So, I’ve been trying to adopt the subjective idealist view, but my materialist mindset is struggling to accept it. I’m very close to fully adopting the idealist part. I can’t see how physicality could ever be fundamental. But the subjective part is a bit harder to accept. All sorts of questions and possibilities come into mind to try to negate the idea that this is not an objective world.
So you’re saying a way of thinking that changes even the very fundamental assumptions you’ve come to fully rely on, assumptions that by now you rely on instinctively, is hard to adopt?
For example, most occultists view their mind as entirely private, unless they make it otherwise. But I don’t see this as being true. I’ve looked deeply into technological progress, and I am very convinced that within a decade or so, we will have brain/mind reading technology that will allow “others” to know what you are thinking of, what you are visualizing, etc. Yes, perhaps through will, you will be able to occlude your thoughts from being viewed, but I’d venture out to say that most occultists will not have the capability to do this.
In the view of subjective idealism your will has the power to shape your experiential reality. So what you’re talking about here is not merely a prediction, but possibly your will. If that’s the case, you may experience something like that, but that wouldn’t prove you were right in some objective sense. It would only be you creating an amenable experiential reality for yourself. If you were using subjective idealism as your understanding, you’d also then realize some very different types of worlds could also be attainable with different kinds of commitments and mind training.
I like privacy. So I will directly break any dream that disrupts that value. In my projected timeline there will not be any tech that can read minds. I’m just not interested. Travel to the stars? Sure. Getting the innards of my mind uncontrollably plastered to some website? No thanks. Even physicalism has gotten so bad that I am now canceling it. Why would I want a really bad feature of physicalism such as mind reading through the brain to be allowed to stay?
But even dreams will be fully recorded, and you and “others” will be able to view them through your computer like a movie.
That won’t happen. It doesn’t have any utility anyway, once you really think about it. Even photographs and videos are crap. If anything, photographs and videos allow people to stay at home more while satisfying their senses with visions of variety as if they’re traveling. My long term plan is to become fully self-powered to the point where I will go and do whatever I want, ignoring all else, even other Gods, never mind people, etc. Like in a lucid dream, I do anything, and recording it is not what I want, but living it all the time is what I want. I don’t want to reminisce. I want to live. Reminiscing is basically death and any tech that encourages and supports reminiscing is a life-denying tech that promotes conservatism and stubborn backward trends. So I am against all that at a very deep level. I’m not so fanatical that I want to tear down every photograph, hell no. But all that sort of tech is super-low value. Totally not worth my time. I don’t dream about it for sure. All this recording tech is not at all in my visions of the future.
If your mind is potentially not solely under your control, how do you guys reconcile subjective idealism with these possibilities?
This is a dumb question. It’s like asking if subjective idealism is potentially wrong, how do you think subjective idealism can be defended? It’s nonsense. If subjective idealism is somehow wrong, it’s just wrong. There is no point in defending it then. Of course it’s not wrong. :) So there is no problem.
There are other future technologies that complicate things, such as, the possibility of “mind uploading” and conscious artificial intelligence. I’m not convinced the former is possible, but the latter probably is.
It’s all nonsense. I don’t worry about it at all. Even if it were possible it would be irrelevant. I mean, it’s possible for me to stick a fork in my thigh. I don’t think about it. It’s not on my mind a lot. It’s irrelevant.
When I think about the future, cognitive upgrades, superintelligent machines, etc, I feel a bit disempowered.
Empower yourself! Stop letting the way things appear govern your life and intent. You know better than that by now. Empower yourself.
Understand this: no one wants you to be empowered. The more power you have, the less others around you will have. No one wants you to be powerful! They won’t help you. No one will help you. If you want empowerment you have to empower yourself. It’s fucking scary to be surrounded by powerful entities. Just the idea of others reading your mind is scary right? You don’t want that. You don’t want other people to become more powerful than you. Flip this around. They don’t want you to be more powerful than them. So that means if you want power you have to seek independence. You cannot wait for people to help you. It won’t happen.
