DocWatts

If anyone is curious, here's a follow up section that discusses the methodology of science - particularly how it helps us better discern casual relevance above and beyond ordinarily observational reasoning (as a prelude to an in-depth exploration the limitations of these methods, later in the book). The Pattern Recognition Trap If early empiricism handed us a box of rough-hewn tools for tackling everyday tasks, science would offer us precision instruments for unlocking realms far beyond our natural reach. When skillfully wielded, straightforward observational reasoning can provide serviceable diagnostics for zeroing in on desired outcomes - provided that problem-relevant features are in plain sight. Which brings us to the key caveat of this approach: its operating domain is constrained to what we can observe and manipulate from our person-sized mesoscale. As we’ve seen, what affects us on the mesoscale need not have its origins there - hardly surprising when we recall that this familiar perceptual domain is but a tiny slice of reality. This widening gap between straightforward observational reasoning and concrete, material demands drove sharpening tension between theorists and practitioners. Practical applicability is where the rubber meets the road for explanatory theories, and in this regard empiricism was straining against its methodological limitations. The ‘gotcha’ of this approach? Empiricism was becoming a victim of its own success, increasingly thrown at problems whose causal chains lay far beyond its operational constraints. In an era where discerning nature’s hidden patterns was rapidly translating into tangible material spoils, empiricism was due for an update if it was to meet escalating practical demands. The core issue confronting its practitioners was an inferential bottleneck, stemming from a tricky framing problem. As the situations that empiricism was thrown at became more complex, it was struggling to suss out reliable links between cause and effect. At first glance, establishing cause and effect seems straightforward enough. Drop a glass, and it shatters. Heat up water, and it boils. As problems increase in complexity, however, it can become deceptively hard. It’s one thing to notice a disconcerting rattling from your car’s engine compartment when you press down on the accelerator. It’s quite another to figure out that the rattling isn’t coming from the engine at all, but from a worn-out joint in your vehicle’s drivetrain that only shows symptoms when accelerating from a stop. The key to this deceptive complexity lies in how causal patterns can be invisible to us without the proper investigative tools. Where our built-in pattern recognition comes pre-calibrated for everyday problem solving, scientific methods are more like precision instruments that demand training and expertise. Case in point, our default observational reasoning naturally gravitates to the readily obvious - the engine must be the problem since that's where the sound is coming from. Yet this reflex can lead us astray when visible symptoms stem from causes that aren't immediately apparent. In such cases, we may end up grasping at patterns that are intuitive but misleading. While human psychology is hard-wired for pattern recognition, most of the patterns we spot are mere coincidental associations rather than genuine causal relationships. Untangling causal threads from this expansive web of spurious associations can be a daunting task, even for experienced investigators. So how do we slice through this tangle of false leads? By a ruthless pursuit of relevance. Without being able to identify what’s relevant for a particular problem, we’re left pulling at loose threads that don’t weave into a coherent tapestry. Our technique for separating these strands rests on a fundamental principle: correlation does not imply causation - meaning that you can’t assume that one event causes another just because they occur together. An oft cited example is how ice cream sales and shark attacks both increase during the summer - yet it would be foolish to conclude that soft serve in a waffle cone sends sharks into a feeding frenzy. Beyond this deliberately facetious example, the real world is rife with cases where the inability to separate correlation from causation has led to deadly consequences. Prior to the scientific principles that gave rise to germ theory, doctors were more akin to respected quacks whose remedies could be worse than the ailments they were attempting to treat. A common idea from pre-scientific medicine was that diseases were caused