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I would reject the underlying premise that the members of other cult like communities have arbitrary belief systems. They are not arbitrary, you can often times abstract and explicitly spell out their epistemology (the way they acquire their "knowledge" ). But one main difference is the underlying claim that you can independently validate the claims that are made by the leader . The issue in practice though again, is that thats just a facade, because as long as you disagree with Leo, the implication will be that there were issues with your validation process and that you need to do it over and over again (do more drugs, more spiritual work, more contemplation etc) up until the point you agree with the leader. So epistemically there is seemingly an out, where you can independently check things, but socially and cult dynamics like you have the same exact same type of punish-reward system as other cults: If you agree with the leader you are profound and intelligent and cool, if you disagree, then you are self-deceived and dumb. You are sovereign and you are the ultimate authority as long as you agree, but if you disagree then you should take Leo's opinion over yours and if you wont, then you are dumb and closed minded. There is also a internal social force inside the community, where they will press you with a bunch of different tools to undermine your confidence in that you are more correct that the leader, and that you need to do more work (for instance, "you are not open minded to the fact that Leo is more right than you" etc). Some other similarities with other cults are - leader has 0 epistemic humility , 100% confidence in main beliefs, 0 ability for the leader and for the group to self correct epistemically, because the norm for what it means for anyone to be right and or to do the practices right collapses back down to what the leader's interpetation is and what the leader accepts to be true. Another interesting subtle dynamic here is that as long as you demonize other communities and point out why they are wrong and why they are dumb , then your sovereignty will be invoked and praised and you will be rewarded for "thinking for yourself"; but if you use your critical thinking and sovereignty to criticize actualized.org, then the claim will be that you are engaging in unconscious group dynamics and that you are biased towards other communities and that you are just unconciously parroting other people. (and basically its impossible that you managed to arrive at a different conclusion than Leo and that your conclusion can match a different leader's answer or a different community's answer). And hence, you will be labeled self-deceived and being a conformist towards other ideas and towards other group of people and your sovereignty (which was given so much importance and which was praised so much up until the point you agreed with the core main ideas of actualized.org) will be immediately trashed and undermined. And there is more stuff that I left out in my long previous ramble. You can notice that Leo is a big manipulative weasel, not just because he only acknowledges limitation when he is hard pressed and when not pressed he immediately goes back to his natural habitat and acts as an authority on spiritual subjects with 100% confidence, but also because he constantly jumps back and forth in a similar way about his superiority as well . In one breath, he will say, that he is not human and that he is above all the limited ,garbage epistemology that humans practice (and so he doesnt care about what any human spiritual leader or philosopher has to say or what objections they have), but when you press him on that claim , then he will immediately change the meaning of that very claim and will pretend that what he really meant was "the reason why he is not a human is because he is God and everyone is God" - and so he will act like he didnt just remove himself from the limitations that he thinks humans have, and he will pretend that he didnt just treat everyone else as just humans and that he only treated himself as God. And the "Im assuming you guys are intelligent enough to interpret my words and posts correctly" in Leo language just means "whatever context we are in right now, and whatever interpretation will make me look the best in this particular situation right now, go with that interpretation and ignore all the previous context that my messages were embedded in; particularly, if that would make me look bad or if that would make me contradict some of the things I already said". So in practice and at the end of the day, its not just that the answer to the question of "what is Truth" and what it means to attain the highest levels spiritually will be directly dependent on Leo; and its not just that the norm that decides whether you do the pracitces right or whether you did enough work will be directly dependent on Leo ; and its not even just that its on Leo to tell you what epistemic tools to even use ; but even the very norm that reveals whether you actually act sovereign and whether you actually practice your sovereignty and think for yourself or not - even that will be directly depended on and judged and answered by Leo (you are not sovereign if you disagree with the main ideas, because the very fact that you disagree with the Leo's ideas shows that you are self-deceived and that you run by unconscious factors).

