StartAtTheEnd

Karma: 388

Crocker’s rules.
I’m nobody special, and I wouldn’t like the responsibility which comes with being ‘someone’ anyway.
Reading incorrect information can be frustrating, and correcting it can be fun.

My writing is likely provocative because I want my ideas to be challenged.
I may write like a psychopath, but that’s what it takes to write without bias, consider that an argument against rationality.

Finally, beliefs don’t seem to be a measure of knowledge and intelligence alone, but a result of experiences and personality. Whoever claims to be fully truth-seeking is not entirely honest.

StartAtTheEnd 8 May 2026 9:15 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
It’s quite clear to me, I even added links to be transparent about the “background knowledge” I was refering to. Of course, it will be unclear to somebody unfamiliar, but that’s how it’s meant to be. There’s conversations on LW that I can’t engage because I lack familiarity, and explaining something in a way that even children can understand requires about 10-15 times more text.
I’m following those community norms. I explain myself, make predictions about the future, offer concrete models (physical, intellectual and social power as categories), and asked what category he’d put murder in. The overton window statement is an unpleasant truth at worst, but this is a website where we frequently discuss the end of humanity.
It wasn’t snark to call myself a non-conformist, I was essentially saying “even if my examples are all about people getting punished in ways that you agree with, the mechanics behind are neutral and may be used against you all the same”. I could just have quoted that poem “First they came for the X, but I did not speak up, for I was not an X” but that has been done to death. I have to disagree both that I lack tact, and that the topics warrants it. And a topic being taboo only results in public opinion being stuck in the stone age in regards to their understanding of it anyway (like mental health in the early 1900s).
When I get a response which is entirely incompatible with my own message, like the one by David above, I tend to guess at what they mean, and to present every conflict between our models, and this is probably a bad habit. Even here, I have to guess which parts of my messages people might have a problem with

StartAtTheEnd 7 May 2026 21:32 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Ari S’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
I agree entirely with that reason.
I think private messages should be able to be screenshot (because the user should control their phones and its apps. Any inversion of control seems wrong from a software development perspective)
I agree that corporations and the government are on the same side, so to speak. I think the media is more aligned with these than against. But I also think public opinion is being manipulated with tactics which make people distrust on another. Snowden was labeled a traitor following the leak of NSA papers, and this label made people reluctant to defend him.
If we assume that 40% of America thought of him as a traitor, then the media could have made it seem like 70% of people thought of him as a traitor. This could, through conformity effects, make people update their stance towards the perceived majority opinion, so that the rate of people who thought of him as a traitor actually became 70%. I believe there’s a lot of exploits similar to this, and that many people overlook them (or consider the change to be organic)

StartAtTheEnd 7 May 2026 20:51 UTC
−7 points
0
in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
One also needs to “move fast and break things” when discussing ideas if they want to learn with any efficiency. It’s a waste of both mine and others time to write “I think” and “in my opinion” in front of every statement. Besides, this place claims to be truth-seeking.
I present too many ideas at once, but I’m not exactly wrong. I think people dislike me because I seem to have different values and didn’t use examples which resonated with them (like death of privacy making it easier for ICE to deport people), but I’m getting the disagree downvotes.
To put it more mathematically and thus neutrally, the attack/defence asymmetry is growing, changing the payoff matrix in a undesirable way. To explain how social tyranny is tied to government tyranny, China’s social credit system serves for a good example and aligns with my arguments.
Can you provide more information as to what the problem is? This response only seems to prove my point, but I may actually be overlooking something important.

StartAtTheEnd 7 May 2026 15:26 UTC
1 point
−9
in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
What would you categorize such power as? I think it’s in-between social power and good old crime. But the former will be much more terrifying in the future (it’s only slightly scary now), especially for intellectuals who do more than merely read popular research and regurgitate it to less intelligent people. If a truth seeking person never goes outside the overton window, then they’re a fraud.
Many called for me to be kicked out of society a few years ago because I refused to take the Covid vaccine, as it wouldn’t prevent me from getting infected (despite the media claiming otherwise), because Fauci kept moving the goalpost on the herd immunity threshold (never getting it right), and because I knew it wasn’t 100% safe.
Kicking people out of society (which effectively kills them) will be possible soon. Maybe “bad people” (non-conformists and those who still use ‘the r-word’) like myself are the first to go, but once it’s in place it will be easy for whoever is in power to use it on whoever is not.
You might have noticed that some people can get fired for what they do or say in their private life, and that you often don’t need to break the rules on a platform to get banned from it, breaking rules off-platform is sufficient. You can even be punished if the people you associate with are unpopular. My point is that norms are changing towards everything getting tied together. Imagine criticizing the government, and then finding that your car won’t start. And that you can’t access your bank account. And that you can’t even leave for another country because you’re on the no-fly list. Even worse, you’re also banned from your local supermarket so you can’t buy food. Where you previously had X things that you could lose access to, with one misstep costing you access to exactly one place, you now have X places in which you can lose access to everything all at once. The merging of different contexts is causing problems like context collapse. What’s acceptable to say traditionally depends on the local environment, but if what you’ve said leaks to another environment, you might be attacked for it (especially if it’s taken out of context maliciously). Everyone breaks the law, but we can still be flexible about it locally, being judged only in that local context at that time. This is changing, and it will get worse with the death of hidden information and the forced legibilization of society.
I wouldn’t say social power irrelevant to most. If you Google “Young people don’t dance” you’ll find that cringe culture (fear of being judged) is deemed to be a main cause. Irony and ironic humor is also on the rise (together with Bathos) and that’s actually a defense mechanism against judgement.

StartAtTheEnd 4 May 2026 7:51 UTC
2 points
−2
in reply to: Roger Scott’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
Power probably ought to be considered multi-dimensional, but don’t let that be an excuse against updating your intuition. Some people think that feminism is the most popular in countries where women are oppressed, but the relationship is the exact opposite. In countries where women are the most oppressed, feminism doesn’t succeed as a movement, and in countries where women hold a lot of power, it ends up being very popular. There’s largely no victims of injustice in society who are recognized as such, for those who are recognized as victims already enjoy protection through that recognition. The fact that this is not well known is also a testament to how power allows you to decide what’s true.
In any case, the least misleading definition I can give you is “the most powerful are those who win”, and a good proxy is “those who hold power over you are those you’re not allowed to insult”.
Do you not think this sort of social power is the most important? I find that physical power isn’t worth much in the modern world, and that intellectual power can only protect you from individuals. Scott Alexander is smart, but that didn’t save Slate Star Codex. He had to publicly defend his innocence and assure people that he held the same political views as the general public. Despite the right-wing being about as popular as the left (necessarily true since Trump won the election), the social power between being associated with one over the other was enough to terrify Scott. I think it would have gone even worse for him if he didn’t have such standard values and opinions, and if he didn’t have social power himself (famous people speaking out for him and a large count of followers).

StartAtTheEnd 4 May 2026 7:03 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Roger Scott’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
Those bans are a work-in-progress. I expect it to take a few more years personally.
Senate Bill 73 was signed on March 19, making websites accountable for users use of VPNs in the state of Utah. Denmark tried to ban VPNs recently (perhaps not a full ban, just a move to “combat piracy”), but due to pushback it was dropped. Officials in France have talked about VPN bans in connection to a planned social media ban for teens under 15, and there’s a proposed EU regulation called “Child Sexual Abuse Regulation” (it’s also known as Chat Control”) and VPNs seem like a likely way to get past it, so I figure VPNs will be targeted next. VPNs also have legitimate uses which are hard to ban, so they might simply restrict their use.
When laws like this don’t go through at first, they simply try again and again until they manage, so it’s just a question of time. The slippery slope fallacy is rarely much of a fallacy when it comes to things like this

StartAtTheEnd 3 May 2026 13:35 UTC
8 points
1
in reply to: HoVY’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
I don’t either. Safety is merely the excuse for grapping more power.
I have to disagree with the drug law example. All kinds of hedonistic behaviour will likely be legal in the future, why wouldn’t it be? The old pressure against things like drugs was downstream of religious morality. That doesn’t exist anymore. The modern morality is that you’re not allowed to discriminate against any groups which hold power. What the media tells you is that you’re not allowed to discriminate against the powerless, but this cannot possibly be true. If a group had no power, then trivially, it would be socially acceptable to harm them. If it’s a social taboo to harm you, then that’s a type of power.
All super-stimuli and wire-heading you can think of will become legal, and there will only be a pushback if it gets so bad that it starts literally giving people brain damage (we have yet to see just how bad the consequences of giving babies ipads are). If these things are not legalized, people won’t be able to vent their frustrations, and they will instead start fighting back.
The set of things which will become, and are becoming illegal, includes anything which makes you unpreditable, illegible, hard to control, or able to influence people around you in a way that the public consensus does not approve of. I find that freedom of speech is a much stronger canary. Of course, they will argue that it still exists, by changing the definition of it over time “it only applies to the government”, “hate speech is excluded”, “misinformation is excluded”, “freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences”, and other poor arguments.
A thing to keep an eye out for is your ownership over things. It will all turn into subscription services, so that your access can be revoked at any time (for instance, if you oppose somebody in power or engage in behaviour which a company doesn’t like)

StartAtTheEnd 3 May 2026 11:12 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Rahul N’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
There are, but none will be allowed to exist. All tools which help privacy also makes it easier to get away with breaking the law or engaging in immoral behaviour. Online anonymity is under attack through ID verification, and they’re trying to ban encryption. VPNs are also increasingly illegal.
The system is trying to make the world more legible so that it can automate its judgement of you, the processing of your information, and the collection of your private information (since it’s valuable to companies and attractive to governments). They will claim that you must be doing something illegal if you want privacy, and since most people don’t want to look bad, few will come to your defense.

