r0ckyreed

But how could someone believe that without some form of closedmindedness? If someone is really openminded, they wouldn’t think they are above others. They would realize that all is relative. All is perspective. Postmodernism is the openmindedness and modernism is the arrogant closedminded scientist. Arrogance and closed mindedness have to go together.

Have an insight into no-self and impermanence. Then you’ll realize how futile all of this self-torture to become “somebody” is.

I would define meta-rationality as thinking about the limits and strength of rationality. Post-rationality, I would define, are features of consciousness outside of rationality. In other words, there are certain limits in rationality/logic and there may be levels of thinking beyond rationality. But what is rationality really? Rationality is using reasoning and logic to arrive at certain conclusions. It uses chains of reasoning, consistent structured, critical thinking to arrive at certain conclusions based off of the validity of the premises/evidence. I would say that rationality is a higher form of thinking than strict empiricism or observation. Empiricism/observation/experience is the foundation of all knowledge. Without observation, there could be no knowing and no rationality. Rationality is dependent on what we observe. But knowledge does not strictly stop at observation. Rationalism is the view of knowledge that suggests that we can derive knowledge from rationality. We can use mathematics and logic to figure out truths that we may not be able to get a direct experience at. For instance, the fact that humans knew that they had to invent space suits to go to the moon. They had no direct experience of this, but they arrived at the conclusion based off of reasoning. Rationality has its strengths, but there are limits. Post-rationality suggests that rationality is one perspective out of many. One of the main objections is that rationality is based off of certain assumptions that were not itself rationally justified. Rationality discounts that logic, reasoning, and evidence are highly subjective and contentious. Context plays a lot in rationality, and rationality may not be flexible enough to understand deeper implicit and intuitive facets of understanding and reality. Understanding itself is a highly intuitive process. Rationality also faces the issue of how to discern and differentiate the differences between what is rational vs. irrational. Everyone thinks they are rational, so who is right? Whose method of rationality is actually rational and how do we decide what is more rational than another? Is there one way to be rational or many? Also, how do we know that rationality is a valid method for deriving knowledge without self-justifying it with rationality? Rationality may not be able to handle self-reference, which entails contradictions and paradoxes. But the Universe is full of contradictions and paradoxes. Contradictions may be a feature of reality and not some fallacy as rationalists might suggest. Of course, we are not going to abandon rationality. We are going to take the good parts of rationality and incorporate them in post-rationality. Post-rationality will encompass intuition. But you see the issue right now is that I am using rationality right now to discuss the limits of rationality! Even to argue with me about rationality is you also using rationality. We really cannot escape rationality, but the most rational form of rationality I would call post-rationality or meta-rationality, which incorporates rationality with what normie rationality misses. Rationality without encompassing intuition and without self-observing its own biases in terms of its limits is itself an irrational system! Of course, I am using rationality to make this post and you will respond with rational reasons for why rationality is irrational. But this is the standstill we are at. In some ways, we can go beyond rationality, but we could never explain those means without using rationality because rationality is the means to which our minds are able to make the implicit explicit.

A bachelor is a concept and is not something that actually exists outside your mind. You wouldn't even know what a bachelor is if you cannot observe anything. I am claiming that you cannot form concepts without your senses. If someone has always been blind, deaf, then how could they form concepts about sight and sound? Your rationality is slave to the senses. I will coin that quote there. It is like rationalizing about what color is when you are blind. If you cannot observe something, you can't rationalize about it. And bachelor is also technically a social construction anyways, so it is true only under relative conditions. Seems pretty clear and straight forward to me. Who is more rational, a flat earther or a round earther, a trump supporter or a liberal? How do we know? Rationalists definitely have metaphysical biases. The world isn't just rational as a rationalist would have you think. The world holds many contradictions that may not be suited for a rationalist approach to epistemology. Remember, epistemology is always about metaphysics in someway shape or form because knowledge is always about the reality/existence of something. Sure, you can ask how do we know what is right or wrong in the context of morality, but it is easy to forget how much our metaphysical biases shape our worldview. There is a reason why worldview is called world-view.

But it is a contradiction because there could be no hallucination without a body. For instance, to hallucinate a human experience presupposes a hallucination of a human body. Part of that hallucination is hallucinating that a brain causes your hallucinations. How could you experience at all without a body? What would you be experiencing?

