Carl-Richard

Life-long, deep longing for truth, purpose and love (prerequisite for spirituality), strong suffering born out of separation from these things (identification with self-narrative), seeing the futility in continuing existence as a separate self and arriving at the willingness to surrender ("I don't want to live with myself anymore"), coupled with the systematic investigation of self-narrative, a.k.a self-inquiry ("who is this "I" who can't live with myself? It seems to be two"), leading to a shift in awareness away from self-narrative to non-symbolic awareness, a.k.a. grace. This is the universal path of awakening. The only surprise is that he is self-taught.

Autodidact, like many other great minds.

Because I felt like it. It's an Islamic custom to say Muhammad PBUH.

Because God is not separate from reality.

Well yeah Ok, here's some backstory to why I wrote this (and hopefully an answer to your thoughts): I'm taking a class in psychology of religion, and in the first class we had to divide ourselves into four groups (1. spiritual and religious, 2. spiritual and non-religious, 3. non-spiritual and religious, and 4. non-spiritual and non-religious) and then talk about why we chose that group. I felt I didn't explain myself well enough, so I wondered if I could find a way to explain myself as concisely as possible using a suitable reference point for that target group, or at least something they're vague familiar with, which I thought would be Western philosophy. Anyways, I say this because we always have to concede to various degrees of dualistic assumptions while communicating, like that there exists other people, that other people can understand you, that you have different beliefs, and that the interesting discussions are about figuring out the disagreements. For example, you would mainly bring up ontological idealism because it could be a relevant point of disagreement (as most people are ontological materialists), rather than some innocent statement like "I'm a human." These would be examples of pragmatic assumptions. An example of a more abstract assumption (on the level of ontology), is how the idealist has to concede to the language that falls out of the materialist's dualistic assumption, namely that matter produces a substance called mind, and then express their disagreement within that framework: "well, since you created the distinction between mind and matter, I think the best way to describe my position would be that there exists nothing but mind." However, if everybody were idealists, you wouldn't necessarily have to use that language. If everybody assumes that experience is the ontological primitive of reality, then "mental", "mind" or "psychic" just becomes synonymous with "reality."

(ignore the ideological framing in the title.) Appealing to veganism through a feminist lens ?

Welcome to Flow. You can also make your life into art. It's called enlightenment: everything flows effortlessly and you're just the receiver.

Just don't overdo it or you'll end up like Phil Anselmo ? 0:32

So? ? For practical reasons, yes, but for existential reasons it's all God.

It's pretty simple. God has no constraints other than itself. To say that there exists "other minds" other than the mind of God is a constraint on God that is not God. Put in another way: if God's mind is absolutely infinite in all possible ways, why should it not be the only mind?