StartAtTheEnd 3 May 2026 11:02 UTC
12 points
9
on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
There will be no privacy anymore, because of a simple exploit (or molochian mechanic, if you prefer that framing).
1: The government says “We need more access to information to stop [taboo]. If you disagree then you’re a [taboo] apologist or somebody who supports [taboo]”
2: The public doesn’t dare to call out the government, because anyone who argues the pro-privacy position will be accused of defending [taboo], and merely being accused of immoral behaviour can ruin your life (fired from your job, debanked, blacklisted from flying). It’s socially costly to try to defend privacy, but you can easily virtue signal by looking for those who are brave enough to do so, and accusing them of being evil.
Life is split into two halves, our public lives, and our private lives. The former is fake and performative, the latter is real, and filled with illegal behaviour (almost always benign, acceptable in the context in which it occurs, or occuring around people who understand and accept the risks. Laws apply globally and generally, but context only exists locally and specifically, and if you act appropriately locally you act inappropriately globally, and vice versa)
The only safety which has ever existed is security through obscurity. Every system can be hacked, the attack vector just isn’t known yet. What’s a password except hidden information? What is a public persona except selective hiding of information? What is privacy except the right to hiding information?
Every intelligent people like to say that they’re on the side of truth, but if you think about what that means, and what must result from it, it’s simply a terrible idea. Most parameters become destructive for society when they get too close to either 0 or 1, and the (ignorance)-(total information) gradient is no different. If every action you had ever taken and every thought you had ever thought was exposed for the world to see, your life would be ruined. But this is true for everyone except maybe for extremely boring people. Also, “acting like you’re being watched” is not very healthy, psychologically speaking. The whole virtue signaling tendency might even be a consequence of this psychological pressure to look good at any time, meaning that we could be entering a feedback loop.
Finally, all your moral examples are about things you agree with, and which the majority of people agree to. Discrimination is bad, terrorism is bad, ICE is bad. You’re making it too easy for yourself here. The publicly acceptable opinions that you’re proudly sharing online now might be taboo 15 years from now. By that time, you will either need to change what you believe, or act like your values changed. If you change, then your histoy will be used against you. If you don’t change, then you will be attacked for your “outdated” worldview.

StartAtTheEnd 24 Apr 2026 9:54 UTC
3 points
0
on: How To Figure Out Life By Ben Franklin
These are practical, and I bet very effective, but I would only recommend living by them to workaholics. It does not lead to a balanced life, the social aspects are lacking. Reading makes you interesting? From my experience, it does not. People like to talk about popular media, food, music, local events and human relationships, and it’s hard to enter such conversations if you’re ‘out of the loop’. Perhaps the advice is just dated, information used to be rather rare, but now we are exposed to too much, so its value has fallen.
Sometimes, one will get the impression that if advice is good, everyone ought to know about it. This is dangerous. The advice works exactly because it’s not common. You’re playing a zero-sum gain, so all advantages are relative rather than absolute.
The advice has its place, it’s even very good, but it’s not optimal for all contexts. If you’re reassuring somebody else, for instance, then using absolute vocabulary is more effective. “I will have X done by tomorrow.” sounds better than some humble “I will try my best sir!”

StartAtTheEnd 22 Apr 2026 12:49 UTC
1 point
0
on: Posts I don’t have time to write
I like your attitude. I have some thoughts about two of your mini-posts:
1: Indirectness and ineligibility are both defences. This problem will get way worse as governments and the autism-cluster of people increase the legibility of society in order to track, measure and ‘optimize’ more. Boldness and honesty is punished, because one is increasingly (in modern times) guilty by default, so discourse becomes increasingly subtle and murky. Even thought the preference for open information is the norm on LW, I consider it perverse. Indirectness is basically clothing. It’s also taste (which is why we say ‘I need to go to the bathroom’ rather than ‘I need to take a shit’). Information hiding is common even in engineering, and the desire to hide ones ‘private variables’ from outsiders is socially, aesthetically and strategically valid.
9: No, ‘optimization’ for appearance is mostly evil (the exception is good-natured deception, i.e. art). Good titles do not correlate with good posts strongly enough. The incentive towards clickbait is not a healthy one and I do not want to participate in it. If the algorithm sorts by quality of the title, then it does not sort by quality of the associated post (popularity is also not a good metric, though the populace will disagree). I also recognize this ‘one has to prove themselves to the audience’ stance as herd behaviour (e.g. it’s common on Reddit), and the herd (the statistical average) is not a good judge of that which is uncommon (which good, original takes are)

StartAtTheEnd 4 Apr 2026 23:36 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratching the sore: how pleasure relates to suffering
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

StartAtTheEnd 29 Mar 2026 16:04 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratching the sore: how pleasure relates to suffering
His conclusion isn’t incorrect, and he got there by the same kind of reflection which may lead to enlightenment. But he likely lacked empathy, which lead him to question the validity of empathy. If he had had empathy, even these realizations wouldn’t have been much of a danger, as the affective/emotional empathy is harder to destroy through thinking than the cognitive empathy is.
Being dangerous is not bad in itself, sometimes the tree of liberty needs to be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants. The world has a tendency to degenerate unless one maintains it like a gardener removing weeds. But the unreasonable and ill are much more likely to default to violence, so the majority of the violence which occurs will be a net negative.
I think it’s true that “the dose makes the poison”, and this makes it so that good and bad things don’t exist in themselves. Nietzsche even wrote “Health and sickness are not essentially different, as the ancient physicians and some practitioners even today suppose. One must not make of them distinct principles or entities that fight over the living organism and turn it into their arena. That is silly nonsense and chatter that is no good any longer. In fact, there are only differences in degree between these two kinds of existence: the exaggeration, the disproportion, the nonharmony of the normal phenomena constitute the pathological state.”
I don’t like the framing that society needs to protect itself against those who harm it, but I do believe that the peoples of a society must protect themselves from elements which would harm their society (this subtle difference is important because society, considered as a super structure emergent from its parts, tends to not represent the interests of its parts).
I must also have benefited positively from thinking too much, since I’m basically devoid of malice by now. Even when I want enemies gone, it’s for practical reasons and not due to hate.
The wise use of thinking is to breakthrough to that holistic level
I feel like the east is really good at doing this by default, and that the west lacks this ability. The same is argued in the book The Master and His Emissary. this division can also be described as a lack of balance between the objective and the subjective, between machine-like efficiency and humanity, between qualia and replication, between materialism and meaning, and between rationalism and intuition. Perhaps “IQ vs EQ” as well. I’ve come to the conclusion that thinking itself might be pathelogical. Which reminds me, have you heard of the idea that language is a parasite? (I didn’t read that paper, it just seems like a good introduction to the idea). It’s a memetic entity with people as its host. I suppose I’m talking about language in the negative sense that people tend to talk about ego.
Anyway. I see what you mean about “the doubter dissolves”. I kind of did that to my own doubt. Just like how enlightenment tells you that it’s real, my experience of the world also considers itself real. It’s a reality, my reality. I don’t particularly care if other, conflicting realities may exist. You seem to rely a little more on the idea that enlightenment has to be true/real (your elephant seems to want this reassurance), whereas I’d be content with it being a state of mind. Your theory may be correct, I just happened to think of a counter-argument. But any belief and statement can be countered, attack is infinitely easier than defense, so my counter-argument doesn’t actually matter. My bad.
I don’t think “deriving pleasure from overpowering another” is sufficient for wanting to hurt someone. I like games because they make power dynamics possible. But we’re only enemies inside the ring, we’re friends playing the roles of enemies. But I do believe that evil mostly stems from weakness resulting in the mind employing self-defense tactics. Almost all psychological self-defence consists of hurting those around oneself by throwing ones own burden onto them, venting to them, draining their energy, fishing for compliments, using them as a means to achieve safety, manipulating them (e.g. guilt tripping), etc. (and this is why an abundance mindset leads to a large reduction in evil, and enlightenment seems like a state of abundance). And as you say, seeing the world as an extension of yourself means that benefiting oneself and benefiting others is the same thing. In a state of poverty, the framing is “self vs world”.
Decoration remains even after awakening
This might sound weird, but I consider the disillusioned eye to be perverted. The purpose of decoration is hiding that which is under, and that which is under is rather crude and unattractive compared to the surface. The underground world is ugly, the person below the mask is a mess, the face without makeup is imperfect, the “behind the scenes” of every performance is filled with problems. Now that I think about it, the state of enlightenment you’re describing is not disillusioning per se, but the process which results in enlightenment rubs me in the wrong way because it’s essentially the opposite of enlightenment (e.g. doubting everything to achieve the state of non-doubt)
An existential threat is something that threatens the integrity of the organism
I was wrong if you meant existential threat such as the emergence of superintelligence. I took it to mean “existential crisis” which I still believe is psychological. Most people might ask philosophical questions as they get older and reach higher states of awareness, but it’s only excessive anxiety (manifesting as doubt and the need for certaincy) which keeps one stuck with these questions. Many simply go “I am”, and this is an assertion, not the answer to a question, but an axiom which doesn’t bother to question itself. The immersion (grounding) is too strong, and the process which disrupts and disorients is weaker than the stimuli in the surroundings. It’s like when you’re about to wake up from a lucid dream and you rub your hands together, feeling the friction between them in high detail, and thus stabilize the dream.
I disagree that everyone thinks about questions relating to meaning. Meaning is a feeling, not a logical conclusion, so thinking about it analytically is a mistake. People justify effort to themselves, e.g. “Do it for your family”, or “work so that you can feed your dog”, or “If I improve, maybe somebody will love me”, but this internal conflict is emotional, it’s still attached to illusions of self and to subjectivity (the first-person view). The third-person view, and the analytical and detached nature of philosophy, is unable to find an answer because it’s detached. Meaning is a property of the first-person perspective, it dissolves when you look at life from the outside. Hence the importance of immersion.
Reflection only happens when something is wrong. Only anxious minds get stuck in reflection because they don’t achieve the feeling of resolution which is required to go back.
While I do have answers to questions, because I too have been anxious for most of my life, these are past conclusions and simple deductions. I no longer consider the questions meaningful nor the answers necessary. I simply am. Reality is what I can get away with. ‘Good’ is what I like, ‘Bad’ is what I dislike. If I want something to happen, I make it happen. Nobody is to blame for anything, everyone is fully responsible for everything which happens. I’m just a player who loves the game. When we play Minecraft, we don’t ask “What’s the meaning of zombies? And we don’t write long dramatic texts like “What’s the meaning of our struggles? We collect items only to lose them, the sun rises only to descend, we heal hitpoints only to get damaged once more”. In other words, the problem is that one thinks there’s a problem to begin with. The solution is to deny the problem, not to solve it. The existence of the problem is not a fact, it’s a perspective, an interpretation.
And how do you know that, seriously?
I experience it, just like I experience ornaments. And all information must come from the senses, right? So experience is the highest source of truth we have access to. Well, perhaps consciousness is first, experience second, senses third, and reasoning fourth, or something. I just don’t think that reflection is more correct than what is being reflected upon, as that is like putting the map before the territory.
Yes, there are times when I doubt I’m being sincere with the effort
I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t putting in effort, but my own motivational system tends to do what I just described (I solve my ADHD with coffee, which makes me more anxious. It’s not ideal). When I really want to do something, the feeling of effort does not even exist, because there’s no friction. I think the feeling of effort might come from internal conflict between desires.
It’s constantly anxious with regards to the future
You’re intelligent, so you should be able to make plans which secure a better future for yourself. You may have problems which make it harder for you than most, but you’ve probably found that, on days where you can be proud of what you’ve accomplished, your elephant lets you relax.
In short, when the brain judges “If I continue like I am now, everything will work out”, the elephant is happy. Jordan Peterson went as far as saying “The vast majority of positive emotion that you’re going to experience in your life is a consequence of pursuing meaningful goals.”, but the meaning is actually the substance which helps one believe in it and move towards it without doubt. It’s the absence of meaning, and not the existence of pain, which makes a goal feel not worth it. This is the default process, anyway. You can live accordingly, disrupt it, do neither or do both at once. Whatever works for you. You know yourself the best!

