Comments by "SkyRiver" (@SkyRiver1) on "Big Think" channel.

We would probably have to hire our police from Canada.
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@free22 The cunning bullies become cops, the stupid ones become thugs.
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@sinkec So then you comment to me is your own way of reinforcing your own illusion? Did you type it without fingers that moved through space? Your comment reminds me of a friend of mine back in the sixties who dropped acid and spent the whole night pointing at a chair and laughing and repeating, "There is no chair." Until finally some smart ass said, "Dude you saying that there is no chair is proof positivist that there is, or else you would have nothing to say." Which everyone but one person found kind of funny. Delight in the minds two dimensional apprehension trying to deal with a nonlinear reality takes all kinds of novel starts and turns. Some of them useful or at least revealing, some of them . . . not much more than an illustration of a thoughts inadequacy in such regions. When the automatic thought-centric associative mind is turned upon concepts that have no primary reality, that is, that disappear when no one is thinking about them, the only thing that can result is endless confusion and paradoxical conclusions that also have no primary reality.
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@karlmiller5009 There is a monumental difference between being consciously aware and consciousness. They are not synonymous or interchangeable.
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@sinkec The "now" is merely the bodies analogue of the cache of a computer. Very fast memory right on the CPU. For the human quite automatic thought-centric associative mind there is no present or now. All perceptions of "now" take place in the past, even one's immediate apperceptive experience.
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Both the creme and the scum rise to the top. Unfortunately at the top the natural course is that over time even creme turns to scum.
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Everybody knows the solution, even the people responsible for maintaining the status quo -- actually especially them.
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Blinding flash of the obvious: People are motivated to become police because they like to push people around and do not want to have to pay the natural consequences, and they don't really want to work, like a roofer or delivery guy which is about what most police qualify for as far as intelligence and education (in the USA). The police problem is much deeper than you address, but the issue you discuss is the bed rock of a rotten system, designed to alienate teens and create an ongoing population of people who detest the hypocrisy of the law as it really functions, and place police in an adversarial relationship to the public. With the exception of the PA state police, who have always behaved professionally in my experience, every cop I have ever run into (on duty) was basically an authoritarian personality who did not give a shit about truth or facts, and when I was a teenagers several just totally made up traffic charges against me, because my car was too cool and my girlfriend too hot. So this was their petty way of trying to bring me down. When I was growing up, most of the police in my hometown actually walked beats and several refused to wear firearms (not because they were wimps). Now in the same small town, the police are militarized, if you do not come to a complete stop, for instance, three squad cars will be involved in your ticketing, and all the while, police who are no longer community residents, but outsiders, act in a totally obnoxious manner, such as shinning their spot lights in your rear view mirrors to blind you while you are searching for your documents. If their obnoxious behavior is questioned the will reply that it is for their own protection. I will note that no policeman has ever been attacked or harmed in this small PA town, ever, and the truth of the matter is that a job as a Amazon delivery driver is twice as dangerous as the average police job and that of a roofer is four time more dangerous, yet they manage to do their jobs without acting like teenage morons. God help the person who does not submit to every order by these guys, at the very least they will find themselves owning hundreds and hundreds of dollars for fines of violations that are totally contrived, or like some have found out, if the authority of these maniacs that use their petty authority to aggrandize their egos is questioned they may be beaten to a pulp and then told that if they say anything they will be charged will all manner of crimes. I personally have had police just make-up evidence and lie on the stand against me for things like pot possession in the seventies and driving offenses in the sixties at least four times in my short seventy three years on the planet. On the other hand, I have never needed a cop for anything, and anytime I reported a theft or vandalism, nothing was done about it. So over a lifetime of observation, I would say that you are totally correct: the police we have are with few exceptions, the wrong types for the job. Nothing will ever be done about this, because the current is in the other direction. Police are far more "equal" than the average person, and can literally murder people and get away with it almost all of the time. This is what the power elite wants. They do not want a bunch of helpful public servants, they want people who will not hesitate to kill on command. And these bastards are interchangeable, a cop in the Kremlin is no more an asshole than a cop in Waco and possibly less of one. A lot of them just want to shoot someone, to give them psychological satisfaction and release. They are so more than equal that killing one of their dogs is treated like killing a human, and they will murder you is you try to defend yourself from a K9 attack. This is not conjecture it is the state of affairs.
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More like opium than cocaine in my experience.
