TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
No bio...
User ID: 616
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1yr ago
Maybe you should explicitly bring up energy policy in your top level submission?
Also, nice cheap dig at the mods. As if they don't do enough for us pro bono.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
I believe that our entire scientific, logical system and much of our physics is based on binary or black and white thinking, and that ultimate Truths which religions claim to purvey are somehow above this sort of binary distinction.
Quantum fluctuations and other edge problems in physics are a good example of what I mean, but even here I think the framing of the problem is sorely lacking.
Basically I think we are deeply limited in our understanding of the world, and that we need to be far more humble than we have been when trying to learn more. Especially when it comes to complex systems such as people.
So angels and spiritual beings exist in essentially higher dimensions than ours…. But again I don’t think we have any concepts that can accurately explain. This is why mysticism and experiential understanding is so crucial for most religious practices.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
Have you tried praying with a humble heart? You might be surprised by Him answering, as I was.
I mean this seriously. I think the majority of materialists, like my own past self, are just fundamentally unwilling to believe in God for emotional reasons. There is plenty of evidence for His existence, but as I spent my post explaining at least partially, it’s not evidence that a scientific framework can easily accept.
Materialism, as the philosophy exists today, is a relatively recent phenomenon. When we talk about someone being a 'materialist' we don't mean they shop for lots of handbags or fancy dining room sets. Instead, a materialist is generally defined as seeing all facts or pieces of the world, including the human mind and will, as dependable on or in the most extreme case reducible to physical processes.
In other words, there is only physical matter moving around and interacting, no other forces exist in the universe.
There are a number of major issues within determinism such as free will, and the seeming ability of humans to make choices that operate outside of physical processes. Of course this claim has been papered over from the materialist side by claiming that free will is just an illusion, but the determinists haven't made much headway. The most famous contemporary materialist from my understanding is Daniel Dennett, who has written extensively on free will, determinism, religion, et cetera, and basically come up with a convoluted 'compatibalist' view: that the world is all physical processes, yet we also have free will. Somehow.
Now challenges to materialism present a number of problems, primarily the fact that our modern, statistical, ScientificTM worldview cannot tolerate or understand any phenomena that aren't easily and simply repeated. Even if supernatural phenomenon did exist however, the bias against them has grown so massive in the last century that any respectable scientist wouldn't be caught dead going near these claims.
Why does this matter for the Culture War? Well outside of even religion, our entire cultural regime rests upon Science being the arbiter of truth and ender of disputes. If it turns out our materialistic worldview science has given us ends up being false, there are innumerable cultural repercussions, from the temporal vindication of religion to the re-opening of entire new vistas of understanding. Materialism's truth or falsity is, I would argue, the most important higher level question for our world to answer at the moment. Unfortunately, the mainstream consensus has been that materialism is true a priori despite massive contradictions. Even if many moderns don't outright argue this, their actions and stances on various topics reveal them as materialists through and through.
I'd imagine many people reading this haven't been exposed to some of the more respectable claims of anti-materialists. I'm going to quote heavily from this article by Roger's Bacon to give you an idea of some of the more interesting claims. Bacon, in turn, pulls heavily from a book entitled The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, if you're interested in further reading.
Bacon explains how Freeman Dyson, an intellectual titan by any standard, posited this idea:
In my review I said that ESP only occurs, according to the anecdotal evidence, when a person is experiencing intense stress and strong emotions. Under the conditions of a controlled scientific experiment, intense stress and strong emotions are excluded; the person experiences intense boredom rather than excitement, so the evidence for ESP disappears...The experiment necessarily excludes the human emotions that make ESP possible.
This view is generally referred to as "Traumatic Transcendence," or in other words you need extremely strong states to activate latent 'powers' or abilities, states which controlled experiments almost by definition cannot excite in patients. We're not just talking scaring someone a bit, we're talking extremely near death or something similar. And even in those states it's an extreme rarity of cases, apparently. However, we have extensive anecdotal reports, many from quite distinguished thinkers and well corroborated, that propose something like traumatic transcendence being real.
