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Like imagine the value of developing an evidence hierarchy for the purpose of investigating paranormal phenomena and then being able to list some of the things and reasoning with respect to how it was built and what kind of core beliefs it relies on and what creates the hierarchy etc.

No thats not my view, I know about some people who take those things seriously who I respect - Im just saying that one should have a pretty robust epistemic toolset, so that one can properly investigate the instances of paranormal stuff and dont fall into pre-rational traps. Relying on some vague notion of "connecting the dots" sounds like a good way to fall into those traps - cause the epistemic norm that is used is not explicated, and because of that one can easily be overwritten by one's biases. Its a vibes based epistemology at best. Imagine having something like - "here is an epistemic standard , and if a given study crosses this threshold, then I will change my view on this particular thing" - in this case , its much easier to engage with this person and in this case one can analyze their epistemic standard and reflect on it and let others to attack it and run consistency checks on it. And given that the norm is explicated , others can now apply that norm to other instances where a paranormal phenomena is brought up and analyze whether that paricular instance crosses that threshold or not. And obviously the same critique applies to people who reject all paranormal phenomena with a knee-jerk reaction, without looking into it and without actually having a clear epistemic norm or without having the ability to explain in a clear way why they reject it in a non-dogmatic way. Most people don't have the necessary toolset to even begin to make sense of these things. Its like asking a random layman on the street to make sense of a random medical study about a given thing - they would have 0 clue what questions they would need to ask, what kind of norms they would need to use, what certain variables in the study mean and what the implications are of certain variables having certain values, they wouldn't know how reliable the study is, because they would need to have a well-developed concept about what reliability even is in that context and so on. So why should we think that its any different in this case? It seems to me, that one would need to know a lot about a wide variety of fields (physics , epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of physics and occult stuff and so on) and one would need to refine and reflect on one 's standards a lot, before they could have a relatively good way to categorize the instances of such phenomena. Like most people cant even explicate and defend their worldview in a detailed way, where they can pinpoint the exact reasons why they believe in what they believe, why they have the epistemology and metaphysics they have. So why would they have the ability to make sense of any of this? For example, don't you think that you having the ability to explain in detail and in a clear way why you were wrong about healing would have enormous value (other than just some vague vibe based gesturing) ? Like imagine you having the ability to lay down "The reason why I was wrong about healing, is because I had this x epistemic norm that I believed in for y set of reasons, but now that I realized that it doesn't work, I can go back look at those y set of reasons and change them and say with confidence that the reasoning I used was wrong, and the norm that I used was inadequate".

The way I use logical necessity (and the way philosophers I know use the term) under that saying what you said would be a category error. Logical necessity isn't affected by time or knowledge or lack of realization. Its like saying " before I realized that a triangle must have 3 sides, a triangle might have more or less than 3 sides After realizing that it must have 3 sides - it became logically impossible for the triangle to have more or less than 3 sides." No, the triangle having more or less than 3 sides have always been logically impossible,regardless of one's lack of knowledge or realization. So given all that - saying "God must exists" means God is a logical necessity which in principle can be proven and you take that burden on yourself the moment you state logical impossibility claims. And they would say that actualized.org's reasoning is mostly correct, they just confuse and corrupt the right infallible way of knowing (revelation) with direct consciousness and they confuse God with something other than the Christian God. I can generate a 1000 other views where the exact same reasoning structure is used, and none of them would be more epistemically warranted than the other. I Just need to say that ontology and epistemology needs to be collapsed , then I need to select an arbitrary ground, then I need to select an arbitrary 'correct' way of knowing that I assert to be infallible, that I can then use to validate/realize that my arbitrary selected ground is logically necessary and then assert that all other views (other than mine) are incoherent and the only way to substantiate the claim that all other views are incoherent is by using my arbitrary selected, infallible, 'correct' way of knowing. You and Leo and some other actualizers take on burden that none of you can substantiate. I don't understand why make a claim that one cant defend or substantiate. And you cant get out of this by saying that you can only realize by using direct consciousness (correct way of knowing, thats infallible), because again 1) you make a logical possibility claim (which in principle can be proven) and 2) you also have a presupposed correct, infallible way of knowing that you take for granted. The method that you propose that one needs to use to realize the truth of what you are saying , presupposes that that particular method is infallible, and how do you establish the infallible part? Well, you just presuppose it. Why not just stay epistemically humble and just say that your view makes more sense, why there is a need to take it up a billion notch and give yourself burden that you can't substantiate and say things like - only your view is possible and all other views are incoherent? Imagine presups saying this: And then saying "Yeah well, I know actualized.org users have the same reasoning structure - see humans cant solve these problems, what you actually need in order to realize truth is revelation" "After going through the transformation caused/generated by revelation, I can now see the Truth, that I cant be wrong about and I know for certain that relevation is infallible" @DocWatts Sorry btw for derailing your thread, I just felt the need to highlight some of these points, because I havent seen any good or satisfying response to any of these challenges by people who hold Leo's views.