by bad blood, leading to ‘remedies’ like bloodletting - literally draining a sick person of their blood. While with the benefit of hindsight this seems like an insane practice, from the purview of its practitioners it made a certain kind of sense. Patients would often recover in spite of their prescribed ‘treatment’, creating a powerful illusion that they got better because of it. In our own era, we can note how racists cite crime statistics to draw sweeping conclusions about out-groups, while ignoring how systemic poverty and forced inequality are the root causes of crime. Or how vaccine skeptics point to rising autism diagnoses alongside vaccination rates, while ignoring how improved awareness and diagnostic criteria explain why this correlation is illusory. The examples above highlight the ease with which our habitual pattern recognition instincts can lead us astray. The lesson to be drawn is that short of solid diagnostic tools for identifying relevance, it’s all too easy to conflate cause and coincidence. What the scientific method brings to the table is a hard-won field manual for addressing this perennial blind spot. It employs methodologically rigorous techniques to develop iterative, falsifiable models of our Reality - or those aspects of it that we can measure and test. These models are how science distinguishes true cause-and-effect relationships from coincidental patterns. To that end, scientific practice begins with transforming hunches into precise, measurable predictions known as hypotheses. While hypothesis formation draws upon a rich blend of observation, expertise, imagination, and informed speculation, these intuitions must be translated into concrete, testable claims. While we might start from an informed intuition that 'phones are bad for young children’, if we wanted to verify that scientifically, we might propose a study that measures changes to sustained attention span as a result of prolonged screen use. But measurable predictions alone aren't enough - we need rigorous methods to test them. The scientific method employs several key strategies: Controlled Experimentation where we change just one thing at a time to see what actually makes a difference for a given outcome. If we’re trying to figure out what affects a cake’s texture, we might adjust only the amount of sugar while keeping all other ingredients exactly the same. Mechanistic Investigation which maps out how exactly A leads to B. Beyond just observing that too much alcohol makes us sick, we want to trace out what happens as it moves from our gut to our bloodstream to our brain. Falsification Testing where a community of scientists works to prove each other’s hunches wrong, whether by design or accident. If the prevailing scientific theory is that light needs a special medium to move through (the so-called ‘luminiferous ether’), we might inadvertently falsify it while trying to measure whether the Earth's motion through this invisible field affects the speed of light. Natural Experiments where we study real-world situations that act like controlled experiments, when direct manipulation isn’t possible or ethical. Like comparing identical twins raised in different environments to understand how genes shape our personality. Statistical Analysis where we measure how strongly two phenomena track together, to separate spurious coincidences from patterns that are worth investigating further. If we notice that crime is reported at a higher rate during full moons, we'd want to track this over thousands of cases to see if the pattern holds up. Replicability where different people try performing the same experiment, to see if the results are consistent or a one-off. If a single study claims to show how quickly ordinary people become cruel when given authority, we’d want other researchers to verify this under different circumstances. These methodological tools have proven remarkably successful in helping us zero in on relevance with a degree of precision undreamt of by our ancestors. The extension of our observational reach beyond our person-sized mesoscale has proven indispensable for sifting genuine causes from a vast ocean of spurious correlations. This investigative power has been enhanced by generations of painstaking methodological refinements, allowing science to peer into realms far beyond our ordinary observational reasoning. World changing discoveries from electromagnetism to germ theory to genetics would have been impossible through pre-scientific observational reasoning alone. And once these forces were unleashed, there would be no going back.

