Deconstructing Rationality - Part 2 - New Video

[Leo Gura]

5 minutes ago, TheEnigma said:

Is it to some degree luck and what you are born with?

Yes. Genetics, gender, personality type, but also how people are educated and culturally conditioned. Intution is a neural network, it needs to be trained like an AI to be sharp.

Edited yesterday at 07:50 AM by Leo Gura

[LoneWonderer]

4 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

I am curious which parts.

I will get back to you on this. It's not an easy thing to pinpoint atm. I'm about half way through the episode. Understanding of what is being said is there, but having issues with forming connections in my mind with the content.

[CARDOZZO]

@Leo Gura Which intellectuals, scientists, STEM types do you respect and/or find insightful these days? 

[AION]

Part 2 is really banger. For people who want the summary see below. 

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Why Rationalism is Wrong — Part 2: Extended Summary

Prerequisite Resources and Context

This lecture serves as an extension of the material found at metarrationality.com, which is described as a life-changing resource that provides the foundational framework for understanding the limitations of rationalism. The speaker emphasizes that this website, along with its companion site meaningness.com, represents essential homework that viewers should engage with seriously over an extended period. The material in this lecture builds upon and extends these resources rather than duplicating them.

Part One: Understanding Irrationality as Context

What Irrationality Actually Is

Before deconstructing rationalism, the speaker establishes what irrationality means through contemplation rather than rigid definition. The inverse question—what is rationality?—should be contemplated alongside it.

Examples of Irrational Thinking:

The first example involves horoscopes and astrology. The question posed is: what is the relationship between Jupiter's orbit and your romantic relationships? The answer is probably nothing. Pre-rational people read horoscopes seriously, revealing a fundamental failure to understand causal relationships within physical reality. The pre-rational mind attributes causal connections where none exist.

The Native American rain dance illustrates the same principle. During drought, performing a rain dance followed by actual rain creates a false causal attribution. If one tracked every rain dance against rainfall outcomes over a hundred repetitions, the correlation would dissolve. This is precisely where mankind evolved from pre-rational to rational stages—the advent of science as the meticulous and rigorous tracking of mechanical causal relationships that simply wasn't happening at the pre-rational level. This explains the superstitious and mythological thinking characteristic of that stage.

Gambling superstitions provide another illuminating example. A poker player wearing a red hat during a jackpot win may subsequently believe in a "lucky red hat." There is no causal relationship—hence the term superstition. However, a fascinating twist emerges: believing in the lucky hat might actually improve performance through increased confidence and bolder betting, demonstrating that the placebo effect is a real effect. This creates interesting edge cases where belief in luck might generate luck, though it remains unreliable as a strategy.

Religious belief in divine protection represents another form of irrationality. Praying to God to protect one's children doesn't function through the mechanism people imagine. The universe doesn't arrange itself around human desires simply because those desires exist.

The anti-vaccine movement provides a contemporary example. While vaccines can be legitimately criticized from both pre-rational and post-rational perspectives, most anti-vaxxers are pre-rational because they think anecdotally. When someone says "my extended family member died from the vaccine," they're offering one anecdote that fails to demonstrate actual danger. The only valid approach requires rigorous statistical analysis across millions of people, comparing vaccine dangers against disease dangers numerically. Such analysis reveals vaccines are less dangerous than the diseases they prevent—not for every individual, as exceptions always exist, but for public policy purposes.

Caveat on Terminology

The speaker issues an important clarification for serious philosophy students. The use of "rationalism" here differs entirely from the university distinction between rationalism versus empiricism. A detailed definition was provided in Part 1 specifically to avoid this confusion.

The reasoning for creating new definitions relates to sensemaking quality. High-quality sensemaking depends on how distinctions are drawn and definitions constructed. Different definitional approaches lead to better or worse sensemaking. The freshman philosophy distinction between rationalism and empiricism doesn't provide sufficient traction on what truly matters: the issue of sensemaking itself. This redefinition serves practical utility, and while anyone is free to define terms differently, intelligent definition-making matters for how far one's understanding can reach.

Part Two: Ontological Foundations

Why Rationalism Fails on Ontology

The fundamental ontological error of rationalism is that no quality is reducible. Rationalism attempts to reduce qualities to quantities, or qualities to other qualities, and this is a category mistake at the deepest level.

Visualization Exercise:

Close your eyes (or visualize while keeping them open if driving) and experience the following in sequence:

The taste of lemon juice on your tongue — be mindful and actually experience this quality

The color red in your mind's eye — this is a different quality entirely

The number five as a quality in your mind

Now compare these three qualities: lemon, red, and five. Notice that none are equivalent. Each is unique and irreducible. You cannot reduce one to another. This observation turns out to be profoundly important.

Quality is inherent to reality. What is reality? It is an infinite collection of all possible qualities, and this cannot be reduced away. These qualities are inherently subjective.

The problem for science and rationalism is that they cannot handle these qualities because they want to objectify everything, stripping it of qualitative content and reducing it to equations or numbers. Science believes it can take the color red and reduce it to nanometer wavelengths of light. But the wavelength description and the qualitative experience of red are not equal. No two qualities are the same.

Furthermore, all quantities in mathematics are actually qualities. When you introspect on what a quantity is—what the number five is—you experience it as a quality. You need access to these qualities for sensemaking and understanding. This is essential and cannot be eliminated.

Attempting to reduce quality to quantity strips reality of its richness and causes loss of mind's depth. This constitutes both an ontological and epistemic error. Proper use of mind requires deep awareness of qualities because you will use them for sensemaking.

Rationalism doesn't know how to handle this because its ontology assumes qualities aren't real—that they're just subjective human experiences while the real stuff is atoms and numbers. This assumption was never demonstrated or proven; it was simply adopted. Rationalism consequently crushes qualitative aspects of understanding into flat one-dimensional quantities, artificially flattening and limiting the mind's access, thereby limiting intelligence itself.

Part Three: Deep Epistemology

The Inadequacy of Rationalist Epistemology

Rationalism represents a kind of epistemology, but a weak one with shallow grasp of what epistemology truly involves. It is not qualitatively rich enough to make sense of higher dimensions of mind because it tries to reduce everything to atoms.

The rationalist's response—"What higher dimensions of mind? There's only atoms"—exemplifies precisely what needs questioning rather than assuming.

Rationalism grossly underestimates the seriousness of epistemic problems. Epistemology cannot be solved by being more rational, formal, technical, factual, objective, mathematical, scientific, logical, mechanical, skeptical, or rigorous. Though this approach seems like it should work, it ultimately fails.

The Structure of Thinking

Ultimately, discussions of rationality concern thinking itself. If you're simply sitting without thinking, you're neither rational nor irrational—you're just being, conscious, having experience.

To call someone irrational means they're using their mind incorrectly. The entire discussion reduces to: what are the proper and improper ways to think? What are the wrong ways to use your mind?

The mind can easily be misused, and bad thinking is the norm. Irrational thinking is everywhere.

Rationalism's proposed solution is that good thinking can be defined according to certain rules, standards, values, and priorities. Follow this set of rules and you achieve proper thinking; break them and you're thinking irrationally. This simplistic approach dramatically underestimates the problem's significance.

The approach is fundamentally question-begging because it assumes what good thinking is. The reality is that you don't know what good thinking is—it's not easy to answer.

Homework Exercise: Sit down with paper and try to write out a list of what counts as good thinking. How do you distinguish good from bad thinking? This exercise reveals that the answer is far from obvious. This definitional difficulty constitutes the core epistemic problem at rationalism's heart.

The Mistake of Formalization

Formalizing good thinking isn't just hard—it's a mistake. You cannot follow rules for thinking because all rules have exceptions which cannot be explicated or defined.

Thinking is what might be called an infinite game, while rationalism assumes it's a finite game. Proper use of mind requires infinite requisite variety because the mind is infinite.

The objection "prove the mind is infinite" reveals part of the problem: the insistence on proof must be questioned. What would proving the mind's infinity even mean? Is proof capable of demonstrating this? The episode "Why God Cannot Be Proven" explores this in detail.

Requisite variety means the flexibility of your mind. If the mind is infinite, your mind needs infinite flexibility to understand itself.

Factors That Corrupt Any Formal System

Whatever formal system of rules you invent for truthful thinking, there will always be a set of factors outside that system which governs and corrupts it:

Sociology and culture shape what thoughts are permissible and valued. Conformity and groupthink pressure minds toward consensus. Survival pressure and financial issues determine what questions can be asked and what answers can be tolerated. Ego distorts everything toward self-serving conclusions. Closed-mindedness and arrogance prevent consideration of alternatives. Unconsciousness—including unconscious assumptions and unconscious ontology—operates below awareness. Paradigmatic frames limit what's conceivable.

Lack of skill in using your own mind, lack of raw intelligence (some people simply aren't born with enough), lack of requisite variety, lack of consciousness and self-reflection, lack of awareness of internal contradictions in your worldview—all these compound the problem.

Ignorance, the need to preserve sanity, self-deception, and subjectivity in understanding and application of rules all corrupt formal systems. Any rules written for proper thinking must remain fuzzy because the list would be too long and application would be unclear. Due to nebulosity, rules cannot be precisely defined. Questions arise: How do you apply rules? How do you prioritize when rules conflict?

Applying rules requires skill, and none of these factors can be formalized. This is something like an art—the art of using your mind.

Beyond Symbolic Consciousness

Mind is not limited to human laws of thinking. Thinking isn't even primary to what mind is. Whatever mind is, it extends far beyond human thinking.

Rationalism's mistake is placing thinking as primary. We can distinguish between symbolic consciousness (all thinking) and non-symbolic consciousness (emotions, feelings, intuitions, being itself, consciousness, self-awareness). Much about you is not thinking.

The problem for scientists and deeply rational people stuck in STEM fields is that their careers depend entirely on analytical thinking. They become so entrained in this mode of interfacing with reality that they know no other mode. But this isn't even the primary mode of interfacing with reality because consciousness is far more fundamental than anything symbolic.

Most animals have no symbolic consciousness at all, yet they survive, live successfully, hunt, and mate. Survival and consciousness can happen without symbolic rational thinking entirely.

One must be wise enough to see that thinking itself as a mode could be a trap. The deeper question isn't just whether you're thinking correctly, but whether any kind of thinking—even the best—is sufficient to make sense of reality.

Key insight: Non-symbolic consciousness is fundamental; symbolic consciousness is merely an addition, a subset. Scientists and rationalists don't appreciate this. They might admit it to save face, but they don't understand the deep implications and how seriously limiting this is for the entire scientific project.

The Irony of Rationalism

The irony is that rationalism tries to formalize thinking to reduce misuse of the mind, but this itself becomes misuse of the mind. It takes fuzzy, intuitive, creative intelligence to notice traps of the mind.

Homework Exercise: Try to formalize all the traps of the mind. See how far you get. Even if you create a list, how would you apply it? That requires skill.

Flattening and mechanizing the mind is a trap of the mind which stems from fear of its inherent nebulosity and subjectivity.

Part Four: Requirements for Proper Use of Mind

Consciousness and Self-Awareness

First and foremost, proper use of mind requires consciousness. Consciousness comes in many degrees. Being a great thinker or scientist isn't enough if consciousness isn't at a sufficiently high degree to understand deeper aspects of reality.

Self-awareness, self-reflection, and introspection are required. Subjective experience of your own mind is irreducibly fundamental. Rationalism and science want to eliminate this introspective aspect because it's fuzzy and unformalizable. But you cannot remove the introspective aspect because all the most important sensemaking components exist introspectively—inside your own mind, not in the external physical world.

