Carl-Richard

Surely there is a reason why he wanted to speak to us

Why speak?

I see a pattern in your posts where you try to find contradictions to SD using specific anomalous examples (e.g. "this" specific aspect of "this" specific country). I think this is the wrong approach. All models generalize at some level, and therefore there will always be inconsistencies on the level of single examples. SD is used to understand large trends of societal development across nations and ideologies, which is a very wide lens. There is always a trade-off between having a wide vs. narrow lens (generalizability vs. specificity). What you should do instead is to look at a large collection of examples, establish a pattern and see if it fits.

It's hard to say. The West has had a very different developmental path to the UAE which is correlated with wealth but not fully explained by it. There have been extremely wealthy empires in the past, but they didn't suddenly develop democracy over the course of 50 years.

Their wealth is a recent phenomena.

You say there are dead ends but also that there are no ends.

Brahman and Maya are one.

They're too young.

It's obvious that humans and other animals are different. The question is if those differences justify how we treat them. Why are you bringing up what other people think? It's you who are having the discussion. We have to outgrow the value systems and social systems that make people hate pedophiles.

You were specifically talking about qualia (what experience is like from the inside), not whether humans or animals look different from the outside. What is the point of factoring out these things?

Sounds great. About the job, as long as you see the value in having a higher-order purpose, things will work itself out. Your goals and the way you pursue them may change, but the important part is having a goal in the first place. Goals, purpose and meaning facilitates movement through the environment, which exposes you to different challenges and leads to growth. Cool

That's an assumption.

The point is that if you're an anthropocentric sadist that wants to argue why animal suffering is somehow different from human suffering, then you for example say that it's because animals lack the cognitive complexity of humans, then you take a human with the cognitive complexity of an animal (a baby or a mentally disabled person) and realize that you still want to claim that their suffering is different and that your argument is bunk

The thing that is reincarnated is the illusory identification with form (self-identity). You reincarnate every time you think a self-referential thought. That is why enlightenment is the end of reincarnation. You realize that both past life memories and current life memories are illusory.

They're the same in the sense that they're mobile flesh bags that whine when you poke them. Here is my non-autistic actually understandable version of "Name the Trait": 1. Name one human trait that animals lack. 2. Take a normal human and remove that trait. 3. Try to rationalize this human's suffering the same way you do with animals. 4. If you can't do 3, repeat points 1-3 until you exhaust all traits.

@fortifyacacia3 Sounds like Vaush has done some work on you ?

Hehe wow thanks! I agree, however, overly abstract concepts or formulations tend to lose nuance, which is kinda what I felt when I started writing this. On the surface, vitality and resilience seem almost synonymous with "health" and "strength" and even "good". On the other hand, I think there is a Goldilocks zone of abstractness; where it's both overarching enough and specific enough to provide some descriptive utility and serve as a springboard for a deeper (or wider) understanding. This is essentially what systems theory is able to pull off (understanding complex phenomenas from a multi-disciplinary and meta-theoretical level). Systems theory concepts seem a bit vacuous on the surface, and everybody has an intuitive understanding of them (e.g. words like "self-organization" or "adaptation"), but simply mentioning the words doesn't do justice in conveying the depth of the concepts. There is a lot of unpacking to do (which like I said, I'll probably do in separate threads, although you got a little teaser in that second comment).

