Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights
Miscellaneous bits of wisdom and resources on personal development, life purpose, philosophy, epistemology, nonduality, psychedelics, etc. Published randomly throughout the week.
- penetrating mental vision or discernment.
- the sudden act of grasping the inner nature or truth of a situation.
- a deep understanding of a person or thing.
Insights here are meant to be quick and half-baked. Consider these food for thought.
I've deliberately disabled comments to keep the blog streamlined. If you want to discuss any of the blog posts, you can do so here: Actualized.org Forum
Humans are so puzzled: if God exists and God is Good, why does God allow all this evil stuff to happen?
It’s simple: Because when God is unconscious, God behaves like a monster. All the evil stuff that happens is when God is less than 100% conscious. Evil stuff is the logical necessity of less than 100% Consciousness, precisely because Good is 100% Consciousness. When we say God is Good, that means God at 100% Consciousness. But even the best humans are only 1% conscious, so evil is rampant. Ontologically, evil IS low Consciousness. God cannot prevent low Consciousness from producing evil. God can only strive to be more conscious. People of low Consciousness cannot magically be Good by God waving his wand. God can’t change its own ontology, God cannot change what it is or how Consciousness works. Skeptics love to turn this into a contradiction against Omnipotence. No! It’s not a contradiction. Truth/Being/Consciousness has a definite nature, an absolute nature. The nature of Truth/Being/Consciousness cannot be changed, not even by God, and this does not contradict Omnipotence. The nature of Infinite Consciousness is that it has to be able to imagine lower forms of itself, which is where evil, so-to-speak, comes from. For God to eliminate evil, it would have to eliminate every form of Consciousness lower than 100%, which means no finite beings like humans could exist. Do you want that? No. You call that death. That would not be Good. It is better that humans are allowed to be evil. So here we are. Life is a sojourn through lower Consciousness, which involves experiencing evil.
Now, some smart-ass will say, "But isn't it evil to subject humans to evil?" To which the answer is: Not if God is the one who is subjecting itself to evil out of curiosity and boredom. Is it evil to bite your own tail if you are bored? Not if you're doing it for the experience. Is it evil to stick your own hand in the fire? Not if you're curious what fire feels like. God's game would be evil if God was doing it to someone other than itself. But there is no one other than itself. What an elegant solution!
No one is evil by choice. Evil is simply a function of low Consciousness. Evil doesn’t know any better. No one chose low Consciousness, they just found themselves in it. The finite is a logically necessary part of the Infinite, because finite and Infinite are One. Life is an experiment in low Consciousness, like God handicapping himself for fun.
See? There you go! A 2000 year old philosophical puzzle solved in a few paragraphs. True philosophy is not about endlessly debating questions, it's about answering them once and for all, so you never have to think about them again. You answer the question and then you have PEACE. The point is to be at peace because you understand.
Think of it this way: Evil occurs when God gets drunk. Drunk on its own hallucination. How can you expect a drunk person to be Good? That's impossible. Only a fully sober mind can be Good. You might wonder, "Well, why then doesn't God just ban drinking?" Because if God banned drinking, your life would end.
Science wants to have it both ways. On the one hand science wants to claim that science, strictly-speaking, never proves anything. However, this is BS because every scientist treats scientific truths as proven and absolute. When debating the shape of the Earth, no scientist will accept the argument that the Earth might be flat because science never proves anything. In practice everyone treats scientific truths as proven, regardless of the technicalities of what proof is or isn’t. See, you can’t survive on the strict idealized scientific notion of proof, because in practice nothing of importance ever clears that bar. Have you logically proven that your spouse cheated on you? No. But you will react emotionally nonetheless. So there exists this profound disconnect in science between proof and sense-making. If you as a scientist want to take the position that science never proves anything, then why do you believe science so strongly? Notice that in practice you treat science as if it proves things. You treat science as having proven that the Earth is round. But that’s an interesting epistemic question, Has science proven that the Earth is round? What does it take to prove that the Earth is round? This is much more tricky than scientists want to admit. Scientists do not want a relativistic notion of proof because they want science to be objective, but proof is relativistic. No two people will agree on what counts a proof, which is why Flat Earthers exist.