There is a tendency to forget that higher perspectives, as far as they pertain to thought, are still relative. To remind oneself of sayings like "the map is not the territory" or "the more you know, the more you know that you don't know" can help to keep this somewhat in check, but despite this, there is still a sneaky impulse to smuggle claims about universality, even to models that are highly culturally dependent, when that is not as warranted as one might want to claim. Let's do away with the basic stuff first (the highly culturally dependent stuff) and then some more subtle points (less obviously culturally dependent): There is an idea that models like Spiral Dynamics, or Developmental Psychology as a whole, is able to establish strong claims of universality, that is truths about the human organism independent of cultural factors. This is far from the case. (This might seem highly confrontational and dry at first, but please hang on until the end before you leave your comment to get the full gist of my message). This first point is on its own not the most critical point about universality per se, but it's nevertheless relevant to the problem of Eurocentrism: Developmental psychology as a whole is an European invention with Eurocentric biases. For example, the idea of explaining the human condition in terms of linear ontogeny (stage models; a step-by-step process with a definite start and end) is highly Western. This in itself isn't a judgement of whether or not we should use such models, but I will come to that later. A contrast to stage models are contextual models without linear step-by-step assumptions (focus on different factors in the environment that influences development), as for example Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory. Said in another way: the way we structure our models is highly culturally dependent, and this informs how we interpret empirical data and further build our models. When it comes to empirical data, there are likewise Eurocentric biases all throughout not just developmental psychology, but all of psychology, which can be refered to as WEIRD bias: (American Psychological Association): https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/05/weird More generally, it's a context blind bias, as it involves the tendency to not control for things like socioeconomic status: (Global Health Now): https://www.globalhealthnow.org/2020-01/weird-psychological-bias This might seem avoidable by actually doing intercultural research, which does exist, but not to any satisfactory degree. This also doesn't change the fact that there still exists biases in the structure of the models (intercultural data being filtered through an European construct). Yet, there is an even bigger problem: the extreme lack of cross-cultural research, that is people who grow up influenced by two or more cultures. How does this affect development and how does it pertain to linear assumptions? Very little is known about this, and it potentially questions the entire validity of linear ontogeny, especially when you take into account the epic variability that exists in the cross-cultural domain (and the increased globalization in the world today): Now add to that the possibility of three, four or five etc. cultures and you're on a ride. Not to mention the fact that the internet is technically a cross-cultural domain as well. As far as developmental meta-lenses go, Spiral Dynamics is also affected by these constraints, both on a structural and empirical level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graves's_emergent_cyclical_levels_of_existence#Criticism Yes, in the case of SD, there has been intercultural research, like Beck & Cowan's work in South Africa, but while I'm not saying this is necessarily the case, such research is very susceptible to post-hoc verification (applying the model to "see if it makes sense"), or in the case of actually replicating Graves' student essay methodology – just simply inhabiting the same structural assumptions of linear ontogeny. I don't know what they actually did. I'm just providing a few possibilities. Now on to the more subtler points. Let's take a strong case for universality and assume you've studied many developmental meta-lenses (Kuhn, Wilber, Graves, Commons etc.) and you've managed to distill the general underlying principles, and you apply this meta-meta-lens to your own life (your own development), and you conclude that it makes sense. Notice that this is a post-hoc verification ("I apply the model, it makes sense, and therefore I keep the model"). You're also applying it to your life, not somebody else's (unless you have also studied an in-depth biography of some other person). Just like your own life is unique and not universal, your experience of different meta-lenses and potential biographies of other people is likewise unique and not universal. Also, if some other person were to study a few meta-lenses, he would have his own understanding of them, his own life experiences to verify them with, and he might have even studied widely different models from you. You can argue that if you were to have a discussion with this person that you may find similarities and common ground in your understanding, but this also assumes that you have a common cultural lens to even communicate in the first place (shared language, concepts etc.). So if you even were to be able to communicate, you would already have so much in common that it would be a little weird to not find commonalities when you compare such wide lenses, and thus this is also a case of post-hoc verification and not indicative of true universality (certainly not if the models are WEIRD). Is this just pessimistic puritanism? Is universality even desirable? Do you who is reading this not know all this already? Well, I'm pretty sure you're able to understand me when I point this out to you, as this is based on my own experience, which is highly influenced by this culture which we share here, so of course. It's nevertheless true that, if not just discovering, but getting complacent, at a certain level of analysis can seem blinding to otherwise previously consolidated understandings about epistemological humility etc., and that if I may invoke some model-esque action myself; it's a process of fluctuation between humility and arrogance, awareness and blindness; and that as you grow, different lenses morph and even shatter as they get re-contextualized into an even higher understanding. So this is just a reminder, that you're not really at the final stretch yet, and that you never will be (as far as abstract frameworks go; direct experience is another matter completely, or not). The process of discovering reality only keeps evolving more and more, and one has to be TRULY humble and not squint too hard onto one's lenses, despite how meta they may appear to be from one's current position.

Ah, the Sam Harris method: "imagine..." ?