Its not about convincing - its about making us learn about how to navigate these topics and how to make sense of them. Getting a more wider and deeper epistemic toolset. Seeing how and what is applied when a paranormal topic comes up would be very interesting. If there are ways to approach these topics in a way where people can avoid falling into pre-rational traps that would help people with coming to their own conclusions.

I dont understand why there isn't any substantial debate happening and why again time is wasted on rhetoric. Leo you got challenged and this is a topic where everyone could learn a fuckton about epistemology and about epistemic standards and about the validity of remote viewing and about how to navigate disagreements around esoteric topics - the only thing you need to do is to respond to the challenges posed by the skeptics. Why not show that they have an unreasonable standard or that the evidence is so overwhelming that they are completely stupid and they must have big cognitive dissonance in order to reject the validity of certain studies? Your responses so far dont demonstrate that you can navigate the complexity of these topics and your response is compatible with a pre-rational persons view of things. ( i have never seen you engage in depth with any challenge) Why should anyone think based on what you provided that you have any more justified or grounded view on this particular topic than a pre-rational person? -- In fact we have at least one good reason to think that you cant navigate these discussions and you are nowhere near as competent around these topics as you try to make yourself to be - is the fact that you made some claims about healing and then you had to backtrack those claims - why should we think that the same epistemology that generated those claims about healing isn't what generated your belief about remote viewing or about any other esoteric topic?

This one would be necessitated given your metaphysics - no? (In other words , all scientists who hold your metaphysics would necessarily look for this virtue when it comes to theory crafting or theory selection) You made me realize (even though it seems obvious now - that there are theoretical virtues that are metaphysics specific) Although I imagine in most of the cases its not relevant, because its already hard enough to be constrained by the virtues that are compatible with multiple different metaphysics. Btw thanks for the detailed answer.

Yeah, I agree.

This is not related to popper, but when it comes to evidence I like the raven's paradox. where for the hypothesis that 'all ravens are black' - anything that isn't a raven and isn't black counts as evidence (so a green apple is evidence for the claim that all raven are black) Do you have any special position on theory selection in general? (like what set of virtues should be taken account and how they should be weighed when it comes to theory selection - by virtues I mean stuff like predictability , how many assumptions it has, how much it coheres with other scientific theories etc) And my other question would be , what do you take theory selection to be? - do you think that the reason why we care about the virtues we care about, is because it simply reflects our intuitions and psychology (aside from predictability) or there is something more going on?