StartAtTheEnd 28 Mar 2026 18:44 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratching the sore: how pleasure relates to suffering
Especially considering how humane awakened people generally are
I’m sure some kind of meditations make you more humane, but not all of them. The quote on the bottom of that page is rather long, but here’s the first bit:
“I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ I even read somewhere that the Chief Justice of the United States had written that the American Constitution expressed nothing more than collective value judgments. Believe it or not, I figured out for myself–what apparently the Chief Justice couldn’t figure out for himself–that if the rationality of one value judgment was zero, multiplying it by millions would not make it one whit more rational.”
Reflecting too much on things doesn’t always make you wise. It causes things to disappear—sometimes meaning, sometimes morality, and sometimes the problem which was being reflected on.
That something appears false upon reflection does not mean that it is false. The self feels like an illusion if you think about it enough—but so does everything else. Reflect on the concept of illusion, and that too will lead to contradictions. There’s fundamental problems with searching for fundamental truths. Thinking, itself, undermines thinking, like how a fire burns what fuels it and destroys itself.
We are indeed that field
That is consistent with a lot of different theories, but I think our consciousness is too tied to our bodies for this to be true. Unless you restrict consciousness, so that the parts of us which feel qualia is part of the body instead of said consciousness.
Which as they say resolves itself on awakening
The awakening process itself happens in the brain, how do you know that you’re describing something external from the human brain at all? Enlightenment might feel how you describe, but feelings don’t leak information about reality.
Analogy of gold and ornaments made of gold
I’m already in a state where I’m aware of this difference most of the time. It’s a great example though, as average people can understand it. However, it takes a lot more insights to even start understanding how limiting language is. There’s no such thing as a chair—everything which can be used as a chair can be called a chair. It’s also not possible for men to be unmanly. Whatever a man does is, by definition, necessarily manly. Bad things don’t exist, as “bad” is a judgement and not a trait. I could keep going, but you probably know these already? There’s too many to write out, but the more you know, the easier it is to find even more.
Their substratum, is “real”
This seems accurate. But I previously wrote that only physical matter exists, so I agree that the matter which makes up gold exists, and that ornaments do not. But ornaments are not illusions in the sense that their substance is false. The gold does exist in reality, so I don’t want to deny reality.
By treating the gold as “ornaments”, I create a local story, which seen from the outside is a sort of overdramatization or perhaps decoration of reality. This decoration adds meaning. It’s not entirely wrong to call it “illusion” when one buys into this story and experiences it as real. However, delusion is only bad because it’s dangerous, and it’s only dangerous when it disrupts the ability to predict the future. Decorating reality doesn’t change the structure of reality, for the same reason that installing a HD texture pack into a video game doesn’t affect the physical meshes or the physics engine. It would indeed be dangerous to think that one could fly and then lean out the window, since this class of incorrect beliefs could lead to death. But I think rationalists reject even this decoration.
I also think it may be impossible to live in “the real world”, and that it would be very unhealthy in case it was possible. It’s often good to turn off the brain and live in the world of experience, but that is still a human experience from a human perspective, and thus decorated in a sense. One of these decorations is “morality”, and not even Ted Bundy is logically incorrect that the value of human beings isn’t an absolute truth. I’m not sure if these are nama or rupa, but I think you’re correct that some of these cause unnecessary suffering. But I think it’s a mistake to throw them all away. I throw away those which seem like a net negative to me.
Most likely your strong capacity for analysis helps you to disentangle from it
I agree. I also had a lot of suffering to reflect about. Half of that suffering was removed with psychological means, the other half was removed through self-improvement. I’m the kind of person who stops suffering when life is good, but I’m aware that some people always suffer even when their lives would be judged as good by everyone else. I’m not sure which situation you’re in, but the worries of your elephant might be rational (even if exaggerated). When a person judge themselves to be in the top 10% or so in social status, the elephant usually feels pretty good about itself. This is the case even for me who is naturally high in neuroticism.
As for understanding, I think it came to me because I had nobody to rely on except myself. It’s similar to the brain not having any escapism to grab onto doing meditation. Remove all alternatives and the brain will usually accept its situation and make the best of it. But learned limitations (e.g. learned helplessness) can also get in the way, so they should be dissolved once they’re not useful anymore.
I don’t model it as complexity. What I’m doing is ‘introspection’. But I don’t know why I’m better at it than most people, coule be experience or genetics. Deadlines close in time also feel like dangers close in space, so I can tell that the brain might use the same tokens for Soon (time) and Near (space). When many similar things become one, the calculations involved become much simpler. But some things cannot be calculated. I’m not sure how I taught myself to think in a way which can handle unsolvable problems, but I must say it’s nice.
What is experienced as an existential issue is actually a philosophical issue, which is actually a psychological issue. “The hard work I put into tasks does not result in a reward which makes the trade feel worth it”, this triggers a sort of reorganization, a reflection on the state of things. The brain then looks for something reliable to re-orient itself with. But a brain which is good at seeing through things will be unable to find anything reliable/absolute/fundamental to support itself. Forever.
People who are psychologically healthy do not have existential issues. They don’t have the answers, but that doesn’t bother them, because they also don’t have the questions which seek answers.
It’s rather questions whether there is any “I” at all
There is an I, but it might only be real in the same sense that ornaments are real. I keep my sense of self because I’ve judged that the positives outweight the negatives, not because I don’t agree that it might be an illusion.
Not identifying with ones problems is probably healthy, because otherwise the ego would feel shame about having problems. It would also feel bad every time its actions went against its identity. For instance, a person who identifies as strong and competent might prevent themselves from getting emotional because the ego protects the self from anything which would contradict and invalidate it. Hmm, that is probably also why being objectified feels bad. The brain protects itself from being devalued because that’s the same as being disrespected. This is because value is a social currency, and because people who are deemed more valuable enjoy better treatment. The broken window theory applies to people as well. I notice that some people are talked over (cut off) more than others in conversations, and that this correlates with their social standing in the group, even if nobody verbalizes or otherwise acknowledges this hierarchy. You can identify people with low self-esteem (self-assigned social ranking) because they let themselves get talked over more. They also take up less space, and avoid being in the middle of open spaces. I’m ranting again, but it’s extremely useful to be aware of just a few dynamics of this type, and once patterns like this are tracked subconsciously, it becomes effortless to do so.
I only doubt that it’s possible in my case
Your brain is probably going “Am I guaranteed the end of suffering? No, well, then I will only half-ass the effort”. You likely asked yourself about the probability of success because your elephant used that as an excuse to avoid acting on your advice. By the way, a thing which might stop rumination is attempting to do the opposite—ask your brain to complain as much as wants for a short while. Then write it all down, I suppose (it’s up to you what you do with it after). Remembering so many negative things at once might be painful, but it would give you a clear picture. You might feel better just by processing these things, but your elephant might also demand solutions. “Do the exact opposite of the naive solution” forms an entire category of solutions, though I only know a handful of its members.
I do think you’re on the way, too. A different path than mine, but it seems like a realistic goal

