Accepting reality or having a society without crime?

[Rain]

Hi all,
@Chase
@Teevster
From another thread

The way I see it, a man is most functional when he learns to operate according to what he was designed for by nature. And the most basic principle of evolutionary survival is the instinct to conquer, create, and expand over space and time. When a man accepts this everything that was muddled becomes clear, his mind and body (reason and instinct) come into harmony, and parts of himself he didn't even know existed aid him to achieve his goals. His motivation and resilience is endless, he requires very little psychological infrastructure to support him, and all kinds of opposition fail to stop him (in fact he relishes pitting himself against them to gain his reward).

Does conquer mean a man or goup beating another man to the death or threatening to beat him/beating him into submission to control him, or an army invading another country, because thats what nature intends? Taking advantage of individual/group whos more cowardly/weaker because thats what nature intends? If I'm understanding what you mean, that's not the only way to conquer. Ie compete in a safe society is less bloodbath and more economic, but fighting/invading to the death, or not to death but for control(things like illegal drug trade, organised crime eg car theft robberies, mafia groups saying pay us "fire insurance" or we light a match), is one of the ways you're saying man is designed by nature?
Just on that, would you(or others reading this who might think like this) be fine being controlled, invaded and killed yourself?
Those that respond with "Nah I wouldn't let that happen to me" you're not going to try and guarantee that, are you?

Another quote

whereas when a man follows his father too much, his diligence and discipline is often not matched by an equal drive to win or conquer - he is too much of a rule-follower and too comfortable with the approval of his father to seek out his own kind of satisfaction.

So if we have rules like do not steal or commit murder, other rules like this, and if people obeyed them, you'd prefer people to be rule breakers and cause suffering in the world? Or maybe you don't on a personal level, but you're saying that's what nature is?

Keep in mind folks, that Will didn't create nature.

Here's an idea, if no one did the wrong thing, in the first place, you wouldn't need an army, or police, or jail, or anything like this. You could leave your doors unlocked.
Is there a way to make that a reality? If that was reality, would there be far less suffering in the world? No mafia taking photos of anyone in your family and bringing that photo in as a threat. No cars being stolen, and so on. No violence. None, zero.

Do you just accept that's how things are and.... ignore/blank out any sympathetic or empathetic thoughts to others who are on the receiving end of crime/things like this?
What do y'all think about this?

 

[ulrich]

There are things in this world that you can fix/end… things like hunger, infectious diseases… those are things that can be conquered.
Maybe you truly hate a certain race of people or consider a specific animal a pest… you can conquer them or eradicate them into oblivion.

But human nature cannot be conquered, it can only be managed.

It is a human imperative to desire power and better position than your fellow man.
Societies can do a lot to temper those desires… satisfy your basic and intellectual needs, redirect you to more convenient pursuits, give you acceptable paths of success to your ambition, imprison you if you become to dangerous, neuter you by involving you in fruitless discussion, disenfranchising you by forcing you to live among people who are not your equals, shaming you and your morals… but all this is fleeting and always end up collapsing.

The same way you can’t eliminate poverty or victim’s mentality (some people do choose to be poor or see themselves as victims), you won’t be able to prevent all living men from breaking the rules to try to get an advantage in life.
A society may get very good at it… but there will always be a man who finds the opportunity of breaking rules too easy and convenient to not take it.

That’s why some people avoid taxes, create criminal organizations or start wars… the upside is too big to not break the rules.

In a society you can’t control this forever… you can only manage.

 

[Chase]

Commander Pyxis: "I once heard a song that someday humans will stop fighting, but when will that be?"​

​

Commander Erwin: "Humans will continue to fight one another until the day there's one human or less."​

​

-- Attack on Titan​

The unfortunate (or fortunate) state of the world is that we are not the infinite.

If we were the infinite -- the alpha, the omega, the beginning, the end, God, in other words -- we would not need to compete for anything. We would have everything, instantaneously, without the need to fight, struggle, or compete.

Because the universe is finite, however, we all must struggle and compete against each other, against other organisms, and against time, space, and the laws of the universe itself.

If you want, you can trace the struggle for survival back to that first strand of self-replicating RNA in the primordial soup. When that first one formed, it was all life was, and could freely float around and take whatever amino acids it wanted, incorporate them into itself, and exist. But of course it's unlikely there was just one for long; most likely couldn't replicate, but even before replication, if two motile RNA strands were near the same amino acid, only one of them would be consuming it -- the other one, slower, less flexible, or just less lucky, might even degrade and fall apart due to not being able to reach and incorporate that vital acid before the other got it.

As life proliferated, life came into conflict more and more. Plants competed amongst themselves for resources, evolving to suck up water and nutrients faster and starve their competitors, or strangle them with their roots. Animals evolved to consume plants, eating up their distant cousins that had worked so hard to convert minerals into leaves and stalks, only to be devoured by those that walked about with teeth and claws. Larger, predatory animals then turned on smaller, herbivorous animals, and ate those too.

Within animal species, there was competition for mates, territory, and resources. If you wanted to mate with a female, and another male wanted to mate with that same female, you faced off with teeth or horns until one of you backed down -- or until one of you was killed.

Human civilization is little more than a thin veneer over this brutal nature inherent in existence. We only cooperate during times when abundance is so great, growth so breathless, that there is little need to compete for resources (but such a time never lasts), or during times when we are under such duress that we must work together to survive, or when, by cooperating, we can better compete against others.

The rest of the time, we just flat-out compete.

Imagine an idyllic utopia. Whatever utopia you want to imagine. It's perfect.

Perfect, but realistic. Realistic means it is not infinite. It is not infinite, because the universe is not infinite. This is a resource-constrained universe, where we are bound by hard limits and the laws of physics.

One of the laws of this universe is that life rapidly replicates to consume available resources. Here's one example: I grew up in the suburbs and my mother hung a bird feeder out back. At first we had only a few songbirds come by. But pretty soon we had dozens of songbirds, squirrels, chipmunks, and even rabbits and deer venturing out for the free meals. Foxes started coming by to hunt the other animals. An entire ecosystem developed in our backyard, all because of some birdseed. That birdseed was used to create more animals. Birds that would've starved due to not enough food during winter survived. They laid more eggs. Those baby birds got fed well and survived. The animals achieved a new equilibrium, where the constant addition of birdseed thanks to my mother led to a larger population of animals.

Here's another example: Africa as a continent is pretty bad at feeding itself. At the start of the 20th Century, it had 1/3 of the population of Europe. Europeans and their ilk in the Americas, with all their excess food due to industrialization, felt bad for starving Africans, who often engaged in grisly territorial wars, and decided to start importing massive amounts of food aid into Africa to save the Africans. Africans responded by consuming all the extra food and turning it into many more Africans, creating a population explosion on the African continent that continues today. Despite $50 billion+ of food aid every year, Africans are still starving, and still locked in grisly territorial wars; the result of the food aid has not been a utopia, but rather that there are now just many, many more starving, warring Africans than there were before the food aid started (2x more than all of Europe today, in fact), because that is what life does, first and foremost: it converts additional resources into additional life.

The global human population explosion in general throughout the 20th Century, in fact, was due to the huge amount of new food offered by industrialization. When plenty increased, that plenty was consumed, and turned into much more life.

Typically in utopian fantasies, the author paints some idyllic picture of a place of plenty, but with low populations. That is not how life works though; when there is plenty, life consumes the plenty and converts it into new life, until it reaches an equilibrium. Once that equilibrium is reached, and all the resources are tied up and distributed among various organisms, competition begins, as organisms compete to increase their share of the pie by reducing others'.

So then the utopian says, "Well, we'll make rules against that!" But rules are just something one man creates, that he hopes other men will obey, and others will enforce. You can make your rules; I can break your rules. Rules only work long-term so long as they move with nature; when they run against nature, they are quickly broken. A rule to the tune of "all these resources are off-limits to the use of being used to create more life" is one that will soon be broken, typically by the poorest and most disenfranchised members of society.

So then the utopian says, "Well, there won't be any poor or disenfranchised. Everyone will be equal!" But everyone is NOT equal. We all have different drives and different capabilities. Give everyone exactly equal, and someone who is intelligent and ambitious will start figuring out ways to increase his piece of the pie -- probably by totally innocent means! Perhaps he provides some service that others very much want, and are willing to pay him for. Gradually, as they receive that service and pay for it, their piece of the pie shrinks imperceptibly, and his grows and grows. Other intelligent, ambitious people follow suit. The unintelligent and the unthrifty gradually spend their ways into poverty, then look about angrily at all the wealthy around them and burn with a sense of injustice. Their competitive drives then awaken: they must eat the rich and set things right again!

The utopian says he will abolish money; yet even if you abolish money, and establish some kind of perfect resource redistribution system, you will simply have individuals who learn to compete on some other metric. Birds don't need money to compete for mates; lions don't need possessions to compete for territory; plants don't need social status to compete for water, sunlight, and minerals.

So then the utopian says, "I will introduce genetic controls that ensure that within five generations, all humans born will be identical: of identical appearance, identical intelligence, identical capabilities, and identical minds. Then, at last, we will have true equality, and competition will cease." But even then, with a world of clones, the utopian cannot escape the role that chance plays: people happen into opportunities, or happen into disaster; individuals end up with more.

