LastThursday

Feeling is quite an overloaded word. You have tactile feeling, hot/cold, rough/smooth etc. You have bodily sensations related to anxiety, anger, fear, hunger or more generally emotions. Then you have feeling as a synonym for belief or certainty and other mental states. All of those are quite different things, so you have to be careful when using the word feeling. Different people also place varying importance on feeling. Some people may trust what they see or hear more than what they feel (emotionally), they have a different emphasis in navigating the world.

I think you're dead right. Ever been in the presence of a big animal up close? Even a dog say. It's hard to ignore its presence and there's something primal going on there, beyond thought and reason. You get the same with some people, a kind of animal presence that can't be ignored, male or female. With men it's nearly an instinctual recognition between themselves that "hey that bloke could kill me, seriously hurt me, or cause me serious issues, even if it isn't physical", and there's a whole super complex mental and subconscious game that plays out in order for those scenarios not to actually play out. But luckily most of us are whimpy, domesticated and non-aggresive - which we also recognise instinctively in others. But I like it. If you think about it there's a majestic kind of respect you have to give to animals that could kill you or that live by their own code and that isn't 100% predictable. It's no different for people. People are unpredictable by nature and can be extremely difficult to deal with, male or female, but that also makes them exciting.

How do you know you really understand a thing? Is it that you can write down or recount it or reason around it? It's not quite that I don't think. What makes a carpenter a carpenter is not the knowledge s/he has but the fact that they can make things with that knowledge. Is knowledge or intelligence or anything mental useful or really understood without application in the world? Although, I admit "application" can have a wide scope, which includes just imparting knowledge to others. It's also the difference between explicit and tacit knowledge or, knowledge taken on versus knowledge embodied. I thought about this in relation to consciousness. How could I prove to myself that I really understand consciousness? It seems in the same way a carpenter does: by making stuff. Can I, create a new consciousness from first principles? Is it enough for me to have sex, and bring a new child into existence, did I then create a new consciousness de novo? Is it only the tacit knowledge encoded in my body that is able to do this? It feels like cheating, that I'm none the wise as to how it fundamentally works. Ok, what about imagination? This is somewhat closer I think. I am able to conjure up thoughts and images and sounds and maybe even smells through mental effort, I have strong memories of my past. I mean it's a weak sauce version of consciousness unlike every day wakefulness or even dreaming, but nevertheless it's something. But the mechanism is inscrutable: the "urge" arises randomly for me to try to create something in my mind's eye, and then I try. Nowehere in that process is it clear how consciousness gets created. But there is something quite fundamental about these thought forms, precisely because they are both ephemeral and not quite like everyday consciousness. There's a platonic simplicity to them. As an example try and recall a face you see every day (your partner's or a family member), and then actually go find them and look at them - what a difference! We inhabit both worlds. So to truly understand consciousness you at least would have to conjure a concrete reality from scratch and interact with it. How would you do it?

@Judy2 Reminds me of my Uni days doing write-ups, shudder. Since you know the subject well and have lots of notes, you will have an idea of the most important points you need to get over. Those will absolutely need to be covered somewhere in the final thesis. You should work on those first. The less important points you should see as a bonus to include. That means if you run out of time or space, you should ruthlessly drop those less important points, it's ok to do that. In terms of structure, you have your five main sections as you mentioned. You should further subdivide those sections into subsections, of two or more parts (but probably not more than 5). If the final thesis were to have 50 pages, then that would be 10 pages per main section, then each sub-section would be roughly about 3 or less pages. That makes writing the subsections more manageable. Even if you write a modest two pages a day, that's 25 days or a month's effort. Maybe a subsection a day is a good aim? As you say there is no right or wrong way to slice up the information, dividing something big up into parts is always going to be an arbitrary process. Creating an outline, is the way to make something flow and hang together well. Choose a way, stick to it, and only at the end you should move stuff around to make it better, because by then you'll have the finished work to play with, instead of it being in your head.