StartAtTheEnd 23 Mar 2026 22:04 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratching the sore: how pleasure relates to suffering
I don’t need to know what it is, I only need to know what properties it has or has to have.
Do you know Conway’s game of life? It’s turing complete, and the structure, life, calculations, and the information—are all the same thing. So you cannot remove information without removing life. You cannot do a calcuation with no squares. There is no distinction between a foreground and the background, or between a structure and its substance.
I think that human beings with thoughts are similar. Maybe not to the same extent. But you can’t really remove all the bias from a person without also removing some of the person. I can remove the noise from my computer, but it requires removing the fan, and most people don’t model these costs mentally. They think “optimization” means “improvement”, as if they could do an unequal trade. When people try to improve humanity, or society, they think they can remove just one aspect of something without removing others, and gain only benefits. SSRIs might help against depression, but is that really all?
This bias is so strong that Nietzsche argued that making society more evil would be less harmful than attempting to remove evil elements. The condept of Chesterton’s fence is only a first step towards realizing the consequences of naive attempts at improvement.
The field in which it all arises may itself be conscious
If consciousness is emergent, it’s very possible that it is. However, while we can describe something with math, which makes it feel as if things are made out of math, and as if math is some underlying reality, I think this feeling is misleading. I think it’s the brain confusing the map for reality. I think it’s more likely that there’s no distinction between foreground and background.
And since the human perception is literally made out of human, and occurs in human, we can’t be sure that the way we experience consciousness is how the universe would experience itself if it was conscious.
It helps me to let go of the psychological grip
Isn’t it enough to feel that it’s real and independent of yourself? You can let go and grasp again as you please, come and go whenever you want.
When my reality turns into a nightmare, I perceive it as real, but not as absolute. Being in a nightmare is a bit like a headache, it’s real but you know it’s temporary. It can also be considered a ‘bad place’, and one can move to a better place physically or psychologically. Bad places are real, but they’re local, so one is not trapped. In either case, the self is the creator of this nightmare, it can always be destroyed. It also helps knowing that, as long as your mind doesn’t break, it can’t actually hurt you. It’s also very unlikely that the mind gets stuck in a really bad state for extended periods of time. My worldview allows for “A reality” which is not “THE reality”.
Something that appears at one time and disappears at another
Makes sense. I still consider it real, just arbitrary rather than fundamental. It’s like.. The name of a folder on a computer. A folder needs a name, but it can be any name. No name is false, and yet, if you don’t like the name then you just give it another. Through this way of thinking, I can create the world that I myself experience, and consider it real, but also allow myself to switch out parts that I do not like. Each little piece is something that I can accept or reject, and with some effort I can change pieces or create new ones.
It means that self-rumination is turned off
I see! Enlightenment helps with that, but reducing anxiety to zero should be enough. And funnily enough, I no longer ask “what it all means”. Such a question does not point to a more real, underlying reality, but rather to a less real, derivative model of reality. In my hierarchy, experience comes first and theory comes second.
But it’s easier said than done
Your case is interesting, you dislike the dream so much that you sometimes wish you were never born, but you’re also really attached to it. I love the dream, but I think I might be less attached than you are, it’s pretty interesting. I’m not actually all that good at math, I just have a good spatial intuition and borrow concepts from it. And yeah, it does feel as if the world is made out of principles, but I think these principles are aspects of the human mind, after all, “duality” is one of said principles. Yin/yang, light and shadow, hot and cold. But when we meditate, we can collapse some of the usual dualities.
In my case it’s slightly more complicated
Yeah, most didn’t apply to you, I was ranting about how human beings tend to trip over their own legs. A lot of human behaviour ends up being the person hurting themselves. So we’re our own worst enemy, even when we blame other people and other things (like society, or reality). I suppose everyone does this, myself included, but that people do it less as they get older and attribute more things to themselves.
Profound experience of peace and tranquility
To really relax, one has to let go of everything that usually consumes energy, like judging if any sounds in the environment are usual or unusual, checking if one is being looked at, making sure one does not look silly from the outside, keeping track of time, etc. And these are usually difficult to turn off because they protect against danger. By wanting a break so much that one no longer cares to defend themselves, profound relaxation becomes possible.
But I’m more interested in perception changes. It would feel terrible if a male stranger, without permission, came over and started touching your inner thigh. But if that was a young woman, I assume it could feel nice (it doesn’t generalize to all people, but roll with the thought experiment for now). The physical touch is practically the same in both situations, but the perceived value and cleanliness of that which interacts with us, and the possible futures which may occur as a result of these, changes the experience entirely.
When I drink coca cola, it can feel refreshing, but only as long as I don’t remind myself that it’s actually synthetic, sugar water acid. Actually, my mind likes to remind itself, because it thinks that disliking what I’m drinking makes it less harmful, as if rejecting it mentally kept it from touching my physical body as well. Not only does realizing this allow you to ‘grasp’ less things, it also allows you to waste less cognitive resources, by defending yourself against less sensory inputs.
It feels like you are beyond time and it feels like the memory is wiped out.
I agree, but in a frozen simulation, nothing can be felt. Even feeling a sense of calmness requires small changes to occur in the brain over time.
I tend to philosophize
I’m guilty of it as well. Too much thought, too little action. I think it’s “need for cognition”. I don’t differentiate much between psychological issues and existential issues, since both occur in the mind. And the mind overwrite reality. A mentally ill person who thinks they’re the main character in the universe will get the benefits of that belief even if it’s false. As I write these messages, I also try to be truthful, correct and logical, but there’s technically no need for either constraint.
We just need to find a sequence of steps which get you from your current state to an enlightened state. An illogical path may be shorter than a logical one. I think “Who am I?” is a wrong question, since it assumes an underlying reality which is more real than the reality we’re experiencing. But you could also look within, and just see what resonates with you, and be true to that. That usually feels good. Throw away stuff which isn’t ‘you’, stuff you picked up because others did, because other people told you to, because you felt obligated, etc. But which always felt foreign in a sense. Perhaps the real you will appear once you let go of everything which isn’t you.
Perhaps it’s an echo of youth
It likely is, but I have more of it than I had 10 years ago. Even if you’re losing this yourself, there should be older models of yourself somewhere which have these qualities. Then you just reconnect with these aspects and reinforce their pathways. There are no real limits. I read a lot of self-help books, I might have internalized some of the positive attitudes over time. A sort of indoctrination of optimism.
There’s also methods out there for manipulating ones own core beliefs. This manipulation is dangerous, so I recommend at least having a notepad where you write down the “version history” of your own configuration. Maybe write ten sentences which make you feel in various ways, and track how these feelings change as you change yourself.
The brain has BIOS level access to itself. This is mainly testable through hypnosis and placebo, but technically you don’t need either. Sometimes, I can just “decide” that I’m not tired, and then feel more alert. And my brain knows how to cause changes that I wouldn’t be able to do myself, e.g. adjusting my level of empathy. You can also fight within the dream, you mentioned that you didn’t like your predictions of the future? If you take life by the horns, and improve yourself, that will make you feel much better too. If you have an issue that another person doesn’t suffer from, find out what they did and do the same. Almost all limitations are self-imposed

