Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights

I started doing philosophy when I was about 18 years old. Between 18 and 22 I was doing my own philosophy and studying Western philosophy. I had certain, very deep intuitions upon which all of my philosophical inquiry was based. I sat down today and recollected all my deepest intuitions that grounded my philosophy back then, because I thought it would be useful to you. Many of these intuitions are so important and so true that it can take decades to appreciate them. Most professional philosophers will never have these intuitions, yet I started philosophy with them, which is why I succeeded at philosophy. If you want to succeed at philosophy, you would be wise to contemplate these very seriously.

Note: these are not current, these are how I intuited things 20 years ago.

The list (in no particular order):

• Everything must be questioned. Nothing can be assumed or taken on faith. Question everything human to death.
• How can anything be known?, is the most important question there is. I do not understand how anything can be known, therefore I do not really know anything.
• Go as fundamental as possible. Get underneath everything. Start from rock bottom. Start from nothing.
• Religion is obviously stupid.
• If Christians can be that stupid, everyone can be that stupid, including me and science.
• Scientists are not serious about philosophy. Science cannot substitute for philosophy.
• All the epistemic problems of religion are mirrored in science and philosophy. The stupidity of religion is not exclusive to religion.
• Atheists are making bad arguments against religion. Atheists are engaging in double-standards without realizing it. Avoiding double-standards is crucial.
• Science is belief. I don't actually know what shape the Earth is.
• Science explains nothing at all. All scientific explanations are just a distraction from serious philosophy.
• Science cannot have a foundation. The foundations scientists claim for science is bullshit.
• Science does not have a serious epistemology.
• No scientific method exists because to have a scientific method would require already knowing everything. Scientific method is a bunch of bullshit.
• What humans and scientists call objective is not actually objective. The notion of objectivity is super problematic.
• Question-begging and circularity is a serious problem. The problem is how to avoid question-begging when constructing a worldview.
• No bias can be ultimately true. Bias is the entire problem. The problem of philosophy is how to avoid all bias. A biased philosophy is worthless.
• Reality cannot have a ground because every ground would need a ground.
• When the philosophy gets radical enough, fundamental enough, everyone quits. The key is not to quit. Keep going no matter how crazy it gets as long as it's true.
• I do not know whether Reality can be known.
• I don’t know that Reality cannot be known.
• Understanding different perspectives is crucial.
• Total openmindedness is required. Without openmindedness I will miss out on truth and understanding. There is zero room for closedminded in philosophy. Closedmindedness is always wrong.
• All ideology is stupid. No ideologies.
• I must be charitable to every worldview. I must see it in the strongest possible light.
• Makes no difference how evil a worldview is as long as it is true. The question of evil or bad is irrelevant in truth-seeking.
• Morality cannot be true because good and bad are human projections. Human morality is idiotic. Humans are not even trying to understand morality.
• Everything is in some deep sense relative. Relativity is hugely important and underrated.
• Everyone is making shit up. Humans cannot stop making shit up. The entire problem is that everyone is making shit up and calling it truth. Philosophy must somehow solve this problem or it is the same shit.
• Self-bias is the obstacle to all philosophy. Every philosophy blatantly favors itself, which is wrong and absurd. The challenge is how to create a non-self-biased philosophy.
• Epistemology must come before everything else. Without solving epistemology, nothing else can be correct.
• Every worldview is self-biased and self-serving. No worldview can be believed because they all feel correct according to them, but obviously they can't all be true. The fact that they all claim to be true but can't be is the problem epistemology must solve.
• Your intention must be pure understanding, not anything else.
• Ego is a serious problem. Ego will ruin any philosophical inquiry.
• Logic cannot be used to solve epistemology because logic only works with sound premises. But the problem is we never know the premises.
• Deep suspicion of logic. High logicality is not the answer.
• Academia cannot be trusted, they are in it for survival, not truth. They cannot handle radical truth.
• Everyone in science and academia has a constructivist bias. They all want something positive and constructive. That's already a mistake. They are all biased against deconstruction because they cannot survive off it. You can't sell a book about nothing.
• Something like nihilism is very appealing because it is not constructive. The emptiness and neutrality of nihilism rings true.
• Truth must exist, since if it doesn’t, that is the truth. (This one I only learned later, at age 26)
• Every worldview, every philosophy is ultimately circular and self-justifying. The entire challenge of philosophy is how to avoid falling into that trap.
• Direct experience is the most real thing there is. Direct experience is more real than all concepts.
• Debate and winning arguments is not truth-seeking. Persuasion is independent of truth. The point is not merely to win arguments but to understand truthfully.
