Scholar

Your dreams indicate immaturity. We need to be very careful, especially in todays climate, about upholding our ideals of civility. It might be the most crucial time in history to do so, because of how high the stakes are. Civility is not guaranteed.

Your argument is fundamentally flawed because we do not even punish such people with life in prison. It wouldn't be a greater deterant than if you simply put them in prison for life. Your logic is just silly. You only get negatives, while achieving nothing that you could not achieve with deterants that are in line with fundamental priniples of humanity, civility and moral progress. Even ChatGPT is more sophisticated than you are on this question, which should be embarrassing. Especially people such as the most vile criminals are essential for us as a society to transcend such flaws in our nature. We must understand them, we must allow them to to exist so as to demonstrate our core values as a soiety, and we must allow them to redeem themselves. If you just execute everyone who is evil, how will we ever learn how these people came to be? Their self-understanding, as would be achieved through self-reflection, is of essential utility to us. There are various other arguments for why the death penality in the contemporary context is simply inappropriate, but that would require you to think about what you say before you say it. Alternatively you can go and ask Claude for some guidance.

Because you can't just make special exemptions on a fundamental principle of civility based on some socialist ideal you have because you listen to too much Hasan. The entire idea of killing defenseless people, which has never shown to have any impact on preventing crime, is something we are moving away from as a developed society. Putting them in prison for life would be more than sufficient. There is literally no point in contradicting our fundamental values as a society so that we an feel validated about "punishing the rich". Especially in a context in which we don't even put these people in prison! How about you start putting them in prison instead of going for executions and opening pandora's box? Mayber we should make a very simple clear cut law that executes people who advocate for the usage of psychedelics and moral nihilism, which leads to an increase in suicidality and social harm.

That's exactly the language fascists employ. What you don't realize is that you are actually the parasite, and that, by your own logic, you should be eradicated. But of course, you don't agree with that, because you are a parasite, whose nature is ignorance and malice, and therefore believes that you won't be one of the people who should get executed. You're lucky most of mankind has transcended this laughably undeveloped mentality, so in the end you are privileged enough to never get to experience the consequences of your ignorance. But you are free to circle-jerk on here with all the rest of the socially and mentally defunct people on this forum.

The funny thing is, by giving power to the state to execute people, realistically, you are giving the most powerful and wealthy the power to execute people, because they are the ones who will have most influence over the system. It's kind of how democracy in the US no longer is about reflecting the views of the population, but rather, political figures and various interests instilling in the population certain viewpoints that will benefit them. Like how half of your society was convinced that they cared about denying climate change, when they never did, and never would have if the politicians wouldn't have implanted those issues in their brains.

That's what the chinese said.

This is precisely the lack of humanity I am speaking of. By condemning this individual to unnecessary death and suffering, we deny our own universality. This is to say that this person is jimwell's incarnation, and that he will be the next incarnation, too. So, in essence, he is wishing death and suffering upon himself, because his lack of development blinds him to the nature of individuation.

Giving the state the power to execute individuals (especially politically relevant ones) is a sign of lack of development. There is no reason to execute individuals, under any circumstances, when we have the ability to restrain them. The killing of a defenseless other is in essence a barbaric act, as it is senseless and achieves no utilitarian gain. It would showcase that the judicial system is uncivilized. But most importantly, it would give the state power it should never have. On a more fundamental level, the restraint to not kill individuals who even commit the greatest atrocities, akin to Andres Breivik, shows that society will not allow individual actors within it to degrade it's own humanity. By maintaining civility, we maintain the core and pillar of civilization. The prohibition of killing defenseless individuals serves to remind us that this very act is unconscionable, even if we think we have good reasons for it. If everyone who thought they had good reasons for killing others would kill others, civilization could not function. Perhaps even more important is that, the employment and support of capital punishment means that a society has not learned the profound importance of forgiveness as a foundational value that fuels human progress. And of course, we have various harm-reduction arguments like executions of innocent individuals being inevitable given human error and corruption. Due the irrevocable nature of capital punishment and there being no recourse or ability to correct such mistakes, it is not justifiable to continue this practice, as it serve no proven end, other than the gratification and corruption of individuals who seek revenge.

“A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals.”