Thank you! I argue in other parts of my book that human rationality isn't a mechanical or computational process, but instead relies significantly on nonconceptual knowledge (or know-how), metaphor, and imagination.

@Davino Thanks for reading, and for your thoughtful questions. Interestingly, there are examples of highly successful democracies which have never had a written Constitution, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand. A written Constitution is really just a shared reference point for the social contract of a country - it only works if enough of a country's citizens are willing to participate in the norms that a Constitution is a codification of. The institutions it provides a blueprint for only work if people believe in them - the best written Constitution in the world can't save a democracy if a large proportion of its citizens are feeling alienated from the civic society that sustains democracy (something the Weimar Republic found out the hard way). What we're living through now in countries like the United States is the breakdown of that shared meaning. Moreover, written Constitutions can be both a boon and a curse to a democracy - in the United States, our written Constitution has shackled us with antiquated institutions that are very difficult to reform, such as lifetime appointments for the Supreme Court, and the highly anti-democratic Electoral College. That's the million dollar question. One avenue is through honest self appraisal and selective change (emphasis on the 'selective' part). Societies need to identify: 1) what their Core values actually are (things they would rather die than lose) 2) Which aspects of their narratives are still working well. 3) Which aspects of these narratives have become outdated and are no longer serving them. Another is through a deliberately reconstructive approach to traditional narratives. The challenge is that these traditional narratives served an incredibly important purpose in cultivating collective forms of meaning and purpose, yet they've also proven inflexible and maladaptive for the complexity of the world we're living in. Instead of dismissing something like organized religion out of hand, we need to take the existential needs they address very seriously, while offering people healthier alternatives. LGBTQ friendly churches seem like a step in the right direction. HealthyGamerGG, an online mental health and spirituality community run by a licensed psychiatrist who's had training as a Vedic monk, is another. Healthy communities are key here - traditional narratives offered this at one point, but they've been co-opted by bad actors who are exploiting their fears to push toxic, divisive narratives (Trump himself has turned this into an artform). You're correct in your sense that I'm an AI pessimist. While I recognize that in theory it could be used for the benefit of all (and maybe some day that will be true), in practice its easily abusable by bad actors who are using it for nefarious purposes. The algorithms behind sites like Twitter and Facebook and YouTube are written for the benefit of their host companies - not for the public good. Their business model of driving engagement through divisive, emotionally engaging content has been corrosive for the public trust that our civil society depends on. The only way out of this, as far as I can see, is to treat social media platforms as public utilities that are much more heavily regulated than they are right now. Their algorithms need to be made public and reworked to not addict people. Disinformation, propaganda, and blatantly hateful content on these platforms needs to be much more tightly regulated. Of course, zero chance of any of this happening any time soon, unfortunately - this problem is going to get much, much worse before it gets better By emphasizing how societal narratives can be true but partial, without falling into the Relativist trap of treating all constructed narratives as equally true, moral, sane, etc. Frameworks should be engaged with in good faith, without necessarily having to agree with the conclusions they reach. That said, not every social narrative needs to be given a seat at the table (we don't need to take Nazis at their word, or give them a platform to spread hate) - but this needs to be paired with a good faith effort to understand what draws people to these narratives. The gist of Enactivism is to cultivate a higher degree of flexibility and self-awareness around our sensemaking frameworks. Doing so involves learning how to introspect about the emotional attachments we form to these frameworks. Are we clinging to something like Socialism or Christianity or psychedelics because it makes sense for us given our life experiences? Or are we using it as a one-size-fits-all blunt instrument? I'll need think more on this one. For now I'll say that men's issues need to be taken more seriously. Do men still have a number of social privileges over women? Obviously - but it's not a one way street. The loneliness epidemic has hit men harder than it's hit women, due in part to how men are socialized - but also due to how things like dating apps are designed, which can leave men who use them feeling like shit (since it's much easier to get matches on these apps as a woman than a man). Outdated social expectations that men need to be 'providers' to not be failures is wildly out of step with changes in the economy over the last half century, where it's become virtually impossible for a single earner to provide for a family. Young men need healthy masculine role models, and access to healthy masculine activities. They need to be talked with from people who understand and empathize with their perspective, rather than talked down to. If the Left doesn't talk to these people, the Right will.

