Scholar

Not in the clinical sense, I was being a bit cheeky. He basically still hasn't properly distinguished thoughts from reality, or rather dissolved the illusiory sense of reality. I say this because it is transparent to how attached he gets to various thoughts he has about reality, or things like believing he was an alien and learned an alien language. Psychedelics tend to reinforce the confusion between thoughts and reality because the experiences are so intense the egoic sense of reality gets hijacked by it.

If you inspect in your own experience what "Realness" is, the sense that something is real, it essentially boils down to how impactful it is on your ego. When I had my first psychedelic trip using LSD, I tripped alone and had a panic attack before the trip even started. Throughout the trip, I was holding onto sanity. I quickly noticed as the trip intensified that my thoughts became terrifying. Each thought I have appeared to influence my entire reality, they came "too real". The thoughts themselves became profoundly intense, the only real thing at the time. I was terrified of a horror trip, so to avoid ending up in a hospital I tried to trip-sit myself by writing words down on a paper that would prevent me from drifting into a negative state. Each word I wrote completely consumed me, it became reality itself. Looking back at this experience, the question becomes, what exactly does it mean for something to become "more real", or "reality itself". It is very clear to me now that any sense of realness is something that is essentially illusiory. What realness actually is, what is "reality", simply means how influential an object of consciousness (any given experience, such as a thought, sense-impression and so forth) is to the ego. What is real essentially just means what is important to the ego, what influences it, what it focuses on, what consumes it. To understand this more deeply you can look at the nature of psychosis. The first time I heard it explained this way was by Dr K. Basically, Psychosis simply means that a mind takes it's thoughts to be real. What is the difference between a psychotic paranoia and a regular person? It's not actually the thoughts that fill the psychotic person. A regular person might walk across the street, and a thought might occur in their mind "What if this person wants to rob me?". The regulated person knows that this is just a thought, that there is a distinction between reality and that thought. They might not react to it at all, or get some anxiety, but eventually they realize "Well, I'm just being paranoid, it's just a thought.". To the psychotic person, the thought they have immediately becomes their reality. They do not recognize it as a thought, to the ego, it becomes total reality. So essentially, psychosis is a spectrum: The more you believe your own thoughts to be real, the more psychotic you are. If you recognize the unrealness of all thoughts, you would be totally free of psychosis. This is why ego death reveals that reality is an illusion, a dream. The word illusion in this sense is meaningless in and of itself, it simply means that the content of consciousness has no impact on the ego, because the ego no longer exists. It is as unreal as a dream, not because it loses it's Isness, but simply because it isn't important to the ego. A dream is an experience which holds no importance to the ego once it realizes it had no relevancy to it's survival. Dream just means "It's not relevant to my survival.". Redness doesn't stop to exist, or be any less real than it was before, it just means there is no ego to take it seriously, to prioritize it, to assert it to be part of itself. I invite you to truly inspect this idea of Reality, or "Realness". How does it make sense for something to be more or less real? And truly, if you inspect your sense of "realness", within your own experience, what is it truly? If you take psychedelics and have an impactful experience, it is no accident that the most real thing you will end up asserting to exist happens to also be the most meaningful thing that exists for the ego. Meaningfulness just means something drives the ego, something is essential to the function of the ego. In this way, psychedelics induce psychosis in all those who consume it. If you end up with an ego at the end of that experience, you will have just amplified it's psychotic attachments to various thoughts and contents within itself. This is why psychotic people are indistinguishable from long term psychedelic users. If you trip, and you have the thought "I am an alien", that becomes your reality, your psychosis. And because consciousness can take on infinite forms, your ego can get psychotically attached to it in infinite ways. Notice that essentially, the meaningfulness of an experience is equal to the realness of an experience. I could put an electrode in your brain, stimulate the neural network that is responsible for attributing a sense of meaning to an object of consciousness, and you would come out of that experience saying "This thing is more real than anything I have ever experienced!". That just means it's more important to your ego than anything you ever experienced. That's why you start shitting and crying, because it overstimulates your egoic structures. Isness itself doesn't have degrees of reality to it. Isness just is, every other assertion is just more evidence of your psychosis.

This is the opposite of true. Realness is a sensation that exists completely outside of the Isness of things. It's not a profound realization at all, it is psychosis. There is no you to give anything meaning and realness in the first place.