StartAtTheEnd 22 Mar 2026 17:54 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratching the sore: how pleasure relates to suffering
I don’t know anything about the brain in a dream
But there must still exist a physical location with bits of informaton which corresponds to your dream, and that is your physical brain. The contents of the dream is using prior knowledge (even if said knowledge isn’t true), you can’t see people in a dream unless the brain contains the pattern of information which resembles people. Human creativity can turn a shadow into a demon, but it cannot turn nothingness into a shadow (unless it already knows something from which the idea of shadow can be generated).
What’s important is not what neurotransmitters are, or if they’re real. Maybe what I’m saying is that “being” and “thinking” seem to be the same. This is why the boltzmann brain may exist as long as particles can appear. You can’t have thinking without physical matter, and thoughts are made of physical matter. This physical matter is also self-contained (that is, equal to itself). It exists, and its existence is the whole structure and nothing but the structure. Nothing exists universally, since existence is uniqueness, and nothing which is universal exists, for “existence” means physical matter at one and only one location, and all matter is self-contained so it cannot reach outside of itself. Thus, human beings can only ever learn information about ourselves, since learning occurs in the matter which we are made out of, and since information is made out of matter.
Here, I’m assuming that the universe follows something similar to rules of logic, and that quantum computers don’t actually allow “existence” and “multiplicity” to occur at the same time. Things get a bit more complicated if I’m wrong about this.
Now, it could be that we’re all a single consciousness, and that the self is an illusion (a sort of compartmentalization/tunnel vision), a false belief of being separated. Nothing I’ve said so far conflicts with that idea.
I’m basically saying “The map is within the territory, but the map models the territory as being within the map. The brain is wrong in assuming that the territory in the map is the same as the territory outside of the map”. Most people make this error when they think. They confuse the model inside their head for the thing outside their head. I’m claiming that it’s literally impossible to break such ‘containment’, and that there’s also no need to do so.
When you meditate, you can gain insight into yourself, but you can only get insight into “the nature of things” if this nature is contained within yourself. To the extent that you’re similar to the universe, learning about yourself can teach you about the universe. But if something outside is different, we will be forever unable to grasp it.
Senses and thoughts “lie” in that models of things are constructed from limiting information. The models are used to predict the consequences of actions, and at times, these predictions are wrong, and then the brain modifies the model such that the new information is taken into account. Over time, the brain confuses the model with reality and with the self. When the model is attacked, it feels like the self is attacked. If one lets go of the model, it feels like one lets go of the entire world. The model isn’t wrong about the environment it was created in (at least, it’s usually a good approximation), but as a being moves to a new environment (or the environment changes), the old model will be more of a hindrance than a help. This is how the ego traps the person, right? So perhaps it’s better to experience life without any models whatsoever, so that one remains as flexible as water. Actually, I think the models are important, but that one should not grow attached to them (more on this later).
What I don’t agree with, is the gloomy attitude that many people take towards life: “If I can’t predict the future then my knowledge isn’t real, and if I can predict the future then my agency isn’t real. I want a model which is perfect in every environment, and I want the environment to bend to my model! I want an easy life but to feel heroic, and I want to play forever but also to win. I want everyone to have freedom but also for them to be unable to hurt me, and I want to give into every impulse but also for others to respect me”.
I’m ranting a bit, but I think most people are unable to accept that one cannot have the good without the bad. That’s silly! Such a thing is only possible in our minds, which is why I’m a psychologist and not a rationalist. And being silly is fine, as long as one enjoys being silly, but a lot of people do not.
All processes are in interminable flux
If life is “becoming” then “being” is every moment of time in that becoming. Life requires change, which requires time. And the universe requires a series of states, and if a loop exists, it must contain every single state, for once it enters the loop it won’t be able to break out, as the markov property prevents it from having a high enough class in the chomsky hierarchy to have the “memory” required for this. But perhaps I didn’t counter this idea of yours well enough before, so I will try again below.
They are the continuation of interactions of the wider system
Yes, I believe so. And the universe cannot have a beginning and an end without breaking the laws of logic, and if the laws of logic aren’t true, then we can’t conclude anything, since “true” and “false” are nothing but logical symbols.
Actually, I will have to disagree with the quote you mentioned earlier. It would assume that exposions aren’t real (as they have beginnings and ends), which is silly. The idea that something has a start and an end also seems wrong. Everything since the big bang (at the very minimum) has been an effect, so there has been no causes since then. When we say “X resulted in Y” we’re just looking at a subset of this chain in isolation, and asserting X as a cause of Y when it’s just the previous state.
The universe follows many conservation laws but these are just symmetries and equivelences over some dimensions rather than others. A cube is equal under rotation, but is a rotating cube something constant or something which is in flux? A vector (1,2) has no location, so it’s equal to every other vector under relocation (translation), but not under rotation. If you scale the entire universe, laws of physics included, does the universe change or remain static? I’d tell you the answers to these questions, but as I think more deeply, all I get is more difficult questions, rather than answers. Category theory might hold the answer but it might also just be abstract nonsense. And already now, one needs a spatial IQ equal to that of Emmy Noether to be able to understand my explanation intuitively. By the time we arrive at the final truth, I fear neither of us will be able to understand any of it.
The only sure thing is being-consciousness
Lets assume you’re right. Being unsure still freaks out the elephant, because certaincy = feeling of power = confidence = perceived realness. Faith is confidence is belief is peace of mind. Without uncertaincy, I don’t think anxiety could exist (this seems to be supported by Lazarus’ research). So why doubt? Why value truth at all?
Perhaps this essay is about people similar to us? “There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic. They both desire to rule over life: the former, by knowing how to meet his principal needs by means of foresight, prudence, and regularity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and, as an “overjoyed hero,” counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty”
And very well, you can end the SRIN. But I find it strange that you’re discussing philosophy and talking about life, when you’re trying to solve a psychological issue. Certain insights can shut down aspects in the brain, but rather than learning about the brain and the mechanisms for shutting down parts of it, you’re learning about life and the nature of being, is that not a lot harder? You seem to think you have no control over either reality nor yourself, but I think we at least have control over ourselves (after all, meditation works, and you’ve chosen it yourself, even if you didn’t choose that choice)
There are the states where it’s seen through
Everything can be seen through, at least everything which can be put into symbols or words. But if “being able to see through” assumes “false” then everything is false, and I can see through even this falsehood—therefore, “being able to see though” does not assume “false”. That’s my conclusion, anyway.
Your rider is an uncompromising optimist!
Doing a few years of depression, I had constant negative thoughts, and I reflected on them, only for them all to break apart (usually leaving behind positive conclusions or at least neutral ones). But after breaking everything apart, I had to build something anew, since I didn’t like the feeling of any interpretation being as valid as any other. I didn’t feel like a participant, and I didn’t have any opinions to share. Perhaps I broke the wrong part of my mind. I didn’t reach that state with classic meditation, after all—and my mind is flexible enough to break itself, seemingly lacking safe-guards which keep other people functioning.

StartAtTheEnd 21 Mar 2026 16:22 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratching the sore: how pleasure relates to suffering
I think everything empirical must be real, it just could be distorted. If you have a hallucination about something, the hallucination is real, and it’s content is real just like how a movie is real (that is, the movie exists, but its content did not necessarily take place in real life). The only problem with “I think, therefore I am” is that it supposes an “I”, and that is assumes we know what thinking is. The logic is sound in that, in order for something to be able to hallucinate, something must exist.
I don’t think we can claim that the dream came out of nowhere. It’s like a computer program claiming that the computer it runs on “came out of nowhere”. The computer existed prior to the program, and it will exist after the program finishes executing. The computer is in a higher scope, and the program cannot break outside of itself, nor can the program understand anything outside of its own grammar, for that’s the scope of its existence. A computer program is not a structure which is capable of calculating and holding information, the calculation IS the structure, the information IS the structure. There is only structure. We can only experience ourselves, and we can’t think of anything external because every thought takes place, exists internally. So just like how a thought in your mind cannot break outside of your mind, and a character in a book cannot leave the book, I think it’s arrogant of human beings when their brains decided that the structure they’re embedded inside is wrong or fake. There’s orders of inclusion, scope and chronology which are broken by such assumption.
I’m not so sure it has a beginning and an end
You assume thoughts have beginnings and ends, and that thoughts therefore aren’t real. But I think thoughts exist physically. A thought contains information, it takes up space, and information must be encoded in something and exist in some location (these are both one). So the only conclusion possible is that thoughts are real, but that we have no way to verify that our thoughts about things outside our thoughts are true. And I will agree with this, but I don’t think it’s a problem.
Also, you think that consciousness may still be real, even if thoughts have beginnings and ends, so you only require the upper layer to be real. This means that the universe may still be real even if human beings have beginnings and ends. You’re only afraid that the uppermost layer is illusion, right? And I suppose you main issue is regarding the agency of the self, and now its realness.
It’s constant with regard to the observer.
If you take a thing which changes through time, and you model time as a physical dimension, then you have one static four-dimensional object. A DVD is also a static, unchanging object, but you can use one to play a movie, and a movie is visual and auditory information over time. My point about the orbits came from the law “An object in motion stays in motion”, it says “Something which changes over time will change over time in the exact same way forever unless its disturbed from the outside”, and the uppermust layer of the universe is a whole, so there is no external force to disturb it.
Heraclitus is right, but it’s because the entire structure which is life must either never repeat, repeat forever in a huge loop which spans the age of the universe, or have a fractal-like structure. That’s the only possibilities which does not violate “Always changes but has no beginning nor end”. This seems in line with the poincare recurrence theorem and the conservation of energy.
So, that was a lot of words, but it solves all these topics without breaking any fundamental laws, it just requires you to accept that local truths aren’t necessarily global truths. And this should be fine, since I’ve also shown that this doesn’t make the local truth less real.
You seem to want a better dream
Yes. But not because I dislike the dream. I’d keep dreaming even if it didn’t improve, for I’d still consider it better than no dream. So to me, destroying the dream would be a loss, not a gain. And, by being both the creator of the dream and the dreamer, it will be my own fault when the dream sucks, and I will have nothing external to blame or complain to.
I’ve experienced the ideal state before, or something similar. But in that state, I didn’t even care if all my friends left me, for I wanted the best for them, and if the best for them was leaving me, I’d consider that good.
When you’re in the state, you do experience it as preferable. But angry people also want to be angry, and depressive thoughts feel correct when you’re depressed, and drunk people rarely think they’ve had too much. You can only really judge a state from the outside, so you need to exit the state in order to judge it. I know I’m doing the opposite when I say that immersion into the moment is good, but this is because I experience life as a work of art, and there’s no wrong or flawed art, so it cannot be judged, only experienced.
I don’t think it’s the dream which is painful, even. It’s the self-torture the brain engages with in order to keep itself alive. For instance, it predicts a large set of bad possible futures, and then feels pain for all of them at once. It doesn’t even map good futures to feel good about. It basically stabs itself in an internal simulation order to motivate itself to avoid being stabbed outside of the simulation.
No possibility to learn from it
I think one can learn to use most poisons as medicine, even if it takes time. Human beings, somehow, manage to fight entropy. I think even anxiety is entropy, which is why people relax with music, rocking back and forth, by cleaning, and with rituals. We’re soothed by all entropy-reducing actions. We love order as long as it doesn’t drop so low that we feel trapped and understimulated.
But I think your way of thinking allows for too high complexity. People with downs syndrome live in the same complex world as yourself, but their thoughts are more simple, and from what I can tell, they’re usually quite happy people. Animals, too, are simple, and this lack of complexity does not threaten their survival. How could low IQ, and false knowledge, be a problem? Sharks have literally been around for longer than the north star, and they never discovered rationality.
If one is not involved with something constructive, it turns into restlessness
I think this only happens if one conditions oneself into such a state. If you know without a doubt that relaxation is productive because hard work requires rest, then I don’t think your brain will protect you from wasting time, by protecting you from relaxation (that is, sending you warning signals every time you try to relax)
One cannot just sit for undefined period of time and be alright with it
I think you only need to sit and look at a wall for around 40 minutes before the brain gives up trying to fight again you. The impulses to do something else stops as the brain realizes it cannot force you. I think meditations work the same way, they can’t be too short, as it takes a bit of time for the brain to change the mode that it’s in. But yeah, it will feel very uncomfortable for a while, and 40 minutes is just a guess, it varies between people.
You accept that there is some nature there beyond the facade of the “I”
Yeah, thought I wouldn’t call the “I” a facade. It’s real, it’s just not everything. Just like pain is real, even though other emotions and sensations exist, and many other brain circuits exist outside of emotions and sensations. When the elephant and rider is in alignment, it still just feels like I’m in alignment with myself. But this ‘myself’ goes deeper than my identity, persona and ego. I consider my entire body to be me. It doesn’t matter that it’s not. Two seperate people can be on the same wavelength and thus understand eachother, so I can also be on wavelength with myself, even if the components I consider one are actually disconnected. And I have introspective access to the decisions which are made by the brain, so I can usually tell when I’m lying to myself or acting on impulse.
You cannot will what you will.
I struggled with this in the past. Then I modeled it as “Neurochemistry is stronger than psychology. You cannot simply think your way to more dopamine”. Then I realized that the release of neurotransmitters are triggered by thoughts and experiences, things that I have access to. Close your eyes and imagine that you’re in a room and everyone likes you—your brain will increase your confidence a little, as long as you don’t accidentally focus on the fact that you don’t believe in what you see. The brain doesn’t really differentiate between the subjective and objective, and between imagined scenarios and real ones. Your reframing will affect perceived reality, and if you make that less threatening, then you will have a more relaxed elephant.
The only question is where it will go in such case?
Look at the destination, and that’s where you will end up. The brain is good at navigation. But if you don’t want to act before succeess is guanteed, I suggest reading this phrase every day for a while:
“Failure I may still encounter at the thousandth step, yet success hides behind the next bend in the road. Never will I know how close it lies unless I turn the corner. Always will I take another step. If that is of no avail I will take another, and yet another. In truth, one step at a time is not too difficult. I will persist until I succeed.”
Whenever I look, I only see intentions
If you tell yourself “Everything is fine” your mind will object. It should also show you the counter-evidence which caused the objection. As you “argue against yourself”, you should feel the source of the counter-arguments, no? Something like “Here’s a memory where you thought was fine and it wasn’t. Here’s a bad situation which has 4% chance of occuring in the future. Here’s the cognitive dissonance between your statement and how your body feels. Here’s a weak unpleasant emotion associated with the phrase, because you disliked it last time you heard it. Here’s the memory of somebody being nice to you because you didn’t look fine, which taught you that not being fine is valuable”.
You cannot really trick the elephant, unless it believes that you’re tricking it in a way which leads to a better future. But you see, there’s no need to lie to it. For the most part, it just wants you to acknowledge the worries, and to listen to it without dismissing anything. Then you can tell it “I hear your worries, I know it’s hard, but I sincerely belive it’s best for both of us if we do X”
The elephant is intelligent, but the rider can see further. I think they work best as a team. Even if you don’t like my solutions, most of them should lower anxiety, and make it easier to reach enlightenment. Unlearning beliefs which block enlightenment is at least as important as learning more. If you want the conclusion of EST, it has a lot in common with Zen: “both the enlightened and the unenlightened man are totally moving in the world of stimulus-response, stimulus-response, the enlightened man seizes a single space after the stimulus to choose, say “yes” to the response. The response will occur in any case (what is, is), and the enlightened man differs from the unenlightened solely in choosing the response, in choosing what he gets… when he gets it.”