No its fine, I wasnt serious about being mad about it and I didnt conceptualize it as a dodge, I took it more like you didnt have time to address things or that you wasnt simply interested in doing it (which would have also been fine ,you dont need to be interested in it). Thats the point, that its hard (or maybe impossible) to solve the underdetermination issue. Epistemically you cant figure out whether a given thing supposed to happen (given that it could be the Universe's nature or it could be something from outside changed some fundamental law or some part of the Universe) So you have at least 2 different hypotheses that is consistent with any given observable state of affairs, and the observed facts are equally expected under both hypotheses. (so this goes back to IBE and epistemic virtues, specifically related to how would you decide which hypotheses is more likely to be true - like what epistemic virtues could you appeal to, to find a relevant symmetry breaker [ by symmetry breaker, I just mean relevant difference between the two hypotheses, so that one becomes preferable over the other]). The meta point is just about showing how difficult it is to solve underdetermination issues (because every single observable state of affair is basically compatible with an infinite number of different hypotheses and we need ways to constrain down the set that contains all those hypotheses and we need ways to select from that set in clever ways) and the second reason why I brought it up is because I just wanted to explore if you had unique thoughts about what you take clever ways to be/to mean and how you approach these problems. I know, it relates to the problem of induction and you can take an antirealist view on laws (thats the view that I take as well, I take it that the entities that we call laws are just mere descriptions of observed repeating events and that they dont exist in any robust sense ). But for the sake of the example and thought experiment, I tried to create a scenario where we assume a realist view on laws and given that philosophical context how would we figure out whether a given strange event happened because that was part of some given already existing law or whether something outside the Universe caused that change or event. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ But we can ditch the example if you want and rather focus on the "seeing without eyes" problem, but this will create and run into similar issues. I think we should avoid defining natural and supernatural and simply just engage with the following two hypotheses that I will describe, and this way it wont become a label battle and this way it will be more clear in my opninion what is being talked about (regardless how we want to categorize the two hypotheses). So we are going with Bernardo's model/metaphysics in the sense that we take it that the Universe is God and we have a fact F1) "creatures can see seeing without eyes" and we want to figure out whether this fact is more expected under the hypothesis H1) where God is agential or whether this fact is more expected under the hypothesis H2) where God is non-agential. Here is my opinion and here is my problem: I dont think its more expected on either. I dont think that God being agential generates any unique expectation that God being non-agential wouldn't generate. I think the two hypotheses are way too ambigous and you cant deduce anything of relevant substance merely from the fact that something is agential simpliciter or non-agential simpliciter. Now, ambiguity can be solved by adding specificity and with that ad-hoc move we can get to a point where both of these hypotheses will generate the expectation for F1 (for creatures to see without eyes), the issue is just that its very easy to augment both of these hypotheses in a way, where both of them will generate that fact (so selecting which hypothesis is better cant be done just by the mere appeal that it generates the relevant expectation, because after augmentation both of them will generate it and before augmentation none of them generate it). For instance, I can just augment the two hypotheses and say this: H1) The agential God had some already existing desire to create creatures so that they can see without eyes H2) The non-agential God had the predisposition to create creatures so that they can see without eyes. And here we will have issues figuring out which one has a higher prior probability. Now given my current understanding how these types of questions can be settled and assuming you go with H1 - my question is just - do you have an argument for why F1 is more expected on H1 rather than on H2 ? Or do you have an argument why H1 has a higher prior probability than H2 or Can you show me on what epistemic virtue(s) does H1 score better than H2? Or im just creating a problem and forcing you into a position here, that you dont even want to take or settle and you only want to say that if F1 is actually true (so we can see without eyes) then that fact undermines our current conception and theories related to what is needed for something to have qualitative inner experience (have adjectival qualia) and that could mean that God has those things as well. (even if this is the case, I would be still curious how you would settle the H1, H2 hypotheses problem, because Im curious how you reason abductively).

Pretty crazy how many things AI and people can express in ASCII. Sure but there you are making a big info reduction by assuming shared context. The reason why its enough to say it in natural language the way you did, is because you assume that the reader will interpret your natural language in a physics specific way. Almost all of those terms can be used outside the context of physics. For instance "energy" is extremely ambigous and is used in a 100 different way outside of physics. Now do it for the whole equation and express even numbers in natural language.

