Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights

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.

I am cancelling the Actualized.org Awakening Retreat that was planned for October.

Why?

Because I ran experiments with individuals over the summer and found the chemical to be too inconsistent to use it in a group retreat. The problem is that the effects and results vary so widely from individual to individual that I do not feel comfortable making promises about the retreat producing Awakenings for you. For some people it may work, but for most people it will be disappointing, and I don't feel comfortable charging people money for such an experience. The challenge with psychedelics is that people have such widely different reactions to them, making standardized, one-size-fits-all methods inappropriate. The attempt to make psychedelics one-side-fits-all is a mistake. They cannot be that due to wide genetic differences in brain types.

I am sorry for the cancellation, I know you guys were excited for it. I was too, but my technique just doesn't scale as well as I hoped. Testing was required to understand that, which now I understand. Overall, I am glad I tested it out, even if the result was not what I hoped for. But that's how science works. The problem is that governments love to ban precisely those chemicals which work the most consistently.

Great insights on how propaganda works:

The interesting and counter-intuitive point is that modern propaganda can be more dangerous than traditional forms of propaganda, because at least the traditional propaganda has stood the test of time. Propaganda such a Nazism or Communism did not pass the test of time, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism did. Propaganda is not all equal. Some propaganda is better at survival than others. It is not so easy to invent a form of propaganda that is not self-destructive. Many new worldviews end in self-destruction, which is why you should be skeptical and cautious about radial leftist views. Most of them will not survive the test of time.

What is the difference between social construction and hallucination?

For example, science is not merely a social construction, it is a hallucination. What is the difference?

Social construction is a shallower thing. You can see how science is a social construction but still not be conscious enough to see that science is a hallucination. It is easy to see that scientific concepts and models are created by groups of humans in a social game. That’s easy! It is much harder to see that space and time are things you are hallucinating. Social construction can be seen without an increase in your state of consciousness, hallucination cannot. Seeing that space and time are hallucinations requires an order of magnitude higher consciousness.

Also, seeing hallucination is much more threatening because it tends to destabilize one’s sanity. Realizing social construction does not threaten your sanity.

But it's important to be able to see both. Many people are in denial about the socially constructed aspects of their worldview, but everyone is in total denial that any of their sense of Reality is a hallucination. The difference in denial is also an order of magnitude. The denial of hallucination is so strong that people will just think you're crazy for even suggesting it. Social construction is much more socially acceptable. But then you have to wonder, What created the social domain? What is social construction constructed out of? That's where hallucination comes in. Social construction is itself a hallucination. But that's a bridge too far for academics because hallucination is not socially acceptable. Hallucination has become a stigmatized term thanks to social construction. Western culture's notion of hallucination has been bastardized, it is not the true notion of hallucination. The true notion of hallucination is as an absolute, with no alternative. The socially constructed notion of hallucination is that hallucination is an aberration from non-hallucination.

Only when you've realized that hallucination has no alternative, is absolute, have you truly understood hallucination.

Good political lessons here:

If you want to understand politics, make a serious study of history, not news. News doesn't educate you, it just hijacks your attention.