Think about this. How is it that there are any non-solipsists at all? Who are these people? What makes them non-solipsistic? Can you answer this one?

As you probably already understand, my view is that everyone is emanating their whole reality. And some realize it and some don’t. I don’t think the idea of one who isn’t emanating their whole reality from their mind is coherent - other than as a position of ignorance - that is to say they are emanating their whole reality and don’t pay too much attention to that. If everything is an emanation from your mind, is your imagination in some sense, then yeah everyone is a solipsist. All possible perspectives are solipsistic. Everyone who doesn’t recognize this is confused or inattentive in my present pov.

What I meant was, a person could consider some things to be not emanated from their own mind (like the minds of the other living beings, for example), and as long as they took responsibility for that belief, and realize they had other choices in how to relate to their experience, they’d still be subjective idealists.

I don’t think there is a clear content of something being ‘out there’ i.e. fixed and true, i.e. ‘my expectations won’t influence my experiences of it’ (nonsense because this itself is actually a confused way of expressing a sort of influence of expectations on the experiences). Something being out there means you’ll structure/narrow your expectations of it based on past experiences and present appearances. You ‘can’t’ use magick in the same sense that you ‘can’t’ use drugs - you’re not supposed to and you internalize that as a fear of insanity on the one hand and a fear of criminality on the other. Or in the same sense that you can’t move a king 3 spaces forward in one move in chess: it’s against the rules and you want to play the game.

It’s basically how othering works. If at first you didn’t realize you disowned something and then suddenly you realized it, you still only own the fact of disowning in a very abstract sense. It doesn’t mean you now attenuated or cancelled all disowning and its implications. To reduce disowning and/or to cancel it, one needs more than just to own the fact of disowning. One needs to produce an intent to reduce it or to cancel it. Imagine you own a pen. Is that by itself what causes writing? No. In addition to owning a pen, you must intend to write with it. Then the writing will appear. Owning is a permission in this context.

Everyone already has all the internal permission to transform their whole reality however they want - in a sense they do this all the time. The thing is that people are committed to and desire to not transform their reality in arbitrary ways. They have a game they’re playing that they want to keep playing.

Then you have to explain what does it mean to be a physicalist. The way you’re talking right now leads me to believe that you’ll end up saying that everyone is basically a solipsist, and they just don’t realize it. Which is something I sometimes say if I am arguing to get someone to unstick from their apprehension toward solipsism. But we need to remember that it’s possible to hold a conviction that one isn’t really a solipsist, and that these convictions have meaning and implications.

Yeah a physicalist is a solipsist that is very committed to and interested in the physicalist game to the point that they are uninterested in considering alternative games and basically never think about them. A solipsistic physicalist is someone who maintains enough distance and detachment from the physicalist game while playing it to sometimes consider alternative games.

I see what you mean. I’ve experienced non-sense-organ-centric ways of sensing, and of course it’s possible to enter such from waking or from dreaming when lucid, but yea, they are really weird states of mind that are hard to describe. In Buddhism I think they would be called the formless jhanas. I do not presently train myself to enter into these experiences at will, but I have experienced them sporadically, when I was training for such long time ago. And sometimes “at will” (immediately) too, but usually (so far) whenever I experienced this weirdness at will I didn’t want to do it again, lol. The more normal way to experience these states would be to concentrate on them and seemingly fail all day long and then when I am exhausted from meditation and nap, then sometimes I will have a dream where the strange thing happens. So even though we wouldn’t refer to this as “at will” it’s obvious volitional, because these episodes during naps aren’t random. Once I abandoned that practice I stopped having such episodes.

This is quite interesting.

So you see how fuzzy it is to even be talking about a hard and certain distinction between “at will” and “not at will?” On some level one can surmise that everything is already “at will” in some sense. And yet we still understand the difference between an experience being as available to one as the snap of one’s fingers, or less available than that, and that difference has meaning too.

Well some things that we want with various intensities stand unopposed and others may stand quite opposed by contradictory desires of various intensities. In fact, those desires and intensities may fluctuate and priorities may shift, sometimes in a cyclical manner of smaller or larger scales of time. Moods are an escape of this.

You might be right. Are you saying one has to be able to let go of this limitation to really let go of materialism? Personally I don’t think so, however, I can also see how if one were to be very comfortable in such states of mind, it might help with other ways of experience because it would probably grant more fearlessness. Then again, the reverse is true too, any fearlessness developed through playing with the sense-based experiences will later translate into fearlessness toward dwelling in formless states. So if there is a relationship, it doesn’t have to be one of obvious cause-effect.

I think I’m wanting to emphasize awareness of these types of states as options because I want to know my options and see what if anything I want to change and how fundamentally.

Not exactly. For example, if I see through walls, I am already violating a conventional notion of sensing. If I can hear music springing from the grass, that’s not any kind of normal sensing either, nor is what most humans would consider “human.” If you see simultaneously from 10 different points in space, that’s not normal either. What I am saying is, even this distinction between sense-organ-based and non- is not a binary. You can begin with small “distortions” (compared to your memory of convention) to sensing and eventually the whole notion of sensing hardly makes any sense at some point, once enough distortions are accumulated or once they are no longer small. So my intuition tells me it’s a continuum and not a binary.

I agree with this 100%. You might say our present experiential model is a form of self-restricted remote sensing and that we are committed to telekinetically moving the body in the shapes of our adjustments of the positions and directions of our remote senses and that we telepathically read other people’s intentions and manifest them in our esp remote sensing fields as bodily movements. I.e. we are already telekinetic and using esp and telepathy, but we maintain highly restricted commitments about how to use those powers.

It’s great to explore sometimes, but I say be careful with the delineations. :) Right now you appear to be under the impression that there is a fundamental and insurmountable difference between the sense-organ-based cognition and “its opposite/compliment.”

I think you recognized something here. After thinking about it I think I have more clearly understood the blurriness although I think there is an opposite side of the continuum from sense organ based modes of cognition, but that such a pov may be tough to talk about in ordinary English (although I’ve got some ideas).

Originally commented by u/AesirAnatman on 2017-01-01 15:07:25 (dbuvbi4)