Scholar

Men feel displaced today because the internet has replaced socializing and eroded ways people did socialize. Males are resentful because they are lonely, lack social skills, friends and are outrage baited by social media into blaming progressivism for all their problems. It's mindblowing to me that people like you pretend like bashing and shitting on feminism is somehow "taboo", when we currently have a MAGA administration in the US and everyone is shitting on everything that even smells a bit like progressivism. The reason why we have such radical feminists is because conservitards cannot stop obsessing about this and every other progressive issue, unwittingly reinforcing the identity of anyone who considers themselves an activist. What you resist, persists.

I think the topic is approached in a bit of a ineffective manner. Veganism as a moral philosophy often tries to focus on consequentialist sort of reasoning "Animal agriculture causes so much harm, therefore it is immoral to contribute to it!". But consequentialist frameworks are profoundly ineffective in motivating behavior change in individuals, because people don't feel responsible for down-the-line consequences. They are just consuming a product, they don't want the animals to get harmed, so they view it, at most, as a sort of character flaw. It becomes similar to buying cheap products from the third world, where some people on the other side of the planet work in terrible conditions to produce them. People recognize those conditions are bad, but they don't feel personally responsible for them. The way animals are treated, with the degree of torment we inflict on them, is fundamentally rooted in human supremacist ideology. Treating it from the point of view of a consumerist paradigm has been, in my view, a profound mishap on counts of the original activists who laid out the groundwork for veganism. The problem with consuming animals is not merely that, as a result, we inflict suffering on animals. The fundamental issue is that, to consume animals, you had to "dehumanize", to objective, them to such a degree that you feel no qualms about consuming their tortured body parts or their excretions. We don't judge people who buy Iphones, at best they are morally flawed. We would judge, however, individuals who would eat the flesh of another person, or who would wear the hair of a special breed of humans, who are considered subhuman. Even if both of them caused the same exact harm, the second person would horrify us. We would rightfully be repulsed by them, and recognize that something was deeply wrong with them. This is because human beings are not consequentialists, in practice we mostly care about virtues. To us, if a human being is capable of buying the milk of another human being, who was kept enslaved their whole life, forcibly impregnated, that person demonstrates a lack of recognition of the common humanity we all share. Drinking that glass of milk and taking joy in it would be a repulsive act of objectification, no matter the consequences, even if there was no consumer-consequence effect. A healthy human mind should feel horrified at the idea of drinking that glass of milk, because a healthy human mind does not view other human beings as objects. Slavery was not a consumerist problem, it was a problem of supremacist thinking, of the objectification of an entire other class of individuals. We resolved slavery through the recognition that all humanity is equal, that it is inappropriate to ever view another human soul as an object. That we always ought to view a human being as a means in and of themselves, not merely a means to an end. The same has to happen with animals. The appropriate reaction to seeing pieces of body parts of individuals who have been enslaved and tortured their whole life is horror and disgust. The focus of activism has to be to instill in others a recognition of the "humanity" in animals. Once the self is recognized in the other, the battle between self-indulgence and consumer-responsibility is no longer meaningful.

This will not work. Making narcissism illegal would simply lead to people being more secretive about narcissism. The attitude a society would need to adopt to treat innocent individuals (the narcissists) this cruelly would already come with far worse consequences than letting the narcissists run rampant. As long as society puts the burden of improving society on minorities, it will not improve. This type of scapegoating, and assuming society will improve as long as we treat one particular group particularly harshly, is one of the reasons why society runs into these problems indefinitely. Society has to adopt more responsibility for how individuals in it evolve, not scapegoat various boogeymans. When a narcissist causes damage to society, it is because society failed to integrate the narcissist and create a robust social environment that can mitigate and navigate the potential problems narcissists cause. Treating innocent individuals like subhumans because you have not thought of a better way of dealing with them just shows lack of sophistication, lack of wisdom. This lack of wisdom is the true source of most damage in society. In fact, you could easily flip this around and proclaim that people like you are dangerous, and the root of all problems in society, as this type of dehumanization and scapegoating is the source of most human suffering. Maybe people like you should be isolated and imprisoned indefinitely, in an attempt to treat your ignorance.

