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Not sure if I'm becoming a narcissist, but I'm starting to believe I'm really smarter than almost everyone. I've scoured the web for good circles with clever people, scientific groups, political groups, and I'm always disappointed. There's plenty of people who know big words and fancy concepts, but if you listen to them talk, you'll realize they're not actually thinking on a high or deep level -- they just know a lot of stuff. Most intelligent people you know are actually just good at memorizing little facts, they struggle to understand bigger concepts. And when I share my ideas in these communities, people are usually supportive but they don't really get what I mean, even when I explain my ideas in a simple way. I'm only 25 but I feel I've outgrown all circles. There are no people I can look up to, because even my favorite people have huge flaws, they don't get things like I do. My entire life up to now is like a boiling pot of water with a lid concealing steam, and as soon as I take the lid off, I'll explode like a rocket and do unbelievable things. This isn't a manic high either, I feel this way all the time. Maybe I should deny this feeling. Well, for years I've done exactly that. "Just play video games, you're not special, you have no potential!" But that feeling just keeps returning. When I look at most people talk, I feel above them, I feel smarter, more capable, I think deeper. It sounds awful but that's exactly how it feels. There's only a handful of people above me, and most of them are dead -- but I'm preventing myself from believing that. It's a feeling in the pit of my stomach I keep denying, because maybe it's wrong. Maybe if I accepted it, I'd turn into a self-absorbed, deluded narcissist who might not even be talented. By seeing the world this way though, by believing I'm better than 99% of people, I could do incredible things. And I just have to take the leap of faith and do it. Probably no one gets what I'm talking about, but that's okay. I'm just a massive weirdo ya know?

Let me guess... you're a "big picture" kinda guy, you don't have time to work out the little details of anything. The big picture often hides complexity because we naturally gravitate towards simplifications and generalizations. Actual subject-matter mastery requires intimate familiarity with the little pictures. Otherwise you're basically no different from any stoner smoking weed and having deep thoughts. You probably do have potential. Maybe you're even special! But until you can actually do what they can do, you're not better than them.

Genius, to me, is a verb, the ability to connect the dots. You're not alone, Lain, we're alone. No matter how much I try to share, I find that people think of me as condescending, as if knowing I'm better makes them less. What did I sacrifice to get here? You? Remember that they have something that you never will. >“There is no loftier mission than to approach the Divinity nearer than other men, and to disseminate the divine rays among mankind.” Mind yourself, and help them to see. It might even kill you.

A couple points: Since you're talking about the internet, most people go on the internet to fuarrrk around, and understanding concepts takes some effort. Understanding is largely a function of what kind of stuff you currently have loaded into your head; it is much more difficult to engage meaningfully with concepts communicated by someone on a totally different wavelength, than to come up with insights yourself that have synergy with your current headspace. These things taken together mean that when you come at someone with some heavy thoughts, and they don't have much to add, it doesn't say that much about their capabilities. They are the ones with a handicap in this situation, and have little incentive to match you. The way you are measuring things probably is giving you an unrealistic picture of yourself. If you want to find out how much smarter some people are than you, put yourself in an intellectually competitive environment where you are weighed against them by objective measures. Being, say, the smartest kid in your school full of dumb rednecks is a low bar. So go take that leap of faith, but don't have an identity crisis when you get humbled.

Let me guess, you never could get good grades at school, you were never one of the smart kids, and you never could get access to their circle. Hell, it seems like you already forgot that there's a whole plethora of them and you're not part of their world. There are people busy thinking they're smart, and there are people busy doing actually smart things. And this IS manic high: >My entire life up to now is like a boiling pot of water with a lid concealing steam, and as soon as I take the lid off, I'll explode like a rocket and do unbelievable things unless you stop talking in future tense.

>>77715 If you’re really so intelligent go post some of your great research, theorems, and work on the arxiv instead of maladaptive daydreaming on lainchan

>>77721 Better yet, he could just illustrate for us some of the ways he is an intelligent, deep thinker, and how the normal people don't get him. Going to write my post strangely I feel as though I've seen this exact post before, had deja vu. Anyway I'd be interested to see because these types of people never really explain comprehensively.

If you feel smarter than most people to the point it's causing you frustration then why not act upon it. People may not like it but then again most people don't care about you they care about themselves or whatever. But it makes no sense acting in a way that you don't feel like you're being genuine. Maybe actually acting in accordance to your perceived intelligence will get you to a point where you hang with smarter people or maybe you hit a wall where you find out you're not as smart as you think. Either way my point, and my advice, is that you should act according to how you feel and not adopt some other people's expectations that you should think less of yourself and pretend, to yourself, that you are less just because people are monkeys. Because regardless of whether you really are that smart or not you should know that a great deal of people are objectively stupid. The intelligence of people decreases in proportion to their numbers. For example, the intelligence of a site like 4chan is somewhere around, say, a 40 IQ points in average, to adopt some metric, while in lainchan it might be closer to say 90 IQ points, though it is declining with the majority of web-based communities.