StartAtTheEnd 21 Mar 2026 3:01 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratching the sore: how pleasure relates to suffering
I suppose that’s true. But aren’t questions and answers false? If I ask you how heavy a rock is, and you answer that it’s 7 kilo, isn’t our conversation happening entirely outside of the rock? Neither the question nor the answer really relates to the rock itself. So when you ask what something “really is”, neither the question or the answer is any more real than your experience of the thing, they’re both inferior. And a memory is, at best, a low quality imitation of an experience, it does the vividness of the experience no justice. The same goes for the re-telling of a story, one had to be there in order to experience the real thing.
For the same reason, I don’t think thoughts, models, theories, explanations and descriptions can get to the bottom of things. They’re all derivatives.
How do you know of such physicality
Through my senses. If you’re asking how I can prove that physical reality exists, that idea is really not something which bothers me. If you mean that it might be illusion or whatever, you’re right, but it’s even less likely that beings exist which have a shared illusion of something they call physical reality, and a whole lot of coherent information which just so happens to not break said illusion. It would be as if somebody faked an autograph by simulating an entire person neuron by neuron and then having them interact with somebody asking for an autograph and then compying it over from the simulation onto the paper. Intuitively, you only have more things to explain if the simple assumption is wrong.
Is there a reality that is distinct from the observer of such reality?
A changing thing can be constant. A stable orbit is something which is constant but also changes over time. And gravity is constant acceleration. The soluton to an equation can also be, for instance, a line. By “unchanging”, you’re actually asking for everything to be zero-dimensional (a single dot). I think we make a lot of unreasonable demands of reality. That reason itself makes wrong assumptions about things.
Therefore we operate through the principles of relativity
No, relativity is correct because absoluteness cannot exist! I meant this literally. Nothing is absolute, for there is no fixed neutral reference point. You might as well try looking for the middle of the surface of a sphere. It’s easy to think that ones own culture is reality until one meets other cultures. A person with a single watch always knows what time it is, but give him two different watches and he will have a problem on his hands. The problem can only be fixed by pointing to a new unique authority, like the clock on the church. But then you discover another church, and now the problem is back! Then you look in a bigger scope for the next unique thing. Similar problem to infinite regress and Infinite ascent.
Now, most people think that “universal truths” are “absolute truths”, but it’s really just that they made “the universe” the new authority. If you point our that, perhaps other universes exist, then they will say “well, math is objective! Laws of physics are objective”. But you can create different mathematics, they’re just axiomatic systems. And it’s possible that other universes have other laws of physics. Even if you arrived at a true upper layer, it would be finite and definite, and thus limited in a way, and thus exist as something specific and thus not universal.
No local patterns can have universal character. Things literally only exist in one place. Existence is uniqueness. If something is multiplicity (like the future), then it does not yet exist. And as soon as it comes into existence, it’s definite, precisely because every other possiblity is excluded at that moment in time. Every single atom is different. From this we arrive at the semi-famous quote: “All generalizations, except maybe this one, are false”.
I have a frightful dream
I experience both positive and negation emotions. Why do you decide to define the experience by the negative emotions? It’s not wrong, but the opposite is just as valid. For the same reason that these two statements are equivalent:
1: Every time I get up, I get knocked down again.
2: Every time I get knocked down, I get up again.
Both are a loop transitioning between two states forever, but one sounds negative and the other sounds positive. But it’s the one and same loop, mirrored.
Person doesn’t exist
I think this means “The (personality/ego/constructed sense of self) doesn’t exist”. Bu the generalization is true even for objects, and I meant the physical person. When I look at things, what I see is a function of my eyes. I cannot seperate what I see from eyes. What I taste depends on my taste buds, if taste buds do not exist then neither does taste. Beauty is also in the eye of the beholder. Thus, if a picture of a flower is ugly, it’s human to assume that there’s something wrong with the flower, but what if the problem is actually with the camera? When a person says “life is bad”, why do we assume that there’s something wrong with life, rather than the person who speaks such words?
Meaning is derived from just being and being ok with it
I don’t think mere being results in meaning. But I think that a person can endure a lack of meaning if he has a sense of beauty. In either case, I feel like enlightenment undermines itself. It cannot be a meaningful persuit if the persuit destroys its own meaning.
Challenges can improve the system
I just model it as two interacting forces with some incompatibility. Is two magnetic poles repulsing eachother challenge or conflict? What about the desire to be productive and the desire to relax? What about a guilty pleasure? I try to model things in such a way that I can trace a single principle from the laws of physics all the way to subjective things. This doesn’t always succeed, but it’s because the brain has different elemental operations than physics does. In real life, hot + cold is lukewarm. Your brain however, can experience the qualia of frost and burning at the same time, they don’t cancel out.
The mind seeks for ways to come to safety constantly
Yeah, but that’s like how an insecure person fishing for compliments. It’s an “error” stemming from a self-protective mechanism, and you can turn it off as long as you can believe it’s safe to do so. You could argue that one has to learn why, but I’m tempted to say “the answer is already within you, you can already do it, you just need to realize it”.
You don’t exist in a vacuum
I have access to my own nature. I can isolate myself and reflect on what I truly like. I can choose, but only because the brain is malleable.
You operate under the assumption that you have control over life
At least, I have control over myself. And I’m a part of life, so I have a little bit of power. And like you, I could make some good arguments that this power is an illusion. But if you look around the world, you will see individuals who singlehandedly seem to have a lot of influence on the world. It’s like those who are crazy enough to believe that they can make a difference are those who can.
Who is the controller?
I’m not sure it’s a “who”. It feels like some mutual understanding between the elephant and the rider, which is experienced as a mixture of agency and certainty. It’s not merely following a schematic created by memory, because if it were, one wouldn’t be able to turn their life around from one day to the next, and yet some people have managed this. The mechanism doesn’t question, it answers. It doesn’t ask “What is it?” It says “Thus it shall be”, it doesn’t follow, it leads.
One has first to find out what is meant by the word “I”
This feels like a limiting belief. It’s a bit like “In order to drive a car, you must first know how it works, and somebody will have to prove to you that it’s actually a car”, but any idiot can get in, turn the key and press the gas pedal, and off it goes.
And it cannot be done
You could say “Take a medicine, and think of yellow flowers”, and then no red monkeys would bother you. The reason that it doesn’t work, is that when you write “not X”, you’re also writing X. The reason it works in logic is because “not false” is evaluated to “true”. It changes into something which works. The brain does not seem to do this step, at least not in the same way.
That is apart from life
I don’t think anything which exists is apart from life. And since we exist, we’re part of life. I think your issue is that you deprive yourself of agency because you don’t trust yourself with it, and then you hide this fact from yourself.
Can you not remember any cases where you “woke up” and allowed yourself agency? This always happens to me when people I care about are in danger. If you ask me if I can get to the graveyard one night, I will tell you no, I don’t know where it is, and it’s basically impossible to navigate in the dark, and it’s cold and I’m too tired. But if you told me that my grandma had fallen at the graveyard and was lying on the ground waiting for me, I’d be there within about 15 minutes. And there are no if’s, it’s an assertion. It feels unconditional. Can you try similar thought experiments and capture this feeling of certainty? That’s probably the elephant you can feel. You allow yourself to use your own strength because circumstances legitimize it.
Now, these experiments might fail. You might feel like a victim instead, and wanting to call for help. That’s alright, it just means that your elephant considers it a better strategy to get the attention of other people who can help you. You might also just panic on the spot—in this case it would be because the elephant first panics, and then protects itself from the feeling of panic through a mental retreat, because it incorrectly believes that it’s the emotion, rather than the source of emotion, which is the danger.
If it works, I’d say focus on negotiating with yourself, and on creating mental framings which legitimize your agency. Fuse what you want to do, and what you know you ought to do, into one. Watch which objections occur, those are the limiting beliefs. E.g. “I want to believe the explanation I’m reading right now, but I want more proof first, as it may be wrong”. In this case, the elephant would be afraid of holding false beliefs, because it thinks it can be hurt by them. There’s an ocean of possible limiting beliefs, including “I don’t think I deserve success”, and “successful people tend to be bad people, and I’m a good person, therefore I must not be successful”. All self-defense, which is also self-sabotage.
I can explain more, but the solution doesn’t actually require understanding the solution. Neither is it the case that it will work if, and only if, I can prove that it will. Reality cares just as little about logical arguments as ideologues and religious fanatics do.

