Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
I have a very weird question for you all. I think it's too much of a question to fit the wellness thread, but it doesn't fit in well anywhere. That said, this is the most intelligent forum I'm aware of.
Why would I waste into nothing and die if I followed my natural inclinations? How did darwinism possibly select for that?
I have to use my willpower and overwrite what my body, ego and drives want, in order to have a good life. Surely it would be more better if nature just gave us all strong willpower? Or if our natural urges pointed us towards that better life in which we're successful all on its own?
There's times where there's a lot of wisdom in the body too, when it actually knows better, and when overwriting it with your willpower is stupid. But I have hurt my own progression a lot by focusing too much on these cases, as the opposite cases are even more common.
So, why? The desire to be a loser, and the hatred of my own inadequacy coexists in the same body. The only theory I have is that life requires resistance in order to grow strong (trees grown without wind do not become strong enough to support themselves, for instance). So, human beings fight themselves in order to create this resistance when it does not exist externally (which is why people who don't know real struggle seem to become insane and invent problems where none exist). When I had my depressive episode, I noticed that it felt like my body was trying to kill itself, but also to stay alive at the same time. And like how a fever hopes to kill the bad parts in your body before it kills the healthy parts, what profound suffering does it that it increases internal pressure hoping that the weakest part breaks first (leading to those turning-ones-life-around stories). But hedonism and other such tendencies do not seem to bring any advantages at all.
The tendency to mediocrity does not make sense to me. It does not seem beneficial. Humanity is capable of so much greatness, but 9 out of 10 end up quite pathetic, seemingly by design or by choice (rather than actual external limitations). Are we sick? Even "The natural environment had limited resources" doesn't seem like a good enough reason for the desire to self-neglect and to avoid opportunities which are obviously good just because they're a little bit difficult.
Civilization can be construed as a hack programmed onto our collective evolutionary codebase — a codebase that has very finite space and is rewritable. The language used is complicated and easy to misunderstand.
Truthfully, I’m not 100% sure what willpower means. Is this when we convince ourselves that the immediate thing in front of us has salvific importance, or that the failure to pursue it opens the gates of hell, metaphorically? In that sense this it’s a kind of meta-social managing of ourselves, what Marcus Aurelius did in his Meditations and what Goggins does in his podcast. There’s a great Louie CK bit on Goggins that I adore: “it’s hard to be that guy — you can be that guy, and then you’re tense all the time, and then you die. It’s not like you become that guy and then you break into some infinite perfection. You just become that tense guy and then you die”. We can see why people don’t become that guy: (1) it’s unpleasant and humans are designed to pursue pleasure; (2) the pleasure which Goggins receives as compensation for his pain is a hyper-socialized glee at his superiority which is instantly diminished the more that people become like him. In other words, who is going to watch him carry the boat? Who is there to yell at? Jocko has one kid, by the way; the fat comedian has two.
Nature has its own consideration of success. We don’t have a say in it. All we have is our hacks, and there’s little telling whether our hacks are better than the hacks the previous coders came up with.
A wise man once wrote:
You have competing instincts. There’s a bunch of social instincts, which in their optimal form will make you do the prosocial behaviors which you’re complaining that you don’t do (this includes exercise, diet). Then there’s more animal instincts: not waste energy, to eat more, and so on. Then there’s the omnipresent antisocial super-stimuli which are a virus to your social instincts. This is the algorithm that shows you a bunch of social information, some validating, some alarming, etc. Video games. Etc. If you feel important, high-ranked, competitive, engaged, desired online — or chasing these regardless — then why would you go to the gym to be Goggins? You would have to exercise for eight months to maybe get a few more likes on an Instagram post, and it’s questionable whether that will really lead to anything, and besides, maybe women online are more attractive? This is reality without Goggins-tinted goggles. What a lot of weight lifters will do to increase motivation is (1) look down on everyone else, (2) believe that exercise has cosmic import. The first is morally bad, the second is Frank Yang. In any case, you would need to continually convince yourself of this motivation with reminders, cues, variability, pilgrimages, dark nights of the soul…
To continue the quote above,
We can interpret this atheistically. The flesh, the sinful body, this is all of the lower anti-social instincts and viruses. The Christ, the Lord, this is the hyper-social, omni-social exemplar, the pious and continual thinking of whom acts as an antivirus which can free the codebase and allow us to implement our own hacks again (which may or may not be better than the original hacks).