There are of course other examples. I'm going to quote this one from Mark Twain at length, which I find fascinating:
Dressed in his famous white “dontcaredam suit” Mark Twain was famous for mocking every orthodoxy and convention, including, it turns out, the conventions of space and time. As he related the events in his diaries, Twain and his brother Henry were working on the riverboat Pennsylvania in June 1858. While they were lying in port in St. Louis, the writer had a most remarkable dream:
In the morning, when I awoke I had been dreaming, and the dream was so vivid, so like reality, that it deceived me, and I thought it was real. In the dream I had seen Henry a corpse. He lay in a metallic burial case. He was dressed in a suit of my clothing, and on his breast lay a great bouquet of flowers, mainly white roses, with a red rose in the centre.
Twain awoke, got dressed, and prepared to go view the casket. He was walking to the house where he thought the casket lay before he realized “that there was nothing real about this—it was only a dream. Alas, it was not. A few weeks later, Henry was badly burned in a boiler explosion and then accidentally killed when some young doctors gave him a huge overdose of opium for the pain. Normally, the dead were buried in a simple pine coffin, but some women had raised sixty dollars to put Henry in a special metal one. Twain explained what happened next:
When I came back and entered the dead-room Henry lay in that open case, and he was dressed in a suit of my clothing. He had borrowed it without my knowledge during our last sojourn in St. Louis; and I recognized instantly that my dream of several weeks before was here exactly reproduced, so far as these details went—and I think I missed one detail; but that one was immediately supplied, for just then an elderly lady entered the place with a large bouquet consisting mainly of white roses, and in the centre of it was a red rose, and she laid it on his breast.
Now who of us would not be permanently marked, at once inspired and haunted, by such a series of events? Who of us, if this were our dream and our brother, could honestly dismiss it all as a series of coincidences? Twain certainly could not. He was obsessed with such moments in his life, of which there were all too many. In 1878, he described some of them in an essay and even theorized how they work. But he could not bring himself to publish it, as he feared “the public would treat the thing as a joke whereas I was in earnest.” Finally, Twain gave in, allowed his name to be attached to his own experiences and ideas, and published this material in Harper’s magazine in two separate installments: “Mental Telegraphy: A Manuscript with a History” (1891) and “Mental Telegraphy Again” (1895).”
Again, there are almost endless examples of these types of phenomena occurring, which are unfortunately decried by any scientific establishment that exists today.
However, traumatic transcendence isn't the only explanation. Another reasonable explanation for our inability to capture these occurrences in experiments would be that they are mediated by an intelligent, non-human agent of some kind such as a ghost, demon, angel, God or gods, et cetera. In fact, this is the claim straightforwardly put forth by most believers in the supernatural throughout history. Which of course is essentially all humans before the last century.
If these other beings did in fact cause supernatural events to happen, or at least need to give their 'permission' so to speak for the normal laws of physics to be suspended, well then of course we wouldn't be able to predict when it would happen. We still aren't even good at predicting human behavior, outside of pacified and corralled Westerners who are manipulated 24/7 by intense media designed to change their behavior.
Another idea to explain supernatural phenomena, while a bit more 'out there,' is actually one I find quite compelling. Bacon outlines it as such:
In traumatic transcendence, we see reality responding to an acute state of consciousness in some individual. However, there may also be a sense in which this happens “chronically” in response to states of collective consciousness. This leads to a startling conclusion, one that forms a central theme of Kripal’s work: culture directly affects the real by mediating and constraining the kinds of consciousness experiences which people are capable of having. In a very literal sense then, the metaphysical paradigm of an age determines the metaphysical truth of that age.
We did not simply realize the truth of secular materialism, we “realized” it.
Crucially, this is not something that one can simply opt out of by adopting some facile belief in the supernatural. To live in this age of disenchantment is to operate within an episteme of doubt and suspicion; this makes it almost impossible to obtain those states of consciousness which require absolute metaphysical belief of some kind. The spell was broken once we began compulsively “looking over our shoulders at other beliefs” (Charles Taylor).4
This idea is actually explored quite a bit in fantasy and science fiction - for instance Warhammer 40K has a similar world, where every conscious mind's inherent beliefs do affect material reality, and enough of those together can cause a planet or part of the universe to operate drastically differently than others.
