Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 35

It is useful to look at explicit definitions of materialism and idealism. This helps clear up many things. So...

Materialism: "Is the claim that consciousness is entirely physical, solely the product of biological brains, and all mental states can be fully reduced to, or wholly explained by, physical states — which, at their deepest levels, are fields and particles of fundamental physics. In short, materialism, in its many forms and flavors, gives a completely physicalist account of phenomenal consciousness."

Idealism: "Is the claim that consciousness is ultimate reality, the deepest level of all existence, the singular fundamental existent. It is the theory of consciousness that takes consciousness to its maximum meaning. Ultimate reality is mind or awareness or thought, while everything else, including all physical worlds and universes and all that they contain, are derivative and illusory."

Materialism is false. Idealism is true. But you need to discover this for yourself, don't just take my word for it.

The real question is not whether idealism is true. The real question is: What are all the ways that idealism plays itself out? What's needed is a deep investigation into the mechanics of idealism. How does idealism work? That's the real philosophical work.

Credit: Robert Lawrence Kuhn for articulating the definitions

On the theme of cosmic horror.

Love this.

Humans are too small-minded to appreciate the beauty of monsters. Especially Christians. Consciousness/God delights in inventing monsters because they are beautiful. Radical openmindedness is required to appreciate a monster.

One of the ways you know Christianity is false is because it is incapable of integrating and loving demons, monsters, and cosmic horrors. God's Love requires love of the monsters that Consciousness can imagine. Christians are too ignorant and closedminded to understand this. That's why Christians demonize things and people they fail to understand.

Even the demonization of literal demons is an epistemic error. It must be, since if God created everything, God created demons. And who are you to judge God's Creation?

This is delicious:

Jorge Luis Borges is one of the coolest fiction writers. His writing explores strange-loopy metaphysical themes.

Framing makes all the difference. Much self-deception comes from selective or limited framing. Good sense-making requires caring about having the widest possible frame. This cartoon illustrates why truth requires holism.

Think about times in your life when you were misled by being shown a limited, selective frame. Notice how often people try to fool you this way, presenting you with half the situation in order to manipulate your perception to serve their survival needs. The epistemic lesson here is that the frame matters more than the facts.

Given how epistemically irresponsible most humans are, you can never trust them to give you the full frame. It's not necessarily that they are intentionally lying to you, it's usually that they are themselves so self-deceived and so epistemically irresponsible that they don't have the full frame to give you. Very, very few people or worldviews are advanced enough to give you the full frame. Which is why you cannot outsource epistemology to anyone.

I like sharing examples with you of the vast genetic diversity of humans, hence the topic of genetic freakery. So here's another example. There exist people who get zero pleasure from music.

Here's an article that studies this interesting case.

This guy devoted his life — thousands of hours — trying to answer the question of What is consciousness? He compiled a list of 325 different theories of consciousness. He makes an air of being scientific, rigorous, and objective about it. But in the end all his scientific logic failed him, as you can see here.

Skip to timestamp: 2:42:23

That's the stupid logic of scientism.

Smart people cling to science to avoid self-deception but this ironically makes them self-deceived and they have no awareness of this simple trap.

Yes, psychedelics are necessary to understand Consciousness. You cannot understand psychedelics by reasoning about them from your armchair. The one thing this guy needed to do to understand Consciousness, he did not do. The ego-mind is brilliant at making a show of understanding Consciousness without doing what is actually necessary to understand it. Studying and rigorously cataloguing 325 theories of consciousness sounds like it's a good idea, but it isn't. It's a distraction from the real work. 325 theories just ends up drowning out the Truth in endless human noise, but it looks impressive to a scientific audience. If you wish to understand Consciousness you have to be careful to do the stuff that actually matters and avoid all the stuff that doesn't.

One dose of 5-MeO-DMT is worth more than studying 325 theories of consciousness for 10 years. And you could easily demonstrate that to yourself by doing it. That's real science.

Clinging to science, logic, and objectivity will not save you. That's the key epistemic insight.

One of the things that annoys me the most is when people act scientifically rigorous but end up as clueless as if they has studied nothing at all. This is the real thing to be worried about.