How is definitive knowledge possible? Knowledge is such a tricky beast. There seems to be no reliable way to discern and differentiate truth from falsehood. Rationality can lead you astray, science can lead you astray, your own senses can deceive you, other people can deceive, and of course my own self, intuition, and emotions deceive me. I can even be deceived through "false insights." So how can I know that any "insight" I have is true understanding? I can smoke 5me0 or meditate and attain an insight or a feeling of conviction that I understand something completely when I don't. A lot of the times when I bring up this problem of knowledge, people say, awaken and you will find out. But this begs the question. How do you know you are awake when every facet of your mind and reality is against you to deceive you? I hear people claiming to have awoken to this or that, but what I am really seeing is that they are very confident that they understand something deeply when they actually might be mislead by their emotions. When a person claims they have awoken, I feel like they are being deceived by their feelings. How do you know that you have totally understood something to the deepest level? How do you know you are not being deceived at all by your insight? What method did you use to discern truth from falsehood and how did you counteract self-deception? You can take 5me0 or meditate and still be deluded, so even meditation and psychedelics aren't a reliable pathway to truth and true knowledge. To fully awaken and reach true knowledge, I think you need to answer definitively of whether anything can exist independently of the mind. If there is such a thing as a mind-independent phenomenon, then notice that you could never awaken and know definitively because all knowledge and awakening are mind-dependent. The feature of knowledge is that it is mind-dependent. It is impossible to have knowledge of anything outside of your mind because the function of knowledge itself is dependent on the mind! But this does not mean that what you do not know doesn't exist. I find it interesting that there seems to be things that exist independent of my knowledge of them even though my knowledge is dependent on my mind. For instance, when I learned about cults for the first time it is implied that they have always existed despite my mind not knowing about it. There can in fact be things that exist right now that I do not even know now but yet still exist it seems. The earth was still round even before I knew anything about it. However, there is no escaping that knowledge is dependent on the mind. But we should not mistake the limits of knowledge for the limits of reality. What if reality is larger than our mind? What if there actually are mind-independent phenomenon but we could never know of it because it is mind-independent? Could you conceive of that possibility? In addition, we also have to take into account that relativism also presents us with another problem in that how can we know anything definitively if all of our methods of trying to know the Absolute are themselves relative? Meditation is relative to the mind, so are psychedelics, and so is contemplation and rationality and science. In fact, you can use all those methods listed to delude yourself into conspiracy theories and nonduality nonsense. But if reality is absolutely relative, how could we say that conspiracy theories are false? I understand that at some degree radical open-mindedness defeats itself because then you expose your mind to all kinds of nonsensical worldviews and toxic ideologies. At some point, you need to close your mind off to perspectives you have definitively understood to be false. But the method for knowing something definitively seems itself to be undefinitive. How do you reconcile this problem?

Very insightful post. I forget how good I have it as a man. But it is nice to have a woman approach as well. My perspective is that someone approaching me makes me feel like I am seen. Whereas when I approach, it makes me feel like I am desperate or that I am invisible to women. Like I have to talk to her first in order for her to talk to me.

I’m curious. How so? Loa says it is different from wishful thinking. Loa is about thinking about the highest vision for yourself and making that clear in your mind. Maybe the BS is overemphasis on thinking rather than action?

Correct. However, you can make observations and apply rationality, and your best bet is to see if what you come up with is something that is verifiable and has gone through critical thought. This is a topic for another post, but you can chew on the fact that some people see ghosts, others don’t, and some see demons. Who has the correct view of reality? Is a person who sees demons more true than a person who sees a ghost? What if they had a mystical experience. We could never verify if the observation had any basis in so-called reality. However, if your hallucinations become unreliable/ inconsistent, then that could cause problems. Some people hallucinate and it is completely wrong and some hallucinate and it could be right. For instance, if someone hallucinates that you killed someone but you actually didn’t, then that would be a false hallucination. But if someone hallucinates a ghost telling them you killed them when you actually didn’t, then it is a true hallucination. How do I know I am not hallucinating right now? The only way I could know is through observation. I know it’s circular. But we are getting off track into meta-observation.

Of course direct experience alone is unreliable. But observation is the foundation. If you do not observe something, you cannot rationalize about it. If you just observe but don’t rationalize, then you are missing out on another half of reality. People with hallucinations cannot trust their own senses in the same way. And maybe they can’t trust their rationality. But there is a good movie based on a true story called A Beautiful Mind where a schizophrenic learned how to distinguish his hallucinations from reality. You can only do that if you are observing something, which is an active reflective process.

Absolutely amazing! Did you use Obsidian, Word, or Google Docs? Congrats! You took massive action!

Read the 5am Club by Robin Sharma.

Not quite. My perspective is that we are all blind and are not seeing what is there fully.

So if there is no thief of my car, then how do you all explain the Israel and Russia Wars? Are the child deaths nonexistent since they aren’t in my direct experience? This is my last time articulating this point and then I’m done. Your experience cannot be all there is because then you open the door for Covid deniers, Sandy Hook deniers, racism, and police brutality denial, etc.

Yup. That’s survival in a nutshell.

