Almost Anything You Give Sustained Attention to Will Begin to Loop on Itself

The words I'm using are the best I currently have to describe ideas that have always existed. It's not like a new messiah or philosopher came about with this novelty. It's something innate to all who possess the creative mind. And this is the root of maybe what I'm talking about (I'm still a student to all of this); every human possesses the ability to create.

Is it chemical? Is it God? Is it Tinkerbell's magical dandruff sprinkling into my head? Maybe it's both chemical and God. Maybe all of the above. How it happens is still up for debate, sure. But let me segue for a moment.

If you follow the progress of AI (I'm assuming you must), there is an ongoing debate of AGI/Superintelligence. OpenAI, Google, et al are promising their abilities to invent new medicine or invent some new art form. They will be novelty generators. I feel quite skeptical of this.

Right now, LLMs are incapable of novelty -- ie, it can only compose existing ideas, it cannot invent some new genre of music or new style of art. If it appears new it's only because that's what it was taught and it's more remixing. And sure, there's argument to be made that remixing is a form of creativity. However, it is not the decider of what is creative or not. The human on the other end prompting it makes that decision. THAT is an act of creativity.

Again, arguments to be made that if all it takes is an observer and a set of criteria then that must mean the AI agent we designed to generate and select images for some marketing campaign must be sentient right?

Maybe. Maybe not. As far as I know, these models do not have an internal motivation. They don't spend time replying to other people on forums with their perspective for.. who knows what reason. And if they do, it's because they have a programmed directive to do so.

The human is the one with an internal universe that span the colorful spectrum of experiences that is referred to as "qualia". Our experiences shape us and the world that we know. Our decisions are based on these experiences. Of course, I'm not deluded that the reality of the world we live in doesn't have have constraints: hunger, loneliness, desire, etc. We needed primal instincts to survive.

But once those needs are met, who are you now? Just a series of chemical reactions? Repeating that survival loop? This is where the ethereal comes in.

> I've never seen "ether," and nobody's ever found a structure in the human body that interfaces with it.

Many humans have been interfacing with the "ether" for thousands of years. You interface with it when you practice creativity. Many musicians talk of how sometimes a song just appears to them. I'm sure you'll find ways of explaining this way, but in my opinion, there's a deeper mechanism that we're unaware of or aren't ready to know yet.

TL;DR - practice creativity.

Meditation, if practiced at least adequately intense, creates a time interval that is entirely different to anything an ADHD mind is accustomed to. Meditation is not a dream, not the Default Mode Network under control. You are awake, "lucid", not rooted in your imagination or some other cognitive style/process resulting from "hyperlight association" or similar common phenomena.

> The history of eugenic programs as well the blocking of male/female sex hormones to inhibit sexual development or for transitional purposes should reveal a solid basis. Brain/body are capable of recovering close to a genetic baseline, at least up to some age.

Showing that some effect can result from some cause is not sufficient to show that it does result from that cause. To be honest I don't even follow exactly what claim you're making here. But even if you show that e.g. certain mental problems can result from reduced or increased blood flow to certain areas of the brain, it does not follow that that is always the cause.

You're resting big confident assertions on "I read this somewhere, go look it up." In fact biology and mentation are complex and we don't have the whole picture. It's easy to put together whatever "just so story" you want by rearranging fragments of evidence, but it doesn't make it true.

This cannot possibly be assumed when talking about physiology already known to be atypical.

And specifically, assuming that reducing blood flow one place, and increasing it in another place, post-development, will predictably be a benefit is ... I have no words.

Your whole comment is full of this type of worse than weak reasoning.

I was with a group of a couple friends who loved A Thousand Plateaus - we would read bits of it allowed together and laugh and generally have a good time talking about it. Probably the best way to have approached it.

Also on the advice of one of these folks, I read just the intro to ATP and then went for a walk outside without my phone or anything and stared into the woods while that clusterfuck of a concept-tangle just bounced around in my head. Then I slept on it, and later we started doing the group readings. Especially together with Guattari, it's almost more of a hallucinogenic substance than it is a book, and approaching it from all sides with a light heart is somehow helpful. Deleuze really doesn't seem interested in objections in ATP, he just wants to throw another concept at you and see if that one sticks instead.

Looking for other reasons behind procrastination is very important, indeed.

There can be many, many core beliefs that hold you down.

This will sound cliche and 70's pop-psy self-help, but people think about themselves as an adult of age XX and don't realize many core ideas about themselves are not those of an adult, but those of themselves at age 7.

My example is that since my daughter was born I was using on her a blessing my grandma was always using on me, and I did not realize I was miss gendering her -- I was using the masculine form and my daughter eventually asked me about it -- why was I using the masculine form on her -- it then struck me I heard the blessing from my grandma when I was very young and it just became a core part of me.

That's cute, until you realize you internalize A LOT of stuff by the time you're 7 and unfortunatelly it's not always positive stuff.

My father did a lot of good things for me, but he was very competitive, he almost NEVER let me win at anything to the point he became visibly distraught when I was about to win against him, so I struggle to capitalize on my insights, especially when I have strong "about to win" feelings which turned into a life long self-inflicted "Cassandra curse".

Exactly. Once I got diagnosed, the doctor wanted to remove the SSRI's that had been treating the side effects and not the root cause... but that happened too quickly in my case. I had constant episodes.

After a few months, I had to go back to them while I was still learning about everything, how I had to change habits, what would work now, etc.

This is a scarily common problem. For some reason, a lot of primary care doctors are jumping straight to very high doses of Adderall.

Most patients love the feeling at first. They think they're going to conquer the world and that they've become an entirely new person.

The euphoria never lasts, though. When tolerance erases the euphoria they start complaining that their medication "isn't working any more".

The good practitioners will actually titrate upward: Start with a low dose, then incrementally increase it on future visits.

What's your current worldview relating to this and the issues you were having with it?

Sure, just like you can't separate "pay attention". Both are idiomatic. But you can separate "aufpassen" into "Paß auf". (For the benefit of non-German lurkers, "Paß auf" is a command to pay attention.)