Organic Portals: Human variation

Thanks, Approaching Infinity. Hadn't seen that article yet. This must be hitting a peak right now or at least ramping up quite a bit. What else is going to get banned in the next few weeks?!

EDIT: quote for next thread page:

This is a good a place as any - maybe even the perfect place. Have you checked out this Focus on SOTT yet:
'Dangerous Dehumanization' And The NPC Meme -- Sott.net

I hadn't heard of this finding before:

Sometimes 4chan gets things scarily right...

I just read the study, and the description above is misleading. it's not true that "1/3 of the participants had none of the five qualities". Rather, they found that anywhere from 4 to 9 (out of 30) participants didn't experience any instances of any one of the 5 inner experiences. In other words, 5 didn't experience any inner speech, 9 didn't experience any sensory awareness, etc. But it's possible that any number of the people who didn't experience sensory awareness DID experience some of the other 5. They authors don't break it down by individual and say how many individuals didn't experience ANY inner experiences.
 
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Thanks, Approaching Infinity. Hadn't seen that article yet. This must be hitting a peak right now or at least ramping up quite a bit. What else is going to get banned in the next few weeks?!

EDIT: quote for next thread page:
In regards to the npc meme I came across these two bits :NPC.jpg

and

IRL NPC.jpg

Now obviously the second one may be fake,but it seems strange to me that out of all the memes that have made it into the mainstream consciousness the NPC one struck the hardest cord.Even people who like these types of memes tend not to like this one.The most common criticism towards it being ''it's just a rebranded sheeple meme''.Which would be valid were it not for the fact that people who use that particular criticism tend so say that almost word for word every time.

In fact almost all complaints about it tend to be somewhat like pre-programmed responses.I suppose that it's impossible to keep the truth hidden forever and if some ancient civilizations had an understanding of this divide in humans then it would be inevitable that such knowledge would become widespread again.It's just bizarre that it's coming in the form of memes and that almost all people who are offended by it are somewhat mechanical.
Now obviously there isn't going to be some massive revelation as most people don't even believe in the concept of souls and would be offended if you said that some don't even have them.It's just interesting to see these concepts from the ''real world'' leaking out into culture.
 
Torn about whether to post this in humor or post it at all since it involves a controversial subject from another thread, but, for a pretty thorough sampling of where the NPC meme is going, check out:

NPC Memes #1 - NPC memes thread #1
WARNING - chan culture - the possibility of seeing something you may not like exists. Insert meta NPC joke here.


ALSO

Michael Flynn Jr. changed his profile pic on twitter to an NPC tonight, I guess daring them to ban him:

Michael Flynn Jr⭐⭐⭐️ (@mflynnJR) | Twitter
cb330aaf4871959562be07e0fd062efcf094d6753b2880910ede0d4e24d40bef.png
 
Thanks for this meme info. I was just made aware of it this week from the SOTT articles and SM posts. I was just thinking last night that NPCs might be OPs. And I was surprised that people seem to be seeing into the OP phenomenon by the creation of this meme.

Hindsight Man, that second snippet on thinking in thoughts is interesting. I've wondered in the past if one can do the opposite. Thinking in concepts or inaudible thoughts. Sort of like 'speed thinking', where you don't subvocalize your thoughts. Not that I'd want to think more like an OP, if that is really how things are and if language is important when thinking.
 
Hindsight Man, that second snippet on thinking in thoughts is interesting. I've wondered in the past if one can do the opposite. Thinking in concepts or inaudible thoughts. Sort of like 'speed thinking', where you don't subvocalize your thoughts. Not that I'd want to think more like an OP, if that is really how things are and if language is important when thinking.
That's actually one of the 5 inner experiences studied in the paper I discussed above. They call it "unsymbolized thinking". Here's the example they give to describe it:

Adam was watching two men carry a load of bricks in a construction site. He was wondering whether the men would drop the bricks. This wondering did not involve any symbols, but it was an explicit cognitive process

In the study, 8 people experienced no unsymbolized thinking over the course of the study. Not sure if it characterizes "OP thinking" or not. I often think symbolically and unsymbolically. I think you can pack a lot of information into an unsymbolized thought. At this point I'm not sure which is more 'advanced'. It's extra work to put unsymbolized thoughts into words, which requires active thinking. But maybe unsymbolized thinking can capture a complex idea that you couldn't catch if you were only thinking in words... I'll have to think about that some more!
 
