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Multiple people have already mentioned this, but yeah: Just because you do something difficult that won't necessarily give you benefits. Doing hard stuff is used as a proxy to achieve the results or to get the benefits that you want. Don't confuse proxy with that actual thing you are looking for. You could make your life 1000x more harder right now: -You could cut your grass by hand picking each piece of grass one by one -You could make a decision that you will never use your eyes anymore and you will move everywhere with closed eyes -You could make the decision that you will never use your legs to get to your destination - you can only move by using your hands -You could make it so that you won't use your hands when you want to eat, you can only use your mouth ..... I could list an infinite number of other dumb stuff here and all of that combined would make your life 1000x harder ,but is that actually necessary? Or you could pick hard stuff mindfully, stuff that you know will actually bring the benefits you want.

@Phil King ??

Im not saying or claiming its impossible to have enlightenments or awakenings or that one shouldn't go for it - Im just suggesting epistemic humility which people here clearly lack - in other words be open to the possiblity that you can be wrong. Thats why you can see a lot of people here acting as teachers and all-knowers all the time rather than actually acknowledging the limitations to methods . A lof of people here are making a lot of assumptions but they try hard not to see those as assumptions even though they have to take them for granted. You can cut through a lot of bullshit by asking "why" and "how do you know that" on a loop, repeatedly to this people and you will see how even though epistemically similar their approaches are - a lot of their conclusions are different. A lot of guessing about other peoples developmental level (as if anyone would have some objective standard to go by - which people clearly don't have - they just go by self-referentiality [or in other words by the experience and knowledge that they think to be true]) There is clearly a lot of ego involved in all this which distorts everything very greatly. A lot of emotional attachment to certain methods, huge emotional attachment to the idea that one is more conscious compared to others, huge emotional attachment to 100% confidence in your core claims (people here need the feel of that psychological safetiness, otherwise they open themselves up to the possibility , where their whole world can fall apart) Notice what people argue about here all the time: "I have a bigger enlightenment dick than you" " I am more conscious than you" "your method is limited compared to mine" - when it comes to Leo , he is making a lot of claims about methods that he is guessing about at best, but he won't acknowledge that he is guessing - he will present it as if it would be absolutely true. So for instance, he will present the idea of doing meditation to reach his current knowledge as either laughable or structurally limited, even though he is using his limited understanding and logic to reach his conclusion (that meditation is structurally limited) and he hasn't gone through 40-50 years of intense meditation work - so he uses mental masturbation and inductive reasoning to make a definitive claim about something without verifying it himself through experience. He might say "okay, but no one can verify all the methods at that depth and length" - sure, but then don't make definitive claims about it and again have some epistemic humility and say: "To the best of my knowledge right now here is my take on this x method" but don't die on the hill with such claims. The time here anyone accepts infinite consciousness as a possibility - is the time, where constant recontextualization opens up, which will undermine your previous thoughts and knowledge about everything as you become more conscious. Leo will say: "no no it won't negate it , it will include it" - even in that case you should go with epistemic humility all the time , but there are things that contradicts the claim of " it won't negate it , it will include it". So for example, if there is a person who says God doesn't exist and then he becomes a person who says God does exist, in that case there is the negation of ' God doesn't exist' and the undermining of your previous thoughts and metaphysics going on rather than an inclusion. Or a different example could be a person switching a materialist paradigm to 'everything is consciousness' paradigm - that case there is a clear negation of the materialist paradigm going on there - you negate the idea that the materialist metaphysics is true. So those two examples clearly demonstrates not just the fact that greater consciousness will undermine your regular knowledge about things, but greater consciousness can undermine your ideas about the structure and nature of reality and yourself, therefore having a 100% confidence in your own metaphysics according to this - is not a good idea, because there is a possibility that it will be undermined in the future as you gain more consciousness. So the conclusion is that if you believe that 'you can always become more and more conscious no matter how conscious you are right now', then you also have to accept the possibility that your deepest ideas about yourself and about reality and about consciousness can be undermined later as you become more conscious compared to your previous self. So the idea of any of you having 100% certainty in your metaphysics is irrational and opens up you to be deluded.

