DocWatts

If you're looking for high consciousness sci-fi / fantasy, I'd highly recommend Ursula K Le Guinn If you're looking for sword fights you won't find it in her work, but if using fantasy as a unique lense to explore sociological and philosophical ideas, Le Guinn is one of the best.

You might also appreciate John Vervaeke's Awakening From the Meaning Crisis series on YouTube, he talks quite extensively about mystical experiences from a philosophical and scientific perspective (without taking a reductionist approach to these experiences). Best explanatory content I've seen for this sort of thing, as he strikes a nice balance between taking an analytic explanatory approach while not trying to reduce these experiences in a way that robs them of their meaning.

Also, as far as books that engage with ontological and epistemological questions in a relevant and accessible way (ie basically the opposite of most academic philosophy), The Structures of Scientific Revolutions would be the first book I would recommend to someone. In a similar vein, Science Ideated by Bernardo Kastrup is also another good recommendation.

@melontonin You're welcome! I'm actually quite familiar with Thomas Kuhn's most well known work, which is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. What Kuhn was trying to do was correct common misconceptions of how science is normally understood among the public. Foremost among these misconceptions is the idea that the endeavour of science consists of an accumulation of facts and theories towards 'Truth', similiar to how a construction worker might lay down bricks to build a house. Rather, the way that Kuhn describes science is more akin to a dialectic of shifting and incommensurable paradigms. These paradigms govern the ontological and epistemological assumptions behind how a field of science is carried out. What is and isn't considered 'scientific' and relevant to a particular field is derived from these assumptions. For example, the origin of the physical universe wasn't always considered a 'scientific' question, until emperical evidence for the Big Bang forced a shift in to a new paradigm. Kuhn also spends a good deal of time articulating a distinction between 'normal' and 'extraordinary' science. 'Normal' science describes the majority of scientific research, and is akin to puzzle solving. It's under this modality that paradigms get articulated, methodologies get refined, and measurements become more precise and useful. What drives a move in to a new paradigm, and what makes progress in science possible in the first place, are the emergence of scientific crisises. Some emperical observations will tend to emerge that the prevailing paradigm is unable to account for (for example Ptolemaic astronomy being unable to account for the movement of the planets, causing headaches for those trying to develop an accurate calenders). Or more broadly, the current paradigm is faced with intractable problems that it's unable account for. When this happens, it becomes possible for 'Extraordinary' science to emerge which makes room to forge a new paradigm. This part is almost always carried out either by young scientists or scientists new to a particular field, and this is because they've yet to be fully indoctrinated into the prevailing ontological and epistemological assumptions of the old paradigm. The rest of the field either dies off from old age,or eventually converts to the new paradigm once it's demonstrated that it can solve intractable problems that the old paradigm couldn't account for. Anyways, that's more of less the gist of it. Hope this helps!

Since there doesn't exist a 'neutral' ontological paradigm to evaluate metaphysics from, the answer is no, essentially. Ontological assumptions aren't necessarily a bad thing, it's just important to be aware of the assumptions you're using and factor that in to one's epistemology. If anything, one's a-priori assumptions should be made as explicit as possible. It's when oncological assumptions are implicit that they're covered up and forgotten, and it's in those scenarios where they're more likely to lead us to epistemological errors. The philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote quite extensively on this, with his explorations in to the meaning of Being. Even a seemingly obvious and self demonstrating statement such as "I think therefore I am" contains ontological assumptions, since it assumes the meaning of 'I am' is well understood and obvious. In actuality, a deeper exploration reveals that there are a ton of ontological assumptions baked in to traditional Western conceptions of Being. He takes a deep dive in to all of this in his magnum opus Being and Time. I wouldn't necessarily recommend picking it up if you're not used to reading academic philosophy, but fortunately there exist books and videos to make Heidegger's philosophy much more accessible. I found the following to be quite helpful: https://www.amazon.com/Heidegger-Introduction-Richard-Polt/dp/0801485649

Just some context and clarification about more men living with their parents than with romantic partners: The median rent in the US is around $1100 a month, and it's not uncommon for landlords to require someone make three times that per month to get approved for a lease. If a person is working a full time job, that would amount to around $30 an hour before taxes. Federal minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour, and a the national median wage is around $17 an hour. Admittedly this is a bit of an oversimplification, but it should hardly be surprising that a growing number of people are living with their parents well in to thier 20s and even 30s when those are the prevailing economic circumstances. Lest we overlook the obvious, building a mature relationship with a partner where moving in together and getting married are a realistic possiblity typically requires some degree of financial independence as a prerequisite.

The way I think about the issue of Values, is to try and consider the foundations upon which my schema of Reality is constructed and cultivated. For me, it can boil down to a small number of baseline principles that have a wide degree of applicability. (1) Compassion - Compassion wins over empathy in my book, because empathy biases us. For example we have a much easier time empathizing with someone who looks and behaves as we do, and a much more difficult time doing so with someone who has very different values or life experiences. Empathy can also lead to projecting your life experiences and beliefs on to others. (2) Dignity - Both myself and others are worthy of self-respect. The primary purpose of social structures should be to make it possible for individuals and communities to live a dignified life. (3) Contemplation - One's meaning making apparatus should be cultivated over a lifetime. Attitudes and beliefs should be scrutinized and deconstructed. This also includes cultivating one's ability to adopt new perspectives. Learning should be a lifelong process.

