r0ckyreed

Absolutely amazing! Did you use Obsidian, Word, or Google Docs? Congrats! You took massive action!

Read the 5am Club by Robin Sharma.

Not quite. My perspective is that we are all blind and are not seeing what is there fully.

So if there is no thief of my car, then how do you all explain the Israel and Russia Wars? Are the child deaths nonexistent since they aren’t in my direct experience? This is my last time articulating this point and then I’m done. Your experience cannot be all there is because then you open the door for Covid deniers, Sandy Hook deniers, racism, and police brutality denial, etc.

Yup. That’s survival in a nutshell.

I have been reading Kubler-Ross, On Death & Dying. It is a very insightful book and I have been contemplating it from time to time. I have been trying to finish that book since the beginning of this year, but I have been putting it off because she illustrates the topic of death profoundly that it has made me want to take a break from the book from how heavy it is. The main insight from the book I have been contemplating is death-denial. Denial is a coping skill that we use to avoid the emotional overload of contemplating our own death and demise. It is difficult for us to even conceive of our own death. Death denial is very sneaky, and we use it all the time! Kubler-Ross pointed out some examples of death denial such as war and belief in an afterlife. Her reasoning is that people go to war as part of their way of denying death by taking others' lives and by surviving war, feeling a sense of accomplishment as if they have "defeated death." We do risky things like rock climbing, scuba diving, etc. Why? Part of us wants to "defeat death" and come out on the other side. But this will not happen. No matter how strong you are, you will die all the same. The belief in an afterlife makes our suffering more meaningful in that you suffer now and reap the rewards in an afterlife. But if there is no afterlife, then all the suffering people endure is ultimately meaningless. I would argue that this teaching that "death is an illusion" or "death is imaginary" is another form of death denial that you are fooling yourself into. Some ways I deny death are the following: 1. Thinking that my good health and vital energy will continue to last (discounting that my metabolism will slow down overtime). 2. Eating junk food 3. Not admitting that my eye sight is getting worse and will continue to get worse over time. 4. Not admitting I will go bald and lose my teeth eventually 5. Not looking into the fact that I will lose everyone I love 6. Scrolling on social media 7. Going to work 8. Exercising These are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Having kids, getting married, sex, etc. are also forms of death denial. What do you make of this?

Just because you cannot disprove idealism/solipsism doesn’t make that true. Solipsism is true from our first-person point of view. But if there is a third-object reality, then your solipsism would only be true relative to your point of view. Postmodernism would say that solipsism/idealism is only one perspective out of many.

Lol.

Yeah. People do question beg this. But knowledge is mind-dependent. Consciousness is my access to reality. Consciousness itself points to things existing outside of my awareness such as learning new things. If I can watch a video about my car being stolen, then I have learned something new that was previously outside of my experience. Im not trying to strawman idealism, but I don’t think George Berkeleys arguments can hold up with the technology that we have that can give us more objective measures. If I can walk around and have a camera recording the world behind me, I can see the world in front and the world behind me. It’s not like the world behind me ceases to exist when I stop recording behind me, it is just that I do not have access to it. I mean this stuff is basic object permanence that you should have developed as a baby. Even dogs know that if I put a bone behind my back, it doesn’t just cease to exist. It honestly seems so stupid that I cannot believe people believe this. The only steel man I can think of is that whatever we refer to as existence has always been an experience. The bone is made out of an experience of my sight, sounds, tastes, and touch. My sight of the bone is not any more real than the sound, touch, or taste of the bone. Humans have a sight bias where we take our sense of sight to be more true/real than our other senses. We have only ever interacted with the world through our experience and yet our experience points to things that seem to exist outside of our experience, such as the experience of object permanence and the experience of an object being moved outside of one’s experience. The question really comes down to what is an object? Is object just raw experience or is that just our interpretation? What if an object has an existence outside of our experience/interpretation? But then if it does, then what do we mean when we say something exists? How could we say anything exists without referring to the experience or potential experience of it? What does it even mean to say something exists but cannot be experienced? So, I see how the objective reality view has its own problems, that if an objective reality exists, then what exactly is that? Objective reality couldn’t be an experience or even just an idea. But like I said, knowledge is mind- dependent. So if there is an objective reality, it could never be known. An objective reality itself cannot be defined very easily because it points to a world outside of our experience. What I find interesting is that we have this idea of an objective reality at all. How do we have this idea if we have never experienced and can never experience objective reality?