Thanks for this meme info. I was just made aware of it this week from the SOTT articles and SM posts. I was just thinking last night that NPCs might be OPs. And I was surprised that people seem to be seeing into the OP phenomenon by the creation of this meme.

Hindsight Man, that second snippet on thinking in thoughts is interesting. I've wondered in the past if one can do the opposite. Thinking in concepts or inaudible thoughts. Sort of like 'speed thinking', where you don't subvocalize your thoughts. Not that I'd want to think more like an OP, if that is really how things are and if language is important when thinking.

As far as I can tell,being able to think without words is an important skill if you apply it to something.For example if you wish to be able to observe people the way Sherlock Holmes does,in the beginning you take mental note of all the little details and try to make a deduction.More advanced practitioners streamline that process so that all the ''note taking'' takes place subconsciously,to a point where if you asked them how they made a certain deduction they wouldn't be able to explain the process to you and would in fact have to slow down and go through the mental notes one by one.

For example : ''Dirt on his boots,torn old shirt,tanned skin,rough hands.Walks quickly with a slight hunch.This is a tradesman,likely a bricklayer.'' But an advanced practitioner would skip the mental notes and go right to the conclusion as his thinking has been delegated somewhat.I hope that makes sense and the reason I mentioned this is because thinking without words has it's place and is at times necessary as religious experiences are usually impressionistic and not verbal.

That said however if someone's internal landscape is really as barren as the reddit post then I think it's safe to assume that the person is soulless. In fact that post reminded me of a Cassie comment regarding souls entering bodies at different stages of life,some coming in as late as early adulthood.Perhaps that's what it looks like and the person was truly soulless as the consciousness was hanging around waiting for the right moment?Of course it could also be someone from 4chan trolling reddit,so hard to say.
 
Just amazing that the OP concept is popping up even if it is under a different name, so to say. It sure was a tough one for us when the Cs first presented it, but darned if it doesn't explain a LOT.
 
My experience is that words serve to slow down and regulate thinking. Translation from thought to words and back again serves as an important source of introspective material, a way of running material through the associative mechanism an extra time in the search for meaning. You can't create a sentence to include everything you perceive at a given time, even within less than a second. Language describes only one thing at a time, and when someone succeeds in describing more than one thing at a time we consider it a feat of literary talent. I think the mind has certain triggers for determining when it's warranted to transcribe experiences into language. When a thought is not complete enough to transcribe, it is more like a nagging feeling in the back of your mind. You may have something you do when you have that feeling; a process where you try to find a way to make this feeling explicit. You are trying to think explicitly in unsymbolic thought.

If your brain isn't working very well and you have a lot of brain fog, language serves as a mental notepad to help things stick. We use language to describe what we are supposed to be doing in meditation, and for the meditation seed. In my experience language allows us to separate concepts that would normally seem indistinguishable in unsymbolic thought. Unsymbolic thought is amoeba-like and is constantly shifting, the categories are constantly morphing and the borders between ideas disappear and reappear somewhere else (I think this is by necessity, as the focus of the mind moves from one territory to another by identifying, creating or destroying borders). Language is like a map that imposes the borders and categories explicitly and forces the unsymbolic thought to conform - if it can. And when there is a conflict we discover that our experience differs from our narrative in some way.

I think the skill of the language center in a person is a function of what the person does with it, which could be affected by whether they are an OP or not. But I don't think it is a direct relationship. It's probably more of a trend, but far from conclusive and likely error-prone.
 
Kinda avoided this thread for awhile, but i just remembered something that seems appropriate. I'm into video games, and in big online ones (where universes are created for players to inhabit) there are computer controlled non-playing characters or NPCs. The PC's or Playing Characters are controlled by people who log in and play the game. A while back i made this parallel to our universe, labelling people PCs or NPCs depending on their level of involvment in their reality. Those who simply go with the flow are NPCs, those that express an inherit quality of individuality and concious thought are PCs.

When i heard about OPs they seemed a little to complex of an issue to burn it down to this level, but i when i was thinking about how to discern OPs from souled i remembered this observation i made in high school. Just my 2 cents.