I don't know how the narrative emerged, but people tend to confuse awareness with egolessness. Both concepts are connected, but a being can be without ego can lack self-awareness, and a self-aware being can still have ego. An enlightened teacher can still act ignorantly even if he has attained a cessation of ego. Sure it's basically the survival apparatus of the mind, although when I talk about ego I refer specifically to the identity-forming parts of the mind. Really, it's just models to communicate the ideas, when I look in my own direct experience it becomes too complex to accurately describe.

This is the confusion that plagues these sorts of communities. You don't have to be without ego to realize what is happening within your own experience. I am aware of what my ego is doing, to the degree necessary to assert the claims I did. Being egoless will not fundamentally shift the awareness of what I speak of, it would just change the quality of this experience.

I just made a thread about this: What you are describing sounds like Derealization. Essentially, the core of your ego is still intact, but your ego has withdrawn itself from some parts of your consciousness to protect itself. This is very scary because now your ego is stuck with the reality of your thoughts, while viewing your sense-perception as unreal. It's basically the worst of both worlds. What you need to do is connect back to your sense-perception and step away from your own thoughts. Ideally you want to work with a professional because Derealization is quite a serious thing. It is called The Dark Night of the Soul in spiritual circles, although the term has been appropriated recently in the mainstream to basically just mean depression or other negative states. If your egoic structures unfold and dissolve in the wrong order, essentially, you can end up in states that create significant uncomfort such as your describe. Step away from Leo's content for now. You need to ground yourself in sense experience. Every word Leo utters is just a thought. It isn't reality, but your ego does take it to be reality. Doubting is a process of thinking, it essentially is delusional. Look at redness and simply realize it's Isness, it's indisputable existence. Sit down and try to think redness itself away with your thoughts. It will never happen. Yet, you can convince yourself that redness doesn't exist even if it's right there in your experience. That's psychotic, and unfortunately it is how the brain operates by default. Leo's content won't help you because he is trapped in psychosis himself.

A sad situation, Connor Murphy seemed to have the heart in the right place. And in his last interview he seemed to have been on a better path, although I still feel he was lost in some profound way that he was coping with. Yes, Leo is psychotic, and most psychedelic users will fall into the same trap because psychedelics have an ego-amplifying effect (which is indistinguishable from psychosis inducing, given both are the same thing). Psychosis just means that you confuse your own thoughts to be reality. And reality just means how important something is to your ego. I made a thread explaining this idea further:

Feminist did fail young men, if they had not, young men would now be healthy individuals who love feminism. If you want to be a progressive movement, you have to take responsibility for your failure in inclusion. You are the future, if you have failed to integrate young men into your movement, it is on your movement to correct that. Blaming men more will not help. Feminists already do, and young men are disgusted by it. Why would a young man listen to a feminist who blames them for all the problems in the world rather than an Andrew Tate type who will give them free reign and actually get them results in life. Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, as sad as it is, give young men advice that gives them at least some results. Feminists do not do so, they are more interested in moralizing and intellectual circling jerking. Why do you have to repeat the mistakes of former institutions. Did shaming and blaming work out for Christianity in modernity? Nobody wants to be shamed, it doesn't work anymore because everyone can simply choose their ingroup on the internet. You can't stop patriarchy if you don't understand young men and boys. If your society has no resilience against people like Andrew Tate, there is something seriously wrong with your society. If you want men to act more responsibly, you have to integrate their identity into the collective. Shaming and blaming will not do anything. Imagine you were a mother and you treated your boy the way feminists treat boys. "You are to blame for everything, it's your responsibility! Don't be a disgusting pig!" This is pure toxicity. If you want your boy to be a good person who cares about others, you need to actually nurture those virtues in him in such a way that it becomes part of his identity in a positive way. You encourage him, you built his character. It takes a lot of work. You can't circumvent this work by just blaming the boy and shaming him for acting out.

Patriarchal society isn't built for men, it is built for a select few men. Most men are exploited by partiarchy just as much as women are, just in different ways. The various asymmetries that exist between men and women do not make it any more healthy to frame the issue the way you do. It doesn't help men to shame them, to blame patriarchy on them. It leads to resentment, it leads to us neglecting the help young men need to actually be functional members of society. Feminism has completely failed men, if it had not, people like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson wouldn't exist. The approach you are suggesting has in my view proven itself to be ineffective.

As if anyone in our society would listen to an ex pornstar spiritual teacher. If someone did it, their career in porn was most likely anonymous. I mean even Leo keeps how he earned money before actualized.org a secret. I'm sure if you google around you will find some. The point wasn't that people will do an actual actualized.org 2.0, most youtubers also won't be doing that. The point is that you can still have a life purpose while being an OnlyFans model or a former model. The stigma makes it more difficult, but there are plenty examples of women transitioning into various meaningful things. I'm too lazy to provide examples, just ask ChatGPT and it will give you a list.

