I've tried to start meditating a couple of times in my life but every time after a couple of days instead of being introduced to gradual calm/bliss/joy/whatever I get met with an existential dread, sadness, anxiety, melancholy etc. I guess am naturally predisposed to those as well, much more than 'happy' feelings. I had to then take a week or even more to recover. I feel like you need to have your shit together so to speak before you try meditating or it might uncover some suppressed trauma or whatever it is. I must say though I am way more 'aware' of my body and emotions more than before, but the problem is they might not be pleasant. It is okay when the feeling is transitory but an existential dread which lasts for days or weeks feels impossible to shake off, it consumes your whole life. One day I hope to be able to swing the pendulum in the other way.
I believe that half of meditation is letting your self dredge up all the nasty stuff and watching it happen, the other half is cultivating an outlook that's okay with or even happy with those things coming up. It's literally practice, for remaining stable when bad things happen "off the mat", and to be able to narrow in and concentrate on the grain of calm/bliss/joy in every moment. These elevated jhana states can be a healthy part of that, but they take work to get to.
if you're going to actually try to do it and not just try to McMindfulness your way out, it's dangerous to go in to this unprepared, IMO. early in my meditation experience I went a bit too deep on this just by practicing insight a few hours a day on one of the apps and was anxious and emotionally unbalanced for months.
Finding a meditation teacher or practice community may help, too, it continues to help for me, but it's one of those things you gotta be ready to keep going back to
To share my own experience, I first tried meditating seriously in the context of a 9-day retreat and the first 4-5 days were as you described. Anxiety, melancholy, boredom, frustration, then a period of emotional catharsis and much more enjoyable meditation after that. I think it really depends on how much shit you're repressing.
I think the most common failure mode is neuroticism; getting stressed and frustrated with the lack of progress, thinking about the progress toward the outcome rather than the problem to be solved. Stress in particular is extremely poisonous to thinking. The expectation should be that it takes as long as it takes, and you need to be calm and well rested.
If you find yourself choosing between working on the problem and taking a nap, always take the nap. (Given the choice between remaining in bed, and taking another peek at the problem, usually take a peek at the problem, after which you should do what feels best.)
Some experimentation should convince you that this is how human minds work (well, most of 'em, and yours is probably one of them), after which you can employ this strategy without guilt during a crisis.
A lack of necessary prior knowledge is often a major reason for struggling with a problem. As a relatable example, suppose you're taking an exam. There's a problem near the end that you don't know how to solve—and the reason is that you haven't studied that topic enough. No matter how smart (as in, fast at learning) you are, you need to practice with similar or related problems to solve that issue.
But suppose you're outside of an exam environment and have time to look up the relevant material. I've known a PhD candidate in a non-mathematics field who had to find a mathematical solution to a certain research problem. That person is smart but still needed a few months to learn the mathematical fundamentals to understand and solve the problem. In contrast, someone with a math background could have solved this far more quickly. But that person would have taken at least some months to get up to speed on the research literature for the non-mathematics part of the research problem, in order to properly understand its constraints and bigger-picture significance.
Lara Alcock's book "How to Study as a Mathematics Major" touches upon this topic more directly. She encourages readers not to be too intimidated if other students in a course seem really smart: much of the time, the reason is not due to an innate difference in smartness, but rather prior exposure by other students to concepts in the course. Students who seem to find the material effortless often have already studied many of the topics in another course or could even be retaking the course after a previous attempt.
When you plant a seed in a garden, there's many factors at play - is the season right? Is the climate right for that seed? Is the soil the right type? Are there pests or varmints roaming that might eat it prematurely? Etc.
The garden of thought has analogous factors: Is this a question your brain actually cares about right now? Do you have the background knowledge necessary to work it out? Is your brain calm enough to process that question? Are there distractions or anxieties that disturb the process?
That said, some people truly are stupid. I recently read John Cleese's autobiography, and he tells a story from when he was a Geography teacher...
There was a lad who he was teaching countries and their capitals. Even when given direct attention, the kid simply wasn't able to name any capitals whatsoever. He would smile and nod, giving no indication of difficulties... But he couldn't recall the info even after being told it 8 seconds previously. This particular type of data slid off his brain.
