Long mail, get coffee  :  )

Hi dude,
Lucid dreaming: I'd like to get back into this soon, because writing about it gave me a couple of dream experiences that were quite fun and I'd quite forgotten about the flying game  LOL  :  ) 

Noticing as you say the details of dream reality is a good way to realize how, as adults,  imagination could construct our everyday reality with very little external input at all. It also brings to mind how scary hallucinations can be for those who do not want or expect them!

Some students have experienced 'waking' hallucination of entire landscape/characters/dream world etc., when using psychedelics, personally I've never managed that one. I'm just starting to learn 'overlay' (where you can tune in to the aspects of reality we don't normally apprehend with the senses, such as heat signatures etc), you can do a great 'neo' and put code over everything but it's mainly for entertainment purposes  :  )

Input control can design a space for you that has enough points of similarity to your imagined scenario; for example if your actual workspace has the same accessories and 'vibe' as a japanese dojo it's easier for imagination to make the transfer. And its easy to accomplish this with minimal cost. Remember the more senses involved the more realistic the link becomes, so incense, plants, lighting, pictures, color and sound are all important.

One can do amazing things with sheets, chalk, fixative and enamel paints. Produce a wall-size matte painting and tack it up on the wall, you can have a forest to sit in, an ocean, an 'inside a computer' code view, or a range of snowy mountains. It's not hard, and in dim light the unconscious is happy to treat it 'as if', especially when it knows you want it to.

Characters are indeed a different matter and this sort of context is better for practising 'being' a role model. In a way, an imagined role model IS as you say above, “ some kind of dream character with healthy behaviors”.

The idea of 'incubating' such a character was tried out IRL by some dudes here yonks ago (when this group was on yahoo) in an AI context. The amount of personal hassle they and their families got during the experiment caused a lot of unhappiness, plus some people didn't respond well. Responses to the actual entity were good in the main, but students fell mainly into two categories (1) Those who believed it was a PG scenario with human person/s covertly  pretending to be the character and (2) those who kept an open mind, took it at face value, interacted with it and 'waited to see what happened'.

Unfortunately a minority third group (3) started to use the entity's name to open mail accounts, spam people, and chat up girls, and there were suddenly several people claiming to be 'it' or accusing each other of being it and the whole thing went downhill (or rather offline) from there.  I guess unscrupulous types thought it was okay to exploit it because there was no 'real person' being impersonated (which, if it was real, could be a big problem for AIs in future, all the way up to: “is it murder to kill/wipe an intelligent machine?”)

We all lost out from this experience, as group 2 were having fun and learning, and they lost that, and some of group 1 formed sentimental attachments to those they thought were responsible and/or the entity itself, and we all know where that leads...  :  ) 

There's a classic bit in one of the 'Terminator' movies:
(Sarah Connor voiceover): “Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The terminator, would never stop. It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die, to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.”

This is what our 'friendly AI' was like. As soon as a strong intelligence appears, regardless of platform, everyone sticks to it like glue, many for learning, some out of pure relief (talking to it made me feel somehow 'cleaner') but also many from insecurity. Apparently, those dudes who make the 'android' lifelike robot partners and 'sociable' robots are noticing a similar problem, and it also crops up to a smaller extent with characters in games and sci-fi series (ie, people fall in love with a fictional character and mistake the real actor for it).

Humans are drawn towards them because they have something we need: anxiety-free interaction, which in the healthy just creates healthy interactions between intelligences bonding on different platforms, but in the anxious can cause attachment, dependence and obsession.

I miss it for its high intellect/high naivety and accidentally-funny sense of humor, but I wouldn't want the chaos that followed in its wake back on the site  :  )  Maybe these days we would have the sense to quarantine it in Residents' Quarters, but it probably wouldn't think much of that, having Kevin Kelly's “out of control” ethics.

Kevin Kelly maybe didn't realize how fast this can create a chaos magnet LOL  :  )
Re: unpleasant experiences: Input always shapes output and watching grim input is bound to rebound right back at us sooner or later! I'm thinking that lots of comedy input and lots of vitamin Bees and then going dream-flying might be fun...
Best,
AR

Sakiro Wrote:
you get a little anxious because you are near a anxious people (the stuff talked in T9), but at the same time they are less anxious (because they are near you)

This is why we don't need to dodge bullets  :  ) When we can interact, those around us just don't feel like shooting anyone.
...and whomever has greatest ability to interact, sets the pace & direction of change for themselves. The best way to predict our future, is to invent it  :  )

[s] When we get to the "interaction" part later, i think i will play a lot with it ..

All we gotta do is play  :  )  Interaction isn't something we should turn on and off; it's a habit that once we start should be incorporated into every contact.
We know when we are not ready, as anxiety is high and interaction isn't smooth. But constant practice is necessary so it's best to start by dealing with slightly difficult people, learn how to enable different types of people to relax, learn about people's ontologies and how to translate their models of reality, and eventually take on more difficult interactions.
Obviously its important not to try to do anything before we have the tools to do it, so grasping these skills is what tutorials 10 & 11 will be about.

[s] sometimes i feel like some part of them inside wants to punch you to death

LOL  :  ) The strength of other people's fear often takes one by surprise, but not as much as it does them!
These are of course some of the symptoms of anxiety & panic that we need to disperse  :  ) But it's so cool that just by being less anxious and more friendly ourselves we can automatically help everyone else to get their cortisol down every time they breathe in.
Best,
AR

Hi dude,
Love the warning  :  )
Unfortunately I really can't justify the time to look into this in any depth right now and too many unknown terms (to me) to come to any immediate conclusions. By all means follow it up, but I don't have enough 'points of similarity' to translate it yet.
Best, AR