Hello, I thought I might share a write-up Reconstructing Meaning, which delves into how updating our sensemaking narratives to be more flexible, compassionate, and expansive is a promising path for addressing the societal Meaning Crisis that's feeding fascism. ____________________________________________________________ The Need For Reconstructive Epistemology To appreciate the need for reconstructive epistemology, we can ask what happens when a culture’s foundational narratives become maladaptive. When institutions calcify against change, their legitimizing stories erode, leaving a society unmoored. Without a more expansive and compassionate story to take its place, the resulting abyss breeds monsters - darker narratives that feed on alienation, fear, and resentment. Weaponized nostalgia for a lost world has bred some of the darkest chapters in human history, from the Ku Klux Klan to Hitler’s Germany to contemporary Christian Nationalism. What’s crucial to understand here is that these constructed narratives aren’t just stories - they’re the invisible scaffolding that holds civilization together, transforming millions of strangers into a functional society through shared forms of meaning and identity. To understand why we need such narratives at all, let’s trace their emergence in human social evolution. These binding narratives became essential once populations grew beyond what hunter-gatherer bonds could sustain. Just as bees are adapted for a hive and wolves for a pack, human sociality evolved within a tribe - where everyone knows everyone else through face-to-face interactions and extended kinship. While living among a sea of strangers is something we’ve come to take for-granted, a ‘tribe’ of millions would have been an unthinkable contradiction for our ancestors. The evolutionary fingerprint of our tribal origins persists in modern humans - we can only maintain meaningful face-to-face relationships with about 150 individuals, a limit known as Dunbar's number. To bridge this gap, we developed social-technologies that would allow interactions with strangers to become a routine part of life. Chief among these was the creation of constructed social identities - shared stories that sustain social trust without requiring face-to-face bonds or kinship ties. These narratives aren't merely cultural artifacts - they're the foundation that makes modern society possible. Human rights, democracy, money, and science are constructed narratives that built the modern world. If people stopped believing in them they would cease to exist, yet calling them ‘imaginary’ is to miss how they shape our material reality. Despite their appearance of stability within a human life, these constructed narratives inevitably break down - through internal contradictions, mounting external pressures, or both. We'll call this process Construct Collapse. While civilizations can and do collapse entirely, our focus here is on societies that endure a narrative breakdown. In these cases, the void will be filled, one way or another. Construct Collapse itself isn’t positive or negative - its impact depends entirely on what replaces the fallen narrative. Very few people today would openly argue that the collapse of narratives that supported slavery was a bad thing. On the flip side, totalitarian ideologies which exploit Construct Collapse during states of crisis demonstrate its inherent dangers - as Nazism’s rise from the trauma of World War 1 and the austerity of the Great Depression make painfully clear. It’s a lesson we may have to live through again, as today’s democracies find themselves under the assault of authoritarianism from within and without. Between these extremes of clear benefit and catastrophic harm, Construct Collapse typically creates more ambiguous outcomes - addressing existing problems while introducing unforeseen consequences. Consider Friedrich Nietzsche's famous declaration that 'God is dead, and we have killed him.' He was describing the displacement of organized religion as the foundation of meaning in Western life. Writing amidst the rapid changes of 19th century Europe, he foresaw how traditional cultural narratives would become increasingly untenable, swept aside by the forces of modernity - science, industrialization, and secular values. His warning was tat existential needs for meaning and purpose aren’t so easily excised. And that in lieu of suitable replacements, cynicism, despair, and empty consumerism would rush to fill the void. While his proposed solution - moving 'beyond good and evil' to pursue individual will regardless of ethical consequences - was deeply toxic, Nietzsche correctly diagnosed the looming crisis. In our own era, we find ourselves amid what cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has termed the 'Meaning Crisis.' Its symptoms are evident in the widespread adoption of conspiracy theories, political extremism, and bullshit in public discourse. The cumulative effect has been nothing short of disastrous for the civil society that sustains democracy. Social media platforms, whose business models push user engagement through divisive, inflammatory content, have only accelerated this decline. While these may seem like recent problems, they're an intensification of profit-driven media's long history of exploiting social fragmentation for private gain. Amongst this rising polarization, we’re facing an unprecedented mental health crisis in the West - millions are feeling alienated, lonely, and displaced. In the United States, 'deaths of despair' - through suicide and substance abuse - have driven a decline in life expectancy. An unfolding ecological crisis, poised to reshape human civilization over the upcoming century, is deepening this collective trauma. A global resurgence in fascism has been ruthlessly exploiting this trauma, promising to make our societies ‘great’ again while worsening the very crises it feeds upon. This cumulative upheaval weighs heaviest on young people, where profound anxiety and despair about the world they’ll be inheriting is commonplace (here in the United States, a shared meme among Millenials and Gen Z is that our retirement plan is to die from climate change before old age). Gen Alpha, our youngest generation, has never known a world before today’s hyper-polarized dysfunction. Amid skyrocketing inequality, basic milestones of adult life - buying a home, starting a family, saving for retirement - have become impossible dreams for most. Yet economic and political dysfunction flows downstream from culture. While these material factors are very real, we’re also facing something deeper: an epistemological crisis in the West, with different segments of society no longer inhabiting the same Reality. Beyond different interpretations over basic facts that we can more or less agree upon, reaching a foundational consensus for productive disagreements has become nearly impossible. The rise of artificial intelligence is poised to deepen these epistemic rifts even further. These developments poison our ability to cultivate shared understanding. As this crisis deepens, our social dysfunction will only worsen - making epistemological literacy more important now than ever before. Of course, no epistemology - Enactivism included - can be a silver bullet for this crisis. What perspectives like this can offer is greater self awareness around our sensemaking narratives. Enactivism is reconstructive because it acknowledges that constructed narratives play an essential role in meeting our individual and collective needs, while recognizing that some constructions serve us better than others. And the path forward lies in narratives that are flexible, compassionate, and inclusive. In sum: reconstructive epistemology isn’t about returning to the ‘good old days’ of a romanticized past. The framework we’re proposing offers no quick-fixes for complex problems. Nor is it meant to be a dogmatic, one-size-fits-all approach. Rather, Enactivism is meant to exist in dialogue with other epistemological perspectives - not because all views are equally valid, but because the perspective if offers is true but partial.