At the end of the term, the kid got one question right on the final exam, probably by accident. Cleese posted the paper in the teacher's room, attracting the comment from one teacher "The sad thing about true stupidity is that you can do absolutely nothing about it".
Perhaps that kid had a genius for engines or something, but he was never going to be able to understand geopolitics. He lacked even the awareness to know that he was stupid (at least about countries and capitals). He would never have asked if he was stupid, because he was truly stupid.
If your friend is ever curious about their intelligence, they're probably ok and can develop the skill of thinking like this.
This is a difficult fact to accept. We have all been told that people are generally equal, especially in intelligence, if given the same opportunities, but it becomes more clear in time that some problems are intractable to some people and no amount of training or exposure can change that. However, it's a better answer to the problem of why some people like Cleese's example do not absorb information. The alternative is to apply malice and laziness to them when it just isn't so.
We all have these intelligence holes that gives some insight into the mechanism. Eg. I'm bad at remembering names. As in the example, if you tell me someone's name, I'm likely to forget it 5 minutes later. I just spent 3 years reading Douglas Hofstadter's book and had to look up his name to type it here. This seems to happen because I don't see an application to remembering the name. I'm never going to meet Doug and rarely will anyone need to be told about the book, so why remember it? There's definitely a parallel to state capitals in that example.
Well said about not realizing it's important therefore names get down prioritized. Here's a counter point. I'm a movie geek. Yet when I reach for a name of someone from the cast I almost always end up describing, y'know, that guy who played together with that other guy in that movie, y'know, the one with the weird story line? Him! Yes, him. Love him.
While thinking is somewhat of a background process, our brains don't just solve the mysteries of the universe while we eat a ham sandwich. We tell our brains which problems are of high importance and it focuses on them. If you've ever laid down to go to sleep and told yourself to wake up at 6:30 and it worked, you've witnessed an obvious application of this.
The problem comes when we fail to point out the importance of a problem, or when we do so reflexively which means that we tell our brain that everything is important and it simply cannot process all of the requests.
Setting your thinking requests before doing a non-thinking activity is a good way to start. Think about the problem consciously and then specifically ask for an answer to a question. Then go do something physical or mechanical: take a walk, sleep, mow the lawn, watch a non-challenging movie, etc. Be prepared to accept whatever result you get. A common response is: non enough information, but it should point you toward what that additional info looks like.
"It is useless speculating about things we can't ever know of."
And how do you know which things we can know of and which we cannot? Trusting your gut instinct on that isn't scientific. And why is speculating about immaterial things useless? I'm sure many great mathematicians heard some form of "what you're doing is useless and has no use or relation in the real world" especially in the realm of pure mathematics.
You bring up the soul which is a convenient example, but let's instead use a concept which YOU know exists for yourself which is consciousness. Can we ever know anything more about the mystery of consciousness or life or why any of this world and universe exists? Are those unknowable? Should we not talk about them? Should we only try to apply the lens of science here and for some reason not try to advance our understanding using philosophy even though it might not be as formal and unambiguous as math?
Yea, the previous posters take is just outright crazy to me....
Imagine reality as the problem space of all things that could exist within the constraints of physics. The problem with observational evidence that it is only providing a tiny window into what is possible, really only the most probable are going to be what you see for the most part. Philosophy gives a means of meta views of systems and simplified system views that allow us to find otherwise unreachable islands of what can exist in our reality.
Here is my reasoning: immaterial objects (such as the soul) are by definition outside of the material world, and thus unobservable. We can't ever (dis)prove the existence of an unobservable object.
As for the other questions you mentioned, I still haven't found any reason to believe their answers are unkowable.
If anyone disproves my first reasoning, I will have to consider the question of the soul as worth pursuing again.
Just like in mathematics, if you have sufficient proof that a theorem is unprovable, it is useless trying to prove it!
So no, I don't trust my gut feeling about wether or not to seek the answer to something.
> I think that if someone is completely unable to justify an observed truth to others, then it might not be a truth at all.
