Carl-Richard

@Scholar @zurew When I think about veganism (or environmentalism for that matter), I think like if you want to make a big change, be an activist, otherwise the impact you can make relative to the rest of the world is relatively infinitesimal. And then the question also becomes in what other ways can you make a change, in what other ways can you spend your limited time? What is the moral calculation there? Then there is also the thought that any act of wrongdoing (especially with respect to animal suffering) should be minimalized, irrespective of any global comparison, just like you don't kill people on the street just because so many people die anyway on a global scale and it's a drop in the ocean (maybe a relatively bad example because killing someone in your community will not be a drop in the ocean, but anyways, you get the idea). I would like to hear Alex O'Connor try to reconcile these two positions (I've heard him endorse a version of the first one; that veganism must be fought on an activist and collective level, not an individual everyday level). There is also of course a problem of what qualifies as fighting it on a collective level, at what point is your contribution big, and also, at what point is your contribution to animal suffering small enough? Is it simply the intention that matters, not the execution? If you simply intend not to kill people on the street, is that good enough?

Wars happen because wars are built on wars. History didn't start yesterday. It's a through line of conquest, suppression, domination. Wars don't stop until someone breaks the cycle of violence, usually the ones with power and will. That's essentially what the critiques are about. When will the ones with the power stop the violence? Not that violence will stop after that, not that one must not respond to attacks, but will violence be kept to a minimum, will one fight to de-escalate tensions rather than build them, will one express temperance and tact, and seek diplomatic solutions, compromises. Israel has lately chosen the path of extermination, of utter domination, the same path that Hitler took, although debatable in scale. And we see the cycle of violence. Even if Palestinians get a win at some point like the Jews did after WW2, will they not return the same? Will they not perpetuate the cycle of violence? Or will they choose not to?

Mhm. The reason it's looping so much is it's primarily about fear, and your ideas about it, rather than one's experience, as @theleelajoker pointed out. "I don't want to be alone, that's scary, that's isolating, that's lonely". Had the discourse around solipsism been about accepting reality as it is, approaching reality with love, rather than fearing what it might mean for you and your ideas and notions about reality, then it would be less loopy, it would instead be people writing about their waking up experiences, not the fear of what waking up might entail.

Why not become a materialist?

What's my perspective? 😆 It's mostly made clear in this thread, which people (not me) abandoned. This comment probably sums it up:

Sick man. Get Animals As Leaders and Meshuggah vibes :,) I wrote something at 17 which is the main thing that stands out in memory. It's on the forum somewhere. Found it: it's actually in your thread lol. Holy shit the sound quality is shit 😂 Also, this one was kinda sick ngl (granted the utter lack of tone and the final chord of the progression containing an unintentional note lol): https://voca.ro/11DYAHJLi7wM Anyways, sorry for derailing thread 👉👈🥺

You're a musician so you're halfway there 😜

I think I've experienced telepathy, many times.

What? I can't rule out anything.

I saw what I thought was a spider outside the window yesterday (and the day before that), but it could've been some ball of dust dangling in the wind. I didn't make much of it though Other than that, three weeks ago, I filmed a spider in my room which looked just like the spider I caught when we were collecting insects back when I studied biology in university. The one I caught then was absolutely huge, the biggest one we caught in my group. When I caught it and put it in my jar and in my backpack, it felt like my backpack was emanating a dark presence (that's what I said to my friend). Ever since then, I've had them visit me multiple times (other individuals of the same species, as far as I can tell, big ones), like they were reminding me what I did to their friend. It's been a while since last time. Titanium, that's because I've been constantly thinking about changing out my toothpaste which has titanium dioxide in it (jking). You were in my dream once and it was weird, like I was experiencing some kind of psychological complex, I would feel weird talking about it No spiders though. Wtf

An advocate? What does that mean? Maybe ask @Natasha Tori Maru what I am, I'm not quite sure 😛

If you want to be a nerd about it, there is no "proof" in science, only corroboration of hypotheses (often based on statistical inference). But this looks pretty solid on the surface (although I would have to review the limitations to say more about it): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252380718_Experimental_Tests_for_Telephone_Telepathy Statistical significance of p = 4 x 10^-16 is way beyond the threshold of what essentially all behavioral scientists are comfortable with publishing (p = 5 x 10^-2).

It's physicalistic with regard to the behavior of reality; that the scientific laws operate as if the world is bound by physicalism. But it's idealistic with regards to what reality actually "is" most fundamentally (ontologically idealist).

If you say "reality is fundamentally made out of consciousness, everything springs out if it" but you also say "you cannot communicate telepathically, precognition is not a real phenomena, remote viewing, spirits, ghosts, all of it is hocus-pocus make-believe" — be it because you haven't looked into the data, or haven't had those experiences, or because you don't believe they're real in principle (they break the "laws" of reality) — I call that "crypto-materialism".