I think some of that is obscuring things, but there are bad examples in your list because depending on the context it makes sense to use slightly different words and the other thing that you forget is that scientists are not writing researchg papers for layman, they are writing it for their peers who are already competent and familiar in the area. The implication that you are making is that for every given specific field, everyone should only use natural language and should only use natural language the way layman do, and that it is just a bad requirement to make, because it would make writing papers and understanding papers harder, because of the introduced ambiguity. Like imagine if you would make the exact same criticism about math and to lets ditch symbols like "/,*, +,-,=" etc, lets ditch algebra and then express all mathematical operations in natural language only. If you thought math was hard, then try to express and understand math only using layman , natural language from now on (if thats even possible). Or I dare you to express some extremely dense physics equation only using natural language and lets see whats your shortest most understandable way to express and explicate the meaning of said equation (I have no idea wtf is going on here, im just giving it as an example)

Carl is ducking an interesting talk about inference to the best explanation again . This guy would rather waste his time arguing with Leo over confused "proper" definitions than possibly have a substantive and fruitful talk about IBE.

Almost. The only thing I would add to that is that the proccess of referring isn't exclusive to group use, but it can be done by intention as well. There can be empirical facts about how a given group of people use a term, but that doesnt constrain you to that only use of the term. This is why for instance by the term "chicken" you can mean literally anything you want (even though there are empirical facts about in what context usually people use the term "chicken"). This is why in talks we usually ask what do you mean by "X" rather than just looking up "X" in a dicitionary. Yeah.

Different way to put is to say there is a term and there is a referent to the term. And the question is about what picks out the referent.

Sometimes we use words to describe that, but how is what you said there is incompatible what I said? You literally started your sentence with the word use , which is part of the thesis I was putting forth about meaning of words. This is what I asked you - "do you agree that terms dont have meaning independent of use and intention" and your answer is that the meaning of terms has to do with use. So where is the disagreement? Words can refer to real things in the world - thats perfectly compatible with the "use thesis". The question is about what does the referring (what draws the connection between a term and the meaning of said term) and the thesis I put forth just says use and intention are the things that make that connection.

Does "proper definition" has a proper definition, and what does that mean? If by proper definition you guys just mean to describe in what context people generally use the term, then I agree with that kind of notion. But that isnt normative (doesnt tell you how you ought to use the term independent of your subjective goals), thats just a description about how people use the term. If you guys mean some kind of other notion, then I have no clue what you guys mean by it.

@integral I honestly have no clue where you are getting at and I dont know what you specifically disagree with. Lets try this - do you agree that terms have no meaning independent of use and independent of how a given person intend to use the given term? If you can , please start answering with a yes or no , and then explain the reasoning afterwards.

Absolutely. And the dog will immediately understand "sit" if you express the exact same meaning using a completely different language, because surely there is some kind of universal law, that makes it so that the term has meaning independent of use and the dog has access to that meaning. Just like how humans will perfectly understand immediately if you express the meaning of a sentence in a completely different language (that they havent studied ), right?

That sounds confused and gibberish. You are normatively loading definition giving as if terms would have meaning independent of use and independent of the intention of how a given person or group of people wants to use the term. Yeah and thats compatible with what I said. The dog's interpretation of a term has nothing to do with the term having meaning outside of use and has everything to do with how the human acts when he uses the term. Also Its not like you couldn't teach a puppy using the word "chicken" to teach it to sit.

The first reason why atualized.org is not cult, is because you can disagree with the leader, its just that you should do infinitely more work as long as you disagree with the leader and your best bet of being wrong is disagreeing with the leader and you are not open minded if you think that you are more right than the leader. The second reason why actualized.org is not a cult is because the focus is not on the leader, but on the work itself , its just that if you do the work and you come to a different conclusion than the leader ( then again, you did something wrong and you should do more work as long as you have a different view than the leader). Again, just focus on the work and not on the leader. Have you heard btw, that the leader guy is the most awake person in the Universe? The real main actualized.org center slogan is: "You should come to my conclusions on your own, exclusively using the epistemic tools I told you to use "

