The Psychology Thread, I Guess...

But yeah, there are aliasing-overtones riddled throughout your actual memory of your life, and their pitch (in literal Hz) across time is modulated 1:1 by the magnitude of your hippocampus' prediction errors at the time.

That's some fucking French Spectralist shit right there imo.

Your experiences can be represented as Fourier 'sine-wave bundles' across 4 (or so) dimensions.

Your brain is essentially an SP-1200 that's (poorly) sampling the environment to construct your memory (and thus your sense of self)

Your fear, sadness, anger, resentment and anxiety are literally printed inside the aliasing artifacts.

Motherfucking Ergo:

your sadness is a melody being performed by the aliasing overtones in your memory.

QE motherfucking Dizooo

Dude, you know what *else* is the result of two-operator phase cancellation?

The interference pattern in the two-slit experiment.

Ergo 2: Electric Boogaloo:

Mental health entails tuning these two hippocampal operators such that they encode 'harmonic' (as opposed to 'inharmonic') spectral 'limbic meta-data' throughout the 4-dimensional space-time corridors of your memory.

  On 12/31/2016 at 10:01 PM, Zeffolia said:

Also what do you guys think about whether there's legitimate significance to the psychedelic experience? For a long time I've felt that "There's really something important here, this isn't just for fun this has scientific implications on consciousness and we should be paying more attention to it than we are as a society" but lately I've been taking the opposite view, that it's not really that important. It just feels so important when you're in it.

It depends on what we're talking about here. Significance as what? A transformative agent? An alternative to entertainment? A window into to greater consciousness, man's true nature? If we're talking about transformative power in terms of facilitating ego death, are we talking about western medicine's psychosis, depersonalisation or derealization, or spiritual insight and enlightenment of the east? I've engaged a lot of these discussions on the Web and people never seem to agree on the basic definitions, yet still jump into wild arguments.

I think it seems to have merit as a therapeutic agent, for treating PTSD for instance. This is because it's a blunt instrument, it provides a shock. There needs to be more studies into these options.

I think precisely due to it being a blunt instrument, it is not useful in facilitating spiritual insight for the average individual (depersonalisation is a more likely possibility as a result of abuse). Many people have wild ego death experiences on psychedelics (I've had one), and they don't seem to be lasting or meaningful. People don't seem to agree on what constitutes ego death, and confuse it with sci fi hallucinations. And don't get me started on the whole hubbub about machine elves or other dimensions...

More elegant tools such as spiritual disciplines and meditation provide a more useful method. It is a subtle process that takes time, effort and can be integrated in daily life in a more meaningful manner. The material concerning deep insight is properly structured and defined, and not disrupted with hallucinatory fairy tales. It is also important to recognize that people who experience ego death in spiritual disciplines report a very powerful, permanent change. This is because disciplines like Zen inherently contain a clause that whenever you have any meaningful insight, that is not an accomplishment, but a ground for further work. So the effort to properly integrate what you experience becomes second nature.

"An alternative to entertainment?"

I don't believe that such a thing as 'mere entertainment' even exists.

e.g. What do you think is happening when you watch a movie?

The screen is not spraying you with anesthesia. It is feeding you complex multi-level patterns. It's exposure therapy, not a blackout episode.

Machine elves lmao I was really into TMK in my early highschool years and am now aware that he's a complete and utter loony who was really good at regurgitating quotes though and making interesting discussion all the same.

  On 1/1/2017 at 7:50 PM, chim said:

 

  On 12/31/2016 at 10:01 PM, Zeffolia said:

Also what do you guys think about whether there's legitimate significance to the psychedelic experience? For a long time I've felt that "There's really something important here, this isn't just for fun this has scientific implications on consciousness and we should be paying more attention to it than we are as a society" but lately I've been taking the opposite view, that it's not really that important. It just feels so important when you're in it.

It depends on what we're talking about here. Significance as what? A transformative agent? An alternative to entertainment? A window into to greater consciousness, man's true nature? If we're talking about transformative power in terms of facilitating ego death, are we talking about western medicine's psychosis, depersonalisation or derealization, or spiritual insight and enlightenment of the east? I've engaged a lot of these discussions on the Web and people never seem to agree on the basic definitions, yet still jump into wild arguments.

 

I think it seems to have merit as a therapeutic agent, for treating PTSD for instance. This is because it's a blunt instrument, it provides a shock. There needs to be more studies into these options.

 

I think precisely due to it being a blunt instrument, it is not useful in facilitating spiritual insight for the average individual (depersonalisation is a more likely possibility as a result of abuse). Many people have wild ego death experiences on psychedelics (I've had one), and they don't seem to be lasting or meaningful. People don't seem to agree on what constitutes ego death, and confuse it with sci fi hallucinations. And don't get me started on the whole hubbub about machine elves or other dimensions...

