Carl-Richard

I have a theory (not a conspiracy theory): the people who get strongly drawn to conspiracy theories are the same people who get drawn to supernatural ideas, like God creating the universe from their own predetermined plan (not simply evolving spontaneously through "natural law"). They are fine with explaining reality top down through an elaborate narrative. There is a seeming plan behind everything, behind world politics, behind alien invasions, behind wars, behind ancient history, and they all connect to a grand meta-narrative of control, of manufacturing, of conscious creating, rather than natural systems acting spontaneously. Those who criticize conspiracy theories point out how that level of organization, of top-down control, is unlikely if not impossible, because of the natural tendency towards spontaneous order and the infeasibility of controlling complex systems. In the "naturalist critique", everybody is a victim of systems, even the supposed people in power, while in the conspiracist's mind, the people in power are the controllers of the systems and the powerless are the victims. Whether one is more correct than the other is actually hard to say, and a naturalist that claims otherwise would then become a conspiracy theorist in their own right, thinking they have the level of insight and knowledge to be able to predict complex systems. As for myself, as a general predisposition, I've noticed I'm fine with either (naturalism or supernaturalism). While for example Bernardo Kastrup says he is strongly opposed to supernaturalism simply as a personal predisposition (which is why he says he sees no point in doing philosophy if nature is not simply naturalistic; no "God" at the top planning it all, intervening into nature and changing the natural course of things). But I would also challenge this idea of naturalism, that you could still try to deduce the "laws" behind God's planning so to speak, and it won't be a completely pointless endeavour, simply a more interesting one. Like trying to understand the psychology of God rather than the "physics" of God.

What changed between the quotes from "earlier Leo" and the quotes from 2026 Leo?

I have 16030 posts on this forum. So yes.

Wait is this for real? Like actually for real? And my parents say I have OCD.

They say that good music keeps you at the edge between familiarity and surprise. Too familiar becomes boring, and too surprising becomes hard to follow. Musical improvisation is the manifestation of this in real time, and you can usually notice when the player is engaging in well-established/familiar patterns ("licks") and when the player is creating something completely original. I'm used to improvising a lot on guitar, and I've noticed that I'm able to imagine impossibly intricate and original lines of improvisation in my head, but I'm in no way technically advanced enough to manifest that through my instrument. When I listen to the most complete virtuostic improvisational players out there, even though they can come very close many times, I always feel a tension between boredom and impenetrability. Of course, this desire I have of hearing the most hyper-creative lines of notes that I can possibly imagine is impossible to fulfill. It's completely relative to my unique conception of music, and I would probably never in a million years get to hear somebody produce even 10 seconds of those exact notes (which would be absolutely transcendentally orgasmic if it happened). Nevertheless, I know two players who come extremely close, and I'll try to weigh to which extent they're too "boring" ("musically conventional" is a better word) or too impenetrable (too melodically or harmonically complex) relative to my impossible standard of imaginative perfection. Guthrie Govan (obviously). It's tricky, because he is so versatile that he often fluctuates between too conventional (like bluesy bendy stuff) and too complex (like jazzy shredding stuff). I'll give an example for each player: Allan Holdsworth is notoriously known for being impossible to imitate by other players. For reference, Guthrie Govan can imitate virtually anyone but him. He often becomes too complex. I sometimes have to listen to his songs 30 times to understand what he is doing (like the run at 1:28 in the video below). (Btw things become more interesting around 0:40).

I'm just asking what you think.

What was quoted here was quite consistent across time. In fact, I can remember he saying something similar two days or so ago (it's in some of the quotes). So is it something he said you have a problem with, or what?

What is your position on using air purifiers with ionization?

What's the problem?