Basically people will help you on the minimum condition that this won’t degrade their own abilities to pursue their visions. Think how scared most people are of everything. They’re scared of diseases, of crime, of poverty, of natural disasters, of political instability, etc. With a frightened chicken mentality that most people have, what sort of help do you think they will render in terms of empowering you? It’s a huge mistake to wait for the frightened chickens to help you get empowered. No way. They will instead create technologies of control and subservience that will keep people under control and suppress them. That’s what fear does. They’ll agree to become suppressed as long as everyone else is also suppressed. That’s how fear works. That’s how people will “help” you. Think carefully.
It seems anything can happen in the “future.” Things that can undermine personal power.
Subjective idealism agrees with the idea that anything can happen in the future, but not with the idea that anything will happen in the future. Will overrides can. Will/Intent > possibilities. Possibilities are infinite but only one specific scenario happens. Which one? The one you intend to happen (consciously or not). So infinite possibilities are not frightening to a subjective idealist who is well practiced. They’re simply the space within which we operate our ships as captains. The ship that you operate is your perspective. Your perspective contains the totality of your present knowledge and experience along with how that relates to other possibilities. Your perspective also contains a direction, a teleological vision you’re moving toward, be it consciously or not. Even something like “more of the same” can also be your teleology.
Instead of worrying what the future may or may not be like, consciously walk toward a future you want to be in.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-10-10 21:26:20 (do5w9aa)
Arguably, there are already many technologies that we should want to remove from our experience. Simpletons have access to guns and nuclear weapons.
Those don’t bother me at all.
So, even in a world full of mind-reading technology, we should, in theory, be able to prevent our minds from being read, while everyone else is getting the contents of their minds exposed by the mind-reading device.
The distinction you’re missing is that short of a nerf gun and a water pistol there is no ostensibly friendly way to get shot from a gun. With mind reading the situation can be different as the act of having your mind read can be advertised as ostensibly a service, and perhaps many idiots will volunteer for that. That’s the problem.
I will not bother to show you “proof” that the technology needed to do this is already in its embryonic stage. But I wouldn’t say it has no utility. Dream recording will be the first step. Eventually, there’ll be devices that give people maximum lucidity in their dreams, and eventually, as these devices connect different minds together, there will be shared dreaming.
All this is perfect nonsense as far as I am concerned. I’ve already experienced shared dreaming and sharing a dream is a matter of will rather than tech. It’s always like that. If you believe that you don’t want it but the tech comes over and takes over anyway, you have a run-away unconscious volition that you’re not getting a handle on. This is similar to having a nightmare, which is also volitional. In other words, just because all experience is volitional it doesn’t mean you won’t ever project some fears for yourself to experience and fuck yourself up with. The only way to really avoid such episodes is to cultivate wisdom and practice using your will consciously all the time, and keep practicing bringing any unconscious tendencies you may have under the light of your own conscious awareness so that you can understand yourself and your process of visioning better.
The only downside is that technology disempowers them by having them think they cannot do such things without technology.
That’s a major downside indeed. There are other downsides. Technology of this kind (as opposed to magick tech) is also a product of collective activity and it tends to be related to exploitation because you have to get it through trade and when you trade you know subconsciously the other parties in any trade are economically hostile to you. This can sometimes be controlled through a public policy focused on sharing and on suppressing the super-rich, but it’s not a given that it just lands like that without effort or will on your part. So you’d have to always fight politically or secretly through magick against the worst excesses of physicalistic tech. That’s a time that could be better spent on something else.
Are you asserting that the mind is fully under your control? I guess this brings up the mind vs awareness issue. If fundamentally, what you are, is Awareness, then the mind is something that can potentially be out of your control.
Why are you on this sub if you aren’t even going to read? I’m not here to argue with you. I don’t find your beliefs interesting and worth arguing against. It’s all dumb and tedious. I expressly pointed out that I will abstain from any polemics here. Our discussion is very close to a polemic right now. I’m just not interested. I’m also not interested in personally dispelling your doubts for you. Although on some level I want to be amenable to all, I don’t want to nanny anyone and I am not in the business of individually helping and/or nurturing anyone.
If you want to know what I believe, read the other content on this sub. If you want me to clarify something that I previously said, fine. If you want to argue with me, then please feel free to go elsewhere because I don’t convert and don’t proselytize and do not engage in polemics. If you don’t agree then you don’t agree and I am fine with it and don’t want to spend time on it. I don’t have the slightest bit of sentimental attachment to anyone here on this sub, not even to my “favorite” people. I’m here to serve a grand cause and not people. Those who share in that cause can benefit. That’s all.