I have been reading Kubler-Ross, On Death & Dying. It is a very insightful book and I have been contemplating it from time to time. I have been trying to finish that book since the beginning of this year, but I have been putting it off because she illustrates the topic of death profoundly that it has made me want to take a break from the book from how heavy it is. The main insight from the book I have been contemplating is death-denial. Denial is a coping skill that we use to avoid the emotional overload of contemplating our own death and demise. It is difficult for us to even conceive of our own death. Death denial is very sneaky, and we use it all the time! Kubler-Ross pointed out some examples of death denial such as war and belief in an afterlife. Her reasoning is that people go to war as part of their way of denying death by taking others' lives and by surviving war, feeling a sense of accomplishment as if they have "defeated death." We do risky things like rock climbing, scuba diving, etc. Why? Part of us wants to "defeat death" and come out on the other side. But this will not happen. No matter how strong you are, you will die all the same. The belief in an afterlife makes our suffering more meaningful in that you suffer now and reap the rewards in an afterlife. But if there is no afterlife, then all the suffering people endure is ultimately meaningless. I would argue that this teaching that "death is an illusion" or "death is imaginary" is another form of death denial that you are fooling yourself into. Some ways I deny death are the following: 1. Thinking that my good health and vital energy will continue to last (discounting that my metabolism will slow down overtime). 2. Eating junk food 3. Not admitting that my eye sight is getting worse and will continue to get worse over time. 4. Not admitting I will go bald and lose my teeth eventually 5. Not looking into the fact that I will lose everyone I love 6. Scrolling on social media 7. Going to work 8. Exercising These are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Having kids, getting married, sex, etc. are also forms of death denial. What do you make of this?

Just because you cannot disprove idealism/solipsism doesn’t make that true. Solipsism is true from our first-person point of view. But if there is a third-object reality, then your solipsism would only be true relative to your point of view. Postmodernism would say that solipsism/idealism is only one perspective out of many.

Lol.

Yeah. People do question beg this. But knowledge is mind-dependent. Consciousness is my access to reality. Consciousness itself points to things existing outside of my awareness such as learning new things. If I can watch a video about my car being stolen, then I have learned something new that was previously outside of my experience. Im not trying to strawman idealism, but I don’t think George Berkeleys arguments can hold up with the technology that we have that can give us more objective measures. If I can walk around and have a camera recording the world behind me, I can see the world in front and the world behind me. It’s not like the world behind me ceases to exist when I stop recording behind me, it is just that I do not have access to it. I mean this stuff is basic object permanence that you should have developed as a baby. Even dogs know that if I put a bone behind my back, it doesn’t just cease to exist. It honestly seems so stupid that I cannot believe people believe this. The only steel man I can think of is that whatever we refer to as existence has always been an experience. The bone is made out of an experience of my sight, sounds, tastes, and touch. My sight of the bone is not any more real than the sound, touch, or taste of the bone. Humans have a sight bias where we take our sense of sight to be more true/real than our other senses. We have only ever interacted with the world through our experience and yet our experience points to things that seem to exist outside of our experience, such as the experience of object permanence and the experience of an object being moved outside of one’s experience. The question really comes down to what is an object? Is object just raw experience or is that just our interpretation? What if an object has an existence outside of our experience/interpretation? But then if it does, then what do we mean when we say something exists? How could we say anything exists without referring to the experience or potential experience of it? What does it even mean to say something exists but cannot be experienced? So, I see how the objective reality view has its own problems, that if an objective reality exists, then what exactly is that? Objective reality couldn’t be an experience or even just an idea. But like I said, knowledge is mind- dependent. So if there is an objective reality, it could never be known. An objective reality itself cannot be defined very easily because it points to a world outside of our experience. What I find interesting is that we have this idea of an objective reality at all. How do we have this idea if we have never experienced and can never experience objective reality?

A Beautiful Mind

If I go blind and deaf right now, is it that the visual and auditory world doesn’t exist or that I do not have access to those senses? Think about this: There are senses that you do not have access to right now, which is called ESP. How would you know it exists? Would it be true to say that ESP doesn’t exist because you don’t experience it? It would be foolish for a person born blind and deaf to say that sight and sound doesn’t exist. They may not have access to sight and sound, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. What if we are all blind to an objective reality or ESP? We would be fools to say that the qualia we have now is all reality is. That is a fallacy. It is more accurate to say that the qualia we have is what we currently have access to and we can’t know if we have full access to all the senses/perceptions possible.

You can’t experience death. Death is the cessation of experience. When you die, you won’t even experience your death. It’s like falling asleep. You don’t experience falling asleep, you experience waking up.

Thats what I’m saying. The only difference is that a unicorn exists only in your mind, whereas a horse exists not just in your thoughts but out in the world.

What Leo means by imaginary isn’t the same as what is colloquially meant by imaginary. By imaginary, I think he means mental construct. A horse is more mentally constructed because it is something you actually experience whereas a unicorn is just an idea in your mind.

But ice cream doesn’t exist because I’m not aware of it right now. You see the issue I’m pointing to? How could you even have the idea of me getting ice cream without inferring into some objective reality. Your statement already assumes that ice cream exists outside of my current experience.