Carl-Richard

The Western values get you sick when you approach them in an unbalanced, inflexible and naive way, which I gave a few examples of. That's when understanding deeper mechanisms like competence, autonomy and belonging comes in (and the hundreds of other frameworks that try to encapsulate health, wisdom, well-being), and of course just life experience. The deeper problem is essentially a lack of wisdom. Latching on to a limited set of values alone is really not sufficient, but still, from a certain "wise" perspective, these values have a place.

I watch documentaries of tigers sometimes even though they murder animals regularly. I watch documentaries of dolphins even though they sexually assault their females. I just like their ambiance. Just listen to some Varg Vikernes and shut up 😛

It's a problem of naive pop science, but also it's a larger epistemological problem of naive realism. You're not born questioning your assumptions. You first have to acquire them and test them out. It's a stage we all must go through, and in many cases, it's the norm, especially when trying to appeal to the younger parts of the population, which pop science does. Those factors would be called "auxiliary hypotheses" in the literature. When testing a hypothesis, often there is a myriad of smaller underlying hypotheses that need to be granted to confirm the main hypothesis, and these are of course not themselves tested (only sometimes indirectly by comparing a large amount of studies), which is a problem. Examples would be the type of measurements used (e.g. self-report questionnaire vs. physiological measures), the general study design, etc. One approach to solve that problem is to simply reduce the amount of auxiliary hypotheses you need to confirm the main hypothesis (and more generally the theory the hypothesis is derived from; "theory-testing research"). That also means you get closer to the Popperian "scientific ideal" of making your hypotheses falsifiable, which they generally and practically speaking aren't in the human-related sciences, because you can always blame the auxiliary hypotheses when your hypothesis goes wrong ("ah, it's probably the differences in sample size, the different type of questionnaires used, the variability in the sample", etc.). That's really how most science goes in these fields: "The hypothesis didn't pan out? Well, it's probably not the hypothesis or the theory that is at fault. Let's generate a slightly different hypothesis and try again! When we find a positive result, we'll publish that so we can get more funding and continue being scientists." ("discovery-oriented research"). By the way, negative results are generally not published outside file drawer initiatives (because it's not interesting), which feeds into this problem. Yes. Other than the "religiosity problem" I pointed to earlier, with fields like physics, the problems become more theoretical than empirical, and it's generally a problem of complexity: what does your theory actually tell us about reality? In physics, you might be able to predict quite accurately how two objects move relative to each other, but what about 5, 10, 20 objects? Similarly, in biology (which is of course related to humans, but it's nevertheless a fun example of the problem of complexity), we've sequenced the entire human genome, meaning we know all the genes that goes into a human, and these genes code for proteins that make up the human. But how exactly do the proteins go about making up the human? The genetic code is one thing, the morphological code is another. So complexity is not just a problem in human-related sciences, but in the human-related sciences, it additionally manifests much more in the empirical realm. It's essentially because in physics, you're more able to ignore the complexity by choosing to study and test hypotheses for simpler things (2 objects vs. 20), while in say psychology, you're always stuck with studying humans, which are of course complex. It's their job, and their default position is to be optimistic. And again, there are promising initiatives for increasing replication rates and more generally improving the state of human-related science. However, the real "black pill" here is not replication but generalization. Even if your studies are 100% replicable (meaning somebody repeats the study with the exactly same setup and gets the same result every time), does that mean your results will hold when you slightly tweak some of the factors? Not at all. Like I said earlier, some people actually argue that generalizability is an unsolvable problem that invalidates all human-related science. But you could counter that and ask "surely, some studies generalize pretty well?". Even though the exact results of the study don't generalize, maybe they partially generalize (there is "some" effect). But how can we know that? Well, you can't know for sure, but doing a large amount of "conceptual replications" (replications where you tweak some factor relative to the original study) could give an indication. It will never be 100% proof (because that requires virtually simulating the entire universe), but I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that you're at least getting closer to an answer than not.

