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In that case , you are using reductionism basically as just "explanation". I take reductionism to be a special position with regards to realness and I also take it as a subset of explanations - where it is an explanation but a specific kind - where the notion of realness is only accounted by fundamental parts (this is where the 'you are just atoms bro' come from) . The idea that" lower levels" can exhaustively explain things that are on the "higher level". Basically, I take it to be the rejection of strong emergence , where higher parts have certain causal powers that cant fully be accounted by their lower parts. To me its very clear that if there are two people and if one of them believes in strong emergence and the other doesn't, then calling both of them reductionist would be very misleading.

It supposed to mock the idea that some MAGA has that creating more factories and therefore more factory jobs is actually so cool because factory work is cool and masculine and people need those jobs over some gay liberal office jobs.

https://x.com/jamiewheal/status/1910704519693971812

@Leo Gura Where do you put Jordan Hall?

That way of using those words seem to be wildly misleading and inappropriate in most contexts. When you give for example a causal explanation, you dont suddenly provide a new substance to thing that is being explained . "Why are you drunk? Well, because I drank 10 beers" - did I provide 'drinking acohol' metaphysics to being drunk? - that question doesn't make much sense. Or another example would be saying that the reason why matter exists is because God created matter - that doesn't mean though that God is made of matter. John Vervaeke has a metaphysics that very clearly don't buy into the idea that things can be exhaustively explained by or that things can be reduce to their simpler/smaller components .

Yeah, I think people here often times confuse having the "correct" take with level of development. I dont know if you have seen that convo, but this kind of goes back to the morally lucky convo Destiny had with Rem about Hasan. It was almost exactly was you said there - the reason why you(in that case Hasan) is not a neo-nazi is not because of your level of development or because you actually reasoned your way there on your own , but because you were lucky that your close environment indoctrinated you with beliefs that we collectively take to be more acceptable and correct. "If you are a very good reasoner and you have the ability to synthesize and to juggle mutliple perspectives towards an acceptable moral and value system that is aligned with mine - you are highly developed and very much above orange and at least yellow , but if all the same things apply except the fact that you have a different moral and value system you are stuck in orange at best".

Yeah, precisely.

And thats just the start - we can easily attach other arguments to this like you cant maintain a finite planet with exponentially growing energy need. Before anyone would say "but efficiency bro" , that doesn't work in practice mostly because of jevons paradox. The more efficient shit gets the more accessible it gets and on a net scale we end up spending much more energy. Today, the average person uses more energy in a single day than what a king did in an entire year centuries ago. AI just makes this whole thing 10x worse, 1 because it makes things more efficient and 2 because the better it gets the more things it can be used for and this goes back to jevons paradox. We also have no good way to properly price things (in a way where the price is not decontextualized, but its contextualized in the context of the whole world) - which inevitably leads to the fact that we externalize harm - why? Because we don't immediately need to pay the price for it ("other stupid people who will be directly affected by it , will pay the price for it") - if everyone would need to pay the real price for it almost all businesses would go immediately bankrupt. And we can go on with other issues (AI alignment issue, environmental issues etc) ,but one main point is that a naive "but history though" doesn't work, because shit is widly different now in multiple ways.

Yeah sure, but once the purposes are specified, we can give an answer to that question. If we care about x set of values and we are clear about what that set contains, then we can go on talking about how does Trump affect those values. Of course, there can be other layers of disagreement like - we disagree about how should we measure how much we progress or digress from that value set, but hopefully we can ground that in a shared meta-epistemic norm and using that we can figure out which epistemic norm is better for measuring more accurately. I think a lack of clarity and a lack of explication of what kind of norms we are using to collect a set of facts and what kind of norms we use to tell a story about that set of facts is one of the things that makes us very much prone to self-deception because our underlying biases can hop in the evaluative process (especially when it comes to the story telling part - the weight of each fact will be different and even what set of facts you collect will be different). But yeah, of course this goes much deeper , because there are some meta-norms (that has to do with relevance-realization) that we unconsciously use to determine what we consider reasonable vs far-fetched and those meta-norms will probably never be exhaustively explicated, and because of that some disagreements in practice wont ever be "solved". Even if we agree on an argument (with all the premises and the conclusion and with the rule of inference as well), we can still disagree on what kind of implications come from the conclusion. There is an infinite set of logically possible implications that can come from any given conclusion and this goes back to the "reasonableness" problem I outlined above, which I have no good answer to, other than we should train our ability to explicate those epistemic norms as much as we can (so that ever deeper layers of disagreements can be specified, pointed out and then argued about without being vague). Tldr - ultimately there has to be a norm when it comes to navigating any disagreement because otherwise disagreements wouldn't be possible. But exhaustively explicating that norm is impossible in practice, so we probably never solve the deepest disagreements.

There can be an attitude and a habit to integrate and to synthesize, but to me it seems there is so much nuance when it comes to what "proper" integration/synthesis means. There is a normativity to it that is often times not specified - and because of it - talks about higher and lower perspectives becomes messy and unproductive. I can be aware of multiple perspectives ,but then I can choose properties from each perspective randomly and create an assembled mess. What makes the outcome not an assembled mess? How can I know what kind of properties are relevant and what should be get rid of given a set of perspectives? To me, the answer to those questions is grounded in pragmatism - so when it comes to specifying based on what kind of norms and characteristics I create a hierarchy of perspectives - it will be based on the given purpose/goal/function and that will automatically give meaning to terms like "better" or "higher". This provides the ability to define and to interpret those terms in a non-vague way , and this would be the opposite to the other approach where there is some kind of vague goal and function independent meaning is attached to those terms. There is also often times an underlying assumption that if the context window that one consideres is bigger (which is often labeled as a more complex persepctive), that is in and of itself better, but that is purpose dependent as well. A bigger context window might give more noise to it and make it worse.

