AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Where are you and where are you going?
AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

@shaz - I looked up experiential intimacy, and I do think that's what I'm looking for here. I definitely have the urge to "do more" socially, since a lot of happy hours/bar environments don't feel like I'm actually doing anything. I'll take this into account when planning new social outings.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

August Goals

Now that my mental health is in a better place, I'm able to set and accomplish more concrete goals. My higher level goal current is to return to the ERE basics, as I've massive drifted with my lifestyle over the pandemic. Here are my current priorities:

1. Shift social activities to support the arts/athletics/nature/spirituality - This will help filter out environments I don't want to be in. Current concrete goals here are to sign up for a pickle ball class and a watercolor painting class. There's also a lot of hiking groups on Meetup that I plan to attend, as well as a book club at a local indie book store. I will also be attending some writer's groups.

Long term, I want to begin to pursue a career as an author, and so getting involved with these now will help transition my mentality in that direction.

2. Continue health/fitness habits - As mentioned before, I've switched to a whole food, plant based diet, and I feel hugely better. I'm going to continue this and my current habit of going to the gym five days a week.

I've been on the WFPB diet now for about two months, and my taste preferences have shifted to prefer this over the high sugar/high meat standard American diet. There really are a lot of very good vegan dishes you can make if you have the right recipes.

3. Cultivate intentional spiritual/psychonautic practices - This has been a focus of mine for a year or so now, and I haven't talked too much about it on the forum because it makes me sound like an acid hippy without the acid. But there are a lot of interesting experiences in consciousness you can induce entirely without drugs if you master psychonautic techniques, such as meditation, lucid dreaming, controlled hypnogogic experiences, and the classic mystical experience. For now, I want to pick up meditation again, keep a dream journal, and possibly find a meditation circle in my area to join.

4. Start tracking and cutting expenses again - Stopped doing this over the pandemic and really need to pick it up again. Part of what's holding me back from freedom is a lack of concrete exit plan, and that's going to include having tight awareness of how much I'm spending and consuming.

5. Write and draw more - I have a novel idea I'm developing. Will continue to work on that.

6. Read the giant pile of unread books - Starting with Infinite Jest may have been a mistake.

dustBowl
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by dustBowl »

AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Mon Aug 01, 2022 9:49 am
6. Read the giant pile of unread books - Starting with Infinite Jest may have been a mistake.
:lol:

I made the exact same mistake. Never did finish it. That thing is a tome.

Depending on your motivations for reading infinite jest, you might enjoy A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again or Consider the Lobster, which are collections of David Foster Wallace's essays. I never made much progress in infinite jest but I devoured all of his essay collections because I just love his prose.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

@dustBowl - Thanks for the recs, I'll check those out. I'm about 100 pages into Infinite Jest, and while it's very good, reading it is definitely a Herculean effort. :lol: I'm hoping the act of reading it helps unfry my social media addled attention span.

Wallace has a very 90s anti-consumer vibe in all his writing. Reading it is a satisfying time capsule of the era.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

On Writing

Attempting to shifting all my extracurricular activities to writing has been a useful exercise in making my priorities a lot more clear. For one, I have learned that when you don't have an end goal, it's really easy to waste time doing any random activity that isn't really bringing you satisfaction. But when you actually have a goal you want to achieve, you suddenly realize there are only so many hours in the day, and if you don't prioritize the tasks you really want to get done, they're not going to get done.

I've also learned that spending money on workshops can pay dividends if you're smart about it. For one, the other people willing to spend money on workshops are usually fairly motivated, so it's a good way to network. And two, it helps a lot with motivation if you have an event with other writers to look forward to vs just sitting in your house and staring at a blank word document. Obviously you can get carried away with this, but I might spend more money on writing workshops in the future because I've found it to be worth the payoff so far.

Writers are interesting to hang out with because a lot of them have the workingman/businessman mindset vs the salaryman mindset. The difference is dramatic. None of the writers I've met are obsessed with their 9-to-5 status, and they're committed to the hustle it takes to sell your book. This is in stark contrast with the salaryman mindset, which usually involves being really good at one thing, looking professional in meetings, and then attempting to sandbag any busy work they give you. The salaryman mindset feels a lot more passive and cog-like than the workingman/businessman, as the later two involve more active engagement with market trends.