Yes it is - from an epistemic standpoint it sure is. the same exact self-referentiality is taking place (therefore you are making an innate assumption that you take for granted). Not all, and from their pov they can claim that they are more conscious compared to you just the same way as you claim that you are the most conscious on earth. ... problem of relying on self-referentiality. If asking questions that you have no answer for is being dense - then sure Im dense. You try to dodge a very straightforward acknowledgment, because its more emotionally appealing to everyone and to you if you can claim something with 100% confidence. Sure you can claim it to be true with 100% confidence, but you having 100% confidence in it won't make it automatically true. A lot of people claim things with 100% confidence and they are wrong all the time. I already listed a set of things that you take for granted and you have no way of getting around them, you just assume them to be true and then somehow claim that what you claim is 100% true without any doubt whatsoever. And who cares whether something worth anything or not? Don't we aim for absolute truth here? If the absolute truth is some valueless depressing thing ,then we should be able to stomach that. "there would be no point in awakening if it didn't guarantee truth." "If it could be wrong it wouldn't be worth anything." - and there lies you guys biggest bias and fear - you want it so badly to be 100% guaranteedly true ,because the minute you acknowledge that there is any slight possible doubt about it, the whole thing and the value of your work collapses (the very same argument is used here that you use against atheists and other fundamentalists Leo).

Probably there are ways to question my own existence, but even if thats not the case - making metaphysical claims will be different than making a claim about my existence, because I have to make more assumptions in order to make that metaphysical claim. If you guys acknowledge that you guys are participating in the same self verifying epistemology (as any fundamentalist) and making certain assumptions in order to make your metaphysical claims about reality, then Im good , but in that case you guys should have some epistemic humility as well, because by the nature of you making some assumptions - you open up yourself to the possibility of being wrong. All I care about here is an acknowledgement to the possibility of being wrong. Some assumptions that you take for granted: You are not deluded You are capable of having knowledge about the fundamental nature of yourself and about the fundamental nature of reality That your memory about your awakening is correct and it actually happened That there is such a thing as an awakening and you didn't just imagine or tripped the whole thing That you having the inability to conceive of or to perceive anything outside of your consciousness is a definitive proof that there is no possibility that there is anything outside of your consciousness That reality is made of one fundamental thing rather than multiple different kind of things that cannot be reduced to each other.

Because its avoiding the hard problem with epistemology and begs the question. To me an answer to the question of "How do you know/how can you know about the nature of reality" seems to be necessary, to answer the question of "What is the nature of reality". Starting with 'What is the nature of reality' entails the assumption that you know what process/method to use to answer the question. The notion of claiming that 'this x thing is beyond worldviews' is just begging the question and makes it so that you can avoid giving an answer 'how do you know that this x thing is beyond worldviews'. You can replace your question with "Why are you confusing x with worldviews?" and create examples like - Why are you confusing the christian religion with worldviews? - Why are you confusing atheism with worldviews?

If your ultimate goal here is to show how my answer will come to the same epistemic problems that I wrote about above, then sure we can skip ahead, because I agree . But I acknowledge these epistemic problems hence why I would suggest that it is more reasonable to have some epistemic humility compared to 100% absolute confidence in a claim. Sure you can further question it by asking , but why do you care about how reasonable or unreasonable it is? But at that point I can literally create any system or worldview whatsoever and you conceding your ability to reject them on any ground - hence an infinite number of worldviews will stay on the table to choose from. The point you accept circular reasoning is the point where I can create an infinite number of other worldviews and use the same logic that you use to defend them. Fundamentalists use the same kind of logic that you use to preserve and to arrive their own conclusions. "doubt on this fundamental point is a self-deception, therefore my worldview is true " ............................................... Seems like you are suggesting that questioning and logic is too limited , but in that case - why do you talk about epistemology and about questioning things?

