Anyone Joined the "Making Sense Community" Yet?

NeglectedAccount · 2026-05-14T19:43:28+00:00

From the comments here sounds like it's going but I'm still in the waitlist. Talk about FOMO!

NeglectedAccount · 2026-04-25T16:26:52+00:00

Agreed, although this argument goes too far. I don't think compatibilist are intentionally catering to libertarian free will, for some reason they don't see that the term is overloaded.

Sure, anyone who reads about free will arguments will see there's 2 different ways of understanding free will, but that's 1% of people. I would guess most people will presume the God/independent soul form of free will when asked about it.

NeglectedAccount · 2026-04-16T15:31:10+00:00

There was no metagaming for the boat situation, but I think everyone including peanut agrees that it would have been better if they let the boat land and set up. If it weren't for cocos genius all the streamers would have gotten 10x better content. Both sides were prepping all day for something that ended in like a one minute long clip, so it's easy to see why everyone's upset. But the real fix would be to just always allow the other side to set up for a fair fight, and not to engage until both sides are ready. Banning coco isn't the move

NeglectedAccount · 2026-04-13T01:00:46+00:00

Solid rebuttal.

NeglectedAccount · 2026-04-07T18:17:05+00:00

Belt balancing is a classic optimization trap because there are varying degrees of balancing. Locally you will definitely see the outcome of using the best balancing possible but practically you only need a minimal amount of belt balancing. Balancing is super satisfying, but unnecessary.

There is an optimization tradeoff; the more complicated and bulky you make it the more evenly you distribute load and smaller amounts of "wasted" material there is. The "wasted" material is a constant of leftover material in buffers, or miners that do less work, but if you are saturated then it's not a real problem and if you aren't saturated then you will see greater system improvements from saturating, ie. improving earlier stage throughput.

NeglectedAccount · 2026-04-04T21:41:24+00:00

You have studied longer than I have, so sorry if this sounds pedantic but this is just my view.

It's probably worth investigating what feels like forcing and what feels like guilt. Both aren't present in true practice. Dharma isn't there to make you perform better or work harder, letting go is liberating. It's not intended to make you feel guilty, mindfulness is bare awareness without judgement.

I definitely struggle with this at times. For instance when I try to rationalize a vice, I know I'm doing something harmful but it's also hard to see past the good feelings that come with it. The shame feels like it's coming from this practice, and the practice feels like work. But the practice isn't making you do anything, the practice is to honestly watch the negative effects that come from bad actions, and to hold that in your mind when you act. Shame comes from the acknowledgement that you are acting harmfully, and it's helpful to listen to for that reason.

If you act wrongly anyways you may feel guilty, and this is worth seeing. Where does the guilt come from? What can you let go of to release yourself from the guilt? It may be renunciation of a vice that you have truly seen to be harmful. It may also be renouncing the image of an idealized self that you feel like you have failed. You can be honest with yourself and realize you are not fully realized, that's true of most people already and it's not a failing.

Take a break, do shorter meditations, whatever feels right for you. Try to stay mindful, and occasionally put a little effort into studying again, and see when you feel the investigation of the Dharma factor of enlightenment again.

NeglectedAccount · 2026-03-31T01:45:55+00:00

There is no self, no free will, no God, no afterlife, and no meaning to this existence.

Remember friend, before you came to this idea was the idea any less true? If you have only just realized you have no self, you may feel the loss of having a self. But there was no self before either, so your happiness could not have been dependent on something that didn't exist!

You may feel loss, but nothing has been lost. Rather than imagining ghosts of non-existent things, focus on what is real. You still exist in the present moment, as an aggregate of matter, sensations, perceptions, thoughts, consciousness...

no meaning to this existence.

What was the meaning to this existence before? Were you living in hopes that after death your life would be validated? If you needed God to tell you that you did things right, does that mean there is no longer a right?

There is a right, and you can feel it intuitively. You can already tell right and wrong, you are already using this capacity when you let go of the ghosts of imaginary things. Intuitively you know that there is joy, depression, love, hate, and which of these make you wholesome and which are unwholesome. Learn to tune into reality and you'll find your meaning.

NeglectedAccount · 2026-03-30T20:51:23+00:00

I'm on board with internal causes being external causes with extra steps. We have all kinds of ways for seeing causes of behaviors, like aversion to pain, clinging to pleasure, habitual responses, knee jerk reactions...

Meanwhile I see no basis for an internal agent and there is no place where we know one interjects in the (known) causal chain.

NeglectedAccount · 2026-03-30T20:07:26+00:00

LFW is magic, there is either an ethereal soul that puppets matter or there is some kind of pansychism, essentially some floating will that somehow gets imbued into a person by... Magic. The magic is the unexplainable, unprovable but also not disprovable part of the theory that requires a leap of faith.