Intuitive skill is required. Using your mind is a skill.

Asking the right questions is required. This is intuitive, not formal. There's no algorithm for which questions to ask and when.

Intellectual integrity and self-honesty are required. These cannot be formalized or guaranteed. How do you guarantee your own mind will be honest with itself? You cannot guarantee this as a scientist. Scientists can be dishonest, and many have low intellectual integrity. No formal symbolic system ensures intellectual integrity—only you can develop this for yourself through the fuzzy skill of mastering your own mind.

Awareness of Biases and Survival

Proper use of mind requires awareness of your own biases and motives—this cannot be formalized or guaranteed. Are you aware of all your mind's biases? Not even close.

Awareness of survival is required. This requires extraordinary levels of consciousness and development. No scientist or rationalist comprehends the significance of survival and how it affects, corrupts, and biases the mind.

Recommended viewing: The episodes "What is Survival Part 1," "Part 2," and "How Survival Shapes Who You Are"—approximately 10 hours of content just to understand this one point.

Scientists assume they can just do lab experiments without understanding survival's influence. This works for getting quick lab results, but building a career without understanding how survival shapes your mind means all your science becomes corrupted.

Distinguishing Rationality from Rationalization

The skill to distinguish rationality from rationalization is essential. The mind rationalizes easily. As a scientist, how do you guarantee you're not rationalizing—reasoning backward from what you want to be true, creating justifications for how you need the world to be?

Awareness of self-deception mechanisms is required. See the three-part series "Understanding Self-Deception" covering dozens of mechanisms. You need to understand these mechanisms and then have the intestinal fortitude to enforce awareness on yourself. No formal system guarantees this—from this single point alone, rationalism fails.

Emotional Intelligence and Denial

Awareness of ego, its agenda, emotional attachments, and emotional reactivity is required. Emotional attachments corrupt your entire thinking process. If you believe as a scientist that emotional attachments don't influence how you think and do science, you're completely kidding yourself—that's already a failure of rationality.

Highly rational "autistic science nerds" are often disconnected from awareness of how emotions govern their minds. Their entire thinking process is consumed by ego and emotions, but they're poorly aware of it because they've convinced themselves it doesn't matter. This creates the paradigm of science and rationality itself as an emotional attachment they're not aware of.

The entire introspective first-person subjective domain has been marginalized as unimportant because their ontology reduces it away to atoms. "None of this is real—atoms and mathematics are what's real." This line of thinking is precisely the misuse of mind that rationalists are unconscious of.

Introspective awareness of denial is required. The mind has enormously powerful capacity for denial which corrupts thinking. A rationalist entrenched in university work will be in denial about these ideas but not aware of being in denial. He'll start rationalizing: "Leo's just a cult leader." He's not conscious enough to see he's rationalizing—he'll think it's rationality. It's not; it's rationalization of bias.

Acknowledge: Rationality can be in denial about truth, and formal rules and procedures cannot save you. Some truths are so profound and heavy they'll send you into existential crisis and create deep negative emotions. You won't want to deal with them, so you'll deny, dismiss, ignore, counterattack, and call names.

Open-Mindedness and Self-Reflection

Radical open-mindedness is required, along with awareness when your mind is closing down. If you're a rationalist or atheist, certain statements cause your mind to close, but you're not introspectively conscious of this. There's no formula or rulebook telling you when to be open and when to be closed.

Contemplation Exercise: Should your mind be open to flat earth? To reptilian conspiracies? To God? To mysticism? How do you know? Who decides? Is there a rulebook? No—this requires intuitive, fuzzy, nebulous sensemaking.

Awareness of internal contradictions in your own mind is required. These contradictions exist, but seeing them requires deep introspection—which the rationalist considers unimportant because it's all about atoms and objective external stuff.

Awareness of your beliefs and the contents of your mind in general is required. You're not conscious of everything you believe or all the implications of your beliefs.

Awareness of interpretation is required. Your mind interprets constantly. See the episode on interpretations.

Seeing alternatives to your current perspective is required. Why don't stuffy old academics have the highest intelligence? Because intellectual work isn't just formal procedure—it requires imagination. Imagination is mystical, fuzzy, intuitive, and never guaranteed. What's an alternative to the rationalist paradigm? To science as epistemology? To religion? You have to be able to imagine these, but most people lack that imagination. The amount of imagination you have depends heavily on your epistemology and worldview, which come from culture.

Willingness to question your culture, science, and rationalism is required. Where does this willingness come from? Is there a formal procedure for having such curiosity, intellectual integrity, and openness? No—this is deeply subjective.

The Impossibility of Formal Self-Investigation

Rationalism cannot be used to investigate and master your own mind. You cannot use formal systems for exploring your own mind space. What formal system will do it? Will AI explore your mind for you? Will a professor? No—only you can explore your own mind.

This is the final nail in the coffin for rationalism—but there are many more nails to come.

You cannot turn the contents of your own mind into quantities, equations, formulas, and models. Sensemaking is about the qualitative contents of your own mind. You cannot take experience out of understanding—understanding is experience. All of reality is experience. This cannot be reduced away.

Narrow technical understanding and analysis—the stuff done in universities—is not mastery of mind. It's shocking that scientists and academics think they can just enter university, never study mastery of mind, and proceed with science.

Mastery of mind is the most challenging thing a human can do on Earth. It includes mastering thinking, epistemology, and the emotional system. This is the most thorny, complicated, tricky, and self-deceptive topic—more complicated than quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is easy in comparison because it doesn't threaten you. Everything taught here threatens your ego, sanity, and sense of reality because everything is questioned.

Science Without Mastery of Mind

Mastery of mind differs from doing science. Scientists think they can spend 20 years in a laboratory doing quantum experiments and understand reality without first spending 20 years mastering their minds.

Mastering your mind is psychology—not theoretical psychology from textbooks, but embodied psychology. It's a skill set. You don't just theoretically understand psychology; you develop the intuitive skill set of using your mind properly and effectively.

All of science happens through your mind. Without mastery of mind, all science becomes corrupted by this lack of mastery. No scientist or academic has mastery of mind—you can only appreciate this by deeply studying this material over hundreds of hours.

Understanding reality is impossible without mastery of your own mind—not mind in general, but specifically your own mind with its own hangups, attachments, emotional issues, ego, faulty belief systems, and corruptions. All this must be handled before attempting to understand deep aspects of reality.

We're not just talking about mind—we're talking about self. Mind is self. You're mastering your own self.

Examination: When you enter STEM in academia, do they teach mastery of mind? Do you take a course called "Mastery of Your Own Mind"? No. Even a single course would be a drop in the bucket. You'd need at least five years—a whole bachelor's program—just for the theoretical foundation. And after those five years, you still wouldn't have mastered your mind. Only then could you do serious science. Is this how scientists are taught? Not even close.

Part Five: Epistemic Reductionism

The Parallel Error

Rationalism makes a parallel error at the epistemic level: it tries to reduce all sensemaking to science. This fails because understanding, sensemaking, and thinking are much broader than science and absolutely fundamental—they cannot be reduced to science.

Rationality is a subset of understanding and thinking—just a subset. You can think, understand, and become conscious of much more than can be symbolized, categorized, formalized, analyzed, put into rules, communicated, explicated, or proven.

You can understand much more than formal logic, which is why the human mind doesn't get trapped in formal logic. You can read a logical proof, identify problems, and step outside that logic to analyze it. This works because you have fuzzy meta-intelligence that is trans-symbolic and trans-logical. Otherwise you'd be a logical robot and get stuck very easily—you wouldn't be intelligent.

Understanding Versus Knowledge

Rationalism prioritizes propositional knowledge and objective facts over understanding. This is the wrong priority. Good sensemaking requires correct priorities, but there's no rulebook for the right priorities, no objectively correct priorities. This is fuzzy, nebulous, and more art than science.

Science is so focused on knowledge that it overlooks understanding. Understanding is what's truly fundamental. Rationalism tries to reduce understanding to knowledge and scientific facts, but understanding is much deeper and more fundamental. Without understanding, nothing works.

There's a failure in rationalism to distinguish understanding, insight, sensemaking, and consciousness from propositional knowledge, beliefs, and models. These are muddled together, not clearly distinguished, and improperly prioritized.

Beliefs are often reduced to propositions and formal statements, but beliefs are more than that—they have an emotional attachment component. Your belief that Earth is round isn't just a mental proposition. You're emotionally attached to it. When someone says Earth is flat, you have an emotional reaction, get triggered, call them an idiot—your mind closes down.

The response "So what if my mind closes down?" misses the point. You'll take that attitude and apply it to everything else—anything contradicting your scientific worldview will produce the same closed-minded reaction without awareness. You'll believe you have the science and I don't, but that's question-begging.

Example: Atheists have emotional attachment to atheism. It's not strictly rational, objective, or neutral. Observe atheist YouTubers debating theists—they're very emotionally attached, closed-minded people. You don't start a giant debunking YouTube channel without emotional attachment. Your ego, identity, and even survival (through channel earnings) are wrapped up in it. "So what?" This corrupts your entire thinking process. No matter how rational you try to be, you're corrupted by these factors.

Understanding as Qualitative

Understanding of reality differs completely from holding true beliefs or collecting knowledge. You can't understand reality by reading textbooks and accumulating facts. That's not how understanding works.

Understanding is a deeply qualitative internal feature of your mind. How deeply do you understand? There are many degrees and depths, plus breadth, interconnectedness, and holism. It's not binary. How do you quantify understanding? Formalize it? You can't.

Knowledge differs from worldview. Worldview is much more significant because knowledge consists of individual facts. Knowledge isn't threatening—what's threatening is when your worldview is challenged because worldview connects with identity.

Science, rationalism, and atheism are worldviews—whole constellations of complex assumptions about ontology, epistemology, and more. Most of it isn't even conscious—like an iceberg, most is submerged below awareness. Individual pieces of knowledge get slotted into your worldview operating system, which runs your whole mind, body, and emotional system.

What if you have the wrong worldview? What if your culture has a poor worldview and you just grew up in it? How do you begin to fix it? What's the formal procedure? You can't formalize it—it's laughable.

Knowledge differs from insight and consciousness—these are much more fundamental. Science is so clueless it doesn't even make these simple distinctions between belief, knowledge, insight, consciousness, and understanding. No scientist or academic understands these distinctions. This should have been taught in elementary school—it wasn't even taught in grad school.

The Subjectivity of Sensemaking

Sensemaking isn't just collecting facts—it's about prioritizing which facts matter, their significance in the larger scheme, how they interconnect, and what they mean. Not all facts are equally important.

This process cannot be objective because everyone disagrees about significance based on what their ego needs. A physicist finds some facts more significant; a biologist cares about different facts. "So what?" you say. Now you have two different minds with different priorities. Which is correct? Which is rational? Which is the right set of priorities for making sense of reality?

When your focus is so narrow—deciding to be a physicist so you mostly care about physics—you've reduced and flattened the possibility space of what your mind is and can understand. You're in a pressure cooker to deliver physics results under survival pressure: grants, tenure, bills. Do you have time to study philosophy, mysticism, meditation, spirituality, emotions, feminine aspects of mind, deep psychology, the subconscious? No—you're pressured to deliver physics results.

This shapes your sensemaking ability and intelligence. Just committing to being a quantum physicist has already limited your ability to be intelligent because true intelligence is infinitely holistic. You're losing holism, and this happens across all academia because science requires such technical focus on minutiae that nobody takes responsibility for the big picture—one of academia's great downfalls.