Sounds epistemically just as self referential and circular as any other explanation for any other worldview. Thats not to say that its not true, but epistemically it has the same fundamental problems as any other worldview. I think you would have to concede the notion that 'its reasonable to be 100% confident'. Saying "Im the most confident in this kind of metaphysics , because this makes the most sense to me for these x reasons" is different from claiming "im 100% sure that Im not wrong". Sure it will come down less badass and attractive to others, but it will come down much more reasonable.

Sounds like a 100. So the next question is this: epistemically speaking ,how can you make 100% sure that you are not deluding yourself, without already assuming that your conclusion is true?

For example that reality is a dream.

Leo on a 1-100 scale how confident you are, that you are not wrong about metaphysics?

No: "Its only a problem if its done to the guys we like". Imagine if we would use the same brainrot conspiratorial thinking to make Russel guilty:

If its your partner, then you can have a one time extensive conversation with her (especially if you two are into cnc) , where you make it extremely clear what word or act she can do that will clearly signal, that you should stop what you are doing. If its not your partner , then you shouldn't push after a no, because its just too risky and too much downside.

Thats not an answer to my question though. I asked how do you know that verbally asking for her consent is a high likely or a necessary turnoff and you replied with sometimes they say "no" when in reality they don't really mean no. Also, again why risk it? The downside is you not having sex, but the cons are so much worse. You can talk about cnc (Consensual Non-consent) type of fetish, but in that case you have to talk with your partner beforehand whether she is into it or not - you don't go steam ahead assuming it, without her consent.

Thats true that society expects men to take initiative, but that does not mean, that you shouldn't go out of your way to make sure there is a clear consent , especially in cases where you want to try out new ways of having sex. How do you know that it is a turn off for women? - How can you rule out cases , where she didn't want to fuck you in the firstplace regardless of you asking your question to her? Also even if we take it for granted that it could be a turnoff for women, why would you try to risk it - Just to have sex one time? The potential cons for both parties are huge.

Your framing of 'going too masculine mode' sounds like trying to get away with a sexual act without get your partner's consent. Its like saying "as long as she doesn't say no, I can try out all my fetishes and fantasies on her and I don't need to ask beforehand whether she is okay with it or not" Why would you try to go hard on your partner without talking about beforehand (and actually getting her consent) if she is okay with it or not?

You can give an answer to those questions and you still won't know whether he actually did rape or not. I agree it can be useful if you want to do further investigation, but none of those questions are deal breakers alone or combined. The implication that I got from Tanz wasn't that he was asking for information to collect the facts, it was that he was asking those questions as a rhetorical move to demonstrate that it is unlikely that Russel committed the rape.

None of these are relevant questions , because none of these are mutually exclusive with him raping a women. 1) Just because it takes x amount times to charge someone from that doesn't logically follows that he is innocent. 2) Just because someone is in a relationship with someone else, that doesn't mean that the partner cannot be raped by the other partner. All of these discussions would be much more productive if you guys would stick to the facts of a given specific issue rather than speak about generalities that might or might not be applicable to this specific case.

It could be worse than that - for example less people will sign deals with youtube, because they know that they can lose their career really fast just for an accusation. You can lose potential youtube stars because of that, and it doesn't seem like a good business model to me. Also youtube's automatic action of demonetizing you after an accusation - just makes the narrative of you actually being guilty much stronger, so why would any famous person ever risk getting into a business deal like that (that can potentially fuck up their whole image)?

Yeah I agree. I just felt the phrase "all" was a little strong, but yeah I get your main point, sorry for being nit-picky.