Leo still uses this confused talk about "proper" definitions. There is no such a thing as a "proper" definition (you can define any fucking term, in any fucking way you like and there is no law of the universe that tells you about what any given term is supposed to mean irrespective of use), but there is such a thing as investigating and firguring out how a given word is used by a given group of people (and yes, you can empirically investigate how society broadly uses a given term or how experts who study that given area use the term). But we can just drop the confused "proper definition" talk and just lay down multiple different definitions and then give an analysis under which ones actualized.org would be considered a cult (assuming Leo and people give more fuck about substance, than about getting lost in semantics). For instance using this definition: I dont think even Heaven's gate would fall under this. It seems to be the case that Marshall Applewhite genuinely believed his own bullshit (he literally unalived himself along with the other members). So under your use of the term 'cult' , Heaven's gate wasnt a cult. if you are the standard of what counts as "proper epistemology" then we are fucked. If other people would apply the lack of rigor that you apply to make sense of the world and to reach conclusions about things, then we wouldnt get anywhere. If treating the conclusions drawn from very weak inductive inferences about other people’s knowledge, experience, or awakening with absolute certainty counts as "proper" epistemology, then hundreds of millions of people on Earth already qualify as examples of "proper" epistemology. Like you unironically have a "God revealed to me that you are wrong and dumb" kind of epistemology. And just to be very clear - you still have 0 reply to the issues that I and others have pointed out about the limitations of the mystic kind of epistemology and you have never ever replied to those and just brush them off or just simply ignore them (as if that would be a substantive reply to the issues that are brought up). You are in a constant cycle of "of course I can be wrong" when pressed, and when not pressed - you immediately pivot back to "of course im the standard of proper epistemology, and Im more right than everyone else and all of you fuckers are completely wrong and have no fucking clue what you guys are talking about" Also the double standards that you use and that you expect about how other should treat you and your owrk vs how you treat others and their work is still very cute: You expect and require other people to always run with such an interpretation of your statements and your work and your behavior, where you look the best and where you never contradict yourself and where there isn't any negative entailments to what you are saying that you would be uncomfortable with, but when it comes to you doing the evaluation of what other people are saying or what the entailment of their work is , then you dont do your most basic due diligence to try to check or reinterpret what they meant by certain statements. When you interpret statements and the work of other people, you either project the most uncharitable and worst interpretations on their statements under which interpretation their statments become either obviously false or insanely inplausible or just simply dumb ; or you just simply force your own frame and own use of words on their work and their statements (again your confused "proper" definition view in action) and then pretend that they used those word the exact same way as you do (this is btw another sign that you are nowhere near the system thinker you think you are - you are extremely rigid and unsophisticated ,when it comes to entertaining alternative positions and alternative interpretations of things). You mistake your lack of capability to entertain multiple different interpretations and hypotheses at the same time and you forcing your one and only understood frame on everything with you thinking for yourself and being sovereign. So what we are left with is something like: if anyone ever thinks that Leo Gura has ever contradicted himself or if anyone thinks that you ever said anything dumb or false, then your reply will be "the only reason why you interpreted my statements that way is because you are not intelligent enough to see that im right or that I was right, and of course and its obviously true, that all of my past statements has to be interpreted in a way under which what I said is true and under which there isn't any such entailment or consequence that I would be even remotely uncomfortable with" If you have a conclusion that contradicts Leo Gura's view of things, then you better do more spiritual work or more psychedelics, because its impossible that the most awake person in the Universe is wrong and that there is someone who is more right about something related to spirituality and if you think that its possible that there is someone who is more awake than Leo, then you are just dumb and not intelligent enough to see the obvious truth. Should Leo Gura do more work and should Leo Gura entertain that he shouldnt "settle" all disagreements about spirituality with "you are wrong , im right, do more work" , naaaah, the dude is already awake and knows his shit better than you do.

Thats just doing the move where you put the probability or the credence talk inside the proposition itself - and sure you can do that, and if you want I can make it more precise by saying - if you include that kind of language inside the expressed proposition then those propositions will be true or false. But my understanding is that ditching the excluded middle doesnt commit you to saying that there isn't any single proposition that is true or false, its just saying "truth is not automatically bivalent for every proposition". But this is besides the point, the point is just to capture nuance, where there is nuance.

