on my meditation retreat this week a big theme was emotions, and feeling them
I often have the experience that my emotions are affecting my body but not "me", e.g. I can sense that I'm smiling genuinely but there's no internal warmth or gladness associated
Dear Christians: That feeling of "lust" as being drawn to a mental object is known in Buddhism as tanha and there is a fairly straightforward mental move you can do where you closely observe the mind as it is exposed to a "lustful" object and in doing so realize
the object is completely empty of lust, it only exists in your mind, and your behavior is simply habitual mental conditioning. Do this a couple dozen times and you can completely solve this problem, for the benefit of all women in your congregation.
Oct 12, 2020 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
self-inquiry (e.g. Whom Am I?), is like broadcasting a ping to the whole network and measuring the responses times to identify subnetworks and even nodes that are holding up traffic
faster and faster pings allow higher and higher resolution maps of the network. the slowdowns are where the network is busy processing ancillary information (trauma/suffering=ego).
Oct 10, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
if you go all the way up
and all the way down
and you get to the same place
that's a hint that there's another dimension if you zoom out
spirals within spirals within spirals...
Oct 2, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I want to feel sad.
What's the saddest movie or show or podcast or tweet thread you recommend?
Oct 1, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
did another fun meditation on my dog walk today. I started by noting colors, as quickly as I could for whatever caught my attention.
red. brown. yellow. green. green. green. brown. brown. black.
then I slowed down and broadened my awareness to note a single color.
and it was really cool how whatever color I was noting just popped out of the landscape.
Sep 30, 2020 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
during the second half of my meditation last night, I moved sequentially through the sensory modalities and linked them more clearly with the chakras than I've ever done before.
in each case, the goal is to model the sensory input as well as possible by intense concentration on that sensory sphere. as in the visual experiments, better and better models allow the brain to invert the model and essentially cancel out the input.
Sep 30, 2020 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
I had a really fun meditation last night where I could observe how the visual cortex generates its model of the world and projects it onto the first visual screen.
I was in a dark room looking out through my eyelashes so I could regulate the amount of light coming in.
I think this method could be turned into a nice scientific experiment by precisely regulating the amount of light coming into the eyes.
Sep 29, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
the way I visualize the ego self is as an electrochemical snake eating its own tail. a circular network of neuronal connections that is self-stimulating, which arises as a natural, unavoidable consequence of having a huge, electrically noisy brain.
meditation practices are essentially a way to starve the snake. by repeatedly directing attention to any other object, they siphon off cycles that would have gone to support the ego cycle into something else. cessation and fruition happen when the self-stimulating chain breaks.
Sep 28, 2020 • 12 tweets • 1 min read
if you love it let it go
if you hate it let it go
Sep 17, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
80kg * 0.6 water fraction / 3kg/day = 16 days to turn over all the water in your body.
on average the cells in your body turn over every 7 years
I just smoked tobacco for the first time AMA
fruitier than I was expecting
Sep 16, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I'm no expert on mantra meditation but I have some ideas about it... using a video game analogy.
basically the idea is that mantras are like button combos in fighting games. individually the syllables have some basic action, but when you combine them in particular ways they provide extra functions
Sep 13, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
one technique I've found useful, with a computer analogy: imagine your awareness is like a virtual machine that gets spun down and up again every time you blink. naturally that limits the length of any computations that can be done on the VM.
this is useful because it circumvents the halting problem, but it also limits how deep you can go.
so first practice not letting the VM shut down. close your eyes and when you get the urge to blink, just watch the urge arise and pass away. follow the continuity of your awareness
Sep 7, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I'm having a hard time getting this one thing into words. it's about beauty. and algorithms.
it's basically an arrangement where someone says I have an idea to make a beautiful thing and everyone else says ok let's see it and also the someone is a bird
Sep 7, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I was also asked to adjudicate between two trees in a small area. the younger gentleman pointed out that the elder gentleman, bless his heart, was consuming more light than he strictly required at his age, and that perhaps it was time to retire.
I agreed, and if I were the local treetender I would have asked the elder trees consent, and then, if given, I would have chopped him down and made room for the younger tree to flourish.
Sep 3, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
what if we could memorize blocks of code and our brains could translate it into cerebral machine language and compile it, and then we could execute it at will. has anyone even tried?
savant syndrome might suggest it is possible
Sep 3, 2020 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
astronomers and space scientists are amazing at pulling every last drop of information from the data from telescopes and space probes.
we need to get some JPL engineers and electrophysiologists and say "treat the human body as a space probe. what info could we get from it?"
then bring in some AI researchers and computer scientists and game devs and say: given this data, what kind of models of the world could you make?
Sep 2, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I know π to the first 128 digits because I was bored as a freshman in college.
I've actually found 2 useful functions for this knowledge: 1) stupid party trick (at nerd parties) 2) an internally calibrated metric for intoxication level
the second is actually pretty interesting because different chemicals have greatly different effects.
there are 2 parameters I can measure: 1) length 2) speed
alcohol has a strong effect on (1). each drink after the first cuts about 20% from the number of digits I can remember
Aug 31, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
ego is a machine learning weaver that analyzes patterns in the environment, abstracts them into Features/Archetypes, and spools those into threads of different colors.
then it continually weaves those threads together into a living, beautiful, completely unique tapestry.
You can make a list of the spools that make up your tapestry
🧵I am a programmer
🧵I am a scientist
🧵I am a soccer player
🧵I am a man
🧵I am smart
🧵I am kind
🧵I am hungry
🧵I am young
🧵I am old
then just go down the list and ask yourself: is that who I REALLY am?
Aug 29, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
notice all of the wonderful sights and sounds that your cell phone can render. now notice that your brain is a supercomputer many orders of magnitude more powerful than any phone. what would you do if you had direct access to that kind of computing power?
would you simulate some 3D objects? buildings? cities? personalities? Selves? deities? just how powerful is it? can you find the limit? these are not theoretical questions, but they can be scary questions. what if you lose control? get lost in your creation? simulate demons?