You could try to engineer humans to lose their competitive drives: slash testosterone and estrogen production, raise dopamine and oxytocin production, and create a race of docile, trusting, smiling humans. But someone would need to manage their evolution -- someone far more ambitious than anyone their own population could produce -- to avoid more competitive individuals emerging through mutation and quickly spreading their genes far and wide. It just takes one competitive male in a sea of docile ones to round up all the females and impregnate thousands of them, leading to a rapid takeover by more competitive genetics again. What's to stop the son of one of the evolutionary managers from being the one who goes around knocking up all the docile cow-like girls? Nothing. Sooner or later, one will do it, then you have to start all over again.

There are only two ways to excise competition from life:

1. Extinguish all life, and somehow prevent new life from arising. The only way to do this would be to destroy the universe. Which you could not do from within the universe, because so long as you are using things from within the universe, you remain bounded to universal laws, and cannot destroy it all. Anything you 'destroy' simply gets converted into something else (matter or energy), and the universe goes on, and eventually after you die and your reign of universal super villainy ends, life will reemerge and begin competing all over again
   
   
2. Or, the second option: ascend to the infinite and become one with God / the alpha and the omega / existence beyond the limitations of the universe, where time, space, and the laws of physics no longer apply

This (#2, anyway) is the objective of religion.

You could also say it is the objective of all living life. Why are movie bad guys always declaring that they are now God? Why do atheist maximalists talk about "becoming God"? Why do people fantasize about having powers that other people don't, up to and including godly powers? All life wants to become so omnipotent, so omniscient, so omnipresent it becomes God... we could say the ultimate aim of life is to become the infinite: to control as many resources as it can, to give itself as many opportunities as it can, and, if there was some way it could, to ultimately consume the entire universe.

(fortunately, those same laws that limit us from creating utopia also limit the reach of anyone trying to "become God", which would likely mean a dystopia for everyone who was not that supremely powerful-yet-still-driven-by-desires being who is more powerful than others but still a far cry from the infinite)

Here's an idea, if no one did the wrong thing, in the first place, you wouldn't need an army, or police, or jail, or anything like this. You could leave your doors unlocked.
Is there a way to make that a reality? If that was reality, would there be far less suffering in the world? No mafia taking photos of anyone in your family and bringing that photo in as a threat. No cars being stolen, and so on. No violence. None, zero.

It is possible -- but only under fleeting conditions.

The U.S. was this way post-WWII. The late 1940s and the 1950s were the U.S.'s golden age, when life was idyllic. Doors were left unlocked and children could play outside unsupervised.

Why was it so?

Post-WWII, the U.S. experienced an unprecedented explosion in national wealth and power as it moved to fill the global economic and power vacuum left by the destruction of Europe. Tremendous amounts of wealth flowed into the U.S.; so much plenty that life could literally not gobble it up fast enough. Women and men married at the youngest ages on record, before or since, and families produced huge baby booms that exploded up the population. Not to mention the fact that many men died during the war, which also meant competition among men was much reduced -- there was a lot more wealth, and many more women, to go around.

There was no need to compete so hard during this period. Abundance was everywhere. You could pick it up off the ground. You didn't need to fight tooth and nail for it. Jobs were easy to come by, paid well, and would never fire you. Nice family homes were extremely affordable. Keeping up with the Joneses was the only real competition you had to engage in -- and this was a fun competition, because both you and the Joneses had so much extra abundance to spend on all those baubles and knickknacks.

Compare the late 1960s and the 1970s to that idyllic time. Life rapidly acclimated to the new abundance, and the competition began. Race riots, student revolts, anti-war protests -- all these were efforts by disenfranchised groups and the young to win more power to their corner and increase their shares of the pie. Why was there a need for women, minorities, and young people to compete with the dominant groups in society for larger pieces of the pie? Because the pie was no longer rapidly expanding, and the boom years when everyone could gobble up as much resources as he wanted were gone. So the country began to factionalize, and groups within the country began to compete to grow their slice of the pie. This has only grown worse over time, as the economy has stagnated, real income growth has fallen, and the U.S. has struggled to maintain its global dominance (the U.S. having reached the point where it had nowhere to go but down).

Earlier periods in the U.S. saw swings between idyllic-ness and less-idyllic-ness. On the frontier were frequent Indian attacks (various parties try to hand wave these away as not having occurred often or often being provoked; all you have to do is read the things written during the settlement of the frontier about Indian encounters and you get a very different picture), not to mention all-male cities that were lawless and extremely dangerous, but then law would be established, people would be spread out with lots of land for their farms and high-trust communities established, and there would be times of abundance as their farms paid off, railways opened, new cities prospered, and for a time things became locally idyllic.

You can have idyllic societies, but only under certain conditions, and thanks to the ever-changing nature of everything within the universe, there is no way to impose those conditions in some sort of static, unchanging society where everyone always follows the rules and conditions never change.

Any attempt to control society in a way aimed at creating a utopia inevitably runs up against the laws of thermodynamics: entropy always builds within any system, no matter how carefully engineered nor how well-maintained that system might be.

Just as all living things die, all buildings crumble, and all stars eventually run out of gas, all human-created systems, too, eventually fail.

The machine always breaks.

Do you just accept that's how things are and.... ignore/blank out any sympathetic or empathetic thoughts to others who are on the receiving end of crime/things like this?
What do y'all think about this?

You can be both sympathetic toward victims of unfortunate circumstances, and at the same time understand that there will always be victims of unfortunate circumstances.

There are things you can do to help other people. You should do them. Doing them does not mean bad things will stop happening. They still will, and always will.

There is a sort of paradox in life, where you realize how things are, but also realize that just because things are that way, and will never stop being that way, does not mean that you should not care things are that way, nor that you should never do anything.

This conversation we are having right now has been had a hundred thousand times before, and will be had a hundred million times after this.

I know that; I know that the hour I spent writing this I could've put into something else, rather than participating in a conversation that cycles on again and again through history; but I still chose to sit down here and have it, because I felt like in this small way, in this singular instance, my thoughts might be useful -- and because I got some enjoyment out of writing a response, as well.

You can know a thing is a way, but still not turn a blind eye to the thing.

Commander Erwin knows that humans will continue to fight each other forever, even as he rides off to fight more humans.

Welcome to samsara; the circular nature of life. If only things could be idyllic forever -- but then it would not be this changing universe!

Chase

 

[Ambiance]

If we were the infinite -- the alpha, the omega, the beginning, the end, God, in other words -- we would not need to compete for anything. We would have everything, instantaneously, without the need to fight, struggle, or compete.

You have hinted about the evolution of your beliefs in other posts; about being raised with religion (Catholicism), finding the evidence unsatisfactory and removing yourself from it, academically exploring all types of belief systems from past to present, and eventually finding a newfound eclectic spirituality. I can tell you've found various Eastern philosophies and spiritualities pretty compelling in particular.

Would you mind sharing what your sense of spirituality entails, and how it has developed over time? I know this isn't a philosophy/science/religion forum, but hearing more about your personal beliefs/purpose would be fascinating to me and plenty of other guys on here.

When you talk about the infinite, the alpha/omega, is this theoretical/metaphysical, or even materialistic (ie Spinoza's God/God defined as existence itself)? Or would you say belief in the supernatural can still be valid despite (from what I can tell) no evidence of it?

2. Or, the second option: ascend to the infinite and become one with God / the alpha and the omega / existence beyond the limitations of the universe, where time, space, and the laws of physics no longer apply

This (#2, anyway) is the objective of religion.

You could also say it is the objective of all living life. Why are movie bad guys always declaring that they are now God? Why do atheist maximalists talk about "becoming God"? Why do people fantasize about having powers that other people don't, up to and including godly powers? All life wants to become so omnipotent, so omniscient, so omnipresent it becomes God... we could say the ultimate aim of life is to become the infinite: to control as many resources as it can, to give itself as many opportunities as it can, and, if there was some way it could, to ultimately consume the entire universe.

(fortunately, those same laws that limit us from creating utopia also limit the reach of anyone trying to "become God", which would likely mean a dystopia for everyone who was not that supremely powerful-yet-still-driven-by-desires being who is more powerful than others but still a far cry from the infinite)

I heavily agree with this.

My ideologies lean Libertarian, but I often fantasize about how much more effective a hyper-powerful, hyper-competent, centralized, enduring, and benevolent autocrat would be compared to entrusting Order to a bunch of flawed patricians and plebeians with middling and ever in flux levels of insight, drive, knowledge, empathy, sense of justice, restraint, etc. Many personal liberties would ironically thrive under this autocrat even better than under an anarchical or "minarchical" governmental structure. If only you could get rid of the risks, that is...

