self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
15m ago
I'm sorry man. I genuinely am. Even during the experience (or very very shortly after the peak), I was grappling with multiple existential crises:
- Was the very vivid and literal visual metaphor real? Was it actually a "choice" to reject endless meaning and hedonium, or just my mind play-acting a decision I'd made well in advance while coming up with an entertaining visualization of it? I genuinely do not know. The opposite felt like a very real possibility. It terrified me.
- I understood the impermanence of qualia, the meaning of the self being a series of continuous snapshots. I vividly remember (and have live notes) of a version of me that was terrified of dying and being replaced by another me. He was practically screaming and begging to stay alive, or at least to be remembered. Then, a little later, a version of me that was more pragmatic but also meta to a degree that annoys even sober me: he had the self-awareness to find this all amusing while hoping he'd be gone soon. He got his wish.
- I understood why the brain's sober state is conserved the way it is. It's the only way to be functional, even if there's some wiggle room. Breaking something and being stuck like that? I'd call depression a broken brain too, but I'm not willing to go that far.
I don't know if you ever had a choice in the matter. I don't know if I did either. But I am so lucky to have made the choice of going the route I would have committed myself to going well in advance. Screwing with my brain's chemistry is pragmatically useful for therapeutic purposes and also... fun. But it's not a solution to metaphysics. If I claimed to have come up with one after the trip, my notes tell myself that I should consider the original me gone, maybe for good.
I hope you're doing okay. I wanted to be changed too, but I'm clearly the annoying kind of person who is just as analytical and self-scrutinizing when sober as they are zooted. I'm happy/sad about that. Uh, now that I think about it, I do understand the limits of language as a communication tool/expression of qualia better. That perhaps does constitute a change. Words genuinely cannot express the conflict within at the time. Good luck to you, if there is some residual damage, we will likely be able to cure you, speaking from a medical perspective. That is a promise I am mostly confident science can cash.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
27m ago
There but for the grace of God the Flying Spaghetti Monster go I. I've seen other people lose it with after using psychedelics, or outright go insane. And more who have become "soft" spiritual and woo-ish. I'm not saying I'd rather die than end up like that, but it's very, very low on the list.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8hr ago
It happens to rhyme with Salman Rushdie.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8hr ago
He fucking hopes so. But yes, it's over. Lasted way longer and took far longer to finish than he'd like.
Well, if one of Odin's ravens thinks so:
The long and short of it was that it went way harder and deeper than I accounted for. I genuinely felt the edges of my mind fraying. I was fighting ego death and struggling to retain the integrity of my consciousness. I might have described myself as "tripping balls" when I enrolled for a psilocybin trial, but it had nothing on what I experienced. Back then, and in this instance, my greatest fear was succumbing to woo or catching religion. I felt the pressure, that sense of cosmic significance. I genuinely told it to fuck itself. At that point, I was envisioning it as some kind of extradimensional tendril cracking open my skull and wrapping itself around my consciousness, while "I" was quite literally shearing it away it with a set of scissors.
Another very literal visual metaphor was trying to keep the "knot" of patterns that constituted myself from being unraveled under the tension.
Words can hardly describe it. I feel like the protagonist of Scott's short story, Samsara, except I actually faced the pressure of imminent enlightenment and chose to walk away. I don't need enlightenment, I need to be less depressed. Jury's out on that one.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9hr ago
Sigh. It's probably not worth talking about. Any insights gleaned are personal and the kind of stuff I could have told you a week in advance if I was drunk.
Accurate on both counts, though the latter could be one of many potential extraplanar entities. Almost certainly just the outcome of the brain being reminded why certain mushrooms are not meant for consumption (though this one wasn't from a mushroom).
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I wish the distrust of pagers had extended to the NHS. I fucking hate bleeps.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
It's the annoying kind of trait, like schizophrenia or height. A gazillion genes that add up to increased propensity but do not guarantee homosexuality even when nearly maximally loaded. Then there's the environmental contribution, and that includes stuff like in-utero exposure to hormones and a bunch of other stuff.
Too much for me to get into, and I was using ChatGPT to look things up to my own satisfaction anyway. I promise that if there was a single gene or even a handful of genes that could reliably be used to gauge gayness, we'd know. There are ML models that can identify gay men with startlingly high accuracy off facial physiognomy alone, but they're hard to get because of Ethical Reasons™.