So my class had a lecture about stress, and it mentioned in passing that extremely stressful experiences might cause time to slow down or even cause out of body experiences (OBEs). So after that lecture, one of my classmates said that he had experienced time slowing down but not OBEs, and he asked if any of us (a group of three classmates) had experienced any OBEs. That day, I was so sleep deprived that I didn't even catch half of the lecture because I was slipping in and out of consciousness (speaking about OBEs; I even joked about that 🥴😝), so I guess my inhibitions were slightly diminished, but I immediately thought about one of my meditation experiences where I opened my eyes and I saw myself from like 5-10 inches above my head. I was about to say it out loud, but then I hesitated and instead said something which is even more suspicious: "not in a stressful situation" 😂. Again, I didn't have the mental agility in that moment to maybe save the awkwardness somehow, and we just ended up moving on from the topic. Who knows what they thought I was referring to? Sex? Drugs? A psychotic break? (they're psychologists after all). Who knows? So that was awkward 😆 Anyways, I was thinking about that moment a bit after, and I thought: "what would happen if I actually said what I wanted to say"? More generally, why am I hesitant about talking about these experiences to people? Two main options (which are somewhat interrelated) popped into my mind: they could have an existential crisis and get scared or really skeptical, or they could just think I'm mentally unstable or delusional. Besides, these are my classmates and potential future colleagues. So there could be both social and occupational consequences in the worst case. In the best case, they're openminded psychologists who have heard about these things before or simply know how to reconcile it with their worldview in an accommodating way. But could the same be said if I had started talking about my other mystical or even psychic experiences? Would it be a bit like talking about having taken drugs? (I generally avoid that as well, unless of course it's obvious that someone is onboard). Anyways, I've concluded that I need to open myself up more to people in order to be myself more authentically, because I believe being your authentic self is synonymous with being confident and competent, and I would like to be that in most social situations. It's just that when you're authentically rather outside the norm, that could have some undesirable consequences if you care about "getting along" somewhere within that norm. I know that it's always a balance, but I just think I could maybe push myself a little bit more in the direction of authenticity (and hence my question).

@zurew Yeah this is a mess 😆 Impressive that you went through the entire thing.

😂 Got it. Cool. Want to elaborate? Like bro cmon, this is like Leo's main catchphrase we're talking about. I've followed him for like almost a decade, just as long ago as I started taking psychedelics (if that's like your qualifying metric). This is basic shit, you cannot be serious. 😂

Duh, that's what science is. "Functional understanding". But that too is also just functional understanding. In reality, there aren't even any relations. "Relation" is something your mind is cooking up to make sense of reality, to make predictions, to help you interact with reality. Kastrup, like me, thinks causality is only a conceptual tool, not ultimate reality. So again, big miss. You should again maybe read more about what you're talking about (?) I actually smelled this one coming from a mile away. At the end of the day, it was always just a flex of "the map is not the territory", "maps are limited, "reality is limitless", "science is only a tool", which is apparently the only thing people think is worth talking about on here. It's hilarious how convoluted some people make it though. I actually appreciate people like @UnbornTao more now: at least he gets straight to the point. It's of course an incredibly juvenile point that you should've known I've accepted ages ago, yet you make it the focal point of this now disaster of a discussion. I do actually remember thinking this thought as a faint glimpse, but I guess I was just in denial that this was actually what was happening. Well well.

Yup. That's what a causal relationship is: one thing happening before the other, and a mechanism that connects the two. If you don't have a mechanism, you only have two things happening in temporal order. Physicalists think brains happen before experience and that there is ostensibly a mechanism there, but they admit that at our current level of scientific knowledge, such a mechanism is either unknown or mysterious, or they woo themselves into a false sense of security by alluding to some vague notions like "emergence" or "function". I agree. I don't think what the physicalists are aiming at is possible. I've just given the criteria that would need to be filled for it to be possible: providing a mechanism that makes sense and isn't mysterious, and ways to explain away the various empirical problems. And of course, so far, those criteria have not been filled, and I don't think they ever will be filled. In other words, it's mysterious for a reason, a reason they won't accept. Your two sentences don't connect.

