Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 6
It is useful to look at explicit definitions of materialism and idealism. This helps clear up many things. So...
Materialism: "Is the claim that consciousness is entirely physical, solely the product of biological brains, and all mental states can be fully reduced to, or wholly explained by, physical states — which, at their deepest levels, are fields and particles of fundamental physics. In short, materialism, in its many forms and flavors, gives a completely physicalist account of phenomenal consciousness."
Idealism: "Is the claim that consciousness is ultimate reality, the deepest level of all existence, the singular fundamental existent. It is the theory of consciousness that takes consciousness to its maximum meaning. Ultimate reality is mind or awareness or thought, while everything else, including all physical worlds and universes and all that they contain, are derivative and illusory."
Materialism is false. Idealism is true. But you need to discover this for yourself, don't just take my word for it.
The real question is not whether idealism is true. The real question is: What are all the ways that idealism plays itself out? What's needed is a deep investigation into the mechanics of idealism. How does idealism work? That's the real philosophical work.
Credit: Robert Lawrence Kuhn for articulating the definitions
On the theme of cosmic horror.
Love this.
Humans are too small-minded to appreciate the beauty of monsters. Especially Christians. Consciousness/God delights in inventing monsters because they are beautiful. Radical openmindedness is required to appreciate a monster.
One of the ways you know Christianity is false is because it is incapable of integrating and loving demons, monsters, and cosmic horrors. God's Love requires love of the monsters that Consciousness can imagine. Christians are too ignorant and closedminded to understand this. That's why Christians demonize things and people they fail to understand.
Even the demonization of literal demons is an epistemic error. It must be, since if God created everything, God created demons. And who are you to judge God's Creation?
This is delicious:
Jorge Luis Borges is one of the coolest fiction writers. His writing explores strange-loopy metaphysical themes.
Framing makes all the difference. Much self-deception comes from selective or limited framing. Good sense-making requires caring about having the widest possible frame. This cartoon illustrates why truth requires holism.
Think about times in your life when you were misled by being shown a limited, selective frame. Notice how often people try to fool you this way, presenting you with half the situation in order to manipulate your perception to serve their survival needs. The epistemic lesson here is that the frame matters more than the facts.
Given how epistemically irresponsible most humans are, you can never trust them to give you the full frame. It's not necessarily that they are intentionally lying to you, it's usually that they are themselves so self-deceived and so epistemically irresponsible that they don't have the full frame to give you. Very, very few people or worldviews are advanced enough to give you the full frame. Which is why you cannot outsource epistemology to anyone.
I like sharing examples with you of the vast genetic diversity of humans, hence the topic of genetic freakery. So here's another example. There exist people who get zero pleasure from music.
Here's an article that studies this interesting case.
This guy devoted his life — thousands of hours — trying to answer the question of What is consciousness? He compiled a list of 325 different theories of consciousness. He makes an air of being scientific, rigorous, and objective about it. But in the end all his scientific logic failed him, as you can see here.
Skip to timestamp: 2:42:23
That's the stupid logic of scientism.
Smart people cling to science to avoid self-deception but this ironically makes them self-deceived and they have no awareness of this simple trap.
Yes, psychedelics are necessary to understand Consciousness. You cannot understand psychedelics by reasoning about them from your armchair. The one thing this guy needed to do to understand Consciousness, he did not do. The ego-mind is brilliant at making a show of understanding Consciousness without doing what is actually necessary to understand it. Studying and rigorously cataloguing 325 theories of consciousness sounds like it's a good idea, but it isn't. It's a distraction from the real work. 325 theories just ends up drowning out the Truth in endless human noise, but it looks impressive to a scientific audience. If you wish to understand Consciousness you have to be careful to do the stuff that actually matters and avoid all the stuff that doesn't.
One dose of 5-MeO-DMT is worth more than studying 325 theories of consciousness for 10 years. And you could easily demonstrate that to yourself by doing it. That's real science.
Clinging to science, logic, and objectivity will not save you. That's the key epistemic insight.
One of the things that annoys me the most is when people act scientifically rigorous but end up as clueless as if they has studied nothing at all. This is the real thing to be worried about.
Cosmic horror is a fascinating notion.
"Cosmic Horror is the realization that the universe is more vast and complicated than you will ever begin to comprehend, and nothing you, or even the entirety of civilization will do will ever make a big enough mark to matter. You're not special, and anything that happens to you is just random happenstance with no reason behind it because the beings we consider gods are so beyond our understanding that they don't even acknowledge our existence. The bacteria that die coming into contact with your body have more significance to you than the entirety of human civilization does to something like Chthulu.
Something so horrific that it's out of our realm or universe of understanding. Cosmic horror is about taking a peek just beyond the edges of reality, and getting a glimpse of that which cannot be understood by our limited knowledge.
It's realizing that nature is so big and so old that: you can't understand it. It doesn't need you and could destroy you without noticing. It's the realization that you don't matter and that you can't understand why. Picture a gold fish born in an aquarium in a pet shop. It's all it's ever known, it's not in control, and doesn't even have the capacity and the software to begin to understand why. That's us, on Earth, in relation to the rest of the universe.
The core of cosmic horror puts a horror spin on the idea that humans (and Earth) are a speck of dust in the vastness of space and time, that we do not matter in the universe. It personifies that with beings so immense and alien that we are like ants to them. Also, I think, a lot of the 'knowledge that makes you mad' is in a way, the idea of ignorance is bliss, but in a horror context. Learning this thing ruins you. There are other elements too, generally involving bending reality and physics, extra dimensions, messing with perceptions, etc.
The horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible.
A character is defeated when their enemy is the embodiment of the fear of the cosmos. It appears as a girl with her brains hanging out of her gaping skull who only says 'Halloween' but to this character she manifests in the form of a librarian of a library with an unfathomable number of books containing EVERYTHING. This cosmic horror then dumps the entire library and knowledge into her head until all she can say is 'Halloween' from the sheer weight of just knowing literally everything." — Reddit
There is a whole game based on cosmic horror, it's called Look Outside.
Why do I mention this at all? Because cosmic horror captures an otherwise ineffable aspect of Infinity. The vastness of Infinity is terrifying and difficult to communicate. Cosmic horror gives us some handle on it.
I have awoken to states of consciousness so alien, so incomprehensible, that they make human existence, all scientific knowledge, and even all human spirituality irrelevant. There exist states of consciousness that reveal the human experience of reality to be as small as that of bacteria. And then you have to live with knowing that.