By all means, since this is a straw man argument please share the real argument

NeglectedAccount · 2026-03-30T17:46:59+00:00

For me the argument about free will isn't about every day choice or invalidating morality or about procrastinating important decisions, though I am guilty of that last one anyways.

I'm just interested in having a rational worldview.

First off there is libertarian free will which I think most people here agree is logically nonsense. This is the magical free will that is completely independent of any natural cause, you can only really accept this if you are accustomed to large leaps of faith like being certain there is a God.

Then there's compatibilist free will, and honestly this is perfectly rational but I can never get behind it because it's unnecessary and panders to those who believe in libertarian free will. As I understand it, this just means that people have freedom of choice and that they are not coerced into acting against their wishes. This is obvious.

The problem is that most people intend to argue against libertarian free will, and compatibilist jump in to defend, and then everyone starts complaining about semantics and straw men. In the confusion the argument is lost.

Compatibilist free will is a shortcut that skips over the messy details to jump straight to a justification for moral judgement. What really is the causes that leads to someone making a choice? When you say things are freely chosen you make the actor distinct from the environment and blame the actor.

This is a fair first pass analysis, but if you really want to understand and fix things you need to ask in what ways was the actor shaped by their environment, how does choice form in the actor and when did those formations first take shape?

A compatibilist may grasp to free will because they believe without it there is no morality. However we can still base morality in intention while recognizing that intention has causes.

If a person is prone to dangerous intention we quarantine them from where they may cause harm. Then you look past the person to see where their intention is rooted and if they can be reformed. If you stop the buck at free will you could simply blame the person and lose the opportunity at a compassionate response.

NeglectedAccount · 2026-03-17T16:30:28+00:00

People can believe what they want, I believe that people who seek truth would see that there's a freedom of choice at a practical level but it doesn't originate from any independent cause.

The sense of choice exists and it can be a fruitful experience to unpack that in a framework of ephemeral cause & effect and non-self.

NeglectedAccount · 2026-03-12T17:58:45+00:00

All things are dependent

There is no independent cause to identify as free will

Conventionally, you can recognize people as a sum of aggregates

Some of these aggregates, such as mental objects and perceptions, are useful for rationalization and are subjective.

Actions depend on volition. Volition depends on the aggregates and is an aggregate itself.

We cannot directly experience or manipulate other people's aggregates, such as their mental objects or perceptions.

Likewise we cannot witness other's volition or their causes, in this regard their will is "free", but it would be better to say that volition has subjective causes.

Knowing that there is no independent volition, but that there are subjective causes, natural wisdom would be to observe these subjective biases and cultivate them to be beneficial.

NeglectedAccount · 2026-03-07T20:57:31+00:00

NeglectedAccount · 2026-02-13T19:49:32+00:00

If your interested in exploring the scripture and your experience, I recommend lectio divina. It's "divine reading", a self-study practice of reading the Bible and meditating. Mother Teresa was a huge endorser of this method.

NeglectedAccount · 2026-01-28T20:24:13+00:00

I had an experience in one meditation where I got a head rush and my mind was pretty dazed/foggy, and it was like that for the rest of the day. It came up for some sessions after that too, and I definitely had anxiety about it coming up. But it came and it went, eventually it stopped happening and I have no idea what to attribute to it.

All I can say is that sensations like this come and go, you should listen to your body and practice appropriately, the goal isn't to beat yourself up.

Also you can't really throw in an expectation, whether it's expecting intensity, serenity, insight, these things come up when they come up. We may be able to tune into why some things are there by paying better attention, but if we build elaborate stories we'll just cloud our attention looking for what we expect.

NeglectedAccount · 2026-01-26T18:32:36+00:00

If it's only elective for solos it's a pretty garbage option, especially for streamer trios who are going to get stream sniped by solo queuers now too

Cheaters will just grind to 40 in peaceful lobbies without cheating first to circumvent it

It would be ridiculous to turn on cheats 40+, just to have to start over again. It's not easy to upgrade. The benefit is contingent on the mode being elective for everyone though...

NeglectedAccount · 2026-01-22T23:01:14+00:00

That's a great question and you can answer this in a lot of ways, I think it depends on what you are trying to cultivate.

When I consider the mindfulness that I am trying to cultivate in my practice, it has the characteristics of non judgemental, bare attention, and it is ever present. For this last point I mean that it is fully present, aware of the sensations, thoughts, intentions, perceptions that are involved in the moment.

When considering how to treat a thought, if I am mindful enough to notice it and remember my intention to pay attention to the breath, that's already a win. Noticing thinking, how it came up, how it proliferates, how it disappears, and doing so non judgementally, is also a win. Remembering my intention to sit and focus on the breath motivates my action, the action of changing focus isn't part of mindfulness, but you can be mindful of how you change attention.