I don't think you have to be in a constant unpleasant state to grow. Growth is unpleasant in some ways, but pleasant in others. It's especially pleasant when you cash in on it, for example becoming rich and then going on vacations a lot. But I do generally agree that "suffering is the root of growth", meaning that it requires great conflict between yourself and the world, or between yourself and other parts of yourself, to grow the most. The greatest growth also puts the individual at risk of destruction.
I'm not puzzles much by competing instincts. Even craving dopamine seems somewhat justifiable to me. It's the craving for what destroys you, or the craving for nothingless, which seems weird. The former might be a way the body is forcing itself into growing, but this mechanism seems more destructive than constructive. The latter seems like the "death drive" or nihilism, but it might be similar to going into a coma, with the body simply wanting rest.
I read in some of Nietzsche's work that people keep themselves ill, and that this triggers healing. Kind of how fasting and cold showers increases longevity. If this is true, then it makes sense that people keep themselves in a constant "just barely surviving" situation. It just seems irrational from the outside, since it's less pain overall just to do something about ones problems.
Your comment seems correct overall, but I don't think that pro and anti-social instincts explain everything. I'm autistic, so the social instincts in me just aren't that strong. I don't care too much what other people think, and I don't even do good things because I felt that I should. I just do what aligns with my sense of aesthetics.
I don't like the idea that the body is bad. I have to agree with Nietzsche that instincts should be tamed rather than suppressed, and that he who says human nature is bad or evil is merely projecting. Rather than "If you're a good person, you will be happy", Nietzsche's stance is "If you're happy, you will be a good person". Merely being in a good mood tends to make you treat other people better. So when other people fear my nature, they fear parts of themselves which they perceive in me. Anyway, this would be the "good/evil" perspective. My confusion is about the "good/bad" perspective. A good way to put it is "One seeks that which tends to be bad for them, and in nature, this works out, because it's gated by that which is good for them". For instance, you want to relax, but you must first work. You want to waste resources, but you must first accumulate them. You want peace, but you must first win it through war. In the modern world, wire-heading, self-hacking, artificial rewards, etc. become possible, and we sometimes manage to solve some of the problems which exist to make us healthy. "We did it, we overcame the need for hard physical labour!" excellent, but if exercises is no longer required, what will stop your body from breaking down? We're meant to try to win, not to win. We're meant to fight for peace, not to achieve it. But I guess this partly answers my original question, thanks for your thoughts!
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You are not just your genes. You are your genes reacting with the (current) environment. Since this environment is miles different from the historical norm there's a massive potential for danger.
Are you weak to modern chemicals? Mold? The food you're eating? Lack of exercise? Lack of physical danger? Lack of responsibility? C-section? Parasites?
I am currently very depressed due to accidently (or rather, in overconfidence, assuming this would not occur, due to having felt oh so great for so long) taking too much glycine last night which screwed up my methylation (but I did sleep like a baby). I have a very similar reaction to choline in eggs. 1 egg is fine, 2-3 makes me melancholy, 4+ and it's a good thing I don't own a gun. I've spent many years unknowingly poisoning myself this way trying to eat healthy earlier in life.
Why do you desire to be a loser? Losers are usually not attacked. Perhaps it knows you cannot defend yourself? Is it because it senses that it's sick? Or because you've never tried before?
Or perhaps your genes just suck. But if I were you I would make sure that was the case (by changing your environment is as many ways as possible) before taking questions like the ones you asked seriously.