>>77721 Extremely intelligent people exist who aren't capable of rising out of the ghettos in which they were crackspawned, and they will never have a PhD. That doesn't necessarily make them less intelligent then people who get one. Srinivasa Ramanujan, for example, and no amount of college or practice will ever make anyone better then he was. He was just born more intelligent, a concept that will assault the ego of most who read it, and enliven people who aren't addicted to their own. >>77722 I feel like this OP would be a useful datamining copypasta for identifying Ted Bundy's to be honest. But what I think he and myriad others coming-of-age are referencing is the disparity between observation and definition; Language is underwhelming. Can a paper be understood just by reading it? Then everyone would be a genius. OP noticing this, and being lost in the subsequent worthless garbage nuances associated with discussing his understanding of topics he'll never be able to convey to other people, is leaving him feeling a little lost, but that's just part of being even just a little smart and growing older.

>>77719 Smart kids realize grades are carrots for donkeys. If you go into a hard field where applicants are low they wont filter you out anyway for not pleasing your religion teacher. And once you get your degree nobody will even look at your high school grades. In case you say i want ivy - 10k bribe gets you in by account of news reports about it. You could work a job as a poor kid and it would still take less time than memorizing useless info for perfect grades which isn't even guaranteed because your religion/language teacher might not like your interpretation and then its goodbye perfect score. Personally i learned webdev starting 14 and that got me an entry job at 18 thanks to a small portfolio i managed to build up. I also spend a lot of time socializing with high school friends, these people are still around and worth way more than some soykafty grades that got obsolete as i just got my bachelor. School is useful but trying to 100% all subjects is just a waste of time. --------------------------------- As for OP's topic - i think entertainment is just too strong. People aren't doing meaningful things because the behavioral sink entertainment is too enticing. Im at fault myself too. I have tons of half finished projects and spend embarrassing high amount of hours playing games. I have only one friend who never got into gaming and i did my best to convince him its best to keep it that way but infotainment got him wasting hours so just a different drug. The reason is simple too - All types of entertainment compete for attention. This means optimizing addiction and so they use addiction research in optimizing games&social media for higher retention. They even hire psychologists specialized in addiction research. This means the system builds its own demise because its increasingly harder to detach from entertainment to do meaningful things.

>>77715 people who whine about everyone else being dumb, whilst having never done anything of substance, are annoying. >>77716 is right. im getting a degree and am surrounded by a lot of “smart people”, so yea i know the exact type of person you’re referring to. top of the class in grades, but lacks critical thinking. but the reality is they’ve already singlehandedly done more in the past few years than you have done in your entire life. you may think you’re special because you maladaptively daydream, but ultimately you are no better than anyone else because you’re capable like everyone else is, but you’re looking for excuses to not take action. you’re lazy and don’t want to do hard work. that’s all it boils down to lainon, sorry to bring you back to reality. nobody’s holding a gun to your head forcing you to waste away your life playing vidya. you’re not really special yet. you want to act like being special is some innate thing, but being special is meaningless unless you do hard work. you’re not a vegetable or mentally handicapped, you have no good reason to mull around being a useless idiot, but you still insist you’re special and different, soykafting all over people who work harder than you ever will. this is pretty common though, welcome to the narcissistic main character delusion club. by all means prove me wrong, but until you do, you’re just going to be a loser.

>>77715 Have you confirmed this in any objective way? From your post, mostly you have only provided subjective feelings of superiority with regards to intelligence. Which is certainly possible, but let's consider 2 distinct possibilities: 1) you are indeed more intelligent than anyone else you've interacted with 2) you subjectively perceive yourself to be mote intelligent than anyone else, despite that not being objectively true Possibility 2 seems more likely to be true, unless you are only interacting with a subset of the population that has average to below average IQ. But more on that later. The logical thing to do is to verify or at least get some objective evidence that your intelligence is alligned with your perception. An IQ test seems like an obvious starting place. You mentioned scouring the web for groups of clever individuals, but online scientific/political groups are not necessarily comprised of highly intelligent members. The distribution might be similar to the general population, or even skewed left or right. This is why possibility 1 may hold, even if you are just moderately above avg intelligence. I have a couple of suggestions. Suppposing you find adequate evidence to suggest that you are indeed extremely intelligent (top .0001% percentile), you will need to adopt a new strategy, possibly seeking out places in the real world where very intelligent people congregate. You'd also need to accept that you are simply unlikely to encounter many or any people as intelligent as you are, and learn to cope with that. However, should you find yourself more in the realm of mere mortals, but still far above averge intelligence, you still would need to change strategies, but at least have the comfort of knowing there are plenty of people in the world who you'd feel challenge you intellectually. Final note is that intelligence and conversational ability, while linked somewhat, are not the same.