The reason I say all this is because when arguing with a serious scientist, eventually they will pull this cheap trick on you: "But science doesn't really prove anything." That's what they love to say when you back them into a corner. But if science doesn't prove anything, then nothing in science is truly known. But the scientist cannot admit that. The scientist needs to have it both ways: the scientist wants science to be the highest source of sense-making, but also must technically deny that science really knows anything for sure. This is the chicanery of science.
"But Leo! Nothing can be known for sure!"
You don't know that.
See, if science doesn't prove anything, then science has not proven that science is true. Yet every scientist holds science as true. If science doesn't prove anything, then everyone is placing way too much authority in science. That is indeed the case, but scientists are in denial about it because they don't want to relinquish that authority.
What is the truth? The truth is that science is much more shaky than scientists like to admit to themselves. Science is a bunch of ideas held together with duct tape and bubblegum. But scientists do not portray it that way because that looks too embarrassing and invites doubt. But that doubt is not a bug, it's a feature. You should doubt science because it was never proven to be true. But here's the kicker: the reason it was never proven to be true is because it isn't.
AI companies have started to watermark their own AI output text. Why?
Not for the reasons you'd think, not so humans can identify deep fakes, but because these companies have a serious practical need to differentiate AI text from human text, because if the AI models train on AI text, they degrade and turn to shit.
If AI was truly intelligent, then it would not turn to shit from training on its own text. But these LLMs have a huge problem when trained on their own outputs. This demonstrates how limited these LLMs are and how parasitical they are on human intelligence and creativity.
If AI is so much better than humans, then why do all these AI companies steal every piece of human-generated data they can find? Surely the AI is intelligent enough to not need it. Or not.
If AI companies have built AGI, then why are they still stealing and scanning books? Why would you need obscure human books if you had an intelligence greater than human? Why are humans not busy reading every book on the planet? Because that isn't needed to be intelligent. In fact, memorizing every book on the planet does not make you intelligent, but allows you to fool many people into believing your are intelligent. Memorizing Wikipedia is not intelligence, but there is a lot of intelligence baked into Wikipedia.
Interesting new indie game that just came out that I am playing:
Too early to give a review, but it looks promising. I like the unique art style.
There is a free demo available on Steam.
The fundamental problem that makes rationalism untenable is that no matter how good your logic or reasoning is, your reasoning can be wrong in ways you cannot foresee or imagine. Rationalism fails at foreseeing all the sneaky ways in which reasoning can seem right but be wrong. Just because your logic is sound and coherent does not mean that it describes Reality truthfully. Whether your logic describes Reality truthfully is an empirical matter. Logic and reason can be wrong even when it seems perfectly rational and sound. That is because logic and reason are bounded by state of Consciousness. What seems rational, logical, and air-tight in one state of Consciousness will cease to be so in another. Logic and reason are not universal, they are local to one’s plane of Consciousness, and there are many different planes of Consciousness. These different planes of Consciousness is what all rationalists overlook, which ultimately dooms rationalism to epistemic foolishness. Rationality cannot anticipate what radically different planes of Consciousness exist. Understanding these different planes of Consciousness cannot be done by sitting in your armchair theorizing, but requires direct experience inhabiting those planes. The only way to know the planes exist is to break out of your current plane and enter a new one. But rationality is not sufficient to break out of your current plane. Rationality does not have enough imagination to foresee higher planes of Consciousness.
Rationalism fails simply because experience is more fundamental than rationality. Rationality cannot anticipate or replace experience. No matter how air-tight your logic is, experience can come along and demolish it, and there's nothing you can do about that. But the rationalist refuses to accept this. The rationalist's mistake is that he has made a god out of reason — which is a false idol. God includes reason but isn't limited to it. Reason is not the end-all-be-all. Reason is finite. Reason requires experience and its proper place is as a subordinate to experience. Notice that you had experience long before you knew how to reason. That's not coincidental. That's because experience is more fundamental that reason. Reason cannot solve for lack of experience. Many blunders happen when the mind assumes it can reason its way through domains in which it lacks raw experience. For example, atheism is the blunder of thinking you can reason through spirituality with no spiritual experience.




