Carl-Richard

So which is better: wealth tax or no wealth tax?

"Existence is sounds, colors, shapes" and then calling this absolute, and then saying that any alternative statement is not absolute, is a clear and blatant conflation of the relative and the absolute. Just like physical reality, atoms, quantum fields are not absolute, these things are not absolute. They are relative things. "Absolute Solipsism" is as ridiculous as "Absolute Materialism". You take concepts and ideas as absolute reality, things that have nothing to do with absolute reality. The only reason you prefer solipsism over materialism is you have a corrupted idea of "direct experience". You take a conceptual idea, like colors, and you project it onto reality, and because you don't see that this projection is happening, you call this conceptual entity absolute. What you call direct experience is a conceptual interpretation of limited phenomena. If you remove the concepts, stop projecting them onto reality, you see absolute reality is simply what is. Nothing need be said about it, other than it's whole, it's One, it's Absolute. Only retrospectively, after seeing it's One, can you take the conceptual projections and treat them as an aspect of absolute reality, because the projections are part of the whole. But that involves all conceptual projections. It does not favor one over any other; it does not favor solipsism over materialism. The absolute reality in itself precedes, goes beyond, and transcends any limited interpretation, be it solipsistic or materialistic.

Conflating the absolute and the relative is not openmindedness, it's not proof of being awake. Don't let @Razard86 make you think otherwise.

I guess in the case of cutting or keeping the wealth tax while rooting for the common man, if you can identify incentives that don't directly favor the common man (e.g. cutting the tax directly favors rich people), then that could argue against it. But then someone will say that keeping the tax is because the state wants to be powerful and rich.

I've also thought the same thing, about voting MDG. I honestly think that somebody like Bryan Johnson being the head of state could be the best thing. When teenagers in juvenile detention centers were given dietary supplements targeting measured deficiencies, violent offences dropped by 91% compared to controls. That could address the problem with youth crime in our country. When older people were given a multivitamin in a 2-3 year treatment program, they slowed their global cognitive aging by 2 years compared to controls. When people are individually healthy and virtually don't get chronic diseases and are less injury prone, you put pressure off the healthcare system, less people are on disability, less elderly in elderly homes, more people are working (and less sick days) and they're more productive. Individual health is something we have a strong scientific basis for being good, it affects virtually everything that the state touches, and an intervention like free multivitamins for everyone would probably not cost much either.

That would be missing the point. That's the absolute perspective. But you can take the absolute as a starting point and then derive relative phenomena and explain them (in the realm of logic). That's what the dream analogy does after all. The dreamer is absolute, the dream character (and characters) is relative. And therefore, objective idealism as a logical theory is also a great pointer to the absolute. If you identify as the dream character but somebody tells you "you are the dreamer", that can be very helpful.

I will wait for the answer of the most awake person ever 👍 If a pointer is logically sound but it uses 500 words to say something you can say in 50 without losing any substance, is it a good pointer? Simple: the internal is personal, the external is transpersonal. The dreamer is transpersonal, the dream character is personal. The point is that it explains more, it's more elegant.

But it's true. If you are able to admit that it's a conceptual framework based on logic and not Absolute truth, then solipsism, but in fact any metaphysics, is actually unfalsifiable. So in order to evaluate which is best, you need to use certain meta-metaphysical criteria, e.g. elegance, explanatory power. But I'm actually cheating because I haven't argued a specific metaphysical position yet (e.g. idealism). My position has been more meta-metaphysical: treating appearances as one thing, treating inferences based on appearances (e.g. an "external world") as another; both can be said to have a kind of reality to them, but I haven't placed any of them as ontologically more primary than the other. But if I were to compare solipsism to say objective idealism (it assumes an external world), and while putting the much more problematic Absolute vs relative conflation that is going on here aside, I think objective idealism is still more elegant. There is something about the linguistic hoops you have to jump through to circumvent assuming an external world that is not elegant. Instead of saying "when I go around my block and I get back to my door, the door is in the same place because it was always there", you say "you simply feel very strongly as if the door was always there, but instead, the actual reality is you only produce every appearance ad hoc with no actual external world grounding it, and the fact that the door seems to act as if it was always there in an external world, is just a funky coincidence".

Might as well put this here:

The function discussions like these serve is you try to focus on throwing in variation, challenge existing assumptions, introducing novelty into the system, through brainstorming and free association. And this can have a function, but the thing is this same function happens automatically as you do things (through mind-wandering, the Default Mode Network). And as anomalies stack up, you can have new insights. But these insights also tend to happen largely automatically (unless it's a very difficult and complex insight that happens during problemsolving). Generally, it doesn't have to be forced. You can force the increase in novelty, but the insight that happens as a result is often automatic. That was more what I was aiming to say with what @Eskilon pointed out.

What experiential insight? Newton did a lot of math.

"Awakening to solipsism" also doesn't exist, speaking as someone who has had it. You enter a non-dual state and then your ego reacts with an interpretation "oh I'm all alone", "people are just empty", "it's all just me talking to myself". But the pure experience itself is not those descriptions. It's simply non-dual reality. Other "awakenings" like "awakening to nothingness" seem to be the same thing.

There is mental masturbation, and then there is pushing rope.