If you want a rough idea of why it's such a PITA to pin these things down, then look up Scott's relatively recent post on schizophrenia and polygenic inheritance. Even if you kill literally all schizophrenic people the moment they manifest, you will barely make a dent in the incidence rate for the next generation.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
There is no single gay gene. It's highly polygenic with significant environmental contribution. I did a deep dive into the topic for.... reasons, and also was slightly surprised to find out that the children of gay men and straight women are not meaningfully more likely to be gay/lesbian/bi.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
A transhumanist Catholic?
...
I suppose that is not technically impossible, and I've heard of queerer ideologies, like Posadism. Welcome to the club, at least for the transhumanist bit, and if you want to call the Singleton At The End of Time God, feel free.
It's well established that people with BPD or elevated borderline features show much higher rates of reported childhood adversity, including childhood sexual abuse, and borderline features are also linked to higher risk of later victimization or revictimization, especially in dating and intimate relationships. They're both more likely to be abused, to abuse, and to be later victims of abuse.
It might be a slight stretch, but I strongly suspect something similar is at play with trans people.
To engage in calisthenics further: autism is a factor. Autistic people are 3x more likely to become trans. That's associated with general dysphoria and being uncomfortable in one's skin. The most vocal parts of the trans community is more than happy to attribute such factors to being an "egg", and encourage transition.
Being trans, or being gay, or autism or very many other human traits, is impossible to pin down to a single gene. They appear to be extremely polygenic and also strongly influenced by environment. There's no neat and tidy answer to give, almost certainly because it doesn't exist.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
You're far too kind. I'm an absolute poser when it comes to football, but I might well take you up on it!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
This is trivial to do, in all honesty, and I'd do it for free if someone asked me to. Unusually, I do not usually accept offers to donate to charity, but I suppose Lightcone could use $100. It would take me all of a minute.
Note that the most popular (and most powerful) AI image tools are invisibly or visibly watermarked. This is unlikely to be an issue, because I doubt the people demanding proof are technically sophisticated enough to check. But caveat emptor. DM me if you wish, I'll do it, and I'm awake for a few hours.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
I'm not surprised. Disliking the podcast but appreciating the community is... very common. Almost universal on the sub, in my experience.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
I lurk /r/Redscarepod for fun (and field anthropology), so that gives me an unfair advantage when it comes to feminine insight.
Hell, even I'm a bit miffed at "only" 77th percentile for the site, I want to believe I'm special :(
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
I want to say that's pretty much my intuition too.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
I encourage you to date her just so I'm around for the debrief. Tag me.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
Rip. I know you IRL so I find this surprising.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
92nd percentile for US. 96th for non-Western. 77th for the site. Raw score of 284.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3d ago
It's not really a new thing, IMO. Even back on the subreddit, you can see a lot of once very popular names and faces either vanish into dust or go out in flames. When I go back to the very earliest CWR threads - the ones that predate my entry altogether - I often found out that many of them were later casualties of suicide-by-mod.
Eh, I would have always said that Dase was at high risk of this happening. While he disagrees with my armchair psychoanalysis, I stand by it. He's always been crotchety, and he's struggled to keep himself in check.
Once upon a time, an informal warning got him to rein it in. Then it started taking formal warnings. Then short bans, then more short bans where we had to explicitly acknowledge that we treat valued contributors with more leniency. Some of the things he said would have gotten him banned for months if he had been a new poster, or even perms-banned.
He said that he didn't want special treatment. Fair enough, that's his prerogative, and we took it seriously. So 3 months it is, and I would say it's 50:50 if he ends up permabanned in a year, or if he even bothers to come back when the ban expires.