I've also learned there are basically three ways to pursue writing:

1. Write short stories and submit them to publications. You usually get paid $50-$500 per story for this.
2. Write the Deep and Meaningful Inner Novel you've been planning your whole life and pray a publisher cares about it enough to pick it up and do all the advertising work for you. As you might imagine, this can be a bit of a crapshoot because you're ignoring market trends. On the other hand, the Deep and Meaningful Inner Novel is, shall we say, more fulfilling to write vs the latest Harlequin werewolf romance that, if you look closely enough, is indistinguishable from PornHub.
3. Go the self-publishing route and write niche, targeted books for the Amazon eBook market. You can make pretty alright money at this if you're willing to chase the market, but also, it may not be that fulfilling to be crunching out novellas on a monthly basis only for the money.

I'm going to attempt to chase all three of these for the time being. Short stories are good practice, and getting one accepted to a publication would be fairly straightforward and good proof that I actually have what it takes to do this.

I do have an idea for a Deep and Meaningful Inner Novel that explores themes of identity and paradigms as influenced by technology planned out. It's about a PI-turned-hacker set in a Snowcrash/Ready Player One/Severance cyberpunk setting. I think I can fit it into an Amazons self-publish genre with a little research (probably a crime thriller), thereby letting myself write something I actually want to write and that readers actually want to read. (While avoiding having to write werewolf romance :lol: )

On Good Habits

I've had a lot of habits I've been slowly changing, and the inertia has been rough. As I've mentioned in previous entries, this has amounted to improving diet & exercise and reducing screen time. For diet and exercise, that's included going to the gym 5 days a week and eating plant-based meals from home. It's taken a lot of effort to make these three habits sticky, including falling off the wagon a few times, but I have made significant progress.

Reducing screen time in particular has been difficult because most of my social life turned online over the pandemic, so reducing screen usage has lead to the loss of a lot of online friendships. This is for the best, but I'd be lying if I said it hasn't been difficult at times. I honestly go back and forth with screen usage sometimes between the positions of "the internet is bad and ruining society" to "this is the future anyway and I might as well just get used to it."

It's especially difficult in the post-pandemic word because a lot of genuinely good things have moved to Zoom. There's a large number of writing workshops on Zoom, which spares me the 30 min - 40 min one way drive I have to make if I'm attempting to do things in person in Denver. At the same time, socializing and networking on Zoom just doesn't cut it.

So trying to cut screen time sometimes feels like a Sisyphean task given the direction the world is headed. It's incredibly hard to stay relevant without the internet. But as I've said before, your social sphere is a function of whatever environment you put yourself in. If you put yourself on the internet, that's the kind of social sphere you're going to make. If you put yourself in the bar, that's the social sphere you're going to make. And at this point, I honestly don't know which one is even better.

If anyone is curious, my average screen time per day is usually 4.5 hours, this includes everything, and most of that time is spent on worthwhile activities. The average screen time per day for an American adult is 7.5 hours, so I'm already below average.

mathiverse
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by mathiverse »

AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Mon Aug 15, 2022 11:29 am
If anyone is curious, my average screen time per day is usually 4.5 hours, this includes everything
Is this including work related screen time? If so, impressively low for a SWE.

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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by theanimal »

I think the writer's workshops are a very good idea and worth pursuing. I remember hearing Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club author) in an interview talk about writing groups he was a part of with Cheryl Strayed (Wild author) and other higher profile authors. He said it was one of the most effective things in terms of improving his writing. Maybe an MMG group would be good for this too?

I'm not sure what type of writing you are pursuing, but depending on style, magazines can pay much more for stories. I've been paid $800 (iirc) for a feature length non-fiction essay (1500 words) in a prominent but somewhat niche magazine. I also wrote a few articles that were published in the same magazine and a newspaper that were ~500 words that paid around the upper end of your range ($300-400). Newspapers pay almost nothing in my experience and after I wrote one I didn't bother trying for any more. My understanding is that bigger magazines will pay $2-3k for articles of longer length, more if you are well known. If you have an pictures to go with your story, magazines will pay for that as well. My total from my feature length essay was over $1k. Of course, all this varies depending on what you write. Poetry and fiction are much different.

ETA: I missed the part about sci-fi. The 2nd paragraph may not be helpful then. @Riparian made most of her money self publishing on Amazon, at least when she was posting on here. It may be worth going through her posts.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

@mathiverse - I work from home but only track time on my personal devices (my phone, laptop, and desktop). So this total does not include work-related screen time. (Since the 7.5 hour stat doesn't include work screen time either). If I add the work screen time in, it's probably about four hours higher, since I try not to stare at the computer when I'm on calls/at lunch/working out diagrams/etc. So it's probably more like 8.5 including work. The worst it ever got was 18 hours a day during peak covid, so getting it down has been a major improvement.