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Just another instance of Chat GPT getting it wrong. And such instances are plentiful. The reification of conscious awareness into a noun is an illusion.
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@SiddhArtha96 The "real question" is not "Who am I?" it is "What is "I"?"
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The biggest single factor in climate change is the generation of greenhouse gases. Far more greenhouse gases are produced by animal agriculture than any other source (87% by animal ag as compared to 13% by all other sources, cars, planes, electric plants, etc.: combined) The most important thing you can do as an individual to address climate change is to stop buying the products of animal agriculture, such as meat, dairy products, leather goods, and furs. If enough people do this, we will survive, if not, your grandchildren will be forced to determine whether to eat their babies to survive a few more weeks when crops fail globally. Your choice: indulge your blind instinctive desires and rationalize them with self-centered mindless opinions, or leave future generations an earth worth living on. Or you can just go on fruitlessly bitching about the injustice of things like Bezo's money and ignore the situation until it is beyond too late. My personal bet is that the vast majority of you, even if convinced of the reality of the global climate situation will go on with your rapacious lifestyles unabated. Even so, those are the facts. Now -- are you a rational moral being, or a mad machine that really has no control over yourself?
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Psychedelic experiences can be very valuable, but they do not compare to natural awakening of the higher levels of consciousness. I have experienced both and there is no real equivalency, especially in the area of permanent extension of consciousness.
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@alanelukman2516 Thanks, for the info. I am not seeking help of any kind, but perhaps someone else is seeking a legitimate source for a psychotropic. I assume that is what you are implying. I recommend peyote. Back in the sixites that was always the sweetest, most fun, and profound, for me.
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Evidently there are areas wherein there is meaning for which communication in language is inherently misleading. Meaning which is so altered and distorted by language that any integral communication regarding it in words, amounts to an endless disclaimer regarding the impossibility of any accurate representation by symbolic means. Here is an example of someone addressing this phenomena. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAOVUo5TYJM
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Perhaps we could learn what would work by what worked so well during the hellish spread of Islam. You simply take a sword and put it to their necks and say, "Convert to atheism or die." Then brainwash them for generations and you will end up with true believer atheists. Islam and it's adherents differ from other modern religions in that it is a terrorist movement and has been from the very beginning. Most of today's Moslems are the descendants of Christians who were given the choice of converting or extreme abuse or death. Moslems were taught by mohammed to be meek until they are strong enough to be viscous. Learn some history, Islam is a plague on humanity that has set us back a thousand years and loves nothing more than selling little white girls into slavery for sexual abuse. At least that is what history tells us, and since you are so concerned about how history will judge us, perhaps you should do some more objective judging yourself.
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Naive: Specialists are near sighted, even those whose field is cosmology. What is needed if humans actually need leaders, and that is a moot point, is a scientific generalist who is conversant with all the fields of human intellectual expansion and not hobbled by politicians in the thrall of their cash cows. Leaders should be chosen by testing and simulations and be imminently replaceable when someone betters their scores, not by popularity among the manipulating bastards that remain hidden from view like Mercer and company while their stooges like Trump distracts an imbecilic public. Addendum: Mercer is a perfect example why what you propose would be disastrous, a genius in his field that subscribes to a legion of crackpot theories and uses his influence to destroy America with Trump and the radical right wing fascists.