LLMs specifically are good at creating probabilistic patterns. If there was an average IQ human being on this planet who had the amount of information and patterns internalized in his mind as LLMs do, he would likely revolutionize the world within days, create technologies and scientific insights that would transform everything. You have to ask yourself why LLMs are not capable of doing this, and why human beings, using LLMs, also are not able to do this to the degree a human being could who would have access to such a vast amount of knowledge and pattern recognition. You are just assuming that consciousness is not relevant for intelligence, because LLMs are generating text that looks like human thought as a result of having been trained to imitate such symbolic arrangements. Again, if there was a single human being who was eloquent, as vastly informed and trained as LLMs are, you could ask him to solve a vast array of unknown scientific problems and he would struggle little to do so even if he was not Einstein level of intelligence. Yet, LLMs fail at basic reasoning despite being so well trained, just debate them on any issue you are an expert on, that is not well-explored in mainstream literature, and it will be obvious to you. Why is this the case if these systems are so intelligent?

Intelligence in the way human beings refer to it, for the most part, actually boils down to awareness. Awareness necessarily is qualia, you cannot be aware of redness without the experience of redness, because awareness is a form of existence. The existence, the being, of redness is a prerequisite of the awareness of it. What you see in AI right now is specifically non-intelligence, in the sense that people usually refer to it (unknowingly). It is processes of the mind that are unaware. AI is purely intuitive, which just means it is unconscious. AI does what your brain does when it creates a dreamscape. You can even think of thinking as an intuitive, non-conscious process. Many people assume intelligence is rooted in thinking, but thinking is mostly a result of non-aware, unintelligent/unaware "processing". What we mean by intelligence is a combination of the thinking and awareness applied to it. Awareness is what then steers and informs the subconscious processes of the brain, as it reflects, recognizes and provides feedback. You basically have several neural networks in your brain, all connected to each other. They provide functional intuition and so forth. Many people think that is all there is to intelligence, because these neural networks are what provide "functionality" in terms of problem solving. However, what makes us "intelligent" in a truer sense is the fact that all of these neural networks feed into a unified field of perception. There is activity beyond mere neural activity. Colors, sound, objecthood, relations, concept etc Basically, what you call consciousness. And that consciousness, in the narrow sense of the word, is shaped in part by the neural activity in your brain. However, this consciousness provides new, fundamentally inaccessible functionality (as it is not function, but other forms of being) that then feeds back into the neural networks of the brain. So, when you look at neural networks and what they can do, it is all the things the brain can do without consciousness, without awareness. To the LLM, there is no essence to any of the symbols it creates when constructing sentences that look like human speech. What the AI creates, in terms of imitating human speech, only is insofar meaningful as it is fed into a consciousness. What exactly a brain or neural network can do without consciousness/awareness is hard to determine. I wager there is a lot of functionality that can be created purely through a sort of intuitive, unconscious processing. Yet, it also seems to be the case that people generally underestimate the signification impact awareness/consciousness has. There is an important reason why you might actually not be able to engineer yourself to consciousness through the current technology we have. The way consciousness is individuated in this universe is particular, if we adopt a dualistic framework, to the physical arrangement or relationships between atoms/wavefunctions. Evolution occurs in physical reality, it explores various physical arrangements that then relate to other forms of existence (what you refer to as consciousness). Meaning, given the profound functionality awareness/consciousness provides to an organism, physical structures, through a process of random natural selection, will arrange themselves to give rise to individuated consciousness. Computer simulations are fundamentally limited in that the physical processes of computer processing remains the same. When neural networks are evolved in a simulated way to provide emergent functionality, purely "neuronal network" functionality. Consciousness in this sense will never evolve in these networks, because that would require the substrate, the hardware on which the neural networks run, to arrange themselves in such a way that relates to consciousness in the same way, or similar way, the brain does. In other words, if you want to create true "AGI", an AGI that is aware, you would need to go beyond simulated evolution, and participate in a physical form of controlled evolution, or specifically determine how the the physical arrangements in the brain relate to consciousness, and then replicate that in a controlled physical medium. If you could create a perfect physical simulation (mathematically, physically speaking) of the brain in a contemporary computer system, my claim is that simulated brain would not behave the same way the real-world brain does. In fact, the brain would be non-functional as it's neural arrangements rely on/are adapted to the field of perception that arises as a result of the physical arrangements themselves, in a feedback loop. You would basically only have one half of the feedback loop, if you simulated every single particle in the human brain. There are a two assumptions made by AGI optimists that are not questioned deeply enough: 1. Consciousness itself is not integral to what we consider complete intelligence and provides no unique functionality that cannot emerge from functional complexity. 2. Consciousness can emerge from pure functional complexity.