The 4.5 hour breakdown ends up being about 2 hours on Discord/this forum/reddit/random other chatting/MMG Zoom/etc and 2.5 hours for drawing comics. Note that some of that 4.5 does overlap with work hours, so tracking it gets confusing. (Like I am writing this post while waiting for the unit tests to run, but I am also writing this on my laptop and not my work computer)

Also noteworthy is I only spend about an hour a week on my phone. Most of my screen time is on my larger devices.

@theanimal - Great point on magazines. I'll look into that. The main type of writing I'm pursuing right now is fiction, but I do know non-fiction usually has a larger market and therefore pays more. It might be worth it to write some non-fiction in addition to the novel I'm working on to practice my skills and build my portfolio.

Fiction short stories are a pretty weak market, so they don't pay much. Non-fiction essays may be a better use of my time for short pieces.

Also great idea on a MMG. I'm going to look into starting one because that could also be a great way to network. I've found all the MMGs I've joined so far to be invaluable. I think writing critique groups are very important, and knowing other writers gives you a good lead on finding publishers and agents.

I'll check out @Riparian's posts too, thanks!

ETA: Here is the link to the mentioned journal: viewtopic.php?t=1715

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

On Self-Actualization: How to Be Different and Liked

I've been mulling over the Dent in the Universe post that's been going around the forums for a few weeks now. I've come to the conclusion that the key to fulfillment is to discover how you are different from other people then use that difference to add value back to the world. This is because progress can only come from difference. Social progress is not unlike evolutionary biology: by acting on difference, you find new solutions to old problems. After all, you can't solve a problem with the same logic that got you in that problem.

Of course, not all difference is adaptive. I think it's easy to get lost in the weeds of alienation by focusing on how your difference is non-adaptive. This is especially easy to do if your difference has been a historical source of personal trauma for you, given that the need to conform is a painful part of adolescence/Kegan3. Being different has a tendency to put you on the outside, and being on the outside is painful. Thus it is easy to turn to reactionary self-hatred over your difference and kill your sense of self and fulfillment by squeezing yourself into blind conformity.

It is equally easy to decide you don't need anyone but yourself and go live the route of solitude. After all, other people tend to be a source of pain, not support, if they deem you out-group enough. Indeed, one can grow resentful of the social nature of the species as a whole. It is very easy to begin to feel humans are nothing but blind sheep who uncaringly toss aside anyone who can't or won't play their social role. Social roles themselves are essentially arbitrary, and so the very existence of the social order can grow oppressive.

Thus, at the most extreme, you can decide that either you don't exist and commit ego death or that other people don't exist and embrace solipsism. However, like most extremes, the binary of ego death to solipsism illustrates the extreme ends of the spectrum of consciousness where actual experience takes place.

This is because the nature of the self is a porous construct that exists only as an emergent property between the interaction of the organism that is you and the environment you exist inside. Existence has objective, subjective, and intersubjective aspects. To cut out the subjective or intersubjective is to rip the wheels off the engine of selfhood, leaving you grasping at a dwindling experience that existed only as the emergent property of relationships within the outside world.

This is why mental illness itself is an essentially ego-centric trap. The mind cuts itself off from the Other, but without an Other to give shape to the liquid experience of consciousness, the mind turns inward. There is a narcissistic element to depression. You are bad. You are uniquely flawed. You don't deserve to exist. But what even is you without a context? We can only exist inside constraints. Like water spilled onto a flat surface, the mind will never make sense of itself without interaction with something that isn't you to give it shape.

Put in more simple language, self-actualization is finding what makes you different and finding the gap in the world that difference can fill. The dialectic between you and the world is the canvas experience needs to take shape. This is both why neither self-indulgent consumption nor clockwork conformity to organizations can make you happy. You need to be able to experience your difference and a social/physical world where that difference can manifest itself.

Put in more concrete terms, what I have been doing is identifying useful facets of my difference and where that difference is needed. You can do this in any social setting. Make it engaging by understanding your difference and other's needs, and then bridging that gap.

For instance, I have been attending a 13-week course on local civic government. This course has involved the opportunity to interact with our town's councilmembers and mayor, as well as other elected officials. And as you might imagine, most people involved in local politics are about twice my age.

Now instead of focusing on how I am so much younger than everyone else and how it will be impossible to relate to anyone because I'm not married/don't have kids, what I've done is embrace confidence and leveraged that difference to add value to the conversation. I've actively tried to bring up areas of my own experience that I think are blind spots in the councilmembers' and mayor's experience. Given this is politics, one thing I've been talking about is how I think technology is influencing the political landspace. I was surprised to learn no one in the group had ever thought about the topic in the way I had, and I had many people, even real politicians, asking me questions about how I thought technology was impacting democracy. It was exciting to have the opportunity to engage with people solving interesting problems in the real world using an area I had exclusive knowledge over.