You got me 😭🙈 That's embarassing, you caught it while I was editing my comment 😅 The electricity was a bit too quick there ⚡️ I broke my rule of don't post while fatigued after near-death gym session 🙉 The semantic territory which my brain was hovering around: there is this dangerous idea that we tend to use flow as a heuristic for truth. The trouble is that sophists use it to fool people, and it can be used to fool yourself.

Things. Things depend on context. Things exist in the context of everything. The way I feel about this discussion is: you can spend a lot time drawing semantic connections between words just for the sake of doing that (or you can do it really quick and get on with your life), or you can simply use words in a larger context of solving or understanding a larger problem, and you will build your understanding of words that way while actually doing something productive with your life. The odds are if you take an average well-read person or intellectually engaged person and you ask them what context is, they will be able to come with everything you guys have come up with and more, and likely also in a way that is more structured, concise, streamlined and insightful. Because learning what words mean requires actually using them in context. And once you have learned a bunch of words, constantly asking "but what does it mean??" eventually just becomes an exercise in trying to force an understanding that doesn't exist.

It's a hyperbolic implication, as you say you are more awake than some of the most awake people around, alive or dead. And that you felt compelled to debunk hyperbole, as if it was a reasonable possibility to entertain, is, let's call it interesting. I didn't ask. Why keep drawing attention to how awake you are? Keep it to logic. I didn't ask. Again, putting other people's experiences down and elevating your own, as if it's an argument. I didn't ask for how awake you are. Martin Ball has taken more 5-MeO-DMT than Leo and he says solipsism is not non-duality. Ok, I didn't ask about that either (about genetics), nor about a sermon on being God. And again, to top it all off, putting other people's experiences down and elevating your own. I didn't ask for how awake/insane you are. 1. "God is alone" is not "your life is a videogame and only your bedroom exists". 2. Because people disagree about frame all the time. It's not something to comment on. What to comment on is those who say their frame is not a frame but the truth. That's an assumption. You can also say that existence is simply what is, beyond shapes, colors, sounds. The absolute truth is you are not experiencing anything. Existence just is. You granting assumptions such as "existence is colors, sounds, shapes" is a choice you have made. It's not implied by non-duality. It's a choice in the realm of logic, or concepts, language, frames, speech, thought. Solipsism is an idea in the realm of logic. It's not the Absolute. Your writing is vacuous. Out of six points, only one was a substantial one, and it was only a rehash of the same point you made earlier in another comment. You make a facade of teaching, you repeat how awake you are, you deny other people's experiences and elevate your own, instead of making points.

I care about your arguments. We disagree about logic. Yeah, and you're apparently the most awake person ever. I didn't ask. Which ill intentions?

I only see non-native English speakers use this phrase when trying to be verbally impressive.

Razard86 (I can't even pretend to do the practice of saying someone's name in the beginning of a sentence because it's so cringe), nobody cares about your experiences, nobody asked you about your experiences. The problem is not experience. It's that you dismiss other people's experiences to validate your own limited framing of them. Did you know I can disagree with your framing without denying that you're awake? Is it maybe a little weird to try to prove how awake your are every time somebody disagrees with your framing? By the way, mr. non-narcissist here claiming to be more awake than Sri Ramana Maharshi, Rupert Spira and Peter Ralston.

What brain training is to merely challenging your brain, especially intellectually (e.g. by reading, writing and thinking in-depth on difficult topics), is a bit like what weight training is to working in construction (or any job with heavy manual labor, e.g. foresting). Like weight training, brain training optimally taxes "general load-bearing functions". For weight training, this is particularly the musculoskeletal system. For brain training, this is particularly the working memory (the "general workspace" of the mind). Both also tax even more general systems like the cardiovascular system, general metabolic capacity (your brain needs oxygen and sugar), etc. They do this because they consist of short bursts of very intense exercises, broken up by smaller periods of rest (reps, sets) and also longer periods (training days, rest days, maybe even meso-cycles if you're a geek like Dr. Mike Israetel). The intensity is what recruits more of the basic load-bearing structures of your mind or body, again, be it muscles, or your ability to "hold" (carry) and manipulate (move, shape, build, destroy) things in your working memory. On the other hand, challenging your brain intellectually, e.g. by working in science/philosophy/academia, is a bit like working in construction for your brain/mind. You do develop your working memory capacity (or muscoloskeletal capacity) quite a bit, and you also develop quite specialized skills ("functional strength") that are very useful and which you don't get from mere weight training or brain training. But you do not necessarily develop your working memory capacity or muscoloskeletal capacity themselves optimally. For that, you need an optimally balanced and structured schedule of intense work and rest, practiced consistently and with progressive overload. That is training done right, be it brain/mind or body. In a nutshell: construction workers are not bodybuilders, academics are not Chris Langan (that's a convenient inside joke 😂).

Yes, you become a good construction worker by working in construction and working a lot. But you can also lift heavier logs if you also do some deadlifts on the side. And only working construction, that's narrow. Deadlifts and building a bigger back translates to more things. So that's more broad. And doing both things, that is even more broad. I'm not suggesting you should only do brain training and nothing else. I do 20 minutes of brain training 3.5 times a week. That's nothing. I sit on the toilet more. Similarly, you only deadlift a few minutes a week. The thing is they give very intense training over a short period of time that seems to generalize in their effects: you become stronger in more domains for a relatively small investment.

You say that shit with a straight face. That's all we need to know.

You're not gonna post your paint experiences in the psychedelic sub-section are you?

Meditation is simple, not easy ☺️