Carl-Richard

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.).

Love is being connected to life, being one with reality, no separation, full immersion, intense experience, no hesitation, no second-guessing, trusting, caring, seeing, feeling, understanding, grasping, grokking, giving, receiving.

It's causative, because winters appear before jackets and not the other way around. People put on jackets because it's winter. It's not that it's winter because people take on jackets. There are also satisfactory causal mechanisms for it, e.g. people put on clothes when the temperature drops to help maintain homeostasis. I'll just leave it at that.

Let me add that when you propose a causal relationship and somebody calls you out on a lack of satisfactory causal mechanism (one that provides a good sense of continuity between the cause and the effect), and then you say "it's simply mysterious, it's God, Infinity, Divinity"; that's called "God of the gaps", or an appeal to an unknown, or an "ad hoc hypothesis". An ad hoc hypothesis is when you conjure up a new hypothesis to protect the main hypothesis and when it doesn't make any new predictions and is often unfalsifiable (which it is in this case). It's a sneaky way to protect a paradigm from critique. It's what the creationists did when dinosaur fossils were carbon dated and falsfied their 6000 year old universe ("God put them there to test our faith"), and it's what the physicalists are doing with the the brain-experience causal hypothesis ("it's mysterious now, but we'll find out some day"). It's unscientific behavior. You wouldn't accept it for anything else that you would call scientific. For example, if I had said "I caused the Jenga tower to fall", and then you ask "how?", instead of providing the obvious causal mechanism ("I pulled out the bottom Jenga brick"), I instead say "reality is mysterious", you would tell me "that's bullshit!". That is what is happening here. So what I'm saying is instead of proposing a causal relationship with a bullshit mechanical explanation, pull back and choose a less bullshit position: correlation.

SDT in a nutshell: Competence: you like to do things you're good at, because that is fun, pleasureable and enjoyable. Autonomy: you like to do things by your own choosing, and if you're allowed to choose, you will tend to do the things you're good at. Relatedness: you like to be in an environment that supports your competence and respects your autonomy.

I can see that. Remember to put on a jacket, it's cold outside. Gotta keep those non-metaphysical relationships in order 🤔

I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm serious. What the heck is a "metaphysical relationship" that exists between movement of individual atoms but not movements of jackets (which is actually atoms) and movements of seasons (which is also actually atoms)? Not really. That's only a probabilistic prediction. Hume showed that with the problem of induction. You can't know for 100% certainty whether something will behave a certain way in the future based on a previous observation. Also, according to quantum mechanics, the atom itself is a probabilistic entity which only exists in relation to a measurement, unless you're a physicalist who believes physical entities have standalone existence. And suddenly, you also seem to be talking about causality again (this time explictly), so again, physicalist assumptions somehow seem to seep through every time you speak. So we're indeed back to the brain-experience causal hypothesis. Glad we could make that clear. It is mysterious indeed, and causality is ultimately just a way of analyzing reality, not ultimate reality. But once you start analyzing reality and pretend to do so in a logically consistent way, logical consistency should not be a mystery to you (unless you want to say debate Aristotelean logic vs intuitionist logic), because now you're dividing reality into parts and looking at it logically. If somebody points out a mistake in that process for you, you shouldn't revert to "ah, but reality is so mysterious". No, it's most likely your logical process which is mysterious, or flawed. Or I'm simply tediously pointing out inconsistencies in your thinking which frustrates you because it is inconsistent with your view of yourself. I actually think we both are sincerely trying to understand each other. Again, you seem to attribute a one-sided causal relationship there That's what understanding is. We might just be living in completely different realities.