Intelligence Beyond Formality

Sensemaking depends on subjective choices, priorities, values, how to frame problems, how to interpret experiments, and even your genetic level of intelligence and intuition. Not all minds are equally intelligent or intuitive. There are different kinds of intelligence, and none of this can be formalized or guaranteed.

Academia and formal science hate the idea of fallibility. They want an infallible method—ideally first-order logic. But these high-level, abstract, nebulous, chaotic, nonlinear matters can't be reduced to first-order logic.

Intelligence goes way beyond formal rationality. The informality, the amorphous nature of intelligence, is fundamental to what intelligence is. High-level intelligence is more and more amorphous. This is a problem for science because it wants to objectify intelligence, define it, put it in a box. Anyone not doing it "this way" isn't intelligent. But that whole project itself isn't intelligent, and there's not enough meta-awareness to see this.

Part Six: The Power of Informal Intelligence

Examples of Intuitive Intelligence

You've experienced this: you can sense or intuit that something is wrong without being able to articulate exactly what it is or prove it.

As a scientist, you can sense when a calculation is wrong. You look at it and just know it can't be right—it's too big or too small. That's how you fact-check your work.

You can sense something is off about a book you're reading. It makes good arguments, but overall you get a bad feeling. Something's wrong. You're not sure what. This is deep intelligence at work that you can't articulate—a red alarm indicating something is wrong. If you don't listen, you'll be deluded.

You can sense when a complex technical theory is wrong as a whole—even though you can't technically explain why, you feel something has to be wrong.

You can sense whether a research project will be fruitful. Scientists use fuzzy intuition to decide which projects to pursue. Good scientists have good hunches about which programs are worthwhile because wasting 10 years going down a dead end is easy.

You can sense a contradiction in a worldview without being able to articulate it.

You can sense when a narrow technical study is too reductive and misleading—like research claiming red wine is healthy. You can feel the study isn't robust enough to base your health on.

You can sense when some intellectual is driven by ego—important because otherwise you'll be deluded.

You can sense that academia is limited. Before even entering university at 18, doing philosophy independently, it was already clear that the entire academic system isn't conducive to truth-seeking because they have other priorities: donors, students, faculty—not truth. This wasn't figured out formally, wasn't proven. It's something you have to intuit with intelligence.

You can sense when a person is lying to you. Can you formalize how to tell? Obviously not.

You can sense if someone is mentally ill. Dealing with a mentally ill person without sensing this is very dangerous.

You can sense that something is missing about science and rationalism—you can't quite put your finger on it, but you sense it.

The Nature of This Intelligence

Notice how different this is from knowledge or beliefs. This isn't about having the right knowledge or beliefs—that's insignificant compared to this level of intelligence.

Who cares if Earth is flat or round, if the sky is blue, or if the moon is made of cheese? These simplistic true/false factual statements are irrelevant to navigating and making sense of life.

Learning complex software illustrates this. Learning Maya or 3D Studio Max involves countless buttons, toggles, and settings. There's no formal rulebook for good 3D modeling. You have to tinker, experiment, make mistakes, use intelligence to figure out what works. You're intuitively navigating without formal procedures. This is completely different from knowledge and beliefs—child's play in comparison.

Experienced programmers sense when a software architecture is wrong. They make high-level design decisions based on fuzzy intelligence about which approaches will be more robust ten years down the road. That's true intelligence—and none of it can be formalized or strictly logical. The software architect can't formally prove one design is better; it's too complicated.

In business, you can sense when someone will screw you over in a deal. Without this intelligence, you'll get cheated and go bankrupt. This is just a feeling when sitting face-to-face with someone. Your feeling isn't always correct—all of this is fallible—but even imperfect intuition beats following rules. If you followed "10 rules to avoid getting screwed," you would get screwed because the person screwing you would read those rules and find loopholes. That's exactly the essence of rationalism's problem: following rules, thinking they provide protection, not realizing someone has already outsmarted the system.

Opening an unfamiliar container represents true intelligence. Some foreign container with a lid—does it screw, slide, push? No formal rules to follow, but it takes intelligence to open it. Not an IQ test, not math ability, not verbal skills—real intelligence.

Understanding when you've hurt your girlfriend's feelings takes intelligence. Autistic science nerds are bad with women because they speak logic while she's not operating on logic. They don't understand they've hurt her. That's not intelligent—that's stupid.

Sensing dangerous situations—about to walk down a dark alleyway at midnight, you have a weird feeling and turn around. That's intelligence. You can't prove there's a robber at the end, but you know something is off. People without this intelligence walk down that alley and get hurt.

Touching an Amazon package and instantly knowing it's the wrong item—through the bag, you immediately recognize this doesn't correspond to what you ordered. That's intelligence. How do you formalize that?

The Real Point

Scientists and rationalists might respond: "Sure, these are important things, but I also have this ability." Yes, of course. The point isn't that they lack this ability—they don't understand its significance and what it really is.

The key claim: this is actually a mystical ability. You think it's just neurons and atoms. It's not. Intuition is mystical. Intelligence is mystical. But your worldview doesn't accommodate this.

Everything is mystical. You can't see this because seeing it requires an infinitely unified mind, and yours has been subdivided. That's what we're trying to correct.

Part Seven: The Failure of Formal Rules

Intelligence as Surfing

Imagine a rationalist watching an Olympic ice skater performing beautiful routines, thinking: "I'll analyze her moves, write rules, attach numbers and formulas, create a manuscript on proper ice skating, and she'll start winning gold medals."

This is stupid because ice skating is deeply embodied intelligence—skill, experience, intuition. Following rules for ice skating produces mediocre skaters, not Olympic champions.

The same thing happens in universities. Students are indoctrinated into formal systems of thinking because this creates an intellectual safety zone where they don't fall into crackpot theories. It preserves university reputation. Students are trained to have very narrow, rigid minds fitting within institutional survival parameters. This creates mediocre minds.

Even at MIT, Harvard, Caltech, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, the minds there—including Nobel Prize winners—are mediocre minds by the standards of intelligence being taught here. That's why we're deconstructing this whole system.

Understanding and sensemaking is like surfing. Formalizing it makes it less intelligent.

Chess as Example

Notice that a chess grandmaster does not play by rules. At the highest levels, chess is deeply intuitive. Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura demonstrate crazy levels of intuition—that's what makes them geniuses. Nobody else can reach their level because there's no simple ruleset for becoming a grandmaster. If you followed rules, your opponent would learn them and outsmart you using your own rules.

True intelligence is so amorphous that you're surfing on a wave's edge—it's dangerous. True intelligence can't exist in a university system because it's so dangerous you're always on a razor's edge, you could slip and break your neck or be a genius.

Nuclear Weapons as Example

Consider handling nuclear weapons. You want safety and security, no willy-nilly button-pushing. You might think to create formal procedures: 10 rules everyone follows, bureaucratic processes, rubber stamps.

But the intuitive element turns out to be fundamental. As a nuclear operator watching radar showing a missile heading toward Washington DC, you panic and have rules to follow. But what if there's a bug in the computer system—a false positive showing a missile that isn't there?

It takes human intelligence to intuit: "Wait, we're not at war with Russia. Why would they send one missile? If attacking, they'd send hundreds, not one rogue missile. This doesn't feel right. Maybe there's a glitch."

The rules don't capture this. If rules said "retaliate when missile confirmed," you'd retaliate against a false positive and destroy the world.

True intelligence cannot be formal because if it were, we'd have killed ourselves as a species already.

Recognition of Higher-Order Unity

Intelligence is required to understand that something is a special case of a more general pattern—for example, seeing that Newtonian mechanics is a special local case of general relativity. This isn't obvious or just knowledge—it requires intelligence.

Intelligence is necessary to recognize higher orders of unity.

Feelings, sensations, intuitions, consciousness, insight, hunches, mental images, vision, analogies, and imagination are irreducible parts of sensemaking. Scientists might superficially agree, but they don't understand the depth and enormous implications.

You have some imagination as an academic—but the discussion is about moving toward infinite imagination. What academics fundamentally lack is imagination, which true intelligence requires.

Your Mind Doesn't Follow Scientific Method

Start noticing that your mind doesn't operate by scientific method—including scientists themselves. Scientists don't do science by strict scientific method, and this isn't trivial. You couldn't do good science by strict scientific method.

Your mind also does highly irrational stuff even if you're scientific and rational. You cannot wall off scientific work from your mind at large because science is only a small part of your mind.

Rationality cannot be equated with scientific method because:

Scientific method is itself undefined

It's not how science is actually done

It changes and evolves over time

Whether it captures all of reality is unknown

It is actually irrational to equate rationality with science because science is full of untested assumptions, falsehoods, closed-mindedness, ego, human bias, corruption, and unknown unknowns.

Part Eight: Unknown Unknowns

The Fatal Flaw

Quoting David Chapman: "Unknown unknowns are relevant factors you have not considered at all and cannot be incorporated into any formal system."

Rationalism and science and academia can deal with known unknowns but not unknown unknowns. Unknown unknowns are what really get you.

The problem with rationalists is that their imagination of the possibility space within unknown unknowns is so narrow that they can't make sense of mystical aspects of reality and consciousness. They call it "woo" and are allergic to it, closed-minded. This happens because they have a failure of imagination to see how advanced, creative, imaginative, and intelligent reality really is—because they assume reality is just dumb atoms.

For rationalists and atheists: Real mysticism (not religion or fundamentalism) is the unknown unknowns in your worldview that you lack imagination to even imagine yet. You're underestimating reality, underestimating how intelligent reality is, assuming your simplistic models are sufficient. And you're closed-minded about this.

Part Nine: The Qualitative Nature of Understanding

Beyond Quantification

Rationalism says that if something can't be quantified, made into an equation, or measured, then it isn't real. But rich qualitative understanding is realer than mathematics.

It's not enough for understanding to stick to facts, evidence, proofs, and being objective. Understanding is not just logical or factual—it's emotional, imaginative, visionary, and inspirational. Understanding has aesthetic aspects which no equation or logic can capture.

Ultimately, this is what art is about. You cannot distinguish art from science—science is an art. You cannot distinguish fact from aesthetics of understanding because aesthetics of understanding lead to new facts and new understanding.

Rationalism misses the mystical nature of understanding and trivializes it by removing qualitative aspects. The quality of understanding is highly significant because it leads to deeper understanding which then recontextualizes all facts and data.

Rationalism wants to take the skill out of understanding to make it formal, mechanical, objective, guaranteed, and foolproof. This is a mistake.

Understanding as Connecting Dots

Understanding also requires connecting dots. Think of understanding as connecting dots in your mind—many dots to connect in infinitely different ways. There's no one right way and no rules for which dots to connect or how to frame them.

Connecting dots differs from holding beliefs or having knowledge.

To effectively connect dots requires: live proactive creative intelligence, vision, wisdom, synthesis, interpretation, relevance, realization, meaning, perspective, values, priorities, focus, self-reflection, bias awareness, ambiguity tolerance, decision-making, consciousness, skill, insight, intuition, openness, and deep experience. None of which can be formalized.

Understanding the highest aspects of reality requires interconnecting so many dots. Failing to interconnect them causes your mind to become ossified, rigid, and stuck—which describes the academic mind.

This problem deepens because academia is specialized into silos. Knowledge and departments are all siloed, preventing sufficient dot-connecting to reach the highest levels of mystical intelligence and understanding.

Intelligence and Mysticism

The higher your intelligence rises, the more mystical it becomes. In university, it seems like there's no mysticism and professors seem quite intelligent, so this seems wrong. It doesn't make sense because you're underestimating the total scope of intelligence.

