DocWatts

Thanks! And there's a term that's used for this problem - 'relevance realization' - which is shorthand for the automatic way in which we just seem to know what's relevant for everyday tasks and activities, without any thought or effort on our part. Our perceptual system puts in a great deal of work to structure the world into gestalts of meaning, long before logic and reasoning ever enters into the picture. This is very easy for living organisms, and has proven very, very difficult for AIs. Although LLMs like ChatGPT have made impressive strides in emulating some aspects of this through the error backpropagation method which its models use to output text.

If that's the case, what you've managed to achieve is all the more impressive - adjacent paths to a similar destination, I suppose! Nothing wrong with reinventing the wheel, a lot of the insights from phenomenological texts are frankly poorly communicated. It's obvious you have a deep grasp on this material from how refreshingly straightforward you're able to convey what someone like Martin Heideggar contorted his text into a pretzel to communicate.

Howdy! I thought I might share an excerpt from a long-form essay I wrote, which is a deep dive into the epistemology of perspectives. The main idea that this piece explores is that we don’t just 'have' perspectives - we inhabit them. Meaning that we don't leave our viewpoints behind as we inspect their construction. Rather than chasing an impossible 'view from nowhere' or bowing out of the truth-game altogether, what I propose is embracing this 'view from within' - and learning to navigate it skillfully. Full article can be found here: https://7provtruths.substack.com/p/the-view-from-within A ‘View from Nowhere’ promises an impossible escape hatch from our messy, partial perspectives. Here’s a better alternative. ______________________________________________ The Waters We Swim In Like that old parable about the fish that’s oblivious to water, we too are immersed within a sea of influences that we rarely notice or examine. We like to think that our viewpoints are our own, yet they’re shaped by currents flowing through us from countless unseen sources. As social beings, our immersion within these shared currents of meaning isn’t optional - it’s a central component of having a viewpoint at all. Yet not all of these inherited patterns are benign. Some can become maladaptive when our circumstances change, while others are deliberately engineered to serve agendas that aren’t in our best interests. We can’t opt out, and we can’t fully step away - which makes dissecting this all-encompassing presence a real bitch. Precisely because we don’t leave these currents behind while we’re coming to grips with how it directs our gaze, any such analysis will inevitably contain some degree of circularity. Given this predicament, we may find ourselves drawn to an impossible ‘view from nowhere’ which promises to liberate us from our messy, partial perspectives. Or else we may bow out of the truth game altogether, leaving us ill-prepared for when the world forces us to pick a lane. Neither approach works - so let’s find one that does. When we abandon the fantasy of escape and the luxury of disengagement, we can pivot instead to an acceptance of our ‘view from within’ - and learn to navigate it skillfully. That means being able to discern between viewpoints that are aligned with our values, those we’ve slid into out of manipulation and bias, and those that are intrinsic to human cognition. The million dollar question, then, is how to develop this discernment, when we can step back from what we’re trying to assess, but not step outside of it entirely? What we’re left with is a gordian knot, where our tools for assessing perspectives are themselves a product of those very perspectives. This predicament becomes even more challenging when we remember that we don’t inhabit these landscapes alone - we’re a product of the systems we participate in, even as we help shape them. And our current landscape is rife with systems that are precision engineered to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities. And with AI entering the mix, this epistemic and emotional minefield is about to get a hell of a lot worse. Faced with the prospect of being swept beneath an exhausting tide of complexity, our frantic desperation for a life raft of easy-answers is perfectly understandable. If only the world itself was so accommodating. ______________________________________________ You Are Not An Island The hard truth: if you were hoping for an escape hatch from the nebulosity of daily life, think again. Becoming skilled navigators on the sea of perspectives begins with attentive absorption within the mundane. No shortcuts here - more purposeful engagement with these landscapes of meaning is hashed out over kitchen tables and workplaces and school boards. The takeaway of this reality-check? You are not an island - your viewpoints don’t emerge from some pristine inner-sanctum, but from the messy give-and-take of our shared, everyday world. Our vehicle for exercising agency within these negotiated realities is through culture. Culture is our shared system of collective meaning-making, which we inhabit and shape together. It’s our signature evolutionary specialization, as instinctive to humans as hive-building is to bees. And like a hive, cultures too are living systems - maintained by individuals, who are shaped by those very cultures in turn. For the influence flows both ways. This recursive relationship between individuals and collectives reveals something crucial about perspectives. We don’t construct our viewpoints from scratch - we inherit cultural templates and adapt or invert them to fit our circumstances. To that end, our attitudes and beliefs are always situated against a horizon of significance - a tacit framework of assumptions about what matters - which we negotiate with our culture. Our intuitive sense that someone’s political beliefs are more significant than their preferred pizza toppings is an example. Most of this horizon comes to us ready-made - we don’t normally begin our mornings by drawing up an inventory of what’s important and what’s trivial. For the most part, these prioritizations come effortlessly - only jumping to the fore when our world is seriously disrupted. Most of us only catch glimpses of this horizon when we experience an unexpected loss or setback that shatters our sense of who we are. But here’s the rub: the effortless nature of this cultural osmosis is a double edged sword - we can’t scrutinize every assumption we absorb, but only fanatics and fools doubt nothing. ‘Question everything’ may sound profound in theory, but it would be utterly paralyzing in practice. Instead, it pays to be strategic about what we’re questioning. Which begs the obvious question: scrutinize what exactly? Since our concern is on how to exercise agency within constraints, that means zeroing in on how this autonomy gets undermined in the first place. Doing so will help us tease out where we have avenues for genuine choice. As we’ll see, some of these limitations on our autonomy are benign, while others are designed to serve agendas that aren’t in our best interests. But what makes us so susceptible to these problematic influences in the first place? To see how this works, it helps to understand the psychological machinery these systems are built to exploit. ______________________________________________ Our Cognition Is Built For Survival, Not Truth Human cognition is wired to prioritize threats over opportunities, which is highly sensible from an evolutionary standpoint. Miss an opportunity and you might go hungry. Miss a threat and you might be dead. While today’s societies are considerably safer than the ancestral environments where this cognitive architecture evolved, evolution doesn’t care if this legacy software is a bad fit for our current circumstances. Natural selection doesn’t optimize - it satisfices, cobbling together solutions that are ‘good enough’ for survival and reproduction. As a result, outdated wiring doesn’t just get switched off - it gets repurposed. Practically speaking, this ancestral firmware shows up in the form of cognitive biases. Two major culprits stand out for our purposes. There’s a negativity bias - where negative events are more emotionally engaging than positive ones. And there’s a recency bias - where we prioritize what’s fresh in memory. The upshot of these inherited vulnerabilities? When our priorities aren’t our own, this can leave us hypervigilant to the wrong kinds of threats, while overlooking ones that actually matter. Our anxieties, then, provide important clues as to our psychological blind spots - areas where our emotional needs override our epistemic ones. And when these hijacked responses get scaled up across entire populations, it metastasizes in culture. ______________________________________________ The Authoritarian’s Bargain So what do our cultural artifacts reveal about our current moment? Judging from our social media feeds, we’re awash in a sea of hostility, superficiality, and despair. Yet we also inhabit a world full of wonder, creativity, and joy. And here’s the real kicker - both of these realities are simultaneously true. So what’s going on here? You can touch grass, experience genuine beauty and connection - and you damn well should! But that doesn’t make the grind of day-to-day life against systems that are increasingly stacked against you any less real when you return. The jarring gap between these two realities isn’t just disorienting - it creates a breeding ground for bad actors to take advantage of us. Our lingering sense that a better world is possible can become the hook for an ugly form of grievance politics, where demagogues offer up a set of reliable scapegoats for why the good life was stolen from us. A fairy-tale for adults that promises to return us to a mythologized past - if only we surrender our agency to a charismatic strongman, and trust in his plan to make us ‘great again’. The allure of the authoritarian’s bargain lies in how it contains a kernel of truth - one that’s rooted in legitimate fears and frustrations. Anxiety over one’s social status is a reliable culprit here. Social status isn’t just some theoretical construct - threaten it, and people respond in dangerously predictable ways. For those feeling the gnaw of victimization and decline, it’s an attractive bargain. Sacrificing one’s intellectual sovereignty and moral agency becomes an acceptable trade off for the intoxicating illusion of empowerment it provides. Put simply, this exhausting disconnect between our expectations and our lived reality didn’t emerge from nowhere. To make sense of this split, it will be helpful to highlight why this particular moment is unusual - and the forces brought us here. The hyper-polarized world we’ve become habituated to didn’t occur by happenstance - it has specific causes that can be traced and understood. So what happens when a disruptive technology collides with a social fabric that’s been hollowed out by decades of quiet erosion? It turns cracks into chasms. ______________________________________________ The Attention Economy The digital revolution that we’ve come to take for-granted was no mere technological shift. It was also an accelerant for an erosion of communal life that was already well underway as this disruptive technology was entering the mainstream. Evidence of this atomization could be seen in declining participation in shared associations that knit individuals into a community - from bowling leagues to union halls to neighborhood associations. These stable anchors of collective meaning-making became collateral damage of changes in how we live and how we work. Suburban isolation, mounting economic inequality, and overscheduled lives gradually hollowed out the civic associations from which our shared social reality is woven. The evolution of today’s digital platforms was a process in learning how to monetize the human needs that were being unmet in the wake of this fragmentation. And while there’s been no shortage of bad actors along the way, this commodification didn’t require an evil mastermind. Just the banal mechanics of market incentives, combined with new means for exploiting old vulnerabilities in the human psyche. The cumulative effect of this algorithmic optimization was the gradual creation of an attention economy - one where our psychological vulnerabilities are systematically exploited.

