Carl-Richard

Why?

The truth is if you don't orient yourself towards something, you disintegrate.

Will coming up with justifications for why electric cars are nonsense be considered an expansive movement?

I kept replying to myself in my head, so I thought I would do it in real life as well

It's a bit tricky, because talking about consciousness is of course sensemaking. When I say consciousness precedes our sensemaking, I'm referring to the knowing of consciousness prior to thought. Also, thought itself is also embedded in lower structures like emotions, perceptions and knowing itself, so you can easily deconstruct the sensemaking concept that way, but again, as a pragmatist, infinitely inclusive concepts aren't very useful.

Whether or not there exists something like an orderedness to reality independent of our sensemaking is kinda vague and trivial. What I'm saying is that to articulate exactly what that order entails does depend on our sensemaking. "Logic" or "laws" is also just one way of making sense of it, and the logic and laws you're able to articulate depends on your cognitive structures, and these are not universal. They're specific to humans who underwent evolution on planet Earth and the cultural evolution of the last 30 000 years. If you were a lizard who evolved inside a cave without a visual system, or a hyperdimensional alien who is not constrained by space or time, you'll come to very different conclusions than humans. The realist tendency is a survival mechanism that reduces complexity and speeds up mental processing. Believing that there is such thing a thing as a physical particle out there in something we call space and which changes its states through something we call time, is an useful intuition given to us through culture and evolution. But look at say quantum mechanics: is light a particle or a wave? How can something be two things? It starts to betray our realist intuitions. The pragmatist impulse is to say that the particle model is one model, and the wave model is another model, and they're simply different ways of making sense of a phenomena. As for QM, somebody recently won a nobel prize for their 40 years of work on quantum entanglement, which disproves the idea that particles have standalone existence (properties that exist independent of measurement) and that actions in the universe are constrained by locality (the speed of light). Einstein didn't want to accept these possibilities because they are so counterintuitive. So again, you see how the rules that we're willing to apply to reality are strongly tied to our cultural and evolutionary intuitions.

All I'm saying is that you update your logically unjustified values (Fi) based on experience. You update many things based on experience. It's not exclusive to Fi. Si is basically just when you access your episodic memory.

Believing in a soul is not a very materialistic standpoint, so no. I'm more getting the sense that you think the soul actually precedes the act of speaking about it. It's there as if it's a physical thing, but it of course transcends atoms and molecules and all that. There are actually souls out there. I'm just saying we're the ones articulating the rules in our limited way using our primate intellect and our mammalian sense organs, and that works fine for doing certain things, and that is all we should expect it to do. Rules, logic, mechanisms, are man-made concepts. It's something we do. Primate go talk-talk

@integral @thisintegrated Here is my MBTI insight for the day: if Ti is logic, then Fi is wisdom. Ti can logically prove why they came to a conclusion, and Fi cannot, but logic is limited and prone to self-deception. Fi is too, but it learns through experience. Blindly trusting logic is not wise and may even be irrational. Rationality is logic + wisdom.

Haha it's as if you couldn't affirm my edit in the other thread in any better way. I'm talking on a very fundamental level of how you relate to knowledge in general (epistemology). When I as a pragmatist look at a concept like the soul, I look at what it means, and then I use it to describe and explain things related to it. That is as far as I feel I need to go. If I can use a concept to describe and explain the things I want, then the job is done. However, a realist will in addition to that ascribe some sense of permanence or "out-there-ness" to it. So a soul will not just be a useful concept for making sense of things, but it will also be a thing that exists out there independent of our sensemaking. Now, I'm not saying that I'm an absolute pragmatist or absolute anti-realist in all possible aspects. For example, I think that consciousness is real independent of our sensemaking. I'm then also defining sensemaking as our capability for abstract thought. In other words, consciousness comes prior to and makes possible our sensemaking (it's very literally the space between and the container of our thoughts).

No ?‍?

It's up there with auras and tarot reading. I'm trying to not say the a-word I just don't vibe with it. I can do it from time to time, but it's like jerking off: it's not very meaningful and it gets stale pretty quickly. The thing about these kind of grand narrative theories is that they're so easy to apply to anything and everything, so you'll easily get stuck in a rut repeating the same patterns over and over again. The reason for that is because they're very surface level, and the path of least resistance is to get complacent and stay at that level, and then you'll not be able to go into detail and generate fresh and authentic insights from the depths of your mind.

It's actually interesting that when I look back to when I used to meditate, every time I had a truly deep mystical experience outside of meditation, I never expected them.