You can also flip it around and ask "but doesn't a conspiracy theorist also find facts for their narrative?". And that's true, but the difference might be they might be more likely to start with the narrative and then find the facts (i.e. confirmation bias like Leo pointed out), rather than walking around and consuming facts after facts after facts until a narrative pops out. An example that comes to mind of choosing the narrative first and then the facts would be Terrence McKenna's Timewave Zero. He essentially created a graph by deriving some mathematical equations from the I-Ching, and then he postulated that the graph represents fluctuations in novelty in world history. And then he looked at the peaks and trophs and tried to find a fact (an event in the real world) that corresponded to the graph at that moment in time. Doing it that way makes it much easier to find facts that fit the time wave, rather than sorting through facts and then concluding what would be the time wave. That's one of the reasons why narrative cognition is more efficient. And narrative cognition is used in science all the time like you say. It's in fact virtually always a requirement, as you virtually always want to go from a theory (narrative) to a hypothesis to then confirming or disconfirming that hypothesis with data. But of course science (or specifically quantitative science) addresses this problem partially with repeated measurement and control of confounding variables. But there are still problems with narrative-driven cognition even in quantitative science (problematic research practices like HARKing/post-hoc hypothesizing, multiple comparisons, p-hacking), which fuels the replication crisis in particularly the behavioral sciences. After all, the scientist's livelihood and career depends on the narrative being correct, as that is what gets published and what gets the university money. So there is a massive incentive to skew the results in favor of the narrative being correct. And that may unfortunately never change unless we either get infinite resources in society (perhaps UBI would help a little) or just less prestige-based publication practices.

Imagine you're a normal person in your own life, working a job and barely keeping your head above water and a homeless person looks at you and says "the workers just want to keep us down, it makes sense as they would want more control". You would be like "I'm just trying to do my job, I ain't got the time or resources for this shit". Do you think the elites have less responsibility, more time, more actual resources than you, to plot a plan of world domination that requires other people like them to be aligned with their interests and in on their plan and not preoccupied with their own interests? The higher up you get in the rungs of power, the more strings are attached to you, the more of your time is valued, the more of your time is needed, if not, you get outcompeted by those that have that time. You think Jeff Bezos has time for your shit? Just playing the anti-conspiracist devil's advocate. If you look around, you see arguably much more division than cooperation, certainly across country lines, across company lines, across different competing agents. And you conclude that at the very top, at the very highest levels of organization, beyond all countries, beyond all companies, there is perfect and synchronous cooperation? This is the fact-driven position (criticizing the narrative by pointing to dissonant facts; real concrete things grounded in the real world). The narrative-driven position is "but the elites are creating all that division to benefit them, to keep us under control; it's all an epic plot, a play, a deception". These are connections that could make sense but are less grounded in concrete things. They are more general and more like possibilities than actual facts. What appeals more to you and why?

Is this not entirely inconsistent with "Apparently we are never meant to feel thirst at all, in an ideal body / health / world."?

You can have a narrative which is more dense in facts (data points) and one more dense in connections or inferences and conclusions. That's the salient difference I'm pointing to. When a conspiracy theorist is like "look at how weird the videos look of the moon landings -> it must be staged", the anti-conspiracy theorist is like "but what about this fact, and this fact, and this fact, and this fact; that surely doesn't yibe with your theory?".

Why is thirst/dehydration not OK but hunger/fasting is?

When I was helping my mom and stepdad move houses (my mom sold my childhood home), we were picking up some final things and we saw they were already starting some renovations (we knew they had planned a lot). And me and my stepdad saw some workers demolishing the wooden fence by the terrace (which my dad had built 20 or so years ago). My stepdad said "remember all the work we spent painting that? Heh". Meanwhile I was left with a distinct feeling like I was watching gore. And that got me thinking: maybe the feeling of gore comes when you see something very familiar to you (like a human body part, or a familiar belonging) get disfigured or demolished. It doesn't matter that it's biological or merely material. It's the feeling of being robbed or seeing the transformation of familiarity to such a severe degree that you're revolted deep to the core. I think the best example of gore that demonstrates this (which is the most terrifying, terrorizing, horror-inducing movie scene I've ever experienced, from the movie Annihilation) is *spoiler alert* the bear. The absolutely disturbing and heartbreaking female screams of distress ("heeelp!") being conjoined with bear growls (which for me was the absolute worst part, something I would've never suspected), the mutation and disfigurement of conjoining a female body/soul with a bear's body, is the haunting experience of seeing something familiar morph into a monstrosity. (I'm not describing a bear attack by the way; I'm describing the aftermath ☹️).

But then we're talking deep in the Walmart sandbox kind of deep. That's why I think "insight" and "belief" are truly not firm distinctions. Insight (unless if we're talking about non-dual awakening as kind of insight, which here we're not) is just when something bubbles up from the pool of other beliefs or the same cognitive architectures underlying those beliefs (language, concepts, words, expressions). It might be highly salient, highly meaningful, by virtue of it bubbling up in that way, but still, it is bubbling up from the pool of beliefs / cognitive architectures and presents itself as that. "Eureka! My mind just had a mind blast!". Ok, but are you the universe yet?