>>77721 arxiv requires affiliation with an institution to post. It's supposed to keep out cranks but it also keeps out anyone with an unusual background. But, you can still post on vixra. >>77724 >Srinivasa Ramanujan, for example, and no amount of college or practice will ever make anyone better then he was. If he hadn't been to college or practiced a lot, both of which he did, he would not have had the skills he is known for. He would have been like OP, dimly grasping deep theorems, but never being able to truly understand them.

>>77728 >If he hadn't been to college or practiced a lot, both of which he did, he would not have had the skills he is known for. Literally wrong. The dude self thaught with books and they could see he had good ideas but his symbols were selfmade, the only reason they insisted he should do academia is to have him learn to write in the prevalent academic style so they could understand him easier.

>>77729 >Literally wrong. Which part is wrong? He attended college and got A's in all his math classes, but failed his other ones. And as you admit, he taught himself, meaning he practiced quite a lot. >but his symbols were selfmade false. Here's a picture of the first letter he wrote to G.H. Hardy. Quite a lot of the myths surrounding Ramanujan are untrue. He was a truly exceptional person, true, but he didn't somehow understood all of math without ever studying it.

>>77731 there is an interview with hardy where he literally says what i wrote - we could hardly understand him so we had to give him an academic training and make him write in our style.

>>77732 You probably misinterpreted Hardy not understanding Ramanujan's work with Hardy being unable to read it. The letter Ramanujan sent used quite standard mathematical notation. Ramanujan was active in Indian mathematical communities and was already published by the time he contacted Hardy. You are correct that they wanted to train him in conventionial proof-writing, because he was very bad at that; but he certainly used standard symbols in his work.

>>77728 It's semantic, but I didn't suggest he never practiced or attended classes, I only intended to imply he was born superior in those fields, and no matter how much anyone else tries, it's exceptionally unlikely they'll ever be his match. My arguments are exclusive to denying societal standards for intellectual success, not renown, wealth, fame, or anything else but the quality of the mind he was born with. He said God gave him the answers, but I don't care about his religious drivel, even if it's true, my only point is that his brain was superior to most others and >no amount of college or practice will ever make anyone better then he was. >a concept that will assault the ego of most who read it

>>77733 Since he learned from a book he would obviously use book terminology but from what i remember he also came up with new ideas and invented his own terminology for those ideas which is what they couldn't read and what prompted them to go "you need formal training and write it the right way", writing proofs was also mentioned, supposedly he tended to write down ideas without doing formal proofs at all as a consequence of being self taught and never having a need to provide evidence to other people. This all tldr's to my initial take: he already had his ideas, the training was for communicating them to academia and make them useful in that way.

>>77722 I'm OP. I'll try to explain. Think of a smart person in your head. What do they do? They're probably a scientist, an engineer, a mathematician, a researcher, etc. Most of their work consists not in exploration, but in memorizing concepts that their predecessors discovered, and applying them. They love to get mired in details, to carve out little paths through immense disciplines and specialize in some obscure niche. I respect the work they do, but this is diametrically opposed to everything I enjoy about learning, and about thinking. >>77716 was kind of right, I'm a big-picture guy. Rather than focusing on obscure details and memorizing things like most STEM enthusiasts, I'm obsessed with making sense of our everyday lives, trying to understand it at some deeper level. But I am also extremely skeptical. I have read the philosophers, I had a Buddhism phase, I read Nietzsche, I came away unsatisfied. I would absolutely love if they were true, but there's just not enough rigor, it's too subjective. My idols are the French Moralists like Montaigne, Chamfort, Baltasar Gracian, and maybe Schopenhauer. But even their standards are too lax (Gracian is the best of them). When I research a topic, like human communities or creativity, my methods are different from everyone else, so I am frustrated that nobody can help. I feel I'm capable of incredible things, but I lack that diving-board environment that STEM brains get to enjoy, so I'm like a perpetually horny eunuch who is unable to find relief for that endless gnawing sensation inside his soul. This isn't an excuse for my lack of results. Until I actually discover something, all this is meaningless. In other words, I'm searching for universal laws that aren't quantifiable by numbers or formulas, but are demonstrable and rigorous. A bit like what Hume did. Even if no one else is doing it, I will still be searching like I am now. Even when it's really frustrating.

