zurew

The best move is to chill the fuck down and to not chase after 100% epistemic certainty

There are two ways I can interpret your question: 1) You know exactly what you want to do, you are just not sure whether having a balanced life will get you there faster compared to having an unbalanced life 2) You know exactly what you want to do, you know that if you have an unbalanced life you will achieve that specific goal faster(or even having an unbalanced life is necessary for you in order to reach that goal), but you don't want to sacrifice everything for it and you are unsure about how much you are willing to sacrifice for it. If the first one is the case, thats just gonna be an empirical question and the question of balance is irrelevant there (its more of a question of "does this thing optimize me more towards that goal or not" thats the question, if more balance does that , [whatever balance means there], then you implement it, if not, then you don't implement it). You need to figure out how you can optimize yourself towards that particular goal. You probably shouldn't completely copy others (regarding how they did it), you will need to fit everything to your uniqueness (to your situation, to your skills, to your strength and weaknesses etc). If the second one is the case, thats gonna be a question regarding your values, where you need to self reflect on what kind of life you actually want and what things you are willing to sacrifice and what thing you are not.

Unironically, It seems like I wasn't clear enough by what I meant by "you" given this context: I used it in a way to refer to people in general, who would use that defence regarding what they meant. I will add to it though, that its fine if you (again 'you' used here to refer to people in general) can't give a perfectly nuanced breakdown every time you use a word,however when it comes to certain topics (like spirituality, philosophy ) it would be cool to see more people being more sensitive to how much semantic nuance there is and to even in some case(s) back down from certain debates or conversations up until you develop a sophisticated enough vocabulary, where if pushed on it, you can give a nuanced breakdown of the language you are using (I personally have backed down multiple times in the past, and will do so in the future). This is not just good for clearing up your langauge, this is also very helpful for clearing up your thinking and your understanding of a given concept. It is also a good way to prove that you have actually thought deeply about said concept, because you can use it in a highly context and paradigm sensitive way.

You think thats something I would refuse to admit, but I can easily admit that yeah - I rely on a set of presuppositions that I cant justify and take them for granted out of necessity. The difference is that I don't pretend that I can't be wrong about those presuppositions or that there is no limitations to my epistemology.

Sounds like a good reason to try to be as clear in our understanding and thinking and in our langauge as possible about them. Clarity and consistency. 1) Clarity on what is being meant by each word, - since you use them constantly , you presumably know exactly what you mean by them . 2) Consistency regarding how you use your language When it comes to any expert within a given field, they have their own specific jargon that they use and there is good reason for that. One obvious advantage is that you create a language set that can be used in a very sharp way to differentiate between concepts (which can elevate understanding) and gives you the ability to point to very specific problems and concepts within that field and then the other advantage is that you can debate and converse more easily and more effectively. Each of the buzzwords that I listed earlier, have a lot of semantic nuance to them in that they can be interpreted in multiple ways and multiple definitions can be given to them. Since that is the case, and since you probably have contemplated about these concepts a lot - you probably have gone deep enough that by this point, you should have a lot more nuance in your language regarding those concepts. If you would ask an academic philosopher what they mean by "possible" or "impossible". They can give you a nuanced breakdown of each of those words and they might even be able to give you what their theory of meaning is. If I were to ask you the exact same question, I think you wouldn't be able to produce any clear answer to that question. But you don't use the word "possible" and "impossible" a lot, so you can be given some leeway on that, however there is this weird word "truth" and you use it a lot and its incredibly strange to me that you never talk about the classical theories of truth and how you have never differentiated your theory of truth from the classical ones (if they are different in the firstplace). If that is the case, then when pushed on it, you should be able to produce a very specific answer, if I specify the context or the perspective. Or you yourself should be able to specify in which context or perspective your statement ought to be interpreted Or you should be able to lay down the nuance regarding all the different ways how your statement can be interpreted. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- But again, if your statement is so vague, that it can be interpreted in a million different ways even given a specific context, then I would consider that statement meaningless, cause you are not really communicating anything specific at that point. Notice that here you gave a nuanced breakdown regarding how it can be interpreted and then you give a specific answer how it ought to be interpreted. I doubt though that Wittgenstein had a view on language where he would consider contradictions to be meaningful (but I can be wrong on that). To be clear by contradiction I mean (It is the case that X and it is not the case that X) where both X has the exact same meaning and interpreted in the exact same context.