But that is the whole point. Not everything that is in atrocity or bad equals a genocide. That's just incredibly stupid, and it has nothing to do with "accepting" certain definitions. These words have meanings, they aren't to be used arbitrarily. There are other words that describe various forms of mistreatment, you don't have to use the most morally loaded word, that we specifically have to describe the basically worst type of thing a nation can do, so that you get your political brownie points for being such a victim. That's not how it works, and it just delegitimizes the concept of genocide. I don't see how your example connects here. It is, defacto, a jewist state. It was created for the jews, by the jews and is maintained by the jews. There is nothing idiosyncratic about it. Using genocide to describe everything you don't like, however, is just assinine. Also, I never dismissed "all usages", just virtually 99.9% of these usages. If there are some scholars who discuss the nature of genicide, that is different. But this isn't what we are discussing here.

I don't think this is true. The word genocide had a clear meaning, namely, to attempt to eradicate (or remove) a certain population based on certain traits, intentionally. This is, more or less, what our understanding of genocide has been in the past an present. As far as I know, as defined by the UN, intentionality is key here, and that is what needs to be proven. I don't agree that leftists call this a genocide because they have an idiosyncratic understanding of genocide. In my view there are three main reasons why they use the most morally loaded word possible: 1) So they can frame anyone who disagrees with them as genocide denialists or supporters, and therefore dismiss and shame them. 2) So they can enforce ingroup compliance, given that individuals who might not totally fall in line with their views would fall risk to be viewed as denying or downplaying the probably greatest moral atrocity mankind is capable of committing. 3) So they can justify radical actions that otherwise would be unjustifiable or viewed as dysfunctional. To frame this as if it was a nuanced difference in viewpoints or positions on genocide is inappropriate. There is no discussion on the essence of genocide, the word is used solely because of it's moral weight. When they use this words, they clearly ascribe intent to the Israeli government. This is essential to their narrative, and this narrative falls apart because they cannot actually make a reasonable case for this.

Sure, the burden of proof is on the people who assert this is a genocide. No such proof was provided.

The idea that we can transfer the notions of human intelligence over to these models, and then try to compare them via tests is a little absurd. I feel like you guys should immediately see how profoundly silly that is. ChatGPT doesn't have an IQ, it is something totally different than the human brain.

Who is to say they wouldn't be at 10 million and would be building spaceships if Hamas would using the insane amount of foreign aid they get to actually establish a properly functioning society and economy, instead of building tunnels they would use in a senseless war against Israel, while letting their population starve and be bombed with no possibility for shelter?

I would say a heightened sense of morality is a byproduct of being a more developed human being. The condition for growth is freedom. A sense of morality is always bound by the restrictions and limitations of the perspectives of any given point on the growth of a system/individual. This means, you cannot just presupposed morality and assume that it will lead to growth. Freedom is what allows us to develop and refine our sense of morality, through increases in sophistication. The problem with focusing on the sense of morality is that it can simply lead to self-righteousness and the holding onto contemporary moral norms. You can observe this in progressive movements well, whom themselves fairly quickly crystalize into dogmatism and attempt to establish a new ruleset by restricting individuality rather than by encouraging growth. The pitfall of this is that you limit the growth of human beings, because you do not give them the opportunity to learn, but rather attempt to instill into them a blind following of what you perceive as an essential norm.

