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I don't think there is good evidence that suggest that death penalty is effective at reducing crimes. But I see your point - if it would actually be the case that death penalty would reduce crime rates significantly - most libs would still be against it (because they probably have a principled stance against it)

Yes you can test stuff on your own, but that has its own downsides also. 1 being that you might waste a lot of time , another could be that even if some change happens in your life - it might not have come from the given practices but from something outside that you didn't track. Anecdotes are really bad in terms of quality and you can mislead a lot of people with your anecdotes. There are other potential downsides as well - for example maybe some practices will fuck some people up, because they have a different basis to work with compared to you. So no - having good intentions and telling people to try and test what you say isn't responsible and good enough (imo). It can be good enough in certain contexts, but in those contexts you have to have the honesty and integrity and make it very clear that you have no tangible evidence that it will work or whether it will be harmful or not. Be clear that you only have a theory that is based on certain set of reasons. You might have strong reasons for your conclusion, but still , empirical claims require evidence, because in practice a lot of theory will fail. Regarding your point about pushing the exploration further - you can't really push the exploration further without first gathering evidence for your current theory. Your further exploration would be built on underlying premises that are unproven, which doesn't necessarily mean that they are wrong, but it means that you are going blindly forward. And yes a lot of scientific studies can be shit for various reasons, but that fact shouldn't give anyone a leeway to just make prescriptions based on claims that don't have quality evidence for them. To be clear though - im not sure whether this applies to Wilber's work or to some of his work or to any of his work at all. Im basing it on the claim that Aurum made (about some of Wilber's prescriptions not having scientific evidence for them), but regardless, this is a general critique that I would apply to anyone who is making prescriptions on unproven or very poorly proven descriptions.

I think thats irresponsible on his part. Making strong empirical claims without actually establishing with studies how effective those prescriptions are. The level of confidence in claims should be aligned with the level of evidence you have for it. Just because some of these studies would be really hard to conduct that doesn't give anyone a free ticket to just freely make claims without needing to provide tangible evidence for those claims.

I am not even sure anymore whether they are actually progressing on laying out descriptively what the problems are and what the dynamics are. Could they provide any premise that they are actually sure of with a high confidence by now? Its unclear what the progress on the problems would even look like, because the fear of "the framing of the problems could be wrong (additional context might completely undermine most of the current prescriptions) and you could miss certain aspects of the problems" - which is true, but lack of action has its on consequences too (which they don't seem to take into account in the whole equation or they don't give much weight to lack of action ( or at least I haven't seen any of them talking about it). This fear of misframing the problem space is used as any excuse so that no one stakes out any positions (based on their current best understanding of the solutions and the problems) on anything at all. There is no confidence margin that is provided regarding any of the premises or problems at all. By now, they should be able to provide at least some answers even if they are not perfect . Its okay if you don't know all the sufficient things, but can you mention some of the things that you know are necessary? - talking about those could give a frame to work with and it makes this whole thing goal oriented, and people can actually have some concept of what the progress or the degress would look like. If the problem space in not defined in a clear enough way where people can track progress and degress, that means that we are probably lost in vauge space, where on the surface - seemingly we are talking about things, but in reality we are not defining anything in a coherent and clear way, and its unclear whether the ideas that are discussed are even coherent after an investigation of the semantics. There is also a difference between not having any solutions in mind at all vs having some solutions but you are unsure about all the consequences that the solution might bring. When they are asked a direct, non-vague question, they shouldn't dodge the question just because they don't have a 100% perfect answer for that question - they should lay out all the things to the best of their understanding and just say that the answer might change in the future.