The biggest problem with pure Authoritarianism is that it effectively puts all of its eggs in one basket. In theory, this could give maximal efficiency, but there are many drawbacks to this:

• It demands great attention and energy from the autocrat to manage an increasingly complex societal system
• It requires the autocrat to be highly proficient/wise in all areas he will determine policy on, lest he wreak havoc (ie Donald Trump sabotaging the Western financial empire by pulling out of Syria)
• The autocrat must not only have his subjects' best interests at heart, but must also properly understand what truly is best for his subjects as a whole (even and especially if they don't), and be able to keep them content in both the short and long term as he implements policy that will give it to them (lest they grow dissatisfied and rebel)
• The autocrat must either be entirely protected from all ailments and threats, even death by natural causes, or he must be able to create a worthy successor who will carry out his own near exact function, including being able to mold their own successor (lest a less competent, or malevolent, or inferior autocrat take his place, which invites Entropy and ensures the system's eventual doom)
• The autocratic system's power would need to be universal and completely uniform, lest a foreign system or internal schism challenge it (and even a system constantly running at max efficiency will have good and bad times due to natural chance events/periods of plateaus in development/etc, which could expose it)

Humans as they are now are obviously not capable of making such a system work, and autocracy is thus much maligned for its dangers, but it is my hope we will find ways to use technological advancement to "ascend" to the point we (or someone) are (is) capable. I see two ways this could potentially happen: we as a species merge with AI and become a unified hivemind, or one single AI becomes so advanced that it cannot be challenged by even other AI, and gains absolute hegemony while babysitting humanity (ideally with human desires still prioritized). It would be essential there would be just ONE AI (be it a hivemind of all, or independent supreme AI), otherwise Commander Erwin's words still apply and it would be humans battling with AIs or AIs themselves now battling each other. Unlike biological lifeforms, an individual AI entity could theoretically remain supreme as it could grow and adapt and repair indefinitely.

Even if either path were to happen, they would both still have the threat of the true enemies of life: Entropy and Death. Such a system would need to always be developing if it were to have any shot of surviving in the long, long term (be that from depletion of Earth's resources, or threats from space like giant asteroids, the sun going supernova, alien civilizations, and ultimately the heat death of the universe). It would have to constantly be refining its own rules of conduct as it assesses its own successes and failures. But I actually think a system that is ever assessing and perfecting itself could feasibly counter the natural state of Entropy, and in doing so avoid the "game over" of Death, provided its efficiency levels forever outpace and limit encroaching Entropy. If it got advanced enough, the probability of Entropy or random chance causing problems would approach zero (we probably can't advance infinitely, so the limit wouldn't be negative infinity/eventually chance would bring down the system given infinite time, but then again time itself might not be infinite)

This would be the ultimate "Hero Project" as Ernest Becker would call it. A true denial of death. But then again, even as technologically ascended beings, could we handle the infinite? Would we eventually grow bored with absolute dominance and ability? All I know is I want to find out for myself, rather than be denied by my current biological and logistical limitations, and if it comes to it go out in my own time and own way.

 

[Will_V]

Hi all,
@Chase
@Teevster
From another thread


Does conquer mean a man or goup beating another man to the death or threatening to beat him/beating him into submission to control him, or an army invading another country, because thats what nature intends? Taking advantage of individual/group whos more cowardly/weaker because thats what nature intends? If I'm understanding what you mean, that's not the only way to conquer. Ie compete in a safe society is less bloodbath and more economic, but fighting/invading to the death, or not to death but for control(things like illegal drug trade, organised crime eg car theft robberies, mafia groups saying pay us "fire insurance" or we light a match), is one of the ways you're saying man is designed by nature?
Just on that, would you(or others reading this who might think like this) be fine being controlled, invaded and killed yourself?
Those that respond with "Nah I wouldn't let that happen to me" you're not going to try and guarantee that, are you?

Another quote

So if we have rules like do not steal or commit murder, other rules like this, and if people obeyed them, you'd prefer people to be rule breakers and cause suffering in the world? Or maybe you don't on a personal level, but you're saying that's what nature is?

Keep in mind folks, that Will didn't create nature.

Here's an idea, if no one did the wrong thing, in the first place, you wouldn't need an army, or police, or jail, or anything like this. You could leave your doors unlocked.
Is there a way to make that a reality? If that was reality, would there be far less suffering in the world? No mafia taking photos of anyone in your family and bringing that photo in as a threat. No cars being stolen, and so on. No violence. None, zero.

Do you just accept that's how things are and.... ignore/blank out any sympathetic or empathetic thoughts to others who are on the receiving end of crime/things like this?
What do y'all think about this?

@Chase's fantastic post sums it up pretty well from beginning to end. The main thing I would add onto that is this: if you engineered a 'peaceful' society where everybody behaved perfectly well, I don't think the only danger is from one person finding a way to break out of the mold: I believe that this society would die out of its own accord.

This is because many things that ignorant people clearly differentiate in psychology are actually sides of the same prism. The same force that enables someone to give with one hand enables them to strike with the other. The same force that enables them to protect someone enables them to dominate them. And because of this, the motivations that produce many necessary and desired behaviors often have a subconscious depth that is not entirely of a 'good' nature. And that's the way it must be. The way you see someone speak and behave is simply the result of a series of internal resolutions between conflicting and sometimes quite forceful impulses that the person's inner psyche must manage for the improvement of their situation. They give in to some, and ignore others, but those varied impulses are always pressing forward.

This is why the society would die out, because the elements of the psyche are so closely related and synchronized that even if you could remove one 'undesired' one, it's not clear if it would not destroy the rest, or whether the remainder would be anything like what you expected.

This core 'life force' is discussed in detail in psychoanalysis and philosophy and and especially by Nietzsche, who called it the 'will to power' and believed it was a force innate in even inanimate objects which caused them to want to expand and propagate. This force is the most fundamental element of life at any level, and without it there is absolutely nothing.
...

You might say that you can create a society with the right rules and incentives so that only the best elements of this force are expressed, but look around: everything that you see that reflects harmony and peace and cooperation, is a functional imbalance. The same way that a man and a woman create a wonderful harmony when they both fulfill their different roles, and the man gets joy from penetrating and the woman from receiving, this is because they are fulfilling their roles in the way that nature determined to be best for the continuation of life. Are they 'equal'? In some ways yes, in some ways very much not so. When you see a team of people achieve great things, is it because they are all 'equal'? Not everyone is the leader and gets to decide. So not really. But in other ways they are equal. There is an equilibrium that is reached where both parties accept the terms of the imbalance. And when you force an objective balance, one party becomes anxious and the other resentful.

So when you ask if I was talking about physical conflict or competing peacefully, really it's about both, depending on the situation. The same life force gives power to either of these circumstances. Ideally, you don't want unnecessary conflict and chaos, but you also want to ensure rapid competition and advancement of new prototypes. So nature selects for things that enable people to operate in enough harmony, but also with enough room for powerful individuals to thrive, that the greatest fruits of evolution can be achieved, things that no individual could possibly hope to reach, such as the civilization we have now.

But the duality of people's nature remains, and especially who operate at the highest levels of this peaceful competition are typically people who would have achieved greatness in other kinds of competition as well, and sometimes the other sides of their prisms show through, and society creates all sorts of narratives to explain it away.
...

Keep in mind, human beings are incredibly flexible and adaptable. They can absorb different rules very quickly and conform their behavior around those rules, even so far as to live an entire life of the kind of 'quiet desperation' that Throeau talked about. But the psyche is fully aware of what is happening, and it suffers, under the surface, the enduring pain of not being able to exercise its desire to expand through the universe.

 

[Chase]

@Ambiance,

I’m normally a bit hesitant to talk about this stuff. I have a lot of people who are in the “it’s nothing but random matter!” camp around me, and any admission of interest in any kind of spiritual stuff makes you sound like a kook or a rube to such folks.

But hey, since we’re on this wild topic, why not go totally buck wild? I don’t mind…

You have hinted about the evolution of your beliefs in other posts; about being raised with religion (Catholicism), finding the evidence unsatisfactory and removing yourself from it, academically exploring all types of belief systems from past to present, and eventually finding a newfound eclectic spirituality. I can tell you've found various Eastern philosophies and spiritualities pretty compelling in particular.

Would you mind sharing what your sense of spirituality entails, and how it has developed over time? I know this isn't a philosophy/science/religion forum, but hearing more about your personal beliefs/purpose would be fascinating to me and plenty of other guys on here.

Since you want those details…

I was what you might deem “spirituality curious” back when I wrote the “purpose of life” article:

The Purpose of Life from a Practical Point of View

Note before you starting reading: This article is almost 10,000 words in length, and dives into a lot of material that goes beyond dating, women, seduction, and relationships. So, you may not want to start in on this one until you're in a more reflective mood, or have a good chunk of time to...

www.girlschase.com

After that I went deeper into reading about near-death experiences (NDEs), finding them intriguing. I started wondering if there was a relationship between NDEs and religious portrayals of the afterlife, which led me to Gregory Shushan, an academic with a very deep book comparing five ancient religious afterlife belief systems with the details reported in NDEs.

It was all very interesting to think about, but also a case well, ultimately, whatever exists outside the five senses and the physical universe we just don’t have a way to know. Whatever even exists outside our conception of time and space would simply be unfathomable to us in general, the same way a two-dimensional sprite that lived inside a video game world could not conceive of living in a three dimensional space. So you can guess, or speculate, but never know with certainty.

Then one night I had this dream that I became trapped in a tunnel underground with people pushing from every direction, me getting stifled, helpless, and I woke up in a panic. I can’t remember ever having had a dream like that, and I’m not a guy who gets panic attacks, ever really experiences panic, etc. The very next day I had a long chat with Hector about something, and out of the blue he mentioned a friend had “achieved enlightenment.”