Questioning one's assumptions can work to uncover unconscious biases and expose certain limiting beliefs and behaviors (analogous to cultivating "attention" in the paradigm I presented). This can open up the possibility and increase the potential for vitality and resilience, but there also needs to be a larger and more general/overarching type of attention (goal-directed purpose for your life) for this potential to manifest into actuality. This is for example why taking psychedelics without being interested in truth or personal growth often won't do much for you. They similarly open up the possibility for vitality and resilience by directing your attention for a moment, but you must align it with a higher-order purpose and work on it over time for it to create a consistent pattern of growth. If you feel that you lack a sense of direction and that your life isn't going anywhere, consciously setting a goal for yourself (like a life purpose) is useful for this. If you have problems with executing on that, therapy can help. Therapy is essentially about internalizing vitality with the help of a vital external regulator, a.k.a the therapist (which is analogous to how children learn emotion regulation from their parents). The therapist exposes you to challenges (exposure therapy) while teaching you to externalize emotional power to deal with these challenges (goal-directed expression of emotional energy), within a frame of higher-order purpose (overarching goal), which produces a consistent pattern of growth. As you refine your vitality and resilience, it becomes self-sustaining. It becomes its own goal. This is the lesson of meditation: true psychological independence. Once you've built up enough internal power to function independently of all non-essential external regulators, you're naturally turned off by them: you don't even want to take hedonic drugs, eat greasy food, engage in overstimulation. The only goal is to perpetuate health itself, in yourself and others: long-term, self-sustained, organic, internal stability: vitality and resilience; internal regulatory capacity.

1. Assuming that one's psychology is influenced by one's environment, there is no dichotomy there. Genotypes interact with the environment to produce phenotypes (observed traits/behavior). There is virtually never a 1-to-1 relationship between genotype and phenotype, maybe except for monogenetic traits like eye color (but these can also change due to environmental factors, e.g. being exposed to toxins or infectious disease that changes pigmentation). In other words, assuming there even is a genetic component to homosexuality (which is not clear), it's still both biological and environmental, because genes always have to interact with the environment. 2. We can observe animals having sex with the same sex, but you're saying you don't see animals having sex with prepubescent animals (have you checked?). Either case, that's not pedophilia. It's child molestation. It also doesn't make sense to apply it to animals as the definition has a social/psychological self-evaluation component that only applies to humans: you're technically not a pedophile if you don't feel difficulty conforming to social pressures (i.e. you feel an urge to offend but you can manage it without creating discomfort).

The points I've highlighted is more about misunderstanding personality as a concept and the faulty conclusions you can draw from that (about jobs etc.) rather than the potential flaws with personality tests in general. All psychologists know that personality is only a general pattern of qualities that persists over different situations and times. That is not to say this video isn't important, but I was expecting it to be more about the tests themselves (and maybe a comparison between different testing protocols or the specific tests for MBTI vs. Big 5).

I'm a privileged white kid.

I was actually kind of hesitant to say humans as I started thinking about animals and aliens. I guess this is what I was getting at: in our current world, only humans have an abstract understanding of morality as a concept and are able to discuss it, and this is both the origin of the diversity of values and the expression of disagreement itself. In other words, if I'm allowed to modify my previous statement again: "moral frameworks are about what humans want to say they are", which is basically a roundabout way of saying "humans make moral frameworks", which is kinda "duh!" But yes, I agree that morality is about preferences and that preferences exist universally for all creatures. I've basically said a bunch of nothing, so I'll try to save my ass: You can't truly know somebody's preferences. You can only infer it based on your own. Even communication itself is a reflection of your own preferences, because like your preferences, your cognitive interpretative structures were molded by conditioning and evolution. However, we can't even pretend to know somebody's preferences if they don't communicate it somehow. Whether that communication is verbal and abstract (a moral framework) or non-verbal and empathetic (a mammalian cry) is just a matter about information density. Nevertheless, in the words of the patron saint of pedos (joke), the path forward towards a global discussion of morality is mutual understanding, which requires finer communication, empathy and charity. Therefore, the future of animal rights is less about animal shelters and more about Neuralinks and Chinese lessons

Seems more like you're questioning the effectiveness of his methods than the sincerity of his intentions. Why not take his word for it?

I also said he is doing that.

Another way to put it: morality is about what humans want to say it is. In our current world, anyone that has anything to say about what morality is (or isn't) is a human saying what they want, thus morality is still fundamentally about what humans want.