ftlsid

the reptiles are very active today

in the old pokemon games, if a pokemon's level was too high relative to the number of gym badges you had, it would ignore your commands or fall asleep because it didn't respect you. there's a very important lesson in that

self-inquiry in a nutshell

@howwardroark 4) feel the emotion that the narrative was protecting you from

the mind constructs narratives and meaning on top of direct sensory experience, which is too detailed to be fit into any single narrative or point of view. what you want to do is 1) look for strong emotional reactions that feel bad. this is usually sign that some narrative has been violated. the most painful instances are when the narrative is about oneself 2) investigate those reactions in great detail 3) realize that you were applying a narrative to something by looking for evidence against your beliefs about what happened

I do capabilities research but on myself

@howwardroark not sure what you're looking for. what questions do you have?

@ftlsid any pointers? even a single pointer would work lol

@howwardroark nah just experiment till you find out what works for you

@ftlsid man, do you have any writeup on how you do self-inquiry using llms?

@henryikoh_ Yep

@ftlsid Haha I think the key is having good morals but also the ability to break them when required. When and how it’s broken is up to the individual which means there aren’t really any moral constants

few have ever tasted the sweetness of true moral nihilism

few are even capable of comprehending it, because the conditioned mind sees "moral nihilism" and labels it immoral faster than conscious thought can intervene

@voidshapes @ad0rnai in south bay the computers programmed us

@ad0rnai 🙂‍↕️👆

the more time I spend in the Bay Area the more I come to the conclusion that perhaps only those who grew up in the East Bay are ensouled

the fact that I based many of my life decisions on a 17th century samurai text is going to pay off any day now

The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.

spent the entire afternoon trying to get this to run in less than a minute, final solution takes 3m in python (best I could do without writing a more advanced primality test than trial division). fun challenge

some favorites from the "walking sid" collection

@dismaien upon hearing this one hundred monks became enlightened

consciousness is not in your head your head is in consciousness once you see this you can't unsee it

@protomneme another one I like is “meditation is the practice of paying attention to everything” because “decreasing resistance” suggests that meditation is all about resistance, but ultimately it shows you how to find joy

@ftlsid I appreciate you saying this bc it feels like its a cursory repeatable answer to "what is meditation"! (at least, it lines up with all my experiences so far, so its a nice seed for a a deeper understanding to precipitate around)

Tentatively, I'm hitting the limit of self-inquiry (basically, noting your thoughts and emotions, asking yourself questions about them, and finding inconsistencies or confusions). If you have high verbal ability it's probably faster than meditation for unraveling beliefs about the self, the external world, and the relationship between the two. It vastly reduces several kinds of suffering that are downstream of those beliefs, including suffering caused by threats to the ego and suffering related to reactivity due to past experiences. Clearing these beliefs is like defusing mines in the psyche, which opens a lot of room for self-expression and dynamism in life. Since self-inquiry is highly verbal, it's also very good at integrating insight into a normal social presentation, and has made me a lot sharper and more responsive in conversation. The limitation of self-inquiry is that at some point the verbal labels and explanations stop appearing, and I'm left with raw body sensations. Some of these are downstream of beliefs (e.g. have anxious thought about the future -> bad physical sensation); these ones tend to stop happening. Other sensations stick around with no verbal interpretation. Then there's nothing left to inquire about, all that's present is, for example, "my throat is tight". Self-inquiry, at least the way I do it, has no tools to deal with this. So I think I will be returning to meditation.

@protomneme I think meditation would allow you to experience sensations without resistance, which is what I’m looking for

@ftlsid This is heartening to hear that there is a dimension you can move into and explore once you've squished the other one (cemented progress is possible, there is such a thing as "completed" or "doneness"). Would meditation bring insight into what conditions produced the sensation?