I would say the decline coincided with the beginning of the war in Ukraine, when he had to flee to Argentina (and perhaps Turkey along the way can't remember). That's an understandable stressor. I wouldn't blame the current war in particular, he was already this... bitter last year. Oh well, good luck to him nonetheless. I've done everything I can to help, and he doesn't see himself as being in need of help. That's the Russian way.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3d ago
I would like to, but I already felt uneasy about the potential dox, and Dase has specifically edited his post to ask me not to share further, albeit not because he seems concerned about doxxing. I'm sorry about that.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3d ago
P.S. (given the length of the ban, btw thanks for FINALLY dropping this blat and treating me like a normal user as I've been requesting, I feel the need to say this in an edit:) I would very much prefer it if @self_made_human did not disseminate my contacts on any external platforms, for many simple reasons, not least being fed up with condescension here, and also not having any valuable thoughts to share with mottizens. I'd rather you treated me as braindead
Noted. It was just one person over DMs, but my apologies nonetheless.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
4d ago
The primary saving grace about experiencing emotional shocks is that they seem to have a half-life. Not in a dismissive sense - the underlying facts don't become less real, and the things that warranted careful thought still warrant it - but the brain's alarm systems appear calibrated for novelty, and novelty is, almost definitionally, temporary. By yesterday I had gone most of a day without the intrusive guilt-spiraling I'd described before, which I'm counting as a positive update. I genuinely do not think it's taken me very long to come to terms with what by all rights is a rather earth-shattering revelation about my near and dear ones.
I want to be clear, again, that my distress was never about any moral objection. I have approximately no moral intuitions against homosexuality that survive five seconds of reflection. The worry was more diffuse than that - a kind of anticipatory anguish about social repercussions, about what I should have done differently, about whether my brother had been suffering in ways I'd failed to notice. The answer to the last question is probably yes, and there's not much to do with that except file it away. Eventually, my subconscious will tug at that drawer and will discover that we've lost the keys.
Then my brother came home and introduced a complication I hadn't fully anticipated: his boyfriend was upset. Not at me, exactly - at the disclosure itself, at having been, in some meaningful sense, outed without consent as a side effect of an unplanned coming-out. This seems to me like a legitimate grievance. These things happen, but the fact that something was inevitable doesn't mean the person affected has to be cheerful about it.
I offered to intervene, partly because I'm on reasonably good terms with the boyfriend, and partly because I suspected - maybe correctly, maybe not - that absorbing some of the relational friction myself would make it easier for my brother to have the subsequent conversation. That's the benefit of being a third party in someone else's relationship conflict: you have less skin in the game, which makes certain kinds of reassurance easier to deliver credibly.
I called him. He was eating, so he called me back. I tried to strike a tone that was somewhere between warm and matter-of-fact - acknowledging that his frustration made sense, explaining the psychological weight my brother had been carrying, reiterating that my knowledge of all this wasn't going anywhere (you lot don't count). I told him nothing had changed between us, that I didn't intend to handle him differently, that he'd been a good friend and a good boyfriend. He sounded somewhat annoyed, but I had the (possibly self-serving) impression that the directness was landing okay. People often respond better to being treated as if their distress is ordinary and manageable rather than as if it requires elaborate delicacy.
They're going to talk it out themselves, which is correct. My most substantive tactical suggestion was that my brother bring sweets and perhaps a flower. I'm moderately aware that this advice is imported wholesale from the tactics I've developed for apologizing to women, and may not transfer perfectly. I'm not sure how much of romantic repair-making is universal and how much is culturally specific to particular relationship configurations. I'll update based on evidence, maybe angry gay/bi men would, like me, prefer a beer.
(My brother is pretty good at calming things down when I've argued with my girlfriends, even if he takes their side at a distressingly high frequency. I lack the same experience when it comes to him, because as far as I was concerned, he'd spent his life in celibacy. Oh well, I'll learn. The skills transfer.)
I didn't expect the response to my previous post to be as generous as it was. The rationalist-adjacent internet, and the Motte in particular, has a well-earned reputation for a certain kind of adversarial argumentation, which I participate in as much as anyone. But people gave real, considered advice when it mattered, and I'm genuinely grateful. That's worth saying plainly. Thank you guys.
Uh.. I have multiple answers to depression. I know psilocybin worked the previous time. I could have gone for IV ketamine or ECT. I know for a fact that I do not need religion to be happy, and that becoming religious has a very real risk of making me unhappy as well as, in a very real sense, delusional and insane.
My ego exists for a reason. I am fond of being mostly myself. The parts of me I wish to keep are present when I'm both happy and when I'm sad, and that's a fact that's clearly documented in my notes. If the only way to live is to trick myself into religious belief? You better hope to ask when I've got a literal gun to my head. I am not read to compromise my epistemics for happiness for a very large value of the latter and a small amount of the former.
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