In terms of personal finance, it is actually pretty simple. I like the bucket with a hole analogy. If you pour water into a bucket, it will keep filling up. It will fill up at the same rate your pour water into it. Seems obvious right? If you make a hole in the bottom of the bucket, then things are different. As long as you have water in the bucket, you will keep losing water at a constant rate. If you don't pour any water in, then eventually your bucket will be empty. If you start pouring water in faster than the you lose water, then the bucket will start to fill up. If you pour in water slower than you lose it then eventually your bucket will be empty. That's it. Pouring water in is your income, the hole is your outgoings, the water in the bucket is your savings. What people get wrong with personal finance is not keeping track of the rate of what's going out, against the rate of what's going in. There's several ways to do this. But the easiest is to check how much water is in the bucket at the same time month to month (if you're paid monthly), If it's going down month on month, then you will go into debt eventually.

@Schizophonia that's a well know lucid dreaming trick, wake back to bed: https://www.reddit.com/r/LucidDreaming/comments/28x5fj/how_to_wbtb/ Another is to have your feet higher than your head in bed. But never tried that. I have varying degrees of lucidness regularly, but can't induce it on purpose. I have had some success at "priming" myself before sleep. For example I have a lot of indoor dreams, and wanted more outdoor ones, so I regularly asked for this before nodding off and eventually it worked. If I have unpleasant stuff in my dreams and I remember it, I will mentally paint a big red cross on it to tell my unconscious not to do it again, it does work eventually.

@MoonLanding I think it's a great idea. It'll be a trainwreck and a vipers' nest of drama. But, definitely good fun, much better than this pickup nonsense.

Thanks @sujaykc-01 I've come accross George Berkeley, but haven't investigated his ideas deeply, I'll have to dig a bit deeper.

Thanks for reading @sujaykc-01. My ideas are kind of fluid. I have a few intuitions about how reality could be, but I don't hold on to anything particularly strongly. Here are some of my heuristics: What I'm conscious/aware of is the only thing I've got. In that sense I should have no choice but to be an idealist. I find the word "consciousness" very problematic. The reason is that a word always has limited scope in capturing a thing, and also because two different people may have different ideas about what the word means. It's also problematic because what I'm experiencing can be viewed either as a unity or as a composite thing. The word "consciousness" normally implies an all encompassing unity, but if what I'm experiencing is actually a composite experience then consciousnesses (plural) may be more apt. If it's composite, then there is the problem of comparing different consciousnesses to each other. It's also very possible that your consciousness is completely incompatible with my consciousness. I can see that all the arguments against materialism can be flipped and equally applied to idealism. Materialism struggles to explain how consciousness arises from matter. I think idealism struggles to explain how matter arises from consciousness, but nobody ever seems to notice that. Why shouldn't consciousness be chaotic and completely structureless? There seems to be no reason at all for structure, time, persistence etc. I can see that all you need for consciousness to work is awareness. If you collapse the observer and observed into one, then consciousness is really about awareness of "stuff". ChatGPT had a problem with this saying it was a circular argument, but it came at it from the wrong angle, because it "believes" that the observer and observed are separate. I see conscious awareness like a bar magnet with only one pole (monopole), which seems like an impossibility. The modus operandi of consciousness is awareness, and therefore it must be aware of something, and that awareness is what "populates" reality with appearances. I can see "consciousness" itself arising like the flicking of the "awareness" switch, as soon as that switch is flicked then the whole of reality pops out. Anyway that's some of my thoughts.

@Breakingthewall I thought it would be interesting to get ChatGPT's take on our conversation. Here it is in all its glory (I don't want to clog up this thread with a wall of text):

