Carl-Richard

I read it earlier today and it didn't tell me anything new about Hanzi's position, and what they said about Turquoise only confirms my suspicion (that Turquoise is an incoherent stage). Also, the author is high on his own farts.

He has books, not free books. https://www.amazon.com/Why-Materialism-Baloney-Skeptics-Everything/dp/1782793623 He says neurology (the brain) correlates with personal consciousnesses, but everything happens within transpersonal Consciousness. I have thoughts, feelings and experiences which you don't have. They're my personal experiences. But you can look at my brain and predict with some accuracy what I'm experiencing. In that sense, the brain correlates with my personal consciousness. However, in no way does this imply the brain causes my personal consciousness. And certainly, the brain does not cause Consciousness. The brain is happening within Consciousness.

Does anybody have access to The Listening Society by Hanzi Freinacht? They write a chapter about "Death to Turquoise". They also believe the stage as currently conceptualized is not coherent. Do they say anything similar to what I said? @DocWatts

Try this out as a meditative exercise: Find a YouTube video where he speaks in a spiritual setting (e.g. this one). Observe him closely for the entire video. Do not listen to the words — observe him. Observe how he moves, observe how he talks, observe his gaze. Do this while sitting in an upright and relaxed posture while breathing deeply and slowly (before you begin, take a few deep breaths). At some point, try to imagine how he experiences the present moment as he speaks. Do this while closely observing him. Then, after a while, open up another video of a random person speaking and compare what you see with what you just saw (or repeat the same procedure for them).

You can literally awaken by just looking a guru in the eyes. Never underestimate the power of Grace.

If you present someone with the truth as plainly as possible, you will either say literally nothing or something extremely vacuous like "you are it", "this is the truth", "Oneness". That often isn't very helpful, so you instead try to poke them in the right direction, which is not a straightforward process (and it's often different for different people, and they can be in different stages of the process). People's minds are a mess, and they're constantly tricking themselves, so you have to "trick them back" to unwind that mess. So the guru is a jester in that sense, trying to trick them into seeing the truth.

What exactly is that?

Intelligent AIs, yes. Conscious AIs? That's a different question. If you're like Bernardo Kastrup, conscious AI just means artifically created life, i.e. abiogenesis. That could happen in a few centuries too, but that's a bit different than proposing that silicon chips (melted sand and metal) can become conscious. Now, I'm clearly nowhere near as qualified as Bernardo to speak on this, but it makes me feel a little queasy when he scoffs at the idea of "AI ethics", simply because he is convinced such a thing is basically impossible. It gives images of a frenologist scoffing at the idea of human rights for African slaves during a presentation about their skull shapes. It's not impossible that he could be wrong, and to me, I would've preferred to be humble, but again, maybe he just thinks it's that ridiculous that he can't even pretend to be humble about it. But again, I do intuit the perspective of perceiving computers as just a pile of rocks, and certainly with the current conception of what a computer is, that perspective could be valid.

"It's just a thought" 😝

I'm starting to think maybe Turquoise is an incoherent stage due to the way the model was constructed, back with Clare Graves using person interviews. The problem of course boils down to the problem with WEIRD samples (Western, Educated, Industrialized, etc.); "Western people" for short. When Western people reach high Tier 1 or early Tier 2 and get statistically more familiar with New Age ideas, particularly Eastern-inspired non-duality, maybe this then becomes their new highest value system when asked about it in interviews, even though it's trans-personal/trans-cognitive and it's possible to happen earlier in the Spiral (like it has for millenia), producing what appears as Turquoise. Had instead the sample been more universal (including particularly people from Eastern cultures), then this confounding variable of Eastern spiritual beliefs would've been ruled out much more easily. So Turquoise essentially ends up becoming this bastardized mix of Green-Yellow cognition and Eastern spiritual ideas, only because we based the model on rich kids in American universities and not much else. But I would have to study the particular methods used in more in detail before making any firm conclusions.