I'm sorry, but what? 🙈 I've never said that. You've lost the plot.

You can think it's deluded, but the problem is that you don't have a solid understanding of it, so it doesn't mean much. You can't actually engage with the concepts. It's essentially the pre-trans problem. A pre-rational religious dogmatist critiquing science is very different from a post-rational person critiquing it. And you can't argue someone out of a pre-position, hence there is no point in continuing.

Ok, let's bring the real context to what's happening here: You make it seem like this about me not understanding you. But in reality, nobody gives a shit about you. You're talking about brains, and brains are studied in academia, nowhere else. If you're unable to engage with the language of academia; if you're stuck inside your contracted use of language and other people have to essentially rescue you out of it to have a conversation with you; then it's not me not understanding you: it's you frankly not knowing what you're talking about. It makes no sense to pretend to have any deep knowledge about academic topics while being unable to work with the language of academia, spinning your wheels in the dirt when basic terms like correlation vs. causality are brought up. It's like pretending to have deep knowledge about Western politics while constantly getting bogged down discussing the definitions of political parties or democracy. I talk with this one guy in academia about these things on a regular basis (the Hard problem, physicalism, brains, experience, etc.), and we have virtually no problems understanding each other. For "some reason", that is not happening here.

I think the reason I got into music with weird time signatures so much is that my dad used to play this song in the car a lot when I was 6-7. It's not really until later that I realized how brilliant it is.

These are arguments less against science and more against people who hold science as a religion. As for my arguments, it depends on what sciences you're talking about. Sciences that study humans quantitatively (e.g. sociology, anthropology, psychology, medicine, political science) infamously have problems with replicability (can you repeat the study and get the same results?) and generalizability (do the results apply more generally to the world and not just inside the particular study?). Many (ex-)scientists have made strong criticisms about these problems, some even claiming that they're practically unsolvable and that this kind of quantitative science is a lost cause, while others are more optimistic and constructive, while some are in denial and keep doing what they've always done. There are many sub-problems that feed into the two main problems, and some of them are summed up by the concept of "questionable research practices", while others relate to for example limitations with methodologies like null hypothesis testing. There has been a great effort to address these problems though, through initiatives like open science, file drawer journals, preregistrations, etc. Qualitative sciences (e.g. interviewing people about their feelings and experiences) bypass many of these kinds of problems, but they're less able to make precise predictions, so you lose something there. "Hard sciences", particularly those that are largely independent of humans (e.g. physics, chemistry), have less of these problems. For them, the problems go back to again holding science as a religion (basically physicalism), which bleeds into the culture through the idolization of pop science communicators ("the scientific priesthood") and is upheld by modern society's disconnect with wisdom and spirituality.