I hear something like that and I feel both skepticism and curiosity. So I asked him all right, how does one achieve enlightenment? How’d that happen? Just a bolt of lightning from the blue, or…?

He said his friend was watching the news, when suddenly he felt a sense of panic. So he went into another room, meditated on it, keeping himself in that state of panic and just staying there, and after some time experienced a kind of ‘explosion’ in his head, all fear of death vanished, and after that he was changed.

I was like, “Huh. That’s a weird coincidence. Well if life has taught me one thing, it’s that i should always pay attention to weird coincidences.”

One week later, I had another panic dream — those are probably the only two I’d had in about 10 years — and woke up and totally focused my mind on the panic. I just kept putting myself mentally into situations where I’d feel panicked: buried alive in a coffin underground; dropped into the middle of the ocean with sharks circling around; etc. For about 20 minutes I just sat there, taking myself through scenarios to keep myself in this state of existential panic. Then, suddenly, BOOM! This electric-feeling mental explosion in my head. I was at total peace. Zero fear of death. Zero fear of anything. Suddenly I felt absolutely confident that the universe is part of some spiritual tapestry. All doubt erased.

The fear of death bit wasn’t completely permanent. Some fear of death returned. But my general fear of death is quite muted compared to before. Certainty about some spiritual fabric greater than the cosmos remains.

I delved into Bhikku Bodhi’s translation of Pali Canon after that. I found Buddha to be an incredible teacher. The way he explains meditation, and pretty much everything, is so simple, clear, and practical it’s striking. So I switched my meditation from the mind-clearing meditation I learned to do when young to one focused on progressing through the jhānas, as Buddha teaches. Like he says, it is quite pleasurable progressing through them. I can reach the second jhāna consistently; reached the third jhāna 7 or 8 times in about five months of steady practice; and reached the fourth jhāna once.

Beyond that, you are supposed to get into the stuff that permanently changes your outlook on life. You let go of a lot of material concerns, etc.

But I also subscribe to destiny. I believe there are things I am here to do. I’m not quite ready to say goodbye to it all and drift off into some monastic life of total tranquil detachment from it all. It is not time for that yet. So I set aside progressing through the jhānas for now, appreciated my lessons from it, and returned to focusing on the material.

When you talk about the infinite, the alpha/omega, is this theoretical/metaphysical, or even materialistic (ie Spinoza's God/God defined as existence itself)?

When you explore NDEs, you discover (as Gregory Shushan so clearly describes) how they contain the same elements everywhere on Earth, but are colored by the culture. So in the modern West, when people have NDEs, they report having traveled through a tunnel, then into light. Some people describe it as getting sucked into a black hole then emerging into light. In the ancient world they talked about walking through a field of darkness until entering into light.

In the West, where people prize freedom, the beings of light invariably present a choice to the person having the NDE of whether to stay in heaven or return to Earth. In the East, where things follow rigid hierarchies, people experiencing NDEs do not get this choice. They have a different experience. For instance, in India, they find themselves in what is basically a reception area, and someone tells them, “We made a mistake. You are the wrong [person with their name]. It was supposed to be a different one. It is not your time,” and then they get sent back. (one thing curious about this though: you can find NDEs of Westerners where the individual decides he or she wants to stay in heaven, but still gets sucked back to life on Earth anyway. So do you really have a choice? Seems like perhaps not…!)

Anyway, there is this universality between NDEs, colored in different cultural shades. I also started to feel like the more I explored religion, the more I could see the same strands connecting every religion. The stuff Buddha talks about is so similar to the stuff Jesus talks about there are people who think Jesus disappeared to the East and studied Buddhism. I don’t think that’s very likely — I think it’s more the fact that religions all hit upon the same underlying themes.

Then you get into Buddhism, and you discover this sort of paradoxical nature of what Buddha is teaching. Zen koans are always these paradoxical things: “What is the sound of one hand clapping”, etc. Things designed to get the mind to stop. But Buddha answers with these paradoxical answers or says that the answer is, basically, unfathomable.

e.g., a student asks when you achieve enlightenment, and are released from the cycle of death and rebirth, what happens? Does your soul simply cease to be? Do you merge with the infinite again? What occurs?

All this has led me to a place where I think all thoughts about the ultimate nature of reality are essentially correct. Is there a God? Yes. Is there no God? Yes. Is the universe totally random? Yes. Is there intention behind it? Yes. Is there a destiny? Yes. Is there no destiny? Yes.

Maybe that sounds like a cheat, but…

Let’s say you have the infinite. Let’s say there’s no universe. There’s just you. You are God. You are everything. But if you are EVERYTHING, you are also NOTHING. There is nothing you could want, because anything you would want, you could have instantly, as much of it as you wanted, to no end. So you do not want anything. So you do not have anything. You exist outside of time and space, with no limitations. Anything you could ever have you would always have, and always have had. Anything you could ever know you would always know, and always have known. But because you are everything, and everywhere, there is nothing to know, and nowhere to be. You exist outside of existence — you both exist and do not exist. We can say that outside existence, then, there is nothing. We could also say there is everything.

Yet, within this infinite sea of everything and nothing, there is this little cordoned off section, that is not really cordoned off from the perspective of the infinite, but is from our perspective, where things are not infinite. Instead, the infinite — either accidentally through random chance somehow, or out of conscious design, or both — has created this thing, “existence”, where there are limitations and rules. The one thing the infinite can NEVER have — lack of omniscience, lack of omnipresence, lack of being infinite.

If you are God, who knows everything and nothing, because there is nothing that is not you, and hence nothing at all to know, the only way to not be ignorant, to “know” things outside yourself, is to create a place where things are able to happen, change, and evolve, and deal with and overcome limitations and rules.

Then you get into even more paradoxical stuff: how does God / the infinite create the universe, when God exists outside of time? There are no beginnings to anything where God is, to the universe from God’s perspective has always existed, and further all points of time within it exist simultaneously. But from our perspective within it, it has a clear beginning, probably a clear end (far off in the future), and every point in time between the two is clearly demarcated.

(and you can say, “Well what if our universe is a simulation?” or “What if our universe is nestled within a white hole within a black hole within another universe?” or “What if our universe is within a multiverse?” or “What if our universe is two branes slapping against each other?” or any of the other “nested universe” theories… but ultimately as you go up the nesting you reach a highest level, beyond which outside it there is necessarily something that exists outside of time and space, that has no beginning and has always existed, and you have reached the infinite)

But that’s where I’m at with things these days, and what I am talking about with those terms you asked about.

One other point is I have noticed there’s a clear trend among people where they become skeptical of religion as they enter their teens and often throw off whatever they were taught as children in their 20s. Probably rightly, if you ask me… organized religion has its good parts, but if you’re a thinking person, you figure out pretty quick a lot of it is basically designed to direct thought, rather than expand it. But then as people enter their 30s they typically either rediscover their original faith or arrive at a new understand of spirituality more fleshed out than their earlier, narrower perspectives.

(if you’ve studied Buddha, you may recall he talks about there being two paths to enlightenment: the hard path, where you eke out one realization about the nature of reality after the other until gradually, after an interminable string of hard-won realizations, you achieve intellectual enlightenment; and the pleasurable way, where you just go through the jhānas until you’re enlightened. Guess which one I’m doing! Looks like I’m in the “grind it out tiny bit by tiny bit” camp…)

Or would you say belief in the supernatural can still be valid despite (from what I can tell) no evidence of it?

Re: belief in the supernatural… well, I don’t know.

I was fascinated by ghost stories as a kid. Even when I was an atheist and did not believe in any kind of God and thought the universe was nothing but random matter, I was still intrigued by ghost reports. Much of the supernatural is explainable by things like sleep paralysis and low frequency waves. But there’s still much to be curious about.

I’ve had a few difficult-to-explain encounters. I saw the family cat four days after we buried her. I did a recording in a soundproofed room in an all-male dorm in school with a deep-voiced buddy and picked up the most stereotypical ghost-sounding voice imaginable, a very clear middle-aged woman’s voice saying “Saaaavvee…” right after me. And I had an apartment for 8 months that you could basically only describe as “extremely malevolent.” I have never experienced anything before or since like I experienced in that place (other people experienced it too, including several who had zero belief in the supernatural but could not explain what went on there).

None of it, I would say, is absolutely positively unexplainable though. The apartment’s the toughest one… that’d be hard explaining everything that went on there, but you could try if you really wanted to. I could probably come up with a list of “Here are all the rational explanations for all this stuff going on” if I cared to.

I had a girlfriend who criticized me for having interest in the supernatural. I think partly because she experienced that apartment phenomenon; she refused to ever talk about it after. Every time she would bring up then start getting dismissive about the supernatural I’d say, “Well, I’m glad you don’t believe in it! So you won’t mind if I take you somewhere reputed to be extremely haunted, and announce to anything that might be there that you don’t believe in them, right?” and she’d freak out.

