Ok, so a thing that has been BLOWING MY MIND laterly is that people seem to process words first as signifiers, not content.
That is, not "what do these words mean" but "what kind of person says these words" (!!!!!!)
What kind of words, formulations, turns of phrases are they using? What does this mean about what kind of person they are? and NOT content
May 7, 2023 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
Ok, let's do it because, why not? Can't really think of something more important to do than this.
The way to evaluate a paradigm is not via the merits of the arguments you can contort out of it that fit into your current paradigm but to adopt it wholesale and check for reduced confusion as vs the paradigm you held before
(incommensurability of paradigms lol)
You’re basically running a min(Confusion) algorithm. (Which is what predictive processing theory says you do, at all levels, except now it's not being instantiated just on your brain but it's running through MULTIPLE brains, on a CIVILISATIONAL scale)
Nov 28, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Ignorance of the law can't be used as a defence. This makes sense: else people would cultivate *deliberate* ignorance of the law making no action of theirs illegal.
However you can imagine that the law was written in a made-up language. That seems very unjust.
Law written in a made-up language seems unjust because it can't possibly be known. It's a law no human could understand.
Now, given the profusion of laws, is the situation we find ourselves in much difference? Can any one human know all the relevant laws?
Nov 25, 2022 • 16 tweets • 2 min read
There's a capability consciousness possesses that I'm perpetually shocked by and haven't seen described elsewhere.
For lack of better terms I'll call it consciousness capacity to "merge" and "unmerge":
When consciousness "merges" it inhabits whatever it merges with and that becomes invisible up until the point you "unmerge" where it becomes visible once more.
The shocking thing to me is how fast, how broad, and how varied the things you can merge with are:
Nov 14, 2022 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
LessWrong is a discursive space. A way of talking about the world that implies a phenomenological theory - a way of being in and seeing the world - within which you can puzzle solve. What makes it an ideology is the additional claim that it perfectly maps or captures the world!
There's an MP, MT here where if you find something seemingly 'beyond the bounds of the system' then either the system is incomplete (which ofc it is, but you can't consider from within the axioms of the system) OR you're failing the system.
Nov 9, 2022 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
I was today years old when I learned about Control-Mastery theory.
A theory of how psychotherapeutic works *in practice* that lines up with all I've seen.
Principles:
*Patients endured traumatic experiences that led to iatrogenic beliefs which are the source of their psychopathology.
Oct 10, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Imagine experience is a river, flowing.
Fixation is like freezing a portion of that river. Now the flowing water is crashing against the frozen block. This is suffering.
Unfixating is unfreezing that portion of the river. Water flows again. There's a release. In it, happiness.
Autistic mind is almost the opposite of nebulous empty mind: every little thing is reified, taken literally, not seriously
Oct 10, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
equanimity = absence of clinging, absence of aversion
not pushing experience away, not holding on to experience
not even attempting to reify experience into the kind of thing you can push away or hold on to
Oct 10, 2022 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
Roger Thisdell (of the image below's fame) has a stage theory of Enlightenment (that he went through) up on Youtube. Summarising it here:
Stage 1:
Stage 1
stew in their emotions
had a thought so must be what i really think
lack of fundamental sobriety
(beginners mind, closed individualism)
I'm gonna force y'all motherfuckers to get enlightened it's not even hard, everyone's just a bad teacher lol, let's go:
First look at these pics
The read these two short parables
Sep 29, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Walking a path back and forth
Don't recall if was having many thoughts going
But def many thoughts coming back
Then had a thought that thoughts are so silly, like trying replicate the Earth with puzzle pieces
Too small, not adequate, too much left uncaptured
Then entered extreme reverie (or maybe even lost frames?) and then realised what Buddhists talk about: the monkey mind, this non-stop rumination, that is default talking as being actually seriously about its object except it DOESN'T STOP!
Sep 28, 2022 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Maybe plans are how you avoid having to think 🤔
Thinking to solve problems
Sep 27, 2022 • 30 tweets • 5 min read
Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han:
"Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society. Also, its inhabitants are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves."
"The depressed individual is unable to measure up; he is tired of having to become himself."
Jun 26, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Water so fucking good when you’re moving the whole day
Engineered drinks are compensation for lack of movement
Jun 26, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The two periods I tagged as happiest in my mind, have been going around for YEARS as to why, and now I see it so clearly why they were “more real than real”: I just wasn’t dissociated
I think I’ve spent ample periods dissociated. Certainly the entirety of [REDACTED]. @meditationstuff might be a terminological mistake on my part but the way I’ve used “virtual machines” I now see it’s just as “smth I was dissociated into”
Jun 25, 2022 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
DO THINGS THAT ARE OUT OF CHARACTER
You can do this because you have a model of yourself such that you know what is and isn’t out of character
Jun 25, 2022 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
Assorted thoughts on fighting:
Probably, as a man, nothing gives you the self-confidence (and consequent calm) that knowing you can fight does
Jun 22, 2022 • 30 tweets • 3 min read
Still on this, reading the obsessive and compulsive personalities chapter and, for whichever reason, I still hold a lot of compassion in my heart for rationalist/EA types, about whom this chapter could've been written. I want to copy paste the whole but, instead, choice quotes:
"Where both thinking and doing propel someone psychologically, in marked disproportion to feeling, sensing, intuiting, listening, playing, daydreaming, enjoying the creative arts, and other modes that are less rationally driven or instrumental,
Jun 5, 2022 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
> Torment and genius go hand in hand because those are the natural results of the same powerful mind being pointed inward vs outward.
The read these two short parables 
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