There is growing research in cross-cultural developmental psychology, but none of the grand narrative models are linear stage models. They look more like Bronfenbrenner (contextual models). If you want a grand model, you need grand effort

In the case of linear ontogeny, it can be something like Graves' student essay methodology, only applied to a huge data set with different categories of cross-cultural people (something like the image I posted). At some point, we'll probably have extremely advanced cross-cultural developmental models that work like computer simulations where you can plot in dozens of contextual variables (education, current nationality, past nationalities, socioeconomic status etc.) and get a detailed report of a person's developmental trajectory. It might have some linear stage theory aspects as well (maybe not an universal one, but several possible paths). It would probably require an AI that could create standarized values for each contextual variable for each person and some revolutionary data gathering instrument (as opposed to highly inaccurate self-assessment sheets). AI would also be useful for running algorithms for things like Graves' student essay methodology with huge complex data sets.

True. Science is about testing if that is the case. You can't get around structuring a model a certain way (Western assumptions or not), but you can at least try to do sober empirical research (circumventing WEIRD bias).

Who denies development? The critique is about claims of universality of linear, non-contextual stage models with empirical WEIRD bias.

Man that's a cool thought. So a more expanded form of spiritual bypassing (applied to knowledge in general). Epistemic bypassing? ☺ Is it like when Orange thinks it is Yellow? ? (I'm not sure if this is coherent at all. It's a pretty off-the-wall late-night bed thought): So in the post-metamodern application of epistemic bypassing, the internal transformation would be described using a metamodern developmental framework (e.g. SD), which then would be used to critique a person's level of understanding of the metamodern level of analysis itself (either that very framework, i.e. SD, or a comparable model), so it's interlooping with itself pretty hard. Is this interlooping action what MHC (Commons) refers to by denoting "performative-recursive" in meta-cross-paradigmatic cognition?

Doesn't work very much like a brain then This is a good talk on ontology (in favor of idealism, but it's good for understanding materialism as well):

I would use the term "self-awareness" to refer to the awareness of the small self and "awareness" to be awareness of the big Self. Self-awareness or meta-awareness is the ability to re-represent internal representations (perceptions), which means to think about something that is not currently in your experience. A more complex form of meta-awareness is the ability to make higher-order symbolic representations (classes like "cat" or "dog" or "human") out of these re-representations, which you can weave into abstract narratives, i.e. a self-story (e.g. "I am a human"). Higher-order symbolic meta-awareness is what humans have (we make stories about ourselves and the environment), some animals probably have a lower form of meta-awareness (they can think about past experiences), and some probably don't re-represent perceptions at all.

I'm not a philosopher, and all these terms have sub-categories which complicates things and which I can't recite from the top of my head, but I would still make a small correction: You did explain substance dualism correctly, but materialism is a monism which says everything is made out of matter, and that mind is an emergent property of matter (brains). It's emergent in the sense that a substance called matter somehow produces a different type of substance called mind. Substance dualism merely poses that matter and mind are produced separately and have no causal correlation, i.e. brains don't have anything to do with mind (which is in some ways less ridiculous than materialism). Yep, that's materialism.

Wrong. There is an increased functional connectivity between some brain areas (communication), but they don't increase blood flow to any of those areas (there is only a decrease). Blood flow is one of the main ways of measuring brain activity, because it's an indicator of increased glucose metabolism and energy expenditure.

I agree. If I can borrow your terms to reiterate: I'm pointing out the potential danger that arises in this new elevated position; of affirming that you've already acknowledged the lessons of the last predecessor (postmodern relativism), and to then inadvertently smuggle some of the thinking from the earlier predecessors (order, universality, progress) into places where they may not belong, in a way that de-emphasizes the postmodern lessons, maybe just as a form of a retrograde amnesia ("it's been a while since I've done a thorough postmodern account of my worldview"), and that it's therefore again only a reminder and a point on emphasis (as the lessons were in fact already learned). You could say it's a type of post-metamodern analysis Basically, it's a roundabout way of saying that one must be eternally aware of one's self-biases

If you build that computer and then damage some of its components, will it have an increase or decrease in consciousness?

And I'm glad the moderator team agrees with my decision . Please don't derail the topic.

Why does psychedelics and meditation lead to a decrease in brain activity but a widening of consciousness? Why do some types of brain damage lead to an increase in functioning? (e.g. Acquired savant syndrome).