As a response to Leo's blog post about the potential harms of liberty - The reason for why liberty and freedom can cause harm is always lack of development/consciousness in any given individual or society. The less developed and conscious an individual is, the more harm he will cause when given freedom. This is because with liberty necessarily comes responsibility, as a result of the wider range of actions that can be taken. Responsibility is the ability and willingness to make the decisions necessary to navigate any given free space. In another sense, we can describe this as liberty being the degree of freedom within a society, and laws being the degree of restrictions. Absolute freedom would lead to absolute chaos, unless there is absolute intelligence/wisdom. Evolution is the growth of intelligence and wisdom through a combination of restriction and freedom. This applies to evolution in nature, evolution in society and evolution in individuals. Both are essential aspects: Freedom is necessary to evolve forward through exploration of the unknown, to inform and expand consciousness, and restriction is necessary to maintain the order required to not dissolve into entropy. Now, in regards to human liberty and societal evolution, freedom will necessarily lead to mistakes that cause harm. This harm is necessary to guide us into a higher levels of complexity/consciousness. Openness to mistakes and errors is necessary for evolution to be able to take place. Examples where this applies: DNA and evolution. Evolution through DNA funtions primarily through random mutations. Random mutations are freedom, but too much random mutation at a time would lead to the disorganization of the given organism. Harmful mutations are a necessary consequence of freedom, because freedom means exploration, and exploration leads to errors, because you cannot predict that which is unknown. Child growth. The way children grow into more sophisticated beings is through a balance of degrees of freedom and restriction at any given point of their evolution. If we restrict the child too much, such that it cannot make any mistake, and therefore not be harmed, we necessarily stunt it's growth because it is unable to explore reality in such a way as to learn and grow from it. We must give the child an appropriate degree of freedom for it's stage of development, such that it can make mistakes without them becoming fatal or unproductive for growth. In regards to societal evolution this means that at any given point of our human development we must consider that any degree of liberty will require from us an equivalent degree of responsibility. For societal progress to take place we require, at any given point, just a little more liberty than we are responsible enough to handle. This is because, by the nature of what progress is, it's consequences are fundamentally unknown. We can attempt to make predictions, but these predictions are not enough to navigate through potentially infinite space. In the end, we will have to navigate through space by setting our foot into the unknown and risking harm to ourselves. As we harm ourselves, we learn and we grow. This occurs at a societal scale. This is why harm-reduction principles, as an absolute, are counterproductive and naive. Society must allow a certain degree of harm for progress to be possible. On the other hand, given too much freedom in the context of too little development, and growth can be stunted. We give adults, for example, more liberty than children, because children are not capable of adopting as much responsibility as adults. They have not made enough decisions in their lifetimes, and experienced their consequences, to be able to navigate the degrees of freedom that we experience as adults. A simple example, as Leo provided, are drugs. Give drugs to a developed human being, and he will benefit from them. Give them to an undeveloped human being and he will ruin his life with it. The fact that drugs are being legalized is one of the indications of the growth of the given society. Now, of course, there are more and less developed individuals in society, so the less developed individuals in society will suffer from the new degree of freedom they are exposed to. In the end, we must balance the suffering caused by freedom with our respect for individual autonomy and the necessary degree of freedom for social evolution. Each expansion of freedom will cause a spike in suffering, as people explore the new, unexplored landscapes. This is why technology causes so much suffering and harm, the more powerful it is. This is, simply, because it allows us new freedoms that we did not have access to before. We make mistakes, we suffer and we learn, without hopefully, destroying ourselves. Another example for this is incest. Given an irresponsible and underdeveloped society, incest, despite it not being inherently harmful or negative, will lead to harm, because individuals are not developed enough to navigate the potential risks that are present in those interactions. We can see this in the middle ages or contemporary middle eastern countries, in which incestious marriages are not necessary prohibited. There, multigenerational inbreeding, especially fueled by arranged marriages, leads to a higher frequency of negative genetic outcomes among the society. Apply the same standard to a developed nation, and the effects can be reversed. A lifting of penalization and stigmatization of such acts can lead to people getting better help in the context of abuse, while also respecting individual autonomy. This can happen because, by and large, individuals in such societies are more aware of the potential negative consequences of incest. Like with the drug example, in one context it makes sense to restrict the autonomy of individuals using stigmatization and criminalization, and in another context this type of approach ceases to be necessary, effective or appropriate. Systems of restrictions exist specifically because of lack of intelligence and wisdom. Given ultimate intelligence and wisdom, you can give an individual complete freedom and autonomy, and they will navigate it without causing unnecessary friction. And, in the most fundamental sense, all of reality is precisely this. It is completely frictionless motion, informed through ultimate intelligence and wisdom, and totally free. That is what reality is, ultimately, which is why it works so well. In a very real sense, the criminal mindset plays a necessary and important role in societal evolution. Criminality, to some degree, will always be necessary for growth, because we fundamentally cannot know how our laws and morals are limited. There must exist minds that are willing to break the norms to explore the future. And this, in reality, will express itself in both dysfunctional contexts as well as benefitial ones, much like the mutations in DNA. We cannot simply weed out the unhealthy mindsets from the healthy mindsets, because we cannot ever know if what we consider to be an unhealthy mindset, might not be actually a healthy mindset. To us, they will appear equivalent, and therefore, an attempt to eradicate one side of the coin completely, will lead to the eradication of progress. You can have no mutations, but that will simply mean that you will never change. The tricky thing, as always, is to find the balance.