Willpower was developed later on. It's also very expensive biochemically. Lots of things related to it can break. But ignoring that, high willpower is also quite dangerous. If you don't give in to your desires there's no guarantee of creating tiny ones. You might spend all your days working on (non-)esoteric math. Or sacrifice yourself to a cause. Or eat too many eggs because you are convinced it's good for you despite the horrible taste. Higher intelligence is fantastic. We should convince the fungi to adopt it.
Have you ever looked at the outer layer of the brain? Any interface, no matter how complex, can be exploited given sufficient computation. But that does not mean it's a good thing for anyone involved.
I like to think that I'm a bit of an arrogant person, but that could just be a defense mechanism against the fear that I'm not. And I suppose that our environment used to force us towards being healthy using things like necessity. I have a bit of royal aesthetics, and most people on this forum are intelligent, so it's likely that we all have family members who used to be rather important people. That said, mental illness runs in my family just as much as intelligence does, so I feel like I'm on the experimental dev branch, one of natures instances of "throw a dice and see what happens".
You make a good point that it isn't ideal to say "I don't fit into society, I must be sick", for it might be that society is what's sick (or at least poorly calibrated for man as a species). Just like there's environments in which a cynical person would fare better than a naive person, there's also socities in which other healthy traits are disadvantageous, while unhealthy ones are advantageous and thus appear good.
I'll take your advice and attempt to change my environment, I just tend to think that external solutions are bad (the insight is from psychology in general. Most problems which seem external are actually internal. If you feel that you lack external validation, you might lack confidence, for example. And the feeling that I "need" a cup of coffee to be able to do my work would also be my brain lying to me. So I've been avoiding external solutions as reliance on external things feel like a bad tendency in general)
Yeah, willpower is dangerous, but a lack of it can be too. Some people are only doing alright in life because their instincts is smarter than the destructive ideologies they have consumed, and other people are only alive because they learned some degree of self-tyranny. The balance here is difficult.
By "tiny ones" I assume you mean children? Thanks for telling me about control theory by the way! I immediately fell into a fun rabbit hole about predictive processing. A final insight is that eggs may taste bad for you because your body knows that you shouldn't eat them, but this isn't always reliable so take it with a grain of salt (heh)
High intelligence means high resource (nutrient) usage by the brain. The chemical fires need to be cleaned up afterwards too.
Figuring out what is (and how much, it's not binary) external and what is internal is very difficult. Hell a problem can have many solutions. Sometimes you find the root cause, sometimes you find something good enough (for now or forever). Just try as many and as varied ones as you can (as long as the risks are low).
Side note: I took a psychology class a long time ago. I asked a lot of why questions and for a lot of definitions of terms. I was not given a lot of answers. But I was given a lot of looks. From my observation it was probably the least rigorous subject I ever took (and that's saying something). But the teachers seemed to be very sure about themselves. And the students liked the fact that they were participating in the process of higher education so the wheel kept spinning. The harder it is to evaluate the truth, the more likely...
Life is pain on the extreme ends.
Yes. Yeah, it knows more than I do.
But the genius of the human race are the kind of people who have seemingly limitless energy (PDF warning). So I don't think it's harmful for the brain to expend a lot of energy (that said, it could be that less energy is needed to study topics that you care for. That it's not just your brain being more receptive to these areas, but that it processes them in a less costly way - for instance, without anxiety, without judgement, without keeping track of time and without evaluating the external environment. In this case, it makes sense that you'd want to isolate yourself before you start studying, because only in a basement or a similar room would it be okay to lose one self in the task and turn off any peripheral perception)
I've never taken one! But I was a better psychologist than the "professionals" around me already at 10 years old, and I read a lot of Jung and such in my teenage years, and ran a lot of experiments on myself as well. I also had the bad luck of encountering most types of mentally ill people and having to deal with them (don't piss off borderline women, by the way). I also experienced symptoms from every cluster of mental illness myself, so I probably wouldn't lose out to even Buddha in experience and self-reflection. I have no respect for 90% of psychologists, even the PhDs seem absolutely clueless. I used to bully the mods on /r/psychology before I was perma'd from Reddit. (Their 'hot' section now has an article about how women value kindness the most in men, and that supportiveness and intelligence were more important than looks. Not a single thing in that sentence is true. Every post I can find on the sub at the moment is garbage, actually). JP is alright, as is thelastpsych.