StartAtTheEnd 19 Mar 2026 20:19 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratching the sore: how pleasure relates to suffering
You must have a reason for seeking enlightenment in the first place, some reason that suffering doesn’t work well. I think there’s good excitement (thrill) and bad excitement (anxiety). And that there’s good insanity (slight mania, vividness, charisma, stong engagement) and bad insanity (mental illness and the mind collapsing under its own generated strain). I hope to flip as many negatives into positives as possible, rather than to remove the mechanisms.
To reflect oneself out of the system
The meaning of the quote is that this is impossible. When a person says “Life is suffering”, what they mean is “My life is suffering”. It’s about them. Everything in life only exist in relation to other things. “Nothing exists but the whole”. How a picture looks depends as much on the thing being photographed as it depends on the camera. In this case, a camera is trying to say “the picture looks like this in itself. I, the camera, am unbiased”.
In order to remove all the bias, you must remove the entire person, including the thinking process. You will not be able to remove “error” any faster than “virtue”.
There are insights that you naturally come across if you suffer enough. Buddha came across them, as I did I. They’re not necessarily true, but most of them are the experience of a previous idea breaking apart, and the mind freeing itself from something which used to trouble it.
Is it really life-affirming if it doesn’t invest into the moment? i.e. if it’s without “skin in the game”. Saying yes to everything means that one seemingly lacks preference. Well, the brain can give a positive value to everything all at once, it’s has slightly different rules from mathematical systems. And it is indeed possible to destroy the narration. But I think that is strongly tied to the meaning-making circuit of the brain? I experience meaning as “weight” and “relevance”. Weight is strongly tied to “caring” as well. Here’s some examples:
In Dragon ball, the power levels scale exponentially every season, making the old numbers feel meaningless.
In videogames, cheating ruins the value of resources because the value was given by scarcity. Also, leaving a game and coming back later makes it less meaningful because the relevance has decreased.
A way to momentarily get rid of anxiety is to tell yourself “we’re just monkeys on a big rock hurling through space” or to otherwise zoom out to a bigger perspective. This is an outside-in perspective rather than an inside-out perspective, making the brain filter away the self which is suffering. The ratio of space that you occupy in the perspective is also about a billion times smaller when you reduce the earth to a rock in space. I think this is WHY the method works.
Finally, the “rat race” makes one fixate on productivity, which makes the brain assign less values to things which do not further the goal of productivity, so the value which things are assigned depends on ones current plans, which explains why people who don’t know what to do next also feel a sense of meaninglessness.
These examples are not exhaustive of how perception and meaning is tied together, but I find it difficult to come up with methods which lessen suffering without decreasing weight, caring and subjective relevance, and therefore meaning. And meditation seems to work by modifying perception directly. I’m open to the possibility that I’m wrong or that my model is incomplete, but the model applies to myself.
Or you have to define what you mean by reality
Reality is that which exists physically. These words merely “point” at reality. Reality is not “ghosts”, I think you’re fixing the wrong side of the equation. The perspective from which reality appears unreal is a ghost.
It’s still ambiguous what I’m actually claiming, so I will be more direct: In order to live in reality, one must have no mental model of reality. When you see a car, you must see the car itself, as if you had never seen a car before. Your brain wants to pull up the concept of car that it’s already familiar with, and this is what would prevent you from experiencing the car as it is. I think one is the closest to reality when they have no preconceived notions, not even the knowledge of logic, nor of concepts.
But it would be a compassionate thing to explain to me that demons don’t exist
To the person experiencing demons, it would feel like that. But perhaps the person who has lost the ability to believe in anything except material reality would be jealous of such an experience. And find it cute in the same sense that it’s cute when a child believes in santa or the tooth fairy.
And fair. I used “development” to mean “adaptation to circumstances of life”.
Suffering leads to development when and only when one overcomes a problem. If one loses to the problem, it becomes a setback, and if the tension remains unresolved, then it’s just a passive energy sink.
Can you learn math without studying math? I think you need math problems to overcome in order to get better at math. The problem helps you find the solution, as the two are one. If you have math homework you just keep trying to ignore, then ignoring it will tire you out (energy sink). If the math is way above your level you become discouraged (lose momentum/energy). If you can do the math, successfully it feels good to the extent that it challenged you. If you were to design a video game and calculate the amount of experience points something would give, it would be a perfect fit to my analogy. And despite this all being subjective and mental, it seems to describe how physical growth in power works, too.
Are you sure challenges can’t improve a system? To grow stronger through conflict is almost the definition of life. The greatest growth results from the greatest suffering. Almost everything I write here I discovered on my own, because I refused the alternative, which was dying.
My entropy also increases when I read a new book, but then I chew on the information and integrate it into my worldview, again lowering the entropy. It’s similar to actual eating and digesting. And physical trainin and healing. If you want low mental entropy, I suggest you don’t learn anymore. Conflicting information reduce the coherence of your mind, increasing entropy until the conflicts (inconsistencies) are resolved. Even chatting with me leads to conflict (inconsistencies) which result in growth (stronger models). The feeling of mental clarity, and confidence, is likely just the minds certaincy about its own worldview. From self-esteem issues to confidence the only things which change are the certaincy of belief and the value assessment of oneself.
It’s a rhetorical question
If you think of things as “created” rather than “discovered”, then you won’t be bothered when you realize how arbitrary many things are. It also won’t bother you that different people have different worldviews. It also won’t bother you that some things are emergent, and that you can’t prove anything exists prior to the universe. It also allows you to create your own values and to believe in their legitimacy. About 80% of all existential issues disappear on the spot for anyone who adopts this view.
Tantamount to finding out the reality
I think integration is needed, not just self-tyranny. And I think one learns to know oneself, rather than reality. But the reality which is not tied to oneself is, in my opinion, irrelevant.
The reason I wrote that, by the way, is that one can focus so much on spiritual growth that everyday life is neglected. In that way, the type of victory does not transfer over.
The intention to avoid suffering is there
I avoid outcomes which are against my taste. Suffering can be beautiful, just likes movies which make us cry can be excellent movies. But why is this anymore surprising than people loving video games? Some even choose hard mode or hardcore mode, intentionally making the game difficult and frustrating.
Or who has the choice over preset conditions of one’s makeup?
Self-modification is doable. Meditation is self-modification too. And I need to know the mathematics of experience in order to create a richer experience. Imagine a fictional book character gaining self-awareness, and instead of breaking the fourth wall and invalidating the book, he chooses to remain a character and make the book even more thrilling to read.
Koans help one to get out of the car
Deep sleep
I only need to show that I sometimes exist in order to show that existence is real. I don’t really care about the reality which I’m not around to experience, and if I was only alive 17 hours a day, that wouldn’t really bother me either.
I’m not sure what experiments will align the most with your quest for enlightenment. I can remain happy even when the ratio of suffering to pleasure is ⁸⁵⁄₁₅. I guess I can teach you one way of escaping yourself, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. The brain can filter out background noise, right? You can treat your own suffering and thoughts like such noise. This would be a bit cruel to yourself, though, since you’d be ignoring their (your) suffering.
Most anxiety comes from not having things in order, and the best way to deal with it is to take life by the horns. Don’t ask for permission, and don’t merely hope. Cause what you want to happen, you have the ability. If you ask me “How will X go?” my first answer will be “I don’t know, I lack information”, but this is just an impulse, a lie. I know what my future will be, how my relationships will go, which of my goals will fail and succeed at this rate. I just have to look, and looking is scary, but if I open my eyes and also steer things in a good direction, then there’s no anxiety and worries about failure. I will know I won’t fail. I can even decide when to go to sleep and when to wake up (and I won’t need an alarm). I could lie and say “It’s unpredictable”, but I can feel my brain negotiating with itself, deciding before it falls asleep if it wants to wake up or sleep until it’s rested. I’ve just sometimes pretended I didn’t know. This is probably what is meant by “There is no try”.
Let me quote “EST, playing the game the new way”, for I just remembered where I’ve seen this idea before: “You have a remarkable ability which you never acknowledged before. It is, to look at a situation and know whether you can do it. And I mean really know the answer for you. And all I’m saying is that if you can see that you can do it, go on and do it”. This requires some level of alertness above that of self-deception and autopilot, but that’s not a very high level. It also requires you and your subconscious being somewhat on the same page (you will know!).
Regarding favorable states, they get easier as you have more control over yourself. Can you relax on command? What about hearing a spoiler and then intentionally choosing not to commit it to memory? Can you placebo yourself without a sugar pill? These things are all quite fun.