Indeed, I've found local politics to be a lot more engaging method to meeting interesting people than going to the bar. Pretty much everyone involved in local politics feels passionately about what they do, and there's a major energy and commitment to solving community problems you don't find when your goal is to passively consume alcohol and entertainment with other warm bodies. It doesn't matter that everyone is older than me or that I'm the only single person when there are actual problems to solve. Indeed, my youth and singlehood gives me time and energy to bring perspectives to the table that no one else can. My computer experience in particular seems to be a coveted skill that I've used to solve many minor IT problems that no one else can solve.

It's made me realize that this aspect of engagement is something I'm missing from my life. I'm not getting it at work because my job feels too detached and pointless. But it is something I can get outside of work by volunteering to sit on boards of local organizations.

Because the most important part of the process is creatively engaging with the world using the ways you are different, not similar, to other people.

zbigi
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by zbigi »

AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Thu Sep 15, 2022 11:56 am
Now instead of focusing on how I am so much younger than everyone else and how it will be impossible to relate to anyone because I'm not married/don't have kids, what I've done is embrace confidence and leveraged that difference to add value to the conversation.
Jarosław Kaczyński, the by far most powerful man in Polish politics, is a 72 year old bachelor with no kids (lives with a cat). And that's in an country very heavily centered around family values. Anything can be possible if you put your mind to it :)

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

Ha, he sounds like a very interesting person! I know Ralph Nader never married and has no kids either. Unconventional politicians are cool people.

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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by jacob »

This was interesting.
AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Thu Sep 15, 2022 11:56 am
On Self-Actualization: How to Be Different and Liked
The keyword "liked" sets the entire framework. It reminds me of the royal choice between being "feared" or "loved" as a practical dichotomy. For example, if it was my title, it would have been "How to be different and understood".
AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Thu Sep 15, 2022 11:56 am
I've been mulling over the Dent in the Universe post that's been going around the forums for a few weeks now. I've come to the conclusion that the key to fulfillment is to discover how you are different from other people then use that difference to add value back to the world. This is because progress can only come from difference. Social progress is not unlike evolutionary biology: by acting on difference, you find new solutions to old problems. After all, you can't solve a problem with the same logic that got you in that problem.
Eric Hoffer noticed the same thing whereas I have been blissfully unaware of [this cause] for the past 5-7 years. He used the word "tension" which I think is more descriptive of whether a difference gets resolved or whether one just lets it be. There are two ways to resolve tension. Everything is fixed (the systems are perfected) which corresponds to WL8 or one eventually accepts imperfections or both at the same time which is worse. Both lead to stagnation. I think this is the danger of Turquoise stage where everything just seems part of a "wonderful" eternal pattern. It's a trap of ineffectivity.
AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Thu Sep 15, 2022 11:56 am
Of course, not all difference is adaptive. I think it's easy to get lost in the weeds of alienation by focusing on how your difference is non-adaptive. This is especially easy to do if your difference has been a historical source of personal trauma for you, given that the need to conform is a painful part of adolescence/Kegan3. Being different has a tendency to put you on the outside, and being on the outside is painful. Thus it is easy to turn to reactionary self-hatred over your difference and kill your sense of self and fulfillment by squeezing yourself into blind conformity.
I would agree with everything except I've never had a need to conform. The lack of this need changes everything. I sometimes wonder if I skipped Kegan3 entirely in its embodied form and only later realized that it was an actual thing via theory. Indeed, I think before discovering Kegan, I could probably have written pages about the impossibility of not having formed one's own thoughts instead of toeing the party line as a "survival" mechanism. In my case, it was easy. I grew up in the sticks and mainly hung out with books, magazines, and eventually fidonet; so the water this fish swam in was made of ideas rather than social behavior.
AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Thu Sep 15, 2022 11:56 am
It is equally easy to decide you don't need anyone but yourself and go live the route of solitude. After all, other people tend to be a source of pain, not support, if they deem you out-group enough. Indeed, one can grow resentful of the social nature of the species as a whole. It is very easy to begin to feel humans are nothing but blind sheep who uncaringly toss aside anyone who can't or won't play their social role. Social roles themselves are essentially arbitrary, and so the very existence of the social order can grow oppressive.
Which is partially what I have done except creating my own little online tribe of ideas. From my perspective, insofar other (random) people are not a source of ideas, they're not a source or support of much of interest to me. We seem to share a basic need to interact, and there's a difference when it comes to interacting with the world or with people respectively, but the dynamics is similar. Ideas or concepts will uncaringly toss anyone who doesn't understand them aside as well. The entire universe will do that as well. I don't think social roles are arbitrary (asserting randomness usually means that the veil of ignorance hasn't been pierced yet). The roles are what they are to support the given social structure, but the structures can be different. An incompatible structure feels oppressive.
AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Thu Sep 15, 2022 11:56 am
Thus, at the most extreme, you can decide that either you don't exist and commit ego death or that other people don't exist and embrace solipsism. However, like most extremes, the binary of ego death to solipsism illustrates the extreme ends of the spectrum of consciousness where actual experience takes place.
The main drive of my response is that this is a false dichotomy---there's another dimension.
AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Thu Sep 15, 2022 11:56 am
This is because the nature of the self is a porous construct that exists only as an emergent property between the interaction of the organism that is you and the environment you exist inside. Existence has objective, subjective, and intersubjective aspects. To cut out the subjective or intersubjective is to rip the wheels off the engine of selfhood, leaving you grasping at a dwindling experience that existed only as the emergent property of relationships within the outside world.
If you were to ask me who or rather what I really am, this entity called jacob is something that turns facts into theory and theory into action that improves the system. Or more jokingly: coffee into papers that improves interaction [in the universe]. I consider the "selfhood" somewhat unimportant for that ... basically just along for the ride. I think selfhood is ultimately a social construct. Note how many people don't really know what they are. This goes back to Kegan3. Or the apparent inability for some to get consistent results in MBTI. As far as I'm concerned I have as much selfhood as Windows11. You may project various qualities to Windows11 like finicky, recalcitrant, and incompetently helpful, but windows11 itself doesn't think in those terms, it just does.
AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Thu Sep 15, 2022 11:56 am
This is why mental illness itself is an essentially ego-centric trap. The mind cuts itself off from the Other, but without an Other to give shape to the liquid experience of consciousness, the mind turns inward. There is a narcissistic element to depression. You are bad. You are uniquely flawed. You don't deserve to exist. But what even is you without a context? We can only exist inside constraints. Like water spilled onto a flat surface, the mind will never make sense of itself without interaction with something that isn't you to give it shape.
Methinks the human mind is a very flexible piece of hardware that has a much greater range of possibilities than we see in our herd-mammal social arrangements. And the "ego" is a piece of software that emerges or gets installed as a coping mechanism for herd behavior. It probably does need a starting point (this is impossible to test) but the mind is capable of referring to itself. This is practically the definition of [human] intelligence.