+1 - their "infallible" non-inferential justification would be revelation , actualized.org's would be awakening

I can grant that - I just dont see how that solves the epistemic anarchy problem. It almost feels like a backwards pragmatic approach to philosophy, where you ask the question of 'what view could justify itself with 100% certainty' and try to construct something that satisfies that. Even under the context, where the existence of the Absolute is granted: 1) To me it seems that multiple people can agree on the Absolute being 'real' or 'existing', but still make different interpretations and inferences about it. 2) There are multiple different ways to arrive at the same conclusion about the Absolute (its not constrained to one way of knowing) This goes back to the problem of collapsing epistemology and ontology. We can agree that the Absolute is real or that it exists, but I fail to see how that claim makes any inherent epistemic claim about a 'right' way of knowing or how that makes any claim about epistemology at all. Like - I don't see how you would possibly derive from the Absolute existing that 'being is the right/correct way of knowing'. The Absolute doesn't seem to have any epistemic norms embedded in it. Kind of - but I wouldn't frame this as something where you either have 100% certainty vs you have no certainty at all - there are varying degrees of certainty. I have to mention again that I see a lot of parallels in reasoning with the presups (and I think similar errors are made on this forum as well). Their idea is to ground everything in the all knowing Christian God, where God can deliver epistemic and metaphysical insights through revelation. This is a move, where they attempt to try to get rid of all the fallible and limited human aspects, so that finally we can have the "correct" take about metaphysics epistemology ethics etc with 100% certainty , where there is no more room to be wrong anymore. At the end of the day, if God is all knowing - that means that he can tell us all truths, right? The answer is yes, but the issue is establishing that the all knowing Christian God exists without presupposing that he exists. Presups reply to this problem by saying that there are certain transcendental categories that are necessary when it comes to any knowledge claim (for example logic, intelligibility , meaning) - in other words, the idea is that you cant make any knowledge claim without pressuposing those transcendental categories. They also say that you need to ground those transcendental categories and in order to ground them , you need the Christian God and nothing else could satisfy being the ground. Essentially they end up saying that the existence of the Christian God is logically necessary (all other worldviews are incoherent and they have a contradiction in them), but if you press them on it, they just keep repeating catchphrases like (Im right, due to the impossibility to the contrary'), but they never demonstrate how all other views necessarily contain a contradiction in them, they just assert that to be the case. So in a nutshell - they answer "how do you know that" question in 2 ways - one is claiming that only their view is coherent and two is saying that they gathered this insight through revelation from God , where they cant be wrong about revelation. The parallels are - the idea that you can get rid of the fallible human aspect of philosophy and the idea that all other views are incoherent (contain a contradiction in them) and the idea that you need to collapse epistemology and ontology (the existence of the Christian God is what grounds epistemology). Now presumably you reject their reasoning and you would label it as question-begging, but when it comes to your reasoning (where structurally you do the exact same), you label question-begging on your side as a postive thing ("feature, not a bug"). I take it that you think that this way of reasoning is a necessary thing in order to justify anything. There are multiple ways to respond to that First way is to grant that what you are saying is true, (that thats the only way to properly justify anything), but that alone doesn't say anything about other views being impossible, it would just mean that other views (where the proposed metaphysics is different to yours) cant 'properly' justify/ground themselves. It would be a pragmatic argument at best. Second way is to question the idea that this is the only way to properly justify things and asking for an argument that establish that all other views different to yours are incoherent without question-begging. TL;DR - I don't understand why you are more justified in your view than presups in theirs (or more justified than anyone who use the exact same reasoning structure, where question-begging is allowed). I also dont understand why collapsing epistemology and ontology is helpful in any way at all - if we are allowed to question-beg then maintaining the epistemology-ontology distinction and question-beg that way doesn't seem any worse than collapsing it and question beg that way. It sounds like question begging is taken to be a necessary feature - but question begging is compatible with multiple different metaphysics Just as a sidenode - I don't necessarily reject the idea in principle that one could put forth a view where there is 100% certainty that it is true - Its just that the argument that would be required to establish that in a non-question-begging way won't be pulled off in practice (you would need to find a trait that is in all views except your proposed view and derive a contradiction from that). Until/Unless that certainty is actually established in a non-question-begging way - I think @DocWatts's epistemic humility (where there is room for error and where there is an acknowledgement of epistemic limitations and where there is constant epsitemic-refinement) is the way to go.

