DocWatts

The difference between the Left wing and Right wing critiques of globalization is the difference between critiqueing something from Below rather than from Above. Those critiquing from Below (ie Right wing critiques of globalism in this instance) will tend to misconstrue sociological critique that's rooted in systems theory as a Conspiracy Theory, simply because they don't understand the former. It's really not all that different from the ways that the Right wing misunderstands something like Critical Race Theory, which they misconstrue as a plot by Leftists to make white people feel bad about their history and culture, versus what it really is (I'd a systems level theory of structural inequality, where whether or not individuals are personally racist is entirely besides the point).

Well, there's a portion of his supporters that are willing to start a Civil War on his behalf.....

Looks like the Trump's passports were seized by the FBI in the raid, which is generally something that happens when a suspect is considered a flight risk. Which naturally leads to asking what form will the inevitable violence from Trump's followers will take when their leader is formally charged.

The normalization of political violence as a symptom of fascism is a troubling sign of a potential civil conflict in our future. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/12/fbi-attacker-trump-capitol-riot-truth-social https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2022/08/14/phoenix-fbi-trump-supporters-armed-mar-a-lago-search-vpx.cnn

While what they were able to pass is far less than what we were hoping for with the far more ambitious $2T Build Back Better plan, all due credit for still being able to get a sizable Climate Change bill passed considering the obstacles that Democrats are facing in getting any major legislation passed with a razor thin majority that includes two conservative Senators with ties to the fossil fuel industry.

The selfishness and utter disregard of any underlying principles of the MAGA crowd can be quite clearly seen in the whiplash of these folks going from 'back the Blue' to 'defund the FBI' in a heartbeat when it's someone they're simping for who's implicated. "Law and order for thee, not for me."

Bump. Bernardo Kastrup does a great job dismantling panpsychism. The biggest issue with panpsychism (other than using a dualistic reduction base) is the so called 'combination problem', which is the problem of how atomistic units of consciousness are somehow able to combine into the unified consiousness that we inhabit in our direct experience. Kastrup correctly points out that the is as much of a crippling issue for panpsychism as the problem of how consiousness can arise out of non conscious matter, and in this regard panpsychism is little better than the materialist paradigm it's trying to supplant.

Trump's sycophants know full well that one of the most powerful people on the planet has innumerable tools at his disposal to make sure that he can't be held accountable for his actions, not the least of which being a cucked Republican Party that's actively working to kill any investigation into Trump's crimes because it implicates them. And in any case they don't apply that impossibly high bar of evidence towards accusations aimed at their political opponents such as Hilary Clinton or Biden. But this is how Cults tend to operate, so nothing unexpected there. The egoicly gratifying empowerment narrative they get from a charismatic person attacking their imagined enemies overrides any considerations of what might be good for the country (if that's even given any consideration at all).

It will be interesting to see Trump's Cult bend themselves into pretzels to hand wave away a former president stealing highly classified nuclear weapons documents. The fact that a small handful of these folks somehow make their way to a conscious politics forum is baffling... As to Trump, the Rosenbergs were put to death in the 50s for nuclear espionage. I don't support the death penalty, but if ever there was a case where it could be justified it's that of a former head of State selling (or intended to commit blackmail with) highly classified documents about weapons that could literally end civilization.

Andrew Yang also made many of these same points, and apologies for being blunt but it's a bad political take. Anyone who would frame this as a politicalization of the FBI is almost certainly already immersed within a far-right echo chamber. (Not to mention that the head of the FBI who signed off on this was appointed by Trump). Similiar to how if you believe that the 2020 election was stolen or that Jan 6 was a false flag carried out by antifa you're certainly not a centrist or even a "moderate" conservative. Not investigating federal crimes and breaches of national security out of concern for the sensibilities of a radicalized political faction within the country sets a terrible precedent that having a radicalized political base places you above the law.

Former presidents arent supposed to be above the law. Raiding a house to gather evidence for an investigation of someone who committed treason against the United States by orchestrating an attempted coup is an appropriate use of the FBI, despite what Trump's cult would have you believe. *** Apparently what the FBI is searching for are classified national security documents that Trump wasn't supposed to have with him when he left office, and that are illegal for him to be in personal possession of.

