zurew

Interesting, would you elaborate on it just a little bit?

I think you had the stance in the past, if I remember correctly, that a small set of highly intelligent and conscious elites should be making the decisions for society. Given the assumption that I remember correctly, do you still hold that position?

So if you are not qualified to make judgements about his claims, what would be the point of you watching him defending his ideas - you wouldn't be qualified to tell whether his defense is valid or not. After Howard runs his defense what will you base your conclusion on? Will you base it on the scientific consensus?

Sounds like you are not engaging with the substance matter and you write Dave's arguments off based on outside factors that are not related to the truth value of his arguments and you don't evaluate each claim seperately. I have someone for you who made an argument why this is a bad thing to do

and where can reptilians fit into this?

Now you are motivating me to bait bad faith moves out of Carl so i can finally be justified to be bad faith towards him as well.

Sure, I agree that name calling doesn't justified him being wrong, although those who did the name calling most of them did engage with his ideas and claims, and explained why he is wrong - but most of you didn't have anything to reply to that, other than trying to change the original claim for something different. - and that makes me think that you guys are hardcore motivated reasoners. Whats your reply to the professor Dave video? Thats a very weak claim though, because that could be said about literally anything. "there might be some kernel of truth in this claim or in this line of thinking". This is why I accused you guys of being motivated reasoners and dishonest about this. Cause you claim more than just the above, you think his ideas are plausibly true not just that there is a slight possibility that they are true, because otherwise you would run the same defense with the same effort and intensity for literally any idea, but you don't.

I see. You guys are freaks. Trying my best to stay epistemically humble . I can be arrogant as well about things I shouldnt be, but Its easier to stay epistemically humble, when im not dealing with sophists or motivated reasoners and some of you are generally honest about how knowledgeable and researched you are about a given question or subject. I haven't seen Carl ever engage in bad faith rhetoric towards me or being dishonest about his knowledge or about how much evidence he has to support a given claim or argument, so he makes the good faith interactions easy.

Im still skeptical of this, but I guess it is a controversial area. Is it the case that your IQ increases by 10 points or the explanation is that you get better at highly specific exercises that are usually measured when it comes to IQ tests? So for example you might get better at recognizing certain patterns in a specific context or area, but that doesn't necessarily generalize to other areas where different pattern recognition is needed. Btw I have no idea about the empirics on this, so I can easily be moved if you have anything.

He was given multiple chances already. He was on rogan, he was at Oxford and he was on multiple other shows already and most of the things he said was incoherent or outright wrong. He also wrote a mathpaper and he couldn't deliver anything, he was rambling about the Annunaki. You guys are conflating the term "open-minded" with being a motivated reasoner. Being open minded doesn't entail that you give all ideas a 50% chance of being right or 50% wrong up until it is debunked or up until it is proven right. It just means you don't completely rule out the possibility of an idea being right or true up until it is proven or disproven. That could mean that an idea has a 0.0000001% chance of being right, so you don't completely rule out the possibility, but you still recognize that its very very unlikely that it will turn out to be true. What you guys engage in is not open-mindedness, its motivated reasoning. You ignore all the times he is wrong and you ignore all the redflags regarding his beliefs and regarding his epistemology and you try to paint a picture where there is still in your mind a 50% chance of him being right about his remaining beliefs and sometimes you even overwrite some of the things he claimed in a desperate attempt to try to make it more coherent. At some point you overwrite some of his claims so much so , that its not even his claims anymore, but something different. Some of you guys would go and bring up articles from the fucking 70s or 60s regarding institutional fuckups and corruption to make an inductive argument in relation to why you don't trust institutions right now, but in this case, you don't make any inferences based on the wrong claims at all and you treat the truthvalue of each claim that comes from the exact same source completely separately.