A Beautiful Mind

If I go blind and deaf right now, is it that the visual and auditory world doesn’t exist or that I do not have access to those senses? Think about this: There are senses that you do not have access to right now, which is called ESP. How would you know it exists? Would it be true to say that ESP doesn’t exist because you don’t experience it? It would be foolish for a person born blind and deaf to say that sight and sound doesn’t exist. They may not have access to sight and sound, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. What if we are all blind to an objective reality or ESP? We would be fools to say that the qualia we have now is all reality is. That is a fallacy. It is more accurate to say that the qualia we have is what we currently have access to and we can’t know if we have full access to all the senses/perceptions possible.

You can’t experience death. Death is the cessation of experience. When you die, you won’t even experience your death. It’s like falling asleep. You don’t experience falling asleep, you experience waking up.

Thats what I’m saying. The only difference is that a unicorn exists only in your mind, whereas a horse exists not just in your thoughts but out in the world.

What Leo means by imaginary isn’t the same as what is colloquially meant by imaginary. By imaginary, I think he means mental construct. A horse is more mentally constructed because it is something you actually experience whereas a unicorn is just an idea in your mind.

But ice cream doesn’t exist because I’m not aware of it right now. You see the issue I’m pointing to? How could you even have the idea of me getting ice cream without inferring into some objective reality. Your statement already assumes that ice cream exists outside of my current experience.

I don’t mean to sound harsh or rude. I just get frustrated when people think their consciousness/perspective is absolute. My perspective is only relative out of many in comparison to the universe. My brain depends on the universe. The universe doesn’t depend on my brain. Of course, I could never know for certain whether something exists outside of my consciousness, but I cannot equally say that my consciousness is all there is. My consciousness is all that I am aware of. My consciousness also tells me that there are things that seem to exist outside of it such as when watching a video of someone stealing my car.

Conscious experience is all you have, but that doesn’t mean it is all there is. Truth is prior to proof. There are things that are true that you could never know and experience. Just think about this, whenever you learn something new, what was that before you knew about it? It’s not like Mars doesnt exist before you become aware of it. It was there before you were aware of it. But think about this, there are millions of colors that exist right now that your conscious experience doesn’t have access to. Don’t confuse the limits of your mind for the limits of reality. We are perceiving the world through our senses, but that doesn’t mean the world is just our senses. Our senses can delude us. You’re not considering that things could exist but our human brains could never access them since they are part of the universe. You think our nervous system has total access to reality? Human experience is one relative experience out of many. There’s postmodernism for ya.

I will say that an interesting thought is that we were all born from death in a way. We didn’t exist before we were born, yet from death life springs.

How can you be so sure? Death literally means the cessation of consciousness like a dreamless sleep but infinitely deeper. If an afterlife or continuity exists, then there is no death. When you look at a dead corpse, what continues? That consciousness is gone.

How do you explain that it still exists outside of my awareness? For instance, my friend could video record it being inside of the thief’s garage. If it really vanished into nothingness, then how is it the case that I can find my car and that my car could be stolen in the first place? My car is literally nothingness right now, so how can it be stolen? You see this idealism is bullcrap. It is not in alignment with how reality works. By this logic, there is no murderer because he is nothingness. But if we really believed this, then we wouldn’t bother to search. We would just say that our qualia shows us a dead person and that’s it. When you throw rationality out the window, you are left with delusion.

How would you know? Isn’t that just death denial? Sure, you are imagining your own death in the same way that you are imagining you being sick. But the reality is that death is going to happen in the same way that sickness is going to happen. People who denied Covid was a form of death denial.

Captain America and Aragorn are my favorite examples of masculinity.

Everything we do is geared towards death denial. Personal development for instance and wanting to create massive value that outlives you. Reproduction is the desire for immortality.

I liked the blog posts about contemplation, how meditation is not awakening and multimodal learning. I read every word of the long writing on your blog posts. I would like to see more about critiquing rationality, going meta-rationality, and teaching us how to think/contemplate more deeply. You do a great job in pointing out the criticisms and highlighting the limits of a certain thought, but I think more could be done on how to actually go meta on rationality for instance or how to go meta on postmodernism. My favorite blog post was your one of contemplation that you wrote a long time ago about how the ultimate game is contemplation. https://www.actualized.org/insights/the-metamorphosis-of-my-work My biggest struggle is still deconstructing rationality and science. I see the limits of rationality and science, but I cannot help but firmly believe that these are our best methods of deriving general knowledge about the world. Science is superior to Mormonism, rationality is superior to belief. I cannot be unconvinced, but I can see the limits that rationality alone may miss out of intuitive insights that may not make logical sense. But my mind wants to understand truth and for it to make sense.

There’s postmodernism in action lol. Is there such thing as an original intent or Leo’s original personality or is it all just my interpretation.