Tag: steemit

A Crowdsourced Book: Andrarchy – Episode 150

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The Story: Andrew Levine explains his collaborative book project

According to modern scientific understanding, the universe came into existence billions of years ago, with matter forming and slowly moving outwards from its centre. Matter stabilised, causing stars, then planets, giving birth to amino acids, simple life forms, and eventually, human consciousness. If we trace through this story, see where things came from and we’re they’re going, would we be able to predict what comes next – what comes after human consciousness?

In this episode, Kurt continues his conversation with Andrew Levine (a.k.a. Andrarchy) about his his plan to write a book collaboratively using social media, using the mental resources of the world to support or counter his arguments, about how the universe is a process of evolving information, and where that evolution might possibly be heading. We also talk about how many people have an anthropocentric view of artificial intelligence, and the value of ideas which seem to be crazy.

Join us on another big-banging, model-developing, consciousness-expanding episode of… The Paradise Paradox!

The Eps:

Everything is information: Andrarchy – Episode 145

Mental illness outsiders – The Andrarchy Show Episode 5

Talking to horses, ghosts and demons – The Andrarchy Show Episode 4

A psychotic break or shamanic awakening – The Andrarchy Show Episode 2

Mental Illness and shamanic experiences – The Andrarchy Show Episode 1

The Links:

Andrarchy on Steemit

The morality of artificial intelligence by Luke Stokes

The Cash:

If you enjoy our posts, please have a look at The Paradise Paradox’s page on Steemit where you can join, earn money, and upvote our posts to help support the show! You can also find a lot of additional content which is not posted on this site, with Kurt’s posts on Steemit and Aaron’s posts on Steemit.

We really appreciate all of your contributions! Every cent and satoshi we receive lets us know that we’re doing something worthwhile, that you are entertained by our program, and that you’re starting to question what you know more and more. Please be generous. Donate to The Paradise Paradox. Or buy some stuff on Amazon using this link. Or buy some of our great T-shirts here.

The Episode:

To download the audio, right click and press “save as”.

Remember to subscribe on iTunes or subscribe on Pocket Casts.

If you enjoyed the episode, don’t keep it a secret! Feel free to share it on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Reddit, or your office bathroom wall.

A Psychotic Break or Shamanic Awakening?: The Andrarchy Show Episode 2

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The Story: Is it mental illness or a spiritual experience?

If we take the psychiatric industry’s model of mental illness, we might be inclined to believe that these experiences are purely negative. But if we go too far the other way, speaking of neurodiversity, spiritual awakenings or shamanic experiences, we might be tempted into thinking that these experiences are wholly positive. It’s true that these experiences may involve a lot of suffering for the people whom they affect directly, and the people around them – however, it’s also true that people can learn a lot from these experiences, about themselves and the nature of the world they live in.

This is part 2 of Andrew “andrarchy” Levine’s interview with Kurt about having a psychotic break, or spiritual awakening. We discuss the terms used to describe these experiences, the change from linear to conceptual thinking that went on in Kurt’s brain, and possible explanations of what caused this spontaneous change from psychiatric and yogic perspectives.

The Eps:

Mental illness and hamanic experiences: The Andrarchy Show episode 1

The Links:

Andrarchy on Steemit

The Cash:

If you enjoy our posts, please have a look at The Paradise Paradox’s page on Steemit where you can join, earn money, and upvote our posts to help support the show! You can also find a lot of additional content which is not posted on this site, with Kurt’s posts on Steemit and Aaron’s posts on Steemit.

We really appreciate all of your contributions! Every cent and satoshi we receive lets us know that we’re doing something worthwhile, that you are entertained by our program, and that you’re starting to question what you know more and more. Please be generous. Donate to The Paradise Paradox. Or buy some stuff on Amazon using this link. Or buy some of our great T-shirts here.

The Episode:

To download the audio, right click and press “save as”.

Remember to subscribe on iTunes or subscribe on Pocket Casts.

If you enjoyed the episode, don’t keep it a secret! Feel free to share it on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Reddit, or your office bathroom wall.

Mental Illness & Shamanic Experiences: The Andrarchy Show Episode 1

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The Story – How to deal with a psychotic break

Psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis as schools of thought are less than 150 years old, and we shouldn’t be surprised if such young sciences have gaps of knowledge, questions that are still left open, or even questions that are outright ignored. It’s possible, even likely, that the modern psychiatric model of mental illness is incomplete, and could learn things from other schools of thought.

Many people have the conception that being diagnosed with a mental illness means that you have a chemical imbalance. However, such “illnesses” are normally diagnosed by looking at behaviour, rather than blood tests or other chemical tests to determine amounts of chemicals in one’s brain. So, at least in the majority of cases, the “chemical imbalance” idea is just an assumption.