I think this is a weak argument and if you take it to its logical end , you would need to conclude that you shouldn't study anyone ever (including actualized.org and Leo's work) cause it will corrupt your mind. The fact that the students you talk about were always quoting philosophers rather than engaging with arguments or in orginal thought, thats not evidence that the reason for that was becuase they read books from philosophers. You can learn ideas and internalize those ideas and then move on and abstract from those ideas and use them to create your own understanding. But often time what happens is what @Nilsi said - You think you have some original thought but the reality is that you have some half baked thought about a thing that other philosophers have already thought about in a much more precise and more polished way about 100s of years ago and if you would have read about them you would have managed to gain that particular insight much quicker than trying to do it all on your own. and btw the "corruption of the mind" argument goes both ways. If you don't engage with any other thought or insight outside of your own, you can easily get locked in your own bullshit as well.

Some of your attitudes towards Terrence Howard is not just being charitable, its a desperate attempt to trying to make his ideas true, cause it aligns with some of your deepest biases. To frame that just as a "blind spot" is fucking wild.

Yes this is a very good point. Its like trying to reinvent the wheel from scratch but in this case in the context of thinking and in the context of making sense of yourself and reality. This lone wolf argument would never fly and would immadiately be shamed in the context of science and understandably so. I personally only had some very basic stuff in mind that would make Leo a more powerful thinker and communicator. Like learning prop logic (what a proposition is, what a contradiction is formally , learning how to make a valid inference, what a sound argument is) , learning the basic semantics of modal terms (the ways the word can or impossible be interpreted on a physical, metaphysical, and logical modality), learning what a category error is (I see many users comitting this mistake including Leo) and then after that there is obviously much more that can still be useful. For example it would be interesting him engaging with the metaethics literature and with the arguments in favour of moral realism. It would also be interesting him engaging with the literature on logic and about paradox and taking a look at dialetheism and taking a look at what entailments come from questioning the laws of logic theories of meaning Taking a deep dive into mereology Infinity; smaller, bigger infinite There is just so much interesting stuff out there that could be integrated into his language and into his work let alone the stuff you are talking about, where you actually engage deeply with books and not with just philosophy articles.

I have seen you saying you are not doing psychedelics anymore. Are you comfortable sharing what methods you use now or you don't want to get into it right now?

I think you are cautious and conscious enough not to fall into that trap. You can recognize that all of those are constructed categories and are only used for pragmatic reasons and you can recognize on a case by case basis whether it is appropriate or not to put the given things into those boxes or not. I view this compeltely differently. I view it as gaining tools for thinking and gaining tools for semantic nuance that can be utilized for communication and for contemplation. It makes you more flexible cause you have a richer set of tools to use. Using a tree metaphor - its like without it, you are only using the first thick primary tier 1 branches of the tree and you can't access or use the more thin tier 2 or tier 3 or 4 branches that are all connected to the tier 1 branch.

This is another thing that would be useful to clear up (what is meant by impossibility). Do you use it as "would be really hard to do" or do you mean something stronger? Btw,you could gain so much useful language that would give you the ability for a lot of semantic nuance from reading some philosophy articles from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy or from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Your ability to articulate your thoughts would become much more effective and clear in the context of philosophical discussions ( thats not to say you do a bad job at it, because you can convey certain things well, im just saying it would make understanding you, and your articulation skills a whole lot better, cause you gain some language that gives you the ability for so much nuance). It can also give you nuance when it comes to your thinking process because you gain the ability to dissect and differentiate things better. Also I don't see how could you talk about the importance of good epistemology and not consider learning or talking about different forms of inferences and why certain forms are much stronger compared to others or learning about different forms of justification.