Thank you!

Hello fellow actualizers, thought I might share a write-up from my philosophy book, '7 Provisional Truths: How We Come To Know Things, And Why It Matters'. In this section, I explore the dichotomy between Absolutism and Relativism, while offering a more pragmatic 'middle way' for thinking about knowledge, grounded in the role that our minds play in constructing an experiential reality. Hope you enjoy! ___________________________________________________________________________________________ The Enactive Approach How can we navigate between the extremes of unyielding certainty and paralyzing skepticism? One method is to chart a ‘middle way’ that’s grounded in our lived engagement with the world. Mind you, this ‘middle way’ doesn’t mean finding a lukewarm compromise that’s halfway between these opposing sides. Rather, it involves rejecting the game entirely, and shifting to a new playing field with a fresh set of rules for thinking about certainty. Our name for this framework is Enactivism, and its course-correction emerges from acknowledging the active role that minds play in ‘bringing forth’, or enacting, an experiential world. Having left the old playing field behind, Enactivism threads a course between two traditional opponents: Absolutism and Relativism. The former contending that knowledge is strictly impersonal; perhaps best personified by the statement that ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’. While the latter attests that knowledge is inherently perspectival, meaning that it’s unavoidably interpreted through a set of individual and social circumstances. Our decision to name this framework Enactivism is no accident - 'enact' means to 'carry out' or 'bring to fruition'. The etymology of our term hints at its core hypothesis: that knowledge is constructed. The key insight? Knowledge doesn’t exist ‘out there’, as a fixed feature of some ‘neutral’ Reality. Nor does it emerge as a pure invention of an isolated mind. Instead, it arises at the intersection of mind, body, and environment, through a dynamic feedback loop we call world disclosure. The crux of world disclosure is that our minds give us an experiential Reality to live in that comes pre-arranged in terms of our needs and capacities. Enactivism extends this insight by showing that knowledge emerges from the relational process between a living body-mind and its environment. Far from being passive receptors for ‘external’ inputs, our mind works in tandem with our living body and our environment to actively construct an experiential reality. The most impressive part? Most of this occurs beneath conscious awareness - our minds' considerable effort to construct an intelligible reality is largely invisible to us And while this generative process can lead to reliable knowledge about Reality, what it can’t provide is absolute certainty. Our knowledge remains inseparable from our lived perspective within Reality, and the perspectives of living minds are necessarily bounded by biology. So does this condemn us to be forever isolated within our individual perspective? Far from it! As we’ll see, our shared evolutionary heritage makes possible stable forms of knowledge that are broadly applicable. An additional aspect of Enactivist epistemology lies in its insistence that Absolutist and Relativist accounts are true, but partial. What this means is that both viewpoints contain elements of truth, but are partial in the sense that they miss the dynamic interplay between observer and observed - how mind and world define and shape one another in a dynamic feedback loop. Armed with this insight, our Enactive approach will aim to synthesize aspects of these two opposing accounts, while rejecting key assumptions from both. Enactivism rejects the shared assumption that knowledge is primarily conceptual, and mostly a matter of holding beliefs. As we’ve seen, this is flawed because it fails to account for how nonconceptual ways of knowing and being are central to everyday life. Our extended survey on the centrality of Situated Coping for everyday forms of knowing and