While that is true, the question is how much does it matter to be dehydrated for a couple of minutes or whatever it takes for you to get to the point of drinking water and elevating your bodily hydration to normal? It's like you have 24 hours of the day to be either optimally hydrated or dehydrated. If the thirst signal has a delay in the span of minutes for maintaining optimal hydration, and you follow that signal, you will probably only be off by a couple percentage points each day even if you eat the most insanely dehydrating foods. It's the same logic with how working out can increase longevity even if it involves putting your body through heavy strain for a couple of minutes/hours each day. The strain is only a couple of minutes/hours each day, out of 24 hours (or whatever the workout rate is). So the adapative benefits from working out can outweigh the effects of strain during the workout, because the strain is so little compared to the overall picture.

@theleelajoker Females are often great at mirroring, so yes.

True if "whatever arises" does not rely on the distinction between "hidden" and "immediate", because then we're back in relativity, distinctions, not the absolute. To really affirm concretely, distinctively, as opposed or separate to something else, what the absolute is, is to betray its absoluteness.

I drink maybe a sip or two of water right after the meal to rinse my mouth (I also take vitamin/mineral/fishoil supplements with a sip of water during the meal). Perhaps a sip or two after brushing my teeth (not necessarily). Then the rest of the day if I'm not working out and only taking walks and working on the computer, I've noticed I sometimes don't actually need to drink before the next meal (although I can be misremembering; I have not done this specific meal that many times yet). I noticed this also with my previous version of the same meal (which used toasted bread and instead of porridge and less blueberries), after I started with the sodium-potassium salt. When I used regular salt, I used to be much more thirsty. If you look at each single meal component above (in finished/cooked form), they sit at around 70-90% water all of them (even the eggs). So reductionistically speaking, the meal should be just as hydrating as a fruit monomeal.

I had an insight and I wrote about it. Notice I put both conspiracy theorist thinking and the opposite tendency roughly equally in their own boxes. But of course the former is more salient as a societal question (it brings up more feelings, because of the negative valence as @LastThursday brought up, but also because there is a societal or cultural bias or stigma against that kind of thinking, again because we're culturally embedded in an analytic and post- traditional-religious framework). That's probably mostly why I put it as a title.

Notice I laid out the cognitive style that underlies supernaturalism and conspiracy theorist thinking. In a culture like ours, overt supernaturalism (in terms of traditional religiosity) is naturally suppressed, so you would expect less people to be overtly supernatural but perhaps they start gravitating toward conspiracy theories to fill that need for narrative-based cognition. Traditional religion is of course considered a meta-narrative that explains everything, gives a history or a plan for everything in reality (teleology, escatology). You could see how that can be replaced by the belief in the Illuminati or repetilians or hidden global world order or something like that. Paranoia and anxiety actually links to narrative-driven cognition (or are sort of the core ingredients of it, but with negative valence). Paranoia is driven by suspicion ("this thing could be indicative of this thing, that would be really bad"; assumption -> conclusion, a micro-narrative), and anxiety is driven by worry ("what if this thing happens in the future? That would be really bad"; similar assumption and conclusion). Paranoia and anxiety is associated with mentalistic cognition (drawing inferences based on sometimes very little information), i.e. more psychotic-like cognition, while more concrete cognition requires more details or facts and often very obvious inferences, i.e. more autistic-like cognition. Mentalism is more holistic, narrative-driven, suspicious, again drawing loose inferences based on less information, while more concrete cognition is more analytic, fact-driven, stable, drawing very few inferences based on very obvious connections. So you're really touching on the same phenomena (of course in a bit of a peripheral way). And when the meta-narrative of conspiracy theories is control, domination, deception, then naturally the narratives become negatively valenced and thus suspicious, paranoid, anxious, worried. Which can be driven (among other things) by a lack of fact-driven approach and drawing more loose inferences based on less information. Of course lower intelligence is also relevant, but that also feeds into facts-acquisition and inference-making (how fast do you do it, how much information can you handle at one time, how is your pattern-identifying skills, perhaps refinement and precision; IQ and working memory, pattern-recognition, intellectualism, all that). Hmm, narratives? Narrative-cognition being more efficient and appealing to the mind? Hmm.

As are those who try to debunk the conspiracy theorists, or what?