Certainly empowering! This is something I am working on. The reason I am thinking of all these things is because I want to firmly ground myself in the subjective idealist worldview.
You don’t seem to be going about it in a correct way. You need to contemplate more and when you have doubts, then bring your doubt under the light of analytic contemplation and investigate it the way Nagarjuna investigates conventional conceptions in his Mulamadhyamakakarika. Blow through your own doubts with contemplation by your own effort. Extreme logic can dissolve or undermine any offensive conception, and it’s just a question of will. The more you rely on having me dispel your doubts for you the dumber you’ll be.
If I encounter some guy in the future that brings up the possibility of mind reading, conscious machines that are super intelligent, etc, I want to be able to not be shaken by these ideas.
I’m not shaken by them. :) Basically what you want is possible. That’s all I want to say right now. First try to understand the basic definition of subjective idealism. It sounds to me like you’re confused about awareness vs mind. In subjective idealism as I have presented it here such confusion does not exist in the slightest. Plus, you need to have your own contemplation. Not just a little bit, but hours daily for decades. After 10 years there is minor progress. After 20 years there is a second wave of minor progress. That’s roughly the speed at which it developed for me. It might sound “slow” but if you compare this to the way physicalist understanding grows in society, their evolution rate is even slower than that. Scientists take hundreds of years to reach a new insight instead of new one every 10 years. Basically conventional science is much slower because in addition to contemplation which they have to do just like me, they also have to do peer review work and confirmation experiments, which I don’t need to do, because I rely on first principles and never take experience as evidential.
The method I use for developing my own mind is in principle much more agile than the method of science. Of course I could take this process with higher potential and just be really lazy about it and make it even worse than science, hahaha. I don’t do that. But I could. So just because the uppermost potential of subjective idealist style of contemplation is much higher than anything explicitly collaborative it doesn’t mean it must always be like that in practice. In practice the way it works depends on the individual. For some people the progress may be very slow. But there is no shortcut when it comes to learning self-reliance. Especially other-reliance is not a shortcut toward self-reliance! I hope that’s obvious.
It makes me uncomfortable and undermines my power just thinking about it. So even if it may not seem like it, I am seeking power by asking these questions and thinking of these possibilities. By openly discussing such things, It helps dissolve my fear of them.
You don’t get it. In the short term if I gently take your hand and start explaining it will help but you’ll cultivate an idea that wiser parental sort of figures are always “out there” and they’re powerfully shaping your well-being for you. This very premise right there is the source of the technological menace that you fear. In other words, technology is other-power whereas what you want is self-power. But the more you lean on someone like me for easy explanations and avoid your own effort (decades and lifetimes) in contemplation, the more your method resembles the situation of other-power, while your goal is ostensibly self-power. So your method becomes at odds with your goal. Then no matter how well I or anyone else explain anything, that fundamental other-reliance will not be undermined inside your mindstream, and you’ll never stand confidently on your own two, and other-power technology will remain an essential reliance to you then and the very thing you fear will come to pass.
What I am saying is: do not be an engineer of the very thing you don’t want. Be careful.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-10-11 11:21:17 (do71qzk)
So you’re saying a way of thinking that changes even the very fundamental assumptions you’ve come to fully rely on, assumptions that by now you rely on instinctively, is hard to adopt?
In the view of subjective idealism your will has the power to shape your experiential reality. So what you’re talking about here is not merely a prediction, but possibly your will. If that’s the case, you may experience something like that, but that wouldn’t prove you were right in some objective sense. It would only be you creating an amenable experiential reality for yourself. If you were using subjective idealism as your understanding, you’d also then realize some very different types of worlds could also be attainable with different kinds of commitments and mind training.
I like privacy. So I will directly break any dream that disrupts that value. In my projected timeline there will not be any tech that can read minds. I’m just not interested. Travel to the stars? Sure. Getting the innards of my mind uncontrollably plastered to some website? No thanks. Even physicalism has gotten so bad that I am now canceling it. Why would I want a really bad feature of physicalism such as mind reading through the brain to be allowed to stay?