And it's quite ironic because Leo has probably read more books than 99% of people on here. It's a bit like when neo-advaita teachers tell you "you don't need practice, just be, just realize you're already it", when virtually all of them spent many decades practicing their asses off to get to where they're at. We can coin it "teacher's amnesia"; you disregard or even forget what you have learned in the past and it tends to detrimentally impact the way you teach. I actually had this insight when I was around 7-8 years old in school, that me who is a child could teach some things better to another child than the teacher because I understand how it's like being a child (by virtue of currently living through it).

By the way, "panpsychism" (or its popular version "constitutive micropsychism") is a Looney Tunes version of idealism where you can hand-hold materialists and make them keep the illusion of Newtonian atomism as a fundamental substrate of reality while simultaneously inching towards the reality that consciousness has to simply be a given. It suffers the same kind of intermediary step as my notion of "crypto-materialism" (being an idealist while disregarding psychic phenomena). You just simply can't completely let go of your trusty friend materialism. @Hojo Do you think "crypto-materialism" is an original idea?

This is a true story: the most intense dream I've ever had involved me crashing a spaceship into an alien planet with my friends and living there for thousands of years and constructing a society. Then I sat down and basked in it all and started thinking about what had been going on, and then I realized that the entire thing was a simulation constructed by aliens as a way to use human creativity to create new technology. Then I woke up from that dream (while still dreaming) and drew the insides of the spaceship on a piece of paper, and then I woke up for real and was like "what.. the.. fuck". Aliens, computer simulations, are so ingrained into us by pop culture, that using any of those concepts in combination to form a thought, would not require much originality as a starting point. He simply "parrots" more than you because he knows more than you and knows how to draw connections between ideas he knows about. But to say he only parrots is gravely uncharitable. In the very video we're talking about, he routinely answers questions on his own behalf. You can be uniquely incoherent and it won't matter for anyone. But if I assume you're being coherent, it reminds me of the idea that consciousness and perceptions are exactly where they seem to be, "out there". They aren't fundamentally a result of a mechanism, of light travelling into the eyes and being projected onto the retina and then adjusted neurologically. The mechanisms of the eyes are only correlative stories we use to explain how reality behaves, of why when we for example put a mask in front of the eyes, perception seems to change.

I remember I wrote something skeptical about it when I first heard about it. Good to know my predictions point in the right direction

They are consciousness' way of telling jokes (to itself).

Would it be ethnic cleansing if Gaza ends up 100% Jewish "on accident"?

Show me one person who can do differential equations without ever reading a math book.

@Leo Gura You think more Love is what they need, when what they need is less fear? Love with fear is just terror.

That's what openminded people do. They actively seek out new perspectives. They actively try to challenge their own perspective. That's what is admirable about Alex. He is constantly challenging himself and actually listens to what people are saying. The alternative, where you sit basking in your own ignorance, drilling down into the isolated cave of your mind, can be useful for some things, but if that's all you do, you will eventually come off as a dull buffoon. Math is like the worst example you could've used. Essentially nobody does math they haven't read in a book. Some things you simply won't come up with on your own in a thousand years. You writing in English right now and using the words you are using is a result of thousands of years of people finding out things and building on prior knowledge. You either adopt that knowledge lazily, haphazardly, by accident, through your upbringing and culture, or you seek it out intentionally from a place of intellect and curiosity.

It's not as much an "ask what makes people experience meaning and make them rate the meaningfulness of their experience on a Likert scale and then deduce the underlying variables" as an "when organisms move, they're alive, they're functioning as they should; when they don't, they stagnate, they die". It's actually in a way more like philosophy than actual nitpicking empirical science. Again, even something as simple as waking up in the morning and eating food because you're hungry after a long night's sleep. Eating at that moment in time is experienced as meaningful. But then if you were to continue to eat after you were full, you continue stuffing food down your throat even though you feel like gagging and your tummy hurts, that is generally experienced as less meaningful. Human beings go through a long list of different ebbs and flows like this throughout a day, or week, or month, or year, and getting sensitive to those ebbs and flows and acting with them harmoniously is honestly the bulk of what meaning is about. But figuring out those ebbs and flows often requires something out of you, be it training your awareness up from the standard sleep-like state you've been conditioned into by modern society, or educating yourself about the principles of how the ebbs and flows work.

I just gave examples of models with three parts in them (bio-psycho-social). They point you to the different aspects of the human being that need to be addressed for the human being to function optimally. That's a start and way better than "meaning is when you do a task and it's fun, yay!". Then you go deeper from there, but the main point is that you should study how the human being works: literally study the science of the human body, study the science of the human mind and brain, study the science of human behavior, study the ancient philosophical traditions, study how religion works, study how spirituality works. Then apply it, and meaning will arise as a result. "But Alex O'Connor studied all that and he didn't say to study all that to experience meaning". Disagree. Alex O'Connor (obviously based on my knowledge of him) is not very knowledgeable of the human body, the human mind and the brain. But that's just my read.