Yeah, but extreme ends have their own opposites. The spikes of positive emotions I experienced when I was severely depressed are much larger than the ones I feel now. Overall, I feel better now that the depression is gone, but I'm actually making fewer meaningful memories now. The subjective parts of life have a tendency to balance themselves like this. It's only objectively that my life has improved a lot.
This is what made me listen to my brain, emotions, instincts, etc. but now I've realized that there's areas where it's unreliable and where I have to overwrite it with willpower. It's not so much that I "know better" than my brain, but I do have way different priorities. My brain is too stingy, it doesn't want to invest. It's also too cowardly. It's also hard to modify, it doesn't care for conformity, it's immune to hypnosis, it won't let me lucid dream, and it resists when I try to reprogram it.
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But that is the long and short of it. Consider humans before the fairly modern era we have:
Because food was scarce, it was advantageous to survival to store up calories as fat. And because you had to exercise just to eat, everyone had to exercise. So there was no selection pressure pushing humans to develop in a direction where the body would maintain its health without exercise.
You have to work hard for food, so if you felt like staying home instead of going out to hunt or pick berries, wouldn't that be a bad thing? I think there's a point where this laziness can be said to be pathological.
I'm quite thin, but even in overweight people, laziness seems dominant. I think optimism and confidence "ought to" modulate laziness (since it would hint at abundance, or tell ones body that one is the pack leader). But personally, my appetite is low no matter my mood.
Sure, it would be a bad thing. But it's only going to be weeded out by natural selection to the extent that you're so lazy that you die off. Presumably people with genes that made them that lazy are long since dead, but everyone else got to work (because they had to) and so they passed on their traits to us.
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No it's basically like predators resting a lot in between hunts, it conserves calories if you sit with your clan.
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Doesn't immortality get in the way of adaptation to changing conditions?
Yes. Perhaps I should have phrased my question better, I just wanted to keep it short.
I know why death exists. But I don't know why people become hedonists by default. Why you have to fight against yourself in order to wake up early, in order to study, in order to exercise, in order not to get distracted. The body seems to want to do nothing at all, or to do the bare minimum when things have to be done. It seems that, if you follow what your body wants, you die. Isn't this terrible design? Anyone can become a great person, you just have to steer yourself manually, while your body yells at you to do otherwise. It's like our bodies want us to live in poverty, to not become anyone special, to be too weak to be helpful to others, and to die without realizing our dreams. How did Darwinism cause this? I don't understand.
Oh, that's easy as well. In an evironment of scarcity, that's what keeps you alive and reproducing! We just got too good at eliminating scarcity.
Were they ever so scarse that people would be "lazy" like the modern human? It seems even more wasteful to let your own body decay and die than it does to take at least some care of it. It could also be that I still have some lingering depression, or that something else is wrong with me. After all, despite having food, I don't have much desire to eat.
It's good that I do have a strong willpower. I've just listened too much to my body since I expected it to be a little more trustworthy with my future than what is the case. This is after all the same body which can wake up 2 minutes before my alarm because it knows the time so well, and which can tell me insights about my problems in dreams just because I ask nicely.
I'm still a little puzzled, by the way. I think I waste 500 calories a day just being anxious, so it's not all about energy reduction.
Quite the opposite. Scarcity would cause laziness to be a transient state, a high you'd be constantly chasing like All Bundy ruminating on that highschool football game where he scored 4 touchdowns.
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