being was an articulation of this precise point. Another area where Enactivism parts way with both camps lies in another one of their shared blind spots: treating knowledge as disembodied. This oversight has direct implications for how perspectives shape knowledge; both Absolutism and Relativism miss the mark here, though for different reasons. Absolutism gets it wrong by ignoring how perspectives inevitably shape what counts as valid knowledge. While Relativism falls short by fixating on the social and cultural dimensions of knowledge, overlooking how our shared human perspective within Reality opens the door to forms of understanding that transcend individual and societal contexts. Lastly, Enactivism shatters a final cornerstone of these opposing views: that there's an absolute boundary between ourselves and the world. It rejects the notion that Reality can be neatly divided into an 'external' world of objects and an 'internal' world of experience. As we’ll see, this taken-for-granted divide dissolves under closer scrutiny. This perceived boundary typically masks a deeper assumption: that one of these domains - internal or external - is more ‘real’ than the other. We can see this in materialist perspectives that try to ‘explain away’ consciousness, arguing that minds are nothing more than an arrangement of matter and energy. On the flip side of the coin, certain spiritual perspectives contend that physical reality is a mere illusion created by our minds. Both instances are illustrative of reductionism - trying to ‘explain away’ a particular phenomena by conjecturing that it’s in fact a property of something else. As we’ll see, one of Enactivism’s core aims is to sidestep this tug-of-war over what’s ultimately ‘real’, in favor of a pragmatic perspective grounded in everyday experience. A guiding insight of this pragmatism could be summed up as: no unmediated access to Reality - that our embodied perspective within Reality is what’s ultimately ‘real’ for us. Precisely because it’s only through this perspective that we have access to a world of people, place, and things, theorizing about what Reality ultimately 'is' is beside the point - when what we actually care about is what Reality is for us. This shift in focus opens a more fruitful path forward. By questioning the fixed boundary between ourselves and the world, we can explore our interaction with these domains without falling into the trap of reductionism. Enactivism's key insight? The divide between 'self' and 'world' is mentally constructed - indeed, the world itself is indispensable to what minds are. With this groundwork in place, it becomes clear why Enactivism offers a compelling 'middle way' for thinking about certainty - without succumbing to a half-hearted compromise between two played-out extremes. Yet instead of a stubborn refusal to find anything of value in these camps, Enactivism reveals how their partial insights can be synthesized into a fresh perspective for reflecting upon our lived experience. The cornerstone of this synthesis? It lies in recognizing that while knowledge is perspectival, perspectives aren’t boundless - they’re grounded in a shared biological and evolutionary context. As a practical matter, there are fundamentals that human beings can and must be able to agree upon to have functional societies. In every society, people fall in love, have children, get sick, grow old, and die. While the meanings we attach to these experiences vary across cultures, their universality creates common ground for shared understanding. So that’s the gist of the Enactive approach. What’s to follow is a brief followup on the Absolutist and Relativist viewpoints which Enactivism offers itself as an alternative to. Our aim is to unearth the basic assumptions behind both viewpoints, while excavating the partial truths contained within. Lastly, we’ll tie this all together with a look at the meaning crisis that’s unfolding within the West, why this crisis calls for reconstructive epistemology, and how Enactivism can play a small but promising part in bridging these divides.

