Panpsychism becoming a more relevant view

[theoneandnone]

32 minutes ago, Hojo said:

If you actually pay attention to how alex connor argues is he says some deep philosophical fact and then when asked to explain he will point to some philosopher he read or how it relates to a philosophical question. Not his own opinion. Hes just a bunch of philosophy quotes. Hes like a robot.

If you talked with him it would be essentially 

Hello how are you did you find purpose today?

Connor - well I dont beleive in God

Oh ok well do you feel any percentage of purpose today?

Connor - Well platos cave says this and this and this

ok.

I like his content but I agree he doesn’t think he just babbles what everyone else says lol

[Leo Gura]

5 hours ago, Arthogaan said:

Those two comments being posted next to each other is a beautifull lesson on it's own.

Post-modernism baby!

Edited Wednesday at 12:06 AM by Leo Gura

[Leo Gura]

5 hours ago, Hojo said:

Repeating philosophy textbooks isnt value. He dosent have an original belief. Hes more a philosophy teacher than a philosopher. While wearing the cloak of a philosopher.

That's what most "philosophers" are.

Rats!

[Leo Gura]

4 hours ago, Salvijus said:

And there is more about him that I just can't put into words. His vibe is so pure. Such a beautiful soul idk. He's just oozing with intelligence of the mind. Everything he says sounds like a poetry somehow. 

This is what I call the Douglas Hofstadter effect. Everything he says is beautiful and smart, but he has no fucking clue what reality is and he never will.

[Carl-Richard]

They touched upon meaning and purpose and said many different things, e.g. "meaning is connecting to something greater outside yourself", "people who experience trauma can have their sense of meaning destroyed", "meaning is significance and flow in the moment", "meaning is to have a task that you think will fulfill you when you get it". The fact that you can say so many things about it, is indicative. I think meaning and purpose can be understood as synonymous with health. And health means "whole", so to understand what makes a healthy organism, you have to understand the "whole" of the organism, how it works and the different parts of it.

Dr. K already touched on this, but I have my own spin. There are many theories throughout history that have come in parts of three. For example, Plato's "man, lion and beast"; Freud's "id, ego, superego"; the Triune brain (neocortex, limbic system, basal ganglia). All of them reflect a bio-psycho-social split (which is in fact its own model; "the biopsychosocial model of health", not coincidentally). But arguably the most illustrative model of this split is in my opinion indeed Self-determination theory (which Dr. K talked about).

Self-determination theory (SDT) is presented as a model of motivation (motivation, health, meaning; different words, same thing). For an organism to be optimally motivated, they must act within their Competence, i.e. their adaptive capacities conferred to them by survival. The very act of movement is an expression of competence. You were conferred the capacity to move so that you can survive, and when you survive, you are rewarded, not merely with survival itself, but through the action itself. It's intrinsically rewarding, it feels intrinsically good to do. This is where significance, flow, internal motivation comes from. The task is rewarding in itself, it's fun in itself, you do it for its own sake. Because being competent, or acting within your competence, feels good.

Also, the organism must have an experienced sense that they can choose their actions, that they have a sense of Autonomy and that they can act how they want to act. And when they are able to do this, they will naturally act within their competence. Nothing kills an organism more than limiting their competence, as well as their perceived ability to express that competence (in fact, you might call it synonymous with death).

Thirdly, you must have an environment which supports your competence (Belonging/Relatedness). You must belong to your environment, and ideally, the environment must be surrounded by other people, and ideally other people like yourself, which harmonize with your values, your competence, which support what you care about, what you are, how you want to act. The very fact that they are human like yourself means they are matching your competence somehow; we are social animals which create bonds, which rely on each other, which feel pleasure by being with each other, which brains are shaped for being with other people.