Not necessarily. Depending on what kind of family you have and what kind of people you are surrounded with (school or work or friends etc) you can get bullied out from being trans (by social push) , the same way you can get bullied into being trans by social push. Basically in short , you can have external reasons for your detransition.

what do you mean by "deconstructing and reconfiguration of the theoretical aspects of science"? Do you mean something like focusing hardcore on empirically verifying everything(each claim separately) and toning down certain parts of science ,where you almost only use logic to reach a conclusion? Do you have any specific change in mind that could change this? Im not asking in terms of social or political stucture change; Im asking specifically how could a random scientist implement and integrate things in to their work so that the 'siloing of research' becomes a non-existent problem or at the very least becomes a lot better than it is now? Sure. As I have suggested before, imo one root problem when it comes to social sciences is that a lot of data is not reliable - mostly you have to to ask questions to people and gather information that way ( so there is a lot information reduction by them trying to introspect and them trying to narrate their 1st person pov/experience/feelings to you) Do you have any specific epistemology or any other idea that could improve the collection of and the quality of data in social sciences?

Leo(I cannot tag you) let me clear up some things,because we agree on things you might think we don't agree on (the reason for that might be that you misread somethings or might be because I phrased myself badly or might be the combination of the two). Lets start with this: every criticism that I wrote should be evaluated in the context of science and not in the context of spirituality. So things we agree on: 1) Any method could be used to generate insights: I am not opposed to this at all, my criticism was specifically targeting insights that cannot be falsified or verified from third person pov. In fact, if you or anyone can build a method that can generate a fuckload amount of insights that could be validated or falsified from third person pov - I am all for it and I would be interested to hear about it, especially if you have some fine-tuned method optimized for generating insight specifically for science . Again , we agree. My criticism was specifically targeting insights that cannot be falsified or verified from third person pov. 2) You can use verficiation and falsification as well: I didn't say that you can't/shouldn't use verification, I was making a specific critique about instances where its impossible to falsify things from third person pov . Making the criticism that 'its bad science if your epistemic method make it impossible to falsify things from third person pov' is different from saying that 'you should only do falsification'. 3) We can broaden the definition of doing science: We agree on this as well. So Im totally okay for example with calling 'snorting 5meo to generate insights that could be verified or falsified from third person pov' doing science, and of course you can replace snorting 5meo with any method , I don't really care in the sense , that Im not attached to any kind of method. The goal here is to do the method or the collection of methods/practices that are the best for generating insight for science. John Vervaeke has some good things to say on this topic. He argued in the context of wisdom, but his argument can be applied more broadly than that. He said that (im going to use your words) doing consciousness work can break the seemingly fixed structure / box that you think in and not just that, but doing consciousness work will make certain things and certain connections between things more salient that you weren't able to see before. More specificially there are practices that can help you with breaking up your salience network (things that are salient to you) and there are other practices that can help you with reorganizing your salience network so that you can actually see things and connections between things that you haven't seen before in a reorganized way. I paraphrased a lof of things about Vervaeke's work there - he has a lot better way of conveying it and explaining it and he has a specific model and that model is very good at succinctly conveying this concept. 4) Most scientist are closed minded and the current way of thinking about whats and whats not possible is too limited in the field science: If that was the main point that you wanted to demonstrate (when you argued for a different metaphysics), then sure I can agree and could see how adopting a different kind of metaphysics could potentially be helpful with opening up the scope that scientists will dare to think in and opening up the scope, that they will dare to explore. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So after clearing up what we actually meant about things , I could only think of one last thing that we disagree on: that I would separate science from spirituality and you wouldn't. I would argue that science should be uphold to a different standard than spiritual work(so the verification and falsification and demonstration of facts should be done from third person pov ), because in my view science is more about how the world works and less about what the world is. Opposite to that spiritual and philosophical work is more about exploring the nature of things and seeing the biggest picture possible. I wouldn't limit spirituality and philosophy to the same epistemic standard as what I limit science to. The reason for that is because they are aiming for different things. Now that being said, Im not suggesting at all, that there isn't any set of things that could be both attached to science and spirituality (for example both try to explore whats true) , but still main thing im suggesting here is that the separation between the two is useful. Science is more about being practical and exploring what works. Philosophy and spirituality is more about going as abstract as possible and exploring the nature and limitations of things.

