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Nick Cammarata

12 Sep, 5 tweets, 1 min read

I think the word conscious may have been net-negative to the field of metaphysics

I prefer thinking about experience. It makes self-reference seem like nothing special, just another experience. If we took an experience-first view of things we wouldn’t have cared much about the mirror test for instance

Experience is sufficiently broad it forces us to think about the constraints of the system, to come up with thought-experiments to find flaws in our current intuitive model of how things work (I think there are many). It deprioritizes lab experiments, which have been lackluster

“Which animals do you think are conscious” seems like such a simple and low-level question but it brings a massive set of assumptions I don’t think are true. It’s a linguistic virus that sets the frame and makes it hard to think outside it, where all the gold is

like, if a 1y kid is in deep suffering, I don’t particularly care if they’re self-referencing right now. I care if their experience of life isn’t bad, because none of us asked to be born and we all deserve to enjoy our time here

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Nick Cammarata

@nickcammarata

13 Sep

I would take a hut and small garden with homey aesthetics and good lighting over most 3000sqft houses

I want a good shower, good stove, warm lighting at night, foresty incense, surround sound speakers, cozy desk, sun lit during the day, and a nice bed. I actually prefer the house to be small, as I like spending most of my time in nature. Luckily this lifestyle isn't expensive

Don't let yourself get psyoped into buying the house society tells you to want. Go try a ton of different houses for a month at a time on Airbnb and see what you actually enjoy living in. It could be one of the most cost-saving experiments of your life

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Nick Cammarata

@nickcammarata

13 Sep

Most of my life I overvalued optionality and dramatically undervalued lineage

At least in meditation, startups / vc, and several fields of scientific research, it seems like the biggest predictor of speed of growth is who you choose as your closest teacher

Optionality helps insofar as it could give you more possible teachers, but it’s rarely the bottleneck

It’s usually one-off and relationshipy than scoring enough resume points. The front doors are often fake, so you have to be more agentic. It’s just people, networks, and trust

One reason optionality doesn’t help much is because you’re making as big of a bet on your teacher as you’re making on them. If you want to grow fast you need a teacher that isn’t already overwhelmed, you need to bet on them early, choose them before it requires optionality

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Nick Cammarata

@nickcammarata

12 Sep

in Miami for a little for a sun recharge lmk if you’re around

In particular I’d love to hang and chat with serious meditators if you know any here

Or if you have a friend with a jet ski I’d love to go with them 😍 one of my favorite things in the world

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Nick Cammarata

@nickcammarata

11 Sep

Anyone who can half or full lotus is a god to me. I’ve been stretching religiously for weeks and I’m 0.5 inches on one knee from Burmese pose

Poast poase

Specifically I’m 0.5 inches from a sketchy bad Burmese. One step at a time!

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Nick Cammarata

@nickcammarata

11 Sep

We need to build mecha-volcanoes to blot the oceans with beautiful new islands. We all deserve private little paradises

the islands themselves need little volcanoes too because volcanoes are incredible

and rapidly evolved friendly human-loving jungle creatures to keep us company that we can climb our mini valcanoes with

(rapid directed-evolution for friendliness is surprisingly fast!)

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