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Wellness Wednesday for October 5, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Two questions that I hope can inspire some wellness discussion.

  1. Have you ever had a "feeling for the divine" without being a believer? The sensation that reality is essentially numinous and you are missing out some fundamental experience and you cannot go on until you develop some kind of wisdom? I'm stuck in a place where I cannot reconciliate my feeling that there must be a higher purpose and my thinking that the law of Physics are all there is. The excess of modern life seem to keep on corroding my "soul" (for some vague definition of soul). Should I explore religion, philosophy, meditation or... something else? Readings or other media suggestions are welcome.

  2. My father, given the nature of his work, has been basically absent from my life. In the last few years I've made the conscious effort to get to know him better and I can bitterly say that he is not a person that I esteem particularly high: if I were not his son I would probably never want to talk to such a person. On the other hand I've always had an excellent relationship with my mother and she basically grew me all by herself without being a single mother... and that's the problem since I've never had a male role model: both my grandfathers died when I was five and I have no uncles, school teacher have a vanishingly small male representation. I feel I lack a "male archetype", a guide, a mentor, and I'm just going adrift without a map, without principles, not only that: I've never learned to interact with other males and I found friendship with women nice but unsatisfying on a visceral level, the only time where I approximated a male "friendship" was during Physics Labs in University and it was deeply refreshing. This ended up more of a rant that a wellness question that is basically the same as the first point: resources to bring new perspective on my problem are welcome.

Thanks for reading.

Fake edit: having reached the end of this post and read it back, it is kind of schizophrenic and relying on concepts I have never fully articulated before and maybe am not explaining very well. It is also directly opposed to rationalism, which might annoy or anger some people. For all that I apologise. I am happy to try to explain anything that I haven't explained properly though.


There is definitely more than the physical world, because humans have sentience. Call it the noosphere or the cognitive realm or whatever you like, we humans can create things that aren't real, but have an effect on the real world. Limiting yourself to physics is cutting yourself off from a large part of human existence, and hamstringing your intelligence.

The funny thing is though, that because we are sentient beings, because our cognitive faculties have such an out sized effect on our experience of reality, restricting yourself to what is physically possible works just fine. It works so well you won't even miss the stuff you don't consider real, outside of the yearning you currently feel for spiritual fulfilment. We replaced the magic of our ancestors with beautiful rational science, and thanks to science we know more about the world every day, so for some science can be spiritually fulfilling, and for others the gains in knowledge are enough to ease the pangs of spiritual hunger.

But if you feel like the physical realm isn't enough, and there should be more then good news! The cognitive realm is real - if not necessarily real in the same sense as the physical universe. My first introduction to it was in a newspaper article my grandfather had kept from the sixties, about a mother whose baby is trapped in a car accident, who rips the door off the car to save her baby. You have probably heard something like it or something similar like a story about a dumb but impossibly strong guy, too dumb to know he can't lift a slab of concrete by himself, and so he does just that, lifts it like it was nothing. Tales like this have been told forever. In their shock or ignorance the subjects don't know what they are physically capable of, and in so doing free themselves from the shackles of physics.

Now hold on you say, those stories are bullshit. No mother ripped a door off a car, any who have claimed to have never been able to replicate it, and even if she did the door was probably damaged in the accident and much looser than it should be and her body was being flooded with adrenaline - it's bullshit through and through. And yep, according to physical reality you are probably right. But I am happy knowing that mother saved her child by doing something she didn't think she was physically capable of, and wouldn't have even attempted ordinarily - and physics isn't everything.

Take the double slit experiment. You know the one, cut two slits in a piece of paper and shine a light through it - because light is both a particle and a wave, you get three slits of light on the other side - it's like magic! When you try to photograph this effect however, you get two slits of light out the other side. Attempting to measure it scientifically strips it of its magic, leaving you with a picture of mundane reality.

Hold the absolute fuck on you say now, that is definitely not correct - there is a perfectly rational and scientific explanation for that, and it's that blah blah quantum mechanics and electronic interference blah blah - no magic required. Except actually, it was magic. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, as Clarke said - and generally it is thought of as a comment on ignorance of science, but it works the other way too. Magic is any phenomenon which we can not explain with science. Before we learned enough about quantum mechanics to discern the mechanisms at play in the double slit experiment, they were indistinguishable from magic.

Our ability to read an explanation of it online now doesn't make it less magic for the guy doing the experiment in 1869. Did we discover quantum physics, and in doing so discover the scientific principles behind something we once called magic? Or did we think so long and hard about it that we manifested a scientific process behind something we once called magic? The answer depends on if you are a scientist or a mage.

If you are a scientist, you get to see the physical world as it really is, you will learn more every day about physical reality, and you get a community of like minded individuals who you can laugh at the ignorant mages with. But you haven't escaped magic.

Humans do not have free will, we simply have the illusion of it and we all employ it all day every day, because we simply aren't capable of doing otherwise. We can't do it, no matter how hard we try - even if we try, we have to think about doing nothing our body doesn't do of its own accord, which is breathing and various involuntary twitches. Ironically, if we stop thinking about it for a second we are liable to forget we are trying to do nothing, and do something. It doesn't matter if we don't actually have free will, it is necessary to behave as if we do have it anyway.

Every scientist performs their science through the magic of free will, which both does and doesn't exist. All magic is the same. It is powered by imagination, which shows us things that don't exist, which makes us feel emotions over things that never happened, and which gives us insights which have shaped reality since the beginning of civilisation. All you have to do is lean into it - and when you do, you will be able to do anything. And you will be able to do the most important thing you can do - take full responsibility for your own happiness, because it is entirely up to you.

Tldr: Living there, you'll be free - if you truly wish to be.

Actual edit: I know my position on science probably seems confused - whether I love it or hate it changing depending on the sentence. That's because this way of thinking is new to me, I've only been doing it for a couple of years. Prior to that I was a hardcore rationalist, who trusted the science. Then we had the replication crisis, and then covid, and I realised most scientists have no fucking idea what is going on, they are just writing down their thoughts in the dullest format possible.

But it was such a huge part of my identity for so long that I have trouble letting go, and if I am being honest I am terrified that if I do I will turn into one of those guys who distrusts and even hates science, and they have been fucking up my life since day one. But over the past few years I have also noticed that every time I slip a little further away from my scientific mindset, I can make myself a little happier. And I spent over a decade being miserable - suicidally miserable - so I won't go back to that. Basically I feel conflicted, but I am erring towards happiness.

Great write up. I’ve been coming to similar conclusions the last few years.

Any good reading suggestions on the subject?

Well I try to only read fiction (because I am not a child) so it's hard to recommend anything, since what you take from fiction depends on what you already know, and only one author really sticks out as foundational - Alan Moore. Especially Providence. If you balk at the idea of reading a comic book you are seriously missing out, (and I don't just mean on that story, some of the smartest authors alive work in the medium) but The Last Psychiatrist was definitely an influence, although he probably isn't new to you.

Ahh yeah familiar with TLP. Comic books are tough because I prefer to read on my small old kindle and they generally don’t translate over to that format.

I think you’re the one missing out skipping non fiction! Reading philosophy, history, anthropology etc can be very rewarding. Fiction is my favorite to read as well though.