It's when this piece of software takes over all functions that it gets problematic. I have learned that many people think they (their ego) exists somewhere in their head and they literally can't feel their body/remain unaware of what state their body is in and how that affects their mind. Apparently, self-awareness is not normal. Hence the popularity and necessity of "checking-in" in certain circles. See what I did there. I slay myself. One solution is to meditate the crap out of the ego but manipulating the surrounding brain tissues... but this leads to turning off activity in the front center neocortex dissolving the sense of self to the point where people dissociate from their body and feels one with everything---this supposedly is wonderful when done deliberately. But is it useful? Cutting away stuff is always the easiest way to deal with chaos thereby making things "Simple". Also see minimalism and simple living. It is much harder to handle chaos with complexity.
AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Thu Sep 15, 2022 11:56 am
Put in more simple language, self-actualization is finding what makes you different and finding the gap in the world that difference can fill. The dialectic between you and the world is the canvas experience needs to take shape. This is both why neither self-indulgent consumption nor clockwork conformity to organizations can make you happy. You need to be able to experience your difference and a social/physical world where that difference can manifest itself.
Self-actualization is removing the grit from the machine (The mind that you have) so it can run smoothly.
AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Thu Sep 15, 2022 11:56 am
Put in more concrete terms, what I have been doing is identifying useful facets of my difference and where that difference is needed. You can do this in any social setting. Make it engaging by understanding your difference and other's needs, and then bridging that gap.
Insofar you're a social person. There may be a person for whom self-actualization is simply jogging. While self-actualization is often described as needing other people, I highly suspect it's due to the experts on SA being *NF* who have finally found their tribe
after growing up in *ST* environments. But since they're the only ones writing books about it, it turns into a self-selected autobiography. "Surely, after getting in touch with your emotions, your next stage is to develop a loving relation with humanity".

Fair enough, but it's not for everybody.
AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Thu Sep 15, 2022 11:56 am
Because the most important part of the process is creatively engaging with the world using the ways you are different, not similar, to other people.
With this I agree, because in that case you're running your "native OS" w/o some compatibility layer.

Also, Bateson always talked about "differences that make a difference" rather than just "differences". It is those differences [that make a difference] that dents the universe.