• I need as many points of view as possible to avoid paradigm lock. I can eliminate bias and bullshit simply by triangulating truth through multiple diverse sources. If multiple diverse sources says it's true, I can be much more certain it is true. My strategy is to triangulate truth.
• Reality is too advanced to be captured by logic. Reality is more than logic and reason. Logical people are actually stupid.
• Reason cannot be trusted because reason can be use to rationalize anything.
• No one can be trusted with the truth. The responsibility for truth is entirely mine. No one can tell me what truth is.
• If I don’t know then that’s the truth: I don’t know. Not-knowing is not a bug, it's a feature. I do not want to bullshit myself with fake knowing. I would rather not-know than know bullshit.
• Reading philosophy will not solve any of these problems.
• The human species is biased as hell. There cannot be proper philosophy without thinking beyond all human bias. A deep distrust of everything human because humans invent whatever they want.
• Inventing whatever worldview sounds good to you, is the greatest danger.
• Truth is sacred. Nothing can go above truth.
• Scholarship is not truth-seeking nor real philosophy. Do not get distracted with scholarship.
• I must go out of my way to listen to perspectives I disagree with. Getting stuck in my own echo-chamber is a serious danger.
• I can’t have any bias against any philosophy, no matter how crazy it is. Crazy and weird are just stupid human biases that have no relevance to truth.
• Humans invent whatever they want. Escaping human invention is the entire challenge.
• Nothing can be known a priori. All knowing requires experience. Experience trumps reason, logic, math, or theory.
• The a priori vs a posteriori and analytic vs synthetic distinction is artificial and stupid. Academic philosophy is full of stupid and counter-productive distinctions. Distinctions can be artificial and must be questioned.
• You can be so wrong in ways that you can’t even imagine how you are wrong. Just because I cannot imagine how I am wrong is no guarantee that I'm not wrong.
• Accepting human distinctions and frames for philosophical arguments is a mistake.
• My raw experience is the closest thing to truth.
• Human thought and imagination is too limited to grasp Reality.
• The mind will rationalize and justify anything. Take no justification seriously.
• Academia is too technical. The ultimate answers will not hinge on technical arguments or points. Philosophy cannot hinge on any technicality, so focus on the big picture. The big picture is what matters, not technical trivia.
• Expect truth to be unpopular. Truth is not going to be socially acceptable.
• Be skeptical about everything. Skepticism is the best philosophy to start with.
• I do not even know that skepticism is true. Skepticism cannot be assumed to be true. True skepticism eats itself alive.
• All of philosophy revolves seeing assumptions and premises. Every worldview has hidden assumptions.
• Being unbiased is the most important thing.
• No worldview that’s too human can be true.
• Philosophy is really psychology. Psychology is more fundamental than philosophy. Philosophy is biased by psychological factors. Philosophy cannot be done without careful attention to psychology.
• Personal contemplation, from scratch, is the most powerful way to do philosophy. Me sitting alone in a room with a piece of white paper and a pen. That is really philosophy. Everything else is noise.
• Philosophy requires observing your own mind as it does philosophy. Noticing how your mind operates.
• Consciousness is something special that science and philosophy do not properly explain.
• Materialism is incoherent and question-begging since matter and brains are experience.
• Any explanation that categorizes Reality into some definite number of categories must be wrong, since why those categories vs others? 3 of this, 5 of that, 7 of these, 10 of those, 12 of this. That can't be how it works.
• The denial of consciousness and phenomena is stupid because everything is made of phenomena.
• I can be so self-deceived that I cannot even imagine how.
• Academia will never allow me to publish my philosophy. It would be too radical for them. I can only do philosophy properly if I am independent.
• The point is not to read others' philosophy, but to do my own philosophy.
• History of philosophy is not philosophy at all.
• The truest philosophy must undermine itself. The truest philosophy must suicide itself for truth because philosophy itself is a human construct. The best philosophy is something like nothing.
• Somehow, the truest philosophy needs to say that all philosophy is false. But the problem is how to say that coherently because the claim undermines itself. But even though it undermines itself, it is nevertheless more true than all other philosophies. Most of my philosophical work was about how to deny all philosophy using philosophy. At the time I didn't know how to do that, but I knew it needed doing.
• Language is not fundamental enough to grasp Reality because Reality comes before language. Language should not be able grasp Reality. The deepest truth will be non-linguistic, that's not a bug but a feature.
• I expect truth to be incommunicable. There is no reason why communication should accommodate truth. Communication is not fundamental.
• Truth-seeking cannot be about language. Getting lost in language is a serious danger, but understanding Reality cannot be about language.
• There cannot be a boundary in animals where consciousness suddenly starts. Consciousness must increase gradually from the smallest animals to the largest.
• Phenomenology is in the the right direction.
• Idealism is in the right direction.
• Solipsism is the most beautiful philosophy.
• Truth can be reached without a guru because the first guru could not have had a guru. (Realized this later when I discovered spirituality)
• Reality is something special, something sacred. That's why philosophy is done at all.