Its not the case yet (if you interpret it literally), but as AI gets more advanced, the capability to do more harm by anyone who has access to it goes up as well.

I dont think you appreciate the level of setback and depth "shit will just break down" entails in the context we are in now. I think appealing to history doesn't work much. Times in the past were different compared to how it is now. Sure you could externalize harm, but not on this scale. In the past, a seriously bad actor could only do so much damage (even if he had all the wealth and all the necessary people), as time passes -especially with the rapid advancement of AI - the potential for a single individual to cause significant harm is increasing at an almost exponential rate, without any need for substantial wealth or for a powerful network of people. The idea that we will have a casual setback in a society, where each member can have at least a nuclear bomb level effect on a global scale, while having perverse incentives , misinformation and a bunch of bad actors is just naive and not realistic. We wont go extinct, but there will be a serious and chaotic setback.

Is this the classic move of "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao' ? - the moment you try to formalize and strategize a plan you've already lost. But regardless, what does "become totally unbound in your own becoming" mean in practice?

I dont share his idea, I just shared his view, which is simiar to yours in that we have no fucking clue what we are doing.

Thats roughly what Jordan Hall is saying. Jordan Hall would say that we have no fucking clue what we are doing and from where our motivations come from and we should connect to God and act based on that not based on our ideologies or random motivations. The idea is that whatever our intellect will come up with will be dogshit and useless , so we might as surrender and let the transcendent show the way.

I dont think I am tracking what you are saying. The premise is not that we are fully in charge of what we are becoming and what we are doing - the premise is that our actions inevitably affect nature and to the degree to which we have control over those actions (even if its very little), we should use that wisely.

I think there is some truth to that (the need for control and the need for taking credit), but on the other , it is also about this - given that we are here and we are planning on staying here in the future, why wouldn't we try to do it in a conscious,wise rather than an unconsious,unwise way?

If you agree with the premise that there are problems that pops up and maintained by Game A dynamics , then if your solution doesn't involve something that takes care of that , then it might help with gaining time, but its not really a solution that prevents from shit breaking down in the future. I don't think you can realistically maintain a game A world without there inevitably being civilizational collapse. In principle, its not impossible to solve these problems in game A, for example using power and other tools of persuasion you can theoretically make everyone to do what you want them to do, but maintaining this long term is just as unrealistic as transitioning to game B.

I think your sentiment makes it impossible to progress on anything. Its one thing to be realistic , but its another to not even attempt to work on the problems and then because of it - make it a self fulfilling prophecy, where the solution never comes (not because you establish that in principle there cannot be one, but because your attitude make it so that you never even try to work on one). So if we are actually solution oriented there are multiple moves - even though its extremely unlikely, still giving the transition a chance and or given that shit will inevitably break down, thinking about how to deal with once it breaks down.

I dont think they would disagree with that. I think the idea was to come up with the necessary and sufficient conditions that a solution must satisfy, and if by its nature it makes it so that it is extremely unrealistic and absurd, then so be it, but it being unrealistic or unlikely in principle won't take away from the need that it has to be done. Or in other words, if there is no other alternative option other than an extremely unrealistic one, then you try to implement that. Its like if its a fact that you will have an MMA match with Jon Jones in two weeks and there is no possible way to get around that, then you will try to do your best with what options you have, even though the chance of you winning the fight is basically 0. But yeah, it seems that you don't even agree with the premise that there is a meta-crisis let alone with what necessary charactersitics the solution must have.

By that you mean that there isn't much substance to what they are saying? Im sure that you agree with the thesis that there is a meta-crisis, you probably disagree with the prescriptions and with the way they outline how the solution supposed to look like.

Have you looked into Forrest Landry's stuff? Jordan Hall and maybe even Schmachtenberger suggested that he is the smartest guy they know. this is more recent - timestamped (59:50)

Everyone can project whatever meaning they want on the Bible depending on what beliefs and biases they have. In this case, one can project nonduality on it and pretend that the authors of the Bible were writing about nonduality and God realization. I don't know why the exact same thing couldn't be said about any other random text and why the Bible should be treated special. If I try hard enough, I can redefine enough things so that I can say that the founding fathers were actually talking about nonduality and they were trying to teach about God realization. To me, this move seems like a desperate attempt to try to maintain a Christian identity while also trying to be "spiritual" at the same time.

Gandalf is good enough for me

I don't see how any of those are good arguments for God and I don't see how those are pointing to God. Because the chance that an all powerful God would create physics this particular way , with these entailments from the infinite set of other possibilites is also extremely slim. Why would he prefer life over no life? And after answering that, even assuming that he preferes life, does he have the capacity to create life that can bear any state of affairs? If yes, then this is simply not a good argument for God ,because he could have made us in a way where we could be chilling in the middle of the Sun and have no issue existing and surviving. I don't see how thats the case. Miracles could be explained by a large set of other things as well. For example other beings using advanced tech or under the assmuption that it is not advanced tech , there could be an infinite number of beings that could hypothetically perform miracles without being all knowing, all powerful etc. God is simply not necessary to explain miracles.