It's worth considering, at the very least.
Overall, there are still many mysteries to be explained in our universe, despite what our reductionist and materialist culture would have you think. I'll end with another block quote from Kripal, as he says it better than I ever could:
As Aldous Huxley pointed our long ago in his own defense of “mystical” experiences, we have no reason to think from our ordinary experience that water is composed of two gases fused together by invisible forces. We know this only by exposing water to extreme conditions, by “traumatizing” it, and then by detecting and measuring the gases with advanced technology that no ordinary person possesses or understands.
Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason to suppose that matter is not material, that it is made up of bizarre forms of energy that violate, very much like spirit, all of our normal notions of space, time, and causality. Yet when we subject matter to exquisite technologies, like the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, then we can see quite clearly that matter is not “material” at all. But—and this is the key—we can only get there through a great deal of physical violence, a violence so extreme and so precise that it cost billions of dollars, necessitated the participation of tens of thousands of professional physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists, and required decades of preparation to inflict it and then analyze its results. Hence the recent discovery of the “God particle,” or Higgs boson at CERN.
We invested our energies, time, and money there, and so we are finding out all sorts of astonishing things about the world in which we live and of which we are intimate expressions. But we will not invest them here, in the everyday astonishing experiences of human beings around the world, and so we continue to work with the most banal models of mind—materialist and mechanistic ones—that is, models that assume that “mind equals brain” and the psyche works like, or is, a computer. What is going on here? Why are we so intent on ignoring precisely those bodies of evidence that suggest that, yes, of course, mind is correlated with brain, but it is not the same thing. Why are we so afraid of the likelihood that we are every bit as bizarre as the quantum world; that we possess fantastic capacities that we have so far only allowed ourselves to imagine in science fiction and fantasy literature? (The Flip, pg. 38)
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1yr ago
Why not just get vaccinated? I also thought it was kind if bullshit but did it to avoid running my social life.
Are you concerned about health risks or is it a principle?
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
You make some good points here, although I still fail to grasp the idea of materialistic free will.
I think that even in rarefied philosophy circles, materialism is used constantly as a motte and Bailey. The Motte is the claim you’re making, that materialists just want to find laws and systems et cetera to explain phenomena. Which yes is an extremely defensible position, but on the other hand prescribes or denies basically nothing as you readily admit.
However, the Bailey of materialism is that God, ghosts, big foot, aliens, or whatever supernatural force or being can’t possibly exist because we know stupid bullshit like that doesn’t fit under our materialist understanding of the world.
I suppose a more accurate term could be something like reductive materialism or mechanistic materialism but eh I think people get the point. Thanks for clarifying.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1yr ago
These claims are hyperbolic, do you really think people will outright ban cars? The goal is to make public transit reasonable or possible for people to use, not destroy all the roads and cars people have.
This type of disingenuous argument about older folks is why I get so frustrated about density conversations.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1yr ago
Messaged you about this - long story short I talked to someone in person who gave me some info but doesn't look like the candidate list is public.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1yr ago
/r/neoliberal vampires
If I have to become a neoliberal in order to become a vampire, I may accept.
In all seriousness, yes losing your home to developers sounds terrible but it does promote valuable use of land. At the end of the day it depends on how you fundamentally view land and how it should be used.
From my point of view, having land simply reward whoever squatted there first with no view to their effort on the land is both unfair and a huge waste of potential value. If anything I would say the landowners who get a massive benefit from simply being lucky enough to live in a desirable area are the vampires, as they are sucking away monetary value from the surrounding area by doing essentially nothing.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
I want you to seriously try and do some experiential religious practice and try to have an open mind as to the existence of divine entities.
I want folks like yourself to perhaps try to pray, or even meditate and give it a genuine shot. Maybe even take psychedelics and explore your mental space, once we have (hopefully) learned to incorporate those sorts of aids into mainstream religious practice.