I thought I'd put part of our conversation between me and @Breakingthewall through ChatGPT to get a third party's eye view of both our positions. This is verbatim from ChatGPT: My prompt: This is part of a conversation between two people having a discussion about the nature of materialism versus idealism. Can you distill down each persons viewpoint?: LastThursday said: That's what I like to call The Hard Problem of Idealism. Part of it is because you're thinking from the materialist paradigm; that perception is a passive process and generated by something else that isn't perception (material matter). But you can see it from a different viewpoint. If consciousness is perception, then something must be being perceived (bear with me). What is that something? It actually doesn't matter, because if it is perceived then it is within consciousness - I would add that what consciousness can perceive is unlimited. The bottom line is that perception is the fundamental nature of consciousness, it cannot not perceive, something must always exist to be perceived. Otherwise, consciousness itself would not exist. That viewpoint is sort of ok, in that it explains why there is perception at all, it is not generated as such but is in the nature of consciousness itself. Just like matter is in the nature of materialism. BreakingTheWallAll: spirituality starts from a false premise: reality is consciousness. Without consciousness, there is no reality, since something exists to the extent that I am conscious of it. Everyone hears this and exclaims: "Ah, of course, that's obvious!" How can something exist without a conscious creator to create it? It's absolutely impossible. There is no consequence without a cause, therefore the cause is God. Problem solved! Well, it doesn't have to be this way. The expression of the absolute does not need to be conscious to exist, nor does it need a conscious creator to exist. Reality has an absolute nature, and this nature is absolute nothingness, which is unlimited potential. This potential develops inevitably, not because an entity designs it. There may exist infinite absolutely unconscious universes whose existence is just as existent as a conscious universe. Consciousness is a quality that exists in reality, and it is not fundamental, but an inevitable consequence of the total potential. It is not special. Well, yes, it is special for us who are conscious beings, but we are not consciousness. Consciousness is not absolute, it is relative. Let's see, you, as an existence, are absolute, but your consciousness is limited, and very limited, just the tip of the iceberg. Is that obvious? There's an unconscious infinity within you. Your true nature is absolute potential; you can become aware of it, or only be aware of the information from your senses or that you want drugs or anything. If there are levels of consciousness, as Leo always says, consciousness is relative. Trying to square a circle is confusing and useless. death, real death, the nothingness, the absolute lack of consciousness, is equally alive than life and absolute conciousness . Absolute is absolute, with the lights on or off. ChatGPT: Here’s a distilled version of each person’s viewpoint: LastThursday (Idealist Perspective): Perception is not passive or generated by material matter; instead, it is fundamental to consciousness itself. Consciousness cannot exist without perception—there must always be something to perceive. Reality is ultimately within consciousness, and what can be perceived is unlimited. Just as materialism takes matter as fundamental, idealism takes perception as fundamental. BreakingTheWall (Materialist/Non-Dualist Perspective): Consciousness is not fundamental but an emergent quality of reality. Reality does not require consciousness to exist; unconscious universes could exist just as validly as conscious ones. Absolute reality is pure potential, not dependent on a conscious creator. Consciousness is relative, not absolute—our experience of it is just a limited part of a greater unconscious whole. Death (complete lack of consciousness) is as much a part of the absolute as life and awareness. Essentially, LastThursday argues for consciousness as the foundation of reality, while BreakingTheWall asserts that consciousness is a secondary, emergent aspect of an absolute, unconscious potential. My prompt: What are the flaws in BreakingTheWall's view? BreakingTheWall’s view presents a compelling materialist or non-dualist argument, but it has several potential flaws or weaknesses: 1. Unproven Assumption: "Reality Exists Without Consciousness" BreakingTheWall claims that reality does not need consciousness to exist, but this assumes an objective, independent reality outside of perception. The idealist counterargument would be: how can we confirm the existence of an unconscious universe if all knowledge comes through consciousness? This leads to a version of the epistemic gap—if consciousness is the only thing we can directly access, how do we justify belief in a reality that exists entirely without it? 2. The Paradox of Absolute Nothingness as Potential He states that "absolute nothingness" is "unlimited potential," but this is contradictory. Nothingness should imply the complete absence of anything—including potential. If reality emerges from absolute nothingness, then nothingness must already contain the potential for something, meaning it is not truly nothing. 3. The Problem of Consciousness as “Not Special” He claims that consciousness is just a byproduct of total potential and "not special." However, consciousness is the one thing we have direct, undeniable access to. Even doubting its significance happens within consciousness. If consciousness is just an incidental property, it doesn’t explain why it appears at all or why it has the structure and self-awareness it does. 4. The Self-Refuting Nature of the Argument He argues that "death, the absolute lack of consciousness, is equally alive as life." But if absolute lack of consciousness is identical to existence, why is there something rather than nothing? If there is no fundamental difference between something and nothing, the argument collapses into meaninglessness. 5. The Relativity of Consciousness Implies a Scale, Not Non-Existence He says consciousness is "relative" rather than absolute, but relativity implies degrees—not non-existence. If there are "levels" of consciousness, then something must be ascending or descending within a framework, which still suggests consciousness plays a fundamental role. Conclusion BreakingTheWall makes a strong case for a non-conscious fundamental reality, but his argument relies on paradoxes (nothingness as potential), assumes an independent reality without proving it, and downplays the significance of consciousness without fully addressing its nature. An idealist could argue that his position is just an unexamined assumption from a materialist framework. My prompt: What are the flaws in LastThursday's argument? LastThursday presents a strong idealist perspective, but their argument has some key weaknesses: 1. Circular Reasoning: "Perception Must Always Exist" They claim that "perception is the fundamental nature of consciousness" and that something must always be perceived, or else consciousness itself would not exist. However, this assumes what it is trying to prove: that consciousness cannot exist without perception. A critic might ask: Why can't consciousness exist in a state of pure awareness without perceiving anything specific? 2. Assumption That Consciousness is Unlimited LastThursday states that "what consciousness can perceive is unlimited," but provides no justification for this claim. Our own experience suggests limits to perception—humans, for example, cannot perceive ultraviolet light or hear ultrasonic frequencies. If consciousness were truly unlimited, why do we experience perceptual limitations? 3. No Explanation for the Origin of Perception The argument states that perception is fundamental, but does not explain why perception exists at all. Why should consciousness necessarily be tied to perception rather than existing as pure, unmanifest awareness? Without explaining why perception is intrinsic to consciousness, this claim remains an assumption rather than a proof. 4. The Problem of Solipsism If everything that is perceived exists within consciousness, does that mean the external world only exists because it is being perceived? This runs into solipsism: if perception stops, does the world cease to exist? The materialist counterargument would be: The world appears to persist whether or not an individual consciousness is perceiving it. 5. Equating Perception with Consciousness Ignores Unconscious Processes LastThursday argues that consciousness is perception, but neuroscience and psychology suggest much of our cognition happens unconsciously. If consciousness is purely perception, how do we account for subconscious thought, dreams, or instinctual reactions that occur outside of direct perception? Conclusion LastThursday's argument assumes perception is fundamental without proving it and runs into issues with solipsism and the limits of consciousness. A materialist could argue that their view is simply flipping the assumption of materialism rather than truly solving the nature of reality.