In contrast, there are shamanistic traditions which stretch back hundreds or even thousands of years. Shamans have been helping people through the strange times in their lives even before recorded history. Is it possible that psychiatry and psychology still have a lot to learn from shamanistic methods?

This is a clip from an interview that Andrarchy (Andrew Levine) did with Kurt, and more clips will be coming over the next couple of weeks.

The Episode

To download this episode in audio, right click here and press ‘Save as’.

The links

“Mental Illness” – how and what to learn from your mind breaking

Andrarchy’s post on Steemit introducing his show

What a shaman sees in a mental hospital

A traditional approach to mental illness – Phil Borges TED talk

Healing with communication, conversation and love by Sterlin Luxan

What is a shaman by Terence McKenna

A game you have to invent, to win – a clip from Episode 121

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For those of you who are too busy to watch an hour long interview, we decided to take out some of the best bits for you to enjoy.

In this clip, Andrew Levine (a.k.a. @andrarchy) describes some important concepts relating to his idea of a massively multiplayer OFFline game. It’s a kind of roleplaying game, with a limited set of rules, which the participants may change as they go along. The players decide what the prize is, and what one must do to achieve it. Andrew also explains how roleplaying games like this enable us to indulge in impulses, such as dishonest, which we couldn’t necessarily get away with in our regular lives, and finally he mentions how cryptocurrency and Steemit make these kinds of ambitious projects possible.

 

Watch the full episode here.

Trackback: We Love Your Comments – Episode 120

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Trackback: We Love Your Comments – Episode 120

As we went through our posts and videos from the last month, we read many interesting comments and questions, so we wanted to give these valuable commentaries a platform. This is an ongoing conversation between us and you, so we can learn and grow together.

These highlights from previous episodes include; whether it’s good or bad to bring a child into the world today, what drugs or shamanic medicines peyote is possibly similar to – if any, Colombia being about much more than beautiful women and drugs, reading or not reading the Communist Manifesto, and the debate on whether Steemit is a valuable social media platform, or just a carefully obfuscated Ponzi scheme.

To comment – is to be involved, we are The Paradise Paradox!

The Eps:

Closet Communist
Peyote Trip Overview: San Luis Potosí
Peyote Desert Adventure Check-In
Ayahuasca Diaries 1
 

The Links:

Steemit is not about luck principles of successful steemians
Steemit’s new economic paradigm: Why Steemit might just work
The great Steemit debate: Tone Vays vs Blankmiles84
The Steemit ponzi scheme – Discussion some common questions
 

The Cash:

If you enjoy our posts, please have a look at The Paradise Paradox’s page on Steemit where you can join, earn money, and upvote our posts to help support the show! You can also find a lot of additional content which is not posted on this site, with Kurt’s posts on Steemit and Aaron’s posts on Steemit.

We really appreciate all of your contributions! Every cent and satoshi we receive lets us know that we’re doing something worthwhile, that you are entertained by our program, and that you’re starting to question what you know more and more. Please be generous. Donate to The Paradise Paradox. Or buy some stuff on Amazon using this link. Or buy some of our great T-shirts here.

The Episode:


To download the audio, right click and press “save as”.

Remember to subscribe on iTunes or subscribe on Pocket Casts.

If you enjoyed the episode, don’t keep it a secret! Feel free to share it on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Reddit, or your office bathroom wall.

 

 

Steemit’s New Economic Paradigm

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An introduction to Steemit

I (Kurt) have been posting on the new social media platform, Steemit, for more than a month, and it seems to be promising for several reasons.

One of the most obvious is that, people can get money on there, which means that many starving artists and writers finally have a platform where they can quickly monetise their content, without having to know too much about website design, sales or marketing.

A deeper point – one which will most likely drive the more constant growth of the platform – is that the system is structured to incentivise helpful, constructive interactions. The system is designed to encourage people to be cool. That’s no small feat. I’ve thought in the past, that if someone really wants to change the world, they have to change the incentives, and that exactly what is what the creators of this site have done.

Since joining, I’ve had to stop myself a few times on other social networks, thinking “Is this the way I would phrase this if I were writing on Steemit? Can I find a way to be softer, more compassionate, more inclusive?” Of course, some people persist in unconstructive feedback, even despite themselves, but the signal-to-noise ratio on the site is still extremely impressive.

In this video, I give an introduction to why this new platform is interesting and may be the way of the future, and I read out an article which I published on the platform, which many people enjoyed, talking about what makes the site and its associated currency, Steem, valuable, and the reasons it may well succeed in the long run.

If you enjoy our posts, please have a look at The Paradise Paradox’s page on Steemit where you can join, earn money, and upvote our posts to help support the show! You can also find a lot of additional content which is not posted on this site, with Kurt’s posts on Steemit and Aaron’s posts on Steemit.

Here’s my original article, and here is the article I mentioned by Leah “Stellabella” Stephens.

To download the audio, right click here, and press “Save as”.