Carl-Richard

Imagine you're a normal person in your own life, working a job and barely keeping your head above water and a homeless person looks at you and says "the workers just want to keep us down, it makes sense as they would want more control". You would be like "I'm just trying to do my job, I ain't got the time or resources for this shit". Do you think the elites have less responsibility, more time, more actual resources than you, to plot a plan of world domination that requires other people like them to be aligned with their interests and in on their plan and not preoccupied with their own interests? The higher up you get in the rungs of power, the more strings are attached to you, the more of your time is valued, the more of your time is needed, if not, you get outcompeted by those that have that time. You think Jeff Bezos has time for your shit? Just playing the anti-conspiracist devil's advocate. If you look around, you see arguably much more division than cooperation, certainly across country lines, across company lines, across different competing agents. And you conclude that at the very top, at the very highest levels of organization, beyond all countries, beyond all companies, there is perfect and synchronous cooperation? This is the fact-driven position (criticizing the narrative by pointing to dissonant facts; real concrete things grounded in the real world). The narrative-driven position is "but the elites are creating all that division to benefit them, to keep us under control; it's all an epic plot, a play, a deception". These are connections that could make sense but are less grounded in concrete things. They are more general and more like possibilities than actual facts. What appeals more to you and why?

Is this not entirely inconsistent with "Apparently we are never meant to feel thirst at all, in an ideal body / health / world."?

You can have a narrative which is more dense in facts (data points) and one more dense in connections or inferences and conclusions. That's the salient difference I'm pointing to. When a conspiracy theorist is like "look at how weird the videos look of the moon landings -> it must be staged", the anti-conspiracy theorist is like "but what about this fact, and this fact, and this fact, and this fact; that surely doesn't yibe with your theory?".

Why is thirst/dehydration not OK but hunger/fasting is?

When I was helping my mom and stepdad move houses (my mom sold my childhood home), we were picking up some final things and we saw they were already starting some renovations (we knew they had planned a lot). And me and my stepdad saw some workers demolishing the wooden fence by the terrace (which my dad had built 20 or so years ago). My stepdad said "remember all the work we spent painting that? Heh". Meanwhile I was left with a distinct feeling like I was watching gore. And that got me thinking: maybe the feeling of gore comes when you see something very familiar to you (like a human body part, or a familiar belonging) get disfigured or demolished. It doesn't matter that it's biological or merely material. It's the feeling of being robbed or seeing the transformation of familiarity to such a severe degree that you're revolted deep to the core. I think the best example of gore that demonstrates this (which is the most terrifying, terrorizing, horror-inducing movie scene I've ever experienced, from the movie Annihilation) is *spoiler alert* the bear. The absolutely disturbing and heartbreaking female screams of distress ("heeelp!") being conjoined with bear growls (which for me was the absolute worst part, something I would've never suspected), the mutation and disfigurement of conjoining a female body/soul with a bear's body, is the haunting experience of seeing something familiar morph into a monstrosity. (I'm not describing a bear attack by the way; I'm describing the aftermath ☹️).

But then we're talking deep in the Walmart sandbox kind of deep. That's why I think "insight" and "belief" are truly not firm distinctions. Insight (unless if we're talking about non-dual awakening as kind of insight, which here we're not) is just when something bubbles up from the pool of other beliefs or the same cognitive architectures underlying those beliefs (language, concepts, words, expressions). It might be highly salient, highly meaningful, by virtue of it bubbling up in that way, but still, it is bubbling up from the pool of beliefs / cognitive architectures and presents itself as that. "Eureka! My mind just had a mind blast!". Ok, but are you the universe yet?

While that is true, the question is how much does it matter to be dehydrated for a couple of minutes or whatever it takes for you to get to the point of drinking water and elevating your bodily hydration to normal? It's like you have 24 hours of the day to be either optimally hydrated or dehydrated. If the thirst signal has a delay in the span of minutes for maintaining optimal hydration, and you follow that signal, you will probably only be off by a couple percentage points each day even if you eat the most insanely dehydrating foods. It's the same logic with how working out can increase longevity even if it involves putting your body through heavy strain for a couple of minutes/hours each day. The strain is only a couple of minutes/hours each day, out of 24 hours (or whatever the workout rate is). So the adapative benefits from working out can outweigh the effects of strain during the workout, because the strain is so little compared to the overall picture.