@Breakingthewall that's kind of what I meant by my comment above: That's what I like to call The Hard Problem of Idealism. Part of it is because you're thinking from the materialist paradigm; that perception is a passive process and generated by something else that isn't perception (material matter). But you can see it from a different viewpoint. If consciousness is perception, then something must be being perceived (bear with me). What is that something? It actually doesn't matter, because if it is perceived then it is within consciousness - I would add that what consciousness can perceive is unlimited. The bottom line is that perception is the fundamental nature of consciousness, it cannot not perceive, something must always exist to be perceived. Otherwise, consciousness itself would not exist. That viewpoint is sort of ok, in that it explains why there is perception at all, it is not generated as such but is in the nature of consciousness itself. Just like matter is in the nature of materialism.

The Glitch In The Matrix subreddit. There's wild stories on there and one time someone mentioned Leo's early videos. The hilarity is that there are two very similar subreddits called Glitch In The Matrix, and you never quite know which one you're in.

You are right that consciousness does dream a material universe. Equally, it could potentially dream of a non-material universe where nothing persists, and that wouldn't explain why it chooses materiality over any other sort of dream. I guess psychoactive drugs allows consciousness to express itself differently - but even then it seems to return back to materiality. My thought is that consciousness gets stuck in a habit of materiality. Philosophy: it's mostly semantics and impossible inquiries.