#cognition habitualization

[mentalisttraceur]

One of the biggest improvements I had with the "constantly triggered" problem, about a month ago or maybe closer to two now, was realizing that:

parts of my brain's threat-prediction and how I reflexively run scenarios are the integrated singlet's equivalent of an "abuser introject";

with most abusers, the right solution is not to argue, it's to state your boundaries, ignore their bullshit, maybe leave the situation, and be ready to defend yourself if they escalate to attempted harm - so if the introject is an accurate model of the abuser, you shouldn't argue with the introject either;

to the extent that the brain is trying to prepare for conflict with this person, an optimal abuser introject is at least as capable and persistent as the real abuser, and keeps coming up with the next argument, the next rationalization, the next difficult-to-overcome move that the person might do - so fighting with the inner model of the shitty person is just prompting your brain to escalate;

if your brain still thinks it needs to predict or be ready for an external threat, that's not going to go away no matter how many times you convince/beat the version of the threat in your head.

So this really made it instantly clear for me that my habit of mentally running scenarios of arguments/fights was literally doing more to implement flat copies of the most triggering people I could think of in my own brain, whose whole function was to shittily come at me in my thoughts in every moment such a person possibly could. Also made it clear that it was often no longer productive, because nowadays I have better solutions.

This clarity gave me the last piece I needed to quickly habitualize myself to just acknowledge it as my brain detecting a potential problem from a potential shitty person, maybe feel some gratitude, but otherwise move on and ignore it instead of engaging in the relevant arguments or scenarios in my head.

[mentalisttraceur-long]

Under-defined question.

Taking omniscience to the logical limit, you kinda wouldn't need to navigate it or anything else ever again, you would just know both the solutions and possibly your next steps.

But I suppose you mean a more... scoped knowledge, perhaps just access to all facts - all things that are true/happening.

Similarly, navigate what aspects of it? There's so many possible angles, ramifications, challenges, dilemmas.

---

At first it would be very trippy. I'm assuming worst still-manageable scenario here, to make it maximally interesting - knowledge pouring in at every flick of every thought. All of my thoughts that should merely graze abstract concepts about the world suddenly start erupting with detail and expansion, as inevitable and instant and inescapable as the sensory data of thousands of eyes and fingertips and all the other possible senses converging to examine every facet of that thing.

So I'd probably be catatonic for a while, or if I'm lucky merely really struggle and make immediate efforts to safely minimize all need to be anything external. Like a huge dose of hallucinogens, it would be very easy to slip into delusion, simply by losing track of everything.

(I suppose it's worth disclaiming that I have more than average proficiency with some meditative mental skills. In particular, "don't think about elephants" is actually really easy for me, I barely even had any piece of elephant concept flit through my mind, as I was thinking of and writing this example - like, we'd need to measure thinking about elephants in the smallest perceptible increments of time and individual cognemes, that's how little I thought of them. And that would be really helpful with any difficult-to-control omniscience - you really don't want to be figuring this shit out after you're already Knowing everything about elephants at the mere thought of them, saturating your mind and tumbling uncontrollably into more Knowing by association. You would pick it up "on the job", but it might take more time than you have.)

Your long-term memory, logical skill, and habitualized cognition is your only lifeline here, because if you could know everything there is to know about someone else's current experience, but you have only one person's worth of conscious attention, working memory, and scope, how do you know you're not them? How do you not forget yourself and get lost in someone else's experience stream the moment you slip into turning your omniscience onto them? If the omniscience includes full vivid sensory/experiential knowledge, you could at any moment experience being them as vividly as they do, just as vividly as you experience being you.

Well, you have one other fortunate escape hatch - you slip out as easily as you slip in. They are shackled to their experience stream, their senses, but you

can perceive and experience all there is to perceive and experience - even if you totally lose yourself, they or you will think something in reaction to something that turns your attention elsewhere, and suddenly you have senses they don't, you're not them anymore, you peel off, and as you notice the peeling you are reminded that you are at least more than just them; and

still have your physical senses... somewhere, if you can quiet your mind and find them.

Like an infant learning to make sense of the world, but now luckily with full adult faculties, you can learn this reality as you did your first one. You will learn to shift your attention until you are good at finding the split between your meandering now-omnisciently-unconstrained experiencing and the experiencing of any other mind that you merely omnisciently perceive into. At spotting the forks in the road where your attention and theirs turn to different things, de-syncing your experience streams once again. And I don't think this would take very long, because unless your cognition is exactly the same in response to all stimuli, sync will only happen very briefly, when you first accidentally indulge/slip into fully knowing someone's current experience. Thinking things that cause desync and noticing desync will eventually be quick and reliable, as natural as turning your head to look elsewhere.

---

Your next task, once you are good at not losing yourself in others, is to find yourself again. That's actually three tasks.

One is that you must rediscover, conceptually, that you are just a tiny little agent within the universe. No, are not everything, despite an infinity of raw sense data to the contrary. The distinction will be profoundly subtle. No matter how dissimilar to your normal sense data your new knowledge access is, no matter how abstract and thought-like it is, you will have full mental access to every single detail about the universe. Far more detailed and complete than your physical senses and internal introspection have ever been. At every moment and whim, everywhere you "look" with your newfound omniscience, you will have access to more, in some form or other, than your whole lifetime of senses.

And for every action you observe in the universe, every single choice a mind makes, your retroactively-weaving-a-self-narrative human brain faculty will have all the data it needs to craft a convincing subjective experience that actually yes, you did do those actions, you made that choice, because after all, you can know so vividly every single mental experience motivating that choice... you know each of those reasons more fully than you ever knew your own reasons for your choices.

(I hope you weren't running/driving/etc when the omniscience hit. The good news is, if you're able to have this thought, either your body and brain is still fine, or you don't might not need it anymore.)

Two is that at a conscious perception level, you must re-learn to notice and focus on your actual sensory data. Since I'm assuming the worst possible case that we could still manage (and because I think it would be hard to expose and process all that knowledge in a human mind in any other way), I'm imagining the omniscience is fully sense-like, to the point that making out your non-omniscience sources of sense data within a full universe vividly accessible as sense data would be... a challenge. If you're lucky, if you are to have a chance at all, the non-omniscience sense data it's qualitatively "elsewhere", still a separate channel, the way that when you stick your finger in water, the visual and the tactile and the temporature sensations are all technically coming from different mental "directions", and you're just subconsciously stitching them together into one, overlaying them.

And speaking of overlaying, three is finding yourself within your omniscience. If you're lucky, this is super easy, you just think of yourself or things immediately in/on/at/around yourself, and your omniscience goes there. If you're unlucky, your brain has to learn the correlations, and during the initial onset you've meandered your omscience gaze fuck knows were. If you're a down-to-earth person, you're probably still omnisciencing something on this planet. If this happens to me? We could easily be looking at Hubble Ultra Deep Field scales/distances of meandering by the time I remember/realize that I'm not the universe, I'm still just a human back on Earth, and I can't turn my omniscience back on myself until I first find my non-omniscience sense data. (There are some worse possibilities, where you can only navigate your omniscience of things in space like moving. Still manageable, you might just end up with a less useful subset of your omniscience, where you mostly end up just ignoring the physical part because you jumped to some random galaxy. Debatable if that's still omniscience - I feel like if I don't know which direction is this galaxy/planet/etc, it's not really omniscience anymore, but I see the sketch or a possible information theory argument to the contrary for finite minds trying to sort through omniscience, so I'm including it for completeness.)