Alex also brought up how our models and theories for making sense of the world provide us with a sense of meaning (and that when we encounter a great deal of them through the modern world through telecommunications, our worldviews have a tendency to collapse into relativism, which we experience as a kind of death). Firstly, again, interesting how "death" is seen as the antithesis of meaning, a bit like how "death" is in a big way the antithesis of health. Secondly, no wonder we experience meaning from our models and theories and generally intellectual engagement with the world, because this is a part of our capacities as human beings. Just like we have the capacity to move as organisms, we have the capacity to move through abstract, simulated, conceptual realms. And logical reasoning, language, really all forms of thinking we do, are riddled with notions of movement ("getting to" the point, "arriving at" a conclusion", "moving on" to the next point). It's no wonder why very logical people like Alex can find a lot of enjoyment by simply "going through" lines of logical reasoning, because that is what is within his competence, as a human being but also particularly for him as an individual.

Even people who are supposedly very narrowly focused on reductionistic notions of health like longevity and "biological age" like Bryan Johnson, still serve to illustrate how health and meaning are intertwined. Firstly, to follow his rigorous protocol, he has to study in-depth how the human mechanism works: how the circadian rhythm works, how nutrition works, how the body works in terms of the skeletal-muscular system. He has to be very particular about the ebbs and flows of the human body and mind. And not coincidentally, he experiences a lot of benefits from it in terms of physical AND mental health. He says he has never felt better, never felt more capable, never felt more alive, and I would posit, never felt a greater experience of meaning. Just like how trauma (which is essentially damage to your system) can zap your experience of meaning, carefully cultivating a healthy body and mind, reducing damage caused by aging (which is generally caused by chronic strain, a kind of slow trauma) will drastically increase your experience of meaning.


I can go on and on about this, but the crux of the point is that while we can talk about how "vacuous" and simultaneously "complex" and hard to grasp meaning and purpose seems to be presented as, if you simply re-frame the issue as a question of what makes a healthy (holistically healthy) human being; and that to understand that, you need to understand how every part of the human being looks like when everything is working as it should; getting a grasp on meaning and purpose becomes a much more simple and straightforward task.

Edited Wednesday at 04:10 AM by Carl-Richard

[zurew]

21 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

if you simply re-frame the issue as a question of what makes a healthy (holistically healthy) human being; and that to understand that, you need to understand how every part of the human being looks like when everything is working as it should; getting a grasp on meaning and purpose becomes a much more simple and straightforward task.

This seems very straightforwardly false depending on what is meant by holistically healthy, because that is what needs to do all the work here and it is not at all trivial what that means.

There are many examples where people have meaning in their life but they wouldn't be considered holistically healthy - like when you have a kid you sleep less, you have less time to do sports you start to have a dad bad  etc.

The idea that one can have meaning and purpose in their life without being holistically healthy seems very trivially true.

[Carl-Richard]

3 hours ago, zurew said:

This seems very straightforwardly false depending on what is meant by holistically healthy, because that is what needs to do all the work here and it is not at all trivial what that means.

It makes it simpler but not simple. I just laid out roughly what it means. It grounds it in mechanism, but the mechanism is not simple. Holistic means there are compromises, trades and balances. And it requires deep involvement, deep study of the human organism, or deep unlearning.
 

3 hours ago, zurew said:

There are many examples where people have meaning in their life but they wouldn't be considered holistically healthy 

It's true you can have "some" meaning and be not very holistically healthy, but on the aggregate, and if you quantify meaning on a scale, like Dr. K likes to do, I think holistic health is the answer.

 

3 hours ago, zurew said:

- like when you have a kid you sleep less, you have less time to do sports you start to have a dad bad  etc.

It could be a net positive. If your "kid slot" goes from 0 to 100 and your body slot goes from 100 to 80, maybe that's worth it.

Edited Wednesday at 06:56 AM by Carl-Richard

[zurew]

Just now, Carl-Richard said:

It's true you can have "some" meaning and be not very holistically healthy, but on the aggregate, and if you quantify meaning on a scale, like Dr. K likes to do, I think holistic health is the answer.

I understand your point that you try to frame the problem so that it is more graspable and it becomes more clear what action one needs to take to "solve" this issue, its just that to me this just pushes back the issue one more step.

