👁️ autosurveillant 👁️ @pee_zombie@schelling.pt

thanks to @RomeoStevens76 for originally writing this up, @Malcolm_Ocean for formatting and posting, and @selentelechia for helping me come across it today

in short, the key insight of Buddhism is that we can study our own phenomenology to arrive at meaningful and harmonious epistemics

consuming the stream of mental events reveals just how hollow the illusion of self is, which motivates the design of a more robust cognitive frame

most ironically, it is that very struggle preventing us from achieving our goals; the intensity of our efforts is inversely proportional to their success

the Joke is that if we stop trying in this way, we usually get what we want

nondoing is a bitch

---
RT @pee_zombie
some call this wu wei, some call it the Alexander technique, some call it action gradient descent through simulated annealing, but at its core all it is is shutting the…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1314436053021884417

we do not have control over the present; the great universal state machine is entirely predetermined & we are but mere observers watching its clockwork, raging all the while against inevitably

the Great Joke is that we try so hard to control that which it was never possible to

being a strict determinist, my relationship with free will is somewhat complex

in one sense, it clearly doesn't exist, and yet, the concept does seem to have explanatory power

my take is that we simply mistake its temporal status

---
RT @pee_zombie
agreed that it's mostly an irrelevant rabbithole of an infohazard, but for those that enjoy thinking about this, my answer is:

while physical determinism is true, it doesn't have any impl…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1309246772380921861

one of these is the illusion of control, which is something I like to call the Great Cosmic Joke

much of our suffering comes from a desperate attempt to simply WILL our minds into a certain shape, to magically jump the state space minima btwn where we are & where we ought to be

as such, frame falsification is a rather critical criteria when evaluating the utility of your mental models; if there's nothing which could possibly convince you that your sense-making apparatus, well, doesn't, then you're vulnerable to quite a few catastrophic failure modes

the most dangerous frames are the unfalsifiable ones, those w/ a built-in excuse-making mechanism, which can be deployed to disarm any potential frame violation; an unfalsifiable frame is based on an article of faith, an axiom

this axiom tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy

"sticky" frames are powerful and dangerous tools; they tend to become all-encompassing and to infect every belief they come in contact with

our psychic immune system, when it detects a threat to the hard won homeostasis, reacts with extreme prejudice

---
RT @pee_zombie
these frames feel compelling, sticky, & hellish all for the simple reason that they are miscarried dimensionality reductions, attempts to reduce complexity by folding r…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1389706149734359045

load-bearing beliefs tend to be rather sticky, being metastable cognitive attractors; the problem arises when they no longer have the same utility they once did, becoming parasitic psychic constructs, preventing us from seeing the new reality clearly

---
RT @pee_zombie
the concept of "load-bearing beliefs" leverages our physical intuition, applying our spatial reasoning capabilities to abstract cognitive questions. the analogy works; w…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1327110847475408896

an extraordinarily clear and insightful exploration of Buddhism's core insights into the nature of the self and its relationship to suffering
---
RT @Malcolm_Ocean
@visakanv @RomeoStevens76! He has a brilliant piece "misTranslating the Buddha" which was just on a mailing list but I made it into a gdoc here for ease of printing & sharing.

It's subtle, perceptive dharma.

(Romeo lmk if you publish this elsewhere)
https://docs.google.c…
https://twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1413634535841943552

I'd never encourage someone to commit a self-violence I hadn't already
---
RT @chaosprime
hopefully it's obvious that i would never stab that hard unless it were into my own heart
https://twitter.com/chaosprime/status/1414061706398126080

the problem with local maxima is that the global maxima is one as well

having long felt similarly, I've wondered what it is about me that differs from those who enjoy this kind of thing; I love hyping up my friends & give out earnest compliments like candy, but these spaces never feel quite right to me. unconditional positivity is meaningless
---
RT @ElodesNL
I've been in a groupchat recently which is incredibly positive, horny, and positive about being horny; full of people posting selfies and bigging each …
https://twitter.com/ElodesNL/status/1413550495101329412

havonign long felt similarly, I've wondered what it is about me that differs from those who enjoy this kind of thing; I love hyping up my friends & give out earnest compliments like candy, but these spaces never feel quite right to me. unconditional positivity is meaningless
---
RT @ElodesNL
I've been in a groupchat recently which is incredibly positive, horny, and positive about being horny; full of people posting selfies and bigging eac…
https://twitter.com/ElodesNL/status/1413550495101329412

using money as an intermediate representation of reified power, one becomes able to solve the central planning problem by entirely side-stepping it

however, signals propagate better thru more rigid media; too much money bloats a system, making it sloshy

---
RT @pee_zombie
in order to do this, you need a way to "push out" decisions to locales where the necessary information is present, & to "pull in" the decisions about the results

th…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1396173122609496068

nothing can travel faster than light, besides shadows, gossip, and money

a system which integrates with a market mechanism to solve a resource distribution problem is able to react to far away events before it even becomes aware they've occurred, through financial backpressure
---
RT @a_yawning_cat
the basic function of money is simple.

don’t do stupid things

for simple initiatives money isn’t even necessary, but for more complex…
https://twitter.com/a_yawning_cat/status/1413336039729483777

so unless you want to be seen as a Stupid Science Bitch, either accept that your inherited worldview does not make you morally superior to those with another, or work to take ownership of your epistemics and connect your beliefs to the evidence of your senses

but the fact remains that Pop Science is a folk religion, one involving just as much faith as other common belief systems

those who value intellectual honesty for its own sake readily admit this, and either accept it or seek to shore up their foundations

---
RT @acmills237
@owenbroadcast You’ve gone this far and haven’t mentioned this clip once… https://youtu.be/b0e-omnsukM
https://twitter.com/acmills237/status/1413271544583831555

given that the egoic needs of most people require them to occupy a morally defensible position, it becomes understandable why they'd accept the arms they're handed down and close ranks, in an attempt to avoid complicity with the ideological outgroup's perceived misdeeds