any koan, not just self-inquiry as the aim of koans is the same—to get rid of the SRIN (which is by some tantamount to awakening). Only a peculiar “I” will agree to that deal. But Gary in Myths about Nonduality and Science says that cognition in the result is much higher. He gives a comparison by Hood’s mysticism scale, where nonduality/liberation scores higher than sex and psychedelics. A worthy read/watch, if you are into hacking your perception.
I know the purpose of asking me these questions, but I’d personally rather anchor my concept of self more strongly than reduce it. I’m trying not to be enlightened, as I enjoy being a fool
Ha-ha-ha! In some way “it’s too late” as you’ve already started contemplating over those questions. But don’t worry about that, they say that awakening is not directly linked with anything we do with our minds. If you are destined to awaken—you will, whether you want it or not, whether you’ve heard something about it or not, whether you do some practices or not. Contemplating these questions (or other koans) just makes one “prone to accidents” more. I think your mind is too curious not to ponder over some unanswerable question or another so you are not liberationproof.
Well, good and bad does not exist in an absolute sense, but they can be local truths, and ahimsa is a fine choice. The only bad systems are those that don’t work out. It’s a bit of a low hanging apple but I consider communism to be such a system. While we can create our own subjective reality, there are natural laws which restrict the set of workable realities.
Most ideals are impossible, we can only approach them, not reach them. It’s fine as long as we recognize this, but I find that unreachable ideals sometimes turn people bitter because they make reality seem flawed in a way which is impossible to solve. Comparison is the thief of joy, so it’s dangerous to compare to perfection (which, of course, is the reason perfectionists are less happy in general).
Truth is defined in a way which implies “one truth path”, but there’s no such thing. I’m really just explaining the pros and cons of various choices that I’ve made, so that you can know the consequences of integrating them into your worldview in advance.
I think anger is the easier ‘poison’ to defend, one often becomes angry about injustice, and so anger can be used for good. Malice is harder to defend, but at the very least, every poison is its own antidote. The more alcohol you drink, the higher your tolerance will be. If you grow up in a bad environment, you will be more equipped to deal with imperfection than somebody who did not. Even exercise is a poison which makes us more resistant to the consequences of even harder exercise. In this case, the tolerance you’re building is muscles. Traumatic events are poisons which strengthen the mind. Life has a quality in which it grows under that which threatens it, and all fatality occurs when the rate of adaptation is too low, or the threat is too sudden. So it’s a fight between “rate of adaptation” and “rate of change”.
You’re decribing mechanisms in which the damage accumulates—trauma which is never overcome, grudges which are kept forever, stress and cynicism which just slowly gets worse and worse until they destroy a person. I might have to concede here—let’s see. There’s poisons which one cannot build tolerance towards (a lack of sleep seems like one), and poisons which only some people can use for their benefit while others are destroyed. Finally, I mentioned earlier that natural laws prevent some things from succeeding, and we can call such things immoral. It’s very possible that malice is similar to communism in that natural laws prevent it from being used for good purposes, which makes it “objectively bad”. But I’m not yet convinced that this is the case.
You’re right that some things can only exist as exceptions to the rule, but this class of things are countless. Society wouldn’t work if every job was “baker”, or if every person alive was a child. So differences are absolutely vital, and we cannot prove the qualities of a person by their rarity, or by the ratio of such a person that society can tolerate before it collapses. I’m afraid this is another argument in favor of “the dose makes the poison”, or at least “Balance is good and evil is that which is out of balance”.
I agree that the average and the true middle are different. I agree about the importance of trust too. I’d put it like “The maximum stable size of a group is governed by its coherence, which is the cooperation and trust of its parts”. But since the need for coherence threaten the unique qualities of the individual, I think we should de-globalize and have more communities rather than bigger communities. Very bad things happen to social dynamics once the network density gets too high. It’s more pleasant to be in a group of 5 than a group of 50, and it’s more pleasant to be in a community with 1000 members than a community with a million, and I think there’s natural laws behind this as well.