Ultimately I’m skeptical whether the supernatural will ever be provable (if it, indeed, exists; I lean toward wanting to believe in it, but vacillate on that. Think of that X-Files poster). I tend to think the material universe is logically consistent; e.g., that so long as you stay within the realm of physical matter, you do not need any other force to explain events. Anything that happens (haunting, miracle, revelation, etc.) should be explainable without needing to rely on supernatural forces. Obviously, outside of time and space, once you reach the infinite, that is something altogether separate.

In that sense, I don’t think the supernatural really matters. If you ask me, it’s there for the curious to help lead them deeper into spirituality, or for the gullible to entertain or appease, whichever appeals more to your sensibilities.

I heavily agree with this.

My ideologies lean Libertarian, but I often fantasize about how much more effective a hyper-powerful, hyper-competent, centralized, enduring, and benevolent autocrat would be compared to entrusting Order to a bunch of flawed patricians and plebeians with middling and ever in flux levels of insight, drive, knowledge, empathy, sense of justice, restraint, etc. Many personal liberties would ironically thrive under this autocrat even better than under an anarchical or "minarchical" governmental structure. If only you could get rid of the risks, that is...

The biggest problem with pure Authoritarianism is that it effectively puts all of its eggs in one basket. In theory, this could give maximal efficiency, but there are many drawbacks to this:

• It demands great attention and energy from the autocrat to manage an increasingly complex societal system
• It requires the autocrat to be highly proficient/wise in all areas he will determine policy on, lest he wreak havoc (ie Donald Trump sabotaging the Western financial empire by pulling out of Syria)
• The autocrat must not only have his subjects' best interests at heart, but must also properly understand what truly is best for his subjects as a whole (even and especially if they don't), and be able to keep them content in both the short and long term as he implements policy that will give it to them (lest they grow dissatisfied and rebel)
• The autocrat must either be entirely protected from all ailments and threats, even death by natural causes, or he must be able to create a worthy successor who will carry out his own near exact function, including being able to mold their own successor (lest a less competent, or malevolent, or inferior autocrat take his place, which invites Entropy and ensures the system's eventual doom)
• The autocratic system's power would need to be universal and completely uniform, lest a foreign system or internal schism challenge it (and even a system constantly running at max efficiency will have good and bad times due to natural chance events/periods of plateaus in development/etc, which could expose it)

These are all great reflections.

I’ve reflected a lot on the failings of republics, democracies, autocracies, oligarchies, plutocracies, and so on. Any of these systems can work really well, and any of them can be a disaster.

So far as I can tell, there is just one thing that determines how the nation is going to go, above all: the people. If the people really, really want a certain kind of government, and a certain kind of leadership, they will throw their weight behind whoever is offering it and enough of the elites will sense the shift in tides and get behind that and you get the leadership the people want. If the people are apathetic, then it is basically a free-for-all, and you end up with bad, incompetent, or disinterested leaders, regardless the system.

What autocrat aspires to be a great leader if the people don’t really care? Who goes into government with virtuous intentions in a republic when the mob consistently votes for the lowest common denominator?

Unless the people demand good governance, they get lazy, incompetent, or brutal governance — they basically get whatever governance they deserve.

Humans as they are now are obviously not capable of making such a system work, and autocracy is thus much maligned for its dangers, but it is my hope we will find ways to use technological advancement to "ascend" to the point we (or someone) are (is) capable. I see two ways this could potentially happen: we as a species merge with AI and become a unified hivemind, or one single AI becomes so advanced that it cannot be challenged by even other AI, and gains absolute hegemony while babysitting humanity (ideally with human desires still prioritized). It would be essential there would be just ONE AI (be it a hivemind of all, or independent supreme AI), otherwise Commander Erwin's words still apply and it would be humans battling with AIs or AIs themselves now battling each other. Unlike biological lifeforms, an individual AI entity could theoretically remain supreme as it could grow and adapt and repair indefinitely.

The thing with a hive-mind is you have an array of organisms essentially functioning as one organism. Dissenting thoughts are overridden and silenced by the dominant thoughts. I hear a lot of people complain about speech policing and thought police; in a hive-mind you wouldn’t have to jail people because you would just directly sync their thoughts to the collective and they would say, “Ah yes, I see. Now I have all the experiences and knowledge the hive does, and I now concur.”

It’s debatable whether that’s desirable or not. Also whether it’s avoidable or not. Maybe it isn’t.

It’s interesting to think about galactic civilization with hyper-connected hive-mind technology. If you’re used to being plugged into 250 billion other people on your planet, not to mention a trillion more people a slight response lag away in Dyson spheres and O’Neill cylinders, are you going to want to shoot off in a colony ship to colonize some new star system many light years away, where you will be cut off from the hive back home in Sol? Maybe that’s why the galaxy isn’t already colonized — if information technologies always progress to the point of total neural connectivity, no one growing up as part of the hive will ever be able to imagine splitting off to colonize some other system. There’d be so much quiet (relatively) they might go mad.

Even if either path were to happen, they would both still have the threat of the true enemies of life: Entropy and Death. Such a system would need to always be developing if it were to have any shot of surviving in the long, long term (be that from depletion of Earth's resources, or threats from space like giant asteroids, the sun going supernova, alien civilizations, and ultimately the heat death of the universe). It would have to constantly be refining its own rules of conduct as it assesses its own successes and failures. But I actually think a system that is ever assessing and perfecting itself could feasibly counter the natural state of Entropy, and in doing so avoid the "game over" of Death, provided its efficiency levels forever outpace and limit encroaching Entropy. If it got advanced enough, the probability of Entropy or random chance causing problems would approach zero (we probably can't advance infinitely, so the limit wouldn't be negative infinity/eventually chance would bring down the system given infinite time, but then again time itself might not be infinite)

Not sure if you watch Isaac Arthur’s YouTube channel, Science and Futurism (only YouTube channel I watch), but he talks a lot about these types of civilizations.

Personally, I am skeptical that any entity (biological or synthetic) or system can escape entropy, no matter how well-built, how well-maintained, nor how advanced the technology. I think there’s probably much you can do to extend the lifespans of organisms, robots, buildings, systems, etc. But also that over time they are simply going to accumulate enough damage to the point where repairing them stops being cost effective.

To me, that seems like an inherent feature of the universe, and quite possibly one that is a feature, not a bug: the point of the universe is to be an ever-changing one, and part of that change is to understand and experience breakdown, decay, and death.

It’s nice to think about being immortal, and all the things you could do.

Although even that would run into entropy problems. They find that as people get older, their brains slow down, not due to mental deterioration, but due to mental crowding — they simply have so much information stored it takes longer to find the right information. Older people have some shortcuts they use to still respond faster, but if you had a person who just got older and older and accumulated more and more information, eventually shortcuts wouldn’t be enough. Eventually you’d reach a limit on how much information could be stored — I assume at that point the brain starts overwriting old memories. Imagine what it’d be like to be 500 years old, watching a video of yourself from 300 years ago with your 31st son, but you have no memory of him at all still in your head and it’s this alien feeling watching yourself play with this child you can no longer even remember because all those memories were long since discarded to make room for new ones.

So you could engineer new brains… come up with some Internet backup system that backs up your memories and allows you to access them remotely… it’s cool to consider what future tech might offer.

This would be the ultimate "Hero Project" as Ernest Becker would call it. A true denial of death. But then again, even as technologically ascended beings, could we handle the infinite? Would we eventually grow bored with absolute dominance and ability? All I know is I want to find out for myself, rather than be denied by my current biological and logistical limitations, and if it comes to it go out in my own time and own way.

You know, I’m pretty interested in regenerative medicine. They’ve had some intriguing findings over the past few decades. When I was in full-on materialist mode the plan was to start a regenerative medicine company once I had a few billion or a few deep-pocketed VCs who were fine with letting me retain full control, and delve into some of these areas, figuring it’d take 10-20 years to get caught up with the state of the art, then start producing new innovations. But if you can do life extension, then you’ve got time to work on longer-time-horizon technologies, building your galactic empire, etc.

I’ll still do it if I get the chance. I think it’d be fun to try (well, probably maddening to try… you’d have to learn a completely new field, that for years would almost certainly frustrate all your efforts: “Oh, this looks so easy, I’m surprised no one has tried X,” —> try X and it doesn’t work at all, etc.).

Once you get into spirituality, it loses a fair bit of its urgency though.

That seems like a bad thing if you lack spiritual beliefs. Or a natural thing if you have them.

The one thing that frustrated me when I was fully material was that even if you could attain effective godhood within the universe — total immortality, ability to go wherever you wanted, do anything you wanted — you would still be constrained within the universe. Super Mario can’t exit Super Mario world and join you for drinks of his own accord. Perhaps future technology will allow you to let him do that, if you want to — but the higher dimensional being still must permit this. A god in a video game is still just a god in a video game.

Ultimately, I think it’s a good thing to make peace with death.

I had a relative die (a deeply religious one, at that) who was not prepared for death. She feared it.

I have had others who seemed to have strong religious faith waver on it after the death of loved ones. And watched people who had no religious faith suddenly start talking about religion when faced with death.

I think it must be regarded as another part of life, as a natural step that waits for us all.

Just imagine how static the universe would be if the old did not die to make way for the young.