@theleelajoker Females are often great at mirroring, so yes.

True if "whatever arises" does not rely on the distinction between "hidden" and "immediate", because then we're back in relativity, distinctions, not the absolute. To really affirm concretely, distinctively, as opposed or separate to something else, what the absolute is, is to betray its absoluteness.

I drink maybe a sip or two of water right after the meal to rinse my mouth (I also take vitamin/mineral/fishoil supplements with a sip of water during the meal). Perhaps a sip or two after brushing my teeth (not necessarily). Then the rest of the day if I'm not working out and only taking walks and working on the computer, I've noticed I sometimes don't actually need to drink before the next meal (although I can be misremembering; I have not done this specific meal that many times yet). I noticed this also with my previous version of the same meal (which used toasted bread and instead of porridge and less blueberries), after I started with the sodium-potassium salt. When I used regular salt, I used to be much more thirsty. If you look at each single meal component above (in finished/cooked form), they sit at around 70-90% water all of them (even the eggs). So reductionistically speaking, the meal should be just as hydrating as a fruit monomeal.

I had an insight and I wrote about it. Notice I put both conspiracy theorist thinking and the opposite tendency roughly equally in their own boxes. But of course the former is more salient as a societal question (it brings up more feelings, because of the negative valence as @LastThursday brought up, but also because there is a societal or cultural bias or stigma against that kind of thinking, again because we're culturally embedded in an analytic and post- traditional-religious framework). That's probably mostly why I put it as a title.

Notice I laid out the cognitive style that underlies supernaturalism and conspiracy theorist thinking. In a culture like ours, overt supernaturalism (in terms of traditional religiosity) is naturally suppressed, so you would expect less people to be overtly supernatural but perhaps they start gravitating toward conspiracy theories to fill that need for narrative-based cognition. Traditional religion is of course considered a meta-narrative that explains everything, gives a history or a plan for everything in reality (teleology, escatology). You could see how that can be replaced by the belief in the Illuminati or repetilians or hidden global world order or something like that. Paranoia and anxiety actually links to narrative-driven cognition (or are sort of the core ingredients of it, but with negative valence). Paranoia is driven by suspicion ("this thing could be indicative of this thing, that would be really bad"; assumption -> conclusion, a micro-narrative), and anxiety is driven by worry ("what if this thing happens in the future? That would be really bad"; similar assumption and conclusion). Paranoia and anxiety is associated with mentalistic cognition (drawing inferences based on sometimes very little information), i.e. more psychotic-like cognition, while more concrete cognition requires more details or facts and often very obvious inferences, i.e. more autistic-like cognition. Mentalism is more holistic, narrative-driven, suspicious, again drawing loose inferences based on less information, while more concrete cognition is more analytic, fact-driven, stable, drawing very few inferences based on very obvious connections. So you're really touching on the same phenomena (of course in a bit of a peripheral way). And when the meta-narrative of conspiracy theories is control, domination, deception, then naturally the narratives become negatively valenced and thus suspicious, paranoid, anxious, worried. Which can be driven (among other things) by a lack of fact-driven approach and drawing more loose inferences based on less information. Of course lower intelligence is also relevant, but that also feeds into facts-acquisition and inference-making (how fast do you do it, how much information can you handle at one time, how is your pattern-identifying skills, perhaps refinement and precision; IQ and working memory, pattern-recognition, intellectualism, all that). Hmm, narratives? Narrative-cognition being more efficient and appealing to the mind? Hmm.

As are those who try to debunk the conspiracy theorists, or what?