The good news is, you've done this before. Your brain learned to overlay and synchronize and, crucially, distinguish, those senses, in infancy. You can probably do it again. I am fairly confident I could, and this confidence would keep me calm and collected despite the time pressure. Because if I'm lucky, I have a few days to do this, at most, unless someone waters my body in the meantime, whether that's IV drip, feeding tube, or just pouring water vaguely in the area of my mouth and hoping some swallowing reflex does the rest. And it would be so easy to lose track of time. On the plus side, if I'm not having much success, panic and frustration are both strong bodily sense data.

I would also attempt differentiating willful actions - ones which introduce big sensory differences, that I could use to help discriminate, and ones which are unlikely to cause physical consequences: blink, breathe, swallow, gentle slow finger movements, curl toes, flex muscles in-place. If that fails, there's always more macroscopic things. Splay out fingers, clench fist tight (risk of catching fingers on something and breaking them, risk of grasping something sharp and cutting/stabbing hand). Full body flail, if you like to live dangerously (realistically, if your body is already in a safe spot, and especially if it's laying down, the worst you're likely to do is a serious concussion - bad, but you'll have plenty of time and omniscience to cure the brain plaques that form before the Parkinson's or Alzheimer's takes you). The key thing here is that by the time you're a functioning human, you have muscle memory for these things - you don't need the sensory feedback loop to set them in motion, simply mentally moving to do them should be enough, and then you just have to listen.

Hopefully by the time I've figured all this out, I haven't even pissed myself. (On the plus side, that too is non-omniscience sense data.)

---

By the way, even if the omniscience spans time, even if all time exists simultaneously to you, that doesn't actually add fundamentally new challenges, it's actually still the same class of problem, there's just one more dimension for your attention to meander in (at worst, it increases the cardinality of an infinity of things you could forget yourself in, or if the universe is finite, it turns a nearly practically infinite set into an actually infinite one).

A few things bring you back to an arrow of time and let you temporaly localize your bodily "now".

First, thinking and experiencing is inherently an over-time sort of thing. A mind that simultaneously experiences all of its experiences across all of time is purely static, it's not actually thinking, it's not actually experiencing. It's a snapshot, a cross-section. It's the theoretical limit of taking shorter and shorter clips of an experience stream. Like all such abstractions, it seems like an intuitively sensical/real concept until you look closely enough.

At a bare minimum, even if raw experiences/qualia are truly infinitely "sliceable"/"thin" with respect to time, changes in experience are inherently sequenced, and thinking is a process, both sequenced and ordered. We have iteration from one mind state to another. If you are an experiencing mind, you have brought your own arrow of time. Even if your entire universe time span is simultaneous to you, even if your entire life exists at once within your senses, your experienced universe cannot simultaneous, simply because you are thinking. If you are a finite mind with omniscience, you are moving your finite attention and working memory over something larger than your in-the-moment mental capacity.

I think, therefore there is at least one time dimension and at least one arrow of time in that dimension.

Second, so long as your omniscient-across-all-time mind is linked to a brain within the universe, a really simple definition of in-universe "now" that follows from your subjective "now". What moment of in-universe time contains the implementation of your current mind state? (Or, more precisely, what slice of time contains this slice of experiencing?)

So finding the current moment within an omniscient awareness of all time is very similar to finding your physical body within an omniscient awareness of the entire universe right now. The subjective experience of the relevant qualia might be very different, but in the abstract it's the same shape of problem, and just as solvable/tractable in principle. You've got a well-defined, conceptually-simple boundary condition, and it's just a practical question of how much work it would take for you to trace/search the available knowledge awareness to find it, if the workings of your omniscience make that particularly automatic and intuitive or totally manual, etc.

---

Okay, so, finally, once I finished all that, I would run free like a child... that might mean I have to do the above process multiple times, if I get so into it that I just lose myself in one sense or another again. That's fine. Eventually I'll be really good at the finding myself, and at not losing myself to begin with. After all, these are all trainable skills.

During the learning phase I would not feel guilty about learning private things. Fuck that. Why would I? Should an infant feel guilty about seeing things and looking at things before they've even learned to consciously control their gaze? No, that would be bullshit.

Thankfully, I have... moderately good mental emotional control.

I talked about losing myself, but honestly the bigger risk and challenge for me would be avoiding triggering myself by turning my attention to all the horrors. There's so so so so much intolerable cruelty and suffering at any given moment in the world.

Thankfully, although I feel like my mental and emotional control could be a lot better about that kind of stuff, I think my toolkit is already a lot better than most have. More importantly, I have a lot of experience with exactly this - too much awareness and vivid apprehension of the possible and actual suffering out there. This ain't my first rodeo. I would handle this better than most, although I'd also sample and fully face more suffering with my omniscience than most would, to really understand and learn.

The other side of that coin is that there's a lot of pleasure and joy and kindness happening in the world. An equally incomprehensible amount. I'd need to make more of a conscious effort to get my traumatized threat-scanning ass to look at those things. I doubt it would capture me, but I could see myself losing a lot of time to it because said traumatized ass might find it very soothing. The risk is that I turn to it for self-medicating, like a drug, tuning in to happy wholesome kind warm experiences that people are having. The possible upside is that this might heal me like almost nothing can.

---

As I got better conscious control, I'd start eventually being very deliberate and restrained about turning my attention to the omniscient knowledge of others' private lives, and very deliberate and habitual about forgetting-by-not-thinking-about-it most such knowledge that I did consciously engage with, for a few reasons:

Compassion/kindness. I simply care about and value the wants and experiences of others.

I enjoy honesty. It's often fullfilling (or rather, contributes to some kind of moral self-image euphoria) and also really lightens my mental overhead. The less I notice/remember about the lives of others in ways they'd be negative about, the less surface area for needing to lie (even just by omission or misleading as-if-I-don't-know action).

It would simply be much much much mentally lighter to not have to track what I know that I'm not supposed to know.

There's profound risk to exposure. Omniscience, or even the slightest fraction of it, even the slightest real capability to bypass conventional perception limits, is absurdly valuable. The greatest powers on Earth would be eventually interested if word got out.

I'd probably enjoy the challenge. All the skills it takes to be more effective despite being a knowledge-limited human are still edifying even after you're omniscient.

I'd have an infinity of better shit to focus on than the private details of others' lives.

---

Omniscience would give me profound peace of mind, resolution, and effectiveness w.r.t. medical issues. No more wondering what if anything is wrong. No more time or effort spent on figuring out how to fix it.

I'd call/walk into exactly the right doctors' offices and tell them exactly what symptoms/knowledge/conclusions/suggestions/requests/wants/demands they need to hear to do the tests/prescribing/referrals/treatment I need.

---

I'm pretty sure if I knew when I'd die or how I'd die, I'd be pretty chill about it, ditto if some disaster was looming.

The nice thing about omniscience is that it solves most of the stresses it could create. Can I do anything about it? Will this work? Oh wow I just know the answer (or at least can know all the things needed to figure out an incomprehensibly more confident/certain/likely answer than I could figure out otherwise). Great, then I'll go do the best of the things I can do, with the strongest imaginable confidence, motivation, and immunity to unconstructive negative emotions.

---

I would be, for the first time in my life, in any human's life, almost totally safe, except from risks I chose to take on (and maybe, theoretically, totally unsolvable risks like "oh fuck, there's the gamma ray burst of a supernova on an intercept course with the Earth, it hits in 16 years and there's nothing we can do", and situations where there's so many risks and threats that I cannot mentally work through my knowledge of them in time to act).

I don't know what that does to a man but based on my results so far, it would mainly make me far more effective and mentally healthier.

---

Over time I'd very carefully start using my omniscience to make things better in increasingly more observable ways. Secure and empower myself and those I trust/value, help and empower everyone I can as much as is safe, improve the world.

