February 2017 – Underlore

Abduction and Revelation

TLDR: I propose specific facilities for plausible delusions for the purposes of addressing three questions.

The curing of genuinely sick patients.
The study of these potential events.
The study of fact and evidence resistance, the study of delusion itself.

The reason I think this would be superior is because it would provide a clear criteria for sanity, it would allow humanity itself to prove it has an open mind, and it would give patients, fixated individuals, and interested third parties a dignified place to interact.

The two biggest categories are religious delusions and conspiracy delusions.

Imagine a place where we could substantively start untangling the line between belief and illness. And imagine what we could learn from leveraging all the currently wasted intellect of fixated individuals.

Instead of a “cure” we would be offering people the chance to truly prove their thesis. As they work to do so they would no doubt teach us things, one way or the other. By creating a facility with the express multi-purpose of mental healthcare facility and event research facility we would be making a place that is objectively the right place for these people regardless of what the truth actually is.

Instead of trying to cure people, we could unleash them as scientists. There would be no antagonism between the groups. If they are mentally ill then we could show them exactly why we think so and their counter arguments would teach us more and more about the mind.

These places would in essence be science training camps, or theology schools. We would finally leverage the intensity and creativity of insanity for the benefit of humanity’s collective rational mind.

And imagine the benefits from a therapeutic standpoint. You could actually leverage psychoses against each other. If the doctors can’t break Through the barrier of a delusions maybe the effort to prove it could. As the patient works to prove their delusions real they convince themselves and each other what isn’t real.

And then there’s the research benefits. Firstly a whole crowd of new help with the science, who knows they might leave the system with PHDs. Secondly we’d be given them the tools to scientifically describe what they are experiencing in a language the whole species can understand.

We start with the basic and totally fair statement that hey, you could be right, We think that’s unlikely, but we’re gonna give you the chance to prove your assertions with a clear non subjective set of criteria. The scientific method. Even if we don’t convince you and you don’t convince us we’ll both be better off. If they start to panic from the conflict of their delusion with reality we remind them that it’s possible to be both. We say to them in word and deed that you may genuinely have a point and be a little bit mentally ill at the same time. The efforts aren’t mutually exclusive and we don’t ever have to have a final say because science never stops. We’re not trying to cure you so much as create a way for us to work together. Either way you’re an expert in this context and experts are always valuable in the right context.

Society has to handle mental illness, and we have a couple basic options. I think this approach combines all the best elements of each one.

When confronted with a person we call crazy society has to either cure them, sequester them, listen to them, or put them to use. Instead of trying to figure out who goes where and which is which, why not create a process and place that can do any blend of the three?

Prisons and homeless shelters have totally attempted to fill the asylum gap, and that is ethically repugnant. Our society has pretty clearly criminalized and monetized both mental illness and poverty.

I think it really would be wise and therapeutic to break down the walls between “sick” and healthy people. After all, if we’re so healthy where’s the harm in hearing them out? Giving them a chance to provewhat they believe?

To me, it’s pretty clear that insanity of some degree is pandemic anyway. Maybe that’s the real problem. That we’re collectively afraid to subject sanity to the same critical examination as insanity.

One can argue that subjectivity itself is insane to some degree. It by definition is irrational after all.

Root Your Own Brain

Free will may logically and physically be an illusion.

But there is another way that you are not the master of your own mind that is useful to know.

There are three huge forces at work in your body besides your consciousness. Probably others.

1. Your symbiotic systems.
2. Your enteric nervous system.
3. Your unconscious brain processes.

In order to root your own brain you currently need to spend a great deal of time learning how and implementing it.

Meditation, biology, neurobiology, lucid dreaming, neuropsychology, public relations.

The cost of learning to do so is high in terms of time and effort. However, realizing you aren’t (yet?) in full command has immediate benefits. And the concept applied to choices can carry you in a more comfortable direction.

You may not need to learn to command them, to make peace with them. This is the real source of ancient concepts like unifying “mind body and spirit.” A modern program of internal peacemaking is possible.

