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I can grant that, but thats not the granting you think it is. There is already a premise that built in your question that I and most people and if you are honest with yourself - you reject as well. The premise being that you have to be 100% certain in your conclusion .- you don't have to - there is evidence that can be gathered that can elevate a hypothesis probability of being true. So the point is, that you can elevate the probability of this premise 'being healthy will make you live longer compared to if you are less healthy' being true with certain studies, without needing to reach 100% confidence in the conclusion. You can pretend to be the ultimate skeptic here, but then the best you can achieve with that is that you are completely agnostic about every empirical question. Which would mean that all of you specualtions are completely undermined as well and you cannot make any positive or negative statement about any empirical matter at all. But obviously you don't believe in that, hence why you made this whole thread.

We can talk about the value of unrealistic hypotheticals if you want to. Btw I find it funny that on a highly philosophical forum, people have problem with unrealistic hypotheticals. Engineers and scientific people in general tend to evade certain hypotheticals, because they either don't see value in it or how it connects back to the discussion at hand or they literally cant go to that level of abstraction.

Now the next step is you giving a definition for what you mean by healthy or more healthy.

good, thats something tangible that can be worked with

We will get back to reality , first we has to establish the goalpost and we have to establish whether you can engage honestly with hypotheticals without evading them. We are going step by step.

That answer makes 0 sense. You are changing what the question asked to you. You are not engageing with the question and evading a really easy straightforward answer. If everything else equal obviously a more healthy person will live longer. "yeah but you are not considering a trillion other things" the hypothetical accounts for all those things you are just not understanding it. Thats what all else being equal mean you take into account infinite variables except health and compare less health to more health. A very easy question you are just evading it.

Thats why I said all else being equal - to isolate the variables. All else equal here would mean whatever objection you can come up with in your mind - you apply that objection to both a more healthy and to a less healthy person. So having the same genetics, same history, taking the same amount of risks (add anything else here) does being more helathy make you live longer or not?

@Yousif All else being equal (taking the same amount of risk etc), does being healthy increase your lifespan compared to being less healthy or not?

Im trying to say more than that, but its hard to convey it in words. The whole thing that you layed down (about only consciousness being real and everything else is just imagination) would itself be just one aspect of the kind of the infinity im trying to point to . For the sake of understanding I will try to make a difference between existential limitation and imagination (yes I know under what you talk about, consciousness can imagine up even existential limitations). So if I grant all the things that you said in that case, we can create scenarios where I imagine that consciousness is not the only thing that exists and we can create infinite different scenarios of this, where I imagine the Absolute or the ground to be different from consciousness. Yes I can grant that all of that is possible under the notion that only consciousness exists. Consciousness can imagine infinite different worlds with infinite different laws and with infinte different relative truths. However that whole notion is existentially limited to consciousness, because the claim is that thats the only actual thing thats real and everything else is just imagined. So there is a difference between being able to imagine non-absolute or in other words, being able to imagine infinite different grounds for existence vs creating worlds that actually existentially different from each other. Im not talking about imagining that those lines between those worlds exist, I mean that they actually different ontologically, meaning different on the being level. In other words, they cannot be traced back to consciousness, they are actually built ontologically different from each other. In the 'consciousness is the only thing that exists' things being ontologically other than consciousness is impossible - and thats an existential limitation. That would also paradoxically be an existential limitation, that impossibility can only be imagined and that it can't actually exist.

@Nemra Most of your arguments are applicable to atheists as well - basically to most people in general (some of your arguments even applicable to people here who claim they are awake/enlightened) I can find certain religious people who questioned metaphysics more and have inquired / have gone down more thought paths in good faith with honesty and with incredible rigor than what you probably will question and inquire in your entire life. Btw I dont know why some people still pretend here that they care about questioning everything ( I specifically mean people who claim to be awake/enlightened). People who claim to be awakened or enlightened will tell you that it is a limited tool and probably wont get you to the end result. Its basically just used as a rhetoric tool when it is convenient and dropped immediately when they are cornered themselves.