I guess I'll be the odd one out and posit some of the limitations I've noticed with Spiral Dynamics, which have less to do with the model itself and more to do with how easy it is to misuse. Spiral Dynamics is best used as a sociological model which maps out the dialectics behind meta-paradigms shifts within human societies. It really shouldn't be used as a model of personal development. Precisely because Spiral Dynamics is a meta model it becomes very easy to apply it in a reductionist way as a form of sociological bypassing that explains away its subject matter. In this way it's not all that dissimiliar to taking the insights of someone like Marx into a class reductionism that's used to explain away multi-faceted problems.

While I don't have a link handy, I do recall Ken Wilber more or less admitting that he had developed a shadow around SD-Green from his time in academia, stemming from the uphill battle he had in getting his ideas to be taken seriously in an environment that was still paradigm locked to post-modernism. So I would take Wilber's predictions and proclamations around Green with a grain of salt due to his biases in this area.

Just to give people who may not be aware of the direction that the States is headed in, there were recently Votes held in the US House of Representatives to codify gay marriage, the right to access birth control, and the right to interracial marriage into Law. An all three of these, the Republican Party overwhelming voted NO. No to gay marriage. No to birth control. And no to interracial marriage... In 2022. People here can sense the direction that the wind is blowing, and are rightly frightened about the prospect of US democracy collapsing. A recent poll said that roughly half of the US thinks a Civil War is likely in the near future. It's a bad time to be living in America, and anyone who tells you otherwise either has thier head buried in the sand, or has some sympathies towards fascism.

In my case, I can list some of the books which deepened my understanding of epistomology, and thus helped me break away from the Materialist paradigm: The View From Nowhere - Thomas Nagel The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn The Embodied Mind - Evan Thompson, Fransisco Varella, and Elenore Rosch Sex, Ecology, Spirituality - Ken Wilber Science Ideated - Bernardo Kastrup Being and Time - Martin Heidegger

They were arrested for blocking a street during a protest in front of the Supreme Court

Proud to say that the representative for my district was at that protest and among those which were arrested. The aging and out of touch leadership of the Democratic Party needs to be challenged, because 'business as usual' isn't going to cut it when US democracy is on the verge of collapse against a rising tide of fascism.

I think it's safe to assume that we're in agreement about the problems with the physicalist paradigm; namely that that the mental isn't reducible to the physical. That said, while forms of objective Idealism that use consciousness as its reduction base are one alternative, a form of dual-aspect monism which treats mind and matter as dual aspects of something more fundamental is another (for example Whiteheads's process-relational ontology). For my part I fall squarely in the camp of agnosticism between the latter two options. Moving away from a flawed and outdated paradigm (physicalism) is of more importance than which of these more promising alternatives is more correct, imho.

The United States needs to be a functioning democracy before it has any realistic chance of addressing Climate Change, or any other systemic issue for that matter. Which means that democratization politics needs to be prioritized before any other issues facing the country can realistically be addressed. Which in actionable terms means restoring the Voting Rights Act, ending gerrymandering, major overhauls to how the Supreme Court functions, abolishing the Electoral College, publicly funded elections, removing corporate personhood, Statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, and disrupting the right wing radicalization pipeline which is fueling the mainstreaming of fascism. Of course all of this is easier said than done, and won't happen without widespread political engagement. My fear is that this won't happen until conditions imposed by a far right reactionary regime become so bad that life becomes unbearable for a large portion of the country.

It's not at all clear that it's even possible to build an artificial general intelligence using machines that operate on deterministic, context free logic. So pondering whether artificial intelligence could be conscious is a bit premature at this stage, as it presupposes that we could even build a machine intelligent enough for that question to make sense.

Well the most common version of the Self that the majority of people subscribe to in the West is that of the Transcendental-Ego Self. Namely that a seperate 'Self' exists apart from the context you inhabit and apart from the continuity of your experiences. While this is most easily encapsulated in the idea of a Soul, this has become such a central part of our culture that a completely secularized version of this is accepted by many people. And not just in the West, the transcendental ego self is also central to metaphysical systems that believe in reincarnation (such as Hinduism). A good litmus test to see if you subscribe to this notion of a Transcendental Ego is to try and imagine being born in a completely time and place. And then contemplate if that person would be 'you', or a completely different person. The other well trod perspective is that instead of an enduring transcendental ego self, the Self has no independent ground apart from it's embodied context and the continuity of experience. This is the perspective of 'no-self' Buddhism, but has also popped up at times in the writings of certain Western philosophers (such as David Hume). For myself, the latter perspective seems more coherent.