And then after you raised your conciousness you can ask the exact same question "How do you know that your consciousness is high enough so that you can't be mistaken?" Don't you realize that this is a recursive problem, that comes from one of your pressuposition that 'there is no highest level'? Raising your consciousness further won't solve this epistemic problem. The honest answer here would be - given the assumption that there is no highest level - you never know and there is always room for you to be wrong later. I don't know how im getting lost anywhere, when Im just making an internal critique (going inside the bubble of your paradigm and then laying down what kind of epistemic challenges and problems come from given paradigm) Of course it can be, you just take it to be true completely for granted out of necessity, because you cannot not rely on your introspection (but again that is just a skill issue). But regardless, again you just put an = sign between your inability to question and between absolute truth for some random reason,and you build everything on the assumption that "If I can't question X, then X must be absolutely true" This is another thing that most of you either take for granted or justify it in a circular way - How do you know that you have the ability to recognize an Absolute truth? ( a truth that is stance independently true, regardless what anyone thinks of feels about it) Also, how do you know that you can have epistemic access to Absolute truth? No, what Ive noticed is that a lot of people use their own epistemic limitations and project them onto the world and then pretend that the "truths" that their limited epistemology produces is absolutely true. To me, that statement sounds like a coping mechanism to avoid admitting the limitations of a given epistemology. How do you know that your epistemology produces truth? "Well, I use my epistemology to validate my epistemology" Notice that you completely arbitrarily choose a specific kind of circular epistemology that you think is superior to all the others. Do you actually bite the bullet or do you choose arbitrarily an epistemology and then say that it produces truth in a 100% reliable way? Just to not lose track remember, that the point we originally started to argue about was whether your inability to question x means that x is abolutely true . Im trying to argue that you just pressupose that 'not being to question x means x is absolutely true' and Im suggesting that you should admit the given limitations whatever epistemology you choose to go with and you shouldn't pretend that your epistemology is 100% reliable.

I would argue most of the debates and conversations on this forum about enlightenment and about awakening and about philosophy are almost completely meaningless (meaningless in the sense that people are not talking about the same thing and sometimes you could literally replace most of the buzzwords that they use with "blabla" and the debate and the convo would go down the exact same way , thats how vague and meaningless most of the buzzwords are.) Here is a list of the buzzwords that are regularly used on this forum , that most people either use completely differently or even in contradictory ways compared to others or use it in so vague ways that its completely unclear whats being meant by them (and in some of the cases this vagueness is used to avoid criticism, cause you can't give a targeted attack, if the target is unclear) Absolute truth truth relative truth illusion infinity dream Absolute consciousness reality absolute reality ultimate reality awakening enlightenment awake God experience Direct experience becoming conscious of knowing knowledge external world objective subjective If you allow Leo and others to be contradictory and incoherent, then im not sure wtf the point in trying to communicate (other than trying to signal to other forum members how wise, enlightened, awake and how much of a deep thinker you are, by using big buzzwords that are at this point meaningless) . The sentence that you wrote there is as coherent and meaningful as this one : "sjkdngfjdjgkdgh fdgjng rjht".

Speaking of aliens, here is a big data dump https://www.dpiarchive.com/ You register and then you will have access for free to a bunch of declassified documents, witnesses, whistleblowers images, videos (I have no clue which one is legit or whether any of it is legit, im just dropping it here if anyone interested to do research on this)

And there you have the exact same problem - how do you know that your consciousness is high enough so that you can't be mistaken? If your introspection is depended on your level of consciousness, then first of all how do you know whether you can correctly assess/judge how high your consciousness is right now (that assessment is limited by your ability to introspect) and second of all, if there is always a higher level to consciouness, then that means that all your judgements about yourself and about the world will always be limited to the level of consciousness you have at that particular moment, so you can never prospectively know which foundational conviction/belief of yours will be undermined about yourself or about the world, as you gain more consciousness. So what do you think, at level you can stop and say "okay this level of consciousness is high enough to make the the following claim with 100% certainty (without it being undermined as you gain more consciousness later), that x really cant be doubted"? Of course it can be doubted, because that claim is an introspective claim (making a claim about your experience) and you 100% rely on introspection to make that claim. How do you know that your introspection is accurate, without using your introspection to assess your introspection and making it circular? But again, even if it couldnt be doubted - an inability to doubt won't solve the certainty problem, because it is bounded by your cognitive abilities and by your introspection, so its more of a skill issue, than a thing that you cannot be mistaken about. Its like how do you know that something cannot be doubted ? "Well, it is based on my introspection". Okay how do you know that your introspection is correct ? "Well, I cant doubt it" - sounds very circular.

Nice, thanks for sharing. It has been a while since the last 'the great simplification' episode with Daniel. It seems that he is comfortable with flexing his bookshelves now.

Notice what you did there. You managed to differentiate infinity (that which contains everything or that which is boundless) from infinitely large number sets (only containing numbers). A table is a member or part of infinity, however it is different from infinity. Infinity has certain characteristics and attributes that tables don't have. If you want to say that you can't exhaustively define it (like listing all the parts and connections between those parts) thats fine, but that applies to other definitions as well. Like I wouldn't be able to give a perfectly clear boundary regarding what should be categorized as a pond (like exactly how many water drops are in a pond), but I can still differentiate it from rivers and from seas and from oceans. The same applies to infinity. When someone says define X - that person doesn't necessarily asking for a completely exhaustive definition, but you can narrow it down and use pointers.

No its not an impossible request. Yes all definitions are necessarily exclusionary, but infinity itself is exclusionary in certain ways. You can have an infinite set (lets say we give label "P" to a set that contains all prime numbers). If I bring up number 2 - that would be a prime number, but we still wouldn't call it P, because it is just a member of P. The same way we wouldn't call P number 2, becasue even though P contains number 2, it is different from number 2. In short - we differentiate the set from the members of said set . So you can have an all encompassing set (S), and you can still differentiate the members of S from S.