As far as I'm concerned, past life memories, souls, the collective unconscious, the sun god and even the laws of physics, are all things we create temporarily (every time you think, i.e. in the form of a thought). I'm a pragmatist. It's all just useful fictions. I don't bother with making realist claims like "the soul is an actual object in reality". I just think that the soul concept is useful for explaining highly consistent and thorough accounts of past lives. By the way, if you're indeed more of a realist than a pragmatist, I think this might be one reason why we talk past each other on things like MBTI and SD, or everything really. For example, I don't treat the brain as a kind of "base reality" (or that there even is such a thing), which is why I won't so readily tie something like "memory" to it in the way you seem to do. I don't treat it any more special than any other scientific mode of inquiry (e.g. a survey). It might be more reliable than other things, but that's about it.

Based on his claims about being able to go many days without thinking a single thought, Sadhguru most probably lives with his Default Mode Network (DMN) mostly shut off, and people who come near him will empathically pick up on his state, and likewise their DMN will probably shut off as well. In this case, you would've explained Sadhguru's effect on people by referring to a neural correlate (the DMN), which is what you would call a physical explanation. Before you doubt the specificity of such a phenomena, remember that humans are highly capable of attuning to other people's mental states. If someone is angry or sad around you, you'll be able to pick up on that and synchronize your emotions with them (you'll get angry or sad). That specific emotion looks like something in the brain. Only two days ago, during lunch at our school, there was organized a highly emotional talk about the ongoing issues in Iran. I didn't attend the talk. When the people who attended the talk entered the classroom and started talking, it only took about 5 seconds before I started to feel how upset they were (in fact, most of the students decided to attend an activist demonstration in the city the day after).

There you have it: correlations between something physical and something non-physical. Congratulations, you got it Memories, like most things, have a mental part, and they have a physical part. I was talking about the mental part. Granted Sadhguru is speaking the truth and granted that all these other gurus who claim to have experienced countless past lives which track chronologically with history are also speaking the truth, I think you would agree that "soul" is a good term for explaining that phenomena. That's all.

When you bring to mind an episodic memory, there will be a certain pattern in the brain which correlates with that, but the same will be true when you bring to mind the fact that you like planes (which is a semantic memory). Surely then, the fact that you like planes does have a "physical counterpart", just like the fact that the memory of a past life has a physical counterpart.

Yeah, I have no idea why you're tying memory down to the physical processes. I only gave some examples for how science doesn't necessarily have to deal with physical processes. When Sadhguru says he spent many lifetimes preparing to build the Dhyanalinga, 1. do you believe him, and 2. is that a sufficient reason for deploying the soul concept?

Does cognitive science describe physical processes? Freudian psychoanalysis? Jungian psychology? You're talking about an experience of Sadhguru, which when it comes to science, the natural go-to option is a research psychologist. A research psychologist could use qualitative methods (e.g. interviews and thematic analysis), or quantitative methods (e.g. neural correlates, physiological correlates, surveys). Talking about the brain is just one of many options. What if the memories are very consistent and thorough, e.g. you can count back all the lifetimes you've had for the last 3000 years in chronological order?

Oh no, not the MBTI-SD crossover ?

The phenomenological experience of episodic memories is not physical. Which one is it? Isn't the experience of past life memories an obvious first option for deploying the soul concept?

Let's say you have a baby. If you deprive it of food and general safety, it will die. If you deprive it of love and care, it will not develop its higher mental functions. As it develops those higher mental functions, it develops an identity and the need to be acknowledged and treated in accordance with how they see themselves. And only after that, the desire to maximize one's potential arises. Even the mystic who goes into the woods must have had to develop all these things, or else they wouldn't have that drive. Whether or not you're lacking in lower needs is up to you to find out, but if you know you're lacking in the lower needs, you should not try to skip them.

Nope. You have literal brain areas dedicated to these things. If your brain is not well-integrated across hierarchies and lateralization, that's when you get inner conflict (what Freud called neurosis: conflict between different psychic structures). All psychological problems show some kind failure of integration of different brain areas. Plato put this as the man taming the lion and the lion taming the monster. The man is the neocortex (self-actualization/esteem needs), the lion is the limbic system (social/belonging needs), and the monster is the basal ganglia or the reptilian brain (safety and physiological needs). For Plato, Freud, Maslow, neuroscience, etc.; health, functionality and wisdom means your psychological structures are well-integrated. Spiritual bypassing, which is what you're advocating for, is one trap that hinders this process.

iT wAs a jOke, mAn

You were asking if a psychology degree is useful for understanding the mind, and it is, but sure, you can also just study psychology on your own, and that too will be useful for understanding the mind.