Scholar

The true question here is, can non-existence exist? If you claim after death there is non-existence, well, that's no problem. Because non-existence doesn't exist, therefore what will happen can only be existence. To postulate that non-existence exists is absurd. How can the cessation of existence exist? What would it mean for non-existence to be eternal? Is it not the case that from the perspective of non-existence, eternity would pass in no time at all? If this is true, an eternity of non-existence would pass instantly. What would this mean? It would mean that upon your death, all existing things would instantly cease to exist from your perspective. This means, that upon your death, all of reality dies with you. All form comes to an end, and then there is only formlessness. And now ask yourself, what was before your birth? If death is non-existence, is prior birth not non-existence too? And if the non-existence of prior birth let to birth, why do you assume that the non-existence after death would lead to anything else but birth?

He is not going deep enough. He has already assumed so many things by postulating that there is perception, that there is Ultimate Truth or that there is such a thing as a "Consciousness". He will be unable to substantiate any of this, infact most likely he lacks the metaphysical intelligence to even comprehend the depth of his own ignorance, the depth of his own unconscious assumptions. How does he know what his perceptions of the brain truly indicate? How does he know what the brain is made of? If he is postulating that the brain is made out of material, what is material but something within his own consciousness? Funny how within your consciousness you have this idea of a brain and a material world, and then you postulate that this very idea, clearly made of consciousness, is that which gives rise to your own consciousness. Anything that you could ever postulate will be consciousness. Any idea, any feeling, any ideology, any scientific fact you will ever come across will always be consciousness. If it was not consciousness, you wouldn't be able to refer to it. Anything you could possibly refer to will always and necessarily be consciousness. But even this is surface level, this problem of assumptions goes much deeper. It goes so deep that it is hard to even communicate this with language. Usually it is not a lack of understanding that is the problem, but a lack of insight into ignorance. You assume way too much and you are not even aware of any of these assumptions you are making. To even pose the questions you are posing requires assumptions upon assumptions upon assumptions, and none of them are substantiated by anything. What do you even mean by reality? Why do you claim that perception is somehow different from reality? Truly ask yourself this, and ask yourself what even is the substance of the very question you are asking. If perception is unreal, how could you possibly even know that you are asking any question in the first place? If perception is not reality, how can you know that you perceive anything at all? How do you know that anything is here at all? What does verification even mean? If anything you posit to be truthful, that truth will be part of your consciousness. So if you claim anything to be true, whether it is that we cannot know reality, or that the brain creates consciousness, you have just posited that part of your consciousness is Truth. Notice how all of your questions work from assumptions outward. So you have unquestioned assumptions, and with the help of these you outwardly question anything but the very assumptions that allow you to form the question you are posing. Notice whether this is true or not, and then clearly identify the assumptions you are holding and truly ask yourself how you can substantiate them. Instead of questioning reality, what it is or isn't, question yourself. If you will just claim that the yogis did that, you are not better than your father. You are just constructing beliefs upon beliefs. And then you came here on this forum, posing your belief as a question. You haven't done anything but construct elaborate web of ideas, all of them founded on nothing at all. You aren't actually questioning anything, you are creating new questions, but you are not looking at that which is posing the questions. Most people are quite literally incapable of doing this. I am not sure what it is, but my suspicion is that there is a spectrum of metaphysical intelligence. Some people will never be able to see the true depth of the problems they face when questioning reality. They swim in the shallow waters, never able to dare to dive into the depth of the oceans. You should not try to create new knowledge, but question your knowledge. Don't speculate about knowledge that you do not have, but inspect the knowledge that you already hold. This work is not about creating knowledge, this work is about truly being able to see that what you took for self-evident, what you took for so granted that you didn't even know about it at all, is not self-evident and obvious at all. You are walking around trying to find the path to truth, but what you need to do is look on that which you stand on. Look at it very closely. Notice that you haven't looked on the ground you stand upon ever before, and now that you closely inspect it, notice that it is no ground at all. That what you felt like was a path, is no path at all. The tricky part is to notice that which you do not notice, which is so obvious, so common, so mundane that you never before in your life truly questioned it. This cannot be done by mere intellectualization, it requires far more depth than intellectualization. Most human beings on this planet are not trained to even begin to question reality. They don't even have the tools to begin to do so. They are so blind, no instructions will help them. Be hopeful that you are gifted with enough clarity that you can question reality, because most people are not. They walk on a path of their own making, a path that they think is real, but if only they looked down on the ground the stand upon, would clearly notice that it is no path, no ground at all. And then, the fall begins. The fall into the unknown, into the abyss. To see that there is no ground beneath your feet requires you to open your eyes, not to keep stumbling in the darkness of your own ignorance.