Yes. So the limit of how healthy I can get away with being depends on the health of my environment. It’s no good to be a naive person in a malicious environment, just like it’s no good to be a malicious person in a good environment. My self-improvement is being limited by society because I’m being “pulled” towards the average. The more out of alignment you are with society, the larger any “correction” will be. A naive person in a extremely hostile environment will undergo experiences which rapidly makes them less naive, but somebody who is 98% in alignment will have to work hard in order to find the tiny difference which puts them 99% in alignment. But I do reap rewards for my mental health, like those who do Yoga reap rewards from their physical health!
What protects things against changes? Against tending towards the average? I find that it’s isolation, gate-keeping, detachment, illegibility, hierarchies. Even shibboleths and such. A sort of entropic protection against updating towards a worse (or just different) state than one is currently in. How do you stay pure around perverts, sensitive to noise around people who yell, optimistic in the face of failure? Researching this is another hobby of mine.
Some would put it in the category of delusion, but I think that it’s often a self-fulfilling state. Sort of like how people who consider themselves lucky find more opportunities. This sounds a bit like spirituality, “belief can move mountains” and all that, but it seems true. A kind of placebo which actually affects physical reality.
I suppose that the lower only hurts through comparison. It can be freeing as well to update ones point of reference downwards because everything else seems better after. But the human sense of aesthetics does protect against that which is bad. If I lived in India, I’d have other standards of hygiene than I do now, but something inside me resists lowering these standards, and I think that’s for the better. About people, I’m conflicted. One should accept people precisely as they are, but on the other hand, I find it beautiful when people work hard for the same of appearance, be it grooming, having manners, remaining positive, or polishing their image. I’m influenced by Nietzsche who defined art as “deception with good intentions”. The quote I sent a few comments ago called rational people “inartistic” and I’m making the same criticism for the same reasons. Truth seeking and disillusionment conflicts with meaning-making and aesthetics. Aesthetics and meaning both add value to things, so they protect against nihilism and life-denying attitudes.
While I think it’s a shame to focus on the screen, you do you. The insights I share should still be helpful in reaching such a state, even if you sometimes have to do the opposite of what I’m recommending. I’ve used two means to get where I’m at, both with limited success. The first is tricking the elephant into wanting the thing that I also want. The other is considering life to be a video game (why can some people be in the top 0.1% in a video game and yet in the bottom 5% in life? If they experiencedf life as a game, wouldn’t they suddenly do well?). I don’t think I’ve shut down the DMN, but I’m slowly learning to live with ADHD, somehow.
I’m curious why no futures are good enough. I’d have to get out of my comfort zone to achieve my dreams, but there’s always a path. If somebody else took over your life, would they also fail at achieving any good ends? If no, I think you have self-imposed limitations you can remove.
When “I am” is followed by other words, it’s a self-imposed label. You could even call it a sort of roleplay. But the world does not work without roleplay. In the structure of a company, each person plays a role over which they are responsible (this also mirrors software engineering principles, and probably generalizes to other fields which I’m no familiar with). Even physically, in a car for instance, each component has a role and a protocol for how it interacts with other components. It’s the same biologically, each of our organs have a specialized purpose and is capable of signaling the components which are relevant for them to interact with. Thus, roleplaying is not merely social pretence or the ego investing too much into an idea, it’s a principle which apples to creations which get things done in reality.
Got me there. The lazy answer is that self-awareness allows me to experience myself. A proper answer is more complicated. Do you think a corporation is many things, or just one thing? What about a human body? A car? If they’re multiple—how do you decide the level of recursion at which you stop dividing? If they’re just one—what is the limit for seperation before the cohersion of the structure is so low that you consider it multiple?