Considering LSD is highly dopaminergic, it is no surprise that it causes lack of motivation in me after tripping. Though, it is pretty annoying, and other than dopamine detoxing, I am not sure what to do to speed up the recovery process. I seem to have a very atypical brain (so do some of my family members, who can take 300mcg LSD and basically feel no effect), so I am not sure whether or not I want to continue to use LSD as I am concerned for potential long term damage. Does anyone here have some good methods to overcome the anhedonia, other than the obvious stuff like exercise and so forth?

Nope, relations exist. It's your mind cooking up the idea that relationships are cooked up to make sense of reality. You're missing the point. You haven't actually recognize what I speak of, you have accepted a surface level conceptualization. Look, at this point we're being like two fresh lovers who can't hang up the phone on each other, so let's just call it a day my friend.

Correct on a surface level, but that misses the point of what I am communicating. I went into what a Causal Relationship is, that it is illusiory and only used to generate functional understanding (understanding that can serve us in some ways, like helping to predict or interact with reality). Physicalists are delusional. There is no underlying mechanism to anything, the mechanisms themselves emerge as instantiated relationships between different parts of existence. The physicalists are deluded in that they believe reality is grounded in a mechanistic foundation. What I am pointing to is that the relationship between what you consider individuated consciousness and the physical nature of the universe are related, through no other mechanism than the relationship itself. The desire for a temporal causal order is mostly due to the primary way human beings, today especially, seek to understand reality, which is propositional understanding. Propositional understand is in it's nature temporally limited, it is linear and follows one concept after another, basically a sentence, or equation. Looking exclusively through this framework, or viewing it as foundational or fundamental, is the root of the delusions I am describing. Kastrup is as guilty of this as you are. There will be no "why" or "how" a certain shape within the wavefunction of the universe leads to the color red, or the sensation of cold. I know you will ignore all of what I am saying here, even though it is not too complicated or idiosyncratic, but that is because you have not yet recognized the ground of existence. The Groundless Ground, the Causeless Cause, the Unmoved Mover. If you had, you would relate to everything I am saying. I probably have a tendency of expecting too much of people who Leo decided to mod. The quality of the members on this forum has degraded significantly over the years, such that the seemingly most qualitative mods currently are completely trapped in rationalism.

That's childish, lol. You made the assertion that establishing a causal relationship (in the sense of considering something causally linked, rather than correlated, epistemically speaking) requires a mechanistic explanation of the given relationship. I demonstrated to you how you cannot have a physical mechanism that will lead to a different type of substance of existence, like colors. It's a basic truth about reality that you would see is self-evidently true, if you had even the most basic grasp of your own mind. It's ironic you would say I lost the plot when I kept track of the line of argumentation of this conversation this entire time, whereas you kept being confused about why you even posed questions to me, and were not able to maintain the framework for why something we discussed was relevant to the initial points being made.