We can have a definition of holistically healthy where it includes having purpose in life and having meaning in life, but then the issue becomes how the fuck can one become holisitcally healthy? It just seems that you take the problem and you put it inside the "how to be holsitically healthy?" problem and then we think that now the target is more clear, but I honestly dont see how.

[Carl-Richard]

13 minutes ago, zurew said:

I understand your point that you try to frame the problem so that it is more graspable and it becomes more clear what action one needs to take to "solve" this issue, its just that to me this just pushes back the issue one more step.

We can have a definition of holistically healthy where it includes having purpose in life and having meaning in life, but then the issue becomes how the fuck can one become holisitcally healthy? It just seems that you take the problem and you put it inside the "how to be holsitically healthy?" problem and then we think that now the target is more clear, but I honestly dont see how.

I just gave examples of models with three parts in them (bio-psycho-social). They point you to the different aspects of the human being that need to be addressed for the human being to function optimally. That's a start and way better than "meaning is when you do a task and it's fun, yay!". Then you go deeper from there, but the main point is that you should study how the human being works: literally study the science of the human body, study the science of the human mind and brain, study the science of human behavior, study the ancient philosophical traditions, study how religion works, study how spirituality works. Then apply it, and meaning will arise as a result. "But Alex O'Connor studied all that and he didn't say to study all that to experience meaning". Disagree. Alex O'Connor (obviously based on my knowledge of him) is not very knowledgeable of the human body, the human mind and the brain. But that's just my read.

Edited Wednesday at 04:06 AM by Carl-Richard

[zurew]

20 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

"But Alex O'Connor studied all that and he didn't say to study all that to experience meaning". Disagree. Alex O'Connor (obviously based on my knowledge of him) is not very knowledgeable of the human body, the human mind and the brain. But that's just my read.

I agree with this, I dont take Alex to be knowledgeable in those things like not even remotely. He has some understanding of philosophy and a kind of good understanding of the Bible and theology but thats it. Maybe I would mention politics as well, because he has a better understanding of it than a layperson, but nothing else comes to mind.

 

25 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

That's a start and way better than "meaning is when you do a task and it's fun, yay!". Then you go deeper from there, but the main point is that you should study how the human being works: literally study the science of the human body, study the science of the human mind and brain, study the science of human behavior, study the ancient philosophical traditions, study how religion works, study how spirituality works.

Again I understand you point because if you frame it this way you can make this an empirical problem rather than a philosophy problem, the issue that I see is just that that lack of ambiguity will probably come back really fast once you start to search for those answers empirically, especially if you will inevitably largely rely on surveys and relying on people introspecting.

Obviously the hard part is always about the  hidden variables and mechanisms that are incredibly hard to recognize and to explicate.

---

I agree btw this empirical approach and I think that philosophers sometimes waste so much time trying to answer certain questions that are not even necessary to solve the given issue. Like the idea that you need to defend objective morality, because otherwise global coordination is impossible - its just as you said the framing of the problem is the problem.

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, zurew said:

Again I understand you point because if you frame it this way you can make this an empirical problem rather than a philosophy problem, the issue that I see is just that that lack of ambiguity will probably come back really fast once you start to search for those answers empirically, especially if you will inevitably largely rely on surveys and relying on people introspecting.

Obviously the hard part is always about the  hidden variables and mechanisms that are incredibly hard to recognize and to explicate.

---

It's not as much an "ask what makes people experience meaning and make them rate the meaningfulness of their experience on a Likert scale and then deduce the underlying variables" as an "when organisms move, they're alive, they're functioning as they should; when they don't, they stagnate, they die". It's actually in a way more like philosophy than actual nitpicking empirical science.

Again, even something as simple as waking up in the morning and eating food because you're hungry after a long night's sleep. Eating at that moment in time is experienced as meaningful. But then if you were to continue to eat after you were full, you continue stuffing food down your throat even though you feel like gagging and your tummy hurts, that is generally experienced as less meaningful.