 

More elegant tools such as spiritual disciplines and meditation provide a more useful method. It is a subtle process that takes time, effort and can be integrated in daily life in a more meaningful manner. The material concerning deep insight is properly structured and defined, and not disrupted with hallucinatory fairy tales. It is also important to recognize that people who experience ego death in spiritual disciplines report a very powerful, permanent change. This is because disciplines like Zen inherently contain a clause that whenever you have any meaningful insight, that is not an accomplishment, but a ground for further work. So the effort to properly integrate what you experience becomes second nature.

Or require years, or even months, or even weeks

Zen is the ideal of making the most adaptive decision or action in each moment

If you just chase that butterfly wherever it happens to lead

Then there should be no need for manually updating your personality day by day over the course of (say) years

  On 1/1/2017 at 11:06 PM, LimpyLoo said:

 

  On 1/1/2017 at 7:50 PM, chim said:

 

  On 12/31/2016 at 10:01 PM, Zeffolia said:

Also what do you guys think about whether there's legitimate significance to the psychedelic experience? For a long time I've felt that "There's really something important here, this isn't just for fun this has scientific implications on consciousness and we should be paying more attention to it than we are as a society" but lately I've been taking the opposite view, that it's not really that important. It just feels so important when you're in it.

It depends on what we're talking about here. Significance as what? A transformative agent? An alternative to entertainment? A window into to greater consciousness, man's true nature? If we're talking about transformative power in terms of facilitating ego death, are we talking about western medicine's psychosis, depersonalisation or derealization, or spiritual insight and enlightenment of the east? I've engaged a lot of these discussions on the Web and people never seem to agree on the basic definitions, yet still jump into wild arguments.

 

I think it seems to have merit as a therapeutic agent, for treating PTSD for instance. This is because it's a blunt instrument, it provides a shock. There needs to be more studies into these options.

 

I think precisely due to it being a blunt instrument, it is not useful in facilitating spiritual insight for the average individual (depersonalisation is a more likely possibility as a result of abuse). Many people have wild ego death experiences on psychedelics (I've had one), and they don't seem to be lasting or meaningful. People don't seem to agree on what constitutes ego death, and confuse it with sci fi hallucinations. And don't get me started on the whole hubbub about machine elves or other dimensions...

 

More elegant tools such as spiritual disciplines and meditation provide a more useful method. It is a subtle process that takes time, effort and can be integrated in daily life in a more meaningful manner. The material concerning deep insight is properly structured and defined, and not disrupted with hallucinatory fairy tales. It is also important to recognize that people who experience ego death in spiritual disciplines report a very powerful, permanent change. This is because disciplines like Zen inherently contain a clause that whenever you have any meaningful insight, that is not an accomplishment, but a ground for further work. So the effort to properly integrate what you experience becomes second nature.

Zen is not something that has to be difficult or work-intensive

Or require years, or even months, or even weeks

Zen is the ideal of making the most adaptive decision or action in each moment

If you just chase that butterfly wherever it happens to lead

Then there should be no need for manually updating your personality day by day over the course of (say) years

 

Holy crap I've never seen it being put that way.  That's really compelling

Just setting your heuristic function and keeping it there forever since you know what is already right and often deny it to yourself and that's when you make mistakes.  Giving you more self control.  Idfk lol

  On 1/2/2017 at 3:12 AM, Hoodie said:

i have an idea to propose about psychedelics + their potential for healing/change based on something i learned about artificial neural networks a few years back. when a neural network is learning, it keeps trying different solutions and adjusting itself until it reaches a solution with the least amount of error--known as the global minimum. however, sometimes, a neural network will become stuck in local minimum--an area of lower error, but not the lowest possible point of error for the function it's using to interpret the data it processes. it's stuck because if it slightly adjusts itself, it results in a higher amount of error. visual reference here.

 

a radical change in the way the neural network functions is needed to jump out of a local minimum. now, applying this very simple model to human neural networks, i'm proposing that perhaps our cognitive networks sometimes get "stuck" in maladaptive configurations that sometimes require a massive change in the way the network processes information in order to find a configuration that generates more adaptive behaviors/thinking. psychedelics have been shown to radically change the way we process information during their duration, which is why they perhaps are so effective for disorders like anxiety, depression, ptsd, etc.

That's the best analogy I've read, holy crap.  The risk is accidentally shaking things up too much so you can't even return back to a local maximum as good as the one you were in before

  On 1/1/2017 at 8:05 PM, LimpyLoo said:

"An alternative to entertainment?"

 

I don't believe that such a thing as 'mere entertainment' even exists.

e.g. What do you think is happening when you watch a movie?