That won’t happen. It doesn’t have any utility anyway, once you really think about it. Even photographs and videos are crap. If anything, photographs and videos allow people to stay at home more while satisfying their senses with visions of variety as if they’re traveling. My long term plan is to become fully self-powered to the point where I will go and do whatever I want, ignoring all else, even other Gods, never mind people, etc. Like in a lucid dream, I do anything, and recording it is not what I want, but living it all the time is what I want. I don’t want to reminisce. I want to live. Reminiscing is basically death and any tech that encourages and supports reminiscing is a life-denying tech that promotes conservatism and stubborn backward trends. So I am against all that at a very deep level. I’m not so fanatical that I want to tear down every photograph, hell no. But all that sort of tech is super-low value. Totally not worth my time. I don’t dream about it for sure. All this recording tech is not at all in my visions of the future.
This is a dumb question. It’s like asking if subjective idealism is potentially wrong, how do you think subjective idealism can be defended? It’s nonsense. If subjective idealism is somehow wrong, it’s just wrong. There is no point in defending it then. Of course it’s not wrong. :) So there is no problem.
It’s all nonsense. I don’t worry about it at all. Even if it were possible it would be irrelevant. I mean, it’s possible for me to stick a fork in my thigh. I don’t think about it. It’s not on my mind a lot. It’s irrelevant.
Empower yourself! Stop letting the way things appear govern your life and intent. You know better than that by now. Empower yourself.
Understand this: no one wants you to be empowered. The more power you have, the less others around you will have. No one wants you to be powerful! They won’t help you. No one will help you. If you want empowerment you have to empower yourself. It’s fucking scary to be surrounded by powerful entities. Just the idea of others reading your mind is scary right? You don’t want that. You don’t want other people to become more powerful than you. Flip this around. They don’t want you to be more powerful than them. So that means if you want power you have to seek independence. You cannot wait for people to help you. It won’t happen.
Basically people will help you on the minimum condition that this won’t degrade their own abilities to pursue their visions. Think how scared most people are of everything. They’re scared of diseases, of crime, of poverty, of natural disasters, of political instability, etc. With a frightened chicken mentality that most people have, what sort of help do you think they will render in terms of empowering you? It’s a huge mistake to wait for the frightened chickens to help you get empowered. No way. They will instead create technologies of control and subservience that will keep people under control and suppress them. That’s what fear does. They’ll agree to become suppressed as long as everyone else is also suppressed. That’s how fear works. That’s how people will “help” you. Think carefully.
Subjective idealism agrees with the idea that anything can happen in the future, but not with the idea that anything will happen in the future. Will overrides can. Will/Intent > possibilities. Possibilities are infinite but only one specific scenario happens. Which one? The one you intend to happen (consciously or not). So infinite possibilities are not frightening to a subjective idealist who is well practiced. They’re simply the space within which we operate our ships as captains. The ship that you operate is your perspective. Your perspective contains the totality of your present knowledge and experience along with how that relates to other possibilities. Your perspective also contains a direction, a teleological vision you’re moving toward, be it consciously or not. Even something like “more of the same” can also be your teleology.
Instead of worrying what the future may or may not be like, consciously walk toward a future you want to be in.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-10-10 21:26:20 (do5w9aa)
[deleted]
Originally commented by u/[deleted] on 2017-10-11 01:18:12 (do64g78)
Those don’t bother me at all.
The distinction you’re missing is that short of a nerf gun and a water pistol there is no ostensibly friendly way to get shot from a gun. With mind reading the situation can be different as the act of having your mind read can be advertised as ostensibly a service, and perhaps many idiots will volunteer for that. That’s the problem.
All this is perfect nonsense as far as I am concerned. I’ve already experienced shared dreaming and sharing a dream is a matter of will rather than tech. It’s always like that. If you believe that you don’t want it but the tech comes over and takes over anyway, you have a run-away unconscious volition that you’re not getting a handle on. This is similar to having a nightmare, which is also volitional. In other words, just because all experience is volitional it doesn’t mean you won’t ever project some fears for yourself to experience and fuck yourself up with. The only way to really avoid such episodes is to cultivate wisdom and practice using your will consciously all the time, and keep practicing bringing any unconscious tendencies you may have under the light of your own conscious awareness so that you can understand yourself and your process of visioning better.
