Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 78
Having grown tired of the talking points and platitudes, I've been taking a much deeper look into the facts behind the trans gender issue. I've been thinking more deeply about the possible effects it has on kids and teens. I think it is a legitimate topic of debate to question it, and a mistake to shrug it off as mere transphobia. It's important to take seriously cases where transition fails to work. I like hearing from people who have actually gone through it, rather than listening to political activists mouthing off. I don't think the standard progressive position on this issue is fully correct because I don't see them seriously contending with cases like the following:
Yes, Jordan Peterson is pretty biased on this issue. But his biases are not as unfounded as Progressives love to claim. Yes, the trans issue IS full of transphobia, but it is not just transphobia. Not everyone who is concerned about their children changing genders is a transphobe. On this issue Jordan Peterson offers an important perspective. Obviously his perspective is not the full perspective, but he makes some good points that should be taken seriously and not just dismissed with Progressive scorn or outrage. If I had a kid who told me that he/she wanted to change genders, I would be very concerned, because this has huge life-long consequences and it should be a very rare phenomenon. Parents are not crazy for being concerned here. I see a problem here of gaslighting parents by calling them transphobes.
I encourage you to make up your own mind AFTER doing some ACTUAL research. And listening to political pundits does not count as research. Understanding this thorny issue requires direct experience with it. Or at least closer to direct experience. You need to listen to people for whom it has worked as well as people for whom it hasn't.
From the metaphysical point of view, it is the case that your identity is relative and fluid. On this matter conservatives are dead wrong — and that is the elephant in the room which they do not want to acknowledge. However! — that is not the end of the story. On the pragmatic level — at the level of everyday human life where most people reside, have sex, have families, and experience emotions — identity is not some willy-nilly thing to be toyed with. If you get this wrong your self-esteem will be shot, your dating and sex-life will be miserable, and you will become depressed and suicidal. So the stakes are high. I do not buy the notion that there is zero social contagion to the trans issue. Which is not to say that all transitioning is social contagion. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Remember, on this issue the primary concern should not be political activism, nor even the well-being of your children, but TRUTH. Forget about all the human emotions and suffering for a minute and consider what is purely true. Are there actually more than 2 genders? Can gender actually be disconnected from sex? Can gender actually just be a state of mind? Is it actually healthy to change genders? Don't take any of this for granted. Set all your personal feelings and politics positions aside and question it all from scratch. You can start by admitting to yourself that you don't actually know what a man or a woman is. You don't know what gender is. You don't know what identity is. And you certainly don't know what role culture plays in influencing gender identity. None of this is well-understood by anyone.
Here's Richard Rorty, a popular contemporary academic philosopher and pragmatist, explaining pragmatism:
Pragmatism is a very alluring trap within philosophy. Especially for common-sense folk and business-minded folk who just want to get on with life rather than sitting around and endlessly theorizing in an armchair. The appeal of pragmatism is that it lets you say, "To hell with all these abstruse philosophical musings, let's just throw all those 'philosophical' questions away and focus on living a good life. We don't need advanced philosophy, we can just be very grounded, practical, rational, and 'scientific'. Who cares how many angels can fit on the head of a pin? We don't need to worry about metaphysical issues. We can just define truth as that which works and leads to better outcomes for mankind." This is Rorty's basic position (AKA, pragmatism).
However, do you see the problem? That will only work if it's true! If it's false it will not work. And it just so happens that it's false that you can go about living life without concern for truth. Nor can you redefine truth to simply be that which is practical and leads to better outcomes. You cannot redefine truth in that way because that's not what truth is. Truth is not utility nor survival, but pragmatism assumes it is or can be made to be without any material difference. As if nothing would be lost by equating truth with survival. But, paradoxically, something practical is lost in reducing truth to utility. Then truth just becomes whatever the ego finds convenient — which means a life enslaved to the self-serving needs, desires, and fantasies of an illusory ego — which comes with serious practical consequences. Years from now, when all your bullshit and self-deception comes due, that will not be mere theory, that will be painfully practical — like a punch to the face.
The issue of truth cannot be dismissed or ignored just because is sounds "academic" or woolly. The whole point is that truth is not academic, it's ultimate reality! Just because the topic of truth confuses you, or leads many philosophers in endless circles, does not mean that you can safely ignore it, as Rorty would have us believe. If you don't take the issue of truth seriously then you have no way of orienting yourself in life — which forever dooms you to false orientation and self-deception. You will not get truthful orientation by default or by accident. Truthful orientation requires serious mental and spiritual labor. The issue of truth is so serious that pragmatism itself turns out to be false, but a pragmatist cannot see this because he has convinced himself that truth isn't important. And so he thereby orients himself toward falsehood. But good luck convincing a pragmatist of that.
