Carl-Richard

True.

People who get into spirituality don't generally aim to be miserable.

Take a break, be a normal human for a while and integrate your insights.

Right now, you're dreaming, while realizing Absolute Truth would be like becoming lucid in the dream.

You're confusing Absolute Truth with Maya (illusion), which is a classic mistake solipsists on this forum tend to make. It's hard to grok what we're talking about conceptually, which is why mystical experiences are needed to actually grasp it. You have to die psychologically to see through the illusion (the illusion of your limited POV). Illusion can only ever be a subset of Absolute Truth, not identical to it; i.e., the personal can only be a subset of the transpersonal, not identical to it.

But you're not the person. The ego is an illusion, don't you know? It can't be true when you fundamentally misunderstand what a "person" is

In analytical idealism, Absolute Truth is transpersonal consciousness, which of course also includes all possible personal consciousnesses, but the distinction between personal and transpersonal is useful for describing the difference between our personal minds (particularly thoughts, emotions and feelings) and transpersonal mind stuff (shapes, colors, general phenomenal qualities). A good ontology (at least in analytical philosophy) is able to provide explanations for a wide range of phenomena while maintaining an adequate level of parsimony or elegance. Your idea of solipsism dispenses with explaining a huge realm of reality (the relationship between the personal and the transpersonal) in exchange for an increase in parsimony (which arguably leads to a decrease in elegance). No other ontology that is taken seriously in analytical philosophy (e.g. physicalism, panpsychism) does this. For them, the distinction goes something like "subjective vs. objective", "mental vs. physical", "mind vs. matter". The distinction between the personal and transpersonal is so central to how we understand the world as humans that neglecting it is in a sense inhuman (and we're all way familiar with this notion being applied to solipsism). So in sum, if solipsism is not simply an inhuman way of conceptualizing the world, it's at least a poor ontology from the perspective of the values of analytical philosophy.

People keep saying vitamin D supplements, and I would echo that. I upped my dose around October or so (I live in Norway which can get pretty dark), and I think that is one of the things that keeps me from going back to the lamp (I should probably consider using it still, if only I could find it hehe). If you suspect you're actually deficient, you should get your levels measured by a doctor and they will put you on a megadose regimen, but if you just think you need a boost and you live in a dark part of the world, you should still consider taking a few times the recommended daily amount.

I don't think "other people" is direct. If you're questioning whether or not other people are conscious, you're questioning things that are not direct. From the perspective of direct experience ("Absolute Truth"), other people don't actually exist. Even questioning itself doesn't exist. Everything that is to know from direct experience is directly clear; no questions needed, no "other people" involved.

What does "what is" have to do with whether or not other people are conscious?

I think solipsism is just as much a mind game an any other, demonstrated by the heavy baggage of assumptions that comes with it. What do you mean by "direct"? What do you mean by "experience"? What do you mean by "me"? These concepts carry a lot of assumptions.

I would say the solipsism is also a secondary truth, because Absolute Truth is beyond language. And that is exactly what I mean by solipsism relying on assumptions and definitions, because the second you open your mouth, you're indeed relying on assumptions and definitions and engaging in something that is not direct, not Truth. Absolute Truth is beyond talking about it. For example, solipsism assumes hyper-empiricism, it assumes definitions of words, it assumes you can talk about it, it assumes assumptions, etc. More critically, it tends to assume that your more general personal knowledge about the world can be fitted into it, which again is arguably the main source of all the disagreements and confusion about solipsism (because people's ideas about relevant words like "experience", "self", "perception", "mind" or "consciousness" can be highly varied, incomplete or incoherent). In other words, what you think of as a minimalist ontology is actually heavily loaded with your own baggage. If you want to dispense with most of that, you must essentially resist the temptation to describe reality. But even here, there is a possible assumption that reality cannot be described (which may be a reasonable assumption, but it's an assumption nonetheless). I'm not saying assumptions cannot be reasonable, but they're not usually a given, which is a common misunderstanding among solipsists: they assume solipsism (or the way they generally practice it) is the baseline "given" truth. If you think I'm misrepresenting you and you actually think that solipsism is just another name for Absolute Truth, then I would advise you to not associate solipsism with making statements like "but I can't know that other people have an internal experience; I only have my own experience". Such a statement is loaded with assumptions that have really nothing to do with Absolute Truth.