You’re asking questions which makes one doubt the I. But you can ask these questions about anything, and make anything seem unreal. I don’t think it’s the ‘I’ which has to prove itself in front of these questions, I think these questions have to prove to the I that they have value at all, that questions have value, that theory is allowed to propose the idea that my experience of myself is wrong.
I know the purpose of asking me these questions, but I’d personally rather anchor my concept of self more strongly than reduce it. I’m trying not to be enlightened, as I enjoy being a fool
I consider some processes like a festering wound. Is a festering wound good or bad? Ultimately it’s neutral, just a natural process at work, but we still would like to be free of it. Otherwise, it leads to dire consequences. So processes with intention to harm another is like festering wounds. If not taken care of, they escalate and lead to more serious consequences.
It’s only as a rule we solve such processes unskillfully by isolation and liquidation of the person who is making the harm. What would a skillful process look like? I don’t know, but it seems to me that prescribing psychedelics (psilocybin and DMT to be precise, as they were proven to shut down the DMN temporarily and proven to work on people with addictions to alcohol, e.g. a good read about psychedelics, Drugs Without the Hot Air by David Nutt) in order to shift the perspective of the person would worth a try, also trying other anti-psychotic medicines, perhaps even experimental. As most issues of such kind are due to neural imbalances of sorts. So it’s not just about reprogramming the rider, it’s about rewiring the elephant. And we even have tools at our hands we just stubbornly avoid using them. But it’s a difficult topic to handle for a layman as one tends to generalize un-generalizable. The direction which seems to be promising is experimental medicine, not just plain old isolation.
Comparison is more evil than it seems as it involves division. And the divided mind is more confused not less so. What I meant by having examples who had different relations to the world was something akin to emulation, rather than imitation. What’s the difference? In imitation we compare and imitate behavior. In emulation, we reverse-engineer the processes down to the principles and then apply the principles in our life. Which may even lead to completely different behavior than that of the example, taking into account our conditions. A good example doesn’t come to mind. But I think one can deduce what I’m trying to express. It’s not comparison that works, but underlying principles behind the behavior. One can say that’s a way to initially gamify one’s experience and potentially transcend it.
Ok, here is a weak example, I don’t eat meat. Many sages didn’t eat meat as well and prescribed sattvik diet. Is is imitation? No. I don’t eat meat not because sages didn’t do it and I’m trying to imitate that behavior. I don’t eat meat because I cannot eat something from which I personally cannot take life. It’s a principle which I came upon in reflection and which feels right to me. As I don’t think anyone should follow this principle, but only those who resonate with it, I don’t expect people around me to follow the same rule. So I don’t compare people who eat meat with sages who didn’t eat it and allocate respective judgements. I believe it’s a personal business of an individual and it doesn’t by itself reflect “the level of malice” of individual. As a person may not have ill intentions towards living beings, yet follow the rules imposed to him by surrounding society and circumstances. So it’s not the comparison that works in that case but reverse-engineered principles. It matters that a person comes up with ahimsa out of personal reflection and not just parrots what sages did. So in my case it works only because I came up with it myself. And I don’t think it should be applied as a universal rule (about eating meat).
You see, I don’t think that traumatic events strengthen the mind at all. It’s true that strong mind will come through them more easily. But comparing them to exercising the muscles seems odd to me. First of all, exercise is a feasible controlled challenge, overcoming which gives one a pleasure. While traumatic events are unpredictable uncontrolled shocks that shutter the nervous system. They introduce an unsurmountable contradiction, “I love her, and she is gone.” Which starts up the cycle of self-rumination (in which the DMN is prevalent) which saps up all the energy from the constructive channels. It’s true that one has to learn to overcome that grief, and eventually some process will shift the network from the default self-ruminating mode to the tasking mode. But the shock divides the mind through contradiction and will in one way or another sap its energy (even when one seemingly shifted from the initial shock).