Then that is your deficiency Some people are so relaxed that dopamine would probably be their only way to become more social. You should see the med student who conducts our brain dissection lab sessions. He is a walking brick wall 😆 (not in an autistic way). On a slightly (un)related topic, I've been thinking a bit about the relationship between neuroticism (in the strictly emotional lability sense) and creativity which we talked about one time. I consider myself way above average in creativity, and I've always been highly neurotic. I'm high in openness too, yes, but the combination with neuroticism and openness I think creates a creative beast. My dad is like that (BP1 diagnosis, arguably the definition of openness + neuroticism). My friend from class is high in openness but comparably low in neuroticism (by my estimation), and he doesn't seem as creative in the strictest sense but certainly intellectually gifted. Same with the aforementioned med student. Another slightly tangential thought to that, I had a wild idea that maybe sprinters or explosive athletes are more neurotic on average. It sort of makes sense that one's personality would be associated with some deeper biological traits like that. In other words, being able to quickly change your physiological state in terms of muscle fiber recruitment could be mirrored in being able to quickly change your psycho-emotional state (emotional lability). Maybe there could be some co-selection of genes going on there to create the optimal "fast" phenotype. Again, this is of course just wild half-baked speculation. I haven't looked into any potential data on that yet Also, back to creativity, I say "in a strictly emotional lability sense" because I believe that even though I have severely reduced my more "Freudian" neuroticism (internal conflict, repetitive and irrelevant mental chatter), I still have a mind that changes quickly while zeroing in on a task. In other words, my mind finds more relevant information and faster. So in a sense, it's possible to distinguish between a more generally dysfunctional neuroticism and a more generally functional neuroticism: emotional lability with or without task-irrelevant mind-wandering. Then again, I'm not saying task-irrelevant mind-wandering is by definition dysfunctional; I'm just saying generally (most people in the modern would could certainly benefit to have less of it). I hope I'm not derailing the thread 😳 (I got carried away, I'm sorry 😣; just ignore everything but the first paragraph if you're not Nilsi. This is what happens when I take breaks from the forum and post at night 🤭).

@Scholar When you equate physicality to logic and when you call Kastrup a physicalist, that sums up the level of semantic disconnect that we're having, and I don't think we'll solve that in 10 years. As someone who aspires to be semantically connected to the larger scientific and philosophical community (academia), as someone who studies neuroscience in academia, I believe you're semantically disconnected from that community. That is not to say your understanding of reality is invalid. It's just that the language you use and the language I use (and ostensibly my peers) is very different. I see no reason for this conversation to continue. It was interesting, I guess. And just so you don't think I'm making stuff up, I'll recap some of the terms you use that seem unfamiliar to me, either in the way you use them or just full-stop unfamiliar: Direct vs. indirect causality Causative vs. causal influence vs. causal relationship Relation (actual relation vs. apparent relation) Metaphysical relationship "Neuronal structure of two" Functional understanding If there is one thing we can maybe agree on, it's that concepts like causality are at the end of the day just concepts we use to make sense of our experience as apes on planet Earth. They don't reflect reality in the ultimate sense. Reality in the ultimate sense is far beyond that. But it's still useful to talk about that if you care about making sense of our experience.

Surely you have more examples. Is the brain-experience relationship direct or indirect? Regardless, when we're talking about the brain and experience, any reference to causality is going to be problematic. It doesn't matter how many variations of causality you want to invent. At the end of the day, causality is causality, and causality is when the happening of one thing (or things) precedes the happening of another thing in time and when you have a reasonable mechanism connecting the two. Hence I don't see why the distinction you have brought up is relevant. It's at best tangential to the discussion. Instead of insinuating that it's relevant and that I'm just too slow to understand, clarify how it is relevant. Be clear. To conclude, as far as I'm concerned, you've been talking about causality in some way or another, and I'm saying that is problematic for the reasons stated: 1. lack of a reasonable causal mechanism, 2. various empirical contradictions. And before you do the "argh you just don't understand me, I have made myself clear so many times, try harder", try to clarify at least this one thing: why is the distinction between so-called direct and indirect causality relevant for understanding the brain-experience relationship? If not, we're probably done.

Nah. Whatever that is. Give me an example of a direct causal relationship and an indirect causal relationship and tell me how the distinction is relevant in this discussion.

Yes you can. Depends how bad though.