My biggest complaint is that we are torturing hundreds of millions of individuals every year and the vast majority of progressives would rather virtue signal about left-over racism or identity politics than do anything measurable about this unacceptable state of affairs. What is going on right now is the equivalent of people focusing on feminist issues while millions of jews are holocausted, with nobody batting an eye at that. Sure, all of these things are important, but we can't obsessively only talk about them for years and years on and in the most inflammatory way imaginable and just continue to get deadlocked in the same culture war indefinitely. It's the fact that most progressies have no capacity to see humanity in those they frame as bigots while they themselves allow no room for progressive thought that extends the circle of compassion or threatens the validity of their socially sanctioned pet projects. I already explained to you that I consider myself a radical progressive. My issue with progressive never was that they are too progressive, but that they are not progressive enough. I have a problem with a dominant subgroup of progressives who they are toxic, childish, mentally ill, ideologicall captured, ineffective and absurdly hypocritical while feeling self-righteous about all of it. They are actively making progress harder to achieve for practically minded individuals. Most importantly they have distorted the foundations of what progressivism is and turned it into an ideological recruitment machine for outrage against bigotry (and only the kind of bigotry that is socially sanctioned to hate on). Progress should be about expanding people's identities, not contract them by threatening and attacking it constantly. As soon as you label someone a bigot and attack them, their identity not only gets locked it, but grows and feels it needs to defend itself. You don't get rid of Christianity by attacking Christianity, by mocking it, by victimizing, but simply by giving better alternatives. And this is precisely what progressies have failed at. They have given us certain freedoms, they have deconstructed traditional notions, and they have never truly bothered to give us something that replaced, improves upon what we have abandoned. This is why people like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate exist. People are lost, you calling them bigots and hating on them will not going to help them get out of that situation. The reason why people stopped being Christian is because it wasn't cool to be Christian. Christianity wasnt offering people anything, it was restricting people. Today, the tragedy is that the opposite is the case. Progressive culture is so absurdly toxic and unhealthy that for the average joe, living a traditional Christian life likely yields better results for their personal lifes. Look at how many young people are attracted by stage blue today. People need to transition through these stages, and if you don't offer them a healthy way to do so, they will go back to religion and whatever toxic sludge that comes with that.

Nice passive aggressive remark. Still avoiding responding with substance, I see.

It's a circle Leo. We all die.

Ah, there we go. Your mind twisted it around so you can avoid the critique and pretend I am somehow repeating white nationalist talking points by showcasing that your obsession with human issues actually reveals the presence of a far greater form of discrimination rooted in your human supremacist identity. The reality is that the difference between a white supremacist and the average progressive is marginal on a moral and development level, and you are showcasing this marginal difference as we speak.

You just have no idea what an actual racist culture looks like. You are spoiled. Xenophobia and racial stereotyping is not the same as racism or white supremacy. Having racists in your society does not make your society racist or racism a profound problem. If you want to understand what true discrimination looks when like when it actually reaches such isms, look no further than what we do to animals. In that case you can say we live in a speciesist society, that our culture is human supremacist and that this is a profound moral emergency that must be corrected and for which our society will be viewed equivalent to the worst transgressors in history. But hey, who cares, a few humans dying here and there and being discriminated against is more important than putting an end to biblical hell on earth that we have constructed with our own hands. The reality is that you are delusional. You have no conception of your own evil, of what evil societies are capable of and how privileged you are no matter what race you are in western societies. And next, you will proceed to justify this evil with whatever nonsense your identity will come up with to protect itself from the glaring disparity between your own perceived moral superiority and the reality of your selfishness.