Identifying it as a matter of Care is the core of it. The majority of human beings haven't developed to the point that the exploitation of other human beings is a matter of serious concern if it's not happening directly in front of them, so it's not surprising that concern for non-human animals isn't even on the radar for most folks. To get to that point, someone has to develop where Care is extended to beings that one has no investment in. That's a big ask for most people, as it involves deconstructing the sorts of ego-defense mechanisms that allow us to benefit from the exploitation of others without paying the emotional and spiritual costs that that entails. Societal structures puts the suffering and exploitation that make contemporary consumer society possible behind high walls, where one has to go out of their way and be highly motivated to even begin grappling with these sorts of ethical concerns in a serious way. Yet I suspect that even if somehow visiting a factory farm was a requirement for being 'allowed' to consume meat, even in this scenario most people would continue to do so because it's not enough just to show people things, there has to be an Internal Transformation for any real change.

I take a Harm Reduction approach myself. In that my approach has been to adopt a diet that's something like %98 vegetarian and %75 vegan. Basically I don't buy animal products when I purchase groceries and will always order vegetarian or vegan when I'm at a restaurant if that's an option (vegetarian meals are almost always an option, vegan options tend to be more limited). That said, most of my social relationships are with friends and family who aren't vegetarian or vegan, so rather than ask for special preparations on my account or decline to attend I will occasionally eat meat if I'm in a social situation where a meal is being served.

Insofar as as those pov's are having a societal impact, I would say we should seek to understand those perspectives. Note that this doesn't necessarily mean empathizing with them, as the vast majority of human beings who aren't white supremacists won't to be able to empathize with a neo-Nazi. If societies are creating large numbers of hateful and alienated people, it behooves to understand why that's happening. I'll likely never be able to empathize with someone who lynches another human being, but I also understand that had I been born in to a very different context with different social conditioning, that could have been me. As far as caring about these perspectives, while most of the time care has a positive connotation, caring also can mean taking something seriously while disapproving of it.

I'd highly recommend John Vervaeke's Awakening From the Meaning Crisis

Long posts are fine, but basic etiquette on a forum should include breaking lengthy posts in to paragraphs (of probably no more than 4 to 6 sentences) separated by line breaks. Run-on sentences where someone has to scroll down on the page before reaching the end of the sentence should always be avoided. If someone's Forum posts are looking like a page ripped out of Finnegan's Wake, that's a good indication that whatever salient point they were trying to make has been completely buried.

Via Hanzi Frienacht (aka Daniel Görtz and Emil Ejner Friis) : https://medium.com/@hanzifreinacht/10-action-points-on-russia-ukraine-984cc1e4f39b "Avoid a nuclear war — by helping Russia to save face! In the end, it is true that: Russia has a ten times stronger military than Ukraine (at least on paper). The Russian government (and the apparatus it relies upon and shares interests with) will be very desperate to not back down. Other countries are unlikely to directly intervene. Putin is threatening us with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Thus, a complete military victory by Ukraine is, after all, unlikely. Even with crowdsourced support around the world, even with a morale boost of the Ukrainians unparalleled in contemporary history (they know the whole world is watching them, and that they’re rocking our socks off; can you think of a better genesis of national cohesion and patriotic identity?), even with Russian logistical fiascos, even with collapsing public support for the government in Russia, it is a David’s fight against Goliath. In fairy tales, David always wins. In reality, this is less often the case. It is probably true, as Yuval Noah Harari argues (also in The Guardian) that Putin has already lost the war in the larger scheme of things — politically speaking. But there is little comfort in that realization alone. It still means military defeat for Ukraine, a prolonged conflict, possibly bloody guerilla warfare, and an increasingly desperate Russian government — increasingly likely to “lose it” and start a nuclear war. When a house of cards collapses, when lies are exposed, when the posers accidentally reveal their underlying fear and weakness, it’s just never a pretty sight. Where does this leave us? Well, we might, again, learn from history. When the Soviet Union attacked Finland in 1939–40, in the so-called Winter War, the USSR suffered massive and humiliating losses because of the sheer logistical catastrophe of the operation. Finnish soldiers, camouflaged, shot the Russians as they tumbled slowly through the thick snow in the dense Finnish forests. In my family, we remember Eifel, a Finnish neighbor in the 1980s who fought in that war. More than four decades later, he literally cried at the thought of how many men he had mowed down. David versus Goliath was not pretty, even when David won. What happened with the Winter War then? In fact, the Russians signed a peace treaty and were handed some new territories. On paper, in theory, in their own narrative, “they had won”. They had conquered new territory. It’s the basic thing that sociologists of everyday interaction teach us: We all need to save face. My take on this is, thus, to try to help Putin and his administration save face by conceding some territories to Russia. It’s not like Donetsk and Luhansk or Crimea will be nice places for Russians and Ukrainians to live together after all of this is over either way. So, make a compromise: Hand Crimea and perhaps Donbas (Donetsk, Luhansk) to Russia. And open the canal down to Crimea, so that Russia can keep Crimea under tolerable conditions."