Leo , I appreciate the lengthy and thoughtful response. What you are describing there with the snorting of 5meO DMT is about doing spirituality, but you are not describing doing science. Science (as I understand it) either relies on falsifying things in the relative world (third person pov) or using logic to arrive at conclusions that may or may not be empirically falsified in the future . If your claims / insights can only be falsified and grounded in a 1st person pov, then I think there will very serious epistemic problems or limitations with your way of doing your discovery. (If your claims can be falsified in the relative world [from third person pov] , or can be arrived at by logic, then you can ignore my list below ,because that criticism is not applicable in that case) 1)We cannot directly access your 1st person experience: We cannot directly access the contents of your mind. So when it comes to your discovery, I can't do anything with it and I cannot really falsify it. You would say here : nonono - you can dummy - just follow my methods. Yeah sure, but the problem is that at max I can first build some conceptual framework about your insight and then use that as a reference point for later when I gain an insight about something. But obviously, that conceptual image (that I built from your limited explanation of something complex, using limited language and because I will filter it through my biases and my limited understanding) it will be distorted as fuck. So after using your method and maybe gaining an insight; after that I might be able to convince or bullshit myself that my discovery is the exact same as yours, but I have no way of truly knowing whether your and my insights are the same thing or not. 2) Your method is actually unfalsifiable: So I don't want to come off pedantic, but the distinction between verification and falsification is really important here. My understanding is that something is falsifiable if it can be logically contradicted by an empirical test or in other words: given your claim, Its not impossible for me to show that the opposite is the case. If there is no way of demonstrating (implying third person pov) that the opposite is the case, then your insight/hypothesis will always stay on the table as a possibly true candidate forever. If you claim thats not the case, then my question would be this: There is person A and person B. Both of them used your method but their conclusions are contradictory. Person A says that x is the case , Person B says that the negation of x is the case. How do you ground this problem in a way, where it can be reliably decided whether person A or Person B is right. 3) Your method is epistemically very unreliable: I have no way of knowing whether you or a person is lying to me or deluded about their insights or not. You could claim that you acquired an insight and then claim forever that "You should try harder" or "you are not following my methods to the tee" or "You should give it more time", but at the end of the day I couldn't not tell whether I am doing something wrong or a person just lied to me about their insight. So from the first criticism directly follows the second one and from the second one directly follows the third one. With what epistemic process can you properly differentiate between those realities? When I say proper - I am saying conceptually distinguishing the layers between those realities. Just for clarity: Conceptual distinguishing doesn't necessarily imply different metaphysics (I can use the same type of blocks to build completely different things), but its a must to make sense of things. So, the solution that you suggests here ( if I didn't misunderstand you) is essentially saying: scientist should use a different kind of reductionist metaphysics ( switching from the idea that 'everything could be reduced to some material thing' to reducing everything to consciousness). My problem with that is , that - that doesn't address the main problems in science, it only blurs the lines between things, but doesn't tell you: How to organize things, How things and in what way are things interconnected Whats the relationship between things How to properly differentiate between things (given you example above "how to differentiate between non-ordinary, non-material realities within consciousness") How to make sense of things How to measure things What things have causal power ..... So the hard scientific questions, that would provide progress are not touched/moved at all. You can only answer one thing "what things are made of or what things are?". You being able to provide an answer to that question is only a philosophical/spiritual progress ( in my view), but not a scientific one. Saying "everything is imaginary/ everything is consciousness" doesn't give you any explanatory power for any scientific problem. For what its worth you could change the word imaginary to any other word and it would make no effect on scientific progress at all. Because now that you reduced reality to that one thing, now you still have essentially the same amount of hard scientific work to do(look at my bullet point list above) as before.

Do you guys know about any high quality philosophy sources? I will list a few from my own list , feel free to provide yours. https://www.youtube.com/@Friction/videos https://www.youtube.com/@MajestyofReason https://www.youtube.com/@KaneB