Thanks for this, as it's especially relevant at our current moment: "[They] did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now [in 1946].” ― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45' In Weimer Germany's last free elections, not everyone casting ballots for the Nazis would have described themselves as a Nazi, and a lot of them didn't have any particular animosity towards Jewish people. What was far more common was that folks saw some personal advantage to throwing their lot in with vengeful nationalists, and were willing to downplay and excuse the monstrous things that Hitler and the Nazis were saying and doing at the time - just as people today are willing to downplay Trump's violent hateful rhetoric, his numerous crimes, the January 6th insurrection, and the Republican Party's ongoing coup attempt. Likewise, the vast majority of Trump supporters don't think of themselves as fascist enablers, but what they fail to recognize is that today's fascism couches itself in traditional American values, weaponized against out-groups within American society - just as Nazi fascism marketed itself in traditional German values, weaponized against the out-groups of its day. It's exactly this type of dynamic that the 'Banality of Evil' was referring to.

Thank you! Let's save our democracy!!

Most of my posts tend to be in the Intellectual Stuff and the Society & Politics sections, since that's closer to my areas of expertise. I do engage in vipassana meditation, but I'll fully admit that meditation isn't the main focus of my contemplative work. I've spent the last two years writing a book on introspective epistemology (a 'field guide' to construct awareness, as I pitch it), and I've been working with some other philosophically minded folks in metro Detroit to build an in-person metamodern forum (https://fluidityforum.org/vision/). Over the years I've diverged from Leo's particular approach to spirituality, since at some point I think you do need to step aside from your initial influences and forge your own path. My work focuses more on embodied phenomenology - basically, understanding how we create knowledge from within the limitations of our lived, human perspective within Reality; and what this means for our constructed sense-making frameworks. That said, there's still a lot that I agree with Leo about, but I'd say that we have very different areas of emphasis. Psychedelics isn't a focus of my work, though I fully recognize that they can be very useful for subjective consciousness expansion. I approach nondualism in a different way than Leo. And I also place less emphasis on frameworks like Spiral Dynamics, since I feel that in practice it's often used as a form of epistemological and sociological bypassing.

Thank you for this. The number of people simping for an OBVIOUS authoritarian grifter in what's supposedly a conscious politics forum has been disappointing. The immaturity, equivocation, whataboutism, and excuses are more reflective of what I would expect to see in a Facebook comment section, or from talking to low-information voters. It's certainly not evident of people who've put in the work to have a solid grasp of epistemology, that's for damned sure.

All that LGBTQ want is to be able to do their business, wash their hands, and go back to whatever it was they were doing without being threatened or harassed. This a total non issue. The only reason it's being harped on is to deny trans people access to public spaces. Trans bathroom panic is the modern equivalent of the 'whites only' water fountain.

What people should keep in mind is that the apt historical comparison at this point is the rhetoric and tactics the Nazis were using to destroy Weimer democracy in the early 1930s, while they still had some constraints on their behavior (just like American fascism is working to subvert the constraints that are imposed upon them by American democracy). It's unfortunate that the type of folk-history that's common here in the 'States mostly mostly glosses over how the Nazis were able to subvert democracy, with most of the focus going to the horrific things they did while they were in power (which is obviously very important, but less instructive for where we're at now). (To that end, I would HIGHLY recommend 'The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic' by Benjamin Carter Hett as a resource for anyone who wants an in-depth account of this).

The racism on display was so ugly and blatant that the public relations teams for the RNC (!!) are working overtime to backpedal from the rhetoric here. Puerto Ricans (who I remind you are American citizens) were literally referred to as 'garbage' by an RNC vetted 'comedian', reading from a teleprompter. Mind you, this is coming on the heels of Trump literally praising Hitler, endorsing a self-described 'black Nazi' for governor of North Carolina, calling immigrants 'vermin', referring to American citizens who oppose his dictatorial plans as 'the enemy within', and openly stating that he wants to deploy the military against United States citizens. Short of Trump stepping on stage in front of a swastika and calling for a final solution to the 'illegals' problem, it's hard to think of how the historical parallels could be made any more blatant at this point.

Welp, wasn't expecting a full-blown reboot of the infamous infamous 1939 Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden as Trump's 'October Surprise' (just a week before the election, no less), but we find ourselves living in strange times.

YouTube has had a longstanding policy of demonitizing and delisting videos for controversial topics that aren't palatable to advertisers (meaning they're on the site, but they won't show up in your Recommended feed). I've seen vids on topics such as suicide and the Holocaust get delisted. Ever notice a video title with 'N*zi' instead of 'Nazi' in the title? That's that the algorithm at work. Little surprise if Rogan's three hour pow-wow with a rapist who launched a violent coup against our government is deemed 'controversial' by the algorithm.

This ^. From their point of view, Trump is stern father figure who's fighting to protect their way of life from encroachment by a host of perceived enemies who aren't deserving of equal treatment (immigrants, LGBTQ people, etc). It's a form of aggrieved entitlement, born of fears about a loss of social status. Read about the psychology of what was going through the heads of people defending white supremacy in the Confederacy and Jim Crow apartheid state that followed, and you won't be far off.

