(24 Oct 2023, 21:14 )Like Ra Wrote: (24 Oct 2023, 20:18 )jadefortyfour Wrote: totally out of control.
It's not always "black" or "white", right? Between "the hypno is not working at all" and "total black-out with no information of what happened"? "Role-playing" has also "degrees" and "levels" 😁
In daily life there are a great many people in various roles and situations, about whom one also can't be too certain what is going on. Is that guy over there a good husband, or "larping at being a good husband"? Is that women over there a passionate educator, or "larping at being a passionate educator"?
Without constant feedback from brain-imaging and internal biochemistry or/and an AI analyzing the micro-expressions and body language tics, and without comparing the gathered data to some pretty ironclad, widely agreed-upon criteria criteria for this and that, it's mostly impossible to say who is "living" their various social roles, and who is "larping" them.
Also, a society of beings with developed frontal cortexes apparently always necessitates them to constantly maintain internal mental self-policing, in a sense implicitly socially approved self-hypnosis in order to participate in the shared reality. Within the wider society you get smaller societies, from hobby clubs on one end to totalitarian cults on the other, where the closer you move to the cult pole, the more stringent the expectation to constantly self-police and thus maintain a personal self-hypnotic bubble ideally identical to the bubbles of all other participants.
Lastly: our personality changes in various ways from year to year, from decade to decade. Various external events and situations combine with our internal processing of them, and gradual changes in personality occur. A person can divide their life up the current point into say five sections, and in every section it's still "them" as in "the same person", but in each of the five sections they will exhibit not only traits, desires and motivations that are common to the overarching persona, but also traits, desires and motivations that are specific to that period alone. Traits, desires and motivations that are not present in the other sections of the lived life.
In this sense, we can view potential hypnotic and/or conditioning brainwashing as "working", if it encourages changes in the personality, only let's say ten or twenty or a hundred times speeded up, compared to the usual rhythm of changes within one's personality over one's lifespan. Speeded up personality change, and also specifically directed personality change.
Just like societies at large maintain an external (to the individual) bubble of constant implicit and explicit conditioning and brainwashing, so is the individual expected to maintain their own internal self-policing duplicate in order to be a proper member of their society. Often enough twenty nesting-doll societies that they inhabit in one way or another.
Hypno porn conditioning brainwashing is a focused microcosm of this. As you listen/watch, you get the external influence, often with an addictive element so that you keep maintaining this influence on yourself. Gradually, an internal mirror structure is expected to being to form, to start self-policing in the ways encouraged by the files.
In some cases the new mental structures could be felt as "external shit in my mind space", in other cases the newly imposed/formed mental structures could be more or less smoothly integrated into the pre-existing personality, becoming another functioning layer, without breaking too obviously the continuity of the personality over time.
Of course, abrupt break of personality continuity can also happen. In hypno porn this is part of the appeal for some and a source of dread for others. Life can provide a million other events, usually of traumatic or epiphany-style event, which also lead to a sharp break in personality continuity.
If someone experiences a traumatic or euphoric break in personality continuity because of exposure to hypno porn, this may be validation of the file's powers of suggestion, or simply a validation of the file's power to bring about a nervous breakdown among a specific percentage of the users. If the elements of the breakdown aggressively mirror the suggestions and commands of the specific file, the situation is murkier still.
If someone's behavior changes without significant personality continuity breaks, simply going the "speeded up directed personality evolution" route, it would also be very difficult to measure if the change in traits, desires and motivations is an "authentic" result or "larping". No more than we can easily distinguish between someone "being an honest policeman" or "larping as an honest policeman". If the measurable end result in the world of physical phenomena is the same in both cases, then what's left is trying to determine if the changes in the soul went "the real route" or "the fake route", which is going way, way into esoteric quasi-religious or deeply philosophical spaces.
If someone, upon exposure to a file,
1) begun developing internal self-policing structures that help maintain the suggested changes/additions, then to me this would mean a "real" effect, beneath the
2) speeded up changes in personality (observable by other people, measurable in various objective ways), that are
3) going into directions suggested by the file. These three criteria to me would mean "yes the effects are real".
If, on the other hand, listening to a file leads to a sudden break in personality continuity, this to me does not necessarily mean "the file worked as intended". To the contrary, it may very well simply mean "the file triggered a breakdown" in a way not necessarily specific to the file or its genre, the way some other external events do trigger breakdowns in people since time immemorial. Including "bad trips". And even if the person undergoing the breakdown exhibits traits that mirror suggestions by the file, this is still not proof. Maybe it's just an traumatized person in a bad place compulsively playing out a neurotic theater that uses concepts and symbols from the last major thing they were exposed to.
And yet, if we're totally objective, even the above can also count as "it worked". Because we can say: "Now look. The file promised a radical transformation that will include X, Y, and Z. It happened. The poor sod did indeed go through a radical transformation, and that crap he pulls right does indeed include X, Y, and Z as suggested by the file. Therefore, it worked."
Discussing possible internal processes and behavioral changes can only help us all in knowing ourselves better, but won't easily lead to determining what is "real" and what is "larping". For now we have some objective measurable criteria:
1) Did speeded up evolution of the personality happen, or did a break in the personality continuity occur?
2) If yes, did the changes or the breakdown lead to exhibiting traits, desires and motivations promoted by the file?
3) Does the person report the appearance of new internal mental and emotional self-policing mechanisms?
If the answer to all three is "yes", then I would say "it's happening for real".