The thing is if you don't engage in that hierarchy, then you just become a part of the other hierarchy of unread dorks who think they're original and think they've re-invented fire for the millionth time. Not long ago, I personally wanted to write a book about the relationship between flow, instrinic motivation, meaning, health, functionality, etc.; something which I felt I had discovered all by myself; but not long after, I realized that this has been talked about for millenia through concepts like eudaimonia, virtue, wisdom, etc. Probably the only favor I would've done to the world would've been to package the same ideas in my own clumsy and idiosyncratic language for people to spend their time scratching their heads over. If I were to "borrow" a concept from John Vervaeke, what you're talking about is called "rabbit hole epistemology" — burrowing yourself down in your own bullshit, which again at the end of the day becomes the same boring and unoriginal exercise, because so many people do it and end up unintentionally replicating the same uninformed low-resolution view on everything.

✋🥸 (That's a commie salute, not a Hitler salute )

🫡 Emojis are dots 😠 Change my mind 😌

I will personally appoint myself to Punctuation and Capitalization Moderator🫡

He has one PhD in computer science and another PhD in philosophy of mind (ontology). So you could say he is qualified to talk about both metaphysics and computer science. That said, a PhD just means you spent around 3 years writing about a very niche topic. I think having a life long personal interest in something, given that you're able to put yourself through the same level of rigor and discipline on your free time, goes way deeper than a PhD. This is evident by the fact that Bernardo only spent 1 year (and one week) completing his last PhD because he had basically already written all of it before he started. He is not a materialist. He is an idealist who is not allergic to scientific thinking. And that is why I admire him.

Lonely coomers are still lonely. Nothing societal about it. It's biological. You're made to be touched.

Me. I'm a Carl 🤡 No idea. And anybody who tells you they know, probably very definitely don't know.

Me neither. I don't know how to distinguish Yellow from Turquoise in any principled way.

This is one big reason why people think AIs are conscious. They look at a computer and think "magic". Meanwhile, if you actually study the engineering down to being able to build these things essentially from scratch, then these things start to look less magical and more mundane. Then the true mysteries like consciousness are understood to be nowhere near such mundane activities like building tiny electrical circuits. This is what I intuit from listening to Bernardo Kastrup, someone who has studied computer engineering to the deepest levels, to being able to build computers from scratch on his spare time, and who has worked with some of the most advanced computer technology professionally, and who also knows a thing or two about metaphysics. When he looks at a computer, he sees water pipes and valves, completely mundane things, and he scoffs at people who think it has anything to do with consciousness. I'm fascinated by this, as I've always wanted to know how computers work, but just like you, I never took the time to get into it.

You're a mammal. Do the things.

Haha. I actually think I had the thought: "what if I told him I sometimes listen to 'satanic' Black Metal music by people who literally burned down churches?"

I was approached by a Jehova's witness on the street while hanging up a poster to my study, and I was like "yeah, I'm into what you could call religion, took some courses on the psychology of religion" etc., and he was essentially like "yeah, but my religion is true though" 🥲

Ruth Underwood playing Frank Zappa's music on piano in the piano room at Juilliard and an employee coming into the room saying "What's that?" "That doesn't sound like the kind of music we play here!" "Get out!" 😝😅

The simplest way is for the general public to become pedophiles themselves. And that might even become a real possibility with the increasing amount of questionable anime watchers (I'm not judging of course 😗). More seriously, just blast them with statistics like "most child molesters are not pedophiles". Exactly how? I dunno. Honestly, you'll probably have a better time trying to make Young Earth Creationists empathize with Matt Dillahunty.

Don Beck who created Spiral Dynamics made Leo retract that video because it misrepresented Turquoise (like you were doing in the start of this thread). Nevertheless, if you dont know what Turquoise is (neither Beck's or Wilber's conception of it), you're most likely not Tier 3. (In Beck's model, there is no Tier 3). It doesn't hurt to learn more about it if you otherwise spend a lot of time thinking about it. Besides, it's one thing to talk about what you personally think is the highest value or stage of development, but it's another to learn about a model that somebody else made.