An example. Having a psychotic break after an existential shock doesn’t make you stronger by any means, it even makes you more prone to more psychotic breaks. That is like uncontrolled entropy growth. And one cannot reverse that process so the feedback-loop is degenerative. It makes one more vulnerable to vicissitudes of life and doesn’t teach anything of value. It’s a lose-lose situation. The only upside of such an event can be the understanding that one has no control over life and attempt to cut the dispersion to different directions of thinking, i.e. simplification. But whether it’s healthy or not in a highly complex environment it’s hard to tell.
Yes, there is a nice paper on this, Hunter-gatherer networks accelerated human evolution. Which basically states that small interconnected groups solve puzzles more quickly than one big group would.
Yes, that’s a difficult topic. The only solution that I have found to work when you are in such conditions is turning inward instead of outward. That is, all the time it is possible to do it. That’s also why I believe spirituality works, as one’s odds of success are miniscule and one is basically operating on faith alone.
It’s funny that I think that the very process of meaning-making (if meaning taken as intrinsic) leads eventually to nihilism. When one is thwarted and doesn’t get what one wants, the very meaning one was invested in turns against him and feeds life-denying attitudes. The only solution that I found to this is the Buddhist middle way, which basically denies intrinsic meaning, stating that all meaning only made up, i.e. relational, local. In that model I tend to de-emphasize the meaning making apparatus. But that’s not nihilistic, as relativized meaning is accepted. It’s like saying, it works, but don’t forget that it’s only local and not absolute.
Positive here. But I don’t despair, because all the conditions and circumstances seem to direct me in the direction of liberation. Everything else will not suffice. In games’ jargon, only epic win will suffice, everything else is half-measures that would not hold ground. I’m certainly not guaranteed of that, but it creates a somewhat healthy dynamics.
It’s not a problem if one takes it to be only a role. But deeply is not identified with that role. Some people used to call me a mathematician or a programmer, but those were just functions I performed, not what I am deep inside. I am neither limited nor defined by those functions. All I can say, I, indeed, simply am.
You seem to want to build a theory of mind (a good read on the topic by Joscha Bach, Principles of Synthetic Intelligence). And it may serve a valid purpose. But what I try to share with those questions is deep inborn childlike curiosity (that I myself get from them). Granted those questions may not be “your” questions and you may resonate with different set altogether. It’s actually good that you don’t have such a theory of mind, as you feel unprepared for their rawness! They are not meant to be answered by the mind, they are to lead the mind into impasse from which it cannot move, where concepts cease and silence prevails. That silence (albeit temporary) is the goal. It’s the data-point that the mind learns after asking such questions. Once it gets enough data-points of silence, it starts to prefer that state over the default one. For some it may take few months, for others—years of practice. There is a good post by Gary Weber that uncovers this process, Self-inquiry vs the egos/Is—How it works—the neuroscience.
Actually, from the theory of mind perspective self-inquiry is meant to get rid of the SRIN. So if one is tired of incessant self-talk one will look for any means to stop it. But the “I” will never agree to that deal as that would mean its own dissolution… Therefore the process of self-inquiry is itself paradoxical. You are either attracted to it or not. That includes any koan, not just self-inquiry as the aim of koans is the same—to get rid of the SRIN (which is by some tantamount to awakening). Only a peculiar “I” will agree to that deal. But Gary in Myths about Nonduality and Science says that cognition in the result is much higher. He gives a comparison by Hood’s mysticism scale, where nonduality/liberation scores higher than sex and psychedelics. A worthy read/watch, if you are into hacking your perception.
Ha-ha-ha! In some way “it’s too late” as you’ve already started contemplating over those questions. But don’t worry about that, they say that awakening is not directly linked with anything we do with our minds. If you are destined to awaken—you will, whether you want it or not, whether you’ve heard something about it or not, whether you do some practices or not. Contemplating these questions (or other koans) just makes one “prone to accidents” more. I think your mind is too curious not to ponder over some unanswerable question or another so you are not liberationproof.