If there is no relation between jacket and winter because winter can exist without jacket, why is there a relation between atom and atom? Can't an atom exist without another atom? That doesn't make sense to me. Are you simply talking about an identical semantic relation, i.e. atom = atom? Other than that, it seems like you're maybe doing a Fritjof Capra "there is no such thing as causality in reality; all things are relational", meaning every part in an interaction is a part of a greater whole. If so, I do very much resonate with that. But even so, it can still be useful to talk about causal relationships. Also, it still bothers me the way you've been talking about the brain-experience relationship. To me, it makes little sense to on the one hand say that you're merely talking about relationships, while on the other you're using words like "x is just y" and "x is due to pre-existing y". Again, that type of language, if you're familiar with most philosophical and scientific discussions, quite explicitly refers to classic linear causal relationships. If that is not what you had in mind while using that language, then sure, we might be miscommunicating, but I would like you to explain why you used that language. Anyways, until then, I can try to make more clear what a causal relationship entails and why it doesn't work for the brain-experience causal hypothesis: If you want to propose a causal relationship ("one thing leads to the next"), at some point you have to justify it through a causal mechanism, or else there is no way to account for the relationship between the cause and the effect. For example, with the atoms, you can invoke Newtonian physics; concepts like mass, energy and Newton's three laws of motion; which would give you a mechanism for how one atom causes the movement of another: when one atom hits the other, it transfers its kinetic energy because of Newton's law of ... etc. With the leaves falling from the trees in autumn, you can invoke biochemical changes in the stem of the leaf that responds to seasonal changes. With people putting on jackets in autumn, you can use some bio-behavioral model. Now, in all of these examples, there seems to be a satisfactory level of continuity between the cause, the mechanism and the effect. On the other hand, in the case of the brain-experience causal hypothesis, there is an obvious lack of satisfactory continuity, hence the Hard problem: how does ions moving across lipid membranes lead to the experience of Red? More generally, how does quantitative descriptions of the brain lead to the qualitative experiences of the mind? There is an obvious mechanistic gap there, and it interferes with justifying a causal relationship. Some people, idealists, say it's a malformed question and that it's actually impossible to get qualities from quantities, while physicalists say we will probably get to a satisfactory mechanism at some point. Anyways, the point is that while you can propose a causal relationship, it's not a well-justified causal relationship unless you can find a satisfactory causal mechanism, and that is what I'm saying is lacking with the brain-experience causal hypothesis which again you seem to be touching on routinely throughout your responses. I personally don't see how you could call any part of this interaction lazy, but as I've figured, you seem to like to invoke classic linear causal relationships, so I guess it's all my fault 😝