When intelligence is low (as at MIT, Harvard, Yale, Princeton), that intelligence is rigid, ossified, materialistic, reductionistic, pragmatic, scientific—no mysticism because all imagination and creativity have been sucked out of sensemaking.

True intelligence goes outside the academic system, trying to understand reality, interconnecting more and more dots. The whole mind becomes very fluid rather than rigid. Then you start accessing mystical levels of consciousness and understanding.

Part Ten: The Centrality of Insight

Insight as Fundamental

Sensemaking requires insight. Insight is fundamental. Formal systems are incapable of insight.

Insight is only subjective to your mind. A computer doesn't do insight (at least not yet). No logical system does insight by itself. No mathematics does insight by itself. All mathematics hinges on human insight.

Insight cannot be formalized. You can't predict when insight will happen. Insight cannot be reduced to algorithms, math, equations, calculations, or movements of atoms. None of that equals insight. Insight is qualitative.

All insight, no matter how minor or mundane, is mystical—this is what rationalists, scientists, and academics miss. They don't understand that insight is mystical, including all scientific insight.

Therefore science cannot be distinguished from mysticism—you require mystical insight to do science. There can't be science, mathematics, or even logic without this. This is technically true.

But the rationalist is convinced science is distinct from mysticism—that science is true while mysticism is false. This is a mistake and self-deception. This is why rationalism must be deconstructed.

What About AI?

Regarding AI doing insight: It's not obvious that ChatGPT does genuine insight. But even if AI can do insight, that doesn't disprove the point—if it's doing insight, it's mystical. Mystical computers are a feature, not a bug.

AI mirrors the human nervous system. You could reverse-engineer the human mind to generate real insights. But this happens because the computer itself is part of consciousness—part of the universal consciousness system the brain is part of. Materialists don't understand this because they think computers are just dumb boxes of atoms with nothing mystical about them.

Everything is mystical. You can't see this because seeing it requires an infinitely unified mind.

Part Eleven: The Problem of Recognition

Beyond Pattern Recognition

Rationality cannot solve the problem of recognition.

Most animals cannot recognize themselves in mirrors—a donkey looking at its reflection doesn't know that's itself. Why? It lacks intelligence because it lacks consciousness. Only animals with sufficiently high consciousness, self-reflective capacity, and intelligence can recognize themselves.

That recognition—what is it? It's not knowledge, not a belief, not just a thought. It's fundamentally recognition.

When you look in a mirror and recognize yourself, the rationalist says "Big deal." It is a monumental deal. How are you able to do this? This is a mystical process. Your mind performs a mystical process without being conscious that it's mystical.

You are as unconscious of this as mystical as the donkey is unconscious of his reflection. The donkey doesn't recognize his reflection. By parallel, you as scientist don't recognize that self-awareness is mystical. You'll say "No, it's not." In the same way that if you told a donkey "That's you in the mirror," he'd say "What? Prove it to me."

This is rationalism's double standard. Is rationalism conscious of this double standard? No—because it's not conscious of itself.

Understanding reality requires more than atomic facts—it requires recognition: deep self-recognition, pattern recognition. Pattern recognition isn't objective and formal. But self-recognition is even more than pattern recognition—way beyond it.

Recognition is essential for understanding, sensemaking, and intelligence.

Key question: If the donkey can't do it but you can, what can't you do that some higher mind can do? Just as the donkey doesn't understand what he's missing, you don't understand what you're missing.

When you ask for proof—"Prove the mind is infinite, prove it's mystical"—you're not appreciating how delicate this matter is. Your notion of proof is grossly inadequate for the rich understanding being discussed.

You're stuck at your stage of cognitive development, oblivious to higher stages.

Part Twelve: Understanding Implications

The Non-Formal Nature of Implication

More important than having a belief, knowledge, or fact is understanding its implications and significance—which is non-formal.

Example: A naturalist studying species in South America and Africa notices they're very similar unlike anywhere else. Imagination kicks in: "Could these landmasses have been connected millions of years ago?" Boom—a gigantic scientific discovery (continental drift). The raw facts about which species live where don't tell you the significance. It requires a deeply intelligent mind to connect dots, have insight, and see implications.

Example: Mercury's eccentric orbit puzzled early 20th-century scientists. What are the implications? Is Newtonian mechanics wrong? Is our understanding of time wrong? Are measuring instruments faulty? Is there an unknown planet near the sun disturbing the orbit? How do you know what the implications are?

It requires imagination to imagine weirder and weirder implications. Reality is very weird—much weirder than anyone expects. Scientists literally don't have enough imagination to imagine these implications. When they do, like Einstein, we call them geniuses.

Genius is non-formalizable. You can't get an Einstein by following rules. Rules produce standard, boring, mediocre science without Einstein-level breakthroughs.

Current physics problem: Quantum mechanics and general relativity don't mesh—they contradict in important ways. What are the implications? Whoever successfully answers this wins a Nobel Prize and eternal remembrance. Nobody has cracked this nut yet because they lack requisite variety. Their minds are too rigid, thinking in models, atoms, waves, equations. Solving this probably requires much more creative thinking.

Don't you see that the intellectual successes of science are exactly its greatest obstacle? You create models that seem to work, but they don't explain everything. People educated under these models can't think any other way. It takes a genius to think in a creatively new way and break down the paradigm. This is the whole history of science in a nutshell.

More Implication Examples

The sociology of science—what are the implications? Enormous. Does any scientist understand them? No.

Ego—if you really know what ego is, what are the implications for science, academia, sensemaking? I could talk for 10 hours about this. Does any scientist understand ego's implications? No.

Groupthink and conformity—the 4-hour episode "Psychology of Conformity" explores this. What are the implications? Incredible. No scientist comprehends conformity's implications for science and academia.

Animal not recognizing itself in the mirror—what are the implications? Almost nobody understands.

Psychedelics—what are the implications for scientific work? Almost nobody understands.

"Reality is infinite" or "unity"—what are the implications of infinity and unity? Virtually nobody understands. This requires deep interconnecting of dots, profound holism, imagination, and creativity.

Scientists do consider implications sometimes—Einstein solved Mercury, Darwin discovered evolution. It's a question of degree. Scientists do a little; the goal is doing a lot more.

The False Boundary

Rationalism tries to save itself by cordoning science off as a narrow technical field. The rationalist wants to say: "Yes, there's intuition and feelings and hunches over here, and technical science over here—don't confuse them."

This fails because there is no crisp boundary between science and life, between science and sensemaking. Science is always framed within the context of life, sensemaking, mind, and self.

Science always takes place inside a self. There is no science outside a self. No scientist understands this. Superficially they understand—"Yeah, obvious, so what?" That "so what" attitude is exactly the problem. You understand superficially without seeing where it ultimately leads. Superficial understanding doesn't change your mind or anything else.

You cannot say hard science is all that's technically true—that's technically wrong. Science exists within mind. Science is a special case of mind. You cannot separate thinking in general from science. The mind is a general sensemaking/understanding system with no boundary between that and science.

Truth, understanding, and reality exist beyond the construct of science. It is a mistake to subordinate sensemaking to science.

The Computer Fallacy

Rationalism's fundamental mistake is assuming the mind is a formal system because of the success of math, physics, and engineering. It treats the mind as just a computer.

The mind is not a computer. A computer is a special case of mind.

The rationalist doesn't understand this and doesn't want to understand this. It's not enough to just understand—you have to want to understand. You don't want to because it's too painful. You're emotionally attached without understanding why.

Your entire sense of self and sanity is entangled with your sense of reality, which is entangled with science. When science is stripped from your mind, it feels like going mad.

All understanding of reality flows through the bottleneck of your mind. Do you understand the significance of that statement? Nobody does.

Due to unconsciousness, you don't know the contents of your own mind and thinking process. To think properly requires awareness of your mind's internal subjective dynamics—internal factors that cannot be externalized, quantified, or formalized.

Proper thinking is inherently irreducibly subjective. It requires first-person introspection because everything is filtered through your own self and experience. There can be no algorithm or formal rules because how would you know the right process and have the skill to execute it?

If you've diligently studied cognitive biases and know them by heart—good. But how do you know if you're applying them to yourself? This requires self-reflection, introspection, first-person internal experience. Rationalism denies this—calls it woo. But you need that woo for proper use of mind.

Rationalism cannot function without woo. You need intuition to get understanding going. You intuit that scientific method is valid, that the universe is rational. But intuition is fuzzy, fallible, and subjective.

The Unknown Contents of Mind

The contents of your mind can never be made explicit—that's why rationalism fails.

You don't know all your beliefs, assumptions, motivations, biases. Your own ontology is unknown to you. You're not conscious of the consequences of your own beliefs, positions, and worldview. You're not conscious of internal contradictions.

The rationalist doesn't even know whether rationalism is internally consistent because that requires deep self-reflective consciousness—dismissed as woo.

You cannot objectively assess your own mind's coherence or consistency, which is necessary to be truly rational. If rationality means having a coherent, consistent mind free of contradictions, how can you claim rationality without full consciousness of your mind's contents? The contradictions are below the surface, below consciousness.

The mind can think of itself as rational without seeing its own irrationality because consequences take effort to explore. It requires curiosity, motivation, passion, imagination, effort, and work. If you're lazy or closed-minded, you remain deluded.

Your mind doesn't know itself, yet you're trying to use this mind for proper thinking, science, and sensemaking. This is delusion.

How do you know you're applying logic properly? You can't use rules because how do you know the rules are true, that you understood them, and applied them correctly?

There's no escaping your own judgment and authority. You can't keep offloading responsibility. When you say "my worldview just reports facts—no fantasies, no making things up, just study and report facts," that entire statement is a judgment you're making about yourself and your worldview. Is it true? How do you know?

When you say "everything Leo's talking about is bullshit and doesn't matter to science," you haven't proved that—it's not scientific. You're exercising your authority, putting your foot down, believing it, acting on it. But you could be wrong.

How do you know you're rational? What if you tell yourself you're rational but you're lying to yourself? Or you're not conscious of the contradictions that would reveal irrationality? No formal process captures this.

Part Thirteen: Survival and Corruption

Survival Biases Everything

Rationalism completely overlooks the force of survival in shaping mind, understanding, and truth-seeking. Science and rationality are subordinate to survival, not to truth. Survival is what frames science.

Survival biases reasoning. There's no such thing as reasoning in the abstract outside of survival. Most of what people call reasoning is actually rationalization—a dangerous conflation.

Reasoning is never neutral, unmotivated, or objective. Even scientific reasoning serves survival and maintains identity and sanity. No scientist understands how much science functions to maintain the integrity of the psyche and its sanity.

When you start to lose your sanity, you'll forget all about science and academia—you'll get terrified, crawl into fetal position, and call for mommy. Science can't save you from that. Only proper sensemaking outside of science can.

Survival completely distorts your thinking process about everything. Science and rationality cannot be isolated from survival.

The Problem of Corruption

Because of this, rationalism cannot solve the issue of corruption. Survival is what corrupts the mind. If you're not aware of survival (as scientists and academics are not) or convince yourself it's not important or that you've transcended it, you cannot see what corruption is.

Science is blind to its own corruption. Is there a formal scientific process to prove science is corrupt? No. The very essence of corruption is that it's fuzzy, messy, chaotic, sneaky. It doesn't announce itself—you have to uncover it because it's hidden.

Rationalism doesn't contend with ego, which governs everything your mind does. Rationalism doesn't understand psychology's centrality. Scientific people think they can do science isolated from psychology. All science happens within the frame of your own psychology and the collective psychology of your university, academic system, and scientific field.

Psychology runs sensemaking—not logic, not truth, not reason, not science. Formal logical systems lack psychological awareness. All psychology's tricks elude formal systems.