That’s a major downside indeed. There are other downsides. Technology of this kind (as opposed to magick tech) is also a product of collective activity and it tends to be related to exploitation because you have to get it through trade and when you trade you know subconsciously the other parties in any trade are economically hostile to you. This can sometimes be controlled through a public policy focused on sharing and on suppressing the super-rich, but it’s not a given that it just lands like that without effort or will on your part. So you’d have to always fight politically or secretly through magick against the worst excesses of physicalistic tech. That’s a time that could be better spent on something else.
Why are you on this sub if you aren’t even going to read? I’m not here to argue with you. I don’t find your beliefs interesting and worth arguing against. It’s all dumb and tedious. I expressly pointed out that I will abstain from any polemics here. Our discussion is very close to a polemic right now. I’m just not interested. I’m also not interested in personally dispelling your doubts for you. Although on some level I want to be amenable to all, I don’t want to nanny anyone and I am not in the business of individually helping and/or nurturing anyone.
If you want to know what I believe, read the other content on this sub. If you want me to clarify something that I previously said, fine. If you want to argue with me, then please feel free to go elsewhere because I don’t convert and don’t proselytize and do not engage in polemics. If you don’t agree then you don’t agree and I am fine with it and don’t want to spend time on it. I don’t have the slightest bit of sentimental attachment to anyone here on this sub, not even to my “favorite” people. I’m here to serve a grand cause and not people. Those who share in that cause can benefit. That’s all.
You don’t seem to be going about it in a correct way. You need to contemplate more and when you have doubts, then bring your doubt under the light of analytic contemplation and investigate it the way Nagarjuna investigates conventional conceptions in his Mulamadhyamakakarika. Blow through your own doubts with contemplation by your own effort. Extreme logic can dissolve or undermine any offensive conception, and it’s just a question of will. The more you rely on having me dispel your doubts for you the dumber you’ll be.
I’m not shaken by them. :) Basically what you want is possible. That’s all I want to say right now. First try to understand the basic definition of subjective idealism. It sounds to me like you’re confused about awareness vs mind. In subjective idealism as I have presented it here such confusion does not exist in the slightest. Plus, you need to have your own contemplation. Not just a little bit, but hours daily for decades. After 10 years there is minor progress. After 20 years there is a second wave of minor progress. That’s roughly the speed at which it developed for me. It might sound “slow” but if you compare this to the way physicalist understanding grows in society, their evolution rate is even slower than that. Scientists take hundreds of years to reach a new insight instead of new one every 10 years. Basically conventional science is much slower because in addition to contemplation which they have to do just like me, they also have to do peer review work and confirmation experiments, which I don’t need to do, because I rely on first principles and never take experience as evidential.
The method I use for developing my own mind is in principle much more agile than the method of science. Of course I could take this process with higher potential and just be really lazy about it and make it even worse than science, hahaha. I don’t do that. But I could. So just because the uppermost potential of subjective idealist style of contemplation is much higher than anything explicitly collaborative it doesn’t mean it must always be like that in practice. In practice the way it works depends on the individual. For some people the progress may be very slow. But there is no shortcut when it comes to learning self-reliance. Especially other-reliance is not a shortcut toward self-reliance! I hope that’s obvious.
You don’t get it. In the short term if I gently take your hand and start explaining it will help but you’ll cultivate an idea that wiser parental sort of figures are always “out there” and they’re powerfully shaping your well-being for you. This very premise right there is the source of the technological menace that you fear. In other words, technology is other-power whereas what you want is self-power. But the more you lean on someone like me for easy explanations and avoid your own effort (decades and lifetimes) in contemplation, the more your method resembles the situation of other-power, while your goal is ostensibly self-power. So your method becomes at odds with your goal. Then no matter how well I or anyone else explain anything, that fundamental other-reliance will not be undermined inside your mindstream, and you’ll never stand confidently on your own two, and other-power technology will remain an essential reliance to you then and the very thing you fear will come to pass.
What I am saying is: do not be an engineer of the very thing you don’t want. Be careful.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-10-11 11:21:17 (do71qzk)