StartAtTheEnd 18 Mar 2026 17:34 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: Scratching the sore: how pleasure relates to suffering
I hear that a lot. But I think suffering is just a broader category of pain, which includes more complex feelings and discomfort stemming from thought rather than physical sensations. I still think that promoting this concept to metaphysics is wrong, suffering is not a part of life, it’s just a function of the body. Human cognition has a built in fallacy which intentionally externalizes internal issues. E.g. when you’re angry, the whole world might seem annoying. When you’re sad, the whole world seems unfair. The projection is a quirk of the mind, but it tricks even intelligent people into writing books “about life” which are really just about themselves. Like Nietzsche concluded:
“It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.”
However, it’s valid to model pain as sensation, and suffering as the interpretation of the sensation, and then to acknowledge that the latter can be controlled by the individual.
Pain is there as an indicator to keep the body going and it will be there after awakening
It’s only there as long as the brain deems it useful. The brain can learn that nobody cares if you cry, and then become unable to cry entirely. It can learn that shame is illogical, and become unable to feel shame. It can learn that backpain is normal, and make your backpain fade into the background so that you don’t notice it anymore.
One cna experience a dimensional collapse, either in the brains signaling or in ones ability to listen to it. Some people are blind to faces, others like empathy, others lack theory of mind, others are asexual. I can’t tell if this is a result of “getting used” to something, or the brain just discarding a frequency entirely because it doesn’t have a use, but one should be careful not to accidentally trigger these changes.
I also think that disabling the internal narrative might be bad for your subjective experience of life, since the story being written might stop feeling like a story. You need to immerse yourself into a story in order to feel the meaning of it and in order to sympathize with the characters. If a character is introduced and dies 30 seconds later there’s little emotional impact, precisely because it takes time for the viewer to get attached to the story and its characters. A common way to feel less suffering is to reduce the mechanism which causes over-investment into a story, but this method has hidden costs.
But you were happy to reduce it, see?
I thought it was interesting more than anything. I’m not afraid of suffering, but it’s reason. When my body is hurt, I’m afraid that it might be permanently damaged, the pain signal is secondary, and if I were to reduce the dimensionality of signal, my life would also lose depth.
And again, the concept itself is flawed. If I love chocolate, and this determine that I choose it over vanilla, how does does that invalidate the choice as being my own?
I don’t think objective reality is a harmful fiction, but the belief correlates negatively with intelligence, so less intelligent groups will claim to fight for “the truth” as they actually fight to spread their own personal values while combating conflicting values. Like with egoism, the desire to be right leads to hostility towards those who disagree. But in cultures, this self-defense is often necessary since it protects against subversion by other cultures looking to propagate themselves.
One has to discover it first in oneself
And I’m not sure I agree with this. Why do you think understanding beats ignorance? Reality doesn’t change by you understanding it, and philosophers don’t strike me as happier nor as more competent than average people. Is the foreground is the most valuable, then isn’t every experience worth more than its explanation?
I consider things like questioning the realness of reality to be a serious mistake. And given how intelligent people do this more than dumb people, intelligence is a mistake. General intelligence conflicts with narrow intelligence, but we’re narrow beings in narrow circumstances. It does us no good to think outside of the scope in which we exist, especially not if it leads us to question the only scope in which we *can* exist.
I don’t trust my brain that much
Since the foreground is the only thing which is real, every experience you have is real. Your brain too is more real than any theory. If you tell me that you’re sad because a demon is after you, then the sadness will be real, even if the reason is false. And to you, the experience would be real.
“Necessary friction for development”, you say. I don’t personally value development except as a hobby. If the world changes twice as fast, I think we’d just destroy ourselves twice as fast. But I do find it strange that you want to get rid of suffering, since it exists precisely to create a friction which results in development. And you think development will continue without suffering, so why wouldn’t a country drift even with strict policing of social norms?
Consciousness
I think consciousness and the moment itself is “foreground”. Things which are background would be anything processing what is experienced. Further in the background is models built from what’s processed. Further still is meta-thinking.
Not even pain
But in novels, characters bite their own tongues in order to sober, because pain grounds them in the moment (grounding techniques too, focus on the sensations of the body). So this seems more like a method to get away from unreality (e.g. doomscrolling).
They are not healthy nor useful
Why do you believe so? Except in this one way, in which I’ll agree: Because we’ve created a modern society which is somewhat incompatible with our biological selves. If you ask me, the error is not our failure to conform to society, but the ridiculus action of building a world which we’re incompatible. It happened in such a stupid way, too. We constructed it out of ideals! Ideals are ideal because they symbolize something which is not the case, we value them because we want them to be true, which is the opposite of them being true.
I could make my happiness not depend on anything, at all. But if I was happy even as my life fell apart, wouldn’t that prevent me from taking action to fix it? The brain seems to think so, which is why it’s so hard to turn off this dependency.
Conquering yourself and conquring reality is two different tasks.
Zen koans
These exist not the find the solution to a problem, but to make us realize that we can deny the problem itself. Koans aim to break the map, so that one may experience the territory. For instance, I deny that suffering is a problem, and because of that, I don’t feel the need to solve it.
Pre-set configuration of this brain.
This is what I meant by “Your brain is your axiomatic system”
Conflict is dissipation
It’s two contrasting forces. Three outcomes are possible:
1: force A is stronger than force B and consumes it. 2: Force B is stronger than force A, forcing A to yield to B. And 3: The contrast itself is denied. Force A and force B no longer interact.
That which does not kill you (force you to yield) makes you stronger (increases your energy), but you may choose to deny the conflict entirely (Amor Fati, turning the other cheek, radical acceptance, denying the problem, etc.)
Depression and low self-esteem is excessive failure (yielding). Mania and grandiose delusions is excessive victory/overcoming.
You can hack this value, but doing so often puts you out of alignment with other people, and it may result in reckless and dangerous behaviour since your self-model may predict victory where you’d lose.
It’s heat and no free energy
Heat is a result of having too many ongoing battles. You should either win them or lose them. Being undecided on a lot of things is what makes you feel trapped and aimless at the same time.
You need information if you wish to update your own model of yourself in a way which is accurate. But it’s a ‘challenge’ of power, not of truth. Politicians keep lying, for that’s what makes them win. If you’re playing the truth game and they’re playing the power game, I’m afraid that’s why you’re not doing well in life.
It was a trick
The entire quest for knowledge seems to end with the conclusion that the quest for knowledge was a mistake, and that only action will suffice. When you take something far enough, you end up with the opposite. The greatest act of living will kill you. Morality taken to its extreme is immoral. Rationality taken to the extreme is irrational.
I worded myself badly, the background does exists, it’s just not physically real. It’s simulacra. The map (background) is simulacra of the territory (foreground). I’m committing an error (thinking) in order to show you that it’s an error. It’s like saying “those who don’t understand, speak. Those who understand, remain silent”. Zen Koans exist because here’s a class of errors which can only be taught through that same error.
how do you know that you are?
Something thinks, therefore something is. But the issue here is not the lack of proof, it’s wanting a proof in the first place. The proof exists in the map, and I’ve already argued that the map is of secondary importance. Do you not wish to be free of existential problems? If you deem reality more real than thought experiments, then thought experiments (e.g. boltzmann brains) won’t threaten your belief in reality.
I won’t write my experiments this time as the comment is already too long for my taste. But I can tell you that if you have a belief which relies on nothing, then no attack exists which can harm said belief. You could write a proof that I didn’t exist, and I’d just laugh at the concept of a map of the territory claiming that the territory its mean to approximate is wrong. It’s like taking a picture of the sky and claiming that the sky is wrong because the picture looks different. Anyway, can you provide more information about the problem you want to solve? Right now I’m just sharing random insights, and I don’t know which may be of use to you