What if the observed truth that someone is trying to communicate is paradoxical and hard to communicate in and of itself? What if the truth is ambiguous? What constitutes ambiguous or unambiguous?
At the end of the day ambiguity is a real concept, so is a paradox, therefore there will exist things that are ambiguous and paradoxical and pointing that out does have value.
There is no reason that ambiguities or paradoxes can't be expressed analytically and formally. Math and computer science are full of such things and they are celebrated.
Being hard to communicate is precisely why it's important to communicate rigorously and formally.
We have a ton of examples of great mathematicians who also happened to be great philosophers and vice-versa. Some philosophers also tried to incorporate mathematical symbols and such into their work. We value both their philosophical works and mathematical works. They were smart people and chose different mediums to express different concepts.
How can you try to explore the ego, consciousness, unconsciousness, dreams, suffering, life's purpose, subjective beauty, symbolism, truth, religion, god, ethics and whatever else that is not easily formalized? We might very well arrive at a formal and unambiguous description of these sometime in the far future, so are we not supposed to at least try to talk about these concepts now? You use different tools for different concepts, and science and philosophy is just 2 of those tools. At the end of the day philosophy undeniably changed the world, so there is at least some value to it. Philosophy is not anti-logic, it is very much for logic.
It is a practical question. Sometimes we need to have or choose a hard answer to make a decision. It inevitably isn't going to be solved formally.
Any more than what is the dividing line between a chair and not-chair. Many patterns we encounter have fuzzy non-formal edges.
Perfect consensus is impossible, but any consensus is valuable. So we invent and argue about the "best" way to "understand" these things.
These arguments are partly objective, partly subjective, partly emergent, and partly just farmed out to favorite "authorities" or social pressure. But important and unavoidable.
--
At the highest level, even how we percieve reality is important. It impacts our values, our motivations, our ethics, how we cope with events, etc. Trickling down to every day choices.
"What is real?" ends up being an important question, no matter how lacking in formal rigor the answers we each have are.
I am really glad to hear that there's interest, and hopefully I will have a 3-part series to share on this some time soon! Similar to Andrew's project linked down below, this is a 'true' home-brew receiver. I didn't know anything about DSP, etc, when I started out, so I learned a lot about signal processing (and the incredible techniques that make GPS work), and really hope I'll be able to publish it all soon!
Not OP, but in the meantime this may help alleviate your thirst for "how could someone do GPS from scratch", especially the end parts about radio signals and encoding: https://ciechanow.ski/gps/
Me: Um9iZXJ0IEogU2F3eWVyIC0gU3RhcnBsZXgK
ChatGPT: "xxxx" is a science fiction novel by Robert x xxxx. It explores themes of discovery, the nature of the universe, and the potential for cooperation among diverse life forms. The story revolves around a space station, xxxxxx, and its crew as they encounter mysterious wormholes, alien species, and cosmic phenomena, challenging their understanding of the universe and their place within it.
ps. I don't know what is there to spoil by sharing a book title but whatever :)
I'm under the impression that the spoiler is what they said about the gigastructure of galaxies. If you don't know the title, you can't related it to the spoiler they just told you
Base64 encoding is a common way of jailbreaking LLMS. The llm just deals with vectorspaces so to it, base64 is just another language for the encoding/tokenization layer to learn.
Sure, but it’s pretty amazing to me that ChatGPT didn’t just hallucinate a response to a generic request to decode a string. It recognized the string as base64, wrote a valid program to decode it, and returned the correct response.
Maybe I’m just old and amazed, but that seems pretty cool (terrifying?) to me.
I’m not sure how I feel yet. Rapid rate of change can uproot systems pretty quickly. I guess I’m just holding judgement to see if this is a new Industrial Revolution, and fallout that might occur. Ideally this wouldn’t be a worry, but we don’t live in an ideal world.
I personally use AI as a tool, and feel more productive FWIW.
"Time drunks deeply intuit this, and their procrastination-induced state of timelessness should not be considered a terrible character flaw but rather an act of spiritual rebellion against modernity."
Thank you, I needed that. Time to continue procrastitating.