Millennials and Gen Z complain about Baby Boomers not getting out of the way now. What if Baby Boomers NEVER got out of the way… nor did the Greatest Generation, nor the Silent Generation, nor any of the other prior generations? It’s pretty clear people stop growing as much as they age and become set in their ways. They hold onto power as long as they can, too. It doesn’t seem like immortality would stop this, either.

Purely from a material standpoint, life is about continuous iteration and renewal. We all need to die to make way for the newer iterations, just as they need to die for the iterations that come after.

That’s our part to play in the cycle of life.

I think it’s a good part. You’ve got to be curious about what comes next. And if it’s “nothing”, and you thought it’d be something, the good news there is you never have to find out you were wrong

Chase

 

[Train]

One week later, I had another panic dream — those are probably the only two I’d had in about 10 years — and woke up and totally focused my mind on the panic. I just kept putting myself mentally into situations where I’d feel panicked: buried alive in a coffin underground; dropped into the middle of the ocean with sharks circling around; etc. For about 20 minutes I just sat there, taking myself through scenarios to keep myself in this state of existential panic. Then, suddenly, BOOM! This electric-feeling mental explosion in my head. I was at total peace. Zero fear of death. Zero fear of anything. Suddenly I felt absolutely confident that the universe is part of some spiritual tapestry. All doubt erased.

It's interesting you mention this because I had a similar experience a year or two ago. And I say the following as a guy who is not religious/spiritual (except when on a shaky plane ). I consider myself to be a man of science (which ironically seems like a religion these days but I digress).

One day I was reading about the out-of-this-world experiences people have while on DMT. And how they see "beings" while on these trips.

Later that day, I meditated and had mental visualizations of an fractal/crystallic "world" and beings as well. Zero drugs during this.

Well, at one point during the meditation, I got curious about ego dissolving and then I felt a total peace where I was one with the universe. It wasn't scary at all. It was just a pleasant, bright sensation that felt vast. It felt like no time passed, the singularity just was.

I remember thinking after the fact that it was like Pandora's Box where if there is something greater out there, I don't want to open that can of worms lol. Sometimes I'd actually get into a mini panic thinking about it. But it's curious to think if the panic was interlinked as in your case. I get little shivers thinking about it now haha.

My thought is maybe there is something grander out there. But it's not something that makes sense as we know it. Hence all the subjectivity and inability to measure it.

And also lately I've felt like there is a "hand of destiny" guiding my path as kooky as it sounds. Like I'll want to do certain things but somehow life finds a way to keep me on a certain path. It's a little unnerving to think about.

But I thought it was interesting you had a similar experience although you arrived through the feeling of panic.

 

[Will_V]

Enjoyed reading your post @Chase, hope you don't mind if I intrude with a few comments

Yet, within this infinite sea of everything and nothing, there is this little cordoned off section, that is not really cordoned off from the perspective of the infinite, but is from our perspective, where things are not infinite. Instead, the infinite — either accidentally through random chance somehow, or out of conscious design, or both — has created this thing, “existence”, where there are limitations and rules. The one thing the infinite can NEVER have — lack of omniscience, lack of omnipresence, lack of being infinite.

I've always been fascinated by this concept as a way to explain why God would create humans the way we are. Initially it sounds like a cope, a way to apply value to the lack of permanence that we face. But especially when you have experienced at a personal level the ways that the pressure from the passage of time or the possibility of an unforeseen end can make the experience of life bloom and become very vivid, and the way that a never ending routine of comfort can produce the deepest sense of dissatisfaction and unease and inner emptiness from seemingly nowhere - and make everything feel hollow - it makes you wonder, what would be the alternative? I've come to the conclusion that existence itself is overrated as a concept, what the mind conceives as the value of existence is really a value applied to it within a specific framework, a framework that includes the urgency of achievement in a constrained time frame.

It's funny how the closer you come to reaching the things that you identify with the Self, they start to separate from your identity, as if they were merely modules attached for a specific purpose for which they are no longer necessary.

One other point is I have noticed there’s a clear trend among people where they become skeptical of religion as they enter their teens and often throw off whatever they were taught as children in their 20s. Probably rightly, if you ask me… organized religion has its good parts, but if you’re a thinking person, you figure out pretty quick a lot of it is basically designed to direct thought, rather than expand it. But then as people enter their 30s they typically either rediscover their original faith or arrive at a new understand of spirituality more fleshed out than their earlier, narrower perspectives.

Exactly my experience.

I’ve reflected a lot on the failings of republics, democracies, autocracies, oligarchies, plutocracies, and so on. Any of these systems can work really well, and any of them can be a disaster.

So far as I can tell, there is just one thing that determines how the nation is going to go, above all: the people. If the people really, really want a certain kind of government, and a certain kind of leadership, they will throw their weight behind whoever is offering it and enough of the elites will sense the shift in tides and get behind that and you get the leadership the people want. If the people are apathetic, then it is basically a free-for-all, and you end up with bad, incompetent, or disinterested leaders, regardless the system.

What autocrat aspires to be a great leader if the people don’t really care? Who goes into government with virtuous intentions in a republic when the mob consistently votes for the lowest common denominator?

Unless the people demand good governance, they get lazy, incompetent, or brutal governance — they basically get whatever governance they deserve.

That's a very interesting concept. What do you think makes people want or not want good governance? Is it a function of the governance they had up to that point, or a function of a series of events that the civilization went through by chance that shapes the collective consciousness, or something else?

The thing with a hive-mind is you have an array of organisms essentially functioning as one organism. Dissenting thoughts are overridden and silenced by the dominant thoughts. I hear a lot of people complain about speech policing and thought police; in a hive-mind you wouldn’t have to jail people because you would just directly sync their thoughts to the collective and they would say, “Ah yes, I see. Now I have all the experiences and knowledge the hive does, and I now concur.”

It’s debatable whether that’s desirable or not. Also whether it’s avoidable or not. Maybe it isn’t.

This is my biggest concern for the future, I certainly don't think it's avoidable that we approach at least very close to this, simply because it is the path of efficiency. The same way that humans begin with many neurons that are free to choose their specialization, and over time, the freedom of these neurons to change is reduced as the human as a whole specializes in their specific path, I'm sure the same thing happens to civilizations as a rule with its people.

I don't think in principle this is a bad thing, specialization, death and rebirth is the course of life. But I think we have an opportunity now to almost completely cut off the possibility of rebirth, which of course means the end of the cycle, or at least going back a very, very long way.

It’s interesting to think about galactic civilization with hyper-connected hive-mind technology. If you’re used to being plugged into 250 billion other people on your planet, not to mention a trillion more people a slight response lag away in Dyson spheres and O’Neill cylinders, are you going to want to shoot off in a colony ship to colonize some new star system many light years away, where you will be cut off from the hive back home in Sol? Maybe that’s why the galaxy isn’t already colonized — if information technologies always progress to the point of total neural connectivity, no one growing up as part of the hive will ever be able to imagine splitting off to colonize some other system. There’d be so much quiet (relatively) they might go mad.

Never thought of it that way.

To me, that seems like an inherent feature of the universe, and quite possibly one that is a feature, not a bug: the point of the universe is to be an ever-changing one, and part of that change is to understand and experience breakdown, decay, and death.

It’s nice to think about being immortal, and all the things you could do.

Although even that would run into entropy problems. They find that as people get older, their brains slow down, not due to mental deterioration, but due to mental crowding — they simply have so much information stored it takes longer to find the right information. Older people have some shortcuts they use to still respond faster, but if you had a person who just got older and older and accumulated more and more information, eventually shortcuts wouldn’t be enough. Eventually you’d reach a limit on how much information could be stored — I assume at that point the brain starts overwriting old memories. Imagine what it’d be like to be 500 years old, watching a video of yourself from 300 years ago with your 31st son, but you have no memory of him at all still in your head and it’s this alien feeling watching yourself play with this child you can no longer even remember because all those memories were long since discarded to make room for new ones.

I've started to believe this more and more, for various personal and scientific reasons. The cycle of rebirth is necessary always for the health of the future.

I even think human beings are well equipped psychologically to accept that they must end so that something new can arise, and I've found anecdotally (but many times over) that those most concerned with longevity or excessively focused on health and fighting the passage of time are often harboring a feeling of panic that they have not yet fulfilled their own potential or that they have failed to overcome obstacles they believe they should have overcome - and in many cases, the obstacle and its possibility of being overcome is firmly embedded in the past where it cannot be reached again. And those who don't feel this way often, at a certain stage of life, naturally start to transfer their sense of value to the next generation or to assisting somehow with the growth of whatever is new, rather than themselves.

 

[Kaida]

@Ambiance,

I’m normally a bit hesitant to talk about this stuff. I have a lot of people who are in the “it’s nothing but random matter!” camp around me, and any admission of interest in any kind of spiritual stuff makes you sound like a kook or a rube to such folks.

But hey, since we’re on this wild topic, why not go totally buck wild? I don’t mind…


Since you want those details…

I was what you might deem “spirituality curious” back when I wrote the “purpose of life” article:

The Purpose of Life from a Practical Point of View

Note before you starting reading: This article is almost 10,000 words in length, and dives into a lot of material that goes beyond dating, women, seduction, and relationships. So, you may not want to start in on this one until you're in a more reflective mood, or have a good chunk of time to...

www.girlschase.com

After that I went deeper into reading about near-death experiences (NDEs), finding them intriguing. I started wondering if there was a relationship between NDEs and religious portrayals of the afterlife, which led me to Gregory Shushan, an academic with a very deep book comparing five ancient religious afterlife belief systems with the details reported in NDEs.

