Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 7

This is a good discussion by a researcher of political psychology. This is the kind of meta-politics I love.

This channel has a lot of other great interviews of academic quality.

I watched this fascinating documentary about a billion dollar MLM pyramid scheme called LuLaRoe. Founded by Mormons.

It's only available on Amazon Prime Video. If you have an Amazon Prime membership you can watch it for free.

There are 4 episodes.

I am finally getting serious about writing my epic book. I spent much of the last week working on it. The initial broad outline of the book is nearly complete. It's monstrously large and comprehensive, unlike any book ever written. I'm quite pleased with it. It's exactly what I wanted to write. At this point my understanding of the subject matter is so thorough that I don't need to reference notes, I can write from my own understanding of the entire domain of philosophy, psychology, epistemology, metaphysics, and spirituality. It writes effortlessly because I know it all like the back of my hand. But it still takes hundreds and hundreds of hours to write it all out, to phrase everything elegantly and beautifully.

I wrote about 7,000 words today.

Here is a tiny snippet of what I've been writing:

There is this pretense within science that objective facts and experimental results run the show, as if sense-making is governed by “just the facts, ma’am”. This is a fundamental error, a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of sense-making that disconnects sense-making from survival and life. It places objective facts above psychology and the self’s survival. This is backwards. If your mind worked this way you’d be dead long ago. Facts are not king, self is always king! Self is the highest level, survival is always the prime directive, preservation of the self’s sense of reality is always the highest agenda. There is always an ulterior motive behind everything your mind does: survival. All notions of objectivity, scientific rigor, factuality, rationality, empiricism, proof, and truth are subordinate to that.

The defender of science fails to recognize — through lack of self-reflection and self-awareness — that his self’s maintaining of reality and sanity always trumps any issues of science. The scientist thinks he’s just doing objective science first, being an ego second. No! That’s absolutely wrong. You are ego. The scientist does not understand himself. The scientist is maintaining sanity first and foremost via highly intelligent and deeply unconscious psychological mechanisms, and only secondarily doing science. Survival, sanity, psychology, and sociology come first, science comes a distant second at best. This dynamic is not understood nor acknowledged by defenders of materialist science. They act like they can just be objective, ignoring the staggering epistemic conundrums of objectivity. You don’t even know what objectivity is! — yet you already claimed it for yourself. Only by understanding that self/ego-mind/psychology runs the show can you have a hope of overcoming the staggering problems of self-deception, of jailbreaking your mind, deconstructing every human paradigm, and accessing insight into the ultimate nature of reality.

The problem in this whole inquiry is that when things start to get deep and serious, the scientist’s mind will tap out. The ideas and ramifications will get too radical, too threatening, too insane. So this book is about slowly building a ramp so that the scientific rationalist mind does not balk and throw away the book in disgust, because I know your ego-mind does not run on objective facts and logic. But do you know that? There's the rub. Because if you throw this book away you will do it under the influence of ego-mind, under the guise of being too “scientific” and too rigorous to entertain my outlandish ideas. For this book to work, for this communication to work, I need you to see that your ego-mind is the executive gatekeeper. You are the CEO who gets to veto all facts and logic, to override all the technicians and scientists working in your laboratories. And just like in a Fortune 500 corporation or the president of Harvard, your executive decisions are not made based on objective facts, science, or truth, they are made to suit your survival. I am saying these things to prepare you to stomach what will be an unacceptable truth to your mind.

No matter how scientific, rational, or objective you tell yourself you are, that’s a fiction. You are none of those things because your mind is defending a constructed reality to maintain your sanity. I know this about you but you probably do not. I know who I’m really speaking to here. I am not speaking to a scientist or a rationalist, I am speaking to an imaginary self that is terrified of death and insanity, of losing its sense of reality. And my goal here is to deconstruct everything you know. So how is that going to work? Do you see the unusual challenge here? It’s like I’m asking you to terminate yourself. Naturally your mind will use every trick imaginable to wiggle out of it. You won’t even be conscious you’re doing it. For this book to work my job is to preempt and unmask all of your mental tricks, and hope that you are openminded and intellectually honest enough to stick around, with an attitude of "Thank you, sir. May I have another?"

That's a lot to ask of you.

The point is, sense-making is too important to subordinate itself to science. Your mind can survive without science, it cannot survive without sense-making. Sense-making is a bigger field than science. Sense-making is more fundamental than science. Why? Because successful sense-making must already be in place to keep you alive long enough for you to develop and execute scientific method. Mankind survived just fine in the jungles and deserts for millennia without science. But they couldn't without sense-making. Also, when you leave your laboratory at the end of the day, you can leave your science back there, but sense-making must stay with you 24/7. Sense-making is a broader thing. If a dragon rapes you in your dreams, you gotta make sense of that somehow. Science can’t handle that for you.

Sense-making is far broader than science, which is what allows sense-making to fix problems in science when your science eventually goes wrong, which it inevitably will. Science is a sub-set of sense-making. Sense-making is how you to figure out what to do when your science hits a roadblock. If science is a pretty sports car that can only drive on paved roads, sense-making is an ugly indestructible off-road 4x4 that can scale boulders, cliffs, sand dunes, and swamps. Understand which is more fundamental. Only a fool would trade his 4x4 for a Lambo because the 4x4 can go everywhere the Lambo can go, but the reverse is not case.

So don’t bring science to a gunfight. It won’t survive. This work we’re doing is a gunfight. This is existential. This is life and death.

Notice that it is possible to believe true things for the wrong reasons.

Religion is a prime example of this. Religious people believe in God, which happens to exist. However, they believe it for the wrong reasons. God is not the province of any religion, religious ideas of God are deeply wrong, and God cannot be understood through religion. So religion is superficially right. But religious believers take this as validation of the rightness of their faith. No. The existence of God means your faith is wrong, a profound mistake. Just because you lucked out by believing in a thing which happened to be true does not mean that your belief was epistemically sound or intelligent. Religious belief is not sound even though it turns out to be true. You weren't intelligent, you were just lucky. Which is why religious people believe all sorts of stupid shit. Because they will believe anything. It just so happens that some of the things they believe turn out to be true. But this is nothing to be proud of.

Notice, if I walk through my neighborhood with a machine gun, spraying bullets blindly in every direction, I might get lucky and shoot a serial killer who just happened to be walking down the street at just the right time, and that might turn out to be a net positive since killing him saves a few lives he would have taken had he still been prowling the streets. However, this does not mean that firing a machine gun wildly in a neighborhood is a valid behavior. A religious person is right about God in this same way — right, but for completely perverse reasons.

Conversely, you can believe false things for good reasons.

Atheism is a prime example of this. Atheism is factually false — God does exist. However, the reasoning behind atheism is sound and healthy. It is correct that one should not believe in supernatural entities without serious evidence and proof. It just so happens that that's true, but God still exists.

Atheists did all the right things but turned out false. Theists did all the wrong things but turned out true. Sometimes it's just better to be lucky than good. Sometimes a total fool ends up being right. But that doesn't mean being a fool is the way to go. Eventually the fool's luck runs out. Which is exactly what happens to all religious believers. Just because you got God's existence right does not mean you understand God or solved the problem of self-deception. Yeah, you got lucky and got God right, but so what? You're still completely self-deceived.

In the long-term it's better to be wrong for the right reasons than right for the wrong reasons. Just as it's better to get the wrong answer on a math test but with good mathematical steps, than get the right answer but with all the wrong steps.

It is foolish to envy the lucky fool because his luck will soon run out.