Not just your writing, but your way of thinking is more clear and easier to follow (imo). Some people can write good books ,but they are not necessarily good on their feet or they are not that good when it comes to dialogue. Even though not everything can be simplified (because sometimes necessary nuance is lost or you point to such foundational concepts that cant be broken down any further etc) - The very fact that you can build some bridge and simplify these complex topics and express them in your own way means that you probably have a very good grasp of them and you dont just gibberate, or want to posture with big words or play language games, but you can actually meaningfully connect and engage.

I dont know what infinity has to do with it (maybe you are refering to infinitism - where we talk about infinite regress) , but I think there could be pontential ways out of epistemic anarchy (of course that are all contentious) and I think a lot of people here engage in category error when they repeatedly ask the question of "whats the justification for x" or "how do you know that x" - because asking those questions implies that it make sense categorically to have a justification for x (but it might be meaningless to ask that question, depending on what is meant by justification and depending on what x is). Its also the case that most of the time people cant even express what they mean by justification and they just have some vague sense of something and they themselves dont even know what they specifcally ask for when they ask for justification. Aside from the category error , it can also be a framing/representation problem - where you start with foundationalism rather than with a coherentist framework where you dont have a hierarchy of beliefs, but you have a web of beliefs that are all on the same level and they are connected to each other. It might not make sense and it might be a mistake to think about epistemology and even about metaphysics hierarchically, where you always search for a solid ground and you try to place everything on that ground.

I can say that the clarity of your writings (not just your book, but your posts on here in general) is easier to track compared how it was before (2-3 years ago) I think the 'World disclosure for dummies' is a good description, because even I with low phil knowledge can track a good chunk of your stuff and can engage somewhat meaningfully with some of it.

I know you don't care. The problem is the epistemology part -for some people who care about that. It doesnt take any intelligence to say "this x way is the true way". Anyone can say that " lets say grant the my way is the true way and lets just forget about all this boring epistmology about making sense of things or justifying things". When it comes to the question of whats the justification for that? There will be a lot of explanations and models of God that will make more sense (to explain the facts of the world) than just dogmatically trying to defend one way that is unexpected or less expected given all the facts of the world. All your non-inferential justifications are incredibly problematic for obvious reasons and you wouldnt accept any non-inferential justification either that doesn't align with your intuitions, so I don't know why you would expect others to accept your non-inferential justification where you just appeal to awakening and say "this is true ". How do you reconcile disagreements when two people appeal to their awakening and they disagree? You don't, you assume that they are wrong and that you are right and they must be wrong about them having an awakening (but you have 0 way to check that other than pure speculation and an appeal to your own intuitions). And of course, the baseline is that you take all the insights that you get in your awakenings to be all Infallible.

Thats fine, but I dont think thats relevant to the explanation of horror and evil. Whats relevant is the claim that his nature includes all horror and evil scenarios and thats what explains the existence of evil and horror. In this case just as how @Xonas Pitfall described it well, its wrong for you to say that he wanted to design reality this way - no there was no creation and no design, its just God being himself and just by the fact that God exists - all those horrible and evil worlds and scenarios exists as well. It makes 0 sense for you to say that God creatively designed the world this way (and that there was some grand design), when this world existing is literally part of its nature.

The 'possible world' semantics includes way more than the multiverse theory. You should know this. It includes all logically possible worlds (which means anything that doesn't include a contradiction, there is a possible world for it) - which means you can have infinite different versions of physics , infinite different versions of multiverses, infinite different laws of nature , infinite different history etc etc. Includes - worlds where the Christian God creates the Universe, includes worlds where Allah creates the Universe etc etc.

I think you would have a much easier time explaning all this if you would take the position, that God has to create all possible worlds (and he has no choice, but to create all possible world), and just because of that fact alone, that explains all horror, because all possible worlds by definition includes the creation of all beauty and horror. Thats one easy route to give an explanation, there are other ways, but each way involves biting some bullet (in this case the bullet would be being forced to create everything and not having choice what you want to create) - the being forced could be interpreted as having the nature of needing to create this way or simply not even talking about creation, but just by the fact that being all possible worlds, all possible worlds have to exist if God exists (because all possible worlds=God).