It was all very interesting to think about, but also a case well, ultimately, whatever exists outside the five senses and the physical universe we just don’t have a way to know. Whatever even exists outside our conception of time and space would simply be unfathomable to us in general, the same way a two-dimensional sprite that lived inside a video game world could not conceive of living in a three dimensional space. So you can guess, or speculate, but never know with certainty.

Then one night I had this dream that I became trapped in a tunnel underground with people pushing from every direction, me getting stifled, helpless, and I woke up in a panic. I can’t remember ever having had a dream like that, and I’m not a guy who gets panic attacks, ever really experiences panic, etc. The very next day I had a long chat with Hector about something, and out of the blue he mentioned a friend had “achieved enlightenment.”

I hear something like that and I feel both skepticism and curiosity. So I asked him all right, how does one achieve enlightenment? How’d that happen? Just a bolt of lightning from the blue, or…?

He said his friend was watching the news, when suddenly he felt a sense of panic. So he went into another room, meditated on it, keeping himself in that state of panic and just staying there, and after some time experienced a kind of ‘explosion’ in his head, all fear of death vanished, and after that he was changed.

I was like, “Huh. That’s a weird coincidence. Well if life has taught me one thing, it’s that i should always pay attention to weird coincidences.”

One week later, I had another panic dream — those are probably the only two I’d had in about 10 years — and woke up and totally focused my mind on the panic. I just kept putting myself mentally into situations where I’d feel panicked: buried alive in a coffin underground; dropped into the middle of the ocean with sharks circling around; etc. For about 20 minutes I just sat there, taking myself through scenarios to keep myself in this state of existential panic. Then, suddenly, BOOM! This electric-feeling mental explosion in my head. I was at total peace. Zero fear of death. Zero fear of anything. Suddenly I felt absolutely confident that the universe is part of some spiritual tapestry. All doubt erased.

The fear of death bit wasn’t completely permanent. Some fear of death returned. But my general fear of death is quite muted compared to before. Certainty about some spiritual fabric greater than the cosmos remains.

I delved into Bhikku Bodhi’s translation of Pali Canon after that. I found Buddha to be an incredible teacher. The way he explains meditation, and pretty much everything, is so simple, clear, and practical it’s striking. So I switched my meditation from the mind-clearing meditation I learned to do when young to one focused on progressing through the jhānas, as Buddha teaches. Like he says, it is quite pleasurable progressing through them. I can reach the second jhāna consistently; reached the third jhāna 7 or 8 times in about five months of steady practice; and reached the fourth jhāna once.

Beyond that, you are supposed to get into the stuff that permanently changes your outlook on life. You let go of a lot of material concerns, etc.

But I also subscribe to destiny. I believe there are things I am here to do. I’m not quite ready to say goodbye to it all and drift off into some monastic life of total tranquil detachment from it all. It is not time for that yet. So I set aside progressing through the jhānas for now, appreciated my lessons from it, and returned to focusing on the material.


When you explore NDEs, you discover (as Gregory Shushan so clearly describes) how they contain the same elements everywhere on Earth, but are colored by the culture. So in the modern West, when people have NDEs, they report having traveled through a tunnel, then into light. Some people describe it as getting sucked into a black hole then emerging into light. In the ancient world they talked about walking through a field of darkness until entering into light.

In the West, where people prize freedom, the beings of light invariably present a choice to the person having the NDE of whether to stay in heaven or return to Earth. In the East, where things follow rigid hierarchies, people experiencing NDEs do not get this choice. They have a different experience. For instance, in India, they find themselves in what is basically a reception area, and someone tells them, “We made a mistake. You are the wrong [person with their name]. It was supposed to be a different one. It is not your time,” and then they get sent back. (one thing curious about this though: you can find NDEs of Westerners where the individual decides he or she wants to stay in heaven, but still gets sucked back to life on Earth anyway. So do you really have a choice? Seems like perhaps not…!)

Anyway, there is this universality between NDEs, colored in different cultural shades. I also started to feel like the more I explored religion, the more I could see the same strands connecting every religion. The stuff Buddha talks about is so similar to the stuff Jesus talks about there are people who think Jesus disappeared to the East and studied Buddhism. I don’t think that’s very likely — I think it’s more the fact that religions all hit upon the same underlying themes.

Then you get into Buddhism, and you discover this sort of paradoxical nature of what Buddha is teaching. Zen koans are always these paradoxical things: “What is the sound of one hand clapping”, etc. Things designed to get the mind to stop. But Buddha answers with these paradoxical answers or says that the answer is, basically, unfathomable.

e.g., a student asks when you achieve enlightenment, and are released from the cycle of death and rebirth, what happens? Does your soul simply cease to be? Do you merge with the infinite again? What occurs?

All this has led me to a place where I think all thoughts about the ultimate nature of reality are essentially correct. Is there a God? Yes. Is there no God? Yes. Is the universe totally random? Yes. Is there intention behind it? Yes. Is there a destiny? Yes. Is there no destiny? Yes.

Maybe that sounds like a cheat, but…

Let’s say you have the infinite. Let’s say there’s no universe. There’s just you. You are God. You are everything. But if you are EVERYTHING, you are also NOTHING. There is nothing you could want, because anything you would want, you could have instantly, as much of it as you wanted, to no end. So you do not want anything. So you do not have anything. You exist outside of time and space, with no limitations. Anything you could ever have you would always have, and always have had. Anything you could ever know you would always know, and always have known. But because you are everything, and everywhere, there is nothing to know, and nowhere to be. You exist outside of existence — you both exist and do not exist. We can say that outside existence, then, there is nothing. We could also say there is everything.

Yet, within this infinite sea of everything and nothing, there is this little cordoned off section, that is not really cordoned off from the perspective of the infinite, but is from our perspective, where things are not infinite. Instead, the infinite — either accidentally through random chance somehow, or out of conscious design, or both — has created this thing, “existence”, where there are limitations and rules. The one thing the infinite can NEVER have — lack of omniscience, lack of omnipresence, lack of being infinite.

If you are God, who knows everything and nothing, because there is nothing that is not you, and hence nothing at all to know, the only way to not be ignorant, to “know” things outside yourself, is to create a place where things are able to happen, change, and evolve, and deal with and overcome limitations and rules.

Then you get into even more paradoxical stuff: how does God / the infinite create the universe, when God exists outside of time? There are no beginnings to anything where God is, to the universe from God’s perspective has always existed, and further all points of time within it exist simultaneously. But from our perspective within it, it has a clear beginning, probably a clear end (far off in the future), and every point in time between the two is clearly demarcated.

(and you can say, “Well what if our universe is a simulation?” or “What if our universe is nestled within a white hole within a black hole within another universe?” or “What if our universe is within a multiverse?” or “What if our universe is two branes slapping against each other?” or any of the other “nested universe” theories… but ultimately as you go up the nesting you reach a highest level, beyond which outside it there is necessarily something that exists outside of time and space, that has no beginning and has always existed, and you have reached the infinite)

But that’s where I’m at with things these days, and what I am talking about with those terms you asked about.

One other point is I have noticed there’s a clear trend among people where they become skeptical of religion as they enter their teens and often throw off whatever they were taught as children in their 20s. Probably rightly, if you ask me… organized religion has its good parts, but if you’re a thinking person, you figure out pretty quick a lot of it is basically designed to direct thought, rather than expand it. But then as people enter their 30s they typically either rediscover their original faith or arrive at a new understand of spirituality more fleshed out than their earlier, narrower perspectives.

(if you’ve studied Buddha, you may recall he talks about there being two paths to enlightenment: the hard path, where you eke out one realization about the nature of reality after the other until gradually, after an interminable string of hard-won realizations, you achieve intellectual enlightenment; and the pleasurable way, where you just go through the jhānas until you’re enlightened. Guess which one I’m doing! Looks like I’m in the “grind it out tiny bit by tiny bit” camp…)


Re: belief in the supernatural… well, I don’t know.

I was fascinated by ghost stories as a kid. Even when I was an atheist and did not believe in any kind of God and thought the universe was nothing but random matter, I was still intrigued by ghost reports. Much of the supernatural is explainable by things like sleep paralysis and low frequency waves. But there’s still much to be curious about.

I’ve had a few difficult-to-explain encounters. I saw the family cat four days after we buried her. I did a recording in a soundproofed room in an all-male dorm in school with a deep-voiced buddy and picked up the most stereotypical ghost-sounding voice imaginable, a very clear middle-aged woman’s voice saying “Saaaavvee…” right after me. And I had an apartment for 8 months that you could basically only describe as “extremely malevolent.” I have never experienced anything before or since like I experienced in that place (other people experienced it too, including several who had zero belief in the supernatural but could not explain what went on there).

None of it, I would say, is absolutely positively unexplainable though. The apartment’s the toughest one… that’d be hard explaining everything that went on there, but you could try if you really wanted to. I could probably come up with a list of “Here are all the rational explanations for all this stuff going on” if I cared to.