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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by daylen »

jacob wrote:
Thu Sep 22, 2022 7:23 am
One solution is to meditate the crap out of the ego but manipulating the surrounding brain tissues... but this leads to turning off activity in the front center neocortex dissolving the sense of self to the point where people dissociate from their body and feels one with everything---this supposedly is wonderful when done deliberately. But is it useful? Cutting away stuff is always the easiest way to deal with chaos thereby making things "Simple".
From what I have heard, read, and experienced, meditation without contemplation tends to bundle up emotions into pressurized containers that are at risk of explosion. The oneness that is felt from pure meditative practice is still dualistic and thus easily recognizable (in first person with the right contemplative practice or on brain scans). Where meditation detaches from desire, contemplation sharpens the view of desire-space. Together, something like "choice" feels more embodied in the sense that the desires that influence choice are clearly somewhere between over there and over here in a meaningful way through flow. This "grasping" process can generalize while remaining complex enough for more and more situations. I think this would be more of a non-dualistic practice that avoids emotional turmoil upon simplicity not matching up to reality. The trade off being that "oneness" and/or "self" are more convoluted (more of a superposition of states) and achieving blissful yet fake oneness is harder. Pure meditation pushes problems away and this is hard to un-see with contemplative practice (since the ego has not been eliminated, only hidden from view).

On the other hand, contemplation without meditation can drive one to insanity. As not all problems and/or desires require dissection to live a good or eventful life.

ADD: I am using meditation above roughly as a binding process between Si and Ni. Contemplation roughly acting as binding process between Ti and Fi.

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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by jacob »

daylen wrote:
Sat Sep 24, 2022 9:18 am
ADD: I am using meditation above roughly as a binding process between Si and Ni. Contemplation roughly acting as binding process between Ti and Fi.
Interestingly, for all introverts these bind 3&6 and 1&8. Whereas for extraverts, they always bind 4&5 and 2&7.

What I find curious is that meditation is usually presented as a means to grounding oneself and fixing the monkey mind problem. When I started learning about [this motivation] I was rather flabbergasted to learn that this is a common problem that I apparently never had experienced. I'm a strong primary Ni which implies a relatively very weak Si to the point of it basically being acknowledged and ignored. Thus no point in binding to what I fundamentally treat as a useless function. Conversely, I've spent an unreasonably large amount of time trying to turn what feels morally right into a coherent structure.

Within the Car-model:
The Ni driver is too old to gain anything from arguing with its Si-shadow.
The Fi 10 year old still likes to argue with its Ti-shadow.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

Interesting response, @Jacob. I had to spend several days pondering this before responding.
Jacob wrote:For example, if it was my title, it would have been "How to be different and understood".
Jacob wrote:I sometimes wonder if I skipped Kegan3 entirely in its embodied form and only later realized that it was an actual thing via theory. Indeed, I think before discovering Kegan, I could probably have written pages about the impossibility of not having formed one's own thoughts instead of toeing the party line as a "survival" mechanism.
I've come to understand Kegan as describing consciousness itself. And if we take consciousness to mean awareness of internal states and models, this implies it's very possible to have internal states and models driving behavior without any kind of awareness, just like a computer program. It also means that animals might be conscious too, albeit at a lower level because they have lesser awareness of internal states and models.

Thus if we assume you can have intelligent behavior without awareness (computers) and awareness without intelligence (animals), what it means is that consciousness itself is a spectrum. And if you accept that it is a spectrum, the implication is that some people experience less consciousness than others. That is, the may have fewer internal states/models or their internal states/models remain hidden to them.

This is my understanding of Kegan where each level is gaining greater insight into internal states and models, thus increasing consciousness.

But Kegan might have been wrong that his states are a hierarchy. They could very well be independent from each other. As a personal example, I have an incredibly easy time seeing how institutions and relationships create the people involved inside of them, which is a Kegan5 skill, but Kegan3 social expectations still haunt me like some type of comic book villain. I suspect there is some personality type that might be prone to learning Kegan4 and Kegan5 but never Kegan3, thereby showing that it isn't a hierarchy but rather separate skills or separate modes of consciousness. I suspect the tendency to think in abstractions is going to make Kegan3 frustrating while making Kegan4/5 easier.

This might also imply skipping or lacking Kegan3 is a skill weakness that could lead to blindspots in yourself or your behavior because you are lacking this aspect of consciousness.

The implication of this is that if you aren't being understood by others, it's possible you're operating at a different level of awareness than they are. Much like projecting a hypercube into 2D space, it's difficult to communicate concepts that require deeper mental models and higher levels of abstraction to people who lack that level of awareness. The two methods around this that I've come across are to either develop their internal models to a higher level or project what you want to say into a simpler dimension. Alternatively, one can go screen for people they think already have high capacity in whatever the area one wishes to be understood is.
Jacob wrote:I consider the "selfhood" somewhat unimportant for that ... basically just along for the ride. I think selfhood is ultimately a social construct.
Have you read Blindsight by Peter Watts? The premise of the book is that selfhood is basically a parasitic process that has no real benefit and was an evolutionary accident.