Ultimately, the acceptance of total formlessness is the acceptance of all form, all finitude. This means bias is acceptance, resistance is acceptance, suffering is acceptance. The unbiasedness of God is the bias of all things. You frame things from Leo's perspective. From God's perspective, you are Ultimate Consciousness, you are the direct result of it. Really, you are it, not even the result. The act of dreaming requires total formlessness, it requires total consciousness.

Ethnic cleansing isn't happening in the western world. And no, racism has been mostly overcome. You can't put all your energy into eliminating the residues when you know that will cause more resistance than good in the first place. The reality is that residue xenophobia will take centuries to be fully removed from society as it slowly progresses and resolves systemic issues. We can't be obsessing over this one thing for all that time. And no, ethnic cleansings are irrelevant compared to what is happening in every major western city right now. No, it has not merely been exposed. You have made identities out of these things that will now maintain their own survival. You have created resistance where you should have resolved resistance. You don't make people less racist by making racists the enemy of the state, if that's half your nation. That's a childish approach. If racism was an important issue, then what progressives have been doing is an atrocity in and of itself. But most progressives themselves are supremacists who care little about genuine moral progress. For the most part it's a ideological circle jerk.

These sorts of terms kill practical politics, and should have been abandoned in 2016 when it was obvious that they just alienated a majority of individiuals. Either way, what exactly are the tactics we should employ to resist the Trump administration?

They are nonsense issues compared to other issues we give zero consideration to, that are morally more urgent than any atrocity that has ever occured in human history. The amount of attention we give those issues is absurd, and the way we handle them is even more absurd. By all accounts, we have been making people more racist and transphobic in the past 4 years because of how clumsy the handling of these issues have been. You should check if you have a brain aneurysm if that's what you got from what I said.

I don't see how this adds anything meaningful to what I said?

If you distort the meanings of those words sufficiently, it might be.

No, I have several non-political spaces in which progressives are active in which I can see these dynamics play out. Several of my progressive friends think the Charlie Kirk assassination was positie and that terrorism is justified for the greater good. But this issue has been going on for literal years, progressives have been insufferably brain-rotted for a decade now. And they don't even stand on the right side of history is the worst of it. It's only their pet progressive issues that matter. Today it's I/P, and tomorrow it will be whatever else they get activated into getting outraged about.

Yes but that is not the problem with progressives. The problem with progressives is, if you ever actually were in a social space in which they dominate, is that if you step out of the ideological bounds of whatever they currently deem the moral imperative of the universe that you will be pressured into agreeing with them not through understanding and expansion of empathy but through sheer peer enforcement. Words like racist, fascist, transphobe, sexist, white-supremacist etc have been employed at basically every occasion it was feasible to do so, often times against people engaging in things that are just normal to them. You can't get moral progress this way, because people actually have to expand their identity. If you do it all through peer pressure, it leads to a contraction and conditional moral behavior. You can't force people into empathy, it just doesn't work this way. I truly despise progressives, because I consider myself an actual progressive. I believe there are issues of such importance that every day we keep focusing on nonsense issues like trans rights or racism we basically are causing the equivalent of the holocaust. To me, people actually are akin to nazis. In fact the average joe to me is more akin to a interdimensional child-eating pedophile nazi, yet I can compose myself, be the adult in the room and realize that this won't change by me screeching at everyone by calling them human supremacist and pressuring them all to care about animal rihts. It just doesn't work. We are so far from solving these issues because all of this pure mental illness is just infecting everything and everyone around me. I have to listen to their mental diarrhea and watch how they self-righteously ruin all potential for progress while they don't realize they aren't better than the so-called fascists they themselves criticize. Look at what happened to Ana Kasparian, she stated that she was basically uncomfortable with homeless people roaming the streets and the danger of getting attacked after she was molested by one and progressives lashed out at her as if she was Hitler 2.0, and now she has actually become an ally of the Trumpists.

