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ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

so the counter-stories here are imperfection, non-dualism, all that. a lot could be said about those but it's not our intent to advocate for any specific path, and again we're not actually that good at doing so, anyway. we just want to show that alternative stories do exist, and offer it as an option that all y'all can explore, or can remember about.

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

you can't just play out a story you already know front-to-back and expect it to end somewhere else, somewhere different from where it has always ended in all the myriad versions of it you've seen around you in the world

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

the habits we repeat, the small choices we make over and over, really do end up defining us in the long run, and that's why narrative structure can be such a powerful thing. if you already know where the story ends, .... is it a place you want to be? if not, you need to tell yourself a different one!

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

everyone will have their own metaphor-of-self for what that actually means; we have ours, but it's kind of personal, and also those things tend to have a strong effect just by hearing them, so we're not going to share it here and now

but it's not a wall. it is very much not a wall.

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

the important thing is that by accepting the feelings and moving past them, rather than rejecting them, the structure-of-self that we're gradually building is one in which a single failure doesn't destroy us

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

we refuse to be controlled by that narrative. we've forgiven ourselves and moved on. we told ourselves that we understand that past choice. we don't agree with it, but we accept that we are mortal and imperfect, that these things are fundamental and that that's just how life works.

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

we have strict standards for ourselves, which we hold ourselves to.

with very few exceptions, we wear an N95 face mask everywhere we go - the exceptions are based on our best effort to quantify the risks, to ourselves and the people around us.

we will not back down from that, until and unless the balance of the evidence tells us it's no longer important

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

that is not easy work. in fact, it's constant work that we spend much of our life on, in one way or another.

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

we know ourselves well enough that we are in no danger of losing ourselves.

and that's really what makes it all work: we've taken the time to study ourselves. we've looked inward, we know what makes us happy and what doesn't and why. we know which paths we don't want to go down, because we've seen where they lead and we know we don't want to be there. we know which paths we do want to go down because we know what they mean to us.

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

we don't reject those feelings. we don't mentally yell at them, we don't tell them, get out, you have no place in us. we don't deny them, we don't say you were never part of us. they were part of us. they are still part of us.

we thank them for trying to help, and then we tell them that it's okay, they can rest now. their vigilance is no longer required. we're safe. we're past that point in our life, we're not in danger anymore.

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

we just need to recognize it when we see it, and know what to do about it. we need to have traced over the emotional paths of accepting our own imperfection, accepting that we are a perpetual work in progress, and then re-grounding ourselves in our choice about who we actually want to be, about what we actually want to do about this situation

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

we don't need to have no trace of purity thinking inside us. that would be, uh... doing the thing while we're trying to reject the thing, yeah?

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

we still fall into habits from the old way of thinking, now and then. we've uprooted most of the big ones, but that sort of thing gets into every aspect of a person's life, and there's always small tendrils we hadn't noticed, which we only discover when a specific context brings them up. we'll be dealing with this the rest of our body's life

and THAT'S OKAY

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

this was a very serious mistake our system made from a young age. in our defense, we picked it up from the world around us and the books we read; it's a very common strategy. we do believe it is a fundamentally mistaken strategy.

we've spent the past fifteen years of our body's life reversing course and working to be something else, and we think we've succeeded about that, about as well as such a profound change ever can succeed within a single lifetime.

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

and .... that's a problem. like. we don't think it's viable to structure your self as a castle. it is the fate of castles to fall under siege.

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

when you make a conscious choice to reject a thing, to feel feelings of disgust or hate or fear towards it

those feelings take on a structural role within you. each individual act is small, but if you have the same reaction every time it comes up, over time, that adds up to something

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

we're plural, we have some serious dissociative stuff going on. if you hear nothing else of what we're saying, please believe us that we KNOW about mental walls and how they work

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

we spoke of a mental "wall", up-thread. we're being literal about that, as literal as any description of internal mind-stuff can ever be. if you are living by the idea of purity, or by the related idea of temptation, you are going through a conscious act of pushing away the things you reject, over time, and with every small act you are putting another brick on that wall, building a partition between emotional contexts, within yourself.

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

there is a Buddhist concept of imperfection

nothing in this world is isolated from anything else. no person and no thing exists separately from the context that brought it into being, nor from the context that it is surrounded by in the present. we may move past our origins, if we choose to, we may find ways to live that involve no longer being controlled by them, but we have been changed nonetheless

and that ... isn't bad

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

we're, you know, Buddhists, we mention that by way of disclosing where we come from with all this. that shouldn't be a surprise to people who know us well, but we don't talk about it a lot in public because we're not very practiced at talking about it, other people explain it all much better than we can. it's important here, though, because Buddhism does have strong counters to the harmful parts of these ideas, and we're going to do our best to explain how to apply those counters

Boosted by pixxl:
GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social ("Kevin Beaumont") wrote:

First time I’ve ever seen this - Microsoft’s view count has gone down since it started, as it’s been AI AI AI. People are mocking it in the chat and then leaving.

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

"temptation" stories only end one way - giving in. it's implicit in the framing. with every small thought you have about temptation, over however many years, you're moving further along the narrative arc of that story that you decided to tell yourself

but there is another option, which is to find a story you like better, and tell yourself that, instead

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

you can find that same sort of resisting-but-not-really in the concept of "temptation", which we also find to be very destructive framing. if you tell yourself you are "tempted" by a thing, you are telling yourself to care about doing the thing, but not actually do it.

even a small amount of meditative practice would show you that your feelings towards the thing get stronger and stronger over time.

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
jplebreton ("JP") wrote:

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/ai/playground-experimental-gaming-platform they're gonna try to make the same bad arguments with this that they made for illustration, music, film, and creative writing and please take this veteran game developer's word that this is all a big load of shit. trash, but diametrically opposite the beautiful interesting trash that game creators, novice and experts alike, make when they think thoughts and pour their life experiences into something that communicates some piece of their humanity to the rest of us.

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

and, therefore, this idea adds, you might as well do all the horrible things

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

... and then, through circumstances beyond your control, that wall is breached

the idea tells you nothing has any point anymore, the thing you did is worthless, you yourself are now on the outside of the wall

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

the core of the idea is that if you have drawn a line for yourself about purity - "I won't use anything from an evil megacorp", for example - and you've spent time congratulating yourself on your absolute stance, on how perfect it is, on how big a wall you've built up between your heart and the outside world...

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

so, our apologies for bringing the religious dimension into this, and we promise we don't do so with an intent to reduce an entire family of belief systems to one topic, but

purity narratives have this problem which is common to a lot of the more dangerous Christian ideas, which is that they're very deeply embedded at the framing level. it's really easy to "reject" them while actually still living by them and spreading them, because the straightforward negation of it is just the same idea again.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
FabMusacchio ("Fabrizio Musacchio") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@h4ckernews/117400527816149038

NaviesStokes lost in translations: #Lean can verify a formal proof perfectly well, while the #AI may have changed the actual #mathematical argument during translation. The authors find exactly this in #OpenAI’s recent #NavierStokes work: Different bounds, different proof strategies, but still valid Lean code.

#mathematics

ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:

we mentioned this topic a few weeks ago as one where we have something important to say. we do think that's true. we're by no means the first to have said it. we also don't have it particularly composed or structured in our head, so this may be kind of rough. we don't see it said enough in English-speaking online communities, so we're going to try our best anyway.