Wouldn't you agree that one can have certain unjustified beliefs that are true? For example, a lot of people can have the belief that the Earth is round without being able to properly justify it with scientific arguments. But just because they can't justify it , that doesn't mean that the belief itself is wrong. And we can go with the opposite as well, where you have someone who might be able to justify a belief, even though that belief is false (I would argue , the easiest would be to just take a look at the philosophy and history of science and at the progress of science - back in the day scientist were justified to believe what they believed, even though looking back in retrospect , a lot of those beliefs turned out to be false).

That doesn't tell me much. A lot of people use that phrase very vaugely here, including Leo. Do you mean something like it is true in all possible worlds? If so what do you mean by possible? Do you mean logically possible, like it doesn't contain a contradiction or do you mean something else by possible worlds? That will be depended on what you mean by 'know'. Which is also very rarely and vaguely discussed here. But yeah it might be the case that you have to stomach and go with partial knowledge (that is probabilistically true, with respect to a given epistemology) and not with absolute knowledge or you can be an epistemic nihilist where you say you don't have knowledge of anything , you only have beliefs and beliefs about your beliefs (no knowledge about your beliefs or about anything) Hence why I said that doubting is itself epistemically limited. You can obviously have 2 people with mutually exclusive beliefs who both have 100% conviction in their beliefs.

Don't make the Descartes kind of (imo) mistake, where you put all your bets on your ability to doubt. What makes you think that your inability to doubt makes that particular thing absolutely true? it might just be the case, that given your cognition you can only doubt certain things and not others, but just because you can't doubt things, from that doesn't necessarily follow that those things are absolutely true (whatever that means). Inability to doubt will give you psychological certainty(will give you a list of things you can conceive of) but not deductively valid conclusions (if you want to go with deductive logic, but that will have its own problems too)

Sorry @Husseinisdoingfine for derailing your thread.

People like to be very vague here, unfortunately.

But I have a big problem though, and I want you to use your energy reading abilities to help me out, my broski. My infallible intuitions told me to follow step by step whatever Joe Rogan and Alex Jones says. In fact, I bought all the products Alex Jones recommended to me, and now i have erectile dysfunction, I have parasites in my body, my piss is black due to my liver and kidneys not working anymore and I see reptilian humanoids everywhere. I tried to use the famous, powerful horse dewormer (ivermectin) against the parasites (recommended by Joe) but it didn't work. After using my highly reliable and sophisticated energy reading abilities (that I have learnt from you), I concluded that all those problems that I listed above were exclusively caused by those reptilian humanoids. I told this highly reliable and non-schizophrenic conclusion of mine to my psychiatrist, and to my surprise, she didn't see the patterns that I saw. I got very dissapointed in her bad pattern recognition ability and I used the last 2 psychiatric sessions of mine to teach her about your methods - like the secret genius method of how to connect 2 dots together. She still has a lot to learn (she is what you would call a non-intuitive fool), just the same way I still have a lot to learn from you. So,what do you recommend me to do? Should I try to communicate with the reptilian humanoids or should I use my psychic abilities to make them go away?

Maybe you two differ on ethics, because I think he would consider himself to be a moral realist, but im not 100% sure. He did say that the is-ought gap doesn't really exist, and that there is no good argument for it.

+ there are a bunch of plugins that others have created that you can easily download and use

Good one, broski. I noticed a pattern in your writing, and I connected the dots together, and read your energy using my perfect , infallible intuitions and my conclusion is that all of your intuitions are wrong.

@DocWatts Most of the things you wrote down seem to be very similar to John Vervaeke's position (as far as I understand his position on this). Even the word "disclose" is a word that he often time uses, when he talks about the subject-object relationship and how you are not just receiving raw sense data from your senses and how you are not just creating objects in your mind, but there are real objects in the world, that exist independent of your mind, but they disclose themselves to you in a particular way and your perception and experience of those objects is depended on your cognition (and you are participating in that disclosure). Do you have any particular disagreement with Vervaeke regarding his metaphysics or epistemology or ethics? Btw your writing is very comprehensible and accessible (even to me who is very poorly read in philosophy), and it is easy to follow your deductions and thought process , so good job on that!

Sure - I can only talk from my pov - Im very poorly read in philosophy , especially on this particular topic and I havent thought much about it, so I don't have any strong position on any of this. I don't have the necessary vocab to have a meaningful talk or debate about this. Im mostly just here to observe and to take some notes . I appreciate the honesty about hitting your limits. If more forum members would be this honest, we would have much more meaningful and productive debates and convos.

Okay gotcha, that clears it up for me.

I meant the classical notion of an abstract object like numbers, sets, propositions. Like if you say that numbers exist , would you say that they are spatio-temporal? this is a general argument for the existence of abstract objects: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism/#4 But regardless, I guess what I wanted to ask is that if you think that things that are non spatio-temporal do exist, then how do you make sense of them in the context of identity? Because it seems to me that your definition of identity presupposes that identity is necessarily being bounded by time (if I understood what you meant there, but I might be misinterpreting)