91–100 of 178 posts
About ten years ago, after my grandmother died, I got really into Robert Anton Wilson. That sort of set the trajectory for the rest of my life. While I think RAW was wrong about a lot of things, the meta-lesson of erring on the side of agnosis -- trusting that, when the world doesn't behave in line with your expectations (and often even when it does) it's because of unknown unknowns, and that the world is stranger an…
Reading. I used to tell myself that I loved to read, but I never read any books. It was a feel-good saying I told myself because everyone likes to think they love to read. The past few years, I started to actually read. I've fallen in love with reading. The world is more open, my critical analysis is stronger, and my school and engineering work has improved. Overall, I have a much happier disposition than before I re…
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I don't advocate drugs in any form, but everyone should experience hallucinogens at some point in their life. It will change your life, for the better.
You don't advocate drugs, but everyone should take mushrooms? That's advocating drugs!
But things went south quickly after my first semester of law school. I realized how little I had actually examined what I wanted out of life. I started questioning more, resisting more. I got severely depressed. I slogged through spring of 1L and a summer internship, and then I just never went back for 2L.
This was the first moment I exercised real autonomy. It spurred an enormous period of growth and reflection, that I'm still in today (and believe will never end, really).
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I gotta disagree with you here. I smoke a little bit every day and I've gone through periods of a month or two without smoking and the only difference I found was that it was easier to get up in the morning if I didn't smoke the day before. My cognitive abilities don't seem to be impaired at all. It's possible that smoking pot for you was associated with other lifestyle affects (like sleep quality/duration) that were…
> My cognitive abilities don't seem to be impaired at all. do you use some sort of external metrics to verify that? using the same brain for smoking pot and determining that smoking pot causes no impairment isn't exactly a well-designed experiment.
I was simply asserting that I could perceive no difference in my abilities between times that I smoked and the periods of time where I didn't. At least not enough where I could make a statement similar to the OP where he detected a significant improvement in cognitive functioning after quitting.
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> My cognitive abilities don't seem to be impaired at all. do you use some sort of external metrics to verify that? using the same brain for smoking pot and determining that smoking pot causes no impairment isn't exactly a well-designed experiment.
I never claimed to be conducting an experiment. This whole thread is opinion-based, so I'm not sure why you are holding me to any kind of scientific standard. I was simply asserting that I could perceive no difference in my abilities between times that I smoked and the periods of time where I didn't. At least not enough where I could make a statement similar to the OP where he detected a significant improvement in co…
Before I learned how to meditate, I thought of everything logically and incorrectly applied that to relationships as well. I found it incredibly hard to understand other people, their motivations, and why they acted certain ways. I wondered why so many of my relationships failed out of no where and why it was so hard to connect with other people. After I observed my background processes with the help of meditation, I realized that people act primarily out of emotion, not logic.
This is where I made leaps in emotional growth. I realized that I had many emotional processes running in the background, like daemons of an operating system. The majority of these processes were subconscious and unaware to me, yet they were impacting every decision I've ever made! Subconscious sensations of fear, sadness, and anger that were influencing my conscious mind. Before someone even considers the logic of a question, they've already made an emotional answer. I could write a book on this, but Thinking, Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman explains this so much better. Once I realized this and confronted my inner demons, the behavior of other people was much more manageable.
Reaching an achievement that I thought was unreachable was life changing as well. On my final semester of college, I had a senior project that was out of my skill level, but it was required for my degree. Without any background in development, I had to develop a web application for a customer, with an entire LAMP stack behind it. I came from a Windows background so I had to learn Linux administration as well as 3 new programming languages within 2 months. I worked extremely hard on it, but did not receive any input from the customer. The due date rolled around and the project inevitably did not meet the his expectations, so he pleaded with the professor to fail me so I would have to retake the class (and he would get more free labor). Despite all that work, the professor gave me a big fat F and I was unable to graduate. The night I got that email I felt so crushed and defeated, I couldn't sleep and developed a stomach ulcer.
But I didn't give up. I petitioned for a grade revision, I had no other choice. I made an 8-page report explaining that I completed everything the customer agreed to in the project proposal. I presented it to the department head, but he said there was no case. I presented it to the grading committee, and to my luck, they accepted my case. They gave me a second chance to complete a revision of the project and I would receive a passing grade in return. The only problem was that the customer was asking for a task that was not possible with the application and I had 2 weeks, Christmas vacation. Despite that I was determined. I developed an extension for the application that accomplished his goal. After turning that project in, the professor awarded me an A in the class, I got my degree cum laude, and I realized the limits I can push my mind and body. Anything you want in life can be achieved, despite the obstacles, you just need to spend enough time and effort on it.
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I never claimed to be conducting an experiment. This whole thread is opinion-based, so I'm not sure why you are holding me to any kind of scientific standard. I was simply asserting that I could perceive no difference in my abilities between times that I smoked and the periods of time where I didn't. At least not enough where I could make a statement similar to the OP where he detected a significant improvement in co…
No, but you did essentially shoot down someone else's statement about what led to their growth. You can't have it both ways. You can't shoot them down and assert they are wrong because your experience disagrees with it, then say it is all just opinion, man. Either respect their opinion about their own life experience or defend your assertion that they are wrong with something stronger than personal opinion.
However, I think you missed the main point of my post, which was to suggest that perhaps there was a comorbid reason for his perceived cognitive deficiencies that were not a direct result of marijuana, but related to known side effects, such as REM sleep disruption.
For me, it was reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” — one small part of it especially. Long before Pirsig begins asking fundamental questions like, “What can we know?”, and “What is the meaning of Quality?”, he mentions the seed of his destruction — his realization when studying biochemistry that there were an infinite number of possible theories that he could propose to explain any observation, and th…
And I'm a fool.
Storytelling and reality aren't mutually exclusive. Consider great minds like Clifford Stoll, Alan Kay, Raymond Smullyan, Douglas Hofstadter -- we can't be sure that what they say is True, but their stories are compelling, and their wisdom seems sound enough. Humans are analogy-engines. For us, myths are the best way to transfer information. And even if the information isn't Truth, it's probably good enough. And "good enough" will likely improve the lives of your children and grandchildren.
Of course you can't know everything! There's endless territory to explore. But there's no harm in exploring the incredibly small world around you. And there's even less harm in finding ways to reduce suffering for others, if you're into that.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I agree with you in theory. But in practice, worrying about whether things are technically True obstructs the way of finding things that seem to work. And many of us deeply enjoy discovering things that "seem to work", and then telling great stories about them.
Exploring reality can be a lot of fun, if you don't take reality so seriously.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64710.The_First_and_Last...