If you make comparative terms to be all encompassing you destroy the meaning of those terms. You can stretch the meaning of the terms, but then nothing will be in the category of 'not real', and "realness" will completely lose its meaning and it becomes redundant. One last comment on logic and I wont derail the thread further - I view it kind of similar as natural language (conceptual tool). It would be weird, and imo it would make no sense (it would contain a category error) to ask the question which one is the most valid or correct or true natural language? Like - English doesn't make any inherent claim about the world. It would be also silly (imo) to say that natural language is in the substance of the world. Like where is English or German like can you find it in rocks or in atoms somewhere or in some transcendental realm? You can use any natural language to refer to and to express things about the real world, but you can also use them to talk about hypotheticals and things that are not world related. Is there a true or objectively "correct" way to design the grammar for English or for any other natural language and do we need to affirm a metaphysical existence to natural language? I don't think so. Its a descriptive, conceptual tool that helps with and useful for a lot of things.

@Thought Art You should work on your confidence, the intelligence gap is not at all, not even remotely as big as you think between you and Leo. Ask yourself this question: If Leo is not allowed to claim bad faith on you, he is not allowed to play the teacher role, he is not allowed to claim that you are closed minded, and he is not allowed to ask questions as a response to your questions and he is not allowed to dodge your questions and he is not allowed to claim superiority - then how many actual and satisfying answers can he provide to your questions? Because thats what we allegedly here for - to learn about the substance, not to play surface level rhetoric games. If you are interested in better responses to the problem of evil and suffering you should take a look at theodicies because they do a much better job at giving an answer , but I think they mostly fail as well There are versions of God where it make sense that the world is the way it is now, but the model of God that put forth here and from Christians on those cases it doesn't make sense to expect a world like this.

What the argument that things wouldn't work if God would intervene and would not let children to get raped just 1 time? Why do you create the false dichotomy that there needs to be either constant micro-management or no micro management at all? Like we can imagine very easy a bunch of scenarios that wouldn't map onto that dichotomy - like God intervening just one time. The answer to that will be fairness? I hope not, because please then explain to us (if you want to talk about fairness) - How is it fair that certain children gets raped and and gets starved to death while others live a perfectly abundant life? Like you invoke fairness and corruption, but none of that makes sense, because the playingfield is not at all in any way fair or you use a notion of fairness that so devoid of how we use those terms that you should use a different label at that point because its nothing other than a rhetorical tool to gesture towards a common notion of fairness while in substance meaning something that goes completely against that common notion.

You ask good and fair questions , I don't know why you let your confidence to be undermined by rhetorical questions. Yes, its just putting the label 'perfect' on reality where perfect doesn't mean anything other than just being a complete,exhaustive desription of reality. How does any of that interesting? Does God have the ability to create the world in a different way? If the answer is yes, then it means either that he has a preference to create the world this way (which means that all things considered - he has a preference for children getting raped on a daily basis) or he is indifferent to all of this and creating the world this way was completely arbitrary and he had no desire to create it in any other way. If the answer is no - then creating the world this way was due to certain limitations and those limitations is what largely explains the traits of this world - but in this case suddenly labels like "perfect" won't sound that cool, because the design of reality will be largely explained by those limitations, not by some design. ------------------------------------------ "oh , you don't get it, all the cool stuff and all the affordance that is possible in this world is due to the profound grand design" Yeah? What are we talking about there, are we talking about logical impossibility (like the world couldn't have been created in other ways with different laws of physics while also maintaining all the cool stuff and affordances that are in this world?) If the answer to that is "Yes" then whats the argument for that (whats the argument that establish the contradiction in creating such a world)? And this is where I probably won't get any response, but if there is no response there, then the question that people should ask next is this - why claim that the world is perfect if you can't defend it? Also just to flag some things - notice the value judgements - you are myopic and selfish for putting certain negative judgements on the design of this world , and on the other hand we also want to claim that the design is perfect (where the design includes facts like giving us agents certain preferences and values that goes against the grand design). If the grand design includes us being myopic , selfish and not being able to appreciate the design, then why is it exactly the case that we get blamed for that ? All of that is also part of the perfection, bro (if we want to be consistent and dont just want to play rhetorically around the label of perfect).