I've come to see selfhood as sort of an internal hallucination. Basically a map maker making a map of himself. It's an entirely internal, unreal hallucination. It's also debatable if your consciousness is even calling the shots or if your lower brain functions just decide first and let the conscious you imagine that you decided. The neurology of this is beyond my pay grade, but researching that is on my to do list.
Jacob wrote:Everything is fixed (the systems are perfected) which corresponds to WL8 or one eventually accepts imperfections or both at the same time which is worse. Both lead to stagnation. I think this is the danger of Turquoise stage where everything just seems part of a "wonderful" eternal pattern. It's a trap of ineffectivity.
This is something I've noticed a lot when I ask older people about their lives or how they think. There seems to be this point where life gets too painful and it's easier to turn it off via spiritual bypass or "surrender." I think it's essentially a coping mechanism--a way to basically be dead without dying because you cut off engagement. You can avoid dealing with your own tension this way, but I view it as the lose scenario.
Jacob wrote:What I find curious is that meditation is usually presented as a means to grounding oneself and fixing the monkey mind problem.
Jacob wrote: One solution is to meditate the crap out of the ego but manipulating the surrounding brain tissues... but this leads to turning off activity in the front center neocortex dissolving the sense of self to the point where people dissociate from their body and feels one with everything---this supposedly is wonderful when done deliberately. But is it useful?
What I use meditation for is to turn consciousness in on itself and basically realize which parts of my ego/awareness are internal hallucinations and which are useful. When you do this enough, you realize basically everything is a hallucination and most human beliefs are either coping mechanisms or social narratives to glue groups together. I know some people describe this process as liberating/wonderful, but I've personally found most of my altered consciousness-ego death-meditation realizations to basically just suck. It's hard not to get stuck inside of solipsism or mechanical nihilism when you mix these realizations/experiences with hard materialism. Everyone I know who describes ego death as wonderful has some kind of spiritual belief that makes the experience wonderful. It's basically just a trip. Without that spiritual belief, you just realize your sense of "you" is a hallucination and...that's it. It's useful insofar as you no longer have to identify with negative ego traits, but to echo what I said above, oneness with the universe is also another way to die without dying.
Jacob wrote:Insofar you're a social person. There may be a person for whom self-actualization is simply jogging. While self-actualization is often described as needing other people, I highly suspect it's due to the experts on SA being *NF* who have finally found their tribe
after growing up in *ST* environments. But since they're the only ones writing books about it, it turns into a self-selected autobiography. "Surely, after getting in touch with your emotions, your next stage is to develop a loving relation with humanity".
I do think this is true for most authors. For me at least, my motivation is the fact that you need something after deconstructing everything about yourself and the world because constraints are what give shape to anything. Total freedom is also total annihilation.

daylen
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by daylen »

AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Mon Sep 26, 2022 2:28 pm
But Kegan might have been wrong that his states are a hierarchy. They could very well be independent from each other.
Right or wrong, K5 is defined in terms of K4, K3, K2, K1, and perhaps K0 (unstated assumptions used to set-up the hierarchy). Modifying the constructor (from 0 to N) nullifies truths (and falsehoods) derived from the system. Essentially restarting from scratch on the phenomenological binding problem that dissolves the abstract/concrete gap if completely solved.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

@daylen - This is true. And yet I increasingly wonder if tying discussions of consciousness to the Kegan/function stack paradigms is perhaps leading to blindspots. I'm going to reread Kegan and get back to you on if there's another way to formulate this because my intuition is that the postmodern model of consciousness may be independent from pre-modern consciousness (Kegan3) in a way that can lead to gaps in awareness. I suppose the question is if consciousness is a network (you might be missing pre-modern social subjectivity while having postmodern institutional subjectivity) or a hierarchy (Kegan3 is required for Kegan5).

daylen
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by daylen »

Networks/graphs are loosely typed structures that can be thought to underpin more strictly typed structures like hierarchies. Generally, being more strict allows for stronger (i.e. more readily testable) propositions.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

Quarter Four Planning - Living in the Positive Space

My general mental health has improved dramatically from the beginning of the year. I feel much more stable now and have more good days than bad days, although of course, bad days still happen. Nevertheless, I credit massively overhauling my diet and exercise, quitting caffeine, getting involved in some regular social meetups, and doing the Plotkin exercises for helping turn my depression around.