You are just proving my point. We aren't actually talking about brains in the academic sense. Academia is deluded, there cannot and never will be a mechanism that will showcase how the color red is related to certain processes in what is conceptualized as physical reality. I was explaining to you why your framework and assumptions are equally as deluded. Of course you will have to leave the framework of academia to understand this, the framework of academia is the entire problem here, lol. Like I said, I explained my language in detail. The terms I use aren't actually that idiosyncratic, especially not when I contextualize them properly. If you think science will find a mechanism for consciousness, you are just lost, and I explained to you why this is the case. How brains are related to different aspects of consciousness is a question of academia, which by the way you are denying, not me. Academia is correct in viewing the brain, and brain activity, as causally linked to consciousness (as I explained to you, it is more a relationship betwee different aspects of existence, as there is no fundamental distinction between mind and world). This is what you are denying, because you have the idiosyncratic view of causation vs correlation. You, funnily enough, missed the entire point of why I moved the topic into a more metaphysical analysis of what is going on here. I'm not particularly knowledgable about neuroscience, but I don't have to be to understand what I have described. You have no problems understanding him because he uses the same framework as you, the academic framework. You should discuss with him standards of causation and correlation, that would be something that would be appropriate in that context. My critique of you is that you fail on both, the academic approach as well as the truthful approach. Academia would ridicule you for your positions, rightly so. And anyone who has even a basic insight into the nature of the mind and existence will be able to see how trapped you are in delusion. I don't mean any of this as a personal attack, but I am surprised you are on this forum and you still maintain the delusions I am pointing to. Although, I really should not be surprised, considering some of the folks here. Thank you, I agree. When I went into detail to explain specifically what I meant by each term, the interlocutor got emotionally triggered and reverted to claims that my perspective is too idiosyncratic for him to engage with, even though I answered all his questions, and he never inquired into anything I said in my explanations and expansions, which would have indicated he was actually attempting to understand what I am saying. The truth is, there is no desire here to understand anything, given that he, from the very beginning, is doing nothing but attempting to defend his own position, which is delusional.

It's not a semantic disconnect, but with your attitude it would take 10 years for you to understand what I am describing. I am disconnected in my level of insight about the nature of existence and the mind. I probably underestimate how difficult it might be for a contracted mind to grasp the concepts I am trying to communicate. My language use is different, that is why I go through such lengths to explain every single term I use on request. I also see no reason for this to continue. I explained all of these terms, many of them in detail. There is an inability here for you to dynamically adopt new frameworks and grasp novel conceptualizations. I have noticed this with you in the past, as you continue to attempt to frame things I state in an already familiar framework to you. I already explained that due to this inability, which I believe is rooted in your cognitive biases, it will not be possible for us to have a productive conversation about this. I will nonetheless expand upon concepts because it is useful, valuable and to some degree enjoyable for me to do so. Right, but this is incredibly surface level. If you have no grasp of what I am pointing to when I use the term "Causeless Cause", "Groundless Ground", "Infinity" or "Free Will", there is no way for you to adopt the framework I am using. I already am adjusting my terminology and conceptualization to something that could be understood by someone who is stuck in the consensus framework, in theory. In the end, to escape your contracted framework, I can only recommend meditations that focus on the substance and nature of existence. If you can recognize the fundamental Isness of all Aspects of Existence, you will be able to correct distinguish between aspects of existence which your mind currently deliberately conflates. To clarify, aspects of existence are what your mind currently categorizes as qualia or experience. Colors are for example an aspect of existence. So is sound. These "substances" are of different kinds, of different categories. There are infinite such categories. I used a metaphor of the cut-out elephant in the paper to illustrate how people like Kastrup, and you, do the exact same thing, on a fundamental, cognitive level, as a materialist does, when they try to describe existence as either mind or world. The physicalist has created a framework of reality which opposes the substance of mind against the physical nature of reality, and claim that the physical nature of reality is fundamental. The idealist, due to the very framework he subscribes to, must already uphold an idea of world against mind, otherwise it wouldn't make even sense to describe reality fundamentally as mind. If there is no world outside the mind, then the mind is simply existence. It's just what reality looks like, in that particular instantiation. The fundamental problem continues, the attempt to use conceptualization as a source of reality, to use it as a lense through which to look at existence. "Existence is mind!" This is the same process as the materialist engages in, just flipped. This condition, this delusion, is responsible for the hope that one could find a mechanism to explain how experience is caused, a link between the shape of the physical universe and the substances of mind, as you would see it. It would be equally as naive as to assume that one day we shall find the song which causes redness. Now, reality can instantiate itself such that this is the case, but it's not causative on an existential level, it is simply related. And the relationship is caused by the Causeless Cause. All relationships in reality are maintained and nourished by the Causeless Cause. If you had a certain level of realization, you would be able to understand what I am saying even if I use words that you never use that way.

I can't think of a line of development in which woke people would be more developed, but I don't have all of them in mind right now.

Just because many hippies were undeveloped doesn't mean the average hippie wasn't more developed than the average woke person today.