Hi, MrTruf. In the event of Trump victory, I plan to stay engaged, build grass roots support for midterm elections on the local and state level, push my local representatives to resist implementing discriminatory federal policies towards marginalized people in my state, support the shit out of pro-democracy organizations like the ACLU which will be working to protect American citizens from having their rights and freedoms stripped away. Also take steps to protect myself and people I care about from state sponsored violence, if it comes to that.

Holding Trump's inner circle and the stochastic terrorists he's inspired accountable for flagrantly criminal actions isn't an iron first, it's the bare minimum for adhering to the Rule Of Law, essential for any functioning democracy. Donald Trump getting to effectively be above the law because he's got a violent Cult behind him sets a ruinous precedent. It's the equivalent of letting Hitler and his brown-shirts off the hook for trying to overthrow the Weimer government in his Beer Hall Putsch (in reality, Hitler got off the hook with a short, relatively comfortable prison sentence) - and we saw how that turned out. What's supposed to happen within a democracy is that when a political party loses, it's supposed to go back to the drawing board, figure out what went wrong, and figure out how to garner enough public support to win the next. Instead of changing course and moderating its views to be more palatable to ordinary Americans, the modern Republican Party has decided that they'd be better of ending democracy rather than competing for power within democracy.

Open dialogue sounds great in theory, but it only works when both sides are operating in good faith. Stemming the flow of disinformation, disrupting the ability of fascist groups to perpetuate violence, and piercing Trump's cult of personality through an election loss and legal consequences for his flagrantly criminal behavior is a start. Reforming our institutions to make it harder for minoritarian rule would be necessary as well - the Electoral College, Supreme Court, and Senate are obvious places to start. While heart-to-hearts may get some members of Cult like organizations like MAGA or the KKK to reevaluate their beliefs, there's difficulty in scaling that up to tens of millions of people. Fortunately for us, we don't have deprogram everyone who's in the MAGA Cult. We just need to disrupt their ability to dismantle our democracy.

Not at all - MAGA is, and will always be, a minoritarian position, supported by perhaps %30-35 of the country. Stopping it hinges upon the rest of the country taking enough of an interest in our democracy to save it from violent fringe extremists.

No point in trying to reach people within the MAGA Cult, who truly give no fucks as to whether the talking points they're sock puppeting are true or not - when what they're looking for is a powerful daddy figure to persecute their perceived enemies.

Which is a tacit endorsement of political violence, and consistent with fascist sympathizers who downplay and excuse MAGA's violent rhetoric and actions. This kind if attitude has no place within a democracy. A consistent trend among MAGA fascists is the same DARVO psychological tactics that abusers use to gaslight their victims: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. MAGA's response to Jan 6 follows DARVO manipulation tactics to a tee. Deny that Trump did anything wrong by sending an arm mob to attack the Capitol. Attack anyone who tries to hold Trump and his inner circle accountable. Reverse Victim and Offender by decrying that Trump is the victim of a witch hunt by the January 6th Commission and the Department of Justice, who've been working to holding him legally accountable for his crimes.

Virtually every policy in Trump's Project 2025 agenda will make it harder to start a family. Paid family leave? Gone. Overtime pay that people depend on to pay their bills? That's gone too. IVF fertility treatment? Illegal. Child tax credits? Cut. Free school lunches? Nope! Early childhood education programs including head start? Also cut. Abortion access in case something goes wrong (ie a medical problem) during the pregnancy? Prepare to be prosecuted for murder.

Democrats can use a process called Budget Reconciliation to bypass the filibuster (indeed, this is how The Inflation Reduction Act was passed under Biden). But the types of bills that are passed under the process is somewhat limited : it happens once a year, and it's provisions have to have a plausible connection to the federal budget. Which is why investments in green energy can be included, but abortion legalization is likely to be shot down by the Senate Parliamentarian who oversees budget reconciliation, since it's far more tangential to federal spending.

Well, there's close to a %100 chance that Harris wins the popular vote (Hilary was an awful candidate and even she managed to win the popular vote against Trump), but because of the antiquated Electoral College, democrats have to outperform to win presidential elections.