You can create any kind of sentence that has a truth value and the negation of that sentence can be true at the same time. For example saying that "Consciousness is the only thing that exists" and "Consciousness is not the only thing that exists" can both be true at the same time if you go outside of classical logic. Literally everything becomes possible without any constrains

When you say words like "thats impossible" or "can't" - I have no idea what you mean by those things, if you don't mean limitation or a lack of possibility. All of the issues that you are pointing out are only applicable inside certain logic systems like for example classical/aristotelian logic. Once contradictions are allowed none of your critcisms are relevant because everything becomes allowed and possible. Even Leo and everyone else here are working under classical logic and the proof for that is that none of you guys allow metaphysical contradictions. Not a single person, and there are very good reasons why that is. Allowing metaphysical contradictions would mean that anything can be anything else at the same time without any problem. So saying things like nothing and everything is made out of consciousness at the same time would mean no problem or saying things like everything and nothing exists at the same time also wouldn't mean any problem at all or saying that everything is made out of completely different substance from each other - literally any kind of silly thing or system could be made up here. In this case nothing needs to be grounded in anything or anythingcan be grounded in anything and nothing at the same time. There is not a single thing that becomes impossible if you allow metaphysical contradictions. The very notion of impossibility and possibility and words like can and can't are all happning inside the framework of classic logic - thats another thing that all of these things become completely meaningless, because our sensemaking is happening within contrast and classical logic.

@Osaid Why do you point out and care about contradictions? - You are limiting metaphysics by aristotelian logic , no ?

I think more or less consciousness is typically used to track how much you are aware of the content not the structure (structure would be the recognition that everything is consciousness and content would be all the possible worlds and things and ways and patterns that can be imagined or in other words built from consciousness). How much relative truths and how many combination of those relative truth are you conscious of and how many sub categorizes and perspectives are you conscious of? - just staying within the laws of logic (law of identity, law of non-contradiction, law of the excluded middle) there are an infinite number of possible worlds, then fuck knows what breaking those actually entails in terms of number of relative truths wise. Like saying - when you go to sleep at night, its one thing that you can recognize that you are dreaming, but its another thing to: Freely do things in your dream ; To be aware all the content of that dream; To be aware of all the laws and patterns of that dream; To be aware of all the perspectives in that dream; To be able to change that dream all together to a completely different dream And then to be aware of all the possible dreams that can be imagined and all the content that can be imagined in each of those dreams and all the combinations how you can arrange the elements in those dreams and being aware all the possible ways how you can categorize and slice up and interpret those dreams

Yep and thats why I jumped in, and I don't think that you have answered any of those questions in this thread that I asked above. The whole point of this discussion was to see how strong the line is between religion and spirituality and you tried to make arguments to make that line thicker and we pushed back to show that that line is much thinner that most people here think. Most attempts to differentiate between the two failed, because most of those things are applicable to spiritual people as well. The fact of the matter is that a lot of people here try to make that line thicker because they think they are more intelligent or more conscious than religious people (this is another thing that most of you probably picked up unconsciously from Leo, without contemplating any of these things yourselves). Its basically seem to be motivated reasoning to feel superior or better without acknowledgeing that most of those criticisms are applicable to the approach that you guys use as well.

@TheSelf Im not sure im tracking whats our disagreement about right now. Do you try to say, that having beliefs about awakening and methods regarding awakening doesn't necessarily mean that that person is religious? Or in other words, do you try to communicate, that just because someone has beliefs about awakening and methods regarding awakening, it doesn't mean that that person can't be categorized as a seeker or spiritual person? Also are you trying to say that you differentiate between religious and spiritual beliefs and if so, my question would be how?

One another thing that might be worth to clear up (this is for everyone in the thread who wants to engage with this) How do you differentiate between belief, knowledge and direct experience? (assuming you differentiate at all)

Well regarding that - Imagine you are completely agnostic about what can elevate your thirst (meaning , you are not giving any method any more weight compared to other methods). In that scenario it would mean, that you have an infinite number of methods to choose from and you will choose completely randomly from that infinite set of methods, because you have no belief at all what has a higher chance of solving the problem. I don't thnk this maps onto what most spiritual people or seekers are. They follow a very clear pattern of behaviour and they start trying out certain methods over others.