(The choice of how to prioritize individual-level help, and who to entrust with any resources or power for doing larger-scale projects, is probably where I'd be most inclined to fully utilize omniscience on the private details of others' lives.)

If at all possible, I'd want to share the reality of my omniscience itself. I'd want the world to at least eventually know. But maybe that won't be possible. (I'd want at least a few people who I could trust to know. That would almost certainly be possible.)

I'm sure I could pump out all sorts of cures and inventions and so on, I'd just need to keep it believable. But as the saying goes, "it's amazing how much you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit". Honestly this is the easiest part. Feeding people ideas and having intelligent discussions where I get a receptive and almost-there person to an epiphany is... really easy? At least for me.

I'd definitely eventually make whatever moves I could to stop the worst people, those who are doing the most heinous things and causing the worst harm and suffering. Most of this would have to be very secretive, but I'd give society opportunity to do their process as much as possible - serial anonymous tips to authorities, that kind of thing. Both because there's many reasons for why it's the ethical and society-friendly thing to do, and because omniscience still needs manpower to get anything done. Vigilantism would become infinitely more doable, but the ethics are the same - it's more of a last resort, a necessary evil for when society is incapable or unwilling to do any better option. Honestly this is just as much selfish as it is kind and noble - so I don't have to experience as much awareness of that abhorrent empathy-offending filth.

I would seriously consider sharing/replicating the omniscience itself, because obviously I can't be the best choice or only good-enough choice for such power. I'd use the omniscience itself to really figure this out. (Naturally, I would know if it's doable, and the omniscience would help a lot with figuring out if and when this is a good idea.)

And so on and so on....

I mean, the full range of everything you could need to navigate once you have omniscience is approximately infinite.

But basically I think the hard part is integrating it into your cognition. The rest is just applied ethics and mind steering/shaping skill.

if u were omniscient, how would u navigate that?

[g8d]

tfw everyone in the system has like vaaastly different ideas about what reality fundamentally is and what it means to be

[despazito]

Idk I have such a fascination with people who coddle and baby wild animals (or even domestic ones). Maybe it's not that deep but I think in some ways it does speak to a lack of maturity in empathy, which sounds counterintuitive but I think its not unlike some forms of unhealthy parenting. It's a cognitive disconnect that perhaps the way you'd like to be treated does not always translate to what others want or feel comfortable with. That maybe your reality is not universal, and an inability to place yourself in another's shoes. People hear low empathy and assume it means distant and unloving, but it can also look like lovebombing or over imposing oneself on others with a lack of boundaries. From the outside it can look loving and pampering and an incredible life, but do they ever really stop to try and get to know the other party, what it actually feels and wants? Are you doing what's best for it, or just what you think is best? Or worse, what you think makes you look best in front of others?

They call animal care professionals who ask for more restraint and less contact with said animals uncaring and cold because they honest to god cannot place themselves in a reality where a kindhearted hug could feel terrifying and a free donut could be horrible for one's survival. And I think information based arguments can fall short because they are primarily operating through emotions and what "feels" right to them. And I think some of these people may be drawn to animals and habituating wildlife because they won't ever tell them off in clean english. Idk it intrigues me

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses

MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?

AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.

Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.

The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/elon-musk-lies

Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/

I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.

The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:

https://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/cf.opinion.rael/

The human-in-a-robot-suit gambit is everywhere in AI hype. Cruise, GM's disgraced "robot taxi" company, had 1.5 remote operators for every one of the cars on the road. They used AI to replace a single, low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged, specialized technicians. Truly, it was a marvel.

Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.

According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."

Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.

What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.

Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.

See the difference? Criticize Amazon for its devastatingly effective automation and you help Amazon sell stock to suckers, which makes Amazon executives richer. Criticize Amazon for lying about its automation, and you clobber the personal net worth of the executives who spun up this lie, because their portfolios are full of Amazon stock:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

Amazon Go didn't go. The hundreds of Amazon Go stores we were promised never materialized. There's an embarrassing rump of 25 of these things still around, which will doubtless be quietly shuttered in the years to come. But Amazon Go wasn't a failure. It allowed its architects to pocket massive capital gains on the way to building generational wealth and establishing a new permanent aristocracy of habitual bullshitters dressed up as high-tech wizards.

"Wizard" is the right word for it. The high-tech sector pretends to be science fiction, but it's usually fantasy. For a generation, America's largest tech firms peddled the dream of imminently establishing colonies on distant worlds or even traveling to other solar systems, something that is still so far in our future that it might well never come to pass:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

During the Space Age, we got the same kind of performative bullshit. On The Well David Gans mentioned hearing a promo on SiriusXM for a radio show with "the first AI co-host." To this, Craig L Maudlin replied, "Reminds me of fins on automobiles."

Yup, that's exactly it. An AI radio co-host is to artificial intelligence as a Cadillac Eldorado Biaritz tail-fin is to interstellar rocketry.

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

[whetstonefires]

#the only point I take issue with is that I don't think jgy believes any of his closely held beliefs about his situation are bullshit#when he says he didn't have any choice I think he fundamentally believes it and can defend his positions when given the chance (via @thatswhatsushesaid)

well i'm sure he doesn't believe his own closely held beliefs are bullshit lol, but hm. this is interesting!

so if we posit that, when jgy says that, it's never just convenient wording for the feeling of 'my hand was forced by the situation'

but that he intellectually believed that when he, say, had his toddler killed to cover up a suspected disability which might have led people to suspect about the incest or otherwise think less of him, then framed a political inconvenience for it and had them massacred, that he had to do it, and do it like that

(that any lesser level of violence and optimization-of-personal-advantage was tantamount to suicide)

then...

are we supposing that he believes that in a sort of, he needs to believe it, that he has an elaborate internal narrative where everything he's done wasn't only appropriate but unavoidable, and therefore he can't and shouldn't take on guilt about it, and that letting go of that conviction even where it's absurd would wound him, kind of a way?

or more like a, he just has a default position of categorizing everything he does from an emotional place of 'survival' as necessary, and therefore adequately justified, and not considering further on that subject once he's committed to a course unless somehow externally prompted, because that's the efficient way to do it and (as with wwx) you can't afford inefficient emotional processes when you're trying to survive, kind of a way?

because those imply two fairly different psychological relationships to the doing of particularly egregious crimes, and as far as i can recall they're both compatible with the evidence.

Something about how Lan Wangji and Lan Xichen took the same parental trauma and, due to their differing ages and characters and the somewhat different pressures they were under, came away with very distinct conclusions that mostly seemed pretty similar at first, since they were cast in the same mold, i.e. the Lan disciplines.

Both of them these under-parented kids trying to reconcile the message that the world is fundamentally just with the lived experience that it absolutely was not.

Lan Xichen comes away with this idea that justice is arrived at by keeping everyone happy--have I compared him to Jane Bennet yet, she's my reference archetype for this kind of eldest sibling--and working for the best possible final outcome. In which possibility he persistently has faith even when it fails to come to fruition; a disappointing compromise is just a lesson to do better next time.

This is a pretty resilient coping mechanism, since it can stand up to not only a lot of bad shit randomly falling out of the sky but to other people and even you fucking up supremely in a lot of different ways, and also to being harmed by enemies, because of course enemies will do that.

It cannot survive the sense of being totally helpless, or a loss without recoup or silver lining, because it relies on the conviction that you can bargain with the universe. That you are in a position to do so, and that the universe is disposed toward mercy.

(This I think is why he attached himself so intensely to Meng Yao--at his darkest moment, when everything was falling around him and he was alone, someone came and restored his faith in the world being, fundamentally, a good place, that will pick you up when you fall and offer second chances. Right up until it gets pulled out from under him, that's what that person means to him, every time he sees him again: that at its core life is kind, and you can be safe again after trauma.