The screen is not spraying you with anesthesia. It is feeding you complex multi-level patterns. It's exposure therapy, not a blackout episode.

I don't see the point of convoluting ideas like this to make them appear more truthful, like your description of brains as waveform patterns. Models only approximate reality. It is what it is, which will always be a subjective thing, but what is the most prevalent effect of excessive entertainment consumption? At any rate, what I'm trying to say is that people generally don't put a transcendental significance to movies or rollercoaster rides.

  On 1/1/2017 at 11:06 PM, LimpyLoo said:

Zen is not something that has to be difficult or work-intensive

Or require years, or even months, or even weeks

Zen is the ideal of making the most adaptive decision or action in each moment

If you just chase that butterfly wherever it happens to lead

Then there should be no need for manually updating your personality day by day over the course of (say) years

It's very easy to condense Zen philosophy into an easy phrase, much more difficult to apply in practice. That is my experience anyway. Most of the time we are not able to make "adaptive decisions" due to being mired in self-centered thinking.

In the earlier Buddhist stories

Enlightenment happened in an afternoon

But as happens with many religious traditions

The 'heaven' bit got pushed farther and farther away from the present moment

So it became a dangling carrot that nobody ever catches

And in another 100 years

'Enlightenment' will be where you go when you die

What are you talking about? The tripitaka has the earliest recorded stories, where people have to spend multiple lifetimes attaining liberation. The koans you're referring to were not written down until about 1,500 years later.

Zen arguably "promises" enlightenment quicker than other traditions, but that doesn't mean it's without effort. Those stories tend to omit contextual information that was presumed common knowledge at the time, like the fact that the monks in those afternoons were usually engaged in rigorous practice for tens of years.

Yeah totally, Hoodie!

'Predictive coding' and the 'free energy principle'!

Also, you know what else this 'reduce prediction error' bit would predict?

Things like stress-induced catatonia

(One way to reduce prediction error is to just make less predictions, so to speak)

I think it would also predict that giving them dopamine ('el dopa') or opiates would wake them up from it

  On 1/2/2017 at 3:15 PM, chim said:

What are you talking about? The tripitaka has the earliest recorded stories, where people have to spend multiple lifetimes attaining liberation. The koans you're referring to were not written down until about 1,500 years later.

 

Zen arguably "promises" enlightenment quicker than other traditions, but that doesn't mean it's without effort. Those stories tend to omit contextual information that was presumed common knowledge at the time, like the fact that the monks in those afternoons were usually engaged in rigorous practice for tens of years.

That doesn't sound very Zen to me

Sounds more like a sweepstakes with vague rules

remember Gutei

Who studied Zen so much that he was no longer Zen

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juzhi_Yizhi

Well that's the popularized beatnik Zen of the 50's for ya - quite different from the actual religion. It's clearly dictated in Zen doctrine that the matter is entirely dependant on the effort of the individual (joriki), the guidance of his teacher, and can be either sudden or gradual. Practice itself is not distinguished from awakening, because practice is all about seeing through the poisons of greed, anger and ignorance. Zen is not an esoteric branch but a pragmatic one. When conditions are ripe, awakening follows.

It's not a sweepstakes. Dōgen said "If those who study the Way do not attain awakening, it is because they keep their old views".

Edit: Gutei's problem was that he was stuck in emptiness, a very common problem among solitary monks. Tenryu's teaching helped him come back to life. That last step "back" into the world of senses and ideas is essential. Zen training also involves that training of reactivity, because it's an element of joriki (self-power). That's why there's a lot of koans involving monks hitting or throwing stuff at eachother.

My understanding is that Gutei had lost sight of the goal of spontaneity

And when asked to utter a spontaneous zen word, he essentially said 'hold on, let me consult my encyclopedic knowledge of zen doctrine'

  On 1/2/2017 at 6:01 PM, LimpyLoo said:

My understanding is that Gutei had lost sight of the goal of spontaneity

And when asked to utter a spontaneous zen word, he essentially said 'hold on, let me consult my encyclopedic knowledge of zen doctrine'

HAH.  That's why any worldview or quasi-religion or spiritual framework or guidelines like this need to be inherently simple imo where any question about it has an easy answer and any question about how to apply it to a situation has an easy answer

Yeah, the metaphor of the finger pointing at the moon is endlessly relevant, as we have a tendency to take out our tape-measures and study the finger as much as we can, and conclude that just a few more finger-measurements and we'll finally understand the moon.

There was a nice Between The Ears on Radio 3 last year (nearly said 'earlier this year') about how certain frequencies impact upon the brain, ties in a wee bit to the stuff Limpy was posting at the top of the page: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0739ndm