Some of you seem extremely confused about this. The view is just something that represents credence in probabilities and affirms that there can be multiple contributing causal factors to things and it takes into account alternative hypotheses for any given thing. You can have two people who have this view and they can still disagree on epistemic norms, epistemic approaches and they can disagree on the assigned probabilities to things. The core idea is just to have a meta-frame that allows you to capture the nuance of the world. It doesnt gurantee anything about forming true beliefs about things in the world, its just given that it makes you entertain alternative hypotheses for any given thing, it gives you the possibility to explore more options (rather than just ignoring alternative options). it makes you ditch the law of excluded middle and you represent most (if not all of your beliefs and hypotheses) in probabilities or credence talk (likely, not likely etc) rather than in a regular (true-false) dichotomy.

I think what you call categorical issue that is basically where one of the main problem of hypothesis creation and picking lies and its highly related to probability issues as well imo. There is a tradeoff between specificity and vagueness in hypothesis creation. The more vague a hypothesis is, the more weight evidence for that given hypothesis will carry, because it will confirm a larger set of things (for instance, if you want to argue for God, then finding evidence that is expected under God simpliciter - meaning a God with any set of desires and nature) that evidence will confirm God's existence in general and given this evidence , it doesnt matter whether you are wrong about the specific attributes of God. However, if the hypothesis is too vague, then it wont make any expectations and hence you wont be able to find any evidence for it. (I personally dont think God simpliciter makes any expectations whatsoever) On the other hand, the good thing with more specified hypotheses is that its easier to find evidence for them, because they make more traceable expectations. The bad thing about specified hypotheses is that they are much more prone to be rendered false, because their specificity gives them more attack surface to be wrong about. (basically they affirm more propositions, and affirming more propositions makes you more prone to be wrong all else equal, because if just one of those affirmed propositions turn out to be false, then your hypothesis will be immediately rendered false). And this is how this problem relates to probabilities: Vague hypotheses are more likely to be true (because they are compatible with a large number of specific hypotheses), but harder to be confirmed, because harder to find evidence for them. Specific hypotheses are less likely to be true and its easier to find evidence for them.

Okay I grant that under most interpretations "actually breaking the laws of physics" is a gibberish statement, but I think I can give a sense under which it is intelligible. Lets say that by nature we just mean the Universe, and the Universe has certain behavioral patterns (behavior that repeats and that can be observed and replicated given the necessary conditions universally everywhere) and that would be basically the "actual" laws of physics. "Breaking" it would mean changing those behavioral patterns, meaning - even if you replicate the exact same set of conditions, the behavior that applied before do not apply anymore. But we can do fine-tuning or miracle hypotheticals if they are easier to make sense (where lets say multiple limbs are fully grown back under 1 second). Im just curious how you run through miracle examples, and supernatural examples , and how you update in principle towards supernaturalism being a more probable explanation for any given event. Because, I have seen your criticism of Bernardo, and I genuinely struggle to see it in principle how you can update towards a more robust supernatural view using abductive or any kind of reasoning. And this isnt about closed mindedness for me, this is genuinely lacking the epistemic ability to deal with underdetermination issues (meaning any given observable event or state of affair will be compatible with both naturalism and supernaturalism). For instance - I dont understand how and why given NDE facts you update towards God having metacognition, values , desires rather than staying with God not having any of the listed things. Like why think that NDE facts are more expected under an agential God than under a non-agential one? And if they are not more expected, then what reasons can you appeal to that should motivate Bernardo to update towards an agential God given NDE facts? Because if the agential God is merely a just so story (its merely constructed to explain the set of facts on the table and it doesnt make any novel predictions) and it commits you to make trade-offs on other epistemic virtues ,then why would you ever update towards it being the case?