🦦

I'm the weasel who wrote another multi-paragraph response to one of your points which you apparently didn't see most likely because of the palpable emotional reaction that you're now displaying. Of course, I have to ask: what is the difference between "causative" and "causative influence" and "causal relationship"? It seems like something you just made up, a bit like "metaphysical relationship". What "causative vs. causative influence" does remind me of is the idea that you can have one thing that causes another thing or you can have many things that causes the same thing. So one causal factor vs. many causal factors. The problem is that this is tangential to what we're talking about, a bit like when you invoked the problem of infinite regression. So again, I have to ask you what you mean. That's my daily dose of gaslighting. You're free to clarify your clear examples. On the topic of being a weasel, now when we've finally managed to distill the conversation down to a very specific and important detail (the definition of causality vs. correlation), you're getting very poor on words and it seems like you're backing out. That could say a lot about what is happening here. @zurew pointed out the importance of getting clear on terms and language in general. If you're allergic to that, then I guess all this makes sense.

I remember when I first got into Self-Determination Theory (SDT), it was the two factors "competence" and "autonomy" that made the most sense to me and that seemed to play into each other in a logical way. Firstly, SDT is a psychological model about three factors (or "needs") that create motivation in an organism, but to me, it's a much broader model about what makes a healthy organism. The three factors are "competence", "autonomy" and "belonging" ("relatedness"). "Competence" is the organism's need to exercise their innate capacities (and fulfill their evolutionary needs, either directly or by proxy): for example, a cheetah running to catch their prey, a bear catching salmon in a river, an amoeba following a trail of food, an Olympic spear thrower throwing their spear, or a musician playing their instrument. Expressing your competence feels inherently pleasurable, meaningful and valuable. "Autonomy" is the psychological side of that. It's the organism's need to subjectively experience that they're able to be who they want to be, not what somebody else or something else wants them to be. This naturally leads to acting in a way that is consistent with their innate capacities, because your innate capacities is in a real sense who you truly are, thus expressing who you are (autonomy) will naturally involve expressing your innate capacities (competence). In other words, you naturally want to do what you're good at (or what you're "made to do"). When something interferes with the expression of your innate capacities (through "extrinsic motivation", e.g. being forced to play a music instrument as a kid), you tend to dislike it and experience less motivation, because innate/intrinsic motivation is the strongest kind of motivation there is, and again, to deny somebody's intrinsic motivation is to deny who they intrinsically are. So those two factors seem to fit together quite nicely and in a logical way. Now, I've always struggled with how to make "belonging" belong to those other two. Here is a definition from Wikipedia: "Will to interact with, be connected to, and experience caring for others". It seems a bit odd and forced to be put in there, and it seems to only apply to indeed social animals. "Well, we need a social aspect in there as well, so why the hell not?". That's what I thought when I first learned about it. But of course, at least for social animals, it makes sense if you look at the fact that being social seems to be an important aspect of health and evolutionary fitness. But it doesn't seem to have the same level of logical connection to the other two factors, at least on the surface. But just today when watching this video of John Vervaeke (requires membership to iai.tv), the pieces suddenly fell into place. He talked about belonging in this way: We usually think of evolution as organisms being shaped by their environment to fit that environment (which again creates their innate capacities). But in reality, there is a co-creation going on: organisms also shape their environment ("niche construction"). In humans, this becomes very clear when looking at society and culture. It's essentially niche construction gone wild. It's when social animals come together and develop language, technology and other new ways of shaping their environment. The last part is the most important: we are each other's environment, and we're shaping each other. That is what being social means. So what is belonging then? Belonging is when the innate capacities of the organism fit with the environment. There! It actually fits perfectly with the other two factors, and now it explains belonging both in a human social sense and a more general non-social sense: Why do you gain health, strength and love from being with your family (most likely)? Because you're most likely very similar. You share the same innate capacities, and you're therefore each other's well-fitted environment. You belong to each other. Why does sharing similar interests with your friends feel so fun and meaningful? Because you share similar capacities and act as each other's well-fitted environment, thus you belong to each other. Why does being deeply open and honest with your partner feel good? Because you act as each other's well-fitted environment and thus belong to each other. Why are you here, together with people who share the same interests, same life goals, same worldviews, same outlook on life? Because you belong here. And of course, even the amoeba can be said to belong to their environment if their environment best facilitates their innate capacities (e.g. just the right pH level, salinity, food availability). Again, it doesn't have to be just the social environment, but it's just that the social environment makes it really clear. And again, I really do appreciate how this definition ties all the way down to the base biological level, even unicellular organisms, just like the other two factors do (if we assume amoebas have a subjective experience, which you can argue they have). It shows the scientific and metaphysical depth of the theory (which you could say resonates with my innate capacities, or at least interests ). What this has made clear for me (but which I've also intuited for a long time) is that I need to find environments where I belong, particularly occupationally and interpersonally, but also more generally. Finding your strengths, your passions, your dreams is one thing, but finding the environments that resonate with that is another. That requires effort and vision, unless you're lucky to already be in that environment. Maybe you have to create some of that environment yourself (like we've always done as organisms ), or maybe it's waiting for you somewhere. Whatever is the case for you, it's something to aim for. It has also emphasized for me nuances like why there could be cases where it's reasonable to say leave your family, even though that would seems like a big loss on a social level, because you might just not belong there (e.g. it's a toxic environment for some reason). That said, I've never thought that leaving your family was an absolute no-no, but this new framing makes it even more clear why it's indeed not an absolute no-no. But of course, that shouldn't really be on most people's minds (I hope). It was just a thought related to some earlier discussion. That's it