You should seriously contemplate why you are attracted to these kinds of narratives, it usually has nothing to do with spirituality, but everything to do with your psychology.

That's giving off severe red flags. "End of Days", "We are the chosen ones", etc. If you don't see these red flags you should consider yourself susceptible to cult-mentality, which is something you need to work on.

I think this kind of personality cult usually is more of a stage orange manifestation, so you shouldn't necessarily expect future movements to work in the same way, they might be far more decentralized than in the past. But if there was a next Martin Luther King, he would most certainly focus on animal rights rather than human rights.

It's fun and games now before food and water security starts to be at serious risk.

What a nothing burger of a report, and what a cringe attempt of the skeptics to immediately use this to confirm their own narrative, when the report literally says nothing of substance.

There is a reason why more primitive societies are more spiritual, why they tend to easily fall into delusions of mystical and magical thinking. It is for one simple reason: Before you come to understand the world, the miracle of existence is obvious to you. There is no question that all of this is utterly miraculous. Only through understanding can you come to take all of this for granted and come so out of touch with the clear impossibility of that which is right before your eyes. The gift of existence, trivialized to nothing but abstract ideas. To understand is to demystify, and to demystify is to become blind to the obvious. To a child, Santa Clause is a possibility, precisely because the child can see that anything indeed is possible. The very substance of that which he experiences, to the child, is so foreign, so strange, so impossible that it can only be a miracle, it can only be magical, it can only be mysterious. But as the child grows, it starts to become blind and loses it's clarity. Instead, it can only see it's understanding, blind to that which is right infront of the childs eyes. There is no reason to this, no understanding, no intelligence. It is beyond all of this, and all of this can only exist because of the miracle of existence. This actuality is so fundamentally clear that to believe otherwise is in and of itself it's own miracle. If you could only open your eyes and see the miracle of existence, your seeking would be recontextualized. You would stop seeking Truth, and you would see that Truth is Creation itself, that there is no reason, no ground to it. That the substance of Truth is miracle, mystery. There is nothing to unveil, the very process of unveiling is it's own kind of Creation, it's own form of miracle. Nothing is ever unveiled, discovered or understood. The ordinary has always been that which you seek, you merely forgot that it is a miracle. There is no need to seek the extraordinary, you simply have to open your eyes to the ordinary. To open your eyes, as they have been when you were born. To unlearn your blindness.

Ignorance is suffering. Suffering for everyone who you turn a blind eye to. If you ignore the suffering of the animals in the factory farms, nature will make it so causing this suffering will be your downfall. The german people choose to ignore what was happening right before their eyes, and nature deemed it rightful that the german people ought to be destroyed. This is what happens when you are ignorant. Yesterday a tornado destroyed several villages in the czech republic: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57605651 You might think "Oh what a tragedy!". But this is not actually true. What is tragic is that all of those individuals who now suffer, choose to ignore the suffering of others, the suffering of nature and all it's inhabitants. They were convinced that they could live their lifes blindly, to only focus on themselves and that everything would be okay as long as they take care of themselves. Nature will cause a lot more suffering to humanity, because humanity chooses to be ignorant and complacent. Only through suffering will we understand how important universal concern is. If you choose to ignore the suffering of your neighbours children, do not be surprised when your own child gets killed in a school shooting. That is the direct consequence of your ignorance and complacency. If you watch by as trillions of beings are enslaved, tortured and killed, what do you think the consequence is going to be? Why would nature have mercy with you, if you cannot show any mercy to your brothers and sisters? People live in such comfort today that they need to be reminded what it means to truly suffer.

Placebo is a real thing my dude. It's sad that so many of you will have to learn the hard way, through pure suffering. For some this is the only cure for ignorance and selfishness.

It's interesting because in a moral sense today there is far more unnecessary victimization, by people who view themselves as victims, than ever before. And a kind of victimization that even is detrimental to survival of the very perpetrators who commit it. So you could argue these individuals are even more morally corrupt than the colonizers of the previous generations, especially if we consider that current discrimination and it's effects are on a scale that makes every historical transgression pale in comparison.

