Carl-Richard

Right??

It's ooonly talk. (btw, the way the lyrics were written may satisfy your Ti )

OMG YES you reminded me to post this song in another thread, and now I can post it here as well :

Counter-counter message (I swear I have to stop doing high-intensity cardio because it makes me mentally unstable ): I think it's better to maybe use a wider definition of sensemaking, e.g. "all attempts towards knowledge, understanding and being"; firstly, because it just makes more sense, and secondly, it better illustrates how I'm not a pure anti-realist. Despite this wide definition, I still think the primacy of consciousness is unavoidable: consciousness is still 'the case' independent of anything else. But again, things like souls, brains and physics, depend on us who are making sense of it.

Great

@Twinstar That's great, and I think you'll agree that this was a natural development that unfolded within you. It wasn't somebody from the outside who told you "mental illness and death are illusions", and suddenly amidst the deepest depths of despair, you understood everything you needed to do. The process of coming to spirituality is complex, and it's not generally not the case that you can simply tell someone about it and they're ready to listen. And not all people are circling rock bottom and in need of a complete psychological overhaul either. For most people, all they need is some tangible structure that pulls them out of the downwards spiral, be it constructive daily habits, physical exercise or a life purpose.

Having a life purpose is essentially like having a work schedule or setting an alarm clock in the morning. It creates some structure in your life. If you care about mental hygiene and not being plagued by existential despair, figuring out a life purpose can be very helpful. Especially if you have aspirations and strive for excellence, the life purpose is basically a mission statement. If all you care about is keeping your head above water, sure, you don't have to do much of anything really.

When did things change?

My experience is that it's much less reductionistic than that, but I guess the culture has shifted a bit as I think you're a bit older than me.

Try to say that to a depressed suicidal person. What the hell is this condescension?

What is your idea of self-actualization?

True. You choose your life purpose, just like you choose what to eat, how to exercise, or how to earn money. But you can't just choose any life purpose. You have to choose one that fits you.

Eating food can become a trap. Exercise can become a trap. Earning money can become a trap. They're still essential.

Disintegration is mental illness and death.

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 ?‍?