Yep, thats where the interesting and worthwhile potential conversations are. But, lets be real here - to actually establish those kinds of arguments in a non-vague and in a rigorous way - that requires things that most of us don't have the prerequisite skills and or knowledge for (especially when it comes to domain specific things). How many people here do you think have good enough stat knowledge, so that he/she can properly evaluate the empirical data on any of your mentioned topics? How many people here do you think have actually read at least one full wiki article on any of your mentioned topics? How many people do you think in general here would be able to steelman both the pro and the contra side on any of your mentioned topics in a way where the inquiry actually goes down at least 5-6 levels deep and we don't get stuck at knocking down the weakest arguments or we don't get stuck at knocking down strawman arguments? How many people here do you think have looked up actual research on any of your mentioned topics? How many people here do you think have read books on any of your mentioned topics? and how many people do you think here even has an idea what a valid argument is ,let alone what a sound argument is and how many of them would be able to actually create a sound argument?

By morality in this context do you mean set of actions or do you mean cultural values or do you mean something different? If I understand you correctly - you are not talking about creating a system that suggests what one ought to do, you are talking about creating a descriptive system that can be used to show what set of actions and or cultural values will be better for survival (depending on the context). Also, defining exactly what is meant by 'being better for a given survival context' will be one hard part of the work.

Would you say that your whole argument is built on the premise of 'there is such a thing as moral development' ? If so, what argument(s) would you give to a person, who disagrees with that premise?

The problem with existential limititation only comes up if there is a definitive ground. The reason why "Every single thing that exists can't not be itself." is because of the law of identity - once you break that, there is no grounding and ground that is needed. Well it seems important to me to point out certain things, because to some this isn't obvious and some of you guys have a really hard time biting bullets.

Based on how he engaged with other threads and based on how he lays out his reasoning in other threads - I doubt he is trolling. His thoughtprocess and personality also matches with a typical spiral dynamics obsessed Leo viewer.

By the way I defined existential limitation, it is applicable to it. If you want to use a different word - we can - but as long as you understand what I mean semantically by that phrase, thats good enough for me. Yep we are on the same page on all of that and I already described the same thing just used different words. Using your words: Imagination cannot not be imagination - thats what I meant by existential limitation. The ground is imagination and cannot be anything other than that. Btw I don't know why you use words like "you expect it to be" or "you want proof" and stuff like that, when none of that is true, never suggested or said any of those things. I literally took the whole view 'consciousness is the only thing that exist' all for granted for the sake of the discussion and pointed out the implications that comes with the view and based on your responses you seem to outline the exact same implications just as I did.

Im not really understanding what you are trying to convey. But as long as we agree on the existential limitation point, I have nothing else to argue about right now.

I don't know what the "no" suppose to respond to there. I already addressed your point in my earlier reply to the other guy , where I predicted that some of you guys will go with the "you just imagine that there is anything other than consciousness". here: ... But my main point wasn't to necessarily disagree with the premise that "consciousness is all there is" my main point was to point out the existential limitation that comes with it. Acknowledge that limitation and use the word 'limitless" more carefully.

By existential limitation I mean the process of explicitly or implicitly (by implication) defining what can and or cannot exists. So for example, when someone says "consciousness is the only thing that exists" there are some hidden premises in that , that sometimes worth explicitly spelling out. So "consciousness is the only thing that exists" means there is only one thing that is real / absolutely true, which also means that you grounded reality in one particular thing (in this case consciousness) and that one thing cannot be swapped or changed to anything else (because by definition you could only swap it with relative things - that consciousness imagines). The existential limitation here would be that the ground cannot be anything other than consciousness. One hidden premise here is that there is a ground in the firstplace.

Which would be an existential limitation - hence why you guys shouldn't use the world limitless, because it is existentially limited - This critique little to do with the truth value of the premise of 'consciousness is the only thing that exist/ absolutely true', this is more to do with motivating you guys to acknowledge a limitation that follows from that premise.

