Debating AI on materialism and the scientific method

[Inliytened1]

54 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

Ok agree , but it's like a misunderstanding. You can't be scared to be alone of limitless, because if the limits get broken, the you dissapears. It's like epicure said: If I'm here, death is not, if death is here, I am not. 

Nice chat, but you are still missing that consciousness is you.  Death is irrelevant. 

 

Edited August 20, 2023 by Inliytened1

[Breakingthewall]

35 minutes ago, Inliytened1 said:

Nice chat, but you are still missing that consciousness is you.  Death is irrelevant. 

 

Yeah, good conversation,  just to say that it's not about knowing that you are god, you are conciousness, anything, it's about to break the limits now, remove the you from the equation because you are a blocker. All the spiritual work is just do this. 

[Inliytened1]

39 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

Yeah, good conversation,  just to say that it's not about knowing that you are god, you are conciousness, anything, it's about to break the limits now, remove the you from the equation because you are a blocker. All the spiritual work is just do this. 

We probably both sound like AI now

But it is about realizing you are God.  Ask AI if that is the point of life.   It will probably give you some scripted answer as to all the possibilities.   But there is only one. 

[Mikesinfinity]

@Danioover9000

3 hours ago, Danioover9000 said:

@Mikesinfinity  Very interesting debate you had. What's your take on this video?

 

 

Glad you found it interesting. I don’t see exactly how the video relates to this thread or if it’s meant to, but sure. I didn’t listen to the whole thing, they covered a lot subjects in a short time so I don’t have the full context for the conversation but I can comment on some things I heard them talk about in the first third of the video.  

He was talking about these spiritual communities and satsangs and I agree with some of his criticism as I have seen it in person myself. I’m not really that interested in these spiritual communities anymore, if it’s zen, buddhism, nonduality or whatever. Besides other problems, like abuses from the guru that might occur in some cases, from my own observation people usually stop thinking for themselves once they have found a group they connect with and have someone with a certain vibe they like, telling them what to think. Not that some aspects of it couldn’t be valuable and very much could help people, it’s just not how I roll.

I’ll share a personal example. Some years ago I went to a Rupert Spira retreat in the Netherlands and I met another swede there who was also into nonduality, so when we both were back in Sweden again we continued to meet and talk about this stuff but after awhile it became clear to me that he was mostly re-iterating stuff that I’ve heard Rupert say a million times, but in swedish. To the point that I could take some typical Rupert phrase and put it in a translator and that word for word translation would be something he could say or write to me. He didn’t even have his own words to describe it, just being a parrot. At the same time he didn’t really want to engage in discussing things seriously while also becoming more smug about the whole thing. I called bullshit and haven’t seen him since. It’s easy to repeat words and play with semantics but if they don’t lead to an actual tangible re-contextualization then it’s not really that interesting.  

The guy in the video also talked a bit about his own experience of first reaching a conceptual understanding before a direct experience and yeah, I definitely think there is a difference between understanding something through logic or conclusions rather than a direct experience but I wouldn’t say there is a need to pick a side and dismissing the other, both have importance in my opinion. Some of us are more conceptual and like to play along with concepts and some of us don’t. It’s interesting when you do both. I’ve experienced some spiritual people using shame tactics against me when I’m using logical reasoning. And then when I go and talk to my normie buddies they call it all woo and says it all goes against science lol. Quite a predicament to be in.

I think it also depends on where you are on the spiral dynamics scale and that we can’t exclude psychology from this. This might tie back to the criticism of the spiritual communities. I think some people who are in the pre-rational stage of cognitive development might hear spiritual concepts and because their mind doesn’t feel like it needs evidence for anything they rely on gut feeling or the vibe of the guru that’s telling them stuff and might just ”accept” spiritual concepts right away without even digging or thinking for themselves. And then to strengthen their newly formed belief-system that haven’t really been validated in direct experience they instead group together to feel more right about their self-perceived to be superior spiritual ideology and perhaps even demonize some other group. I mean, that sums up a lot of religion. And then the rational people instead misunderstands what it’s all about and lumps it all together with those religions and people who are in that pre-rational stage.  

For me growing up in a highly secularized community with atheistic, or at most agnostic, parents and being mostly stage green my primary challenge has been to overcome skeptical arguments that came up as I was having experiences I couldn’t explain. So I tried to make sense of it from my materialistic worldview, which I couldn’t really. Stuff like psychedelics really doesn’t make sense under the materialistic paradigm, the explanations given very fast becomes incoherent, which was the point of discussing the AI, to see how it would react when it's shown its incoherencies. So I don't see it as constructing something new, rather a discovery that what was thought of as reality is something constructed. If there is a model that I’m deconstructing the deconstructing of it isn't itself more construction, unless I make it so. It depends on what’s left after the deconstructing business is done. Maybe I’m making it into something else, very possible so gotta watch out always. It would be similar to those who make a big deal out of being skeptics. Being skeptical and viewed as being skeptical becomes more important itself than using skepticism as a tool in the pursuit of truth so they in many cases cynically just dismiss things which could be true because their identity is tied to looking like a skeptic, which also in mainstream society is associated with intelligence so they are trying to remain on their high horses. I see it with a lot of scientists and public intellectuals right now with this whole UFO thing going on lol

Anyway, sorry to ramble on but that’s my thoughts so far.

[kylan11]

On 8/19/2023 at 0:23 PM, Mikesinfinity said:

@kylan11

Very interesting. It seems even more hardcore materialist in GPT-4, or at least a more clear materialist lol

I disagree, I think GPT-4 has clear "insights" on the limits of materialism and is open to admitting its philosophical limits, although it adopts it as a default. GPT-3 is just so dumb and dogmatic in comparison.

On 8/19/2023 at 0:23 PM, Mikesinfinity said:

It’s interesting that it mentions evolution in its defense of materialism. Actually Donald Hoffman showed exactly the opposite from this, that if you use evolutionary game theory to determine the accuracy of perception then perceptions tuned to fitness points win and perceptions tuned to ”reality” go extinct. Essentially that there is zero overlap between perceptions and an objective reality that’s assumed to be there.

Actually GPT pretty much agrees with Hoffman. Our senses are indeed tuned to survival and reproduction, not accuracy. So they are at least functional to navigate reality as an individual. That's pretty much what GPT said here, although "he" seems to imply that therefore it must be accurate as well, which I do not believe is the case.