Human beings go through a long list of different ebbs and flows like this throughout a day, or week, or month, or year, and getting sensitive to those ebbs and flows and acting with them harmoniously is honestly the bulk of what meaning is about. But figuring out those ebbs and flows often requires something out of you, be it training your awareness up from the standard sleep-like state you've been conditioned into by modern society, or educating yourself about the principles of how the ebbs and flows work.

[Carl-Richard]

13 hours ago, Hojo said:

@SalvijusSure tell me how his mind is a work of art. What makes it different from a philosophy teacher?

Imo learning about philosophy isn't philosophical.

That's what openminded people do. They actively seek out new perspectives. They actively try to challenge their own perspective. That's what is admirable about Alex. He is constantly challenging himself and actually listens to what people are saying. The alternative, where you sit basking in your own ignorance, drilling down into the isolated cave of your mind, can be useful for some things, but if that's all you do, you will eventually come off as a dull buffoon.

 

13 hours ago, Hojo said:

Like reading a math textbook isn't doing math. Hes the textbook not the actual thing. Just go read a textbook.

Math is like the worst example you could've used. Essentially nobody does math they haven't read in a book. Some things you simply won't come up with on your own in a thousand years. You writing in English right now and using the words you are using is a result of thousands of years of people finding out things and building on prior knowledge. You either adopt that knowledge lazily, haphazardly, by accident, through your upbringing and culture, or you seek it out intentionally from a place of intellect and curiosity.

Edited Wednesday at 09:19 AM by Carl-Richard

[Hojo]

@Carl-RichardYou dont have to adopt the knowledge at all. All the knowledge of others will get you is the same spot you are in right now.

Edited Wednesday at 11:37 AM by Hojo

[zurew]

This is only with philosophy again that people think they can skip the study, but no one would accept this when it comes to any other thing like science.

"No no no let me teach you about biology and physics without ever studying those subjects"

Like some of you are the Terrence Howards of philosophy.

[Carl-Richard]

5 hours ago, Hojo said:

@Carl-RichardYou dont have to adopt the knowledge at all. All the knowledge of others will get you is the same spot you are in right now.

Show me one person who can do differential equations without ever reading a math book.

[Hojo]

@Carl-RichardAlex connor is the math book. Just Go read a math book. He wont expand your view in away text wont. You arent seeking out a new perspective with alex connor you are seeking others perspectives hes memorized. Him the individual is just parroting philosophy. You dont need the person it wont expand your world view hes quoting philosophy thats it. Its like talking philosophy book.

If you went to a youtube channel and the person was just saying philosophy theories would you say that youtube has a beautiful mind? No hes just quoting people hes like a robot.

Its like getting a video cassette of people talking about philosophy and saying I really like this cassette it has a beautiful mind. No it dosent its mind isnt even working. Its just a cassette saying what other cassettes have said. Maybe a good place to hear philosophy terms explained but you can do that by looking them up. Now the beautiful mind is useless.

If you watched a video about someone reading a mathbook you wouldnt say this is a beautiful mind. Hes just reading text.

All alex connor is the knowledge of others that will get you nowhere. Wow words.

Hes also state that he was changing to pantheism based on no understanding about conciousness. How can you do that? Only when you are stuck in word games and dont know what you are talking about.

You can tell hes doing this by everytime hes asked to explain his position he brings up a philosophers theories in order to ground and explain his own positions.

Math maybe have been a bad choice but the explanation works with it. Its like hes reading a math textbook without understanding what math is hes just doing the math.Philosophy is about understanding what math is and he is claiming he knows when he dosent so that turns him into a philosophy regurgitator.

Hes making his philosophy around other philosophers not himself.Hes not doing philosophy. Hes reading a textbook meaning hes a philosophy teacher not a philosopher.

Theres a reason in the video the people dont let him explain, its because all his explanations are just telling them opinions other philosophers had that they already read so they dont need to hear him explain himself. 