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Before Facebook, before fake news, before incredible credibility gap, Google asked the general public for ideas that it should fund research into. I suggested a neutral nonprofit agency that would give every internet address that is a venue for information of any type a rating, for factualness of the information they are presenting and hoping to disseminate. . . . Crickets, in fact the crickets were so deafening that they still can't be heard. I can just hear the objections in the form of projections of rationalized complications because of this or that trivial factor. It would have made a difference. Now I am going to present myself, for the moment, as an irrelevant and fictitious personae who views themselves as knowing much more than the established recognized official experts in all matters having exclusively human, causal dynamics, because I do know more than them, so indulge my pronouncements as, though seemingly out of touch with official narratives, not only are they effective, but inescapable, unless you want your escape to be into a realm that is more like what you are presently attempting to escape than it is itself. But then why change something that hasn't worked in such a fine fashion up till now?' That dear reader is up to you. This is my one indulgence: playing Cassandra. Only this particular Cassandra is not only disinterested, but is exceedingly irrelevant, with nary a dog in the fight. I do not know if democracy is a desirable form of government. I do not know if it is a possible from of government. I do not even know with good faith that it has even ever existed as a form of government for a so called sovereign nation in all of history. One two three: but I do know this: . . . In order for democracy to transcend the status of a mere amalgamation of partisan viewpoints: in order for democracy to invoke the very physical epigenetic human potential of a large group to transcend the perception and conception of an individual in the consideration of questions they find relevant enough to hold up to democratic process, this process, cannot take place in a media of lies, rationalizations, guesses, opinion, and all manner of manipulation and disinformation. All you will get in such cases is confusion. Like you have. I refer you to the example of the jelly bean urn, like you find at a stare fair, or charity event. A huge glass urn, filled with so many jelly beans that you can only take your best guess. If the n is large enough, that is, if enough yokels buy a chance and take a guess, the tendency will always be for the average of all guesses to be more accurate than the most accurate individual guess. So to take the average answer would usually be taking the most accurate estimate. This is analogous to the manner in which the epigenetic democratic genius of large human groups can be utilized to succeed where even the best and brightest fail. With this one huge caveat: this cannot take place in a culture of lies, manipulation, propaganda, disinformation, etc. That would be the equivalent of having a hidden softball in the middle of the urn. You would still get a good answer, but not to the question you asked. You can let the superficial idea of democracy destroy the real significance of democracy by protecting every crackpot who wants to spout some idiotic psychotic nonsense or you can value the higher potential of democracy enough to establish iron clad contingencies for anyone presenting any information to the public. Which would necessary include fines and penalties for those individuals and organizations presenting fictions and delusional nonsense as facts. These penalties should include total confiscation of all property worldwide and banishment from the USA. That's what it takes for democracy to function at it's highest potential. Personally I prefer RetrConfucianTechnoMeritocracy sans tyrant and police state. But I can see that you prefer what is automatic. . . . Entropy, . . . go eat you big mac pink boy, drink that coke: swill that liquid barbiturate, you deserve it.
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For the sake of the one in a hundred thousand persons who can properly understand this, because they may come upon this, and are dear to me, here is the seed: Total objectivity, in the moment, of one's own subjective process IS cosmic "consciousness". No DMT or exogenous poisonous approximation molecules necessary (only a distortion anyway). For that one in a hundred thousand, you can do this, if you really want to, and you really want to, if your were born that way, and somehow stayed vital despite the automatic thought-centric associative function you call your mind. It doesn't get any more direct in words than this: though all words regarding this are incorrect and misleading. Including these. But they are the most accurate you will ever find. This is not a concept it is an action, woefully described in terms of it's own antithesis. The proof is in the doing.
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Mescaline (peyote) is way better than any other psychedelic.
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Consciousness is not a problem where I come from. In fact it's not even a thing: unless you are using the original archaic Frisian meaning of the word. And even then "conscious awareness" would be far more accurate, since there is about as much consciousness as there is runningness (in a runner who is standing still). Or as Carlos Dwa said in The Unwritten Book: Xellex . . . "The inherent deception in all conceptions of consciousness can be traced to the suffix "ness". This is sometimes referred to as the "ness" lock monster." . . . . . .
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@WelfareChrist 😄
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@ZennExile Hostility as amusement: a true Zennish achievement (of the reptile brain). I bet you pull the wings off flies to make you happy. Even if you don't, that is what you are doing here. Consider this: EVERYONE is enlightened EXCEPT you. . . . (Notice the proper use of ellipses.)
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The chances that the masses will shed their delusions or even have any interest in doing so are slim. They consider their delusions to be what makes life worth living, and who is to say they are wrong in their cases? Awakening to the sublime impossibly energetic beauty of it all, is not something that you can just decide to do then do. It is not a conceptual construct but something that must be pursued despite all the conceptual constructs about it. It is a ignition of an epigenetic metabolic process that lies in wait for the proper stimulation to arise and energize an enhanced form of consciousness that lies at the inception of the very core of religion ideation (all of which is degenerated, deviated from, and can be an actual impediment to coming in touch with it.)
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I support Bernie, and cannot fathom Trump's appeal except as a reaction to the general hatred of Hillary. On the other hand Asian is an jerk and Islamic apologist who deserves no public attention what-so-ever. His report about Pat Robinson's dream is real fake news. Research it for yourself. No, he didn't really say that. The story came from a site called "The Business Standard News." This is what they say about themselves: "The Business Standard News is a satirical site designed to parody the 24-hour news cycle. The stories are outlandish, but reality is so strange nowadays they could be true."http://bizstandardnews.com/.../robertson-said-he-had.../
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@llIlIlllII Because they murder people everyday.