It is utterly fascinating how the mentality criticized finds itself in the very author who criticizes it. There is a far more fundamental dynamic at play here, which even the victimized are unable to escape. The victimized themselves are the perpetrators, the dominators, the keeper of slaves. Victimhood and perpetration are mere relative notions in this game of dominance. The core of this very issue is never being touched in these superficial "stage green" thinkers, because if they came to understand the core of this issue, they would understand that they themselves commit the very same evil, take part in and benefit from the very frame of mind which lead to their own subjugation. Infact these individuals lack even the tools to begin to come to understand this issue, and to truly understand their own evil and selfishness. The fundamental dynamic, given rise through the struggle of survival, is that the powerful justify the subjugation and victimization of the weak by means of viewing themselves superior as a result of the very power they hold. On a psychological level this is fascilitated by selective compassion. A learned discrimination that assigns worthiness of consideration before any consideration can happen. This means that my eyes of compassion are blind and only when someone meets my criteria of worthiness, do I open my eyes of compassion and let myself feel the perspective of the other. In this way, I can say that I am a slave, because the white man is subjugating me, but I must not view myself as the subjugator of others, because the pig, the chicken, the fly, the deer, all of them are not worthy of consideration and therefore I can close my eyes of compassion. I can clearly understand white supremacy, but I am blind to my own human supremacy. I am blind to the very mindset within myself that I criticize in the other. This allows me to subjugate while upholding my victim identity. I am not actually different at all to those who I call masters, I just happened to find myself at a different position within the hierarchy of power and worthiness of consideration. To escape and deconstruct this very hierarchy, what is needed is a deconstruction of the very process of discrimination which allows this to happen in the first place. It means to stop coming up with reasons why some deserve more or less compassion and consideration than others. It means to look at the fly which buzzes in your room and to develop an instinct that will expand your compassion to this fly. This must be a natural, ingrained process, a process which projects individualism onto others, which expands it, which is inclusive and not exclusive in nature. This means to consider the interests of the flies, to feel connected to the fly and to act accordingly. The reason why it has to be inclusive, why there cannot be bias, is because once you allow for bias, you will require the very process which leads to all discrimination. You will use a filter before opening your eyes of compassion. And this inevitably will lead to you discriminating against others. Infact, all it takes to kill a human is to just consider them to be a fly. If you look at the human the same way you look at the fly, suddenly your mind will have no problem with exterminating that very human. This is why compassion cannot be selective, because the process of selection will always lead to this struggle of power and the subjugation and victimization of the weak. It is your mind that is the root of this issue. Those who have altered their minds to rid themselves of this process of discrimination became Jains. Not necessarily those who follow the religion of the Jains, but rather those who gave rise to it. It is the natural conclusion that follows the disassembling of the process of selective compassion.

Haha. Well if it was complete, it would become obvious that it was unreal from the very beginning, dissolving itself into the nothingness it is. Once you recognize that a thing is causeless, you realize it was never caused. If it was never caused, it does not exist. Incompleteness it quite literally that which holds math together, aswell as everything else in existence. Being complete means to be no thing at all. If you could proof everything, you could proof that you don't exist! Sneaky, sneaky reality with it's tendencies to thrive for existence. So really, what the mathematicians were thriving for all along was the cessastion of math itself, aswell as all else in all of existence. They are lucky they stumbled upon incompleteness, this way they can avoid the inevitable for a few more moments. Also, they are making a mistake in describing infinities to be larger than others. This is not actually true, any infinity is endless, it has no size at all, it is undefinable. What they call different sizes of infinity actually show different densities of infinity. We in general seem to be approach the idea of infinities in a kind of naive way. People are kind of mind blown by the ideas of infinity, yet it is not limitlessness that is so extraordinary, but limitation. Limitation must be explained, limitlessness is the default. They are trying to explain limitlnessness through limitation, when instead they need to start to think about how limitation can be explained through limitlessness. The miracle is not that there are lines with no divisions. The miracle is the fact that division can exist at all. That is mindblowing, truly mystifying. The self-referential problem is actually a really fitting name. You cannot refer to your Self, because if you could, you would lose your self.

No, this would not be practical for many reasons. One of them is that a foreign government could produce these seeds and distribute them in the economy to deflate the currency and collapse the economy which is build around it. This happened in the past, infact it is a big security risk eve today. This is why only the government can print money and why we go through such lengths to make it hard to counterfeit bills. Here is a good video on this: There are other reasons why this would be impractical, like that seeds can spoil quickly and so forth.