The irony is imo less that this person is actually bad than that Meng Yao is the last person who believes that.)

Lan Wangji, on the other hand, younger and more rigid and somewhat more sheltered, comes away with the idea that bad things are the direct consequence of flawed actions. Punishment is natural law; on earth as it is in heaven; only perfection merits mercy.

(Mumble mumble Legalism I haven't read enough Chinese history to unpack that lol but.)

The advantage of believing this is that it frees you from the bulk of internal conflict. If bad things happen it's because they ought to. You can stop them from happening by doing everything right. There is no need therefore to be afraid, and relatively little need to be angry, and when you are angry it can happen in a contained, approved way, toward disruptions to the system.

This is not a worldview that can survive very many disruptions. It does not have a lot of shock absorption built in; to keep it mostly intact in the face of the universe glaringly failing to deliver requires, more or less, going systematically insane.

Plenty of people raised with these kinds of values do in fact choose to do that. If choose is the right word.

If our Lan Zhan hadn't already gotten his coping mechanism shaken up and expanded by Wei Wuxian and his charismatic undermining of the Lan Sect's system of making their laws appear to be the laws of the universe, I think he'd have been a lot more likely to break when the Wen took Cloud Recesses. Not in an obvious way, necessarily, not cracking up and screaming or berserking, and probably not even going into complete shutdown, but like. Retreating from reality a lot more.

Living way more completely in his own head, and lashing out more at people who threatened his elaborate, infinitely brittle mental architecture.

(In his worst moments, this is Lan Qiren.)

As it is, it takes Lan Wangji a long time and a pretty large amount of trauma to fully break out of this belief system, even once he's been confronted with its inadequacy to handle the actual complexities of the unstructured world.

(This is narratively important, I think, because Lan Zhan having gone through that growth is kind of the reward for the tragedy of the thirteen years; a cathartic grace note.)

And just when Lan Wangji's reached his success state on processing all that and been, essentially, rewarded by the universe with a Wei Wuxian, Lan Xichen's far more robust just-world coping mechanism is finally brought to its own shattering point. And how.

...also Jiang Yanli is a very similar person to Zewu-jun in a lot of ways, but not having been orphaned as a child or thrust into politics from a young age the scale of her ambition is more modest. But that's its own post probably!

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Psychological Abuse

Hart, Binggeli, and Brassard (1998, pp. 32–33) have pointed out that psychological maltreatment not only stands alone but is often embedded in other forms of maltreatment. They identified 6 major types of psychological maltreatment:

Spurning - includes belittling, shaming, and public humiliation

Terrorizing - includes caretaker behavior that threatens or is likely to physically hurt, kill, abandon, or place the child in a dangerous situation

Isolating - generally involves placing unreasonable limitations on the child’s freedom of movement

Exploiting/corrupting - includes modeling, permitting, or encouraging antisocial behavior, or developmentally inappropriate behavior

Denying emotional responsiveness - generally considered to be ignoring the child’s needs

Mental health, medical, and educational neglect - involves ignoring the need for, or failing or refusing to allow or provide treatment for serious emotional/behavioral problems, physical health problems, and/or educational problems

Child Maltreatment

The accepted definition of child maltreatment reported in Garbarino, Guttman, and Seeley (1987) came from the Interdisciplinary Glossary on Child Abuse and Neglect:

“The definitions of emotional abuse include verbal or emotional assault, close confinement and threatened harm. The definitions of emotional neglect include inadequate nurturance/affection, knowingly permitting maladaptive behavior (for example, delinquency) and other refusal to provide essential care” (pp. 4–5).

A child is considered to be emotionally or psychologically abused when he or she is the subject of acts or omissions by the parents or other persons responsible for the child’s care that have caused, or could cause, a serious behavioral, cognitive, emotional, or mental disorder.

In some cases of emotional or psychological abuse, the acts of the parents or other caretakers alone, without any harm to the child’s behavior or condition, are sufficient to warrant intervention by a child protective services agency.

An example would be if the parents or caretakers used extreme or bizarre forms of punishment, such as habitual scapegoating, belittling, or rejecting treatment.

Demonstrable harm to the child is often required before a child protective services agency is able to intervene (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1992, p. 3).

Source ⚜ More: Writing Notes & References ⚜ On Psychology

[wraithdance]

Stray Dogs | GHOAP x Reader

Synopsis: You never had a problem with strays, but you should have been wary of the rabid dogs begging to be leashed.

Pairing: Johnny x Avoidant!reader | eventual Ghoap x Avoidant!reader Note: AFAB!Reader, No physical description but reader has background story, no y/n use or gender terms for reader, Reader is LGBT (Bisexual) Content warning: Mature | brief mentions of childhood trauma, avoidant personality, therapy and allusions to mental health issues, passive thoughts of death

Prologue: Foxy Leaves

You told your new therapist that you like putting things into categories because it was fun.

It was half a lie, minuscule really and not enough to be of consequence. You suppose you could have been honest and said the process of grouping things made the endless dread you lived in just a little bit easier.

But you didn’t really like the pitying look Dr. Sanchez gave you when she went over your intake questionnaire. She’d looked down her glasses while you numbly repeated the same spiel about ‘what brings you to cognitive therapy’ that you’d been giving for the last decade. 

You’d google her practice on your lunch break scrolling through the reviews and stuffing the last of your sandwich in your cheeks. In your car before the first session you silently prayed to the empty space that this time you could stick with her long enough to fix you.

You doubt it though because her bob bounces as she nods to your explanation of ‘The Chasm’ and how it came to be. The way that it bounces as she hums, being sure to signify her active listening. It really pisses you off. 

The familiar sense of despair boils hot when you realize that even though this is an unfamiliar office half way across from town, she’s giving you the look. The one of interest, like she wants to crack open your skull and observe your chaotic wiring in hopes to understand what your fucking problem is.

It’s the same one every other therapist has given you since you were old enough to inevitably stop showing up to mandatory sessions without consequence. 

It’s so habitually intolerable that you have a 'Therapist breakup’ text in your notes draft on your phone. It's simple, clinical, contains something vague about not thinking you were compatible as a client. It’s usually enough to keep them from doing a wellness check (or worse a call to your emergency contact.) 

When you’re done talking, Dr. Sanchez reaches for your hand in some gratuitous act of extending comfort. Her cold fingers and the sensation of her half rubbed in hand cream, makes you want to vomit. It must not show on your face because she keeps talking and squeezing your hand.

“I think that it’s brave of you to come in and I think we can work on some of your goals.” She pauses accessing you before she says the thing that signs the death of your therapeutic relationship.

“Do you also want to work on mending the relationship with your parents?”

You ignore the receptionist when she asks if you want to make a follow up appointment. You’re combing through your drafts to find the breakup text when you think that you’re glad you lied about the category thing. Your control issues are yours, precious and responsible for your ability to focus on anything but the heavy weight of being. So fuck her and her stupid fucking bob.

Her contact gets blocked as soon as the message reads delivered.

When you were anxious the familiarity of nature documentaries, specifically the ones about apex predators, were a comfort. Duckie, your best friend of nine years, had been squeamish the first time she watched one of your favorites with you.

It was about big cats in the wilds. The man with the Aussie accent narrated with excitement that belied the violence of seeing a lioness take down a gazelle. From behind the safety of your throw pillow Duckie asked why you like watching stuff like that. You shrugged like you didn’t have an answer.

You did though.

It’s because predators in the wild didn’t hide what they were. They didn’t need to pretend to be anything but carnivorous and survival driven. Would never think to explain to the gazelle that they were sorry for hurting you, but they couldn’t help themself.

