Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 20

I want to warn you about the trap of pseudo-archaeology.

As you get into spirituality, you'll get sucked into the New Age and you'll see that domain overlap with the domain of pseudo-archaeology. Myths of advanced ancient civilizations, Atlantis, ancient flood stories, ancient golden ages, people living in Antarctica, aliens building the Egyptian pyramids, etc. At first these ideas will sound appealing, playing on your sense of mysticism, wonder, openmindedness, and unconventional thinking, but eventually you will come to see that these are lower perspectives — self-deception — based on poor epistemology. The evidence for it just doesn't exist and the people who engage in this type of unscientific speculation are falling for their own New Age biases. It's not just that the content of these beliefs is wrong, the epistemic structure of how these beliefs are being formed is wrong. I'm talking about the kind of theories that people like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson are pitching. The kind of New Age -fueled speculation they engage in is an epistemic trap that you should be intelligent enough to see through.

Unfortunately, podcasters like Joe Rogan have popularized and mainstreamed a lot of these bad ideas because they sound fascinating to uneducated people and they make for good, cheap slop for the endless content mill that is the alternative social media ecosystem.

Here are some good videos to help you deconstruct that misinformation:

More links:

What Graham Hancock Gets Wrong About Flood Myths

How Rogan Was Fooled By Graham Hancock

One of the most important lessons I hope you learn from me, from the Actualized work, is that spirituality is not about speculation, it is not about adopting New Age beliefs. Such things are false spirituality. True spirituality requires extreme epistemic rigor, more rigorous than science, not less. Distinguish between direct experience and speculation. Distinguish between grounded scientific evidence vs wild ungrounded wishful theorizing. Have the intellectual discipline and integrity to refuse wild speculation about history or the future. This is an important discipline for serous truth-seeking. Truth-seeking is NOT what Graham Hancock or New Age people are doing. Recognize that difference.

One of the most important lessons for you to learn is to stop your mind from adopting beliefs it wants or needs to be true. If you are unable to do this, self-deception is guaranteed. Be extra skeptical of any belief that feeds into your sense of the mystical and magical. Just because some aspects of spirituality are true — like God, Love, relativity, or the imaginary nature of things — does not mean that anything you want goes. Spiritual New Age fantasy is a serious, serious problem that you should be on guard against. Just because spirituality is valid does not mean that you don't take scientific rigor and rationality seriously. Evidence for things still matters. Sound reasoning still matters. Scientific method still matters. Epistemic rigor still matters.

My African mask collection:

That's about $5000 in masks and 3 years collecting.

This was just a proof of concept. It took me a long time and lots of wasted money to figure out how to select the best masks. Now that it's proven successful, I can start collecting rare masks in earnest.

Tim Snyder has a great view of our political situation:

Although, I must add a warning. Snyder does not really understand what freedom is in an existential sense. The entire point of government is that humans do not and cannot like freedom. Freedom is not good for you. Freedom is bad for you. This fetishization of freedom comes from a misunderstanding of what freedom is on an existential level, and when you get freedom so wrong you will end up living under a corrupt and unjust government.

But Snyder's perspective is still good to consider. Not every perspective needs to be existential.

Rich and powerful people often do not have an ideology or a consistent set of beliefs. Their ideology is pragmatism and opportunism. They will believe and say whatever they need to in the moment in order to get more wealth and power. This is vital to keep in mind when trying to understand and predict their behavior.

Acquiring and wielding enormous power and wealth is virtually impossible without constantly lying, both to others and yourself. Rich and powerful people lie so fluently and constantly that it doesn't even register in their minds, it's just the only way they know how to live. Their entire lifestyle and mental structure is oriented around it. So there actually is an important psychological difference between ordinary people and megalomaniacs. Megalomaniacs do not think like you or me. They have sold their souls to the devil for power, wealth, and status. This is a fundamental decision they made early in life and never looked back. Truth and integrity does not exist for them, even though of course they tell themselves otherwise. But it is crucial that you understand that rich and powerful people are literally incapable of doing the Actualized work because their life would implode. I want you to really understand and appreciate the cost of the Actualized work, and why it is so rarely done. You have to give up aspirations for serious power, wealth, fame, and sex in the name of truth. Very, very few people will do that because they do not comprehend the value of truth while the value of those others things is obvious.

Truth is antithetical to power. Contemplate why.

Note: Of course, do not make the silly mistake of thinking that poor and lower class people are champions of truth. No, no, no. Lower class people also have a shocking disregard for truth, but for other reasons, usually reasons of ignorance and low intelligence. Lower class people are usually more honest and authentic than the powerful, but they are still profoundly ignorant. One can be a very authentic and honest ignoramus. This is why populism is a canard. On the other hand, the powerful are more cunning, conniving, and manipulative.

So who cares about truth then?, you might ask. Basically, no one. But there are degrees of selling your soul to the devil and you should distinguish between them.

Wolfram has one of the best understandings of how reality works, for a scientist. But I must stress, for a scientist.

This is about as profound as science gets:

As great as Wolfram is, I still hesitate sharing this with you because Wolfram's model is not at all the correct explanation of reality, and I don't want you to get mislead by the entire paradigm science. It is good — for science — but it is nowhere good enough from the point of view of our work. There is only so much understanding that the paradigm of science allows, so relative to that, Wolfram's work is profound. Enjoy his explanations, glean whatever insights you can, but do not start to take it as literally true. You will awaken far beyond such scientific reductions. God is way beyond all that. Consciousness is not reducible to computation. Reality is not finite/discrete. You can subdivide space (consciousness) forever.

With all those caveats in mind you can still appreciate Wolfram's work. And you will go beyond it.