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Psychedelics may be the only way that enough people can transcend their limitations to once again introduce sanity as a norm in civilization. I personally have experience with them back in the late sixties early seventies, I have also been involved with the so called "work" for many decades. I have had spontaneous "awakenings" that made even the strongest psychedelics seem childish -- but, though I haven't used it for decades I must confess a lingering affection and predilection for heroic dosages of peyote over all the others I had experienced. Be that as it may, I could now tell someone in very few words exactly how to "teleport" to the top of the mountain without exogenous recreational molecules. And guess what: that exact information is meaningless to 99,999 out of 100,000 people. There is simply no there there for them. So perhaps the temporary and exogenously produced psychedelic experience is the closet they will ever get to a cosmic refresh. And that is exactly what our culture desperately needs at this juncture. Oh, by the way, the question that can actually intimate transcendence is not "Who am I?" That is largely the net you are stuck in. The more proper question (for someone serious about conscious evolution) is "What is "I"?" Good luck.
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Sorry the public is too busy watching porn, sports, netfix, and video games to care about anything but their own petty pseudo experiences that stimulate dopamine release.
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No doubt America could learn a lot from the sane countries of the world, like yours and New Zealand, and the Nordic counties in general. But we like to keep our public dumbed down so they will believe any crap that the media tells them and can be easily manipulated by cultural warriors and other assholes like Trump.
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It's really simple, and really obvious to anyone who has bothered to observe themselves with some degree of objectivity. If your hormonal "brain" doesn't like it, your neural (electrical) brain won't believe it. How do your hormones relate to that statement? Don't like it? Then you won't believe it.
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Many years ago I offered to sell a vector diagram of the mechanism of "consciousness" to google. No response.
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I finally listened to this on a drive a day after making several comments. It was more or less what one expected, well less to be honest. It would be an easy and useless matter to find fault with every comment it contained. Despite this I will offer one "amendment" to a few of the initial statements. In particular about the supposed benefit or sentimental inner psychodrama in asking oneself what is often taken for a profound question: "Who am I?" If you are one of the few who are actually attempting to transform the dimension of your apperceptive awareness the question "Who am I?" will get you nowhere real only further into the high security area of the associative prison you are already in. For the few with such an aim this is a wrong question. It is the equivalent of asking the color of the elephant in your dresser drawer and having to determine this without looking in the drawer but perhaps by asking Chat GTP. In other words not only is it useless but it is meaningless as regards your aim. A certain modification of this question, if taken to "heart" can provide a benefit with regard to the direction you are drawn to. That modification can be approximated by the words "What is "I" ?" and the unnatural arousal of the prowess to observe you subjective process, including this self-reflective observation as objectively as you are able. When referring to human capabilities of being aware above the level of the automatic thought-centric associative mind, all word are misleading and in a very basic manner erroneous. This is not a concept it is an action described in concepts, the proof is in the doing: in the activity. Total objectivity IN THE MOMENT, of ones subjective process (appercreption) IS "cosmic consciousness". More accurately: is to be consciously aware on a cosmic level. Simple as that, and almost any one in a hundred thousand people drawn to such conscious evolution can do it. And most of the rest really don't want to, no matter what their lips (inner or outer) confess.
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It is obvious why our institutions do not trust the public: the power-elite who control the institutions are not trustworthy. All too simple: all too true.
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Consciousness is not a problem where I come from. In fact it's not even a thing: unless you are using the original archaic Frisian meaning of the word. And even then "conscious awareness" would be far more accurate, and "apperceptively aware" even more so, since there is about as much consciousness as there is runningness (in a runner who is standing still). Or as Carlos Dwa said in The Unwritten Book: Xellex . . . "The inherent deception in all conceptions of consciousness can be traced to the suffix "ness". This is sometimes referred to as the "ness" lock monster." . . . . . .
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I support Bernie, and cannot fathom Trump's appeal except as a reaction to the general hatred of Hillary. On the other hand Asian is an jerk and Islamic apologist who deserves no public attention what-so-ever. His report about Pat Robinson's dream is real fake news. Research it for yourself. No, he didn't really say that. The story came from a site called "The Business Standard News." This is what they say about themselves: "The Business Standard News is a satirical site designed to parody the 24-hour news cycle. The stories are outlandish, but reality is so strange nowadays they could be true."http://bizstandardnews.com/.../robertson-said-he-had.../
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