I had a girlfriend who criticized me for having interest in the supernatural. I think partly because she experienced that apartment phenomenon; she refused to ever talk about it after. Every time she would bring up then start getting dismissive about the supernatural I’d say, “Well, I’m glad you don’t believe in it! So you won’t mind if I take you somewhere reputed to be extremely haunted, and announce to anything that might be there that you don’t believe in them, right?” and she’d freak out.

Ultimately I’m skeptical whether the supernatural will ever be provable (if it, indeed, exists; I lean toward wanting to believe in it, but vacillate on that. Think of that X-Files poster). I tend to think the material universe is logically consistent; e.g., that so long as you stay within the realm of physical matter, you do not need any other force to explain events. Anything that happens (haunting, miracle, revelation, etc.) should be explainable without needing to rely on supernatural forces. Obviously, outside of time and space, once you reach the infinite, that is something altogether separate.

In that sense, I don’t think the supernatural really matters. If you ask me, it’s there for the curious to help lead them deeper into spirituality, or for the gullible to entertain or appease, whichever appeals more to your sensibilities.


These are all great reflections.

I’ve reflected a lot on the failings of republics, democracies, autocracies, oligarchies, plutocracies, and so on. Any of these systems can work really well, and any of them can be a disaster.

So far as I can tell, there is just one thing that determines how the nation is going to go, above all: the people. If the people really, really want a certain kind of government, and a certain kind of leadership, they will throw their weight behind whoever is offering it and enough of the elites will sense the shift in tides and get behind that and you get the leadership the people want. If the people are apathetic, then it is basically a free-for-all, and you end up with bad, incompetent, or disinterested leaders, regardless the system.

What autocrat aspires to be a great leader if the people don’t really care? Who goes into government with virtuous intentions in a republic when the mob consistently votes for the lowest common denominator?

Unless the people demand good governance, they get lazy, incompetent, or brutal governance — they basically get whatever governance they deserve.


The thing with a hive-mind is you have an array of organisms essentially functioning as one organism. Dissenting thoughts are overridden and silenced by the dominant thoughts. I hear a lot of people complain about speech policing and thought police; in a hive-mind you wouldn’t have to jail people because you would just directly sync their thoughts to the collective and they would say, “Ah yes, I see. Now I have all the experiences and knowledge the hive does, and I now concur.”

It’s debatable whether that’s desirable or not. Also whether it’s avoidable or not. Maybe it isn’t.

It’s interesting to think about galactic civilization with hyper-connected hive-mind technology. If you’re used to being plugged into 250 billion other people on your planet, not to mention a trillion more people a slight response lag away in Dyson spheres and O’Neill cylinders, are you going to want to shoot off in a colony ship to colonize some new star system many light years away, where you will be cut off from the hive back home in Sol? Maybe that’s why the galaxy isn’t already colonized — if information technologies always progress to the point of total neural connectivity, no one growing up as part of the hive will ever be able to imagine splitting off to colonize some other system. There’d be so much quiet (relatively) they might go mad.


Not sure if you watch Isaac Arthur’s YouTube channel, Science and Futurism (only YouTube channel I watch), but he talks a lot about these types of civilizations.

Personally, I am skeptical that any entity (biological or synthetic) or system can escape entropy, no matter how well-built, how well-maintained, nor how advanced the technology. I think there’s probably much you can do to extend the lifespans of organisms, robots, buildings, systems, etc. But also that over time they are simply going to accumulate enough damage to the point where repairing them stops being cost effective.

To me, that seems like an inherent feature of the universe, and quite possibly one that is a feature, not a bug: the point of the universe is to be an ever-changing one, and part of that change is to understand and experience breakdown, decay, and death.

It’s nice to think about being immortal, and all the things you could do.

Although even that would run into entropy problems. They find that as people get older, their brains slow down, not due to mental deterioration, but due to mental crowding — they simply have so much information stored it takes longer to find the right information. Older people have some shortcuts they use to still respond faster, but if you had a person who just got older and older and accumulated more and more information, eventually shortcuts wouldn’t be enough. Eventually you’d reach a limit on how much information could be stored — I assume at that point the brain starts overwriting old memories. Imagine what it’d be like to be 500 years old, watching a video of yourself from 300 years ago with your 31st son, but you have no memory of him at all still in your head and it’s this alien feeling watching yourself play with this child you can no longer even remember because all those memories were long since discarded to make room for new ones.

So you could engineer new brains… come up with some Internet backup system that backs up your memories and allows you to access them remotely… it’s cool to consider what future tech might offer.


You know, I’m pretty interested in regenerative medicine. They’ve had some intriguing findings over the past few decades. When I was in full-on materialist mode the plan was to start a regenerative medicine company once I had a few billion or a few deep-pocketed VCs who were fine with letting me retain full control, and delve into some of these areas, figuring it’d take 10-20 years to get caught up with the state of the art, then start producing new innovations. But if you can do life extension, then you’ve got time to work on longer-time-horizon technologies, building your galactic empire, etc.

I’ll still do it if I get the chance. I think it’d be fun to try (well, probably maddening to try… you’d have to learn a completely new field, that for years would almost certainly frustrate all your efforts: “Oh, this looks so easy, I’m surprised no one has tried X,” —> try X and it doesn’t work at all, etc.).

Once you get into spirituality, it loses a fair bit of its urgency though.

That seems like a bad thing if you lack spiritual beliefs. Or a natural thing if you have them.

The one thing that frustrated me when I was fully material was that even if you could attain effective godhood within the universe — total immortality, ability to go wherever you wanted, do anything you wanted — you would still be constrained within the universe. Super Mario can’t exit Super Mario world and join you for drinks of his own accord. Perhaps future technology will allow you to let him do that, if you want to — but the higher dimensional being still must permit this. A god in a video game is still just a god in a video game.

Ultimately, I think it’s a good thing to make peace with death.

I had a relative die (a deeply religious one, at that) who was not prepared for death. She feared it.

I have had others who seemed to have strong religious faith waver on it after the death of loved ones. And watched people who had no religious faith suddenly start talking about religion when faced with death.

I think it must be regarded as another part of life, as a natural step that waits for us all.

Just imagine how static the universe would be if the old did not die to make way for the young.

Millennials and Gen Z complain about Baby Boomers not getting out of the way now. What if Baby Boomers NEVER got out of the way… nor did the Greatest Generation, nor the Silent Generation, nor any of the other prior generations? It’s pretty clear people stop growing as much as they age and become set in their ways. They hold onto power as long as they can, too. It doesn’t seem like immortality would stop this, either.

Purely from a material standpoint, life is about continuous iteration and renewal. We all need to die to make way for the newer iterations, just as they need to die for the iterations that come after.

That’s our part to play in the cycle of life.

I think it’s a good part. You’ve got to be curious about what comes next. And if it’s “nothing”, and you thought it’d be something, the good news there is you never have to find out you were wrong

Chase

Wow. This was an extraordinary read.

Ive had lucid dreams before where I know I am dreaming while I’m dreaming. Usually I will be able to do whatever I want in the dream like fly, give myself powers, fuck any girl I want etc.

Sometimes tho, even though everything can be somewhat normal in the dream, once I realize that I am dreaming I suddenly feel a deep sense of panic. I randomly start feeling like I’ll lose all control of the dream and monsters or demons will just start coming out of the walls like a horror movie. I usually wake up once the panic starts.

I wonder what thats about

One week later, I had another panic dream — those are probably the only two I’d had in about 10 years — and woke up and totally focused my mind on the panic. I just kept putting myself mentally into situations where I’d feel panicked: buried alive in a coffin underground; dropped into the middle of the ocean with sharks circling around; etc. For about 20 minutes I just sat there, taking myself through scenarios to keep myself in this state of existential panic. Then, suddenly, BOOM! This electric-feeling mental explosion in my head. I was at total peace. Zero fear of death. Zero fear of anything. Suddenly I felt absolutely confident that the universe is part of some spiritual tapestry. All doubt erased.

The fear of death bit wasn’t completely permanent. Some fear of death returned. But my general fear of death is quite muted compared to before. Certainty about some spiritual fabric greater than the cosmos remains.

Do you think someone could achieve this on their own, or do they have to wait for an “enlightenment opportunity” to present itself?

Also what changes have you seen in yourself since the brain explosion

 

[POB]

About lucid dreams...I think people who have a better grasp of reality will be more sensitive to small shifts in the universe. After all, our senses can take us so far in the grand scheme of things.

Personal example: exactly two months before my father passed away, I started to feel really cold in my sleep. And it all started during my birthday. He was already not feeling ok, and he was not his usual happy self, but he didn't say anything. He just kept to himself. Fast forward 20 days and we had to check him into a hospital. After 40 days he passed away.

It's funny, because this cold feeling steadily growed inside me every time I went to bed. I had the worst vivid nightmares. Three days before he passed, I felt as cold as a human can get (it was summer btw). After that the cold went away and then....peace. Like I never felt before.

He passed in his sleep, and I was sleeping right next to him. Felt sad of course, but took me some time to figure it out. I sensed his time was coming even before I could process it rationaly. The universe sent it's waves, and they brushed on me, gently. I was just not equipped to understand it.