>>77738 [cont.] The vast majority of intelligent people on earth are concentrated in STEM, and only using STEM methods, while every facet of life that cannot be readily and smoothly quantified by numbers is ignored or not taken seriously. Nothing that cannot be worked out with a calculator is taken seriously, even though the laws of causality still apply and we can make mental models for it. There are no "non-scientific" researchers in the world in any meaningful sense. That's what I'm talking about here.

>>77738 The struggle you are currently having is something I've had around the same age: to answer the question to what is the meaning of life. Many before you have been on the same quest which has resulted in many different views on this (religions, philosophies, doctrines, disciplines etc.). You are unable to find that one which answers those questions for you, and this is probably because the answer to this question is very personal; for one it is to build an spaceship while for the other it is to bake food for the neighborhood. To each their own. Considering your situation: to me it seems you are overly focused on post-enlightenment views on the truth. Can the answer be found in STEM-subjects or Modern Philosophy? Perhaps not for you. Have you ever looked into (esoteric) Alchemy and/or Hermeticism ?

>>77715 if you were actually smart you'd be rich or famous already. are you?

>>77747 >rich >musk&bezos had both bankers finance them which allowed to financially ruin competition with deeper pockets, literally 0 relation to being smarter >fame >OL whores are famous while current lead ai researchers arent even in news your success metrics is the typical midwit take of how the world should work without acknowledging how it really does.

>>77715 >last two paragraphs You can do it! Focus on finding resources for ambitious goals. Learn exactly what you need to advance or disprove a plan. If your focus on people who remember things well is a cope, then focus on things very specifically- no big picture thinking, find a critical niche and think about it until you have a genius plan. You mention "leap of faith" and suchlike. I have taken a small leap of faith, and it was important to do but the leap isn't the end of the road. If you don't have a plan it is easy to get stuck in just another comfort zone or neurotic pointless grind. Most people are bad at big sudden changes, if you want to change how you live your life you need to start living in accordance with your vision a bit more every day. I am a naturally lazy person and I suspect you may be as well. It is very useful to visualize how much time you actually have. Look at calendars and try to perceive how many days are in a week, how many weeks in year, how many years before you've spent the best of your life on twitter. Construct matrices in your head if you are good at visualization. When you go to sleep, think about every aspect of your day in as much detail as you can remember. If you find it hard to fit in 8 hours of focused work in a day, then aim for a lower goal but hit it more days that regular people work. Cut out weekends or holidays. >Not sure if I'm becoming a narcissist, but I'm starting to believe I'm really smarter than almost everyone. I've scoured the web for good circles with clever people, scientific groups, political groups, and I'm always disappointed. There's plenty of people who know big words and fancy concepts, but if you listen to them talk, you'll realize they're not actually thinking on a high or deep level -- they just know a lot of stuff. Most intelligent people you know are actually just good at memorizing little facts, they struggle to understand bigger concepts. And when I share my ideas in these communities, people are usually supportive but they don't really get what I mean, even when I explain my ideas in a simple way. I have a bit of this, and a bit of its memoryholing counterpart. Does everyone else just have a brain like a sieve? Are they not good at reading? "Why don't people remember that thing that happened? Am I the only person who remembers this thing that is obviously connected to the current thing? Does the news cycle depend on a guy in the back with a jupyter notebook estimating the Ebbinghaus curves for the audience?" >>77738 >>77739 I relate to what you mean about researching things that can't be turned into numbers, but more on the focus of things that can be quantified but aren't because people are (reasonably) afraid of subjectivity or systemic errors in how they do it. I don't see the practical value of anything that could come out of this mode of thinking but good luck if you can make something of it. I would like specific examples so I can better relate your ambitions to my idle musings. Esotericism/occultism seems like a waste of time if you aren't starting a cult.

>>77715 Have you done anything of note that demonstrates your superior intellectual capacity? I would say I'm in the upper 20% and still I hacked, dealed drugs, invented, have high paying remote programming job, know a couple of languages and have masters in electrical engineering. That still doesn't demonstrate my intellectual capacity tho, and probably I never will be able to fully actualize it, but still I have something behind my name. Do you OP?

>>77738 can you please write down how your mind thinks, how you research and study? I want to emulate your thinking style