I mean you can say that in principle, but as a fact, you don't know the actual plan of God, and that plan can be studied, and you might find out that it unfolds only in a certain way that only fits with a few narrow hypotheses. It's not like NDEs are without coherence or substance. They are highly structured, highly meaningful. That's when the naturalism collapses into the supernaturalism, in that you can start giving an account for what is happening that is supposedly supernatural. What Bernardo calls supernatural is really just due to a sort of paradigm-locked version of naturalism, that relies on current assumptions about how reality works. Once we can explain how NDEers see without eyes, that becomes a part of the naturalist framework. The notion of "spontaneous" assumes the notion of law or principle that guides the spontaneity (or else there would be no structure). Once you uncover the law, you can call the products of the law spontaneous. That's what we do with human minds (Sam Harris style): it's not really free will (and being an author of thoughts, ideas, desires, plans), it's the illusion of free will, but it's really just nature acting spontaneously through a set of laws (brains, neurons firing, atoms colliding, etc.). When we do it with God's mind and its plans, we have recapitulated the "acting spontaneously through a set of laws".

Let's say I eat a meal, I get dehydrated, I drink, and I'm no longer dehydrated. What is wrong there? The video actually didn't explain why transient dehydration is bad (except "animals don't drink with their meals, we never observe that in nature", which is itself dubious). Also, please rate the hydration of my new morning meal: 1 kiwi fruit (with skin) 5 eggs (lightly scrambled; cooked on low heat in pan until chunky but still slightly moist/runny). With freshly ground black pepper and tiny amounts of 50/40 Na/K salt. Quick oats porridge (100 ml quick oats, 2.5 dl water, brought to boil and cooked for 2 minutes in pot). 10g of pumpkin seeds (cooked together with the oats) 200g frozen or fresh blueberries (mixed into porridge when done cooking).

You read my post.

In the beginning I was like wtf is he talking about, but at the end, I think I got it.

NDE stuff. I think most of Sheldrake's stuff (parapsychology and morphic resonance) is actually consistent with a naturalist conception of reality (Bernardo's conception; spontaneous at the bottom layer). He is mainly just challenging the idea that laws of nature are fixed (which doesn't necessarily allow for divine intervention, only that the laws might change slightly over time). But I think I remember he believes in divine intervention as well judging by his talks with Bernardo where he claimed something like God can have a plan (which would also be consistent with his Christian leanings, of course depending on how you define Christian again, that's always a problem, and I'm not just being a Peterson about this). What was that specifically? The Fine-tuning argument, in my limited knowledge of it (or rather almost purely intuitive understanding of it), never made much sense to me. Like the universe is the way it is, and if it wasn't like this, it might've been different or not been able to exist, therefore it must have been planned? Couldn't you just add infinite time to the equation and perhaps Sheldrake's idea of laws not being fixed and then over time, this universe is inevitable? Or is it that it being planned is more parsimonious than simply adding infinite time to spontaneous order and slight changes in constants over time? But isn't infinite time already the case (or what's the loophole there)? I don't know.

Are you living with roommates or with family?

Not really. It's about being top-down vs bottom-up, narrative-driven vs detail-driven, holistic vs analytic. You can be perfectly capable of rationality at either style. It's just a different orientation of the rationality, of what you decide to focus on. But of course, supernaturalism tends to appear at earlier stages of development, because cognition is efficient at dealing with narratives, less so with details.

Not really. Tell that to multiverse theory enthusiasts (who are virtually all naturalists by the way; it's often used as a defense mechanism against the Fine-tuning argument). Not a shred of evidence for a billion billion hidden universes or whatever with all slightly different physical laws. And the very reason why Bernardo Kastrup entertains the supernaturalist position as a naturalist is because there is evidence that threathens his position.

Now link a retarded atheist. I'll link a non-retarded Christian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake

It goes a bit deeper than that. I used to think this when I was 17. Truth is, especially when young, you soak up any and all ideology like a sponge. It doesn't matter much which one it is. And a woman who gets hit by their man in say Saudi Arabia or Iran doesn't necessarily pick up feminism.

Choose one and change it later if you feel it's a good thing to do.

What the fuck