Rationality, logical inferences. You seem to be looking for a hyper-empiricist ontology like solipsism which doesn't require any logical inferences. Well, analytical idealism is not hyper-empiricist like that. It relies on logical inferences. If you care about rationality, then solipsism seems incredibly absurd. But if you don't, then sure, solipsism is all you got. I've tried to show how absurd it is before (if you care about rationality that is): In this particular example, I highlighted the emotional aspect of how you in that situation obviously "feel" and "believe" that other people are just like you (personally conscious), but the more general point boils down to how extremely trivial it is to imagine yourself being in the other people's shoes when you're literally up on stage in the same place performing the exact same play, displaying the exact same emotional responses and feeling the same emotions from the inside (and how trivial it is to conclude that other people are therefore personally conscious). The way this ties into logical inferences is that you take the similarities of the external appearances of other people to your own external appearances (emotional expressions, anatomical, physiological, biological makeup, etc.) and you conclude that this is reasonable evidence for an internal experience in those people (just as your own external appearances correlate with own your internal experiences). That is one of the logical inferences you can make that supports the idea of an objective world outside of your own personal mind (and it's not the only one, as I've alluded to in previous comments), and of course, analytical idealism would propose that this world is not physical, but mental. Exactly, because you seem to be an ontological hyper-empiricist who doesn't rely on logical inferences. I personally find it a lobotomized way to view the world (as you're quite literally pensioning a major part of your cognitive faculties, i.e. your capability for rationality), but hey, if it floats your boat. Also, just because you're not relying on overt logical inferences doesn't mean you're not relying on assumptions (about what "this" even is). You also can't stop relying on definitions, and that is a huge issue for defining what solipsism even is (which is arguably the perennial problem on this forum). So when you realize this, maybe relying on logical inferences is not such a big problem after all? Maybe you're just as able (if not more) to obfuscate your ontology without it.

Firstly, transpersonal consciousness exists beyond all forms, beyond all limitations, and therefore you're already in it. You cannot enter it or exit it, because it's limitless; it's everywhere. You can experience formlessness through meditation (a state of consciousness devoid of thoughts, perceptions, etc.). When it comes to forms, it's simply the case that I as a person have my own formed experience (thoughts, perceptions, etc.), and you as a person don't have access to it. Still, our separate formed experiences do exist, and they're all part of a larger whole; trans-personal consciousness; consciousness beyond the person. Likewise, neither of us have access to every form in the universe right now (e.g. what is going on in the Andromeda galaxy), yet these forms do exist, and they're all part of a larger whole; trans-personal consciousness; consciousness beyond all persons. But where does that leave my personal thoughts and experiences? Are they simply non-existent?

True, but you have to qualify what type of consciousness you're talking about (transpersonal consciousness vs. personal consciousness). Your personal self is "dissociated" from these things. They don't enter your personal field of experience, because your personal field is limited. If everything in reality occurred within your personal field of experience, then you would not be a human being staring into a computer screen right now. You would be the entire universe.

He prefers to be very concrete and thorough.

🥣🔪

You are aware of the formless consciousness pervading all of reality, but not necessarily all of the forms in consciousness. For example, you're not aware of my thoughts, or your past thoughts, or your unconscious mind (thoughts and experiences that will be or may never be).

To be clear, analytical idealism also posits an objective world outside of your personal self (personal consciousness), but this world is transpersonal Consciousness.

Actually true on a philosophical level as well in an interesting way 😂 I think Anil Seth coined it "the Real problem of consciousness": how do we explain how human minds (personal consciousness) arise from brain states (roughly put). He also views the Hard problem as a red herring.