>>77746 >to answer the question to what is the meaning of life Nah, I gave up on that My goal is more like the following: Do you remember when you finally learned about sex? And all the millions of unexplained things in life clicked into place? In the natural sciences, gravity has a similar explanatory power. I am looking for "skeleton keys" of knowledge that have massive practical utility and explanatory power. Some things I wonder about are, "How does creativity truly work?", "What's the optimal environment for learning?", "Is the hedonic treadmill true?", "What's the optimal way to handle pain?" and so on. Basically, imagine a massive world in Minecraft with an enormous tunnel going straight down. Any time someone wants to explore the world, they are told, "Go to the big tunnel in the center of the map". This is amazing for most purposes -- by using the same tunnel, you can reach the bottom of the map much faster. However, most of the ores and diamonds this tunnel offers have been mined, and attempting to find new ores from here is inefficient. By nature, there's far less stuff to find here now than there used to be, and it will probably take longer to find them. I would rather dig a new tunnel somewhere else on the map. The error people make is in thinking, "If it's not covered by STEM, it cannot be predictive or accurate." STEM does not have a monopoly on truth, it relies on simple induction and syllogisms like all knowledge. You can make abstract mental models for anything, and morph them until they're as reliable as our STEM models. Do you know that all our Scientific and Mathematic and Logical models began with Aristotle, who was extremely wrong about most everything? He believed women and men had a different number of teeth, and this wasn't determined false until centuries later. We think STEM is some incorrigible body of hard facts when it's really just a long chain of models polished by trial and error. Steal the scientific method, drop the focus on stats and papers. Make iron-clad axioms and deduce everything from above. Nothing stops us from treating every subject like a science and deepening our understand of reality, except ideology for some people. I want to make better models than we have now, that aren't tethered to the current body of science like a battered wife, but are empirically consistent and verifiable. I think it's possible.

>>77715 Just manifest the type of people you want. After driving myself to despair I'm just going to manifest being alone (again). If you truly desired and accepted it, it would come about.

It's weird. Silence is the usual response. When I express the better part of myself to the world, I'm talking to a wall no matter which community I bring it to. When I do get a response, they rarely get my point & usually miss the big picture. This is surprising, because I write in a pretty clear style (IMO). It honestly reminds me of Hume. His treatise on human nature was so poorly received, that he judged his writing must be horrible, and rescinded that work in favor of the enquiry into human understanding. But this didn't help much. The general public was incapable of understanding what Hume was actually saying, so the popular verdict became "Hume is a malicious actor trying to undermine the foundations of knowledge". If it weren't for Kant restoring his name, that would be his permanent reputation. Hume's thinking style was just too different for most people to understand. Even modern scholars are still uncomfortable with him. Usually when people drop fancy names like Hume and Gracian, they're putting on airs. But honestly, they've helped me the most in making sense of life. Around anybody IRL, I feel like a stranger. Our priorities, beliefs, interests, etc. are all too different. Only with old books do I feel kind of understood. But this is getting too long. Oh well

>>77768 The skeleton keys you are looking for already exist to a large extend. They are just hidden from general knowledge and are in the hands of the few wielders of supreme power and knowledge. Still your pursuit is a noble one and I encourage you to go down this path: we are shifting into a new world, which will open up new ways of understanding. A word of caution: expect to find a lot of resistance down this road, since such a thing always happens when you are to shake the foundations of society; many people have got lots of invested in this and thus are afraid to lose all that they've invested.

>>77715 Maybe you have been looking at the same material (books? articles?) for too long? Or maybe you have been interested in the same thing(s)/topic(s) for too long? The easiest way to have kind of reality check is to find a subject that you don't know much about or a subject that you are bad at. For example, I don't know much about chemistry and I wanted to start studying it for that reason only. The really smart people can learn anything new really fast and really deeply That what makes one smart, in my opinion (but actually smart persons need to also to be able to apply the knowledge to create something new or come up with new knowledge that's derived from the stuff he/she learned). btw, I'm not claiming to be exceptionally smart (I'm average).

could you share what you meant by "good circles, scientific and political groups"?

>>77919 Sure. A few years after discovering 4chan, I found a community called the Rationalists. They're centered on sites like LessWrong and Substack, they work in big tech/medicine/startups, they claim to have an average IQ of 120-130+, and are probably one of the smartest circles on the public web. However, even these guys feel mostly stupid to me. I can run circles around them easily. I only feel matched when I read old books. Maybe this is a good outcome for some people. Personally, "being smart" is useless by itself. You don't want to be the smartest person in the room, because that means you're alone in trying to solve whatever problems you care about. But, oh well. Before long I'll be self-sufficient; I'll give up trying to find whoever I'm looking for. All this searching has been a waste of time.

>>77921 >feel matched (((by someone that is alive))) oh I know the crave, let me help you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54l8_ewcOlY I'm with you, rolling eyes at those "well why aren't you rich then huh?" people. They are only technically right and that's the worst kind of right. >give up on searching That means you'll end up alone. Keep searching socials, I beg you.