It would be even more insulting than being eaten alive. 

You’re relieved when the lioness finishes the gazelle off, letting out a small sigh of 'finally' that earns you a wide eyed look from Duckie. The death was quick and even if the gazelle didn’t realize it, she was lucky. You’ve been on the end of an explanation for harm and wished you’d have the mercy of death instead.

But you couldn’t tell Duckie that. So instead you tease her about being a big baby.

For a few years now you’ve gotten into the habit of assigning everyone you meet an animal that reminds you of them. It satisfied both of your interests and it was fun. It’s how Duckie got her nickname. She’d crowed over the cuteness and tried to hug you before you threatened to bite her if she touched you.

It didn't matter the amount of time you'd known a person you grouped them. The scrawny teenager at the local Tesco was Giraffe kid, The high pitched woman next door with the ugly dog, Chihuahua.

You’re looking at your girlfriend of 3 months, Foxy, thinking how the name works for her better than Taylor does. 

She’s beautiful even while spitting vitriol as she packs her Telfar bag to the brim with stray items she left behind at your apartment. 

When she flicks her hair over a tanned shoulder you’re distracted, remembering how it felt when you gripped the long strands that morning, holding her still and demanding to be kissed. Instead of the soft look she wore then, she’s openly glaring at you now. You know your face is doing the blank thing she hates because she searches it for something. You suppose she doesn’t find whatever that something is because she’s yelling again.

“You make it so FUCKING hard to love you and I can’t do this anymore.”

You're frozen, caught off guard with the remote to the television still in hand as the nature documentary drones on. The ‘what?’ you blurt out is one of genuine confusion, you'd both been cuddled on the couch talking before whatever this was came to be. You wrack your mind trying to remember what the last thing you said was and come up blank. To your embarrassment, you'd been on autopilot the whole morning, so there is a gap in your memories.

Taylor, upon your continued silence makes a sound that can only be described as a screech.

“You always have an excuse why I can’t meet your parents!” She cries exasperatedly, “If you’re ashamed of me I’d rather you just say that over leading me on for God’s sake!”

Your body flinches only slightly when she throws her hands up. You’re still defensive when you bite out a sharp rebuttal that makes her frown and drop your spare key on the coffee table. You don't admit to yourself that you can't remember exactly what you say over the cotton in your ears and the dark corners that sink into your neck at the first display of conflict.

It still stings when she leaves though. You spend the next day crying under your blankets, the pillow she slept on still smells like her perfume. The scent clean and floral, one you'd gotten used to seeking out when you did the laundry.

Fuck, you really did like Foxy. But you suppose you’re going to have to call her Taylor now that she's your ex-girlfriend.  

Duckie laughs at Taylor’s comment when you tell her over brunch. Your effervescent friend’s giggle tumbles out of her uncontrollably, whilst her mimosa in hand, threatens to spill in her lap. She slaps a hand over her mouth when a loud snort escapes against her will. She shoots an apologetic smile to the couple at the table adjacent to yours when they ask her to keep it down. 

You glare until they turn back to their lunch.

Duckie straightens when she takes in your stiff form, having finally realized she’d stepped on a landmine and right into your ire.

“Darling, you certainly don't make it easy to be close to you, you're a bit…” 

She pauses in thought, shifting her glasses on her nose and placing the glass flute down on the table. Today her spectacles are fire engine red with rhinestones on the brim. You’d asked her if she was nearsighted or farsighted once and she’d told you the lenses weren’t prescription. She only wore them to seem a bit older and worldlier when out and about.

 You don't like how long it takes for her to search for an adjective and say so when she still doesn’t finish her sentence after several moments. 

“I just mean that you're purposely closed off,” She makes a panic flapping movement with her hands when your eyes narrow even more “Oh come on! You like it that way!”

“Duckie, what are you talking about?” You grit between your teeth. 

You're pushing your half eaten club sandwich out of the way to lean across the table, waiting to hear her explanation. You’d lost your appetite.

Duckie shirks from your unblinking leer and sniffs indignantly. 

“It took me nearly a year to get you to call me your friend and I swear I still feel like I don’t know you.” she gives you a pointed look, “If it weren't for the fact that you’re like that to everyone, I’d think you hated me sometimes, so I really do have to empathize with Taylor in this one.” 

She’s waiting for you to say something, you can tell by the way she brings her shoulders up to her ears as if gearing for some great big reaction.

But, that wasn’t your style, never had been. So you still don’t know what’s expected of you. To negate her statement? 

You suppose you could tell her that's absurd, she was your best friend in every way. Had been since the day she’d laughed at one of your more tasteless jokes during an intro to Psychology class in undergrad. You were softer for Duckie, more than you were- well really anyone. 

Your own mother only knew enough about you to identify you on a morgue table if it ever came down to it. But you don’t tell her that.

Instead you do what you do best. You leave.

You’re pushing up from the table gathering your purse and throwing back the last of your mimosa like a tequila shot, before you can think twice about it.

Duckie tries to reach out to you but you flinch from her touch. 

“Wait Darling, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, please don't go!”

“I’m just going to the ladies.” you mumble flatly over your shoulder. At least that's what you hope comes out because your throat is closing up with the effort to hold back the stupid tears in your eyes. 

You slam into the restroom startling the barista applying lipstick in the mirror. Her owlish eyes take one look at your dark expression and she pops the top back on her lipstick, skirting past you. You check to make sure the bathroom was truly empty before locking yourself in the biggest stall.

As soon as the lock clicks the dam breaks and it makes you so angry it hurts. The level of intensity of your crying is absolutely repulsive. Your jaw aches with the efforts to muffle the sobs that thrum through your body like a struck chord.

You’re pacing the small enclosure with tears running down your face, feeling like the lioness in the nature documentary after it’d been captured. You feel the gut punch of self loathing as soon as the thought comes up. It's insulting to compare yourself to the deadly beast when you’re trying not to get snot on your dress sleeves. 

Duckie comes to the restroom after a while tapping on the stall door, begging you to open up.

You feel only half guilty when you tell her to fuck off. She’s quiet for a while and you know she stands with only the thin door between you, you can see her colorful converses from beneath the gap in the door. 

You want to let her in. Figuratively. Literally. 

What a relief it would be to just let her crawl into the hole you’ve made at rock bottom and let her be there with you. 

You want to laugh imagining her taking the time to do that rocking thing she does when she's trying to get comfortable in the decorative chair in your office. You always remind her it was meant for aesthetics, not comfort when she huffs out the same grouchy complaint about the hardness. She scoffs in mock offense anyways. 

“Really Darling, you make enough money to get rid of this thing. Ooh let me send you the link to the bean bag I saw on Wayfair, one sec!”

You’re still crying when you consider that she's really the only person who makes the effort to visit you at the office.

Or anywhere really. 

You'd gotten accustomed to only hearing from your family when there was a crisis or need for quick cash to keep them afloat. 

If you weren’t stuffing tissues into your running nose you’d scoff at the thought of your parents caring, much less visiting. They were still content to be fuck ups well into their retirement age. You’d long stopped bothering to call to make sure they were still alive after the first year of college. 

Maybe if you told Taylor that she would have stayed.

The emotional despair rot you call ‘The Chasm’ deepens and you question if you’d ever really gotten used to the loneliness of having no parent to turn to. The years of casual disdain and dismissal. The resentment for being half a child and reluctant third parent to children that weren’t yours. Their desire for all of you and none of you and back again in an endless loop. 

Ceaseless demands of a gluttonous beast you could never please, even when you’ve flayed yourself bare. 

It stings, the reminder that you’d been living on scraps and toughness disguised as love long before you met Duckie. Long before Foxy- Taylor- or even the parade of friends and disappointed exes, who’d simply had enough of whatever caustic matter made you, you. 

