luka

Well-known member
The reason I started writing is that I had thoughts which were different from other thoughts, that came with an electric charge. This is as a teenager. Power surge getting unleashed. Very exciting. And they seemed to lead somewhere. Taking me somewhere, and changing me as they did so. That's the invisible college.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I know the feeling, but I can't sustain the belief that it points to a reality exterior to my own neural cortex. The charge comes from somewhere incongruous with the ego, sure, and it brings us up against something that has the feeling of being concretely, vividly, over-against-us really there, but I think it's located in inner rather than outer space, and I do think that distinction means something.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
The ego is like the user interface of the neural cortex, there's a whole lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that's not represented by "I"-thoughts or articulated in "I"-statements. Sometimes bits of the stage machinery make their presence felt, sometimes the salience function that decides what's Really Important glitches and thrusts something into the foreground that normally sits in the background, and so on. But such events are localised to the brain and related bodily systems, they aren't signals from the outside world - they just feel like they are because they come from outside of our normal processing context.

I sort of want this not to be true, but I can't persuade myself that it isn't.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Well, I care whether what I believe is true or not. I could choose to believe untrue things for the sake of a more interesting life, but that would be cheating.
 

luka

Well-known member
You must have experimented? Just to see what would happen? Adopting a proposition you don't, strictly speaking, believe to be true. Slot it into place. Note the effects.
 

luka

Well-known member
I mean, the thing is, it changes your experience of life in very fundamental ways, the assumptions you make about reality.
 

luka

Well-known member
Even down to how vivid reality is, how deep and vibrant the colours are. what you are capable of experiencing, the range and intensity of affects. The frequency band. So my habit is not to worry too much about what seems most plausible but what gives me the best results. Like tuning in a television. Colour, sound, clarity. The clearest reception. This is my guide. Can I receive the message loud and clear.
 

luka

Well-known member
For me it's all about the feedback. That's how they guide you into alignment.
 

luka

Well-known member
One example, I've talked about this loads before but I was sitting down in a room with two lads I was 20 or 21 and I suddenly realised oh they like me I don't really have to worry and this changed my basic orientation towards the world at large and I was never the same again. It really was like taking off a hair shirt I'd been wearing all my life.
 

luka

Well-known member
these underlying assumptions which it makes very little sense to label true or false but have huge huge influence over your everyday experience, the texture of your life as lived.

Is it "true" to say people basically like me? Well, probably not, no.
 

luka

Well-known member
Or what you identify with. The experience? The experiencer? all this basic stuff. We make mistakes we get bad results and so we change things. Try something else. Make different mistakes.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
that came with an electric charge

But your writing is like an electrical charge, though: not only how it is created, but how it reads. Other people write differently: they compose, arrange and edit.
 

luka

Well-known member
Yeah it's funny. That's the aspect of your thing that can make me feel inadequate or at least very envious. It's so grown up and sophisticated and controlled.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I love the way he keeps going with these enormous, esoteric essays, in apparent immaculate isolation. I really admire it, the style and the stamina.
 

luka

Well-known member
He had a bit of a crowd but they all turned Nazi when reality switched to the new server a few years back
 
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