I don't believe it's healthy to make this about gender and exploitation. Human beings are animals, in the end, if you blame men, you blame individuals who have not be raised and educated correctly. A gooner in the end is a victim of a lack of proper integration of his sexuality because society doesn't even view that as an important part of raising a child. But sexuality is associated with so much shame (partly because we shame men for their lust and sexuality) that nobody is even capable of talking about these topics without it being extremely awkward to everyone involved. And the reason is because sexuality is viewed as inherently corrupt and shameful. It's the one of the reasons why sex-work can be traumatizing and damaging to women. Not because showing your naked body inherently is psychologically damage, but because the mental constructs society has built around sexuality affect women even if they are convinced they do not care. Just think of how absurd it is that we have so much concern for women and men in regards to their sexuality when the overall harms is almost entirely caused by actual exploitation and violation of peoples autonomy. The harm caused by the psychological effects of being a sex worker itself is minimal, negligable, if we compare it to something we consider completely trivial like obesity. TikTok alone is orders of magnitudes more harmful to people's psychology than consensual, online sex work is to women (even if it is done entirely for money or attention). People just obsess over the most sublte of negative psychological effects in regards to sexual acts, but then completely neglect things that actually destroy peoples lifes and health in irrevocable ways.

I am pretty sure there are more OnlyFans and Pornstar spiritual girls than there are spiritual girls working at walmart.

Another issue is that, the societal attitudes required to maintain the stigma that we apply to sex-workers like OnlyFans models (people calling the whores and whatever) already have a higher cost on consciousness/development than the sex-work has on those models. You are dehumanizing other people, shaming them, treating them cruelly. A society that just does this for some supposed utilitarian gain (in the end it's actually just motivated by ignorance and fear) is a society that is unconscious. A conscious society doesn't treat sex-workers like this, a conscious, mature society would view that as untenable. What is so perverse about society is that it the proposed mechanism of protection becomes the very mechanism that harms and dehumanizes the individuals who are framed as the victims. We have to maintain the purity of women, so we have to shame them for being promiscuous, because it's bad for their psychology to be promiscuous. But the solution is more harmful than the problem it tries to solve.

The point is: If an unconscious person did what you did, they would have as toxic consequences from that as an OnlyFans model. If a conscious person does what you did, they can achieve their life purpose that way. And the same is true for an OnlyFans model. If you are an attractive, conscious woman, then you can easily enable your life-purpose, including actualized.org 2.0, with an initial career on OnlyFans.

Lmao, you cheeky hypocrite. The only reason you made actualize.org is because you had that business exploit that generated tons of money and had luck on youtube. You basically are the equivalent of an OnlyFans whore. Most people who made money the way you did would be developmentally stunted by it more so than OnlyFans models are by their OnlyFans modelling. Getting popular on youtube is absolutely toxic for your development, and so is making easy money through some google-exploit.