You can in essence read him and understand his opinion before it leaves his mouth. So he dosent have to say anything at all. And he desperately wants to get his 'points' in so people think hes smart but hes just repeating philosophy theories he dosent understand. 

His logic is looping. He is secretly self referencing himself.

Edited Wednesday at 06:22 PM by Hojo

[zurew]

13 hours ago, Hojo said:

Hes making his philosophy around other philosophers not himself

None of your thoughts and ideas and philosophy is unique and this goes for Leo as well.

You extremely naively think you are unique up until the point it is pointed out to you that there are and there were a bunch of other philosophers who articulated those thoughts much more eloquently hunderds or thousands of years ago.

The funny and ironic things is that a good chunk of you just parrot Leo's myopic view of (basically constantly shitting on academics), without first you studying and looking up in depth actually what academic philosophers can offer and what they study.

Edited 21 hours ago by zurew

[Hojo]

@zurew I think I am in a computer on in a simulation that aliens created named God. I never parroted that from anyone. I do parrot things but all this guy does is parrot. This man has no single unique belief that means he isnt doing philosophy.

Here is a unique perspective on philosopy youve never heard you arent looking out your eyes your eyes are actually like 15 feet in front of you and up. You are actually way tinier than you think you are.

Even if you are staring at a wall your real eyes are in front of you and up someone looking at a bigger world.

If you look at the sky your eyes are behind the sky and bigger than the sky as you witness reality inside your head. THinking you are looking out your real eyes.

Edited 21 hours ago by Hojo

[Carl-Richard]

2 hours ago, Hojo said:

@zurew I think I am in a computer on in a simulation that aliens created named God. I never parroted that from anyone.

This is a true story: the most intense dream I've ever had involved me crashing a spaceship into an alien planet with my friends and living there for thousands of years and constructing a society. Then I sat down and basked in it all and started thinking about what had been going on, and then I realized that the entire thing was a simulation constructed by aliens as a way to use human creativity to create new technology. Then I woke up from that dream (while still dreaming) and drew the insides of the spaceship on a piece of paper, and then I woke up for real and was like "what.. the.. fuck".

Aliens, computer simulations, are so ingrained into us by pop culture, that using any of those concepts in combination to form a thought, would not require much originality as a starting point.

 

2 hours ago, Hojo said:

I do parrot things but all this guy does is parrot. This man has no single unique belief that means he isnt doing philosophy.

He simply "parrots" more than you because he knows more than you and knows how to draw connections between ideas he knows about. But to say he only parrots is gravely uncharitable. In the very video we're talking about, he routinely answers questions on his own behalf.
 

2 hours ago, Hojo said:

Here is a unique perspective on philosopy youve never heard you arent looking out your eyes your eyes are actually like 15 feet in front of you and up. You are actually way tinier than you think you are.

Even if you are staring at a wall your real eyes are in front of you and up someone looking at a bigger world.

If you look at the sky your eyes are behind the sky and bigger than the sky as you witness reality inside your head. THinking you are looking out your real eyes.

You can be uniquely incoherent and it won't matter for anyone. But if I assume you're being coherent, it reminds me of the idea that consciousness and perceptions are exactly where they seem to be, "out there". They aren't fundamentally a result of a mechanism, of light travelling into the eyes and being projected onto the retina and then adjusted neurologically. The mechanisms of the eyes are only correlative stories we use to explain how reality behaves, of why when we for example put a mask in front of the eyes, perception seems to change.

Edited 18 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[Carl-Richard]

By the way, "panpsychism" (or its popular version "constitutive micropsychism") is a Looney Tunes version of idealism where you can hand-hold materialists and make them keep the illusion of Newtonian atomism as a fundamental substrate of reality while simultaneously inching towards the reality that consciousness has to simply be a given.

It suffers the same kind of intermediary step as my notion of "crypto-materialism" (being an idealist while disregarding psychic phenomena). You just simply can't completely let go of your trusty friend materialism.

@Hojo Do you think "crypto-materialism" is an original idea?

Edited 18 hours ago by Carl-Richard