Antisadian
He sobbed and he sighed and a gurgle he gave, then he plunged himself into the billowy wave, and an echo arose from the suicide's grave: "oh, willow, tit willow, tit willow…”
User ID: 2890
It was quite embarrassing and a part of me hated it. I mean honestly this whole process has been difficult internally, I find materialism and atheism a difficult mindset to shed which is why part of why I write about it on here occasionally.
I commend you on occasionally bringing up this topic because it’s really quite important at the end of the day, and obviously the scientific idea of there being something ‘beyond’ science seems to be such a taboo idea that you can even do race science and get by, but if you posit something like ‘maybe remote viewing is a thing?’ you immediately get anathematized. This is despite the fact that most humans in history have had a deeply-held belief that the material reality we experience is not all-there-is, and many many many people in the past (and today) have had direct experiences not explainable by our current models of empirical reality or even our current ideations of psychological conditioning (e.g. UFO encounters by nuke-launchers).
Also, in my opinion, once you get deeper into the idea of this non-materialized phenomenon seemingly being even intelligent, then the topic of studying this thing and utilizing it seems to be an extremely hard process compared to simply doing repeatable experiments on dumb matter — it’s most like attempting to align an AGI on the first-try without having any test-cases rather than being able to measure the acceleration of a ball dropped from a constant height, for an example that would be appreciated by this community more than others.
I also personally find the arguments for God, or at least a necessitated intelligent prime-mover, to be extremely more powerful than the arguments against such a being’s existence, so I am probably much more open to non-physical phenomena existing, as at least one thing outside of material reality exists in my mind. My own personal experiences seem to corroborate this fact, as I have also had very powerful emotional experiences & physical changes occur due to the fact of my new-found faith and also my Christian conversion from atheism. You’re definitely not alone in this, and all I can say is that you shouldn’t ever think you are.
Antisadian
8mo ago
The materialist conception doesn’t even necessarily prohibit some kind of spiritual existence, a soul of some form, a God, an all-loving, all-knowing being beyond and above us (the simulation hypothesis, which would allow for such a God, can be framed in materialist terms)… It just says that if they’re real they’re going to be systems, they’re going to function in a predictable way, they’re going to be based on laws of the universe whether we understand them yet or not.
I guess it really depends on your definition of ‘material’, because the standard conceptions of these things (like the conception of God’s omnipotence and omniscience) are very much contrary to the idea of material existence in terms of things like, ‘these are actual objects composed of materially smaller parts put together in some larger material space’. If you conceptualize materialism as just, ‘this is a paradigm that says that things will function in a way predictably subject to the axioms of existence at large’ then that’s not really something rejected by even staunch anti-materialist theists, as they see the entirety of the universe (including the things in the universe that aren’t ‘physical’) as predictably and ultimately subordinate to God’s will, and if you have knowledge of God’s will through viewing God’s essence (in terms of the Beatific vision) then you also have total knowledge about the past and future as far as a human could possibly know. In fact, the idea in Catholicism that perfect knowledge of God, who is the embodiment of all possible laws of being as God is Being, in fact makes you God (as that communicates to you the divine essence).
And obviously the classical theistic idea of ‘God’ is also much different from the post-humans attempting to capture us in ancestor simulations. They’re still, to our knowledge, ‘finite’ in terms of causality, space, time, extension, dimension, etc. If not, then they wouldn’t need to ‘simulate’ us to begin with, as there would be no distinction between their knowledge in simulating us or not simulating us, or distinctions in their indexical knowledge from ‘t1 where 1 is the second before the simulation occurs’ and ‘t2 where 2 is the second when the simulation starts’. A truly all-knowing and all-powerful deity wouldn’t be limited by computation (or hypercomputation) and would be more analogous to like, a metaphysical singularity rather than anything else. This is also quite similar to the Buddhist idea of non-duality which is pretty antithetical to materialism, to the point where basic classical laws of logic like the law of excluded middle seem to break down once you try to predicate the non-existence of the ‘self’. If I am mischaracterizing your conceptualization of materialism then I’m sorry, because I’m taking this from a very rudimentary idea of materialism as effectively conceiving reality as just being totally concrete sums of things out together in causally connected ‘space’. The traditional Aristotelian ideas of angels as being just forms beyond space and time and God as being pure actuality, as well as the Dharmic ideals of the ultimate non-existence of selfhood and the univocality of nirvana and samsara. The investments of these religious ideals are much bigger than anything extensions of materialism can supply, even the ‘out-there’ materialism of transhumanists where you can just recreate everyone who ever lived in an ancestor simulation and call that ‘heaven’, even as someone like Thomas Aquinas wouldn’t consider that as the same thing as transcending material reality, causality, and spatiality at all in union with the ultimate metaphysical principle at all.
I think this attitude probably above all proves the basic fact that the Enlightenment effort failed. This failure was despite the fact of the promulgation of the ability to manipulate our environment with its ideals, as in, we as human beings were made one with the environment that we were supposed to study (the ‘phenomenological’ world, as Kant would express) and hence the idea of conscious experience (the ‘noumenon’ representing qualitative experience, the ‘self’) was somehow shifted into the categories of the empirical world; we began to see our conscious-experience as just another ‘thing’ we should study with the mind instead of it being a top-down observer which had to enter into that world of materiality to understand it.