Makes sense. I think when it comes to these pragmatic (how to live peacefully together and how to solve disagreements ) questions - philosophers would be better off researching conflict resolution tools, than spending time trying to establish objective morality and normative realism. One reason is because (even if they were actually right and they would successfully pull that off) most of the population wouldn't be motivated by that (I think I would include myself there as well). The reason why I brought this up is because I see so many times this problem of conflict resolution brought up to people like us (who reject normative realism and objective morality) as if it would be unqiue to us and as if it would be suddenly resolved by affirming realism.

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Even when we lay down axiomatically our epistemic framework, when it comes to the application of it and when it comes to the question of "okay given this x situation what makes y contextualization reasonable and z contextualization unreasonable) most of the time, it will be very unclear how to give a clear definitve answer to those questions. It also doesn't help that I take it that discovering/realizing facts requires different norms than the contextualization of those facts (this is why we can agree on all the facts, but take different perspectives, because we don't share the same norms when it comes how and what kind of perspective should be taken given a set of facts) Yeah, I take it that most of those intuitions are grounded in the subsconscious and the content of our subconscious is largely informed by our lived experience, therefore if we largely differ when it comes to lived experience, we will have a hard time understanding each other (unless we are exceptionally good at explicating our norms and beliefs and we have a habit of reflecting on them a lot). I think this is true. This is one reason why i am not completely blackpilled when it comes to 'solving' disagreements (because in principle a lot of the disagreement can be reconciled), its just that in practice in a completely fked up media environment, this is close to impossible.

Also (even though I agree) that after we specify a goal there will be ways to progress toward that goal better than in other ways, the exact same problem (about unshared metanorms) is applicable there as well. The only reason why we can agree on whats a better way or even whats the best way to progress toward that given goal (or even on whats relevant) is because we agree on some epistemic norms that help us to make sense of the world. To check how much we progress or digress from the goal we need to know facts about the world , but what if we disagree on the facts? Well we appeal to some norms that can generate those facts, okay, but what if we disagree on those? Then we will eventually end up in a sitation where we cant agree on what make us progress or digress from the goal. I don't know in what possible way one could reconcile fundemental disagreement there. Like imagine some silly scenario where one guy has some weird epistemology where he appeals to the problem of induction (where he says there is no guarantee that laws of physics will hold up 1 second from now and that the regularities of nature can change at any moment) and this guy says that staring at the sun for 24 hours is whats necessary to crack an egg and you hitting that egg with a sledgehammer wont crack the egg

Yeah personally I don't think normative realism makes sense, I don't know what it would even mean for something to be the correct or right independent of a goal or context. I think the same goes for relevance as well - goal independent relevance doesn't make any sense, and I don't know what it would mean to say x is relevant independent of context and goal. If we introduce goals to that situation, then we can have actual code to crack. So If we introduce a set of goals attached to the 'kissing of the romantic partner for the first time' - there will be answers that are better when it comes how and when the first kiss should be done ('better'- ness in this case would be defined by how much we progress toward those attached goals). In principle, we could lay down a set of rules that would outline with 100% clarity whats the best approach (with respect to the goals we have) in that situation, its just that in practice it cant be done , because of a bunch of limitations (cognitive , resource, time , ill-defined, lack of info etc). That doesn't necessarily mean that there is only one answer, but clearly there is a hierarchy of answers (after we attach our goals to the situation) Do you have an answer to the questions I gave to aurum? Because it seems to me that if two people disagree on the answers (when it comes to these two questions or questions as such) , there is no way to solve their disagreement, because they cant appeal to anything.