Scholar

Leo, like everyone else, is a meaning addict. In my opinion, psychedelics provide him with experiences of meaning, in his case the sense that he gained deeper understanding into reality and specifically that he gained understanding that is superior to others, which is a central theme in his psychology as you have shown in the post. Having a sense that he realized something essential, the most important thing in reality, and that others are blind to him, gives him an ultimate sense of meaning, and that's why it just keeps repeating over and over in a new form. And there is nothing you could do to convince him this is the case. Psychedelics are basically a brainwashing tool, in terms of the centers of the brain they activate outside of mere ego dissolution. It is so obvious and undeniable, the first time I took psychedelics I immediately recognized this, and the more I actually saw what psychedelics do to others, it is obvious they have a profound reinforcing effect of whatever psychological state the mind is in. Leo's mind would never be satisfied with "realizing reality" and then moving on. He needs more always, otherwise the meaning-treadmill would end. He is still a rat chasing it's own tail.

Do you think raising black slaves is comparable to white slavery?

To me it seems pretty obvious that any reaction to "enlightenment", is always egoic/psychological. When someone is mind-blown by the nature of existence, the "being mind blown part", is just a psychological reaction of the limited form, the human, to the recognition of this nature. So most of consciousness work is just about a human ego getting obsessed with the nature of existence. The nature of existence already is the nature of existence, it already is infinite, it has no need to go and "realize itself", other than limited forms within itself getting "mind blown" by the differences between the limitations and limitlessness. The construct of "I am the most enlightened person", is blatantly a psychological process, a reaction of a psyche to the nature of reality. You cannot actually get rid of this, because any reaction will always remain to be a limited form, as that what a reaction is. Oneness is not a feeling. It doesn't feel good or bad, it just is. However, a psychological being, when it experiences Oneness, will have a specific psychological reaction to it. The feeling is actually what is "mindblowing", the reaction to the recognition of the Self then overshadows the recognition itself and becomes centerpoint. The "energetic response" is not enlightenment, it is just psychology/limitation, in fact, the more intense it becomes, the more you know it is limitation. It would be obvious if the psychological response to the nature of reality was a color. If humans had their vision fill with redness instead of psychological love when recognizing Oneness, humans would say that God is Red. The Redness would be so intense that their psychology could not help but get swept up by it. The reason why you cry and shit yourself when you take 5-MeO-DMT is because of the feelings that flood your consciousness, not because of some sort of "energy" that fills you because you become God. Your Psychology is not calibrated for Ultimate Oneness, or Infinity. If it was, it would be mundane to you, nothing special at all. Only a limited form is mind-blown by Infinity. And then, here is the ultimate trap: Human psychology is fundamentally driven my emotions, and mostly by emotions of meaning. Because psychedelics stimulate so much meaning in the psychology of a mind, it is a recipe for ultimate delusion. The meaning will be so intense that your psychology will rewire itself to view the psychological reaction as the most important and essential thing in reality. It will trick itself into having experience objective Meaning, when it was just All-Consuming Meaning, psychologically speaking. Meaning so intense, no psychological being (or human psychology) could resist it's allure.

Why be so closed off to slavery? If only we had compromised with slave-keepers and not judged them so harshly, for many of them giving up slavery meant financial ruin after all. Those pesky, moralistic abolitionists, look how many people had to die in the civil war just because they were set on their radical ideas of ending slavery. Clearly those were just ideological, fatherless losers who couldn't cope with reality. And look, now slavery is even worse, with people working in sweatshops for us instead of having high quality slavery where we treat our slaves with dignity and respect. So much suffering could have been prevented, the world could be a free-range slavery utopia.

it's funny how people will become completely sociopathic utilitarians as soon as it suits them. Here is the challenge for you: If you truly believe in this logic, how can you possibly judge someone who keeps a sex slave more than someone who buys an iphone? Assuming the slave-keeper keeps his slave above the level of well-being of a sweatshop worker, or assuming that if he had not bought the sex slave, the sex slave would simply have gone to someone else who would have treated them even worse? With your sociopathic utilitarianism, you could never say the sex slave keeper is worse for raping the sex slave every single day than any person on this forum who buys a smartphone. You'd have to say that the act of buying a smartphone is worse than the slave-keeper not only keeping a slave but raping his slave every day, assuming the slave keeper treats the slave better than the average slave-keeper, who would have bought the slave otherwise. You might say that the slave-keeper shouldn't be raping the slave, but you cannot ever say that with more force than saying that people shouldn't by smartphones, and you certainly couldn't say it with more conviction than someone who tells you to stop consuming the corpses of animals. It is so obvious that this is not how humans do morality at all. We do morality by how we relate to others. Keeping another human being as a slave makes a person much more evil and depraved than someone who consumes iphones, no matter the difference in "utilitarian yield" by the end of that interaction. Because what matters is how you view others. What makes you so depraved, as someone who is capable of keeping another person as a slave, is the fact that you think you are superior to them, that you believe that they are an object for you to use. If you wore the hair of a person who was tortured and abused before being killed, even if you just picked up that hair and caused no utilitarian effect in the world at all, we would still say something is wrong with you, rightfully so. No amount of utilitarian calculus will change the fact that you are a sick, depraved, selfish freak who believes his own kind is superior to others.

By this logic we might as well consider pedophiles paying for child rape acceptable, because after all, no matter how you live, you will contribute to children getting raped somewhere in the world. We also might as well make slavery legal again because after all, no matter what you consume, some humans will live in slave life conditions somewhere in this world. In fact, if we had a specially designated subgroup of humans that we enslaved locally, we could treat them far better than wage slaves in other countries and give them much better standards of life. Cannibalism is also okay because after all, humans die from cancer and other terrible ways no matter how you live your life as a result of the pollution you produce through your consumption. A free range human would at least have a quick death. The reality is that moral progress only can occur if we change the relationship between us and whatever group we consider beneath us. There is a reason why we consider the direct objectification of humans as unacceptable. A pedophile who watches a child getting raped is sick not merely because of the consequences of his actions, but because his mind relates to other human beings in a way in which his pleasure takes precedence over them as beings. He doesn't view them as human beings, he views them as objects. This is why someone who holds a slave at home is worse than someone who buys an iphone, even if the consumption of the iphone causes more suffering because the slave-keeper treats his slave incredibly well. It is the act of objectification that tells you that their mind is depraved and sick, that they relate to other individuals in a way that undermines the nature of what an individual is.

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.