Yet, Duckie is the only one who keeps coming back. Time again she comes back to your side with a smile, like she likes to be with you. Like watching nature shows with you on the couch, eating whatever snacks she brings because she knows you forget to eat, acting like it’s the highlight of her day. Never an inconvenience to care for you the way others had said it was. It makes you cry harder until you can’t breathe because you’re trying not to let her hear you.

Duckie in all her color and too big glasses, has always acted as if she can see that weak part of you peeking out from behind the thorns and quick rebuttals bordering on mean. She still stands waiting for you even now, even when you told her to fuck off in public restroom at your favorite brunch cafe. 

It’s staring at the graffiti-ed dick on the stall door when you think you can honestly say you love her and it hurts your feelings that she doesn't know that. 

You think you can be honest and tell her that it’s not about Foxy or even Duckie’s laugh at your expense. It’s about the revolving door of disappointment that still keeps you up at night. That landed you under the microscope on a a faceless therapist's couch for emergency sessions and the mementos of non-slip socks in your dresser drawers.

The half guilt turns into full fledged self loathing just thinking about how you really needed to get a cushion for your office and let her in. After a beat you think you’re in control of your crying enough to reach for the lock inside the stall. Of course, as always the universe is having a laugh at your expense. 

“Darling, I'm going to go back to the table now okay?” 

You know she's making that nervous face scrunch she does when she’s anxious, waiting for you to reply. You can’t, you’re frozen in place as always. 

“Don't want them to think we skipped the tab, so just come back when you feel a bit better, yeah?”  

She says something about her getting the bill and you can talk when you come back. You don’t hear her really because ‘The Chasm’ calls to you first. You keep it together long enough until the scuffling sounds of her shoes quiet before allowing the tide to take you under again. 

Eventually, when you’ve stuffed the feelings back into the pit, you’re able to leave the stall. You never go back to the table. Texting Duckie a simple ‘sorry’ along with a money transfer for your portion of brunch. You leave the restaurant for the safety of your home, wondering if this will be enough for her to leave you too. 

You half hope it is because it was exhausting loving someone else.

An hour later there's a timid knock on your apartment door. It’s opening to peer down at a shuffling Duckie on your steps, with flowers and the expensive bottle of wine you like, that you know that it’s not. Enough to keep her from coming back that is. 

She follows you inside like a chick behind its mother and toes off her sneakers in the hall next to your rows of shoes. She takes your general wave her way as a sign of ‘go ahead’ when she asks if she can put the flowers in water. 

You’re sitting on the couch with your knees to your chest, staring listlessly at the nature channel. You know Duckie is taking in your bare face and faux casualness. You know you look pathetic in your too big hoodie and headscarf. You at least hope you've gotten enough of your makeup off to not look like a drowned raccoon.

'Pathetic', The Chasm says.

Duckie carefully tiptoes over your outstretched legs to scrunch herself small on the other end of the couch. After a few episodes of the documentary, this one about penguins, she slowly makes her way to your side and cautiously gives you a half hug and a tearful apology.

“I’m sorry for being a bitch, I shouldn’t have laughed.” She doesn’t turn from the t.v's glow. You’re secretly thankful she doesn’t look at you because you’re embarrassed for crying again. 

With gentle prodding she asks you to tell her how you really feel about Taylor leaving. You tell her. You also tell her about your parents and why it was such a big deal introducing Taylor to them. It’s more than you’ve admitted to any therapist and she has the foresight to not make it a thing.

Duckie just hums quietly, listening. As she sleeps on your shoulder, drool wetting your sleeve, you think you can carve her a spot beside you in rock bottom. Maybe another inside the space where your heart should be, just big enough for one. It’ll just be you and Duckie for as long as she wants it that way. You’re satisfied with the thought, drinking the last of the wine.

As always nothing you ever want matters for very long.

Because Soap doesn’t give you a choice when he barrages into your life and demands you make additional space for him and his stray dog.

Masterlist | Next >>

[pandemic-info]

Reposting via a redditor; re:

Is there a sound argument for why people aren’t taking this seriously?

Why do they think that way? https://essaysyoudidntwanttoread.home.blog/2022/10/09/why-do-they-think-that/? 7 psychological defense mechanisms used to downplay covid https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1737582325779624059.html? How to hide a pandemic https://howtohideapandemic.substack.com/p/how-to-hide-a-pandemic Cognitive Dissonance & Ableism https://www.tiktok.com/@fka.monstersincooperated/video/7360285749574421802 Anti-social punishment https://www.tiktok.com/@creative.neurospice/video/7269910082769653038 NYT: Why People Fail to Notice Horrors Around Them (helplessness & habituation) https://archive.is/wVL85 [article about the ongoing right to avoid infection. ... how people just can't really face reality due to death anxiety] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/side-effects/202309/how-to-socialize-during-a-pandemic Increased risk-taking behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic: psychological underpinnings and implications https://www.scielo.br/j/rbp/a/TPpQKTwfqTH5Q8qKghRkWpf/?format=pdf&lang=en Cognitive Biases https://www.instagram.com/p/C8TdduJMtKH/ We’ve Hit Peak Denial. Here’s Why We Can’t Turn Away From Reality https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weve-hit-peak-denial-heres-why-we-cant-turn-away-from-reality/ Difficulties in Understanding Population Risk versus Individual Risk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2X_HRfJpio&list=LLkcwJR5kj80dAQNAT83d1NQ&t=2522s

See also:

Normalcy bias

Semmelweis reflex

Just-world fallacy

Survivorship bias

Compassion fatigue

Sunk cost fallacy

Learned helplessness

Informational social influence

Ableism

Nihilism

[loassbarbie]

philosophy, conciousness, the 4D (imagination) and the world

I am a philosophy enthusiast, specially when it comes to the field of Metaphysics. I consider myself somewhat of an existentialist, and I enjoy reading a lot of Sartre. In several philosophical movements and schools of thought there is an idea about how imagination has a crucial role in our individual understanding, perceptions and assumptions of ourselves, the world and the Universe.

Barthes wrote Camera Lucida in homage to Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Imaginaire, in which Sartre discusses what the existence of imagination shows about the nature of human consciousness. His conclusion is that because the imaginary process relies on intentionality, the world is constituted not from the outside into our consciousness, but rather we constitute the world based on our intentions toward it (Falkner, 2014).

Yogācāra is one of the philosophical backgrounds of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition. Its doctrine is summarized in the term vijṇapti-mātra, “nothing but cognition only” which also known as “Consciousness Only” or “Mind Only”. This school advocates the existence of the consciousness and cognitive object. An object that we think we see is an illusion according to Yogācāra School. This illusion is due to our habits. These habits come from our minds. This is for our habitual conditioning that we see that things as real and in different ways. In other words, only the subjective aspect (darsanabhaga) is real, not the objective aspect (nimittabhaga). The object world is merely the transformation of our consciousness (vijnanaparinama) (Barua, 2019).

Barua gives the example of "an itinerant ascetic, an amorous person and a dog, all catch sight of a woman, but they all have three different notions. The ascetic looks upon her as a mere carcass (made up of the five aggregates), the voluptuary or sensualist takes her to be an object of amorous delight while the dog takes her to be something eatable" (Barua, 2019), or a caregiver.

In other words, an object appears in different forms according to the conditioned, subjective state of mind.

Bottomline is, in my humble opinion of course: we perceive the world not as it is, but as we are. Since imagination (that we call the 4D) relies on intentionality, we must free our minds from the way we were conditioned if we want to see changes in our perceptions. And that the way things seem to you (your 3D) is not inherently what they are, but only your perception of what they are.