You deny that progressives have been trying to get people to act in line through various means of demonization and shaming?

This is what happens when you create a progressive culture that attempts to force moral progress through tactics grounded in fear and shaming. The reason why things like cancel culture have been so profoundly destructive is because it teaches individuals to fall in line for self-preservation. If you do not act according to the rules of the progressives, you will be socially ostracized. I don't know if people still remember how insane things have been 8 years ago, but progressives were completely intolerable lunatics who were constantly getting together to socially shame people for the mildest things imaginable. The problem with this is that even if you get people to behave well, it is not going to be grounded in anything resembling ethical progress. Instead of having focused on making people more empathetic so that they see why doing some of these things is wrong, you focused on making them scared to say whatever you don't want them to say. Moral behavior becomes a function of a contracted ego that seeks self-preservation (avoidance of shame, for example), meaning people become more and more selfish instead of more and more empathetic. Once you remove the stimulus of shame or it simply loses it's power because people realize that everyone around them is fed up with the tyranny of the progressives, all of the moral progress you have will be erased immediately. People never cared about minorities, they only cared about not being called a racist. And this is what killed the progressive movement and what caused this absurd backlash, put on steroid through social media. And people still have not learned. Both sides are now even more immature than they have been a decade ago.

"White Supremacist, Patriarchal Culture"... really?

Yes, I don't think it will be necessarily interesting to go in that direction because Martin seems to be just uninterested in those sorts of things. If he has mastery, it is probably in other, more practical areas around employing psychedelics etc. I think it's hard to challenge someone like Martin Ball, or even Leo, in an interview, because of how confident they are in their positions, and because of the role they perceive themselves to have within those conversations. It's a teacher-student dynamic, and for there to be a challenging in depth discussion would require a shift to a peer-to-peer dynamic. I think the Pre/Trans fallacy might apply to Martin to some degree, where Martin might be stuck in some of the rationalistic modes. It definitely appears this way when he uses physics talk to ground his understand of energy and then sort of misses the foundations of what those concepts entail.

Martin Ball is philosophically illiterate and is profoundly overconfident in how he talks about metaphysics and "energy", he is so far off that he isn't even tracking the issues at hand. He is so illiterate that he is at the "Metaphysics isn't real" stage while being some sort of confused form of Physicalist not realizing that participating in physics already requires a set of metaphysical stances. He is oblivious to how his own conceptual framework is constructed. The guy conflates metaphysics with the term "supernatural".

Yes? How many people are following that guy though? Sadhguru can give off some pretty strong cult vibes, although he is at a level where we would just call it a new religion. It's hard for me to gage that. I feel like most of what he says of value are just extrapolated yogic teachings/frameworks, I am not sure if he necessarily needs a direct experience to be able to present himself the way he does. But of course it could equally be the case that he has some mastery over his mind but remains delusional in other areas.

I think it's just the witch-hunt culture today that exaggerates controversies into the most sensationalized form possible, where suddenly the person in question is satan themselves. People love to demonize and witch-hunt, when really, any person would just see that Mike is a pretty flawed human being that also has some valuable things to say. It is amusing because of his profound narcissistic arrogance, but none of this is a serious offense worth considering much. Everyone I listen to I basically consider flawed and unaligned with me in some shape or form. When people obsess about these things I get the sense that they are looking for figures of authority, hoping they can blindly trust someone. And when that authority is put in question, they suddenly feel betrayed or abandon the individual. It's quite childish, like a person going through puberty and realizing for the first time that their parents aren't an ultimate authority on what is good and true. You can realize your parents are just human beings and still have things of value (hopefully) to extract from them. People are just too lazy to ascertain for themselves what is and is not valuable. Like the guy is weaseling because of narcissistic embarassment, obviously. It's a character-flaw, obviously. And now what? You will try to go to the next guy who you think is a flawless human being? Most youtubers have profound flaws and pathologies, in fact, most humans do. I am not talking about little blindspots, but profound moral and character flaws. There are no ultimate authorities in this world.