I can grant that, but thats not the granting you think it is. There is already a premise that built in your question that I and most people and if you are honest with yourself - you reject as well. The premise being that you have to be 100% certain in your conclusion .- you don't have to - there is evidence that can be gathered that can elevate a hypothesis probability of being true. So the point is, that you can elevate the probability of this premise 'being healthy will make you live longer compared to if you are less healthy' being true with certain studies, without needing to reach 100% confidence in the conclusion. You can pretend to be the ultimate skeptic here, but then the best you can achieve with that is that you are completely agnostic about every empirical question. Which would mean that all of you specualtions are completely undermined as well and you cannot make any positive or negative statement about any empirical matter at all. But obviously you don't believe in that, hence why you made this whole thread.

We can talk about the value of unrealistic hypotheticals if you want to. Btw I find it funny that on a highly philosophical forum, people have problem with unrealistic hypotheticals. Engineers and scientific people in general tend to evade certain hypotheticals, because they either don't see value in it or how it connects back to the discussion at hand or they literally cant go to that level of abstraction.

Now the next step is you giving a definition for what you mean by healthy or more healthy.

good, thats something tangible that can be worked with

We will get back to reality , first we has to establish the goalpost and we have to establish whether you can engage honestly with hypotheticals without evading them. We are going step by step.

That answer makes 0 sense. You are changing what the question asked to you. You are not engageing with the question and evading a really easy straightforward answer. If everything else equal obviously a more healthy person will live longer. "yeah but you are not considering a trillion other things" the hypothetical accounts for all those things you are just not understanding it. Thats what all else being equal mean you take into account infinite variables except health and compare less health to more health. A very easy question you are just evading it.

Thats why I said all else being equal - to isolate the variables. All else equal here would mean whatever objection you can come up with in your mind - you apply that objection to both a more healthy and to a less healthy person. So having the same genetics, same history, taking the same amount of risks (add anything else here) does being more helathy make you live longer or not?

@Yousif All else being equal (taking the same amount of risk etc), does being healthy increase your lifespan compared to being less healthy or not?

Im trying to say more than that, but its hard to convey it in words. The whole thing that you layed down (about only consciousness being real and everything else is just imagination) would itself be just one aspect of the kind of the infinity im trying to point to . For the sake of understanding I will try to make a difference between existential limitation and imagination (yes I know under what you talk about, consciousness can imagine up even existential limitations). So if I grant all the things that you said in that case, we can create scenarios where I imagine that consciousness is not the only thing that exists and we can create infinite different scenarios of this, where I imagine the Absolute or the ground to be different from consciousness. Yes I can grant that all of that is possible under the notion that only consciousness exists. Consciousness can imagine infinite different worlds with infinite different laws and with infinte different relative truths. However that whole notion is existentially limited to consciousness, because the claim is that thats the only actual thing thats real and everything else is just imagined. So there is a difference between being able to imagine non-absolute or in other words, being able to imagine infinite different grounds for existence vs creating worlds that actually existentially different from each other. Im not talking about imagining that those lines between those worlds exist, I mean that they actually different ontologically, meaning different on the being level. In other words, they cannot be traced back to consciousness, they are actually built ontologically different from each other. In the 'consciousness is the only thing that exists' things being ontologically other than consciousness is impossible - and thats an existential limitation. That would also paradoxically be an existential limitation, that impossibility can only be imagined and that it can't actually exist.

@Nemra Most of your arguments are applicable to atheists as well - basically to most people in general (some of your arguments even applicable to people here who claim they are awake/enlightened) I can find certain religious people who questioned metaphysics more and have inquired / have gone down more thought paths in good faith with honesty and with incredible rigor than what you probably will question and inquire in your entire life. Btw I dont know why some people still pretend here that they care about questioning everything ( I specifically mean people who claim to be awake/enlightened). People who claim to be awakened or enlightened will tell you that it is a limited tool and probably wont get you to the end result. Its basically just used as a rhetoric tool when it is convenient and dropped immediately when they are cornered themselves.

You can create any kind of sentence that has a truth value and the negation of that sentence can be true at the same time. For example saying that "Consciousness is the only thing that exists" and "Consciousness is not the only thing that exists" can both be true at the same time if you go outside of classical logic. Literally everything becomes possible without any constrains