I've started rereading this thread and thought it interesting the NPC's where mentioned back in 2006 page 7.
 
I just read the study, and the description above is misleading. it's not true that "1/3 of the participants had none of the five qualities". Rather, they found that anywhere from 4 to 9 (out of 30) participants didn't experience any instances of any one of the 5 inner experiences. In other words, 5 didn't experience any inner speech, 9 didn't experience any sensory awareness, etc. But it's possible that any number of the people who didn't experience sensory awareness DID experience some of the other 5. They authors don't break it down by individual and say how many individuals didn't experience ANY inner experiences.
I contacted one of the authors, and he confirmed to me that they have sampled individuals who they suspect did not experience any inner phenomena. However, he wasn't sure if any were subjects in the study quoted above. So it was probably the case that those who didn't experience any of one type of phenomenon probably experienced some of the others. But it's nice to have confirmation that it appears there are at least some individuals who seem not to experience any whatsoever. That said, it's probably a small percentage.
 
I had never heard of this NPC thing before and I find it very interesting too.

The study mentioned in that SOTT article reminded me of another article I read recently on SOTT about the effects of internet in kids. It might be a bit off-topic, but since there's a discussion on that study, I thought I'd share it here:

A thought-provoking experiment: What happens when children don't have the internet for a whole day? -- Sott.net

Child psychologist Yekaterina Murashova describes an unusual experiment in her book showing what happened when a group of teenagers were deprived of access to the internet and modern technology for a single day. We think it's well worth checking out — you can consider the implications for yourself.

Children and teenagers aged between 12 and 18 years voluntarily spent eight hours alone without access to any means of communication (mobile phones; the internet, etc.). They were also forbidden to turn on the computer, any other electronic gadgets, the radio and the TV. But they were allowed to engage in a number of 'classic' activities by themselves: writing, reading, playing musical instruments, painting, needlework, singing, walking, and so on.

The author of the experiment, a family psychologist, wanted to prove her working hypothesis that the today's generation of young people are too often entertained by things not of their making, are incapable of finding ways to keep themselves busy, and are completely unfamiliar with the idea of the world of their imagination. According to the rules of the experiment, the children had to explain the next day how they had coped with being alone under such conditions. They were allowed to describe how they felt at the time of the experiment, and keep a record their actions and thoughts. In the case of excessive anxiety, discomfort or stress the project leaders would recommend stopping the experiment immediately, recording the time and the reason for its termination.


The experiment showed some interesting results regarding their dependence to their devices, social media, etc., but this caught my attention:

Almost all the participants tried to sleep at some point, but none were able to due to the unusual thoughts going round and round in their heads.
[...]
All of them, without any exceptions, said that they were extremely surprised by the thoughts that were crossing their minds during the experiment, but they were unable to examine them rationally because of the overall deterioration of their psychological state.

I thought it was interesting because in other articles which deal the subject of hyper-connectivity/internet we read that a very important part of memory and learning is the assimilation and association process in which the internal processing of the information we receive is involved. Basically, the thesis is that when we are hyper-connected we receive too much information which we can't properly process in this manner, so our memory and learning is particularly affected by this way living.

So I related it to the fact that this way of just swallowing lots and lots of unprocessed information shuts down that internal thinking necessary to assimilate it and so when the kids in the experiment where left without their devices for a while, they started thinking! This important assimilation process started working again and they were confused because they weren't used to it of course. It also made me think about what this hyper-connectivity can be doing to the kids, and even to young people in my own generation who had lived most of their teen ages and adult lives with access to this level of connectivity... we could probably say that we're being turned into NPCs by it, although it seems that it might be reversible if the potential for it was there in the first place.

Jean Piaget also talked about assimilation:

Assimilation and Accommodation
Jean Piaget (1952; see also Wadsworth, 2004) viewed intellectual growth as a process of adaptation (adjustment) to the world. This happens through:

Assimilation
– Which is using an existing schema to deal with a new object or situation.

Accommodation
– This happens when the existing schema (knowledge) does not work, and needs to be changed to deal with a new object or situation.

Equilibration
– This is the force which moves development along. Piaget believed that cognitive development did not progress at a steady rate, but rather in leaps and bounds.
Equilibrium occurs when a child's schemas can deal with most new information through assimilation. However, an unpleasant state of disequilibrium occurs when new information cannot be fitted into existing schemas (assimilation).