If I tell you, "Truth matters", and you respond, "No it doesn't", there's nothing more I can do to help you other than to tell you that you're fooling yourself. But to see that you are fooling yourself and how much this will be a problem down the road requires that you be able to recognize some semblance of truth. Which of course you cannot if you argued that it doesn't matter to begin with — thereby creating a Catch-22.
It is not safe to assume that truth doesn't matter, nor that you can reduce truth down to anything practical. In fact, truth is such a serious issue that truth CANNOT merely be practical. If truth were nothing more than pragmatics it wouldn't be worth a damn and we wouldn't be talking about it for 2000 years. Truth is too profound and too important to be subordinate to utility. Truth must transcend practicality because it is prior to the notion of utility, purpose, value, or meaning. This is what Rorty and the pragmatists fail to understand. If truth could be boiled down to pragmatics then I would be very displeased with GOD. GOD designed reality such that everyone who ignores truth will be punished, not by GOD, but by their own stupidity. And I would not want it any other way. Rorty's punishment for treating truth so flippantly is that he never found GOD. That will be your punishment too unless you are careful. And there will be many more-earthly punishments as well.
When you decide to discount truth, GOD himself can no longer help you. Your care for truth IS how GOD helps you. Truth is the umbilical cord that connects every creature to GOD. Because GOD IS TRUTH! But if you cut that cord out of stupidity, then you're doomed to a hell of your own creation. By discounting truth you disconnect yourself from yourself. Because, of course, YOU ARE GOD!
Now you might protest, "But Leo! Isn't it unfair that GOD would doom stupid people to hell? What kind of GOD would withhold himself from the stupid? Why is GOD so elitist?" Well, you see, since GOD is Intelligence, it cannot be accessed other than through exceptional levels of intelligence. It's not that GOD is withholding itself from the stupid, it's that the stupid simply cannot fathom GOD, because GOD cannot be stupid, GOD is Intelligence itself. So either you rise to GOD's level or you don't get to see GOD. If you don't see GOD there is only one reason: you're not being intelligent enough. That's it! GOD itself is not powerful enough to disclose itself to an idiot, precisely because that idiot is GOD. The only way GOD can disclose itself to an idiot is if the idiot cures himself of enough ignorance to realize that he is GOD.
The notion that the best kind of philosophy is one which rejects all philosophy to just focus on practical earthly matters, is one of the stupidest kinds of philosophy. You'd have to be a fool to think that this would work. Unfortunately, many of the best scientists and business-people have convinced themselves of this very notion. But if philosophy worked like that then philosophy wouldn't exist! The whole conundrum of philosophy is that you cannot avoid philosophy any more than you can avoid a charging rhinoceros by burying your head in the sand.
Many people believe that they can avoid philosophy by being very practical, business-like, reasonable, and 'scientific'. As if that wasn't a philosophy! The issue is, Is that a truthful philosophy? And the answer is No! So it's not that you're outsmarting philosophy by avoiding it, you're actually fooling yourself into doing false philosophy. It's like you've entered a boxing match and decided to open by tripping and falling flat on your face because you're worried you might get punched. And you're convinced that this is the winning strategy. No! In life, if you fail to act wisely you lose by default.
That's pragmatism in a nutshell. Pragmatism is one of most popular philosophies on the planet. It's so popular that most people don't even recognize themselves as pragmatists. It's popular because it gives the ego a blank check to run hog-wild with its favorite activity: survival. Money, success, convenience, pleasure, fame, status, sex, power, family, tribe — all of this is now equivalent to truth, which is the very essence of devilry. The Devil is a pragmatist, for obvious reasons. The Devil's notion of truth is anything that serves him — anything that's useful to him. But that is NOT truth!
And yet, despite all this, the final paradox here that academic philosophy is so bad that I would rather have people be pragmatists than doing academic philosophy. This is the awful state of current philosophy in our culture. It's embarrassing how bad humans are at philosophy. I would rather live alone in a cave than participate in the horseshit that is academic philosophy. There is hardly a single Western philosopher in the last 2000 years worthy of respect. They were all clowns and devils. So much debate, so many words, so little substance. None of them can render a satisfactory explanation of Consciousness, Truth, or GOD. I reached the ultimate understanding of reality despite all their bullshit. I spit on all of them. None of them comprehend GOD. Fuck you academic devils for what you did to philosophy. You turned the most important subject of all into a joke. I had to wade neck-deep through 2000 years of your horseshit to finally reach GOD on my own. So pardon me if I'm a bit bitter.
I'm trying to show you how to cut through all the crap and do some serious philosophy.
I have an episode called Learning = Making Distinctions, in which I explain how to super-charge the rate and depth of your learning by consciously focusing on making sharper distinctions.
