zurew

No, it doesnt have to be based on that - it can be based on relying on a revelation from an entity that is all knowing and all good and all powerful (one that provides accurate information with 100% certainty, since he is all knowing, and one that can pull off so that you cant misinterpret his missage - since he is all powerful and one that who won't lie to you since he is all good) and one that asserts that only christianity is true and your view is false. So how do you exactly have any upperhand vs them?

Is that a summary done by AI or an article ?

That sounds like something that makes your position even more shaky. How can you know that your interpretation of awakening is accurate and that you haven't misinterpreted it or drawn false conclusions from it?

But there is no possibility that you are wrong and that they are right about you being wrong.

The whole point of that example is to outline this problem - you choose a random method that you can use to gather info about metaphysics,epistemology etc and then you take whatever info you gather by the use of that method to be infallbile (100% accurate and you cant be wrong about it) and the gathered info includes the claim that all other views except the one that is mentioned are incoherent. The obvious problem is if person A claims that I need to use method Y and if person B claims that I need to use method Z and the information gathered by method Y contradicts the information that I gathered by method Z - then how do I know which one is actually correct? Both of them claims that the info that I gathered by the use of the method is infallible and both method provides the claim that all other views (except the one that they mention) are incoherent. Now change method Y to direct consciousness and change the view provided by method Y to your view and change method Z to revelation and change the view provided by method Z to Christianity. And then tell me how you saying to just use direct consciousness gets around the problem I outlined above.

Yeah this is the part where you think you can choose the method by which you want to substantiate a given claim. You think you can categorically rule out all other views with awakening. Still waiting for your response to the example where Chrisitans claiming that by the use of revelation they realized that only the christian view is coherent and all others (including yours - are incoherent).

If by defense you mean asserting a claim to be true over and over again, and then ignoring all the challenges and pretending as if you would have successfully responded to them, then sure. I have no clue why you respond "no" to that, and agree with them when it directly contradicts your view (the example claims that only the christian view is coherent). And then I guess the answer is that the only Christians who had a revelation are the ones who agree with you, and the ones who disagree with your view are the ones who must be wrong about them having revelation. So we can conveniently ignore all Christians who claim to have had a revelation and also claim that only the christian worldview is coherent. (categorically ruling out all other views - including yours) Can you tell me the relevance in difference? The subject/object that the reasoning is applied to is irrelevant , because the exact same issues come up - if you think otherwise, explain it to me how changing the subject of the example breakes the point I try to make there.

Or if you really want to stick with the mirror example , a more correct representation would be this: You making a claim that "If you look in the mirror, you’ll see your reflection” and you also saying that "its impossible for you to be wrong about it". Can you recognize what burden of proof you put on yourself between the claim where you dont add the "its impossible for you to be wrong about it" and between the claim where you add that part? In the instance where its not impossible for me to be wrong about it - Im more than okay with just looking in the mirror to check your claim, in the instance where you add "its impossible for you to be wrong about it", me looking in the mirror is nowhere near sufficient to substantiate the claim.

You don't need to prove anything to me, the discussion is not about that, the discussion is about recognizing and being honest about what your claim entails and and what kind of burden you take on yourself when you state your claim. The very moment you make a logical necessity claim, you take on the burden to subtantiate it by showing the contradiction and you cant get around it by appealing to a different method ,that would be way too convenient. Its not like you can just randomly pick and choose what kind of method you want to use to substantiate your claim. Notice, that you would never ever accept the idea from presups that "all views are incoherent except Christianity and the way to substantiate this claim is by revelation" - you would probably say "no dude, revelation as a method isn't sufficient to substantiate that claim!" So there is a big disconnect and confusion around what can substantiate your claim. --- Yes, given your mirror example , the claim that I will see my reflection can be properly substantiated by the move of me looking in the mirror. I know by that example you want to imply that I want to place some kind of unfair burden on you, but what you don't understand is that you categorically put it on yourself and you can't get around it. (no one is forcing you to make claims and put on burden on yourself that you cant substantiate) A more accurate representation would be saying something like: an infinite book example - You saying that if I look into book A, I will get answers to all of my questions and using the method of 'looking into book A' is an infallible method so I can trust 100% all the answers that I will find in it. And one of Book A's claim is that all other books are wrong (so I go with that, and conclude that all other books are inaccurate - categorically ruling out an infinite number of other books). Then a presup comes along and tells me to use the method of 'looking into book B', and that method is infallible and I can trust with 100% certainty all the answers that I find in that book. Book B also tells me that all other books except Book B are all inaccurate, so I go with that and I categorically rule out an infinite number of others books (including book A) Can you recognize why you asserting the claim that using the method of "looking into book A" isn't responding to the issue and doesn't solve anything? Again this pressuposes a bunch of things already and this isn't responding to the problems that I brought up. Presups can do the same thing - "Just have revelation and your question will be answered". So why think that the answers that are realized during awakening are 100% accurate? You would ask the exact same question to presups "Why think that the answers that you got from revelation are 100% accurate?" And I will state again - the only reason why im pressing you on this is because of the burden that you place on yourself. I wouldn't play this level of skeptic if you would have just said "my view seems to be the most reasonable one, but I dont think that any other view would be logically impossible" - I would have no issue with that, I would still investigate the view, but you want to categorically rule out all other views and then you don't want to defend it.

Haha, I feel your pain. I don't know why you waste your time here. There are other places, where you can have much higher quality conversations, where people know more about philosophy and nutrition and they can actually make sense of the papers and they know what the evidence hierarchy is about.

Im sure you would be so convinced if 20 firsthand accounts of vegans were come out saying how great they feel after changing their diet to a vegan diet and that they have completely great health results and they have been on a vegan diet for the last 20 years. You surely wouldnt pivot to saying and make a 1000 excuses that we need to be nuanced about it and that it must have been other factors other than the vegan diet (that made these people more healthy )and would imply that it wouldnt work for other people. - you would immedately ditch this "I need first hand accounts" criteria. I don't understand how can you not see how incredibly lost you are in this conversation. You dont have any basics ready to even begin to have a conversation on nutrition or on ethics. If we were to run consistency checks on your values you would crumble left and right and dodge all questions like you did in this thread already. its beyond cringe and embarassing to see you even attempting to make any criticism on any of this.

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.