Me neither. So in other words, experiences correlate with brain activity? Yes... The first part of the sentence: I don't understand why you're saying that. The second part: I don't understand what that means. And I don't see how it relates to the next sentence, which is why I've chopped it up. On a meta note, you honestly should try to simply the way you write. I think you write in a kind of abstract and cryptic way. I've read some papers on brain function, so if you're talking about basic principles of how the brain works, I should be able to understand that if communicated well. Uhm, yes, both are true. When I'm next to a sad person, or an angry person, or a scared person, that correlates both with a change in my experience and a change in my brain, and both can be predicted quite accurately. For example, my experience will probably mirror the emotional state of the person, and my brain will probably show a change in activation of the amygdala and other limbic systems. But what compels you to say that one "alters" the other? Why not just say "there is a correlation"? Yes. I think "correlation" is the functional understanding here. So in other words, the Gestalt shift you see is not informed by sensory information, which means that only some of our experience correlates with sensory information. Are you simply repeating what I'm saying in other terms? Certainly. Sometimes you speak like one, sometimes I don't understand what you're saying. Why is it not? "Correlation" is fundamentally synonymous with "relation". It's just that in science, "correlation" is generally used to describe relations of behavior (how things act or change together), because that is what science is concerned with investigating (as opposed to e.g. ontology which is concerned about investigating relations of being, which is more general). So if when my experience changes, my brain also changes in a certain predictable way, we tend to say that they're correlated. Ok, but as you've now eased off calling it a causal relationship, why not just say "information in the brain correlates with experience" rather than "the experience is just already existing information in the brain"? Those words "is just" and "already existing" mean something, and they seem to imply an order of how things arise; in this case, the brain before the experience; i.e. causation. Ok, so now "relation" suddenly means "direct relationship" in your idea of the word, which again seems to point to causality, as again, you seem to be implying an order of how things arise. That is causality: "cause" and then "effect". If we go back to the scientific use of the term, a correlation is when the behavior of two or more things are interconnected. For example, when leaves fall in autumn, people seem to put on jackets. They're correlated. Now, it's probably not that leaves falling causes people to put on jackets. That would probably be a spurious relationship (a non-causal correlation). The actual causal factor here would probably be the cold winter temperatures, which causes both the leaves to fall and the jackets to be put on. Still, the correlation between leaves falling and people putting on jackets is actual in the sense that there is such a correlation. But it's different from a causal relationship. A correlation can be hinting towards a causal relationship, but if you falsify that possibility, then there is no causal relationship, which is what psychedelics, OBEs and NDEs do with the hypothesis that experience is caused by brain activity; they falsify it. So what you're calling "actual vs. apparent correlation" is actually "actual causality vs. actual correlation". So if we're assuming your use of the terms is consistent with the general scientific understanding of them, then it actually seems like you do believe the brain causes experience. We've gone over this language stuff. I think I have, as per the images showing the Gestalt shifts and various other top-down perceptual phenomena that I can show you. And technically, millions of people self-reporting psychic phenomena that falsifies brain-experience causality is a form of evidence, just not hard evidence. I would be happy to call it a dream, but not caused by a brain. Well, you're certainly making claims about the experience and the world, which requires evidence just like any other claim. Your claims aren't exempt from that just because it's the mainstream ideology. And it's laughable to call claims about psychic phenomena "new" claims when these experiences have existed for all of human history and when it's the hypothesis of brain-experience causality which has probably barely existed for 300 years (if we grant that honor to the "Enlightenment philosophers"). That's a nice prediction. Let's see how it will reproduce cardiac arrest NDEs No idea how that explains anything. Like? You know, I wouldn't say synaesthesia is when color "becomes" sound, etc. I would say it's when color and sound correlate But that's more a joke than a sincere point (which is also what you responded to in the first place). Which they probably have (psychic senses). Why wouldn't they? Feeling when somebody is looking at your back is evolutionarily advantageous. Having precognitions is evolutionarily advantageous. Telepathy, etc. Also, I actually think I could give a satisfying "material" explanation for some psychic phenomena if you're interested (which doesn't "disprove" the reality of the phenomena, but only provides coherence between different ways of viewing the phenomena). Whatever that means. Are amoeba individuated? Sea sponges? Jellyfish? Coral reefs? There are parapsychology studies on animals that speak against that claim. I would refer to Rupert Sheldrake for that. Maybe people should get research grants and PhD programs at mainstream universities for that (like other sciences) and not just some obscure universities funded by hippie decamillionaires. You mean "downloading metaphysical assumptions from the larger culture". True, just like reality, and no brain-experience causality involved. Then I would like to see how you would explain the OBE of the patient in the above video who was declared dead for 20 minutes after a failed heart surgery, came back with detailed information about the room he was laying in that wasn't there before he was put under anesthesia.

Because your trip is not just a chemical. Your trip is your mind, your body and the surrounding environment: set and setting.

Depends on what you mean by "universe". What is "my" consciousness? Depends on what you mean by "my" consciousness. Sleep is not a lack of Consciousness. Neither is death. They're different states than your usual waking state. Not at all. It proves that different states appear to exist. Yes, which is why egoic solipsism is untenable, because it relies on taking forms as something fundamentally real and not just appearances.

It can seem contradictory, but finding your niche requires growth, so it might not seem as obvious at first. You have to test things out. That's the "variation" part of evolution (genetic mutation, sexual recombination, etc.). But at the same time, you have an internal compass that guides you. That's the "selection" part (biological fitness, sexual selection, etc.). So your psyche evolves just like the species: selection and variation. If you become aware of this and how it relates to your personal psychology, it may help you find your personal niche. @DefinitelyNotARobot (Now I saw you answered the same thing )

What?