The idea that OnlyFans is an actual problem for society is ludicrious. Only a tiny % of models on OnlyFans make a lot of money from it, even being able to earning a living is extremely rare. Attractive women will always have opportunities that offer them an easier lifepath. You could say instagram modelling is even worse because there is even less stigma surrounding it. There is likely far more women who do non-explicit work that is based on their beauty than there are OnlyFans models who make enough money to make a living. Attractive women can just get into a relationship with a rich guy and get taken care of, which is precisely what a lot of women do. Intelligent women also often use sex-work as a way to fund their education, you even saw that in the porn industry. If you do Only-Fans, you have a lot of free time, so you can do whatever you want with that freetime. The positives far outweigh the negatives here. Less stigma for women who do this work (stigma is ethically untenable, and the naive-utilitarian calculus that you guys make here won't change that), less exploitation and more agency. You pretend like the alternative to OnlyFans for these women is to do some high consciousness work, but that's a fairy tale. The alternative is to do some other useless, barely socially benefitial job that they are forced to do because otherwise they will be homeless. And we don't need more people in academia who do it for financial reasons. Economic incentives like this corrupt academia. We need high consciousness individuals do to high consciousness work because they are high consciousness, not because survival pressures them to get a degree in whatever the fuck the market currently values. There is more than enough people to do that kind of work. Sure, there are inherent negatives to being attractive in terms of development. But the idea that we have to go cavemen logic and stigmatize people for something people clearly want and harms nobody directly is just silly. You can create positive incentives and educate people around these issues without the negative externalities of stigma. Sure, getting easy money for your looks is developmentally harmful, but it's not remotely as harmful as women who are stigmatized for sex-work. It's not even the same universe of harm, and of course some women benefit greatly from doing sex work, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. A woman who would have had to prostitute herself to random dudes and possibly get murdered can now make an OnlyFans and feed her children that way. You guys are inhuman for some of the solutions you suggest for problems that are completely 1st world trivialities. Developmental problems lol, as if those don't occur in most jobs. Capitalism fucks peoples minds, at least OnlyFans models can remove themselves from the pressures of survival and then focus on their development directly. Other people do 9/5 jobs their whole life and are equally as stuck developmentally, become resentful, dysfunctional, have a worse quality of life. Most jobs in the economy destroy your soul. The idea that OnlyFans is especially harmful is just part of the stigma of sex work. People uniquely analyse things like OnlyFans for all it's dangers and negative impacts on society because people already have a preconception of how sex-work is inherently corrupt. Yet, nobody bats an eye at how a majority manual labour jobs occur in the most toxic social environments imaginable. If I did OnlyFans and made a ton of money, I could make actualized.org 2.0 easily. In fact, the whole reason why Leo was able to make actualized.org was because he found a way to make tons of easy money. Sure, most people will not do anything conscious with their OnlyFans money, but the same applies to any other job. Most people won't do anything conscious with their PHDs, with their youtube money, with their modelling career. You won't increase consciousness by just forcing people into the regular jobmarket, if that worked, society wouldn't be as dysfunctional as it is.

lol

That's a whole can of worms. You shouldn't look at it as "who are reputable sources?". I could be full of shit, so you just trusting what I say just reinforces the epistemic issue here. Go and actually research this question, even with something like Gemini. How do you know a source is reputable? How do you build a good picture of history and geopolitics that isn't filled with fantasies or half-truths? In general, you don't want to start out listening to controversial sources because you have nothing to compare them to. How would you know if what they say is true or just sounds great? You want highly reputable, academically supported sources because at least there, experts applied rigour to verify or challenge whatever is being said. With controversial sources, you always want to check counter arguments. Just google debunkings, critics and so forth. If in the end you can't tell what is true and what isn't, well then you have no reason to adopt any position. You continue to refine your knowledge. You have to improve the way you obtain, process and filter information.

Right but in practice this is just disinformation. You can just listen to reputable sources that will have insightful ideas with 98% less bullshit. The most dangerous liars are those who mix 90% of truth with 10% of bullshit. If you can discern the bullshit from the non-bullshit, you probably don't have to listen to anything he has to say anyways. The danger is that people who are less epistemically careful get swept up mostly by the bullshit. People don't listen to him for the insightful ideas, they listen to him because of his oversimplified, emotional narratives that confirm their biases.

If you take this guy seriously and can't spot him to be a charlatan within 30 minutes of his speeches, you really need to reconsider your education on history, politics and philosophy. The guy is not a professor nor a historian, he is a high school teacher. Most of his prediction are laughably off. It's hard to believe that he is anything but an intentional disinformation agent, spreading narratives that undermine the interests of the west and encourage more internal conflict. Though the guy is so unbelievably stupid, I wouldn't be suprised if it's just pure ignorance.

The problem is the perfect enforcement of human will. Transsexuality is an example that would have applied 20 years ago, the things that are marginalized today are obviously outside of the consciousness of the mainstream. Humans did try to suppress LGBTQ speech in the past, the whole point is that they failed to do so because human beings are imperfect, a system of AIs the way you propose would be able to have oversight over every single piece of content that is posted. People only care about transsexuals today because these marginalized perspectives were pushed forward despited cultural censorship and backlash, because there was no perfect speech moderation back then. People wouldn't flee to another platform, people would actively want the platform to enforce that type of speech, like 20 years ago, a majority would have limited trans-rights speech if they had their way. One problem is that, of course, society could become more conservative as time goes on, or various incentives could push platforms to enforce certain marginalizes speech that most people simply give no shit about. If you want an example that is relevant today in parallel to trans-rights, just take consanguinamory rights as an example. Most people think advocating for such things is dangerous, obscene, perverse, enabling abuse and so forth. Various social media platforms will limit visibility even if you just mention a certain keyword related to the topic. This makes rights advocacy extremely difficult in the environment we already exist in, an AI that would be tasked with "preventing dangerous speech", could easily make it impossible to ever talk about the topic in an organized manner that has any impact on society. And the vast majority of people, including progressives, wouldn't mind this at all, because they all share the same perspective that enabling such things is dangerous and wrong. Nobody will leave a platform because "incest rights" discussions are banned from it, to them it is no different from banning speech that advocates in favor of rape. But this could easily spill over to other things that are illegal, like drugs usage. There would be no clever ways to avoid the system with AI that was genuinely intelligent and could read subtext. Drug usage is a less controversial topic today, so most people would be bothered if it was being targetted, but it just tells you how relative everything is to the time we live in. There are various other controversial topics that are similarly controversial, that are increasingly difficult to be discussed even with human moderators around. In the following years, we will see an increasing danger from allowing unfiltered free speech, which will make people more open to the idea of censoring and regulating some type of speech. If the regulatory mechanisms are too efficient once that happens, it might very well resemble the "no crime world" which we all agree would be terrifying. You think you want perfect law enforcement, but you actually do not. A world in which every law was perfectly enforced would be a terrifying world, and the same applies to speech.