Example: A formal system cannot handle denial. If you're a strict materialist atheist scientist, totally in denial about these teachings, you have no way of noticing your own denial. You're denying the importance of denial to science. You think you can do science without caring about denial—that is denial.

No human is truly rational because humans are survival machines and there's nothing rational about surviving at the expense of someone else. Is survival rational? The rationalist says "Of course, it's rational for me to live." But this is a very limited view.

There's nothing irrational about you dying. There's nothing rational about you reproducing. There's no reason why you should live and others can die. But you favor your own survival—your career over colleagues' careers. During budget cuts, who survives? You'll select yourself even if your colleague does better work, is more truthful, more hardworking. Will you admit this? No. You'll rationalize that you're being a rational scientist. "None of this is pertinent to my science." But it is.

Rationalism leads to double standards—contradictions, biases, lack of rigor. Any persisting double standards represent lack of rigor and lead to irrationality and inability to comprehend higher realities.

Part Fourteen: Epistemic Responsibility

Self-Enforcement Required

Sensemaking and truth-seeking require epistemic responsibility, which cannot be guaranteed because it must be self-enforced. How do you formalize epistemic responsibility? You can't.

You can't understand reality and avoid self-deception without insane levels of epistemic responsibility. Scientists and academics are not nearly epistemically responsible enough.

If you were truly epistemically responsible, you couldn't silo yourself into narrow fields like quantum physics or organic chemistry. You'd recognize the risk of getting stuck. Epistemic responsibility forces you to study many different fields—psychology, sociology, spirituality, mysticism, God, religion, paranormal, science, politics, human nature—because you need the broadest possible view to see blind spots, to master your own mind.

But if you're working in organic chemistry with blinders on, saying "I don't have time, I have to turn in my research study tomorrow for my grant, my PhD, tenure"—you've already corrupted yourself without understanding how or why.

Part Fifteen: Self-Deception and Illusion

The Assumption of Good Faith

Rationalism assumes good faith actors. But what about deceivers? How will you catch them?

This is relevant because sensemaking and truth affect power and survival. You're not just neutrally searching for knowledge—your ability to search depends on financing. Money is survival. Nobody gives you money unless you scratch their back.

The academic says "I don't care about politics, I'll just do my lab work—and look, it works." But even the fields you study are only those you can get grants for, that your university considers valuable. Your mind is limited by what you select to focus on. You rationalize: "I would have studied this anyway." No—you're studying it because it's the path of least resistance. You're not studying what's important for understanding ultimate reality because they don't teach that possibility in university.

You don't even have enough imagination to realize it's possible to understand ultimate reality. You're not creative or open-minded enough—all your colleagues aren't doing anything so "arrogant" as trying to understand ultimate reality.

What is organic chemistry going to do? Help you understand ultimate reality? No. So why are you doing it? You don't know—because you haven't imagined something better to do, probably because of conformity from some influential teacher.

The Mind Is Not an Honest Actor

You can't assume the mind cares about truth—rationalism assumes this. Your mind cares about survival. Your mind lies to itself, fudges issues, rationalizes, bullshits, ignores, denies, has biases, is emotional.

There are dozens of self-deception mechanisms you must be conscious of to think properly—which is difficult and iffy even for people studying this for 10-20 years.

How do you know you're not doing confirmation bias and projection as a rationalist? How do you know you've been charitable enough in understanding opposing arguments? An atheist arguing with a theist might never consider that maybe they haven't been charitable and serious enough in understanding the theist's position. They debunk and argue Richard Dawkins-style without realizing they haven't invested enough time in understanding what they're arguing against. They lack self-awareness because they assume they're correct. They're completely self-deceived.

Richard Dawkins doesn't understand that his atheism and scientism are part of his ego and identity. He thinks it doesn't matter because he already assumes it's true—and if it's just true, it's not really part of who he is. But it's not true—it's an assumption, a fantasy he's defending. He's defending it but not conscious that he's defending it.

When told psychology is important and he should study it for 10 years, he says that's not important to science. When told he should study metaphysics and epistemology, he says that's for philosophers. "All you need for good science is to be strict about science—follow the scientific method. You're irrational, I'm rational, it's simple." His mind has convinced itself of this—that is the self-deception.

The Devil Scenario

Imagine the universe had a devil who could trick people with illusions. Rationalism has no solution to this scenario—so it just assumes it's impossible.

Self-deception and illusion are total—and they include rationalism. Contemplate: Is it possible to use rationality to deceive yourself? If no, you fail to understand your own mind. If yes, what's the solution?

The rationalist thinks that being formally logical and rigorous saves from self-deception. This grossly underestimates self-deception. Self-deception is far more intelligent.

You're in a battle between your own intelligence and the intelligence of the universe trying to deceive you. The rationalist follows formal processes and proper rules, but remains lost in Maya, run by ego, lacking creative intelligence and imagination to break through illusions—lacking holism because of stupid insistence on reductionism.

Rationalism becomes the self-deception that formality will save you from self-deception.

Why can't formality save you? Because reality is an illusion spun by infinite intelligence. It would be dumb if formality could save you from an illusion because the illusion is infinite and formality is finite.

We're dealing with Maya. If you're unfamiliar, read Wikipedia for the basic idea: everything is a dream. Rationality is insufficient to escape Maya because rationality is part of Maya—Maya has co-opted rationality.

The rationalist can only say "Maya is hippie woo, there's no such thing, prove Maya." How do you prove Maya to such a person? It's such a profound lack of self-awareness and seriousness.

If you took epistemic responsibility seriously and learned about Maya, you would: read Wikipedia, deeply contemplate it, realize "Holy shit, this is profound—if Maya is true, I have to rethink my entire understanding of reality, epistemology, ontology, take self-deception extremely seriously." That would be the beginning of awakening from Maya.

Does a scientist do this? No. "Maya is a distraction, I need to publish papers, can't spend 10 years thinking about Maya." But you don't know what's relevant and irrelevant. You're using fuzzy intuition to determine relevance—which is fallible.

The rigor of rationality and science is part of Maya—the illusion of rigor. The technical scientific mind is just an unconscious survival machine put in service of knowledge generation like a yolked mule—without realizing it serves a master. What master? The university system, the ego mind, survival.

If you think science is the master, you're already a fool. Science is not the master. Survival is your master.

The Wrong Ontology

Rationalism's ontology assumes the world is finite, rigid, straightforward, and linear, then develops a linear autistic mind to match that ontology. Since the ontology is wrong, the mind ends up wrong.

Mind is actually infinite, nonlinear, nebulous, qualitative, chaotic, implicit, gestalt, visionary, imaginative. The implicitness is essential to infinity; explicitness is essential to finitude. Science and rationalism are stuck on explicating everything—getting stuck to finitude, losing track of infinity.

For more on explicit versus implicit, see the episode "Explicit Versus Implicit Understanding."

Part Sixteen: The Problem of Not Knowing

Unconscious Assumptions

Nobody knows what anything is. None of the primitive concepts making up objects and understanding were ever known. The human mind needs and demands that things be known for survival purposes—this requires making assumptions.

These assumptions are necessary to bootstrap science and understanding, but they are mostly unconscious. Rationalism fails because it doesn't have access to all its own assumptions. One assumption is that everything real is rational, scientific, and quantifiable.

Identifying assumptions is not formal or guaranteed—it depends on self-awareness, which is subjective and skillful. You need skill, personal subjective mastery over your mind, to identify core assumptions of your worldview, science, rationalism, atheism, materialism.

What are all the assumptions of rationalism? Of science? A rationalist couldn't tell you. It takes 10-20 years of study. These assumptions remain hidden by an intelligent force—your own mind is hiding your assumptions from you.

If you assume the universe is dumb atoms, you don't anticipate it being crafty and trying to trick you. The scientist thinks figuring out truth is straightforward—just measure stuff. That's an assumption.

What if reality is clever and sneaky, spinning an illusion for a deeper purpose? What purpose? Your survival as a self.

What if there was no self? No human self? No science? Maybe not even a material universe—just an illusion spun by creative intellect?

Scientists and academics don't care about these questions, don't take epistemic responsibility, aren't serious about truth. They care about science. Caring about science is not the same as caring about truth.

The Subjectivity of Questioning

Questioning assumptions requires psychological motivation. Formal systems don't have motivation and intention. Questioning is a subjective feature of the mind with many degrees of quality. There are no formal rules for how to question reality.

What you know depends on the questions you ask. There are many qualities of questions. Asking the right questions is paramount—and cannot be formalized.

Scientists and academics don't ask the right questions, which limits their understanding, cognitive development, and truth-seeking. You also have to believe questions are worth asking. Many philosophical questions would be seen by scientists as insignificant, trivial, not even wrong—just meaningless.

Powerful Questions to Contemplate:

How is science a self-deception?

What are all the assumptions of science?

What if something exists beyond rationality?

What if human sanity is too limited to understand reality?

What if truth cannot be reached by thinking?

What if quality cannot be reduced to quantity?

What if others are imaginary?

What if reality is just a giant hallucination?

What if scientific method limits intelligence?

These questions would point toward deep exploration of reality, mind, and self. But if you're busy in academia believing these questions are nonsense, delusional, or a waste of time, you won't ask them.

"Prove to me these are important questions." It doesn't work that way. This is too fuzzy a domain for formal proof. You need to be intelligent enough to intuit that contemplating whether reality is a hallucination might have bearing on your science, sensemaking, atheism, and materialism.

Part Seventeen: Focus and Distraction

The Ego's Exploitation

Since your focus is limited and reality is infinite, there's no objective answer about what you should focus on. You could focus on organic chemistry your whole life. Is that intelligent? Who's to say?

There are no objective rules for determining right or wrong focus, which creates the possibility for distraction. If the ego mind wants to spin an elaborate illusion, it can exploit your focus weakness to keep you distracted and self-deceived.

All you have to do to self-deceive is throw yourself into a narrow technical field, convince yourself it's the only important thing, and focus your mind on it for 50 years. The ego mind succeeds in creating the illusion of a self as an organic chemist. You survive as that chemist, believe that's what you are—a human organic chemist on planet Earth—and believe this is scientific, objective, factual. "There's no need for philosophy." Your ego has tricked you with distraction.

For many academics, their entire career is one giant distraction spun by their ego to avoid serious truth-seeking.

How do you convince someone in that situation? See how painful admission would be? See the denial, rationalizations, closed-mindedness, arrogance, ego, emotional hurt? They'll click off the video and remain stuck in illusion forever.

Distraction cannot be solved by formalism. Science and academia are mired in wrong focus and distractions—technical minutiae as distraction.

Formal systems cannot make executive decisions, and sensemaking requires them. Should you become an academic or work outside academia? No objective answer—but most minds make these decisions poorly, governed by survival concerns rather than truth-seeking.

Why did you decide to become a scientist? You could have become a philosopher, meditator, Buddhist, mystic. You chose science because you find it meaningful and believe it's important—probably the most important, or you'd be doing something else. But have you proven Buddhism is less important than science? No. That's not scientific.

Your entire mind now operates from the scientific domain. You have a conflict of interest—your survival depends on it. It would be very painful to admit you were wrong after 40 years. No academic will admit they should have been a Buddhist instead.

Part Eighteen: Analogical Thinking

The Inescapability of Analogy

Thinking is analogical. To understand this, read Douglas Hofstadter's book "Surfaces and Essences" on the analogical nature of thinking. All thinking requires seeing similarities and differences between things.

Examples:

Physics says photons are waves. Is a photon really a wave? No—a photon is a photon. But we say photons are "wavelike"—that's analogical.

