>As anyone who has had good sex knows [...] High school tier literature.
I couldn't relate either but that doesn't make the article bad.
Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
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Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#32Drug addicts, patients and recreational users start to increase the dosage and chase the high.
Others don't chase the high at all, but remember the state of mind and simply tune their brains to respond with said high on command whenever the chemistry in the brain fulfills the conditions, which can happen without taking the drug at all.
I don't see a loop there; I see different levels of awareness, consciousness and needs.
It's also what I think when I hear Hofstadter or (high-)functioning people talking about being "strange loops". ... use some of your opportunities, peace of mind and resources to sue people (you can probably come up with entire lists...) and the "strange loop" will break immediately.
Some people edge for days, others had to use various toys and stimuli before getting off since youth.
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#33> In Spanish, you “lend” attention. In Swedish, you “are” attention.
In Hebrew you "place [your] heart" (lasim lev).
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#34>As anyone who has had good sex knows [...] High school tier literature.
Goes well with the rationalist/Bay Area-audience in here.
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#35He's right, but he approaches it from the boring physical materialist perspective. Wrong level of analysis.
Go on
I'll take a shot. I think what the OP was alluding to is a modern movement towards "metaphysics" or manifestation.
Think about the world you see and live in. Someone created the monitor you're looking at that you're reading my comment. Someone created the keyboard you're working on. Someone created the machines to manufacture these things. And so on.
It started with a concept, an idea. It didn't just appear. We, as humans, have the ability to collapse (hint hint, quantum physics) from the ethereal to the physical world the thoughts we have. This applies to everything. What our decisions are. Should I eat McDonalds today or have fish and salad?
We are, in a sense, wizards in this world. We create what we focus our mind on. Where we direct our focus and our intent we can see desired outcome. If your desire is to make a billion dollars, no one is stopping you. You are the only obstacle.
What I'm saying won't resonate with a lot of people, but in my experience, this message isn't for everyone. I'm a software engineer who has learned to appreciate the spiritual world as much as I appreciate the science. The two can live in harmony (as it used to, read about Tesla and Newton's metaphysical works -- they were manifestors as well).
This was a little all over the place, but it's meant to be a sampler platter of metaphysical ideas.
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#36That's the default mode network. People that struggle with anxiety and rumination, as per the author's second section, lack the endogenous mechanisms to interrupt the default mode network.
> lack the endogenous mechanisms It's not a lack of mechanisms. It's buggy wiring in the brain where at some point in time t some substance or lack thereof forced the brain to reroute blood flow through "paths" that were less impacted by the bug. if you can increase the blood flow through the originally responsible paths, you can recover any buried mechanism. people with ADHD and stuff who had only slightly lower blo…
This seems like a strong claim, and I've never heard of it before. Can you provide sources?
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#37Weird unnecessary title editing, the “and bloom” part is necessary to the title. Sometimes I don’t know if the title editors here are just bored.
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#38[flagged]
Not all philosophy amounts to the same egotistical vocabulary contest. I found it inspired and coherent, maybe not to an analytical taste, but a flowery style is proper for the actual point.
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#39> In Spanish, you “lend” attention. In Swedish, you “are” attention. In Hebrew you "place [your] heart" (lasim lev).
Absolutely mind/world-expanding. Thanks for sharing. The Swedish version reminds me of (the now "disgraced" but his Proust book is cool journalist) Lehrer's chapter on Virginia Woolfe in Proust Was a Neuroscientist, where he claims that "attention _is_ consciousness" in Woolf's then-novel stream of consciousness style in To the Lighthouse.
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#40Sounds like concentration meditation. (The Buddhists call it "samatha") Concentration causes your perception to penetrate things. What you observe dissolves, its former appearance a mere veil, parted, to reveal another appearance. And then that veil is parted. And so on. The process could be described as a penetrating, blooming or revealing.
There is limit to the "power" of concentration and what things it can help achieve. If meditation could help unravel the secrets of the universe, it would have helped the meditator reveal that the hardware responsible for consciousness is actually composed of neurons. All meditation might help is to remove the fog from the hall of mirror that is consciousness. To know more about the universe, one has to experiment on…
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