If you study the mechanics of how these powerful new AIs are trained, it's exactly by this method! AIs are trained using sharp, clear, distinct data-sets. For example, you feed an AI 1000 clear images of dogs and 1000 clear images of cats, and it will learn how to distinguish them. If the data-set is murky or ambiguous, the AI will not learn well. Your mind works in the same way.
One of the things that makes learning anything difficult is that no one gives you enough clear, sharp, unambiguous examples. Much of the labor of learning is finding these distinct examples out of all the crap humans feed you. One of the biggest parts of AI research and development is to use humans to curate very clear data-sets. For example, if you want to train a Tesla car to avoid driving over children, you have to curate a data-set of 1000s of videos of children running across the street. Then it will learn to recognize or distinguish children. Otherwise it won't.
Which is why I fill my episodes with dozens and hundreds of excellent examples. I rack my mind to come up with the best examples for you. Because I know I need to train you like a neural network.
Ta-da! ;)
A neural network is a massive set of distinctions that mirrors the infinite set of distinctions that we call Reality.
I just explained the metaphysics of AI.
Good little intro:
The trouble with Post-Modernism is that it's both brilliant and stupid at the same time. It contains some extremely profound truths about relativity, however is also badly misuses them and overlooks the existence of Absolute Truth, Consciousness, and stages of development.
This issue is too complicated to elucidate here. I will have a future video which I discuss the limits and problems of Post-Modernism. For now I'll just say this: There are two traps with Post-Modernism: one is to reject it, the other is to subscribe to it.
I suggest you research Post-Modernism a bit on your own and contemplate where it gets reality right and where it gets it wrong. This is a good exercise in critical thinking. Think it through for yourself rather than just listening to 2nd hand opinions.
What is the proper way to hold and apply relativism? And what are the excesses and misuses of relativism? That's what this whole issue boils down to. It is not easy to answer this question accurately. It takes serious contemplation. But give it a shot before you hear my answers. I don't want you to just believe me.
It's extremely fascinating how these art AIs work under the hood. They've basically figured out how to generate deep abstraction.
The ability for Consciousness to do abstraction is one of the most profound things. Human's don't understand how profound abstraction is. This stuff has metaphysical implications which one one comprehends. Contemplate: What is abstraction and how is it possible?
Read the following article from one of the world's top AI researchers:
The first time I heard this I idea I thought it was overblown. But the more I started thinking about it, the more my mind opened up to it. Maybe we are moving ahead too fast. I don't know. I'm just sharing this to make you think for yourself.
Share your thoughts on the Actualized Forum.
This is very good:
I wish Jordan Peterson stuck to teaching psychology rather than politics. He's really good at psychology. But hey... I'm sure many people would say the same thing about me.
Has my work been made worse by my forays into political topics? I would say no. But then again, I'm biased. I'm sure JP would say the same about himself. Why do we both feel a need to talk about politics when it turns people off? We both believe we're saving the world. Everyone believes his work is saving the world. Isn't that funny? And yet, I would feel negligent if I didn't speak about politics. Which is exactly what I'm sure JP would say. So here we are. The only question is, Which one of us is more self-deceived?
For most of my life I've been a relatively agreeable person. I've always hated conflict with people. But in order to attain my recent insane awakenings I've had to become much more disagreeable with people, especially online, where interactions are asymmetrically anonymous. People know me so deeply from my work, but I don't know them at all. Which is why I've been acting a bit strange lately. It was a necessary part of my process to achieve the sovereignty of mind necessary to transcend all human understanding. You're not gonna cut through all the human spiritual bullshit that's out there by being agreeable.
I don't enjoy being disagreeable. It's painful to me. But I would rather be disagreeable and have Truth than be agreeable and full of human shit. So I endure the pain. This work ain't easy. You have to be very careful with agreeableness, niceness, and politeness. People will abuse it. Ignorant and selfish people will takes advantage of your generosity. And the devil will use it against you to flood your mind with bullshit and group-think. The devil LOVES spineless people with no boundaries because they are ripe for seduction and corruption. Being too nice can ruin your whole life if you're not careful. That's how serious this issue is. I have to keep myself isolated from humans and their activities in order to avoid getting corrupted and distracted. One of the most important parts of my work is making sure that it doesn't get co-opted by human games, as that is the default.
Then again, this is not license to be a stingy, bitter, isolated, jerk. You need to find a balance where you are firm yet kind, generous, and loving. It's not easy to strike that balance. It takes a lot of practice and experience in dealing with people and their games, and a serious commitment to your own values. By being too agreeable you let others trample on your values. Sometimes a bit of conflict is necessary for a higher purpose. But you have to be careful not to abuse this tool. It's not worth being disagreeable unless something crucial is at stake. For me, that's Understanding.