@TheSelf okay, so would you define the seeker or the spiritual person as a completely agnostic person (who doesn't have any beliefs at all regarding awakening, and regarding what methods will produce awakening) ?

I didn't say that you are religious, I also didnt say that you said that I have to believe it. All I tried to say is that the seeker has certain beliefs too - The seeker has the belief that there is such a thing as awakening, the seeker also has the belief that certain methods can get him to awakening and awakening doesn't happen completely randomly. You retrospectively know. When you started as a seeker you had to have some faith in the method , otherwise you wouldn't have done it. No you arent joining his religion and no one is claiming that. No one said that teaching methods is a sufficient criteria alone for someone to be a religious leader/figure. All that was pointed out is that one of your differentiation regarding spiritual and religious people doesn't seem to work (specifically the one where one have faith in the methods/techniques). Responding to the drawing analogy - when you start, you have no idea what method will actually teach you how to draw. All you have is a master who can demonstrate that he can draw, but you have no knowledge whether the techniques that he teaches will get you there or not.

Okay, so your take is that certain methods can help one or push one to get there. How do you know that thats the case, epistemically speaking? --- Just to be clear (Im not suggesting that you are wrong), the reason why I ask is because that take seem to be a belief (the same way religious people have beliefs about what method or technique will produce or can help you the best to have an awakening). So that would be a similarity between religious and spiritual people, unless you can provide a symmetry breaker (differentiate the two in a relevant way) For the sake of understanding this kind of language in a more precise manner - Can you become directly conscious of things that are not absolute? So for example, would you use that language to describe causal events like "I became directly conscious of what healed my relationship with my family members or I became directly conscious of what is the cure for a specific illness".

So basically you use it as - becoming conscious of something. @TheSelf Do you think there is any relationship between a method (like praying or meditation or doing yoga or doing psychedelics or doing breathwork or anything else) and awakening? In other words, do you think that doing certain methods will elevate the chance of awakening or awakening is completely random and detached from all causal relations?

Whats the difference between experience and direct experience?

Yeah I think now I know what you are refering to when you say "infinity". When it comes to that kind of description though, that entails literally everything (which means all non contradictions and all contradictions and all non paradoxes and all paradoxes at the same time) - and even this framing is bad for it. Its much more paradoxical in nature than some of the people here might think. Whatever framing or nature you describe to it - it immediately falls apart .Even the idea to think about it in terms of inclusion and exclusion is wrong and limited. Even to say that it is the thing that includes everything - is not it. Even to say that it is the thing that includes , excludes everything at the same time - is not it. Saying that it is limitless is not it. Saying that it is limited is not it. Saying that it is limitless and limited at the same time is not it. Even calling it non-dual is limited and wrong (cause non duality excludes duality). It is nondual and dual and every other possible thing that we can think of and can't think of at the same time - and more.

I want to respond to this, even though I know you replied to another guy. To be clear, Im not trying to defend his idea of spirituality or God, Im specifically trying to respond to the infinity claim. (If you have a different definition of infinite compared to what Im outlining down here, then Im sorry, cause I will probably waste your time.) In mathematics you can find claims about bigger and smaller infinities. Think of it this way: You can have a set of natural numbers that will contain numbers starting from 0 to infinite. However that set is smaller compared to the set of integers (which includes negatives as well). And that set is smaller than the set of rational numbers. Another way to talk about it - is by invoking a coordinate system: We can start with only using one axis (x). That one axis can contain numbers from - infinite to + infinite. However, we can add 1 more dimension (axis) to it and it will contain infinitely more coodinates. And then we can add one more axis to it and that will be bigger compared to the 2 dimensional one. And after all that, we can add infinitely more axis to it. - in other words, even though a 2 dimensional coordiante system can contain an infinite amount of coodinates, it still cant contain as many as a 3 or more dimensional coordinate system could.