(Take Control - Kodaline / click the image for the Spotify link of the song)

References Barua, M. (2019). The Doctrine of Perception in Buddhism. The Journal of International Association of Buddhist Universities (JIABU), 12(1), 276–282. Retrieved from https://so06.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/Jiabu/article/view/216911

Grant Falkner. (2014). Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida: Absence as Presence. Retrieved from http://grantfaulkner.com/2014/08/roland-barthes-camera-lucida-absence-as-presence/

[luxe-pauvre]

Professor Oliver Hardt, who studies the neurobiology of memory and forgetting at McGill University in Montreal, is much more cautious. “Once you stop using your memory it will get worse, which makes you use your devices even more,” he says. “We use them for everything. If you go to a website for a recipe, you press a button and it sends the ingredient list to your smartphone. It’s very convenient, but convenience has a price. It’s good for you to do certain things in your head.” Hardt is not keen on our reliance on GPS. “We can predict that prolonged use of GPS likely will reduce grey matter density in the hippocampus. Reduced grey matter density in this brain area goes along with a variety of symptoms, such as increased risk for depression and other psychopathologies, but also certain forms of dementia. […] Map reading is hard and that’s why we give it away to devices so easily. But hard things are good for you, because they engage cognitive processes and brain structures that have other effects on your general cognitive functioning.” Hardt doesn’t have data yet, but believes, “the cost of this might be an enormous increase in dementia. The less you use that mind of yours, the less you use the systems that are responsible for complicated things like episodic memories, or cognitive flexibility, the more likely it is to develop dementia. There are studies showing that, for example, it is really hard to get dementia when you are a university professor, and the reason is not that these people are smarter – it’s that until old age, they are habitually engaged in tasks that are very mentally demanding.” (Other scientists disagree – Daniel Schacter, a Harvard psychologist who wrote the seminal Seven Sins Of Memory: How The Mind Forgets and Remembers, thinks effects from things like GPS are “task specific”, only.)

Rebecca Seal, Is your smartphone ruining your memory? A special report on the rise of ‘digital amnesia’

[mentalisttraceur]

One of the things that really frustrates me is that my upbringing has robbed me of a healthy default of confident calm in the face of cues that someone is frustrated or angry.

For now. This too I will overcome.

When I see signs of anger or frustration in others, I can't just feel like an unperturbed observer, I can't just watch or look away with curiosity, disinterest, or amusement. As if their negativity is harmless or unthreatening. I don't get that choice.

Yet. I am terraforming that choice into my mind.

My mind fires off the beginnings of a fight or flight response, I get mentally tense and vigilant and a nasty fear discomfort permeates (unless I am eagerly looking to handle the situation with anger or hostility) before I even get the chance to have any other thoughts about it.

Closer now. Better at catching myself in the moment. Shrinking the average gap between trigger and me flowing into the bypass canal towards calm confident presence. Reducing how much conscious thought it takes.

[contemplatingoutlander]

THOM HARTMANN: Science Explains Why Republicans Can’t Accept Trump’s Guilt (Sept. 12, 2023)

Scientists discovered a fascinating reason why Republicans can’t accept criticism of Donald Trump. Thom explains.

In the above video, Thom Hartmann refers to a Raw Story column by cognitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian, PhD (shown below):

Here are some excerpts from Azarian's column:

In 2009, a study published in PLOS ONE challenged our understanding of belief systems. Researchers placed participants into the confines of an fMRI scanner and presented them with a mixture of factual and abstract statements. The results were illuminating. Disbelief, it turns out, is cognitively demanding. It requires more mental effort than simply accepting a statement as true. From an evolutionary perspective, this preference for easy belief makes sense; a perpetually skeptical individual questioning every piece of information would struggle to adapt in a fast-paced world. What does all this have to do with Trump supporters? Well, it’s far less cognitively demanding for them to believe anything their leader tells them. Any challenge to what Trump tells them is true takes mental work. This means there is a psychological incentive for Trump loyalists to maintain their loyalty. (I wrote about this phenomenon in a slightly different context in the Daily Beast article "Religious Fundamentalism: A Side Effect of Lazy Brains?") Molding of belief: neuroplasticity at play Now, let's consider the unique predicament faced by individuals who staunchly support Trump and want him to again become president. From the moment Trump began his political career and his social engineering career, his supporters have been exposed to narratives — Trump doesn't lie, Democrats are communists, the media is an enemy of the people — that emphasize loyalty and trust in their political idol. These narratives often steer away from critical examination and instead encourage blind faith. When coupled with the brain's inherent tendency to accept rather than question, it creates an ideal environment for unwavering allegiance. No matter that Trump, time and again, has been revealed to be a serial liar, habitually misrepresenting matters of great consequence, from elections to economics to public health. For example, in the Psychology Today article "Why Evangelicals are Wired to Believe Trump’s Falsehoods," I explain that the children of Christian fundamentalists typically begin to suppress critical thinking at an early age. This is required if one is to accept Biblical stories as literal truth, rather than metaphors for how to live life practically and with purpose. Attributing natural occurrences to mystical causes discourages youth from seeking evidence to back their beliefs. Consequently, the brain structures that support critical thinking and logical reasoning don't fully mature. This paves the way for heightened vulnerability to deceit and manipulative narratives, especially from cunning political figures. Such increased suggestibility arises from a mix of the brain's propensity to accept unverified claims and intense indoctrination. Given the brain's neuroplastic nature, which allows it to shape according to experiences, some religious followers are more predisposed to accept improbable assertions. In other words, our brains are remarkably adaptable and continuously evolving landscapes. For ardent Trump supporters, residing in an environment that prioritizes faith over empirical evidence can reshape the neural circuits within their brains. [color emphasis added]

[edited]

[mindblowingscience]

Scientists from the US, UK, and Uruguay analyzed data from 378,932 people aged 40 to 69 to see how those who are genetically 'programmed' to nap regularly fared cognitively compared to those who lacked comparable genes. Nappers, they found, had larger brains, equivalent to those who were 2.6 to 6.5 years younger. "Our study points to a causal link between habitual napping and larger total brain volume," says lead author Valentina Paz, a neuroscientist at University College London (UCL). Previous research on adults over the age of 65 suggests daytime dozing improves short-term cognition, with nappers outperforming non-nappers in cognitive tests. The new study didn't record nap length, but prior studies suggest naps under 30 minutes are best, with earlier naps less likely to affect nighttime sleep.

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[writerbuddha]

Okay so I recently saw a reblog to Jedi Apologists refutation of the Jedi being a cult which talked about mindfulness as a bad thing with it’s emphasis on self compassion leading to narcissism (I’m paraphrasing). Anyway, this really didn’t sound right from everything I’ve read about it on various pro-Jedi blogs and have taken away from Star Wars itself. And we’ll when I looked up mindfulness some of the stuff I’ve found went into how the practice has been corrupted by Western capitalism and how Buddhists have criticised the way it’s used too.

So as a practising Buddhist how does Western mindfulness deviate from its Buddhist roots and how do the Jedi use mindfulness in the truest sense?

First of all, people have a tendency to forgot or to actively ignore that there is a difference between these four:

Mindfulness

Meditation

Mindfulness meditation

Being mindful of your emotions

Mindfulness in Buddhism

Mindfulness in Buddhism can be defined as maintaining a flow of voluntarily awareness or attention, holding, bearing something in mind, without distraction, without forgetfulness. This awareness, attention is non-judgmental, not filtering things through subjective opinions, or labeling things as good and bad based on like or dislike. But it entails you to have a clear view of what's happening in your mind, body, and environment, and you can recognize which ways of speaking, behaving and using the mind is conducive to your and to other's well-being, which are afflictive, toxic, harmful to you and to others, and you can do the sensible, compassionate thing.

