Hm. This might be a valid point. Thanks.
SpectrumDT
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[Question] Things can be difficult in 3 ways: Painful, time-consuming, or uncontrollable. Is this reasonable to say?
Hm. This might be a valid point. Thanks.
Huh. This is an interesting read. Your mind seems to work in a very different way than mine.
Have you read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes? I have not read the whole thing, but I have read summaries of it, and your description reminds me of it. :)
Do you do painful things with no reward in the near future?
For example, do you exercise even if you don’t want to? (Here I am assuming that you hate exercise like I do. If you enjoy exercise, this question is not really relevant.)
Do you refrain from eating tasty but unhealthy food?
If so, how do you motivate yourself?
Thanks for the links. I will look at those.
You seem to be one of the relatively few people who have some understanding of my problem.
Demotivation is only a problem when it comes to tasks that I do not want to do—typically because there is a great delay between the action and the reward. It is easy to motivate myself to eat breakfast because it is an easy task with a swift reward. It is much harder to motivate myself to exercise, for example, because it is a painful task with no reward in the near future.
“I” control my choices in a sense, but this “I” is deterministic.
And I am not making any particular distinction between small and large events. Suppose I am hesitating over whether or not to eat a piece of cake. One part of me wants the cake; another part of me wants to skip the cake for the sake of my future health.
The part of me that wants the cake will use this argument: “Eat the cake. In the end, it’s predetermined whether you’re going to eat the cake or not. So you might as well take the path of least resistance. Why struggle and go through hardship? You’ll always end up doing the one and only thing you can do anyway. If you ingest more sugar than what would be optimal, then it’s because you were always predetermined to ingest that sugar. Do what feels nice.”
I find this hard to refute.
In the end, it comes down to being able to train yourself to purposefully pick and choose the aspects of life you choose to judge with fierce rationality and the aspects in which you allow a little leeway… or maybe just tweaking your definition of rationality as a whole to maximize long-term happiness.
Can you say something about how you did this?
A practical exercise I like is asking “If I had to bring myself to face the most ‘makes me feel bad about myself’ cause of my demotivation, what would it be?”.
Could you please explain that again? This sounds like it could be useful, but I don’t completely understand it.
[Question] How to deal with the sense of demotivation that comes from thinking about determinism?
Thanks!
I don’t agree that the solution to it is to shut up and go practice more. Or rather, it may help the individual who makes that choice, but it doesn’t help the community in general. It just means that in the absence of that one person, the other people will shift their philosophizing to other topics.
A good example of evaporative cooling. :)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-cooling-of-group-beliefs
The truths of General Relativity cannot be conveyed in conventional language. But does one have to study the underlying mathematics before evaluating its claims?
General Relativity makes testable predictions. Conversely, whenever I hear descriptions of “nonduality”, it is not at all clear that these claims make any predictions at all. Most statements I have heard about nonduality seem like non-statements with no ramifications. But I might be wrong.
You do bring up one example of a potentially testable prediction of nonduality:
A consequence of the statement “we are all One” is that we should be able to experience this unity. If there exist people who experience this as a reality (and not just as an altered state,) they should be able to detect the thoughts and feelings of others around them.
Why merely “others around them”? If “we are all One”, I would think it should also be possible to detect the thoughts and feelings of people on the other side of the Earth.
> The truths of General Relativity cannot be conveyed in conventional language. But does one have to study the underlying mathematics before evaluating its claims?
Yes. Of course you do.
I was surprised to hear this from you. In other threads you have seemed rather quick to dismiss mystical claims without trying to master the underlying “language”.
Neat! Could you elaborate on what the person in question “used” the idea of the Trinity for?
Your link has since rotted. But I found this other article which also paraphrases Batchelor’s paraphrase of the parable: https://thebuddhistcentre.com/westernbuddhistreview/does-it-float-stephen-batchelors-secular-buddhism
It references Batchelor’s book Secular Buddhism.
Because that was not the purpose of my post. I did not mean to invite people to “cast a quick glance at the occult community and come up with an explanation”. I was fishing for people who already knew something about the topic.
If they are trying to sell something—authors, bloggers, influencers—then I agree that this is a major concern.
When it’s just people posting on social media, I don’t expect there to be that many overt liars. Although self-deception is very much a possibility.
Very good points! Thanks.
What have you tried?
In my experience, meditation works wonders to improve focus. Some people might recommend exercise as a way to improve energy. (Meditation and exercise also takes time, of course.)