I think the user atheisticnonduality said the same thing a few years ago, that it would be easier to create a new biological organism rather than an AI from non living parts. I guess the next question is can that biological structure that you talk about be rebuilt completely from non-living parts (or in other words from dead matter)? If it can't then I would be curious what would be the reasoning behind it, what would make it impossible in principle. Yeah I undestand and I agree

But you do have a way how you make sense of awakenings and psychedelic trips and you make a bunch of inferences based on those awakenings, you just don't formalize what those inferences are. You also make a bunch of arguments on a day to day basis about empirical stuff lets be it politics or which method is more effective in general for awakening or other stuff. You also make a bunch of statements about what can be achieved and what is possible and all of those includes you making a bunch of inferences that you don't formally spell out. Thats not the point, because no amount of talk in natural language will get anyone to see the features that you mention there either. It could just radically clear up what inferences you are making, and it would make navigating the disagreements much easier and it would clear up your own thinking as well. Lot of things can be flawed, depending on what we mean by flawed. All formal systems for example rely on certain logical laws like the law of non-contradiction (even the ones that allows sometimes for certain contradictions to be true, becuase they are consistent about which contradictions can be true). Im just saying you don't necessarily need to make certain ontological commitments (what does or doesn't exist). But ,sure you can make it stronger by saying that some parts of math describes physical reality (but then you take on more burden as well), but even then you don't need to subscribe to the position that Howard subscribes to , that math itself has to have an existence in nature or that all parts of maths has to map onto physical reality.

I wouldn't go as far as to say 'aligns with reality' I would only go as far as 'it aligns with our cognition' - thats why I said earlier how it aligns with our perception of the world (not making any judgmenets how the world is). This is the same confusion that Howard has about math that I pointed out earlier - he thinks that math and all parts of math has to have a 1:1 correlation with reality, but that just an unnecessary added axiom. Im pretty sure most physics and math professors acknowledge that there are parts of math that cant be mapped onto physical reality, but still useful for specific things.

Yeah but a formal system being consistent alone is not that big of an achievement. The axioms of math doesn't seem to be arbitrarily choosen - it seem to very precisely align with how we percieve the world. But this is the part that requires studying and I don't have the necessary knowledge to give answers about this. Howard seems to be very confused and that confusion seems to come from his lack of understanding and knowledge. For example the very idea that all parts of math has to directly correlate to physics or that numbers somehow has to exist in the world are all axioms that he is adding onto things ,but they are not necessary. You can be an antirealist about math, but still acknowledge and recognize its usefuleness and its applications. So for you to acknowledge math to be useful you don't need to presuppose that mathematical or other abstract objects somehow exist in the world.

I don't know whats this specifically responding to, cause I haven't implied that math can be inconsistent and if you think I did, then im not even sure how you you inconsistent there. Sure but one thing to say "your definition is wrong" but its an another thing to actually lay out what kind of logical entailments would come from it. There are a bunch of ways to create other formal systems by starting with different axioms and if you don't violate those axioms then those formal systems will be consistent as well, but they probably wouldn't be as useful as math right now. You could actually formulate your arguments in syllogisms if you wanted to, as long as there is no contradiction in them ( I don't see in principle why you couldn't). You can show there what the logical connections are and what kind of inferences you are making to get to your conclusion. If you did that, it could bring a ton of clarity, cause people who can read syllogisms (which is not hard to learn), could see the whole path how you get to your conclusion in detail , without logical jumps.

Nahh, he is right. The standards here regarding explanations and regarding seeking semantic understanding is pretty bad. You rarely see people here say "what do you mean by that" , they quickly deliver objections to things that wasnt even said. Everyone throws around big vague words just to sound elegant rather than to actually get their idea across.

Thats all nonsense. Why would a "formula" has to work with all numbers - Which math axiom implies that? You are also wrong about the formula not working with other numbers than √2, it works with 0 and with -1*√2 as well , but I don't think any of this is in any way relevant to math being consistent or inconsistent.

Do you still maintain the position that Bernardo seem to hold about AI, that AI cannot ever become conscious? If so, how would you respond to Vervaeke about the idea of AI sages (AI actually becoming conscious and even wise at some point)?

At 39:23 he claims he is working with a doctor who can cure cancer and AIDS. This video was 6 years ago. Again radical claims (right now not about physics, but radical medical claims) but 0 evidence