The downside is I feel I was actually more creatively productive when I was depressed because all I would do was write as a kind of coping mechanism. Working FT, maintaining a good level of fitness, and having a social life is making it hard to find the focus to write. And it's not so much a matter of time, because I do have time, but I seem to lack the ability to focus on consciously changing more than one habit at a time. I'm trying not to let this frustration make me lose sight of just how much dramatic progress I have made, however. I'm doing a much better job living life intentionally and not on autopilot than I have in my entire life leading up to this moment.

Anyway, my plan for Q42022 is to focus on cultivating a life in positive space rather than negative space. This means looking at what my life is rather than what it isn't. This is good, ol' freedom-to, and focusing on freedom-to has become a lot easier as I've banished the demons of freedom-from.

I've come up with the following goals to help cultivate this.

1. Avoid the verb "to be" - The verb "to be" leads to imprecise thinking that can easily lock you into a certain perspective that limits cognitive freedom. It leads to over-identification. For example, instead of saying "I am a software developer," I can say "I think abstractly about software problems and write lines of code for a living." Saying "I am a software developer" means I lose my identity if I quit my job. Saying "I solve abstract problems" is something I can do anywhere in life. Likewise, saying "I am an American" might get me stuck in tribal thinking. Saying "I was born in this city and raised with these cultural values" frees up my identity to be more open-ended and less limiting.

This applies to other people and objects too. I could say "that person is annoying" but it's better to say "that person cut me off in line and now I feel impatient." It means "annoying" isn't an intrinsic or permanent feature of that person, but rather, I feel frustration as a fleeting emotion. This should help counter the black and white thinking that is easy to creep up on you with depression.

2. Frame goals in the positive, not the negative - The problem with negative (freedom-from) goals is that they can be imprecise and lead you to not knowing what to do in that imprecision. For example, I could say "I'm going to quit social media," but this goal leaves me nothing to do after I've quit social media. And with nothing better to do, I might as well browse reddit.

But instead if I say, "I want to get my news from the newspaper," now I have a positive goal to pursue (reading the paper), which is a tangible action I can take.

Framing goals this way should help me escape too many levels of abstraction and focus on concrete actions.

3. Build engagement with the external world/Se - As someone with high Ni, I have a very easy time spending my entire life in my head. Left to my own devices, I will sit in a chair all day and ponder the meaning of life or attempt to prove that p does not equal np. This is a useful talent, but it can grow imbalanced if not check with Se activities.

So I'm going to add more grounding hobbies into my life. I am a tad concerned this will continue to eat up all my free time, but I think it's important in living a balance lifestyle. I'm going to attempt to fit the Se-version of things into my existing web of goals as much as possible, instead of doing something like becoming an elite hockey player, because I don't see Se-land becoming the focus of my life any time soon. Rather, this is just for grounding/balance.

I know this is essentially what Shop as Soulcraft tells you to do, which I have not read and I don't know if it's worth my time to read given I already know the basic argument. Anyway, these are the Se activities I'm thinking I can easily add into my life:

1. I already have a decent level of fitness, so I could get into more free weights and advance weightlifting techniques. I actually find some sports are extremely easy to autopilot through (running), so I need to pick ones that are complex enough I can't just zone out.

2. Riding my bike around instead of driving both saves money and gas and engages Se.

3. Continue to clean my house/make it aesthetically pleasing.

4. Continue to learn to cook well.

5. Go to the life drawing sessions at the art co-op I joined. I find life drawing engages Se a lot more than drawing from a picture.

6. Join Toastmasters and work on vocal training for public speaking. Being able to present yourself well is useful for promoting books/etc.

7. Get involved in hiking and other outdoor activities.

8. Hone some improv acting abilities for DnD.

4. Focus on systems, not outcomes. - This is a cliche that gets tossed around a lot, but as I try to enact a lot of change in my life, I'm starting to realize just how true this is. Setting a goal of "I want to lose 10lbs" is way less useful than developing a system where I am going to be eating salads every night by default and running 10 miles by requirement. One requires a lot of willpower while the second simply happens as a side effect of the system. I need to rethink all my habits from this paradigm because I think this is the current biggest limiter on my behavior.

5. Writing & Art - Currently not doing as much of either as I want. Need to make more time for it.

6. Internal practices - Looking to get into building a memory palace, more consistent meditation, and pick up lucid dreaming again.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

New anti-consumer challenge: I need a rear seat cover for my car to keep dog fur off the seats. My initial reaction is to buy this on Amazon but instead I'm going to see if I can make one for as cheaply as possible. I already have the sewing skills so I just need to find material.

Posting this in my journal to hold myself accountable. Will provide pictures when done.

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