For me personally, if not create something similar on my own, I would like to join something like the Essentia Foundation and contribute to some meaningful work there.

So you're challenging me:

That is why it helps to be super focused on the clarity of language in general. I think that award goes to @DocWatts or @Nilsi or the legendary @Oeaohoo (RIP he was the most fun person on this forum 😭; btw, he just left, he didn't die irl 😂) ☺️

I identified another salient point in your post: The problem of infinite regression in causal chains is a different problem than what I've been talking about. With the brain and experience, you don't even have a chain. That is the problem. And again, it has to do with a lack of a satisfactory causal mechanism. What is a satisfactory causal mechanism? Well, it gives you a sense of understanding and continuity between the proposed cause and effect. There is a recognition of "ah it makes sense". It sounds subjective now, but it's reflective of a deeper point which I'll explain later. Anyways, when you take a concept like gravity and look at the different practical instances where it can apply, and when you apply it to the example of the apple falling, you do get the sense of "ah, it makes sense". It's a satisfactory causal mechanism. It's a "quality" about that causal mechanism. Now, the problem of infinite regression is more "quantitative": you can keep adding an infinite number of satisfactory causal mechanisms without finding the bottom so to speak. That's of course a problem, but again, it's a different problem than establishing a satisfactory causal mechanism in the first place. In other words, you've been talking about finding a satisfactory number of mechanisms, while I've been talking about finding a satisfactory kind of mechanism. Both are significant problems in their own right, but they are indeed different. And why is "neurons firing" not a satisfactory causal mechanism for the brain-experience relationship? Because just look at it: Like "what?!" "ATP and shit" and then boom -> "psychological transformation, rapture, fear, amazement, awakening". There is a clear discontinuity there, and in this case, it's mostly because you're dealing with two different ontological categories ("abstract physical stuff" -> "concrete mental stuff"). Now compare that with the falling apple: You see a kind of continuity there that is absent in the brain-experience relationship. It's a continuous process of different kinds of abstract physical stuff bringing about other kinds of abstract physical stuff. It's a difference in forms, but it's not a difference in fundamental ontological categories. Also, hearking back to an earlier point about another big problem, i.e. the empirical problems contradicting the brain-experience causal hypothesis; when there is a gravitational field present, you can predict that an apple will fall. When there is brain activity present AND when there is brain activity not present (or it's reduced), you can predict that there will be experience (and more intense experiences). Again, that's another big issue for the hypothesis, and even there, the mainstream paradigm will throw ad hoc hypotheses at you like no other ("there is some activity deep in the brain stem...", "there is an increase in brain noise...", "functional connectivity...", etc.).