And consequently, as we were skeptical of that empirical, phenomenological world, we were skeptical of our own conceptions of uniqueness—we began to collapse that luster of what experience really meant as a liberated agentic ‘force’ which could impact reality as mere dumb things couldn’t, we made the sharpness of the edges of the conscious mind in comparison to the dullness of the mundane things around us analogous to those mundane things, just with added processes hitherto unknown that were compossible with those mundane things, and were probably just another mundane thing that we hadn’t categorized yet. Hence we stopped thinking of people as having ‘souls’, but just being flesh-automatons piloted by electricity. Lovecraft, or other fictional views of the world in this stead, just espouse the same basic idea of life inherently having no pattern, no uniqueness, that if we were all swept away tomorrow it wouldn’t matter—and yet this was seen as something that should be accepted unflinchingly! As just an extrapolation of the inevitable axiom of the Enlightenment project, to seek truth wherever it was, even as this truth hurt to look at.
And yet that ignores the fact that the methodology of this conclusion might be faulty on its own terms, for if we are to assume human flourishing as related to social norms is also a fact of life, a fact as true as the fact that we have evolved from single-celled organisms billions of years ago, then we aren’t to flinch from that, either. If we are to assume that the idea of the pursuit of truth is worthwhile because it pursues some ‘good’, with this good being expressed in terms of human flourishing (since the idea of ‘there’s no pattern in this world, we are alone’ would be antithetical to the idea of formulating the pursuit of truth in any way beyond a utilitarian mode), then that also would carry for those social norms being good for the same goal. For if we are to abstract truths from their ‘metaphysical’ qualities as the materialist extrapolation of the Enlightenment project says we should do, then there is no difference between these two facts after all, and if one (the pursuit of flourishing) even supersedes the fact of pursuing truth that could diminish the flourishing of the first, then we must necessarily choose the former—since, as said, the only motivation towards pursuing truth whatsoever would be to maximize the pursuit of flourishing to begin with. The latter is embedded in the former, not the other way around.
And yet, again, this is only something brought up if the Enlightenment project’s conclusions are bought on their own terms for the sake of argument. There are reasons to even reject the conclusion that materialism is well-founded, especially from the skepticism that regarded us as believing in materialism in the first place (due to being skepticism of our own skepticism, for instance—a ‘critique of pure reason’, if you will). Not to mention the fact that if the truths of this reality and the evolution of our subsequent conscious minds would be based on the materialistic framework, then accepting the naturalistic model of the world because our conscious minds (operating on a process of materialistic accidents) would similarly be irrational. Our conscious minds in totality, as a thing-in-itself, should be ‘beyond’ the phenomenology expressed and filtered through that consciously-reflected sense experience; to attempt to understand our conscious minds through that world would be an instance of relative self-reference, which could cause loads of paradoxes due to circularity and things like that.
Right, but the ‘UFO phenomenon’ is seen by most Ufologists as mostly pertaining to involvement beyond simple scientific or recreational activities on behalf of the so-called ‘Ufonauts’, or the intelligence behind the phenomenon at large, given the fact of how intricate the deception and psychologically-based operation of this intelligence seems to be. This seems to be indicative of something beyond simple probing for the sake of another intelligence understanding a lesser one (especially since, if these things are actually aliens, and could engineer the space-time metric like no-one’s business, something like nanotechnology or ancestor-like simulations wouldn’t be too far away in the tree of technological development most likely, and having nuts-n’-bolts style data-collection would be too ‘clunky’). Jacques Vallee formulates a handful of arguments against the hypothesis that these are actual interplanetary spacecraft here if you take the data seriously. As a corollary of this, the ‘control system’ that Vallee describes the UFO phenomenon as being (some sort of atemporal ‘higher-dimensional’ memetic phenomenon attempting to manifest its existence to us through manipulation of our mental, spiritual, and physical faculties) also seems to be very hard to distinguish from some sort of intelligence operation done on behalf of the US government, as some of the first abduction experiences also seem to point to some psyops entirely. The issue is that the intelligence community also seems to have some sort of belief in these things (as shown with Grusch et al.) and also seem to consider themselves as ‘superior’ to the rest of the population due to their knowledge of such things ultimately.
So we’ve come to this weird impasse where elements of the intelligence community are attempting to manipulate phenomena like this, while also ostensibly believing in it, to the point where the so-called ‘gatekeepers’ consider themselves incumbent to manipulate the rest of humanity with this given technological advantage for the ‘greater-good’ in a mode of absolute secrecy, which coincidentally is very reminiscent of the top-AI labs and the idea of ‘pivotal acts’. Also, the whole ‘this memetic structure from a higher atemporal dimension is attempting to manifest itself through us without direct causal actions, mentally and physically’ idea is an antecedent to the Landian accelerationist idea of AI & capitalism as a basilisk which has itself been succeeded in this community by e/acc people. So it’s interesting to see how that plays out.
EDIT: some links fixed.
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