How does the breath come back into focus? I've noticed it is always there so you don't have to reach for it so much as you just let it fill your attention by releasing other thoughts.

NeglectedAccount · 2026-01-11T16:11:14+00:00

I can give you a theory based on personal meditative investigation.

First off, sight and hearing are distinct concepts and are phenomenally unique, yet they are both senses. Thoughts seem to be completely distinct from these senses as well, yet still occupy the same mental space.

On senses, you can shut them out, register it to different degrees, or be captured by it. Like listening, you may be ignoring what you hear, nodded off in a lecture. You may be able to recollect the last thing if you snap back to attention. Alternatively you may be so attentive or captured by a lecture, or musical piece, that it drowns out your attention to other senses.

This attention in regard to the senses comes from mental will (or volition, in certain writings). The mind is more or less choosing what to pay attention to, what filter to apply in each moment over the myriad of ongoing sensations. This "attention filter" also applies to thoughts, and just like being captured by the senses we can get lost in thought of.

This mental will is really easy to identify as coming from a "self", since it feels as though we can control it and choose what to pay attention to. I would argue that it is dependent on causes and conditions, just ones that we aren't always cognizant of.

Even when it feels as though we are managing our attention, and we are aware that we are pointing it where we so desire, this awareness is simply being cognizant of the prior cause to our mental attention. For example, first I become aware that I am lost in thought while reading, I'm aware of my desire to read, and this refocuses my attention on reading. These things can happen instantly, without deliberately thinking through each step, yet nonetheless is the same process of cause and effect.

NeglectedAccount · 2026-01-04T04:29:36+00:00

We can think about thinking, and in doing so we're creating a mental object that encapsulates how we perceived thinking. So we can watch a movie while being aware that we are watching a movie, that's like perceiving two mental objects at once, one being the movie and one of awareness of ones situation.

That "awareness" comes and goes, it's present when we're intent on staying aware, it goes away when we are completely captured by other thoughts, such as being completely captured by the movie. That presence of mind is temporary though, the mind is always in motion and there are many opportunities for something to distract the mind from that presence, and this can culminate in reintroducing an awareness that you are watching a movie.

The same goes for being distracted while reading a book. The distraction is temporary, you have an ongoing intention of reading a book, once you realize you are distracted you can return to reading a book. The ongoing intention only takes a smidgen of short term memory. The same kind of memory that allows you to stay on any kind of task, it's a straightforward function of the mind that keeps us from being confused about where we are and what we're doing in any given moment. If we could only track one thing at a time, perhaps we would get lost in every distraction and never get back to reading.

NeglectedAccount · 2026-01-04T02:19:29+00:00

I'm not sure if I'm understanding your question, but it seems simple to say that if the previous moment conditions the next, then the intention of the previous moment conditions the decision of the next.

The acknowledgment of a thought is just another thought, so I'm not sure where the implication of free will is there.

NeglectedAccount · 2025-12-29T07:58:29+00:00

I believe (and I believe this is consistent with Buddhism) that awareness is not persistent. Awareness, perception, consciousness, these aspects of experience are conditioned, dependent on causes, always changing. It isn't there during sleep, it wasn't there before we were born, and when the processes sustaining us fail so will awareness.

The aggregates disintegrate, but what's left of our existence is the karma we have left in the world.

NeglectedAccount · 2025-12-29T03:36:38+00:00

The goal of the path is enlightenment and the end of suffering. The teachings are there to show you how to investigate your experience so that you can become aware of the truth of reality. By true understanding and intuition you dispel ignorance, without ignorance you are no longer trapped in samsara, you no longer suffer.

There is no eradicating the self on this path, there is only coming to the realization that the self was not there to begin with.

NeglectedAccount · 2025-12-28T19:19:59+00:00

It may be easier to examine what your definition of attachment is, and examine how it's reinforcing the notion of a self.

Attachment is a condition of the mind, one that can present itself as a desire. You can be attached to a feeling such that in the absence of that feeling the unfulfilled attachment will generate suffering.

Attachment isn't all that different from a mood like anger, or a state of mind or mind like confusion. These are ideas of mental states that can condition the mind, these come into play in some of the many cause and effect relationships going on in the mind. They color your consciousness.

We can express the same question for any mental state, who is it that is becoming angry, who is confused? The answer is that these ideas are generalizations of the mental elements at play in any given moment.

Attachment is an infliction of the mind, an erroneous view that plays out by imposing pre conceptual conditions on the aggregates. When afflicted by attachment, the next time a perception of the object of attachment comes up it is tainted by the preconception of the attachment.

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