For what it's worth, this kind of in-depth and thoughtful analysis requires time to reflect and integrate - which is why I suspect that the Intellectual Stuff form gets less traffic than sections of the Forum. I really dig your writing style, which does an admirable job of making a complex topic approachable without dumbing things down. You also do an impressive job of integrating the sort of insights that Leo shares in his videos within a rigorous, phenomenological analysis of experience. All too often I see the sort of topics that you take the time to deal with here handwaved away with catch-all terms like 'God' or 'The Absolute', without the sort of grounded deconstruction of these concepts which makes these notions feel earned. There's a surprising amount of overlap with my own epistemic and ontological framework, with an obvious difference in emphasis. I'd be curious to hear what some of your influences were - the shadow of Alfred Korzybski, Martin Heideggar, and Hubert Dreyfus seem obvious (but perhaps not, there are of course other places to absorb these ideas). Some favorite sections from your piece: From a meta-phenomenological perspective, this does not confirm an external God’s existence, but rather situates “God” as the felt substance of experience itself – an infinite, divine-like reality encountered within consciousness. This view honors the power of the experience while maintaining humility about its ontological meaning. Love, love, love this! A perfect encapsulation of the phenomenological God that I subscribe to - where the big G isn't a metaphysical entity but our felt connection to Reality itself. The intensity or beauty of an experience does not determine its ontological status. The mind is evolutionarily tuned to treat powerful sensations as meaningful, but this is a heuristic – not a reliable truth-detection mechanism. Mystical experiences are vivid, coherent, and emotionally overwhelming, but this doesn’t mean they describe an ultimate reality. They may reveal something about the nature of experience, not what exists outside of it. Perfectly sums up some of my criticisms of psychedelic mysticism - we can attend to mystical states with an appropriate amount of skepticism without being dismissive of their value. A very William James-ian point.

For what it's worth, I'm willing to give much more leeway to 19 year old kid who got suckered because they saw some Joe Rogan clips pop up in their YouTube feed. I'm far less willing top extend that leeway to folks who remember the shitshow that was the fascist cheeto's first term. Watched him attempt a violent insurrection at the US Capital. Heard him say that he was going to be a 'dictator on day one'. And said to themselves "more of that please". I'm also pissed at the folks who sat this election out because of they couldn't be bothered to vote for the most clear case of the lesser of two evils in the history of US politics, but I'm not going to place them in the same bucket as literal fascists.

Meanwhile, MAGAs are shocked that their family and friends have cut them off for participating in our version of a Nazi movement.

As much as Trump is posturing as being a strong-man, his regime is weak and historically unpopular. Recognize that there aren't enough troops in all branches of the US military to enforce martial law on a nation of 340 million people. This is political theatre by a weak, wanna-be dictator meant to intimidate us into anticipatory obedience. Don't fall for it.

And Al Capone was ultimately brought down on charges of tax evasion. The lesson here is that you bring down these powerful bastards however you can, with whatever legal, political, and rhetorical tools that are at your disposal.

Because the timing of this is no coincidence. For weeks DJT has been telling his supporters to 'shut up' about Epstein - but the Cult isn't buying it anymore. After saying that the Epstein files were on her desk (with the implication that they were ready to be released), Pam Bondi is now involved in a blatant cover up at the behest of Trump. Again, this is on the heels of Trump cutting Ghislaine Maxwell a sweetheart deal - transfer to a luxury prison in exchange for her silence. So yes, it's a power grab - but it's also calculated political theatre

Additionally, he's also actively alienating the national guard - the majority of whom are not MAGA and are uncomfortable being deployed against American citizens. Morale among the troops who are being used for this stunt is reportedly in the shitter. Most of our national guard are ordinary people who signed up to help their communities by aiding in things like disaster relief. They didn't sign up to become political puppets for wanna-be dictator.

Some context and perspective Let's not lose the plot - Diddlin' Don has placed his bloated, disgusting foot all the way down on the authoritarian accelerator as a direct response to his Epstein problems not going away. In addition to being a dangerous power grab, it's important to keep in mind that this is also psychological warfare - outrage bate calculated to terrify us while draw attention away from Trump's involvement with a literal child sex trafficking ring. Don't fall for it - as we push back against this dangerous escalation, we also need to be loudly and unapologetically drawing attention to the fact that Trump is soft-launching martial law so we're not talking about Epstein. Don't forget that this move is coming on the heels of his DOJ giving sweetheart deal to Ghislaine Maxwell as part of a blatant cover up. This matters because Epstein is an area where he is very vulnerable - a growing crack in his pillars of support that we need to be pushing on as we speak, post, and protest against this fascist theatre. Here's some free images and memes to that effect.