Buddhist Mindfulness and Western Psychology - mindfulness versus meditation

In the context of Western psychology, "mindfulness" often refers to mindfulness practices incorporated into the Western therapeutic toolkit, most often mindfulness meditation. However, one must understand that even as all forms of Buddhist meditation involve mindfulness, mindfulness is not the same as meditation and not all types of mediation is mindfulness meditation. The Buddha taught his followers to practice mindfulness all the time. It should be clear that one can make Buddhist mindfulness a day-to-day activity, but it would be very difficult to stay in the state of mindfulness as it is defined in Western psychological context.

Mindfulness in the Western context is becoming more fully aware of the present moment and becoming more fully in the present moment, completely and non-judgmentally. It generally involves heightened awareness of sensory stimuli, e.g. noticing your breathing, feeling the sensations of your body, being in the “now.”

Buddhists define meditation as a tool used to habituate yourself to constructive, realistic and beneficial emotions and attitudes, to build up good habits of the mind. It's used to transform thoughts and views so that they are more compassionate and correspond to reality. Some forms of meditation are aimed to develop mindfulness. Whereas in the Western context, meditation is often defined as a set of techniques that are intended to encourage a heightened state of awareness and focused attention.

Therapies incorporating mindfulness practices include: Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), Mindfulness-based art therapy (MBAT), Mindfulness-based pain management (MBPM) and Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MSBR).

The Jedi way: "Be mindful of your emotions"

The Jedi way of being mindful of your emotions in George Lucas' Star Wars is to hold your emotions in calm, non-reactive ("passive") and peaceful awareness. When you do that, you can realize: you are not your emotions. You are not your fear; you are not your anger; you are not your aggression; you are not your hate. They're arising within you, and when you're not mindful of them, you are pulled by them to places where you didn't really want to go. However, when one is mindful of their emotions, instead of being carried by them, one can recognize where fear, anger, hate, aggressive feelings are leading them, and can choose the light path over the dark path: to act with firmness, spacious clarity and compassion.

This kind of mindfulness practiced by the Jedi, the Jedi teachings of "be mindful of your emotions", "be mindful of your thoughts" and that one's mind should be where one is, in what they're doing, are very much identical to Buddhist mindfulness. But it should be noted that even though many Jedi - Qui-Gon, Yoda, the whole council, etc. - and even Jar Jar were meditating, this doesn't mean that they attempted to incorporate meditation into a therapeutic toolkit.

Western pop-culture mindfulness

The Western pop-culture mindfulness is to immerse yourself into the present moment, focusing your full and undivided attention to your experiences, whether it's within you or around you. It lacks the aim to discern what is conducive to your and to other's well-being, and it's just experiencing passively. Most worryingly, it's promoted as a way to increase the pleasures you receive from the present. Eat mindfully, get a massage mindfully, walk mindfully, have sex mindfully etc. And this is profoundly non-Buddhist, because it's all about squeezing out more intense and more lasting pleasure of the things that are coming and passing. When "mindfulness practice" is removed from other Buddhist teachings, guiding us to release our greed, anger, to develop empathy, kindness and compassion, and non-attachment, "mindfulness" could reinforce negative qualities. For example, if one fails to differentiate between self-compassion and self-indulgence, self-care and self-centeredness, they likely conclude that their narcissistic tendencies are self-compassion.

Most worryingly, mindfulness is conflated with mediation and is marketed as some kind of relaxation exercise or stress-reduction technique. But mediation was designed to gain insight and wisdom, not to relax. Also, it's popular to treat it as a tool or as a magical remedy for psychological healing, whereas it wasn't designed to be anything like that. It can powerfully support therapeutic processes, but one must know that Buddhist practice is not a substitute for, say, psychotherapy. And when pop-culture mindfulness fails to deliver, people often believe, what they did to themselves was Buddhism and mindfulness, whereas that wasn't Buddhism or mindfulness at all.

[thejockout]

A Word On Dumbing Down

In some conversations with my bros @avissapiens and @master-villain the other day, I finally managed to put a specific idea into words that had been crystallising for a long time. Nothing earth-shattering or even transformative, because I'd been exploring this same understanding with different wording for quite a while now, but it felt significant to me and sparked me to make this post.

The realisation was simple: Dumbing Down is not something you can "Do" as a standalone action. It's perhaps more accurate to say Dumbing Down is itself the perspective shift and realisation that "Smart" is something you can choose to "Not Do."

Clunky wording, I know, but pretend it's smooth for me.

(And as a necessary fyi, this post assumes familiarity with Dumbing Down as a hypnotic concept, which is nowadays most often written and spoken about as a general simplification of thought and cognition versus turning you into some drooling doofus. Maybe the latter is your thing, maybe it isn't - either way, I'm talking here about the more "realistic"/AKA sustainable model where the word dumb is synonymous with "so laid back, you don't want to think or care if people perceive you as dumb because of it".)

Too many subjects (myself included) work at hypnotic personality and cognition changes with a straining effort, in an energetically desperate approach. This is understandable - we tend to push hard for things we really want - and anyone can fall victim to it. It's very similar contextually to the trap many anxiety sufferers fall into when they begin therapy. In an earnest attempt to recover, many sufferers approach recovery with the exact same mindset they do life; that of a "fixer", a "do-er", someone who problem-solves and overthinks themselves into knots and runs loops around the same well-worn mental tracks over and over again to the point of exhaustion.

Don't worry, I'm not here to give some big-brain solution to mental health issues. I suffer myself and am on my own journey of recovery, so I'm in no place to play armchair psychologist. But I will speak about this topic as it relates to hypnosis and dumbing down because the overlap of people who are into Dumbing Down/IQ Reduction/Simplification/Bimbofication/Himbofication hypnosis and who suffer with anxiety (and overthinking) is quite high, so chances are that many who struggle with Dumbing Down suggestions are making the same mistakes. Please see my peer-reviewed Paint Diagram below which provides unequivocal, non-anecdotal proof of this.

IMO, there's nothing wrong with this overlap. Kink is an outlet for many people to deal with emotional issues, and often a very helpful coping mechanism. Dumbing Down is no different conceptually. But I'm talking about this because, just like approaching anti-anxiety work with an anxious energy and effort is doomed to failure, the exact same is true for Dumbing Down. Approaching it with an Intellectualist mindset OR in other words, the anxious energy of a fix-er and do-er and try-er is antithetical to the very state you wish to experience.

Does that make sense?

Successful Dumbing Down (beyond the very enjoyable, shorter-term effects of deep trance which feel like intoxication) is effectively the act of stepping back from mental action/the habit of overthinking. To give another clumsy metaphor, if your default mind works like a toy train constantly running around its track, sometimes gaining speed and sometimes slowing down... Dumbing Down comes from realising "hey, I can actually plug this thing out." No, it's not as simple as turning off an appliance, and it takes time for everyone. Overthought (in all its forms, whether anxious or just from over-intellectualising your life) is effectively a habit, and habits take time to make or break.

Therefore, Perspective Shift #1 that you need to make: recognise that thinking patterns and their frequency are ultimately behavioural and habitual, and can therefore be rewired and lessened with time and specific action. It's not an immediate thing - but it is possible, and this is effectively what dumbing in hypnosis is about.

That perspective raises some questions, I know. But I don't want to write about the answers just yet. Reread and consider that last paragraph a few times to make sure you've really processed it. Think about the questions it leaves you with, and come up with a few answers of your own if you can. You can post your thoughts in the comments or reblogs of this post, as I will be taking the time to read through them, and I'll continue this topic in future as I think more on it myself.

Later.