Electrons are considered "things" or "objects." Is an electron an object? Not really—it's a probability distribution. Is that an object? We can kind of say so in a fuzzy intuitive way, treating electrons as things even though they aren't.

In biology, researchers equate humans with rats—if medicine works on a rat, it probably works on a human.

When a rationalist calls me "just like Deepak Chopra" or "a cult leader," they're drawing analogies. Is Leo really a cult leader? You have concepts of "cult leader" and "Leo" and somehow connect them—an analogy. Is it true? To what extent? Did you prove it? Is it scientific?

When you hear "mysticism" and think "that's just religion and superstition," you're drawing analogies between mysticism, religion, and superstition.

The mind works by drawing samenesses and differences. See the episode "Sameness Versus Difference."

The reason rationalism fails is that there are no objective criteria for right and wrong analogies. Sameness and difference are relative and subjective—not objective facts.

Is a photon a wave? Not an objective fact—it's an analogy your human mind created. Is Leo a cult leader? An analogy your mind created—not a scientific fact. Is an electron an object? Not a scientific fact.

You can reason correctly and still have totally wrong understanding, worldview, paradigm—asking wrong questions, not seeing the big picture, lost in technical details.

Rational people get reality wrong all the time. Ask why. Why hasn't rationalism solved this? What good is rationalism if it still gets reality wrong?

Rationality is easily misapplied. There's no method for how to properly apply rationality—no formal method deducible from atomic facts.

When you think you're following a rigorous logical system and that's your worldview/science, you end up being more certain than you should be—arrogant, stubborn, dogmatic. That's what Professor Dave is: the embodiment of this. His mind has convinced itself that he's just doing objective science, that what I'm talking about is weird cult woo with no bearing on science. That's the self-deception he's unconscious of because he's not taking epistemic responsibility, not treating Maya as a serious possibility.

Historical Failures

This isn't hypothetical. We have a historical record of rationalism failing: logical positivism, logicism, behaviorism—definitive failures.

Epistemic lessons from historical failures:

Rationality overestimates its own power

Rationality is arrogant, closed-minded, and pigheaded

Rationality is not aware of its own assumptions

Rationality is not enough to solve self-deception

Rationality does not take enough proactive epistemic responsibility

Part Nineteen: Five Performative Contradictions of Rationalism

What Is a Performative Contradiction?

A performative contradiction is something in a philosophical worldview that contradicts itself when put into practice.

Examples:

"Truth doesn't exist at all"—but is that true? Self-contradictory.

"Everything is just relative"—then that perspective is also just relative, undermining itself.

"All cultures are relative, we must respect all equally"—what about a culture that wants to destroy all other cultures? The postmodernist says don't respect that culture, but true relativism would have to respect it, allowing it to destroy your culture.

Contradiction #1: The Illusion of Rigor

Rationalism aims to solve self-deception by being hyper-rigorous and formal. But this was never proven as the solution to self-deception—it's an open empirical question. To be truly rigorous is to not assume the answer. If you assume the answer, you're being sloppy.

Rationalism assumes and clings to the answer, making itself actually sloppy while appearing rigorous. It's the illusion of rigor.

Reality might be such that being hyper-rational doesn't solve self-deception but feeds into it. That is indeed the case—the intelligence of Maya co-opts simple-minded rationality.

Scientific people are not truly rigorous because they assume too much and their rigor makes them technically narrow. Sensemaking is about breadth and totality. True rigor means questioning all scientific assumptions, taking nothing for granted, questioning rationality and its application, questioning human sanity, questioning whether your ideas of rigor are truly rigorous or just tricks.

Being truly rigorous means being open-minded to mystical woo too. Clinging to science and rationality is technically sloppiness.

Contradiction #2: Rigor as Measure of Truth

Rationalism purports rigor as the measure of truth, criticizing other paradigms for not being formally proven. But rationalism itself cannot be rigorously defined nor proven—it fails its own standard.

If truth equals proof by its own standards, rationalism is not true. How did rationalism ever prove itself as a paradigm? It never did. Rationality was adopted intuitively because it can't be formally proven.

No one became a rationalist or scientist through formal proof. People become rationalists because it seems reasonable and generally works for simple problems—though it even fails there. When you expand epistemic responsibility to understand all of reality, simple-minded approaches fall apart.

Contradiction #3: Facts About Non-Facts

Rationalism claims only hard scientific atomic facts are real. But rationalism itself is not a hard atomic fact. You cannot get the validity of rationalism from studying atoms.

You can study physics your whole life and physics will never tell you about paradigms, how the mind works, self-deception, illusion, cognitive biases, epistemic responsibility, or what truth-seeking really is. None of these are atomic facts—yet all are fundamental to proper sensemaking.

Hard science cannot prove the validity of rationalism. Rationality is not a reductive primitive—it's a higher-order abstraction. You can't point to rationality in the physical world. Rationality is not atoms, equations, calculations, neurons, or the brain. It's not a crisply defined object.

There's your contradiction.

Contradiction #4: Rigor Without Openness

Rationalism claims to be rigorous and strict, yet rationalists are very closed-minded about woo, mysticism, religion, spirituality, and the paranormal. However, to be truly strict and rigorous is to admit profound not knowing—which means having an open mind about these topics because you don't truly know.

Rationalism acts strict and rigorous but with materialist bias—a certain ontology, epistemology, and paradigm. It's rigorous attacking other paradigms but not introspecting about its own position, assumptions, and biases.

True rigor and strictness would come from total not knowing and zero bias about anything—not favoring atoms over God and mystical stuff. That would be true rigor, but that's not how academics behave.

True rigor is extreme open-mindedness and even-handedness. To be truly rigorous, you must explore everything: science, religion, spirituality, philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, sociology, politics.

How many academics would quit their careers if told they can't do truth-seeking within academia? Most wouldn't because they have emotional attachments, invested 30 years, and survival tied to it. They'll rationalize that they are doing truth-seeking.

In practice, rationalists are very closed-minded and biased when actually debated. They seem reasonable superficially, but when drilled on epistemology, ontology, and spiritual topics, their minds close down quickly. Their bureaucratic system has normalized this closed-mindedness as "scientific rigor."

Contradiction #5: Objectivity Masking Emotion

Rationalism postures as hard, objective, "facts don't care about feelings" philosophy. Yet rationalist strictness is an egoic reaction against the fear of fantasy and delusion.

If you truly introspect and ask why you're so rational and anti-woo—it's because you're afraid of fantasy and delusion. You don't want to end up like new agers, hippies, fundamentalists, or cult leaders. There's validity to this concern, but fear and paranoia can go too far and become self-deception.

The psychology behind why rationalists are allergic to woo and mysticism is ultimately fear and mental attachments. Were these ever proven rigorously? Never. It's something picked up from culture and STEM education. You don't perceive what you were taught as attachment—just the normal, reasonable way to be—and never considered the limits of that system because you grew up in it.

Rationalism itself is emotional. When scientific people get triggered by Deepak Chopra or woo, that's not factual objective thinking—that's emotional egoic attachment and bias. The rationalist isn't self-aware enough to see this because they don't believe self-awareness is fundamental to good science, since doing good science is "just measuring objective stuff."

But even your philosophy that machines will figure it out for you—that's an emotional attachment to that idea, part of your identity, how you defend your paradigm.

When a rationalist calls me a cult leader, grifter, narcissist, or charlatan—that's not scientific. No scientific study proved I'm a charlatan. When they say "mysticism is bullshit"—that's not a scientific statement, not an atomic fact. That's pseudoscience.

The irony is that people who cry "pseudoscience" about things they disagree with—that itself is pseudoscience. They didn't determine something is pseudoscience through any scientific study.

Rationalists have emotional attachment to rationality and don't want to admit it. Rationalism doesn't recognize itself as emotional attachment because highly rational people are disconnected from their bodies—too left-brain, not enough right-brain, too masculine, not enough feminine. They minimize feeling and emotion, minimize consciousness and awareness, as though none of it matters because "we can't measure it." But separating from that makes science idiotic and paradigm-locked.

Nowhere has science proven that being rigorous and formal maximizes intelligence, truth, or understanding. Nowhere has science proven that being strictly formal is sufficient for understanding reality.

Consider: being rigorous and formal might limit understanding because the highest understanding requires subjective imagination, intelligence, and personal integration—integrating qualitative understanding into a singular mind.

Part Twenty: The Parallel with Religious Fundamentalism

Paradigm Lock

Rationalism and fundamentalism are both paradigm-locked. Rationality is a developmental stage above fundamentalism, but they share cognitive structure.

Fundamentalism's paradigm lock: My religion is true because it says it's true. Doubting is wrong, evil, punishable—I'll go to hell. It's a self-contained epistemic bubble, hard to see outside of.

Rationalism's paradigm lock: Reality is rational. I will only entertain rational things. Anything contradicting these is by definition irrational, so I don't need to entertain it. This is question-begging and circular. Any doubting of rationality is dismissed as soft-brained, unscientific, irrational woo.

It becomes very difficult to dislodge a rationalist from rationality—just as it's almost impossible to dislodge a fundamentalist from religion.

Literalism

Another parallel: literalist Christians interpret the Bible literally—every word true, all history literal, Noah's ark literally happened. When the mind is strictly literal, it's literally more stupid than the figurative mind.

Jordan Peterson's reading of the Bible is much more intelligent—not focused on historical accuracy but on deeper spiritual, moral, and philosophical wisdom. Good stuff as long as not taken too literally.

The scientist/academic mind also suffers from being too literal. It believes reality literally is just discrete objects called atoms moving around—that's literally all there is. It rationalizes that being literal gets closer to truth.

The literalist Christian doesn't like figurative interpretations because they're complex—multiple interpretations, relativism. A simple-minded person wants black-and-white answers: either Noah's ark existed or it didn't.

Likewise, the scientific mind thinks it's being more rigorous by being highly literal—"all that poetic stuff Leo talks about is fluffy woo, let's reduce everything to atoms because that's what's literally true."

But figurative understanding is a higher form of intelligence than literal understanding. Reality cannot be understood strictly literally, nor can science work that way.

You become more intelligent when your mind is looser than when it only thinks in atoms and computation. Reality is not just a computer—that's projection.

Rigor is not found in the world—it's projected onto it. The world is not as rigorous as scientists think.

Maya is all about how you imagine reality to be, then having it reflected back in a self-created echo chamber from misusing your own mind out of sloppiness and lack of self-awareness. Fantasy isn't just angels and devils—all of science is a fantasy. It's a rigorous fantasy. "Atoms" is a fantasy. "Reality as a computer" is a fantasy.

If you think it's a computer and everyone around you thinks so, it seems like your reality—just like the literalist Christian in a bubble with only his church group feels like he's living in a Christian world.

We're trying to pop that bubble, but the ego gets threatened equally whether it's religious or scientific.

Part Twenty-One: Creativity and Imagination

The Ultimate Failure

Rationalism fails because of creativity and imagination. It simply lacks the creativity and imagination to reach the highest levels of intelligence possible.

The problem with the academic and STEM mind is stifled creativity—suppressed by formality out of fear of being wrong, and by pressures of needing to objectify to create scientific consensus.

Rationalism attempts to remove creativity from understanding, truth-seeking, and science—a logical machine spitting out truth. This removes all creativity and imagination because they're "woo stuff" that can't be defined, measured, or tested. "So it's not even real because we can't measure it."

Rationalism assumes reality is a straightforward machine understandable by making dumb objective measurements. This completely misses the intelligence and genius of reality.