A macroscopic object suddenly spawns in your room out of thin air. For instance a chair or 10 million dollars or anything else. or maybe a better example that would be more applicable would be something like : there being 0 gravity (but just exclusively inside your room) for a duration of 10 minutes. But the difficulty to come up with an example that can tease out the relevant epistemic differences between the listed hypotheses is sort of part of the problem I want to highlight. It seems to be the case, that even in the context of a random event that violates the laws of physics - even in that context - we still have almost 0 epistemic tools at our disposal how to figure out which of the listed hypotheses is more likely to be true (especially if we cant assume anything specific about the desires or nature of the powerful agent).

A good chunk of hypothesis picking will come down to abductive reasoning - So Carl, do you have any thoughts on IBE (abductive, inference to the best explanation arguments) - more specifically how to cash out different epistemic virtues when you compare two or more hypotheses? More specifically would be curious about how you approach issues like miracle claims or supernatural claims and you how update your view and whether you have some kind of sophisticated principled approach by which you can compare supernatural claims to natural claims and would be also curious by what epistemic virtues you compare hypotheses. I will give you a specific example , and if you have an answer to this, then please walk me through your reasoning and approach using IBE or your statistical worldview and show me how you assign probability and or how you decide which hypothesis is more likely to be true and why. Example: There is an event that breaks the known laws of physics and you need to pick which hypothesis is correct or more likely to be true. H1) A powerful enough agent broke the actual laws of physics H2) The actual laws of physics was never broken, we just had a wrong understanding of the actual laws of physics , so the event that we observed was consistent with the actual laws of nature. H3) The laws of physics was actually broken, but no agent caused it, and this event was brute in principle, meaning nothing caused/triggered the event and it doesnt have any further explanation in principle. (I dont think these three hypotheses exhaust the possibility space, but for the sake of not making this issue even more complex than it already is, lets just only entertain and compare these three hypotheses). Side note: There is so much more that I would want to talk about related to worldview forming and hypotheses picking and issues surrounding these things (like your views on the PSR, your potential approach about how you navigate disagreements about assigned priors to hypotheses specifically in the context of apriori arguments and more) but I dont want to overwhelm you and the earlier given example is already complex and time-consuming enough.

I like this approach, and I mostly live by this - but when it comes to applying it to meta frames and different meta-philosophy frames , it can get so complicated so fast that almost no one practice it at that level (or they might, but given that they are nowhere near informed about other alternative views and frames, their probability assignment will be meaningless and it will only represent a very small fraction of things that they know about). This is not a criticism of this approach though, because the problem I proposed is not even related to this, it is related to our cognitive limitations. Like it would be very cool if we would be able to do something like this - " Okay, currently here is 10000 different possible positions that can be taken on metaphyiscs , here is a 100 different theories in phil of language, here is 10000 different views on epistemology , here is 10000 different views on ethics - I understand each and every one of these theories in depth and let me now create a 100 million different configurations (worldviews) using these views and then let me think through all the possible problems under each and every one of these configurations and then let me come up with a synthesis that has the least amount of problems with it and let me also assign a probability to each and every one of these views "

I dont have any specific framework in mind, but fuck it, I will defend your position about wanting to have a framework. Just like some people here can make the argument how a framework can fuck conversations up, not having a framework can also fuck conversations up if you are not already skilled in having conversations. If you want to improve any skill - its good to have some structure in mind that you can use for practice and for consciously creating feedback-loops and then to eventually , hopefully integrate skills into your subconscious mind (and at that point you actually wont need any framework anymore) Btw people here failed to recognize that the reason why Ulax created this very thread was because he wanted to have a meta frame under which he can practice his convo skills and most people here failed to read your intentions and your tone, so its clear that they arent equipped and they arent suitable to give you advice about how to have convos.

Its fine , you are good, no need to apologize.

Then what was the issue with what I said? The "trash" response was a criticism to people who were writing their comments in the context of an agential God. Then we literally agree, because I take it that that phrase is almost entirely useless and vacous in the context of a non-agential God.

Given that passionate (definitely not triggered answer), you surely have good arguments and answers to my questions. Given that you go with an agential God , based on what set of values does God make his choices (for instance create the world and potentially prevent things from happening and or allow things to happen) and what does "all-good" mean under your conception of God?