Equilibration is the force which drives the learning process as we do not like to be frustrated and will seek to restore balance by mastering the new challenge (accommodation). Once the new information is acquired the process of assimilation with the new schema will continue until the next time we need to make an adjustment to it.
Source: https://www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html

This is a very reduced summary, but I think it's interesting because it fits quite well into Damasio's idea of homeostasis driving evolution too, OSIT.

And talking of Piaget, the following comment reminded me of him as well:

In the study, 8 people experienced no unsymbolized thinking over the course of the study. Not sure if it characterizes "OP thinking" or not. I often think symbolically and unsymbolically. I think you can pack a lot of information into an unsymbolized thought. At this point I'm not sure which is more 'advanced'. It's extra work to put unsymbolized thoughts into words, which requires active thinking. But maybe unsymbolized thinking can capture a complex idea that you couldn't catch if you were only thinking in words... I'll have to think about that some more!

For me it was hard to understand what they describe in those terms, but my guess is that it the same or at least related to the concept of abstract thinking in Piaget's theory of cognitive development. I will just paste a short summary from that same site again, for reference:

Sensorimotor Stage (Birth-2 yrs)
The main achievement during this stage is object permanence - knowing that an object still exists, even if it is hidden.
It requires the ability to form a mental representation (i.e., a schema) of the object.

Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)
During this stage, young children can think about things symbolically. This is the ability to make one thing - a word or an object - stand for something other than itself.
Thinking is still egocentric, and the infant has difficulty taking the viewpoint of others.

Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years)
Piaget considered the concrete stage a major turning point in the child's cognitive development because it marks the beginning of logical or operational thought.
This means the child can work things out internally in their head (rather than physically try things out in the real world).
Children can conserve number (age 6), mass (age 7), and weight (age 9). Conservation is the understanding that something stays the same in quantity even though its appearance changes.

Formal Operational Stage (11 years and over)
The formal operational stage begins at approximately age eleven and lasts into adulthood. During this time, people develop the ability to think about abstract concepts, and logically test hypotheses.

When I studied this at the Uni, I remember learning that Piaget considered that the last stage wasn't "mandatory", meaning that not all people developed until this particular stage, but that it needed to be "impulsed" or "developed". I don't remember where we got that from but I'll search the reference because I always thought that it was very interesting. According to what we learnt back then, most people do pretty well with the operational concrete thought which already implies being able to produce internal thinking, to put that thinking into words, obviously to understand that words relate to things in the world and to have symbolical thinking. The formal operational stage seems to be related to pure abstraction, so to say, and maybe that's what unsymbolized thinking refers to, but I'm not sure either.

Now I want to study this 'formal operational stage' in more depth. I think it's also very interesting in the context of the NPCs and OPs discussed here.

Just some thoughts...
 
I am putting this here since it deals with unsymbolized thinking which I talked about earlier, and may further that discussion, but maybe this should go somewhere else.

I have started reading Speculum Mentis and this thread got me thinking. I spent weeks on the "art as error" section, reading it over and over. Eventually something makes it through the intellect and this part seeds a number of revelations that enlighten the rest of the text. Until that happens it's as if I am just reading words and then forgetting them.

I wrote this as a sort of revelation. It's probably full of mistakes, or even completely incomprehensible, so I ask you consider it a rough draft and don't read it if you don't have the time or energy or desire to point out flaws or mistakes. It is not a purely intellectual writing. Every sentence is a visceral experience for me. They viscerally match my inner experience (if only from the way I read my own writing). If it remained visceral there would be nothing on the page, but if it were purely intellectual I would have felt nothing when writing it; and never felt it might contain truth. I see this text as a process of the concepts of the 4th way along with Collingwood and other reading, after having affected me viscerally in the realm of unsymbolized thought, turning back to pass through the intellect and language center in order to unify into a more explicit form of knowledge. Not perfectly so, but at a new stage of refinement.

