an extraordinarily clear and insightful exploration of Buddhism's core insights into the nature of the self and its relationship to suffering
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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
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
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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
"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
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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
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
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
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
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
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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
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
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
thanks to @RomeoStevens76 for originally writing this up, @Malcolm_Ocean for formatting and posting, and @selentelechia for helping me come across it today
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
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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