Thanks, appreciate it!

Thanks for the kind words, much appreciated! The book that this article is from is still another year or two out though

Trying to change the trajectory of national politics as an individual is a recipe for burn out. When nothing you do is enough, you do what you can. So my suggestion is to pick one issue (or set of related issues) you care about that you can engage with locally in your city and state, and then find your organizing home. That could be collecting signatures for a ballot initiative, canvasing for a progressive candidate in your state, getting money out of politics, becoming a voting member of your local Democratic Party or DSA, organizing and attending protests, advocating on behalf of immigrants, or being on ICE watch. Unless you truly live in bumblefuck-nowhere, odds are high that you'll be able to finding something worthwhile to lend your time and energy to within your city, county, and state. In short - find a way to help people who share your values and concerns acquire Institutional Power on a local and state level, so that they can wield it in constructive ways. Finding your local chapter of Indivisible is a great way to find out which organizations are doing what in your home state. As Individuals, we can't do much to affect politics on a national scale. As networks of communities pursuing a long term strategy we can do a lot. American fascism was built methodically over 50 years through participation in school boards and local radio stations and city councils and state governments. But the flip side is that if the far-right can do that, we can too.

Let's not be hasty, there's a chance he might have only sexually assaulted adults while protecting pedophiles. Huge difference. /s.

Exactly this. They went as hard as it was possible to go, baiting him to have a narcissistic crash-out over being portrayed as a tiny-dick Middle Eastern dictator ala Saddam Hussein. It places dRump in a no-win scenario. Either let South Park get away with their brutal takedown thus giving courage to other creators, or prove their point if the wanna-be king tries to get the show cancelled.

Also, the US is smorgasbord of different realities depending on your socioeconomic status. Living in a poor rural county whose only hospital is about to be shut down due to the MAGA Murder bill - and living in a high-rise in downtown Manhattan - is arguably a much larger difference than averaging out the metrics between the US and other developed countries as a whole.

If all you have to contribute is doomerism, you're only helping project the false impression that Trump is invulnerable. Diddlin' Don likes to project the image of a strongman. He wants us to believe that his rule is ineivtable - that he has a mandate from the American people. Well, that's horseshit - his regime is weak and historically unpopular. He's underwater on literally every issue, including immigration. He's in declining mental and physical health. Once he drops dead, there's not an obvious successor to lead the Cult - in fact, we're starting to see the beginning stages of it breaking apart due to how poorly he's handling the Epstein files.

I give him coin flip odds of even making it through to 2028. Have you heard him speak lately? He's in terrible mental and physical health. He has the same health condition that my 81 year old grandpa did a year or so before he died of congestive heart failure.

That's where your wrong. The Cult is starting to fracture because a lot of them do care. Not all of them, probably not even a majority, but enough to seriously hurt Trump. I'd highly recommend Cult College here - she worked worked with the FBI to lock a lot of these violent cult members up, and is an expert on cult psychology.

When the subject of Trump comes up, make sure to ask any MAGAs in your vicinity if they like Trump because he protects pedophiles, or whether they like him because Trump himself is a convicted rapist. No more humoring these folks, go for the jugular.

I can respect that. But I'd also counter that 'we' didn't do anything, because America is not a unified culture - Trump was given another bite at the coup apple because tens of millions of Americans were more comfortable voting for a convicted rapist over a highly qualified black woman. When the only language that your opponents understand is raw, unaccountable power, you use whatever tools are at your disposal. Fact is that mockery and disdain are powerful tools for undermining a wanna-be king, who's also an abusive, insecure narcissist.

Like it or not, we're living in an attention economy where our opposition is intentionally flooding the zone with shit to keep people distracted and afraid. We go high, they continue throwing brown people into concentration camps while memeing about it, while their white nationalist enablers clap like drunken seals at the cruelty that's being inflicted by this regime. I don't want to be the most conscious person in a gulag - if we're not willing to adapt to the environment we're living in, we might as well admit defeat and let Trump crown himself a king.

Rationality should be learned and transcended - a stop rather than a destination. Metarationality is its higher form. From 'In The Cells Of The Eggplant', written by David Chapman, with an audio version narrated by my friend Matt Arnold. "Meta-rationality is particularly useful when rationality isn’t working well. Its value comes into view when you have seen rational systems fail enough times that you start to notice patterns of limitations to their use in practice. You realize that solving technical problems within a fixed set of concepts and methods is not always adequate. You become increasingly curious about why, and what to do about it."