Correct. But the deeper point is that any concept of Self is going to be an abstraction built upon axiomatic metaphysical assumptions. Now that's not at all to say that there are not ways of determining how apt a particular abstraction is, by examining how well it allows us to make sense of our experience. The map is not the territory, but that doesn't mean that map isn't extremely useful. Correct, and this is an aspect of the embodied nature of our minds that I was describing earlier. What I was contrasting embodiment with are mistaken Enlightenment era notions that there's a clear boundary between our minds and our bodies, and our minds and our environment. The reason that this is important is because Enlightenment Era assumptions which about what a 'Self' is are still present in the materialist paradigm despite being shown to be untenable. The notion that the mind is a biological version of a digital computer is a good example of a paradigm with with the underlying assumption of a disembodied mind. While Freud and Jung do emphasize that there are important aspects of mind that exist outside of conscious awareness, the subconscious is still something that can in principle be accessed through conscious awareness (for example through the use psychoanalysis or the examination of dreams). This is a far cry from the unconscious (rather than subconscious) processes posited by cognitive science, where there's no way that much of what goes on in our minds could ever in principle be made available to conscious awareness (for example the complex mental activity that goes on when you move your arm to catch a ball).

To answer what this abstraction that we call the 'Self' actually entails, it's critical to unpack the epistemic and ontological assumptions about the Self tend to be left unexamined (in the West at least). The idea that everything in the mind must (at least in principle) be able to formalized as a collection of context free facts that can (again, at least in principle) be made explicit, is a mistaken epistemic assumption that stretches back to the beginnings of Western philosophy. And yet somehow these assumptions still linger on despite the illusion of a disembodied and dis-worlded mind being thoroughly discredited by both cognitive science and from penetrating philosophical critique from the likes of Heidegger and Wittgenstein. The primary mistake is the idea that the mind (which we equate to our sense of self) can be disembodied and disembedded from our physical bodies and from the world. With the reframing that comes from making this assumption explicit, the unconscious processes that make awareness possible are more properly understood as an aspect of our embodiment. While the hard and fast decision between the conscious awareness and unconscious processes can be useful for some purposes, at the end of the day the two and interlinked and interdependent. And because the mind can't be seperated from the embodied context which makes conscious awareness possible, it makes little sense to exclude conscious processes from the construct that is the Self.

If you are able to, consider donating your time or money to one of the organizations that's fighting this in the legal system, and providing relief to people who are being negativity impacted by these rulings. A few good organizations to consider donating to: The ACLU OxFam National Network of Abortion Funds While 'just voting' on its own is not enough, doing whatever you can to ensure that everyone you know comes out to vote in the mid-term elections will make it more difficult for Republicans to turn the country into a christo-fascist theocracy. For the time being the battle for the continuance of democracy will be fought at the States, so become knowledge about local politics Beyond that, some sort of large scale civil disobedience that leads to civil disruption is one of the few tools we have, but short of a general strike it's not clear how that would materialize. If you live in an urban area, be prepared to defend your community and neighbors from fascist gangs like the Proud Boys and Patriot Front, since local law enforcement is often sympathetic to these groups and not interested in protecting citizens from them. Consider firearm ownsership, since if there's some sort of civil strife (ala a modern version of Bleeding Kansas) it would be better if fascists weren't the only ones who managed to arm themselves. And as Uvalde horrifically demonstrated, the police are not under any legal obligation to protect anyone.

@UnbornTao I suppose that depends on where you're at, since there's many different entry points depending on what your pre-existing Frame of Reference happens to be. If you want to learn more about how paradigms work, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a great starting point that will teach you some epistomology, and is a fairly accessible read. For another fairly accessible book that deals with epistomology, Lakoff and Johnson wrote a book called Metaphors We Live By which deals with how our embodiment frames the ways in we learn about and interact with the world. If you already have a basic understanding of how paradigms work and at least some familiarity with meditative practices, you may find The Embodied Mind to be highly helpful. I found it useful primarily as a way to reframe how I would approach meta-theories. While the focus of the work is cognitive science, the basic idea is broad enough to apply to other meta-paradigms. If you're curious enough to put in the work for a challenging but very rewarding read, Heidegger's Being and Time is probably the most useful book on epistomology I've come across. But it's also very, very challenging, and not the sort of thing one can jump into without a good grasp of philosophy.