This doesn't matter, society would agree with the agent, that's the whole danger. Society is ignorant, if society could have banned transsexuality or psychedelics from becoming a popular topic, they would have of course done so. The issue is that we WOULD want to marginalizes views, that's exactly what people want. We already marginalize certain views with algorhythms and human moderation. Again, just analogize it to law enforcement: If we had perfect enforcement of drug laws, nobody here would be talking about psychedelics. You are basically asking for superhuman cops that can catch every crime at it's inception. The good thing about humans is that they are flawed, that they allow for enough wiggle room for marginalized perspectives to eventually find expression in society. With superhuman AI, or just cheap human-like AI on mass scale, you can forget about that in the future.

You have to be careful, when the immune system of a system is too "perfect" it can lead to a cessation of progress. There are two important components here: Stability and degrees of freedom. When collectives evolve, it is basically a balance between these two things. We can use the law as an example: If we had a way to enforce the law perfectly, and reduce all crime completely such that at the very inception of a crime it is detected and stopped, you would get a society that might get frozen in that state of development. The reason for this is because any law at any given time is a reflection of the state of development of society at that particular point in time. If you had a law against drugs and mind-altering substances, nobody in that society would ever get to experience psychedelics if the law-enforcement was perfect. it is obvious when the laws are clearly and obviously wrong from our point of view, but the issue is society never knows what exactly it's blindspots are. The danger of an AI based moderation system is therefore that it is overly good at achieving it's goals. For example, you could have an AI system that will not merely work by keywords, but by genuinely analysing the content of any post and deriving the meaning, and then making a decision if that content should be banned, hidden from the algorhythm etc on the basis of whatever set of rules the platform established. If you do this, you might render it impossible for marginalized forms of speech, that might be considered controversial and dangerous today, to actually find any exposure in this new world. Here would be various examples for speech that might be completely erased with such a system today: - Speech about drugs/psychedelics considered to be dangerous, and positive advocacy for such drugs. - Speech that relates to controversial moral discussions - Speech that relates to sexual minorities demonized by a society - Speech that relates to spiritual truths too radical/threatening for people - Speech that has negative economic impacts on the platform it is published In a human collective, you basically want to leave some wiggle room for criminality so that forms of criminality that are actually justified can take place. Perfect enforcement would undermine the dynamics that are necessary for social evolution. I think it is easy to underestimate just how important this wiggle room is. Giving humans ultimate power is so dangerous because human beings are ignorant and immature, which will be reflected in how they will wield this power.

I think this is an unnecessary duality. Human beings are limited, and we can complete each others limitations in many cases. If you have a genuine concern that a friend is falling into a certain trap, of course it can be perfectly acceptable to voice that concern as long as it is in a respectful manner. There is nothing lost there, unless the receiving end is so immature merely bringing up ones own perspective hurts them in some way, but that shouldn't be the case with Leo. To have a concern and just force yourself to dogmatically accept the other person because one is convinced that's the most loving thing to do, always, doesn't seem healthy, for yourself or the relationship. There should always be transparency and communication when possible. I recommend to watch out for rule-based thinking, like proclaiming to yourself that "Behaving in X way is more loving", because that type of thinking tends to be mechanical. Relying on such rules already undermines your own consciousness, focusing on abstractions rather than what is. In this case, Carl gave you specific and contextual reasons for why he did what he did, and you responded with a generalization that is specifically removed from context and seems to be a rule derived from past experiences you made.

I'm not a utilitarian, I already explained why I think it is sociopathic. See my first post in the thread.