Easy: choose analytical idealism and make transpersonal consciousness ("the ground of Being") the ontological primitive, which leaves the thing that seems to correlate with brain activity to be personal consciousness (private mind states; e.g. your thoughts vs. my thoughts). Now you don't have to solve how consciousness arises from brains, because consciousness has always existed. However, it leaves you with a different problem; "the Decombination problem": how does transpersonal consciousness divide some parts of itself into separate individual perspectives (personal consciousnesses)? For that, you can point to a phenomena described in psychology as "dissociation", but how dissociation takes place is not very much understood, but at least there is a recognized concept in science that you can point to that can account for how transpersonal consciousness becomes personal. Even though dissociation is not well-understood, by comparison, other competing ontologies (e.g. constitutive panpsychism and physicalism) do not have any better candidates for scientific concepts they can point to which can explain their respective main objections ("the Combination problem" and "the Hard problem"), like "emergence", which has different incompatible positions (strong vs. weak emergence) and are yet to provide any specific mechanisms of how the emergence takes place. So from this, it might seem that the three ontologies presented are on roughly even ground, but analytical idealism also wins on the count of conceptual parsimony (Occam's Razor), in that it postulates only one ontological category (consciousness) while panpsychism and physicalism postulate (in a roundabout way) two ontological categories (physicality and consciousness) (I'm pretty sure panpsychism does that, but feel free to arrest me).

@Javfly33 Gratz

When you find it out for yourself, that's when it truly sticks.

Two things: modern society and the materialistic worldview. Once you're hooked up to modern society, you get exposed to both hyper-salient stimuli (e.g. cakes, junk food, social media, porn) and hypo-salient stimuli (grey urban environments, office walls, lack of direct sunlight, physical inactivity) defined relative to what our minds and bodies are evolutionarily adapted to. These things erode your general sensitivity to life, because sensitivity comes from a high level of calibration of your body/mind systems, and that requires giving your body/mind exactly what it needs at any given time (neither "hyper" nor "hypo", but just right), and modern society (or the default version of it) largely fails to do that. The materialistic worldview contains within it certain assumptions about what is likely and what is not likely to experience. For example, hearing voices, seeing spirits and experiencing psychic abilities are seen as metaphysically incompatible with "reality", and to the degree you do experience these things, you will be labeled as delusional and/or slapped with a mental disorder diagnosis. Now, to the degree that you inhabit these assumptions, it will actually dictate how likely you are to experience these things. For example, the times you're walking in the dark and have an intrusive thought about some ghost being in your presence, you'll be less likely to brush it off as an irrational fear and maybe actually open yourself up to what that experience might entail when fully investigated. There is naturally some fear associated with opening yourself up to "the spiritual world", especially when you hear about stories such as entity possession, and also just the general cultural framing of it as something pathological. Also, I personally think it can possibly open you up to an endless source of actually delusional and neurotic mental behavior (e.g. "I feel kind of bad -> it must be a spirit"), a kind of spiritual hypochondriasis, especially when it's tied to narratives about the causes to these problems (e.g. "some people carry bad energies, so I must avoid them"). When we're dealing with subtle phenomena like "bad energies", which is surrounded by so much doubt and uncertainty ("is it actually there or am I projecting something"?), it can easily lead you down an actual pathological path of excess suspicion and eventually full-fledged paranoia. The only remedy to the aforementioned problems is some rational inquiry: firstly, spiritual phenomena need not be dangerous, detrimental or persecutory. The starting assumption should be that the spiritual world is neutral to whatever your human existence is, just like everyday reality. Secondly, be skeptical of narratives related to the spiritual world, especially theories about things like entity possession that have a persecutory note to them. Unless you're walking down the street minding your own business and you suddenly become 100% certain that an entity hopped into your spiritual body, you should be highly skeptical of such theories that even feed the slightest suspicion of such phenomena having an impact on your life. The skepticism towards narratives should also apply to the cultural narratives labeling them as pathological, as these will also color how you will approach this issue if you don't become consciously aware of them ("what is happening is bad"). In summary, be aware of your narrative lenses and let experience be the guide.

@Nilsi Damn, good job. I especially like the insight about holism 😉😚