Ultimately I want to return to a more symbolic worldview such as the ancients had, while retaining the benefits and understanding modern science has given us.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
How far am I supposed to bend over backwards extending charity to all the sorcery that turned out to not actually work? Magical beliefs have been with us since we climbed down from the trees, and after thousands of years we have what? What have you brought us?
All of civilization and the foundation that allowed science to be developed and flourish, perhaps?
Yes materialist science is powerful. It's also flawed, and from my perspective has essentially been burning down our cultural myths and the built up social capital of millenia in order to fuel it's relentless search for reductionist physical truths. That store of fuel is almost gone, and if we don't realize and pay attention to the societal structures which undergird science, it won't matter how much scientific knowledge or power we've accrued. We'll kill ourselves anyway.
To be honest, I'm not sure what non-materialists even want from us materialists. They aren't bringing any experimental insights, they aren't bringing any testable theories, and they don't have any magic that works. Do they just want to get snorted at less when they relate their ESP anecdotes at a party or on an internet forum? I don't know what they expect me to do with what they've given me other than shrug.
Generally I want a revival of religion, I want atheism to be a thing of the past and I want materialists to acknowledge arguments and admit they don't know instead of sneering. It seems that's too much to ask, however.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
3mo ago
No need to beat yourself up so much. It’s perfectly legitimate to believe the Eucharist to be Christ’s literal blood and body. Many modern ‘rational materialists’ believe things just as ridiculous on their face, like the Big Bang or the origins of life.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
6mo ago
If length were the real preference, I could post this as a top level:
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Do you see that happening? No? Well then length is not the preference.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
7mo ago
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
7mo ago
It's the victim's responsibility to, if they are in a place or situation where their morals or sense of right and wrong is continually violated, find a place or set of relationships where their values are respected. From there they need to start working to live those positive values and encourage others to do the same by example.
Complaining about your situation, refusing to change anything, and calling for violence is not an admirable response at all in my view.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
7mo ago
I can't say I wish you the best, but at least you're honest about your intentions.
I hope for all of our sakes you and people like you never gain a significant amount of power. I don't think you understand the scope of the horror you will bring back into the world if you achieve your goal of widespread political violence.
It's always the naive ones that want it bloody, and ruin things for the rest of us, unfortunately.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
8mo ago
I think that what we should really get rid of is mandatory education. It is a day care program dishonestly masquerading as an educational system and it packs kids into close contact with each other right at the age at which most of them behave more like chimpanzees than at any point before or after in their lives. To force this on people is fundamentally abusive. School also trains kids that what they should expect from life is to be closely observed and trained by bureaucrats. And in the age of the Internet, school is also near-irrelevant as a source of learning when it comes to anything above very basic math and reading skills.
Tear down the mandatory education system.
Beautifully said! The mandatory education system is, along with factory farming, one of the most horrible moral abuses of our day. It's incredible how ordinary people just paper over the horror that kids must deal with, and think throwing more money at the problem will solve it.
Tear. It. Down!
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
9mo ago
You may have a point for France, but for America at least this is hilariously backward. It denies the whole founding purpose of the USA.
May I remind you:
Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
Send these the homeless tempest-tost to me
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Nations can be built and can thrive based on more than just ethnicity or “family” as you call it. It’s been done before, to more success than anything else in the history of the world, and we can do it again.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1yr ago
I’m not advocating for getting rid of cars entirely, I think anyone who wants to do so in the US is deranged. I’d be curious to read any arguments you can point to that call for that drastic of a move.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1yr ago
(1) Convince people to abandon existing driving infrastructure.
Extremely simple, just increase taxes on cars to capture their externalities.
(2) Figure out how to contain the high costs of projects in the US.
This is the hardest one, but is not limited to transit. If we solve this one we solve a ton of our other problems. I'm convinced that the lack of pay/prestige in public service is the issue - we should have less jobs that are much more highly paid.