>>77768 This is literally just an exstential crisis... If you were to refine purpose to a singular word, what would it be? (your answer, not someone elses) Many of your searches are just surface level or objective and focused issues that can be nuanced. There is no one way to skin a cat, and the concept of "the void" should not be unfamiliar to you. Buddhism (which you claim to have studied) focuses on the "normal mind," which is an abstract concept of both taking everything and nothing at face value while simply acting according to your way. The Tao te ching also has a great deal to say about it. The concept of a universal understanding is not so much a singular outcome or solution, but an embracing of all things. You only have a vary narrow view of the world, and your pursuit of knowledge reflects that. The optimal way of pain ellimination is easy, no self means no suffering, since you need to have a self to suffer. This could be interpreted in loosing yourself in meditation, drugs, or suicide, but which is correct? You seem to want to use western research methods as a crutch for finding meaning. The only way to win the game is not to play. By that I mean that the STEM meme just relies on fragmented observation and causal assignment which never captures the complete picture. The complete picture is too esoteric to comprehend. Like >>77807 points out, if you try to disrupt the foundation of society (a hyperfocus on flawed or selectvely presented empirical evidence and hypercapitalist ideals) you are bound to become an outcast. Best of luck to you tho! >>77923 The concept that captalist leaders are "smart" is actually a fallacy. Just because elon musk is enigmatic and charismatic does not make him any more special than you or I. In fact, he is actually one of the worst examples of being "smart" . The truly intelligent do not bother with trivial things, and rarely end up being seen in a positive light. Collecting money is not difficult, but you just need to reframe the mindset and morals that you have. People often equate money with freedom, from capitalists to communists (which is just an offshoot of agregated capitalism). Where have all the humanists gone? Where have all the absurdists gone? Where have all the idealists gone?

>>77956 Meaning is a red herring. Life quality = Sum of pleasures - Sum of pains This formula is the only thing I care about. I want to maximize the pleasures and minimize the pains using any means possible. You may believe that "meaning" is too complex to be quantified in this way, but brain scans (fMRI) have shown that the brain produces all its various feel-good sensations in the same areas. "Meaning" can be triggered through drugs, through art, through many ways. Buddhism (meditation) is very effective at one thing, which is lowering your subjective experience of pain, both physically and psychologically. Buddhism cannot add much pleasure to your life though, it can only strip away the excess baggage that comes with handling your mental state poorly. Positive feelings in Buddhism are uncommon beyond a general level of peace and contentment. When it comes to permanently increasing our happiness, what can we do? Psychologists have observed a 'Hedonic treadmill' effect where most positive (or negative) changes in life are quickly adjusted to, so that the mind holds a kind of homeostasis, and no one stays truly happy or miserable. This seems to be accurate, but I'll add that each person's baseline is different, and some live with a very low baseline such that they're chronically unhappy or bored. This baseline is a riddle to me, and I want to solve it.

>>77960 >fMRI shows that but we need more than measurement of pleasure for your equation, we need also an appropriately weighted pain metric

>>77960 It would be interesting to wirehead a human (with CONSENT) and try to keep them happily wireheaded, with no acclimation to happiness. Maybe some sort of exponential back-off could let different pleasure centers of the brain recover their novelty from inactivity.

>>77987 Yeah this is a good thought experiment. People always say, "But you'll get bored!" However, when you think about it, we're talking about all the hypothetical brain signals you could have. Even those signals which produce a sense of "Difficult but meaningful struggle" could theoretically be added to the equation. Maybe you could be deluded into believing you're undergoing a powerful battle, when in reality your brain is hooked up to a simulation where your success is guaranteed. Would such a life be meaningful? I don't know. Personally I would trade my current life for that in a heartbeat (if it worked), but there seems to be many people who believe their own struggle has meaning, and they wouldn't hook themselves up to the pleasure machine. Which is naive IMO. They probably have easy lives. People with bad lives become addicts or NEETs.

>>77738 Have you read Universe, by Scudder Klyce? https://archive.org/details/cu31924029066343/ He certainly took a good run at what you describe.

>I've scoured the web for good circles with clever people, scientific groups, political groups, and I'm always disappointed. There's your problem. The internet is largely a rejects club. That's not to say there aren't intelligent people in niches and hanging around, but there is a massive over-representation of people with non-trivial, relevant mental disorders, combined with material factors of most forums which encourage 'hot takes', moral outrage and trolling (see every for-profit social media platform's methods of retaining interest, post/comment voting systems rewarding the lowest common denominator, bump systems on forums including imageboards) Most of the web just isn't designed to reward effort or intelligence.

