Carl-Richard

Blink your eyes fast, the rock remains in the same place among the blips of darkness. What does that tell you about perception?

The illusion is exactly that this is not how it appears, and that to not engage with this fact is in some way to refuse to explain it. The illusion is that it appears that there is something outside of you. "It's all just oneness, infinite youness" is to dispel the illusion, not to explain its contents.

We still need to explain the illusion.

You're pointing at the interconnectedness of all the levels. And that is true: all the levels are technically rock. All biological life, animals and humans, stand on top of rock (literally and figuratively). From dust we came, to dust we shall return.

I'm saying Consciousness is like a rock.

It's made up, but you also probably agree with some of it. When you close your eyes, do you think the world ceases to exist? When you think about closing your eyes, is that the same as actually closing your eyes?

@Breakingthewall So the experience of say hotness vs. coldness is called a "representation" (an internal or subjective representation of something external or objective). It's the basis of cognition. On the other hand, to be aware of the fact that you are experiencing hotness or coldness is called a "re-representation". It's the basis of meta-cognition. I think what most spiritual traditions are referring to when talking about "transcending the ego" is to see through the compulsive activity of re-representation or meta-cognition, to the point where this activity largely diminishes. It's not about transcending representations themselves (e.g. the experience of hotness and coldness), although that can be done in cessation. Hotness and coldness are just experiences, and they may involve pleasure or pain, but they're not the mechanism that causes suffering (compulsive re-representations). By this definition of ego, most animals probably do not have much of an ego (just like humans 30-50k years ago). That said, spiritual teachers also talk about subtler processes of refinement after the initial dropping of compulsive re-representations, and that is where concepts the like the "unconscious ego" or the various types of karma come in.

What does it mean to make differentiations? Why can a sardine make differentiations while an amoeba cannot?

Do amoebas have egos?

If we define ego as the "conscious ego", or the thing that talks to itself (also called "meta-consciousness"), then dogs probably don't have much of an ego. This is a pretty safe assumption when you consider that according to this definition, humans probably didn't have an ego before 30-50k years ago. There is evidence for meta-consciousness in some animal species, but the methods for determining it are not foolproof.

That is true.

It feels like that if you're biased.

In what way does GPT-4 show sparks of AGI? It's still dumber than an amoeba at most things. It doesn't even know how to pick up a pencil.

And low in trauma, mental illness, family dysfunction, socioeconomic instability.

And a rock is a geological computer.

I swear all these new members are banned ex-members

Going to university is not such a big deal. I remember when I was 12 years old and was downhill skiing every winter, I was so envious of the bigger kids who had cooler looking jackets and skis than me. Now I look back and laugh at all the wasted mental energy I spent worrying about that trivial stuff. When you get older, university is the same thing.

Who cares?

You can know for certain that you yourself feel pain. You can then look at other humans, and you'll find that they are just like you: they have things like a skeleton and internal organs. So when they say "ouch", it's safer to say that they experience pain the same way you do than a computer program that has been programmed to say "ouch". A computer is nothing like a human.

If my rubber duck says "quack", does it have internal organs and a skeleton?

Ah, I didn't read it. He did say that it was a bit complicated, and I could understand his point if you consider the thing I said about pragmatism. What postmodernism is really threatening is the idea of realist truth claims: "this is the actual truth, independent of perspective". On the other hand, if you're a pragmatist, you simply use models to give you an understanding of the world, and your truth claims are merely tools to that end. You don't have to claim anything about the world that is independent of perspective. So the mistake that can happen when you use postmodernism to dismiss realist truth claims about say developmental psychology (which happens), is to fail to make the distinction that this doesn't apply to pragmatist truth claims about developmental psychology, and instead of merely being skeptical towards realist truth claims, you wholesale reject entertaining the models at all. So I think this is the possible trap in postmodernism that Leo could be alluding to: getting stuck in radical skepticism without moving on to pragmatism. It's not that developmental psychology is "above" postmodernism, but rather that pragmatism somewhat "escapes" the critiques of postmodernism, and that it's possible to approach developmental psychology from that perspective.

Mhm. What prompted you to make this thread?

Your preferences. I might be pursuing academic psychology as an area of specialization, but it's not like I'm placing it as my baseline epistemology. It's one of many interests. But it's true that I can't rationalize my interests by some absolute metric. But also, at some point, you have to "accept who you are" so to speak, live your life and continue moving forward. I could probably be pursuing music instead of psychology if I had made a few different choices, and my worldview would probably be very different (with a different set of biases and blindspots), but that's not where I am today.

Yes: pragmatism. To act like all perspectives are equal can in some ways be crippling. You don't actually structure your life that way, your mind doesn't work that way. You have preferences, and the postmodern mind can either consciously accept that, or it can pretend like it doesn't accept that (which of course would lead to some amount of inner conflict). Could you elaborate?

It isn't. But there are different ways of approaching developmental psychology, like with all things. You can approach it from a limited reductionist view (only subscribing to one or a few perspectives), or you can approach it from a meta-theoretic and post-structuralist view that synthesizes different perspectives and has a deep understanding of the underlying assumptions of each perspective. The latter view is generally something that happens "after" one has wrestled with some of the implications of postmodernism, which you can use to argue that it's "above" postmodernism, but it's not above it in any absolute sense.