Some evidence of the visceral origins is that I don't know how to match the "centers" I write about with the centers as defined by Ouspensky. It was never clear to me which center did exactly what and it was hard to understand the text. But in my inner experience recently I've started to feel like there are "centers" in me which have specific functions and in moments of deep contemplation it is as if I can feel them performing specific functions and having certain relationships with each other. It's not as if I had these ideas independently of the 4th way material. But being unable to understand centers explicitly from my reading, I was left mainly with the ideas of what a center is and hints about how they work; and with these seeds of inquiry aspects of my inner experience are becoming tangible. For lack of certainty in relation to the 4th way centers I have just used thought center, unsymbolized center, intellectual center, language center, etc. I don't know how well these correspond to the 4th way centers but I think they at least have their own particular functions which can be thought of as separate and used to explain their relationships.

One thing that is missing here is the relationship of these things to action. Acting in the world is not mentioned anywhere and it is not where the exploration of my visceral space lead me (except in the sense that I am now viscerally going "wait a minute" because the dog is not barking). In my inner space, it is as if I am blind to this concept.

As worrying as that may be in itself, in the bigger picture it illustrates something I said in my last post - translation of visceral unsymbolized experience through the language center and back again serves as a valuable source of introspective material. :/



It is difficult for introspection to occur without passing through the language translation layer. That is not to say it is impossible. But in the absence of well defined areas in the unsymbolized center creating in effect letters and numbers, a sort of alphabet of the soul, the intellectual/language center's yearning draws instead from the world as an external alphabet or pattern, which we can only hope will be a good pattern and will enrichen the unsymbolized center.

The unsymbolized center contains shifting, transitory borders so that the thought center can translate through the space of the mind using the borders as doors and walls. The intellectual center needs perfectly defined borders so that each part can be referenced like a puzzle piece or a letter of the alphabet. An undeveloped unsymbolized center cannot offer the intellect this structure that it needs and yearns for. To satisfy this need the intellectual center will look for external sources of structure, with the hope that it will keep the intellect stable, and maybe even enrichen the unsymbolized center.

The easiest way to traverse the unsymbolized space is to see through multiple doors at once in a straight line - linear thinking. This is akin to automatic thought with it's well-worn pathways. It takes a voluntary role in thinking to stay a little while and peer through different doorways, bend the path of sight to see the same room through multiple doorways at once or to multiply the number of viewers to explore multiple paths.

The unsymbolized space is multidimensional. Linear thinking presupposes a 3D structure where nothing exists that cannot be seen in a straight line. Sometimes by accident or by insight the thought center moves in a nonlinear or non-3D manner; but it inevitably returns to 3D thought on the other side and then wonders why the space is now entirely different or even unfamiliar. Like walking up the stairs and finding yourself in the basement. And then the question is, how to get back to the ground floor? What if you appeared in an entirely different building? Do you react to this experience with wonder, or with fear?

Maybe the intellectual center is not so much a separate, defined entity so much as it is the desire for order manifested in process. (Perhaps every center is an aspect of being manifested as process?)

Unsymbolized thinking seems to be a deeper part of the mind than the speaking/language layer. Art touches me in ways I can't describe with words. All my visceral feelings are hard to distinguish from unsymbolized thought. Pains throughout my body appear as unsymbolized thought when I don't recognize them as external; a headache may be indistinguishable from the experience of envy, or a stomach ache from that of abandonment. The musical experience to me is nearly inseparable from the experience of unsymbolized thinking. Music has a dominating effect on my unsymbolized thought, and as the intellectual center reorders in an attempt to match the experience of the unsymbolized center, thoughts appear which try to match the experience of it in the intellectual center. My unsymbolized center wants to push the experience of music through the intellectual center to form it into a spoken thought which it understands intuitively in harmony with the intellect. The intellect yearns for this as well, but has as yet no way to participate in the experience of music. When the intellectual and unsymbolized centers harmonize, they share the same experience as one. Both of them yearn to dissolve the border that separates them. For the task set before them is not a different task given to each, but the same task given to the one machine they are a part of.

The unsymbolized center may approach the intellect with music to attempt working together. The intellectual center may approach the unsymbolized center with word. If the music includes word, or the drawing includes abstract elements, they approach at the same time. When both centers have material to give, there is the possibility of together as one. Hence the experience of pure art is secondary to the experience of art and word together. At the same time, if the centers come to each other with material that is incompatible, the experience is unpleasant and triggers a need to resolve the conflict internally or externally.
 
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