>>77960 >I just want unlimited dopamine release What is this hyperfagotree? >When it comes to permanently increasing our happiness, what can we do? Be thankful for things in your life, and don't do soykaf that you find bad or questionable. Once again these are highly subjective, and deal with what you find meaningful. Life quality is not pleasure - pain, because the magnitude of pleasures and pains are different. How would you explain cold to a man who is warm? There are a number of issues immediately present with this equation. If your measure of quality is limited to pursuit of a net pleasure, then the simple solution is just to ignore or drown out pain. As any early 20 something party goer who does /drg/ and booze, you will quickly find that this is a hollow and meaningless lifestyle. The same goes for all the money in the world. You can buy food and toys and fake friends, but in the end they are just simulations or simulacra for the meaning you seek. Coohmers and cam girls also find that all the sexual stimuli in the world won't make them happy. You can also synthetically control the bodies dopamine, so why can't the world be happy and free from pain? People without meaning or purpose quickly turn to apathy and depression because they turn to fatalism or survivalism. How would you define pleasure? hint: positive stimuli is not a clear definition, as "positive and negative" are relative terms and derive meaning only from a persons values.

>>78126 >Life quality is not pleasure - pain you say this and then you go on to give examples that more or less can be characterized up as 'common hedonism is inefficient at maximizing this system'. Really what you are getting at is that unlimited dopamine release is probably actually not long term extremely pleasurable, and not at all that life quality != pleasure - pain.

>>78128 There's no such thing as unlimited dopamine release either. Like serotonin, our brain has limited amounts it can produce or release, so any artificial boost is usually followed by a crash. Imagine if you could live permanently buzzed off 2-3 cans of beer with no comedown and no liver damage? People would love that. That's what a hypothetical unlimited dopamine release would look like.

>>78148 Heroin is synthetic dopamine my guy >When it comes to addiction, opioids are an off-switch for an off-switch. Opioids hold back GABAergic neurons, which in turn keep dopamine from flooding a brain’s pleasure circuits. >Once opioids shut off GABAergic neurons, the pleasure circuits fill with another neurotransmitter called dopamine. At one stop on this pleasure highway — the nucleus accumbens — dopamine triggers a surge of happiness. When the dopamine rolls into amygdala, the brain’s fear center, it relieves anxiety and stress. Both of these events reinforce the idea that opioids are rewarding. Present Day, Present Time! AHAHAHAHAHA!

>>78151 Heroin doesn't disprove my point. You can go on a crazy, nonstop heroin binge until you die and it will feel 100% amazing, your death could even be painless. But this is not unlimited. I am talking about something you could do every day to significantly improve your baseline happiness until you reach old age. Recreational drugs are not a solution here. The closest things we have to what I mean are: (1) Caffeine, (2) Depression meds, (3) Nootropics, (4) Kratom/Kola nut, (5) Meditation, (6) Microdosing psychedelics Most of these don't work that well.

>>78126 After years (decades?) of drifting in and out depression and apathy, and into extreme passion, I'm convinced the "ideal" way to live is to experience significant, but tolerable struggle in the pursuit of something that gives you a periodic feeling of release and achievement. I still do not know how to maintain this kind of cycle without falling back into depression, but that fall is always triggered by a short break due to life getting in the way, or perhaps just not having the energy for a couple days. Then you just don't do that thing for several months and a rolling stone doesn't gather moss. Perhaps that fall is inevitable and due to a poor balance of challenge to reward, but those periods of apathy in which you do nothing are addictive. Perhaps it's even part of a sort of "macro-cycle": doing something stimulating and challenging gives you stress, then release, but that period itself is more stressful than the apathetic months. It might be impossible to figure this out in full.

>>78155 It's been pointed out before: you are experiencing existential angst. You seem to be in denial about this but it's really no thing to be ashamed of: it's what many people in their 20's deal with in this society: they've walked down the path that was plotted out (elementary school --> high school --> higher education --> you are here) for them and now they're at the start of walking their own path. Your mindset, as many in this day and age, is hyperfocused on achieving happiness. That's just a lifetime of marketing and feel-good entertainment that you've internalized. How does achieving happiness is to be the goal of life? What does it say about you that your goal in life is to achieve happiness? This says something about your current mindstate. Another thing worth noticing, is that you seem to seek the means to raise the baseline happiness outside of yourself. You post a list of drugs which will raise the baseline and you also rightly point out that these are not the ways to achieve happiness. What they do is that they manipulate parts of your body into fooling yourself that you are happy. Basically, that says that your body is able to have all these 'upper'-effects without the use of these medicines, and most of them are on mastering your own mind and body. There's many other ways of achieving that, of which some have already been shown to you.

