Staples

@Ishanga Good for you, sounds like a wonderful life. Don't worry, I will not waste my life. My self-actualization is just different to yours.

That's your prerogative. I'm going to figure it out the best I can. My desire to understand outweighs the desire to avoid suffering. From my point of view, I would say you give up too easily or are not interested in the deepest understanding.

If there were no limits, and everything was somehow equally possible, then it would be possible (and thus necessary) for nothing to have ever existed including now. Thus, not allowing for reality to exist in any way. Yet here we are. An absence of limits is nonsense. It's a non-statement, that can't be properly considered because it is reasonless. Reality is not constructed with nonsense. Reality is unlimited in the sense that can create anything that can be constructed with sufficient reason.

@Breakingthewall Then how do you explain irreducible complexity? My awakenings have shown me God has justified absolutely everything. The cause / effect paradigm can be rationally understood as necessary. If a thing happens and there was no cause, you have nonsense. Therefore, existence is eternal, and the causal chain is infinitely long. The reason reality exists is that it could not be any other way.

God is so serious it has gone full circle and is now entering maximum silly mode.

But you are god @Ishanga. At least a part of it. Nothing egoic about admitting that 😉 If a bird shits on me, really I shit on myself. Staples just doesn't like it very much. If I told the bird: "Don't shit on me for I am god." then I would deserve a second helping of shit. But it doesn't make my being god any less true.

Leo recently posted on his blog a video detailing Lacan's concept of The Real. I thought overall it was quite a good analysis. I liked that it recognized some sort of fundamental bedrock, black hole, singularity within consciousness that cannot be undermined or shared. First order truth? Great, I can get behind that. That should be graspable to the people on this forum. But the conclusions and framing that come from that are just so damn depressing. I haven't read Lacan so maybe this is PlasticPill's influence, but it struck me as an extremely human-centric, and negative view on existence. And the music... so melodramatic . "Most of what we do as subjects is to try to avoid the recurrence of that original trauma that was forced on us when becoming subjects. We lost something that we never had, significance. The Real is incurable, it's there because you're a subject." He's framing the real like an incurable disease, something to be victim to. This perspective seems to me to be the response one feels as a human when you have developed sufficient self-awareness but not the psychological development required to handle it. Lacan read the Necronomicon before he was ready. Do you remember being a child? The Real suggests you must be traumatized from birth with this self-awareness, but in my experience this must be impossible. In my life, I started off with zero self-awareness, and it very slowly developed until I hit my late teens. Memory formation didn't even properly begin until I was four or five years old. How could I be traumatized by self-awareness in such a state? I was eating cake off the floor at that age, I couldn't give a fuck. So, I can't accept the trauma of the real as some sort of fundamental aspect of being. What do you think?

The Real is a Real pain in my ass.

I am not so sure. I could point to quotes from both of these schools of thought that link desire directly to suffering. But it seems we agree on principle which is nice, and just discussing interpretations now. Mirror stage is not the beginning of desire though. Plenty of animals lack self-awareness and desire to eat and fuck. It's probably closer to when a subject begins to construct some ideal self which they are not. Which leaves them vulnerable to disappointment when reality is otherwise.

@Jacob Morres I've watched a bit, it's better than I expected. I just get the ick when people outsource their critical thinking to the profiteering internet gurus who have an incentive to distort information. @Asia P I suggest you find out what you want to do, and then go ask someone who did it how to get there. Want to be a lawyer? Ask a lawyer you respect which law school to go to and why. Then decide for yourself. Overall if you have the means university is probably a good decision, if you can handle the financial pressure.

@Jacob Morres Hormozi is pushing his agenda on young dudes for profit. I definitely don't trust him with this by default. He has an inventive to get guys to not go to university, and instead buy his courses and products to make a living. He obviously wants you to sign up for his platform SKOOL. He wears on his sleeve that all he cares about is sales. Anyone selling a course on how to make a living is a biased actor contributing to the University debate.

I agree that desire and needs-meeting are core elements of human existence, but I don't think suffering is then implied by that experience. Having needs as a subject is not suffering, failing to meet them is. I see this reading as the depressive attitude of Buddhists and Lacan. Who says your needs are reasonable? Which of your human needs and wants are fantasies versus actual survival needs? People cause themselves a lot of suffering by constructing unnecessary needs that are impossible for them to meet. Yes true, that makes sense given Lacan is biased by his psychoanalytic perspective. I don't know if a human can integrate that trauma. Having your core needs and state so violated destroys the foundation of human life. I don't expect a positive mindset to save me from such an encounter. My concern with Lacan is that he reads The Real as a potential for violation at the root of consciousness, which is not the case in my experience. There can only be violations against particular forms of consciousness, so it's not a default like he suggests. It seems to me it can only come later as a result of circumstance that directly attacks the core needs of a subject. I worry that people will construct this root violation perspective and torture themselves with it unnecessarily.

Do I really look like a guy with a plan?

If you eliminate money from politics the only other tool we have for securing power is force. So take your pick. We need force, money and new technologies as potential options for solving conflict and getting human needs met. The problem is in the minds of those who wield power, not the tools they use.

It's only the peak so far.

Post-Modernism Part 1 is fantastic. The new direction for Actualized is a great move. I have some questions for follow up episodes: 1. How does a post-modernist effectively communicate with modernists, and pre-modernists? How can they present post-modernist perspectives such that a modernist can understand and get on board, without severe resistance? 2. How does a post-rationalist or meta-rationalist effectively communicate with post-modernists and modernists? 3. What further development exists after post-rationalism? Are we starting to reach the limits of human cognition, requiring a shift into transhumanism in order to further develop? 4. How does a post-modernist+ individual succeed and thrive in a world that rewards modernists and rationalists? Where having a post-modernist+ perspective is quite lonely or even demonized.

That's not what I said. I said the universe is free to act out whatever it pleases. Good and nasty included. As humans, we generally don't like corruption because it causes us suffering. But we are still free to do as much of it as we like. Corruption is a construction because there exists minds that can not and will not ever act it out. Could you expect a goldfish to be corrupt? No. One has to exist at a certain level of conciousness to act out corruption. And yes everything is constructed. You're just going to have to accept that at some point.

Make your own job. Start a business.

If you're engaging critically with whatever you're consuming it could be a good use of time. That's the whole reason I'm on this forum, you guys give me prompts to think and contemplate on (like right now, thanks!) I am working on doing less YouTube/ podcasts and more talking directly to AI models. Bouncing ideas of them rather than unconsciously consuming some content in the background.

By default it's ignorance. Dishonesty requires one to be aware of their bullshitery, and then continue to do it because they will not give up the profit it brings. And of course there are degrees of awareness of one's own bullshit.

Said every HP Lovecraft character, before succumbing to madness 😂

I've even noticed that people can fake being post-conventional. I've met people who are certainly conventional who present post-conventional, but as soon as things don't go their way they demonize and use black-and-white thinking behind closed doors. Sneaky... So definitely don't peg someone at one stage even just going by how they talk. How they act and strategize is an even better indicator.

Totally up to you and your values. Personally travelling interests me very little. People think I'm crazy when I express little desire to travel, but that's just the social matrix trying to worm into my brain. Travelling carries a huge cost, make sure you're travelling for the right reasons if you do decide to pursue it.

Sorry, I draw the line at 3 post-modernisms. After that you're a Marxist devil hell bent on destroying the west. 😂

Sorry bro, real woke people are way beyond that. We're into post-post-post-modernism now.