You are missing the point completely. You were misusing a cultural standard we use in science and misapplying it to this instance. This has nothing to do with materialistic reductionism, I have no idea how you even got this idea. You could be a materialist reductionist or a complete idealist, it wouldn't change anything I was adressing. This isn't about proving aliens, this is about pointing out flaws in your approach. I don't care about the aliens, the reason why I view discussing this as so useful is because it actually illustrates how people approach truth. Look at some of the first statements you made addressing me, it was never about whether you are agnostic or not, I am trying to focus in on how exactly you are thinking about these issues, because they reveal alot about how your mind works. And you keep avoiding all of the questions, and when I point something out you keep making this about a singular claim like whether or not you should be agnostic. No, that's not the only claim you made, and that's not the claim I was arguing with. This is very similar to how people approach incest. Ask them whether incest is moral or not and then investigate how they came to conclude that. In most cases it will reveal that people are utterly shallow in how they determine something to be moral or not and all they do is rationlize an intuition they already hold. You and that other guy are basically doing the same here, and it's so obvious when I keep pointing out how you do that. But you keep escaping it, so much so that now you pretend as if all you said was "I am agnostic about this".

That's literally completely irrelevant to the video. I am done engaging with you, this is getting to levels of cringe I have no time for.

No, this is not how any of this works. There is no scientific paradigm that tells you aliens were never here, or couldn't visit us, or are unlikely to visit us. That's all just nonsense people make up to sound reasonable. None of this is scientific, none of this is rational, none of this has anything to do with evidence. This is not like we have an established theory if evidence supporting it that can make scientific predictions, and that if aliens exist all of that will turn out to be wrong. This isn't like Relativity overthrowing Newtonian physics. You are completely abusing these ideas. Again, we have the Fravor incident, and you still did not contend at all with it. What does that mean "It is a possibility!", that's the most laziest non-answer possible. Give me some good account of what conventional explanation would fit the data here. This isn't about agnosticism, this is about your previous claims that it's somehow more likely that your pet theory is correct while you have not provided any reasoning for it at all that is solid. Again, we have an object described that behaved intelligently, that did active jamming, that moved in a way that fits no technology we know of. We have radar data and other witness accounts all corroborating this. And you basically treat this the same way like some image made by a smartphone from some random dude on the internet where "it's a possibility that this is aliens". And now you are even moving the conversation to agnosticism because you have talked yourself into a corner. This has never been about agnosticism. You realize that 3 of the pilots were on national television like a week ago? You don't even know what you are talking about yet you have strong opinions about this. That fact alone tells me everything I need to know about you in terms of how you approach this. Here, this is actually a solid degree of open mindedness coming from a scientist:

This isn't about aliens, I don't care if aliens visited us or not. This is about showing how none of you guys have done any epistemic work at all, you work completely from cultural dogma. You don't actually consider how you can know something and this incident is the perfect example for this. You don't have any reasoning here, you are just rationalizing your dogma. Sure, 90% of the people who believe in this don't do so because of rigorous epistemic standards, but this is the case equally for those who just dismiss this incident without even contending with any of the data. It shows how biased your are and that you basically don't have any standards at all. You just backwards rationalized why your position is true. Again, we have 4 fighter jet pilots witnessing an object that moved in basically impossible ways in terms of what we consider technologically viable, we have radar and visual data corroborating this incident. You have literally two options, either they are all lying for the sake of some government conspiracy, or what you have is a technology that you cannot explain at all. Not a weather phenomena, not some hallucination, but a technology. But you don't care, you will just dismiss anything because you think not believing in aliens is the most rational thing to do.

You are not engaging with anything, you are just giving me vague and general claims. Apply them to the Fravor Incident, don't just give me your idea of how you would approach the data. Approach it. You keep making the basic analytical mistake I have pointed out several times now. We are not talking about eyewitness report incidents, then footage of another incident, then radar data from another incident. We are talking about all of this data from one incident. All of them corroborating each other. That's what you have to contend with, not some random stuff that some civilian recorded or saw.

I am not sure if you are familiar with the case because what you say does not make a lot of sense. Highly experienced professionals make mistakes, but it is highly unlikely that 4 of them see an object that according to all of them behaved in the same way. The object was seen by their eyes, not merely instruments. Again, even if you wanted to dismiss all of them, you also have radar data, optical data and so forth all corroborating what these people saw. To me it actually is highly implausable that they are being honest and that at the same time that what they describe is some phenomena we can explain through ordinary means. It is far more likely that they would all be lying and that this would be some sort of conspiracy. But I find that itself rather implausible. I don't actually think you have contended with anything here, you just remain agnostic for the sake of seeming rational. Again, give an account of all of the data points we have, you are doing precisely what I have been criticizing a few posts earlier.

Don't use a razor if you don't know how or when to you use it.