There are a seemingly infinite number of variables no question, but you may chance on solutions easily if you at least begin looking. And they might feedback. Gains empowering further gains.

I’ve noticed that my mood is best over the long term when I try to cultivate a concept of compassion for all the “people” trapped inside me. That sounds weird. Let me explain. I use people first of all just to cultivate compassion. If I say animals or systems or pets even, we tend to dial back compassion, that’s unwise. Also, humans are wired to relate to other humans, which means that a metaphor using hypothetical people is easier to process.

Now, the enteric nervous system is a living thing. It’s my guts. It feels things, it has nerves and does a lot of information processing. Having it is like being linked to a large blind and deaf pet snake. What and how I eat is really the only substantive way I have to be good to it. And I should, just generally, but also because when I am, it in turn is good to me.

There is a scientific basis for this:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/

Every aspect of your mind also has a time element. It’s best to realize there is a past self, a future self, and a present self, and they all have links to each other. Your past self for example has made decisions which your present self is now dealing with. Your future self is making requests of your present self at all times as well. You will eventually be your future self so it’s wise to listen, however, you ARE your present self and it is the only self truly capable of feeling. You can’t feel the future until it’s the present. You can remember feeling from your past self, and memories themselves can cause feeling in the present self as well.

It sounds complicated but really it’s intuitive after you think about it and sleep on it a few times.

Why I say that brings us back to the people inside us. There are literally parts of your brain that are in a sense very separate from you. Like your guts, they can be thought of as organs and their feedback takes every possible cognitive form. The phrase five senses is extremely misleading. You actually have thousands. These thousands mesh to form your entire reality. Every modular and integrated bit of your sensorium is composed of sensations which are senses. They just aren’t direct linkages with the outside world. But they are built on that data and are thus every bit as valid.

Your sense of physical orientation for example is a sixth direct sense. Your time sense is an indirect one. Your sensation of proportion, the distance from your eye to your hand for example. And on and on. EVERY aspect of what you think of as reality come from these brain “organs” which aren’t always discreet organs. This goes to neuropsychology. You don’t need to understand all that to make use of it. You can just realize that you have a whole bunch of back brain processes going on all the time and they don’t all happen instantly.

Memory and learning require sleep cycles. Remember the compassion and people inside thing? Well, imagine there’s a second person, a second mind, trapped in your mind, and it only gets to be awake when you’re asleep. If you don’t give it good sleep it will be miserable, and it’s misery is partly your misery. Be good to it and it will be good to you.

Don’t let your future self tell you to pound coffee because you want career advancement for example. Being awake is a short term benefit anyway. Being awake or asleep right now is hardly ever worth having a lousy memory and being unable to learn things properly later.

My system of ethics is universal externally and it recently occurred to me that I should apply it internally as well. And just aiming the concept inwards fit and inspired this essay.

I feel like it could turn into a book almost hehe. It’s such a massive subject and I feel like I can parse so many elements of the human condition in this way usefully.

I feel compelled to point out why one can accomplish with a hacked or unified mind. Extremes of human accomplishment spring to mind and there are many, but really I think the most informative is Quang Duc and other self immolators.

We know, for an indisputable objective fact, that it’s possible for a person to train themselves to not feel pain. Not everyone can do this of course in their context. But it’s important and informative to realize that it’s physically possible and has a firm basis in reality.

I share that not to scold or inspire feelings of ineptitude but to inspire with a concept of what this line of thinking might be worth to you.

Earlier I mentioned a symbiotic system as well. By this I mean all the life that lives in you that isn’t even human. Most people are aware of the bacteria in their gut and on their skin but people tend to think of it as mostly a pest when in fact it’s a protective ecosystem.

There’s good evidence that your appendix and tonsils exist to provide shelter for beneficial strains of bacteria. Some hospital born skin infections can only exist because things done at a hospital temporarily strip away that skin based ecosystem.

Now again, some compassion applies here, not in the sense that bacteria can feel, (though that is debatable imo at the colony level: https://futurism.com/bacteria-can-use-electricity-to-communicate-across-species/) but in the sense that you can choose to be either mean or nice to your bacteria.

