Carl-Richard

Lol you can see what other people voted

Epistemology tries to answer the question "how do you arrive at what is true?". It's not really a set of facts that you can write down and memorize. It's more like a skill or a 6th sense that you have to build up over time. The only way to begin is to open up some maps and start exploring, establish some reference points, widen your perspective. Study a diversity of historical figures, read between the lines and see the parallels in your own life and the world around you. What is the deeper lesson? Another crucial part is to study one's own mind, because truth-seeking always involves a truth-seeker. How does the mind play tricks on itself? What are its drives, its illusions, its biases? In what ways did the people of the past fool themselves? How are you fooling yourself?

It solves confusion about the big picture.

But is it maybe how the world works? Map =/ territory.

One way to experience the relativity of concepts like today/yesterday/tomorrow and early/late is to screw with your sleeping schedule. We instinctively define the beginning of "today" as the moment we wake up, and if you consistently wake up at night and you talk to somebody with a normal sleeping schedule, it becomes very easy to talk past eachother ("today? You surely mean tonight?").

If your addiction is a response to an underlying trauma or other dysfunction (lack of meaning, belonging etc.), address those first. Then become aware of the mechanics of cyclical thought and behavior, discover your goals and interests, and ask yourself if x behavior is in alignment with your interests. Maybe you're not giving yourself a good enough reason to quit smoking or giving up junk food. However, once you've convinced yourself to quit, the only thing that is stopping you is a lack of awareness of your own mental state; of the discrepancy between your interests and compulsive cycles.

Benevolent mass homicide through utilitarianism also hides a supremacist underbelly. It values a few over many, luxury over diversity, part over whole. The ethical path to sustainability is ecoliteracy. Humans need to learn, not get killed.

Stage Blue: it doesn’t really matter what you do for money as long as you're serving a transcendent ideal (God, the law, your country, your family). If there is ever a time where Blue will shoot someone for something, it will be in service of those things.

What about armed robbery?

The sanctity of the soul.

This is your main assumption. Here is a couple of points: There is a difference between revolutionizing science and practicing "normal science" (intraparadigmatic science), between creating the formulas and using the formulas, between being an innovator and a technician. Your focus and vision is completely different. There is a trade-off in both attention and ability. For example, you're less likely to be a brilliant science communicator when you're a brilliant holistic scientist. It boils down to personality traits and focus. It's the difference between Neil deGrasse Tyson and Albert Einstein. The Cartesian-Newtonian worldview is sticky, because it is reinforced by common sense analytical thinking, and unless you deliberately spend time questioning those assumptions (which only some philosophers, mystics and revolutionary scientists do), your mind will not pierce that veil. The collective manifestation of this is the neopositivist spectre that has been haunting science for a century. Epistemology does not need to be questioned for it to be programmed into your mind, and if you don't do the work, you will soak up the average cultural backdrop, which is non-holistic. It's perfectly possible for an analytical thinker to manipulate the formulas in QM, work on specializing himself as a technician in his little niche, and not ask too many questions about the bigger picture (in fact, he won't have time to do anything else). At the end of the day, being a scientist is a profession. Everybody needs to work to survive, and survival is extremely streamlined: it takes shortcuts and minimizes information processing to save resources. Survival does not breed construct-awareness, and surviving as a career scientist does not make you construct-aware.

It might not be too bad, but it's certainly not perfect.

This one initiated the change in trajectory of my life 5 years ago.

All of those are deeply metaphysical ?

@FlyingLotus There is no point in talking to someone who isn't coming from a place of openmindedness and willingness to learn. I've already said too much.

We're not talking about books. We're talking about a very specific book that represents a well-established discipline with real-life impact and empirical evidence to show for it. In what way are all these smart and driven people wasting their time?

Why?

Then educate yourself. https://www.amazon.com/Community-Psychology-Pursuit-Liberation-Well-Being/dp/1137464097#

Survival vs Truth.

Only if you value truth more than life.

The most legendary Symphonic Black Metal song in history.

Locked for low quality.

Ah. My theory (not a ToE, more like a wide-reaching mechanism) goes like this: mental attachment leads to circularity of thought, magnifying dysfunctional cognitive patterns, which adds a positive feedback loop on all sources of stress, which then ties into the diathesis-stress model (genes+environment=illness). Basically, mental attachment (remedied by spiritual practice) modulates the frequency of all mental activity, and decreased frequency leads to a general dampening of illness. I also think that increased frequency is what leads to the cascading effect that catapults one into psychosis, and if the frequency is diminished, full-on psychotic breaks can possibly be prevented. The downside is that it doesn't directly address the psychotic content of the thought (though maybe indirectly if stress is indeed a component).

The impulse of wanting to unify gravity and QM (derive them from the same substrate) is realized in mysticism: Everything is Consciousness. Its expressions are fragmented, but its basis is unified. That is my hunch with a potential unified theory as well: even though the substrate is the same, the expressions are fragmented

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? I have some ideas around the relationship between attachment and mental illness as well.