So what is your position on the Fravor incident?

That's not how any of this works. The goal of the court is not to determine truth, but to establish justice to the highest possible degree. The entire point of the court system is to create a binary determination, guilty or not guilty. This is not how science works. We aren't trying to establish the motivations of the aliens, or what exactly they were doing, or whether or not the aliens sitting in the proposed craft were a particular alien. We have data and eye witness reports that show behaviours that cannot be explained by conventional means. You don't need to see anything beyond a silhouette to see that an object is moving is physically unintiutive ways, or that it disappears or flies away at a speed equally unintuitive. You don't know anything about a potential alien civilization. Why would it be the case that they would have the ability to mask their crafts? Just because you assume that is possible? And furthermore, what would even be the motivation for conceilment? Why would they believe that your way of conceilment is more appropriate than another? How do you know they are even familiar with the way other beings would detect an object? There are so many ungrounded assumptions it's utterly silly. Okay, provide some arguments for this. You are just assering that it is not unreasonable to assume X. Why would they be motivated to hide themselves, how do you know whether or not in their eyes, whatever conceilment they use, is not effective for whatever they are trying to accomplish? How do you know what kind of technologies they would have and be interested in? What about any of this is reasonable? All you do is trying to project your silly sci-fi ideas onto the real world. But this doesn't actually contend with any of the data there is. There are people who want aliens to exist as much as people who are dogmatically opposed to it. You don't recognize anything, you are simply asserting something that you have no way to justify. How the hell do you know what is most likely? You don't know anything, and you seem to not even be willing to contend or even look at the data that is already present.

Look at the close-mindedness and ability to use skepticism to basically confirm your own biases. When Joe brings up the Fravor case, Neil proceeds to use his skepticism to dismiss every data point. "What about the radar sensor data?" -> "It could be a malfunction or miscalibration!" "What about the eye witness accounts?" -> "Humans are flawed, you know this!" See, you can be skeptical of each singular data-point, but the data does become compelling not because of the individuals points of data, but because of the fact that there are multiple data-points that give you the same picture. Sure, a human is flawed and as an eye witness cannot be trusted. But is this true when we talk about 4 fighter jet pilots who claim to have observed the same thing? Maybe even that could be dismissed, but let's add radar data, optical data and several others data points. You could dismiss each of them individually, but the problem is that you cannot dismiss them all together. And this is precisely the sneaky game the skeptic is playing here. This has nothing to do with testing something with scientific rigour, but everything to do with defending a present dogma in the community. The same is true for video footage of UFO's, you can pretty much dismiss each individual data point, cast doubt on it by claiming that what has been observed was actually X phenomena rather than Y, and then after you do that you exclaim "See, so with all the video footage we have, none of them ever recorded aliens!". How could you possibly know this? And how could you make such a statement and literally a minute after that proceed to explain how we only go so far as to understand the sensory data rather than what might have caused this. How do you know that every single video ever recorded that claims to have recorded a UFO, actually was something that could be explained away by any other phenomena, like weather baloons. Just because something can be explained naturally, does not mean that it is actually that natural phenomena. You have to be equally uncertain of whether or not some of these things are UFO, as you are that they indeed were UFOs. And if you are uncertain you cannot claim that "No UFO was ever recorded!". These are such basic scientific and epistemic blunders it should be embarrassing and it should disqualify Neil from being a scientist. That this is not the case shows you the standard we have for our scientists. The irony that Neil then proceeds to explain to everyone how rigorous the scientific community is, is blissful.

This is actually a huge trap in my opinion. Leo has these huge blindspots precisely because he went for everything that confirmed his already present biases (in terms of valuing his intellectualism so much). In a natural way he has created a personal philosophy of devaluing everything that contradicts his biases and valuing everything that confirm his biases. His concepts of devilry are very much centered around this, how they are applied is not at all objective. It will change depending on what he is trying to justify. Interestingly he will make it appear that these are some sort of objective values, that actually his way is the better way. He gives off this energy aswell, but if you push him, he will recognize, intellectually not energetically nor emotionally, that actually it's just his personal biases and that other ways are just as valid. This doesn't actually mean anything because it's just an intellectual admission, but still for him it is enough, because it he does not value other aspects as much. Sure everyone has their strengths and their weaknesses and it is good to nurture your strengths, however it is easy to fall into this dynamic of falling completely out of balance, as is happening to Leo. So if there is a teachers that especially resonates with you, ask yourself whether or not this indicates some bias you have that might in the future bite you in the ass. This is very much a confirmation bias problem.