zurew

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?

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.

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?

@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.

Yep and thats why I jumped in, and I don't think that you have answered any of those questions in this thread that I asked above. The whole point of this discussion was to see how strong the line is between religion and spirituality and you tried to make arguments to make that line thicker and we pushed back to show that that line is much thinner that most people here think. Most attempts to differentiate between the two failed, because most of those things are applicable to spiritual people as well. The fact of the matter is that a lot of people here try to make that line thicker because they think they are more intelligent or more conscious than religious people (this is another thing that most of you probably picked up unconsciously from Leo, without contemplating any of these things yourselves). Its basically seem to be motivated reasoning to feel superior or better without acknowledgeing that most of those criticisms are applicable to the approach that you guys use as well.

@TheSelf Im not sure im tracking whats our disagreement about right now. Do you try to say, that having beliefs about awakening and methods regarding awakening doesn't necessarily mean that that person is religious? Or in other words, do you try to communicate, that just because someone has beliefs about awakening and methods regarding awakening, it doesn't mean that that person can't be categorized as a seeker or spiritual person? Also are you trying to say that you differentiate between religious and spiritual beliefs and if so, my question would be how?

One another thing that might be worth to clear up (this is for everyone in the thread who wants to engage with this) How do you differentiate between belief, knowledge and direct experience? (assuming you differentiate at all)

Well regarding that - Imagine you are completely agnostic about what can elevate your thirst (meaning , you are not giving any method any more weight compared to other methods). In that scenario it would mean, that you have an infinite number of methods to choose from and you will choose completely randomly from that infinite set of methods, because you have no belief at all what has a higher chance of solving the problem. I don't thnk this maps onto what most spiritual people or seekers are. They follow a very clear pattern of behaviour and they start trying out certain methods over others.

@TheSelf okay, so would you define the seeker or the spiritual person as a completely agnostic person (who doesn't have any beliefs at all regarding awakening, and regarding what methods will produce awakening) ?

I didn't say that you are religious, I also didnt say that you said that I have to believe it. All I tried to say is that the seeker has certain beliefs too - The seeker has the belief that there is such a thing as awakening, the seeker also has the belief that certain methods can get him to awakening and awakening doesn't happen completely randomly. You retrospectively know. When you started as a seeker you had to have some faith in the method , otherwise you wouldn't have done it. No you arent joining his religion and no one is claiming that. No one said that teaching methods is a sufficient criteria alone for someone to be a religious leader/figure. All that was pointed out is that one of your differentiation regarding spiritual and religious people doesn't seem to work (specifically the one where one have faith in the methods/techniques). Responding to the drawing analogy - when you start, you have no idea what method will actually teach you how to draw. All you have is a master who can demonstrate that he can draw, but you have no knowledge whether the techniques that he teaches will get you there or not.

Okay, so your take is that certain methods can help one or push one to get there. How do you know that thats the case, epistemically speaking? --- Just to be clear (Im not suggesting that you are wrong), the reason why I ask is because that take seem to be a belief (the same way religious people have beliefs about what method or technique will produce or can help you the best to have an awakening). So that would be a similarity between religious and spiritual people, unless you can provide a symmetry breaker (differentiate the two in a relevant way) For the sake of understanding this kind of language in a more precise manner - Can you become directly conscious of things that are not absolute? So for example, would you use that language to describe causal events like "I became directly conscious of what healed my relationship with my family members or I became directly conscious of what is the cure for a specific illness".

So basically you use it as - becoming conscious of something. @TheSelf Do you think there is any relationship between a method (like praying or meditation or doing yoga or doing psychedelics or doing breathwork or anything else) and awakening? In other words, do you think that doing certain methods will elevate the chance of awakening or awakening is completely random and detached from all causal relations?

Whats the difference between experience and direct experience?

Yeah I think now I know what you are refering to when you say "infinity". When it comes to that kind of description though, that entails literally everything (which means all non contradictions and all contradictions and all non paradoxes and all paradoxes at the same time) - and even this framing is bad for it. Its much more paradoxical in nature than some of the people here might think. Whatever framing or nature you describe to it - it immediately falls apart .Even the idea to think about it in terms of inclusion and exclusion is wrong and limited. Even to say that it is the thing that includes everything - is not it. Even to say that it is the thing that includes , excludes everything at the same time - is not it. Saying that it is limitless is not it. Saying that it is limited is not it. Saying that it is limitless and limited at the same time is not it. Even calling it non-dual is limited and wrong (cause non duality excludes duality). It is nondual and dual and every other possible thing that we can think of and can't think of at the same time - and more.

I want to respond to this, even though I know you replied to another guy. To be clear, Im not trying to defend his idea of spirituality or God, Im specifically trying to respond to the infinity claim. (If you have a different definition of infinite compared to what Im outlining down here, then Im sorry, cause I will probably waste your time.) In mathematics you can find claims about bigger and smaller infinities. Think of it this way: You can have a set of natural numbers that will contain numbers starting from 0 to infinite. However that set is smaller compared to the set of integers (which includes negatives as well). And that set is smaller than the set of rational numbers. Another way to talk about it - is by invoking a coordinate system: We can start with only using one axis (x). That one axis can contain numbers from - infinite to + infinite. However, we can add 1 more dimension (axis) to it and it will contain infinitely more coodinates. And then we can add one more axis to it and that will be bigger compared to the 2 dimensional one. And after all that, we can add infinitely more axis to it. - in other words, even though a 2 dimensional coordiante system can contain an infinite amount of coodinates, it still cant contain as many as a 3 or more dimensional coordinate system could.