>>77715 You have to turn your "concept ideas" into product or maybe "scientific paper" if you really do have profound ideas but since you mentioned "political groups" I just chuckle a little bit. You're probably spending too much time on weird internet places. If you really wanted or delved in the "deep meaning" you should have delved into the mystic. I'm already far too gone on this stuff, the bigger picture is the moksha and no one will understand me unless they are capable of accurate remote viewing, accurate divination, synchronicity, and astral projection (of which I'm really amateurish about). I've realized all these products of "ideas or science" are futile. Most of my novel ideas and creations came from dreams, during certain sub/unconscious brain state. The best way to maneuver reality and future is through Foresight, Insight, Fortune, and Control (and understanding that mind is a control center and other vague methods to control others or influence reality to the desired outcome). I've spread my method on lucid/astral projection several times yet I'm still a novice. Fortune includes your Genius or upbringin. A genius aka a demon https://www.etymonline.com/word/genius , is a possession (once burned/hunted/persecuted..), and possessions are ... your talents and what it produces (more possessions) which came from your previous experience. I find it hard that people don't remember their past life (is it that much trauma they got after death? can't blame them since past memories can impede baby's mental growth), we all have innate talent/past since all of us had been recycled at least once, everyone can have Deja Vus, everyone can remote view given enough practice (biggest RV organization confirms it is for everyone, not exclusive to special ones) but all of these people are quick to chant "Astrology is bullshit" although it is but an indicator of time and sky formation that correlates to certain predictable behavior (and thus the "signs" have been personified or characterized) and so people made Astrolabe as a useful ancient computer. The true answer is to seek, and how do you keep seeking? To live. Life is the answer to its question. But do you remember what it was before? (Past memories) What is your guide? (Synchronicity) I don't have past memories but I only have deep passion in something which is mostly related to some form of cultivation my old soul may have wanted to fulfill. Let Lain be my guide. Synchronicity, be with me.

>>77921 quite frankly i travel the world, and very recently traveling in Istanbul after ams i seem to have stumbled upon exactly the community you're talking about here - ppl from Silicon Valley, saying they're into Rationalism (which I thought was initially buzz) having v niche discord servers on the periphery of philosophy, AI and quantum intelligence. Very interestingly, i think we are talking about the exact same thing.

these people seem decent, but less smart to me than people on this hub. anyone who talks about their IQ is generally not v intelligent ; the thing i appreciated w the ones i met is that they were Doing something, as opposed to just talking about things - so not theoretical intelligence has anyone on here (ex: >Jean Dupont) by any chance infiltrated into the internal spaces of sites like Berkeley, UCLA, etc? if you want top go to the Highlands Forum, but the technical sophistication on the protection of *these* sites might not be as hard. is it worth it? could it be worth it? should we strive to end up there?

>>78412 >Big IQ here and BIGGER Benis I can't really say that I've done anything notable. I often times infiltrate universities and start talking to people who look or seem interesting. After discussing philosophy with some young engineering students, I think they became terrified of their own creations tho. Perhaps it is better to just leave people alone. I've gained essentially nothing but a collection of fledgling ideas and dreams that have caused me great concern for the future of the human race. I have also introduced people I have met to one another in hopes that they can solve grand existential problems, so it will be interesting if they someday create something beautiful. I'm just some idiot who despite having attended university for almost 2 decades has nothing to show for it. I do like attending technical events and meeting new people. What else should I have spent my money on, a GF? Lmao

Alright, OP here. I discovered something. On occasion, (especially when I'm under the influence) I gain access to a weird, unique style of thinking. It honestly feels like a halfway point between schizophrenia and sanity. Basically, words just start flowing out of my head like a river, and I feel like a master of the English language. I can direct this flow however I want, and can make sentences sound exactly as I want. If I come to a gap, the perfect word rises up from memory unconsciously. However, I'm still a novice to writing, so I lack the other skills needed like scenery description, character writing, plot design, etc. I especially suck at describing places, since I'm bad at visualizing stuff with the mind's eye. The downside is that my ability to do this is random and it doesn't last long, like 30 minutes at most. And it can happen whenever. When I am in these moods, my potential feels unlimited, equivalent to the best of our English writers. That if I fully hone this ability, a writing on par with Hemingway or Melville is not out of the question. In fact, I believe this ability must be what James Joyce used in writing Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. He began his career writing normally (but very well!), and slowly, gently learned to incorporate this second mode of thought as stream-of-consciousness. Why gently? Well, I'll give you a quote: >In later years, Joyce lived in Paris but frequently travelled to Switzerland for eye surgery or for treatment for Lucia [his daughter], who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Lucia was analysed by Carl Jung, who had previously written that Ulysses was similar to schizophrenic writing. Jung suggested that she and her father were two people going into a river, except that Joyce was diving and Lucia was falling. Jung is 100% right. When I'm in those moods, it feels like wading into an ocean of madness, and if I act dangerously and fall in, I'd have a psychotic break and go mad. But if I am patient, if I learn to refine this ability, I could produce genius. I'll give it my best shot, but only time will tell.

>>78563 Research unsymbolized thinking on youtube / elicit.org

>>78563 see Dostoevsky's descriptions of Geschwind syndrome in genius enlightment from the face of the main character in The Idiot