That isn't where I ended, that is where I started. I started philosophy further along than most philosophers end. That's the power of intuition. I would not trade my intuition for all the philosophy books in the world. Starting correctly is the whole trick.

Those are basically the principles of sound philosophy. Nobody teaches it. I had to figure it out by myself from scratch.

Combine the above with my post on Pure Philosophy for a powerful synergistic effect.

If you have a girlfriend, send this to her and say, "I saw this and it reminded me of you."

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DdSBrKjjeRa

No, it is not AI.

Note: Do not strawman what I said. Genocide is a crime. I do not condone crime and I support international law.

This is scientific nonsense:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DehLTWhAVub

It is unscientific to claim that science does not need metaphysics and that metaphysics cannot be solved. Of course metaphysics can be done and can be solved.

What scientific studies prove that metaphysics is useless and impossible? None.

What scientific studies prove that science can be separated from metaphysics? None.

What scientific studies prove that science is superior to metaphysics? None.

What scientific studies prove that metaphysics is unscientific? None.

The absurd irony is that every negative thing scientists says about metaphysics is just their own unscientific opinions and dogmas, unsupported by experiment, studies, or research. It is just bullshit masquerading as science.

Whether or not metaphysics is doable is an empirical question. You can't know until you do it. But scientists refuse to do it because they assume it cannot be done. But if you think you can't, you've already failed.

No amount of fancy scientific experiments can solve metaphysics because metaphysics requires personal contemplation and recognition. No scientific apparatus can tell you what Being is, because Being is You.

The real reason why scientists don't do metaphysics is because if they solved metaphysics they would realize that science is not ultimately true, which is too painful for them to admit. Solving metaphysics would mean having to admit that there exists something beyond physics and beyond science. Solving metaphysics is the death of science. Scientists don't do metaphysics because that is their suicide. Scientists don't do metaphysics because they are doing survival. Scientists do not understand that science is survival.

If science did metaphysics it would discover God. But that is completely unacceptable because God cannot exist. God cannot exist because science is supposed to be God. Science is idol worship, but scientists don't have enough spiritual intelligence to see it because spirituality cannot be real.

Science does not realize God because science holds itself as God. God cannot be realized with such arrogance. Science does not want there to be a God because if there was a God, science would need to subordinate itself to it. Science is not humility, it is arrogance. But every scientist thinks he is humble. That's the depth of the self-deception.

Here's a good explanation of why religious belief is the opposite of real spirituality.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ddmrf3bsB7H

Belief separates you from Reality. But Reality is God. That's why all religion is wrong.

The more you love Reality, the less belief you want to have.

You can’t spell belief without lie ;)

Too real:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DebDbZxuhiT