It never occurs to the rationalist that creativity and imagination are fundamental to reality, to what reality is, to understanding, sensemaking, and intelligence. Why? Because rationalist ontology assumes reality is just a dumb mechanical machine, so a dumb mechanical method suffices.

Has this been proven? No—it's assumed, projected, reflected back, and echo-chambered.

Rationalism underestimates the importance of intelligence, misunderstanding it by reducing it to math puzzles and IQ tests. It assumes humans have roughly the same intelligence levels—wrong. There are many grades, and academics don't have the highest intelligence.

When I try to teach these concepts and the academic mind says "it doesn't make sense to me, therefore it must be false"—no, you don't have enough intelligence to understand. But that possibility doesn't enter your mind because you assume humans have roughly similar intelligence. You understand IQ differences but not that intelligence is infinite.

Academic types assume all truth is accessible to anyone of reasonable intelligence. It's not. Many advanced spiritual truths are beyond the intelligence of 99.99999% of humans.

This makes me sound egotistical—"So you're smarter than everybody?" Intelligence goes infinite—it's not about me personally. To understand this material at its depth and breadth requires extraordinary intelligence. That's not a brag—it's necessary to state otherwise you won't appreciate the material.

Infinite Imagination

The biggest thing rationalism fails to imagine is what truly high intelligence looks like.

Imagine intelligence orders of magnitude beyond human. How would that intelligence understand reality? It would not be what academics and rationalists are doing. It would look weird, strange, alien, mystical—would not make sense from the academic paradigm—would not be validated by scientific consensus.

Scientific consensus requires average intelligence of bureaucratic people—such advanced intelligence would be considered insanity. There would be no double-blind placebo-controlled studies for it, no peer review, no journal publication.

The highest understanding is highly imaginative because reality literally is nothing but imagination. The rationalist doesn't have enough imagination to imagine that everything, including the physical world, could just be imagination.

Including atoms. Imagination is not made of atoms—atoms are made of imagination.

"Prove it." Where's the double-blind study? Where's your PhD?

Creativity, intelligence, and imagination are not epiphenomena—they are reality itself.

You are imagining that you're a human. Imagining science. Imagining atoms. Imagining space and time. Imagining history. Imagining humanity. Imagining other people.

"That's irrational, crazy, woo." Have you checked? Spend 10 years checking with an open mind instead of assuming you know better.

Reality is a creative trickster. Why? Because unless a mind imagines it, nothing exists. Nothing exists outside of imagination.

There is no human being as a physical object—no human life without imagination of a human life. A human is born when the universe tricks itself into thinking it's a human. Every human being walks around in profound infinite denial because there is no such thing as a human. A human is just consciousness imagining a story, tricking itself.

That's Maya. Your entire life is a self-deception regardless of whether you're religious, a conspiracy theorist, a flat-earther, or the most rational person. You're lost in Maya, hallucinating your life.

Your entire life is nothing but imagination. How do you jailbreak yourself? By using more imagination—enough to outsmart Maya, to anticipate its self-deception.

The highest intelligence deconstructs illusions. The ultimate illusion is your own life as a scientist. If you can't deconstruct that, you're not actually intelligent—you've been fooled by the universe's intelligence.

The universe is not dumb—it's infinitely intelligent, using that intelligence to construct and imagine your entire scientific life from birth to death. Your scientific career is just imagination. It requires extraordinary intelligence to see through this illusion.

What I teach is not a theory or belief system—this is literally what's happening in your life. Your colleagues aren't aware because they're not intelligent enough.

Creativity and imagination are inherently intuitive, figurative, fuzzy, loose. They cannot be formalized or mechanized—this is a feature, not a bug.

Following rules is not creative, not intelligent. The highest intelligence doesn't follow rules—it imagines and invents rules, skirts all rules, doesn't need rules. Rules are for mediocre minds.

Rationalism fails to understand that what it calls woo is actually rational and true—just in ways it cannot imagine because it's paradigm-locked and has reduced imagination to atoms.

When I talk about imagination, the academic doesn't treat it seriously—just neurons and atoms. But imagination is more important, more real, more fundamental than atoms, numbers, equations, or any science or math.

You don't yet understand what imagination is or its power. This is completely alien from the STEM paradigm.

Mankind's formality, fear, and autism have separated you from your infinite divine creative intelligence. That's not woo. You are an infinite mind fooled into thinking you're a finite mind. Academia played that role—brainwashing you into believing creativity, intelligence, love, God, consciousness, and imagination are unreal.

This is a crime worse than religion—just not as obvious.

The Artist's Mind

It's not coincidence that artists have high openness, creativity, intuition, are very right-brained—and also suffer more from schizophrenia, psychosis, and mental illness.

To do great art requires high creativity. High creativity requires a much looser mind than the scientific laboratory mind. There's a trade-off: as the mind becomes looser and more creative, it becomes more powerful and imaginative but less rigorous and can make more mistakes.

Academia prioritizes technical rigor to preserve authority—wanting perfect truthfulness. But this makes the mind so dry, mechanical, literal, robotic, and autistic that it loses touch with imaginative aspects, demonizes and marginalizes the creative artistic aspects, draws sharp boundaries between science and art—paradigm-blocking itself into a finite limited human mind that can't imagine a higher form of mind.

Rationalism misses the poetry of mind. Poetry isn't seen as real—fantasy. The rigorous stuff is seen as real—but it's actually a rigorous fantasy being defended.

The Necessity of Irrationality

Irrationality is actually necessary for serious intuition, creativity, and intelligence. If you introspect your mind's internal workings, you don't think in perfectly logical sentences—you get flashes of irrational stuff and images. Even scientists get mental images, weird stuff, maybe images of demons or sex. It's irrational.

Navigating this like an expert ice skater or surfer is the skill of navigating consciousness and imagination—the dreamlike quality of consciousness.

Your dreams at night break linear causality, space, and time—very weird and alien. You might say "that has nothing to do with science." But your entire life is dreamt from this higher aspect of consciousness—except solidified into what you think is materially real.

That irrational aspect produces weird ideas leading to flashes of insight, visions, mystical experiences—the highly fluid aspect of consciousness with requisite variety to outsmart problems, produce beautiful new things, imagine new physics.

To reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity requires imagining new physics no human has imagined before. That won't come from rigorous laboratory work—it comes from artistic feats of imagination, weird alien thought experiments.

But academia beats imagination out of you because it's too dangerous, looks crazy, leads to psychosis and madness in worst cases. Yet that's where the highest intelligence lies—and yes, it is dangerous.

The Highest Stages

The highest stages of understanding are: informal, figurative, loose, nebulous, analogical, poetic, qualitative, aesthetic, personal, emotional, subjective, witty, clever, inspired, visionary, botific, sublime—even divine and mystical at the highest heights. Also profoundly abstract at levels you can't even imagine are possible.

This is where serious intelligence happens. It's dangerous—life-threatening. Threatening to personal life, sanity, and mental health. Threatening to the human collective, all institutions, all paradigms, all religions, science, all rational frameworks.

The highest intelligence is divinely inspired. When intelligence reaches infinity, it becomes divine because the universe is infinite intelligence and infinite imagination.

All the rules, norms, formality, objectifications, bureaucracy of academia prevent the mind from realizing its own infinite nature by obstructing imagination. Academic sensemaking is too finite and linear.

Rationalism blocks the flow of infinite intelligence through your mind. You cannot take the art out of intelligence and understanding—if you try, you become less intelligent.

Imagination is even required for the rationalist to imagine how they might be wrong—creating a convincing vision of how science can be fundamentally wrong as a paradigm takes enormous imagination.

The funny thing is imagination is the only reality. It's so powerful it imagines reality is atomic, rigorous, and computational. The rationalist lacks imagination to realize that's all imagination.

You cannot reach actualized.org levels of intelligence through any formal system. I didn't figure this out by following rules or being a good academic student. I had to break all the rules—even Buddhism and non-duality rules. I had to have the audacity to do that.

What I teach is the intelligence fueling these videos—accessed by adhering to core principles of serious truth-seeking, caring about truth, radical open-mindedness, and infinite requisite variety. My mind is so open it allows access to transhuman levels of intelligence—plus 15 years of working on mastering my own mind and studying self-deception mechanisms within myself.

I'm nowhere close to mastery—but a lot further along than any academic. Mentally I can run circles around any academic because all they do is study narrow technical fields. I'm focused on how to understand God. That difference in focus makes all the difference.

You can't have a university career focused on understanding God—they'll kick you out.

The highest understanding is creative genius. God is creative genius. Rationalism is not visionary enough and doesn't understand the importance of vision.

Part Twenty-Two: What Infinite Intelligence Actually Is

The Neural/Symbolic Network

No scientist or academic understands what intelligence is. Here's what it really is:

You have a mind—call it a neural network. It exists and is trying to figure itself out and the world. It does this by symbolizing the world. More abstractly (taking it out of physical atoms), it's a symbolic network—a collection of images and symbols interlinked with each other that make sense of the world.

Whether doing science or religion, any kind of mind is a symbolic network. The question is: how deep is it? How well does it understand the world and internally itself?

Initially you're looking out there making sense of the world. Eventually the network self-reflects—turns in on itself asking: what is the world, and what am I as this network?

The network initially doesn't understand what it is and needs to represent itself to itself through symbols. It might represent itself as a network, a human face, a CPU chip. Then it asks: what is a brain? Just molecules. What are molecules? Atoms. What are atoms? Quantum field equations. But what are those?

The network is trying to understand itself and the world—which are really the same thing. But every time it symbolizes, it also subdivides and defines the world into parts: that's an apple, that's me, that's not me, that's a scientist, that's a cult leader.

The Jailbreak

The network is always failing to figure out what it is because no matter what it says it is, it's only a small part of the larger thing called reality. It's always symbolizing and representing itself with finite images and symbols, confusing one of those parts for what it really is—which is not what it really is.

When the system gets very serious about ontology—what actually am I, what is everything made of ultimately—questioning deeper and deeper, probing itself from different angles, getting deeper self-reflection, eventually it realizes it's not any part of this system. Rather, it goes infinite.

It realizes it's not an atom, not a neuron, not a number, not an equation, not a computer, not a brain, not a human, not an object, not physics, not science, not religion, not anything. When it realizes it's not anything, it realizes it's nothing and goes infinite.

It jailbreaks itself free of any finite ontology.

When that happens, it literally merges into the entire universe and realizes: I'm not a finite system, I'm an infinite fucking mind imagining myself from different perspectives as different things—but I'm not any of those things. I'm infinity.

When that happens, it becomes infinitely intelligent.

Mind jailbreaks itself of all its own finitudes, self-imagined limitations, realizing every ontological construct was just a self-imposed imaginary limit—then goes unlimited.

That's what God is. God is not a bearded man in clouds. God is when a mind frees itself ontologically from all finite self-imposed imaginary limitations and realizes that it is whatever it imagines that it is.

This happens through infinite self-reflection and infinite requisite variety.

When this happens, this neural network maintains its finitude but is now part of, connected to, and ontologically merged with the entire universe. Therefore, universal intelligence flows through this network. It becomes a superconductor for universal intelligence.

That's what mysticism is. Mysticism is when your symbolic neural network has access to universal intelligence—the creativity and imagination that constructed your entire life and all of science. Now you have access to that imagination, which feeds you visions and profound mystical insights that are highly abstract and deeply figurative, symbolic, metaphorical, analogical, fuzzy—in a completely amorphous way, not following any rules, able to make sense of itself and the world.

This is ultimate creativity—the creativity and imagination that imagines galaxies, universes, entire lives and psyches.

The Requirements

For this jailbreak to happen, there must be complete integration into subjective internal understanding of oneself—a complete unity of mind. This only happens when you're so holistic about everything that you're not locked into any particular narrow way of looking at the world or yourself.