(3) Improve the strength of our institutions and management
Not sure how this is related?
(4) Move forward transit spending to update all outdated systems.
Even with current systems, if people use public transit it's massively beneficial and efficient compared to cars.
in terms of reveled preference I do think it's quite possible American really do prefer car-centric neighborhoods. And those that do rightfully bear (at least part) of the cost of the preference.
People also like smoking cigarettes, and we took that away too. Seatbelts etc etc.
I'd argue that car owners bear very little of the cost of the preference, as it hits the urban poor who can't afford a good car the hardest. You get into a poverty trap where you can't afford a good car, have to spend money on repairs constantly, lose jobs, and generally have a bad life.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1yr ago
In history most academics still see be defining work on this as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
Yeah this debate tends to get messy. I threw Bigfoot in there for variety, I’m not a cryptozoologist by any stretch of the imagination.
What I’m trying to get across is that while most default modern thinkers believe they have achieved a hyper rationalist, extremely logical and bulletproof worldview based on rigorous scientific inquiry, they in fact have not. And don’t even question the core assumptions of their worldview, just dismiss challenges a priori.
To your credit it sounds like you allow a much larger amount of leeway for possibility than most. I’d be curious if you’ve tried prayer or any other personal or ‘experiential’ practice aimed at seeking direct contact with the divine or spiritual world?
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Thanks for the quality response here. I also think the effects of stress are dramatically underrated by modern medical science. Overall we have to understand that our understanding of population level genetics and statistics are extremely poor and misleading. We need far more epistemic humility than we have, especially for a claim as strong as HBD.
Unfortunately, it's easy to believe things that confirm your priors.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
7mo ago
If you see a path forward now, your eyes are better than mine.
Thanks! Maybe you should invest in Lasik or something, friend. Alternatively...
And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
As for this part:
Sure. And a couple years ago, the actions individual people chose was to tell lies to foment mass violence nation-wide, then fanned that violence continually and dropped the hammer on anyone who tried to resist. A massive amount of damage was done, and now everything is worse, and none of the people responsible suffered meaningful consequences. They did that because they thought it was in their interest. They'll do it again, because they still think it's in their interest.
I absolutely agree. It was awful, immoral, and absolutely destructive. The recent response to the Covid pandemic and the George Floyd situation were bungled unimaginably bad. Unfortunately for Covid at least, both parties were more or less complicit in fucking things up, at least on the national stage. On the local level conservatives made much better choices.
In my mind the obvious solution is to keep blasting the truth from the rooftops in places like this, and not let the people who pushed for these awful policies and disregarded our liberties get off scott free. It will take some doing and persistence to push through the government propaganda, it always does. But I'm encouraged by the fact that the Covid response has seen things like Musk taking over Twitter, and generally a much larger signal-boost of the wrongs committed.
If all goes well, this blatant corruption and evidence of outright lies by the elites during a time of serious upheaval will serve as a renewed beacon of the importance of free speech. If we do our jobs right in learning from the disaster, we can teach a whole new generation of people to keep the flame of liberty alive, and warn them away from the dangers of authoritarian governments, policies, and ideologies.
Again it won't be easy, but this is the path forward that I see, which it seems like you are too blind to even admit it's a possibility. I'm not saying it's the only path forward, or even the most likely. But for you to effectively say it's impossible is utterly foolish, and as @Amadan says in his other response, this type of rhetoric is exactly what will lead us to unnecessary bloodshed and war.
I like your thoughts elsewhere and you've helped me to become a more moral person with some of your other perspectives, so I hope I can convince you to lay down your sword and work for a peaceful resolution.
Hah, this is so hidebound and backward I can't tell if you're being serious. I could just as easily say "click at the wrong time, you just deleted an hours work!" Get real.
Unfortunately technology doesn't sit stagnant for long, as much as you want it to. Sorry to break it to you friend.
Not sure, but I linked two in-depth reviews from fairly popular writers that gush over it. There are far more people who have used it and find the control scheme incredibly intuitive and easy to pick up. That's with usually 30min - 1 hour demos.
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