Ok, a cessation then. A bit of a tangent: when you said "lost consciousness", I thought you meant like a concussion. I got that skiing once when I was like 11 (I've technically had many, but this was a pretty solid one). I went on a "jump" that lead out from the woods and into the main slope and flew across the air and smashed my head into the ground. As my head hit the ground, I heard a metallic "doioioioioiong" sound, and it was as if I was inside a dark box that rotated backwards for a few seconds. Then I came back to reality crying because my head hurt. That was probably my first serious experience of an altered state of consciousness (outside the ones when I was very little). I wasn't saying that, although that is also something that is talked about (Nirvana: the end of the cycle of birth and rebirth).

Maybe there are more awakenings to discover Thoughts and emotions, if not tied to a gross body, probably need to be tied to a subtle body, like the kind that leaves the gross body in an out of body experience. Some people report that the thoughts and emotions in those experiences are of a different kind than their usual egoic thoughts, which is also interesting. When you detach from the subtle body, maybe then it's a complete wipeout: no experience. So even if we can't see "God himself" in his gross physical form, maybe he has a subtle body with thoughts and emotions tied to it. But that makes it even harder for us to know whether he has those thoughts and emotions or not (because it's subtle).

There is the entrance into the void and then there is the complete wipeout. Those are apparently different things. I've personally only had the entrance, but even then, my thoughts and emotions became at least extremely reduced, if not completely gone for a period. But there are people who talk about a complete wipeout where there is literally nothing. Regardless, the fact that you were able to retain your thoughts and emotions in a certain state of consciousness doesn't really tell us much about the question. After all, you're retaining your thoughts and emotions now, and that doesn't tell us much either. Of course, there is evidence, like people claiming to communicate with God and hear the voice of God, but it's not strong evidence. It's a bit funny in a way, because it's a similar problem to what egoic solipsists bring up ("how do you know that other egos have an egoic experience?"), only that now you really don't have a good way to counter it, because God doesn't seem to reveal itself quite as easily like that. A possible trap here is "but wasn't Jesus just that?". Well, no, because Jesus is just another human that God is puppeteering. The question we're asking is: what about the puppet master? Does the puppet master have its own thoughts and emotions distinct from the puppets it's puppeteering? And if so, how would we come to know that?

Why? What is "mind-stuff"?

But why?

Did you at one point get to a place where you also had no thoughts and emotions? Seems like an odd in-between state to be in.

Well, you can say that, but it seems like human thoughts and emotions tend to co-arise with some sort of localized embodied experience, e.g. having a sense of a body, of being somewhere in space relative to other objects, of experiencing these things changing through time. It seems very unlikely that you will experience thoughts and emotions for example in a state of samadhi where you're no longer localized or embodied. Those things seem to disappear in those states almost definitionally.

Everything exists within God. But if emotions can be said to exist and humans can be said to exist, then human emotions can be said to exist within human egoic bubbles. The question is whether human-like thoughts and emotions only exist within these human egoic bubbles or whether they exist outside of them as well, sort of like a white bearded man in the clouds looking down on Earth.

In the first sentence, God is anthropomorphized. In the second, God is objectified. Whichever you prefer. I thought about making the sentences the same, but I just left it like that for some reason. Maybe it happened because God "thought" this was a lesson that was needed (that God can be made both being-like and object-like and still be God) 😉 By the way, I usually prefer objectifying God, as there is to my knowledge little evidence that God thinks and feels like a human "by itself" so to speak, although I won't discard such a possibility. God as "an empty field which's excitations are experiences" is a description I like.

If you guys need even more spoonfeeding than I've already provided, here are my approximate heuristics for that post: for the pro list, I just went by gut feeling and then constructed the list of attributes afterwards. Then for the con list, I also went by gut feeling and then wrote down at least one flaw with their speaking style, starting with Peterson because he was mentioned earlier. Maybe I could've included all the pro people in the con list. But that's not what happened.