Just heard that McDonald's is closing down all of its locations throughout Russia, and that Starbucks is doing so as well.

Beat me to it. Yes Russia has legitimate security concerns that are worth taking the time to and effort to understand, but many (though not all) of these security concerns are a self fulfilling prophecy through it's own aggressive actions towards its neighbors. In this way, the self fulfilling nature of its security concerns aren't so different from a country like the United States, whose short sighted foreign policy decisions creates enemies throughout the world.

Vaush (correctly, in my view) calling out a blindspot for some on the Left.

@Carl-Richard I can definitely tell she has some pretty substantial meta-level awareness. I just think she could have articulated the groundwork of her schema better than she did, before hitting the ground running by jumping in to categorizion. Leo spent quite a bit of time laying out this groundwork for Spiral Dynamics and Suzanne Cook Greuter's model, and I feel that it was missing here. Not like people with a construct aware meta-perspective don't have blindspots

Listening to this right now. My impressions so far are that this is someone who's probably familiar with developmental Stage models, but perhaps hasn't embodied an understanding of thier inherent limitations. Models are only useful insofar as they provide a coherent framework for making what is complex or hidden accessible to productive inquiry. Spiral Dynamics does this by grounding its model in a dialectic framework that's tied to shifting survival needs, where there's an explanatory mechanism behind why each Stage is qualitatively distinct from the others. Unfortunately she doesn't seem to provide a good justification for why the model she's using is a useful schema for understanding the complexities of human development. Without grounding her model in an underlying explanatory mechanism, and without articulating why it makes sense to categorize development in the manner she does, the whole thing ends up feeling a bit arbitrary.

The West really dropped the ball after the fall of the Soviet Union by not offering them the equivalent of a Marshal Plan, and helping with the transition to a democracy. Instead, multinationals were given free reign to practice Disaster Capitalism in Russia, and one can't help but see the current situation as a direct consequence of the West's greedy and short sighted behavior.

That's a fair point, it was never my contention that Russia doesn't have legitimate security concerns about NATO expanding eastward. Short of retracting NATO membership from its Easternmost members, I'm not sure what's to be done short of not expanding NATO any further towards Russia's borders. Yet at the same time the attractors in the situation would likely be the same even if NATO's borders were the same as they were 25 years ago, due to the power imbalances at play. Assuming the internal dynamics between Russia and the US still played out the same way in that scenario, the two hegemonic power blocks would still have mutually incompatible long term goals. Hell, Russia's role as a oligarchic petrol state alone would likely cause it to resist efforts to combat climate change, if nothing else.

This dynamic seems less like something NATO went out of its way to cultivate, and far more due to Russia losing its captive satellite states after the USSR broke apart. Back during the Cold War NATO and the Soviet block had somewhat comparable populations (600 million vs 400 million), but that was was only due to compelling half of Europe to join the Soviet Bloc against their will. Whatever semblance of a balance of power that may have existed during the Cold War was lost when Eastern Europe gained its independence. This seems much more a consequence of Russia being in a much weaker strategic position after the USSR broke up, than due to the structure of NATO. It seems that th we dynamics would have been in place even if NATO didn't expand eastward (though I recognize that this exacerbated Russia's security concerns). Is there something I'm missing?

@Leo Gura Any plans to make a video (or a vlog) about current events in Russia?

Brings to mind bad takes I routinely hear for someone like Hitler, where the analysis stops and ends at calling him Evil, without attempting to understand the socio-ideological context that motivated Hitler to do the things that he did. Jordy P had a really bad take along these lines, if I recall. I don't understand why it's so hard to grok that people can (and often do) horrific things for sober, rational reasons. Reasons that are defined by the rules of the 'Game' that they're engaged in, which is really just another way of referencing the banality of evil. To take another example that deserves to be more well known, it explains why someone like King Leopold II of Belgium could sleep soundly at night despite being responsible for 10 million deaths in the Congo. After all he wasn't setting out to commit a genocide bigger than the Holocaust, he just wanted to make boatloads of money under the rules of the game of Capitalism.

What embracing Russia would actually entail would be a greater degree of economic and political integration with Europe. This would almost certainly require some degree of democratization from within Russia as prerequisite, which sadly probably isn't likely in the near future. What's really unfortunate is that the adversarial relationship between US / Western Europe and Russia didn't have to be this way. The US and Western Europe really dropped the ball after the collapse of the Soviet Union, by not doing more to help Russia transition to a democracy. A Marshal Plan style policy to prevent Russia's economy from collapsing in the 90s would have been a wise investment, as it was the chaos and austerity from that period which effectively doomed Russia's chance at democratization. Instead of help, Russia was given a double dose of shock doctrine under disaster Capitalism, with multinational corporations moving in to take advantage of a country in the midst of a crisis.

The greedy, vain, predatory, and short sighted Skeksis from Jim Henson's Dark Crystal feel almost like a perfect fictional analogue of the modern Republican Party.