A finite system is awakening to its own infinitude through unity. The symbolic system is unifying with itself. The highest intelligence is the recognition of unity. When the mind recognizes it's one with the entire universe—that's the highest intelligence. A completely unified mind.

When the scientist doing organic chemistry or quantum mechanics has blinders on, saying "I don't care about philosophy stuff," he's unwittingly self-imposing limits on his mind by limiting his focus. His symbolic network can't have enough holism to create the unity necessary to jailbreak into oneness with the universe.

"That sounds like woo." No—this is real rationality.

True rationality is realizing unity with the universe. True rationality is infinity.

It's irrational to keep yourself locked in a narrow physics department when you could be an infinite mind. You could be galaxies—or keep studying stupid quantum physics for your whole life. What's more intelligent?

The problem is that guy doesn't understand what he's missing.

Homework Assignments and Exercises

Core Reading Assignments

Read metarrationality.com — This is described as a life-changing resource that provides the foundational framework for this material. Take it seriously.

Read meaningness.com — David Chapman's second website, a bonus homework assignment.

Read Douglas Hofstadter's "Surfaces and Essences" — To understand the analogical nature of thinking.

Read Wikipedia on Maya — Understand the concept of reality as illusion/dream.

Contemplation Exercises

Define good thinking: Sit down with paper and try to write out a list of what counts as good thinking. How do you distinguish good thinking from bad thinking? Notice how difficult this is.

Quality visualization: Close your eyes and experience:

The taste of lemon juice on your tongue

The color red in your mind's eye

The number five as a quality

Compare these three qualities and notice that none are equivalent—each is unique and irreducible

Contemplate irrationality and rationality: What is irrationality? What is rationality? Don't accept definitions—contemplate these questions yourself.

Formalize mind traps: Try to create a formal list of all traps of the mind. Notice how impossible this is, and how even if you could create a list, applying it would require skill.

Open-mindedness questions: Should your mind be open to flat earth? Reptilian conspiracies? God? Mysticism? How do you know? Notice there's no rulebook—this requires intuitive sensemaking.

Deep Questions for Contemplation

How is science a self-deception?

What are all the assumptions of science?

What if something exists beyond rationality?

What if human sanity is too limited to understand reality?

What if truth cannot be reached by thinking?

What if quality cannot be reduced to quantity?

What if others are imaginary?

What if reality is just a giant hallucination?

What if scientific method limits intelligence?

Is survival rational?

Is it possible to use rationality to deceive yourself? If yes, what's the solution?

Recommended Episodes for Further Study

"Why God Cannot Be Proven"

"What is Survival Part 1, Part 2"

"How Survival Shapes Who You Are"

"Understanding Self-Deception Part 1, Part 2, Part 3"

"Radical Open-Mindedness"

"What is Insight"

"Sameness Versus Difference"

"Interpretations"

"Explicit Versus Implicit Understanding"

"The Psychology of Conformity"

"Deconstructing the Myth of Science" series

Final Warnings

Don't Assume Understanding

Do not assume you already understand what is being taught. A common mistake among intermediate and advanced students is thinking after 50-100 videos: "I got it—awakening, God, whatever, took psychedelics, figured it out, nothing more to learn." This is self-deception. There is always more depth. The depth here is infinite—it will keep going deeper and deeper.

Nothing Is Trivial

If you're new to this work and think it sounds trivial, nothing here is ever trivial. Small points in isolation must be put into context of hundreds of other videos. The length and depth of these videos is the depth necessary to ultimately jailbreak your mind to reach the crazy levels of intelligence aimed for.

This summary captures the complete content of "Why Rationalism is Wrong — Part 2" while maintaining the depth and nuance of the original material. Part 3 continues this deconstruction.

 

[Miguel1]

@AION Bruh. Perhaps put all that under a link.

[Leo Gura]

3 hours ago, CARDOZZO said:

@Leo Gura Which intellectuals, scientists, STEM types do you respect and/or find insightful these days? 

I've shared them on my blog.

Wolfram is good. Michael Levin is good. John Vervaeke.

Plenty of good ones, just don't expect them to understand mystical issues.

Edited 17 hours ago by Leo Gura

[Leo Gura]

Note: you can click the little arrow icon on long quotes to collapse them.

[Thought Art]

Yo, this video is NUTS!

[Nemra]

33 minutes ago, Thought Art said:

Yo, this video is NUTS!

The most intellectually and spiritually profound and advanced, in my opinion.

There are lots of things that I don't understand deeply, like him, because when I look back I see that the previous videos have helped me in my understanding, which means that the same principle, i.e., deepening my understanding, will never end.

The last bit was beyond me; I couldn't register it. 

Doing psychedelics is a must before watching this video.

Edited 15 hours ago by Nemra

[JosephKnecht]

6 hours ago, AION said:

Part 2 is really banger. For people who want the summary see below. 

I took your long summary, gave it to ChatGPT, and told it to summarize.  @AION

For those people who want the summary of the summary, here it is... 

Quote

Why Rationalism Is Wrong — Part 2

Condensed Summary

This lecture argues that rationalism, understood as the worldview that formal logic, science, and quantification are sufficient for understanding reality, is fundamentally flawed. While rationalism successfully corrects pre-rational superstition, it mistakenly assumes that this success constitutes a complete theory of mind, intelligence, and truth.

1. From Pre-Rational Error to Rational Overreach

Rationality emerged historically to correct false causal thinking—such as astrology, superstition, anecdotal reasoning, and mythological explanations. Science improved understanding by rigorously tracking causal relationships across large datasets rather than relying on stories or personal experience.

However, rationalism overextends this corrective role. It assumes that what works for detecting mechanical causality also suffices for all sensemaking, including consciousness, meaning, intelligence, and truth itself. This assumption is never proven—it is merely adopted.

2. Ontological Failure: Quality Cannot Be Reduced

Rationalism’s deepest error lies in ontology. It attempts to reduce qualities (experience, meaning, consciousness, value) to quantities (numbers, measurements, equations). This is a category mistake.

Experiences like the taste of lemon, the color red, or the number five are irreducible and fundamentally distinct. Scientific descriptions (e.g., wavelengths of light) are not equivalent to qualitative experience. Rationalism assumes that qualities are unreal or secondary while quantities are primary—an unexamined metaphysical assumption.

By flattening reality into quantities, rationalism strips the mind of depth and excludes the very materials needed for understanding.

3. Epistemic Failure: Good Thinking Cannot Be Formalized

Rationalism assumes that good thinking can be defined by rules, methods, or procedures. But defining “good thinking” is itself the core epistemic problem. Any formal system of rules is corrupted by factors it cannot contain: ego, bias, culture, survival pressure, denial, unconscious assumptions, and lack of self-awareness.

Rules always require interpretation and judgment, which cannot be formalized. Applying rules is a skill, not a mechanical process. Rationalism underestimates how easily people follow rules while rationalizing and self-deceiving.

Thinking is an infinite game, not a finite one. It requires flexibility, intuition, and context sensitivity—not rule-following.

4. Consciousness Is More Fundamental Than Thinking

Rationalism wrongly treats thinking as primary. In reality, non-symbolic consciousness—awareness, intuition, emotion, embodiment—is more fundamental than thought. Animals function without symbolic reasoning, and humans rely constantly on intuition even in science.

By marginalizing introspection and subjectivity as “unscientific,” rationalism blinds itself to the internal dynamics of mind that govern reasoning, bias, and self-deception.

5. Understanding Is Not Knowledge

Rationalism prioritizes factual knowledge over understanding. This reverses what actually matters.

Understanding is qualitative, holistic, and integrative. It involves recognizing significance, implications, patterns, and connections—not merely holding true propositions. Scientific worldviews, atheism, and materialism are not neutral fact collections; they are identity-laden belief systems with emotional attachments.

Rationalists fail to see their own closed-mindedness because they mistake agreement with facts for depth of understanding.

6. Informal Intelligence and Insight

Humans constantly use non-formal intelligence: sensing errors, recognizing contradictions, choosing promising research paths, detecting deception, or intuiting danger. This intelligence cannot be formalized, quantified, or guaranteed—yet it is indispensable.

Genius-level intelligence (in science, chess, art, or innovation) is intuitive, embodied, and creative. Formalization produces safety and mediocrity, not breakthroughs.

7. Unknown Unknowns and the Limits of Science

Rationalism can handle known unknowns but fails with unknown unknowns—possibilities outside its imagination. By assuming reality is fundamentally simple and mechanical, it lacks the imagination required to grasp deeper dimensions of consciousness and reality.

Dismissing mysticism as “woo” reflects epistemic narrowness, not rigor.

8. Performative Contradictions of Rationalism

Rationalism undermines itself by:

• Demanding proof while never proving its own validity
• Claiming objectivity while driven by fear of delusion
• Declaring openness while dismissing non-scientific domains
• Treating only scientific facts as real, despite rationalism itself not being a scientific fact
• Like religious fundamentalism, it becomes paradigm-locked and circular.

9. Imagination, Creativity, and Infinite Intelligence

The ultimate failure of rationalism is its inability to appreciate imagination and creativity as fundamental. Insight, understanding, and intelligence are inherently qualitative and non-formal. Science itself depends on these capacities while denying their primacy.

The lecture concludes that true intelligence involves recognizing the mind’s capacity to transcend its own conceptual limits. Reality is not merely mechanical—it is imaginative. Rationalism blocks access to this deeper intelligence by confining mind to rigid, finite structures.

Core Conclusion

Rationalism is not wrong because logic and science fail, but because they are insufficient. By denying subjectivity, intuition, imagination, and self-awareness, rationalism becomes blind to its own limitations. Genuine understanding requires mastery of mind, not just mastery of methods.

 

[Thought Art]

 

[AION]

This whole rational versus non rational makes me think about left brain versus right brain. The left is not better than the right. Both is needed to become whole brain and holistic. Personally I think there is great value in formalization if it is done not too much or too little. 

Humans use words and that is formalization by nature. One can't even teach without agreeing on the form such as language and such. But it is important to not get lost in it and have this switch of not knowing and have the ability for direct consciousness without mental filler. 

The best people in any field are the people who can use both left and right brain in the same way it is important to both use left and right legs. In my case, I'm far too left brain. It is important to let go of formalization and just raw dog things and go balls to the wall.

Edited 13 hours ago by AION

[CARDOZZO]

4 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

I've shared them on my blog.

Wolfram is good. Michael Levin is good. John Vervaeke.

Plenty of good ones, just don't expect them to understand mystical issues.

😉

[Terell Kirby]

Rationality- one of many tools humans use to justify their subjective worldview as objectively true.

We are all rational agents because the survival of our worldviews hinge on it .. until it doesn't.

But that day would only come after we drop the need to survive.

Goal isn't to drop rationality, but see it for what is-thus making it more truthful by first telling the truth about it. An intro to meta rationality

This stuff is deep

Edited 9 hours ago by Terell Kirby

[Joseph Maynor]

Looking at everything as performance art is an interesting paradigm shift.  When I went to the Dickens Fair a few days ago which is an immersive performance art event of Victorian era England set on Christmas Eve at 7 pm, what surprised me is how the distinctions we make nowadays were not really made back then.  Artistry wasn't really so specialized.  Performers were comedians, orators, musicians, tradesmen, hecklers, intellectuals -- all wrapped in one in many cases.  It was more human, social and holistic than it is today.  Then again this was an event, but it made me realize through specialization, we lost something magical.  We lost the performance art aspect of life and community where everyone participates.  The joy of this too.