Mythology is like a political constitution for the psyche that engages with it immersively

The images of Odin or Zeus, for instance, resonate with certain parts in us, and the cosmology that puts them in the center makes us look to those parts as decision-makers in our own lives How is your psyche organized? Which parts get to decide? What are their personalities like? What aesthetics do they resonate with? What other parts have influence over you, and does your center part allow or resist them?

What is your implied mythology?

Hero's first journey Myths are often writ too large. It becomes difficult to relate to them. This circle of security, which I first encountered at my niece's kindergarten, is much more relatable. I think it generalizes quite well, far beyond kindergarten

It's important to acknowledge and come to terms with having an animal body. That includes an organic mind. Accept the way it produces a world and blows life into it, where spirits are as natural a component as geometry. Both projected onto reality as a peculiarly human interface "Truth" ought to go back to just being an honorific; a title we give to perceptions or conceptions we trust or believe in. A stamp of approval, a mark telling us that this idea deserves to be spread around the community. A memetic fitness signal

Don't identify with your body—its appearance and moods etc. Identify as a good spirit possessing your body, on the one hand using it as a vehicle for your own aims, and on the other, attuning to it and taking better care of it than its lazy energy conserving instincts ever could A daimon or genie is a guiding spirit imagined in the 2nd person. A "soul" (or whatever you want to call the good spirit possessing your body) is similar in kind, but imagined in the 1st person. I guess which roles to use in your own Cartesian theater is an artistic choice 🎭

Compare experience with a landscape painting. The painting may be expertly done, and very realistic in the sense of accurately reproducing the sensory impressions one would have from the landscape directly, but materially, it can't escape being made out of paint Similarly, experience is made out of what you might call "dream stuff", bc it's all the same components we encounter in dreams, just expertly "tuned" by an unconscious perceptual process to create a live predictive model for a continuous stream of events registered at our senses

Can the universe be losslessly compressed so that it fits in a mind? Science implicitly aims to do something like this. It's a ludicrously ambitious goal, which is great when you're using its resonance to search for patterns with great representational capacity, but I believe it's impossible to completely achieve

There are really two yous: one is the transcendental you, the organism generating the world you experience. The other is the model you have of yourself, inside of that interface world

The body you see in the mirror *is* your homunculus. The Cartesian theatre is wide as the sky

https://twitter.com/metaphorician/status/1541557819366940673

All our minds can ever know, even in theory, is within the small circle in this diagram, but that world is just a virtual model of the real one. We project these ideas about the world onto reality, and immerse ourselves in them, mistaking the inner circle for the outer

I want to learn more and more to be a this-chooser

I think I like that term better than "yes-sayer", because what I need to accept is specifically this: this body, this life, these circumstances. The specifics of reality as I understand them, from my embodied access point I don't mean choose in the sense of "this is better than that", only in the sense that I accept my life and volunteer for it

When we can prompt an AI to produce sensory experiences with pretty much exactly the features we want, we'll all start to actively explore feature space, and start to think like author-artist-directors With the increased exploration, we'll also find real gems a lot faster. We'll be like ants of creative imagination going out in every direction, finding ridicoulous bounties of novelty to bring back to the culture hive for mass digestion

What's a moon landing event for feature space exploration?

(where DALL-E could be the equivalent of, I dunno, an early flying machine or something) Some computer games try to impress players by offering huge game worlds, with THOUSANDS OF PLANETS to explore, but exploring quickly gets tedious if the planets are too similar. What matters for keeping the interest of players is how expansive games are in feature space

Giving up produces reasons to give up. This is the mechanism by which depression can trap you Hopelessness makes you withdraw and distract yourself with escapism, which over time drains your energy capacity and makes your life circumstances worse, giving you more reasons to feel hopeless

https://twitter.com/metaphorician/status/1529402905651994624

After years of floundering, I think I'm finally getting it: You get energy by spending it. The fuel tank metaphor is completely misleading. The body supplies energy to meet demand. The tank *expands* if you use a lot of fuel. In other words, biology is fundamentally antifragile Placing heavy demands on a machine grinds it down. Biology, on the other hand, grows and strengthens in response to challenges, as long as they're not completely overwhelming

100 overly ambitious blog post ideas, for
@threadapalooza 1. The attentional body

An amoeba-like moving and extending blob of dilute awareness, in physical space and abstract areas of interest, within which a more concentrated core of attentional focus can move. Using this visualization as a language to describe features and effects.

It's gonna be wack when the Earth does this I watched this video after posting the above as a joke, and apparently it was a real worry for a while! 🤯

They don't know about beans

https://twitter.com/Quicktake/status/1369947733008781312

I really love beans btw. No idea why I never ate them before I had to after going vegetarian. I'm not a strict vegetarian any more, but I still eat ~90% plant-based, largely because I just love kidney beans

I've tried to make a first rambling youtube video for a few days now. I keep doing dry runs where I come up with great ways to phrase things, which I forget when I hit record, making me all frustrated and brain freezy. Learnt my lesson: No more dry runs. We'll do it live! The struggle has been constructive though! I'm trying to summarize my core beliefs in ~10 minutes, and this exercise in compression has been yielding some nice new broad strokes to my worldview canvas

Weird meditation prompts thread Inflate your awareness from the inside of your body to the surface of your skin. Feel all of your skin at once.

Close your eyes and unfold skin space into a blanket.

Wrap the world in the blanket. Feel it breathing.

Enlightenment is this: we don't live inside our experiential world, our experiential world lives inside us.

Use of the word 'enlightenment' is taboo, but it's just a simple metaphor that has been subject to an absurd meaning inflation. I think we should be more relaxed about it. I should add, what I'm referring to by "our experiential world" is what I call virtual in this clumsy diagram. It is our mental model, which we project outside of our minds to get a handle on a directly inaccessible reality.

https://twitter.com/metaphorician/status/1380234440270622724

I'd love to see a philosophical VR game with an Inception-like plot, where you put on virtual VR goggles and enter into more and more simplified worlds. The main point would be to amplify the feeling that experience itself is virtual, even after you take off the real goggles. There are other philosophical ideas that could be explored, like synesthesia and how it relates to our sense-making capacities.

And you could point out phenomenological aspects, which is hard with words, giving you a categorized tour of the feature space of your own experience.