I think it’s unwise to take a genocidal approach. And the harm done by the overuse of antibacterial soap supports that. Extend and apply this concept where ever you can. Don’t be over zealously clean or filthy. The filth thing is a factor too. The bacteria aren’t very smart. They need you to manage their civilization basically. You can’t let it turn into a giant slum because that’ll hurt it and therefore you.

It’s important to point out that all this applies to other actual people as well. This is why altruistic groups do better than selfish ones.

The Apex

Always Buff, Never Nerf

The reason you should buff instead of nerf is because all meaning can be controlled by context and any overall effect of nerfs can be achieved with buffs because all games are math. All games are power fantasies. (Primarily war stand-ins which amount to immortality fantasy. “Look I can be in war and not die!”)

And this means that nerfs defeat the purpose of any game to the exact degree they are deprivational while buffs bolster it. More power in a power fantasy is always better. It’s that simple.

Issues Index

The purpose of this post is to give a reader and myself the ability to quickly match a given social issue with our position on it.

Issues to my mind can be roughly sorted by duration or scale. For now I’m going to generate two lists then, topical and general.

Topical Issues:

Trump’s Immigration ban:

Issue Position: Trump’s Immigration Ban

Trump Election Protests:

The Trump Protests Were Stupid

Trump Generally:

Trump’s Silver Lining: Big Reasons Not to Lose Heart

General Issues: (In no particular order as yet.)

Gun control:

2nd Amendment and Related Links

Prison:

Prison

School:

The Tyranny Of Compulsory Schooling

Kids:

The Final Underclass

Things every kid should know.

Universal Basic Income:

One Possible Solution

Nuclear Power:

Nuclear Advocacy’s Failure

The Drug War:

PR and Persuasion:

Ending and beginnings

That’s Why I Stopped

Avoid my Mistakes

The State:

An argument in favor of the state.

Issue Position: Trump’s Immigration Ban

Partisan position: Neither.

What I mean is, can I be labeled accurately in the popularly understood partisan sense to be in favor of or opposed to this issue? In this case no. My position is a little complicated. But generally I am opposed.

Why am I not entirely opposed?

Because I feel that Islam is dangerous and that it’s a good thing to limit exposure to it in ethical ways. I consider it a memetic pathogen that barring a more sophisticated response is best addressed now all things considered by way of quarantine.

Digital information channels should remain open of course but that’s because they are an entirely different style of vector, not because the information is any less dangerous.

Basically I consider religion a disease but grant that it is a person’s right to permit self-infection.

Why I am not entirely agreed?

Many reasons, most of which are obvious. Firstly because we already have an immigration process. Secondly, it ignores the real global exporter of terrorism, Saudi Arabia. Thirdly, it’s for the wrong reasons and it serves mostly as a distraction and a stress test.

Your Emotions are NOT Under Your Control

This notion that emotions are controllable is shared social mythology, not science.

“Conscious emotion is in a way a red herring: the feeling and behavior prompts are surface responses the initial mechanism orchestrates … Emotions are things that happen to us rather than things we make happen. We try to manipulate our emotions all the time but all we are doing is arranging the outside world so it triggers certain emotions, we cannot control our reactions directly. “~Joseph LeDoux, Professor of Neural Science and Psychology, New York University.

We hide from it to avoid the hard problem of free will and the resulting problem with culture based on that myth.

These facts undermine virtually all of our excuses for harming others and lauding ourselves. From the work ethic to prison to democracy, to identity itself and even religion.

Sorry, you’re just a meat machine too and you live inside a great big lie. The sad fact is that OTHERS have more control over your emotions than you do:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

You know… I’m reminded of the Chinese parable of hell, the one with the long chopsticks. Where in heaven they feed each other and in hell they all starve because they can’t feed themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_long_spoons

Our emotions are literally a lot like that. So quit being mean to each other.

Specifically you can start by supporting a basic income and making prison tolerable.

One Possible Solution

Prison

See also: http://underlore.com/avoid-my-mistakes/