Philosophy, Metaphysics & Mysticism Subforum

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Good point!

Smudge,

The other thing I was just thinking about - we might be somewhat limited for how much enthusiasm we'll be able to track in this folder. Truthfully I barely paid attention to this folder unless I had something that I wanted to address regarding WP and kind of like a site IT and troubleshooting folder it might that way for a lot of people.

Not sure how we'd gauge the interest level? I'm sure there are some ways to get a sense of it but I'm not sure strategically what's the most tactful way to go about it. Really I've been hoping that as many of the decision makers on the site could chime in as possible. Between this thread and the one I posted it seems like a lot of moderators feel like a more segregated PPR would be easier to manage so I'm wondering who, with the authority to do so, thinks its an actionable plan and if so what they'd need for it to make broader sense.

techstep,

I honestly think this site could do a bit better overall. With the bugs it carries, it really puts a lot of people off I'm sure, which is an awful shame. More people would be interested in the whole place if it wasn't buggy.

But yeh...I see what you're saying. I think gauging peoples' interest would mean having to make people feel they're able to post in there without being harshly criticized or told point blank, *again*, and very patronizingly, "There's no evidence for this (while you're rolling your eyes wishing them to f*ck off) as BirdInFlight was saying. That, and making the intention of what the forum's about (not to debate whether peoples' experiences are valid or not) very clear.

I think some of the experiences people may have might be so weird they don't want to post about it. I'm not sure what the answer is for this. I mean my experience I posted the other day, of course people aren't going to believe it and think I'm just crazy. I totally get atheism (except the unquestioning part) because the stories you hear fit in peoples' most minds as make-believe, because that's how people are (mostly) brought up and automatically categorize those stories and associations as such. It's too out of touch of their realities to make sense of it at all.

Whereas for me, it seems normal because although I was brought up an atheist, my family has always discussed spiritual encounters, I guess because I was born a year after my granddad died, and it was when all the stuff started in the house. I mean, death can make people turn to religion, and try to see that the dead person is still there, if even in another world.

Going by my the Mary\Isis\Sophia experiences and encounters I've had to date have to say this - the question of whether it's real or not is probably the least interesting or constructive conversation to be had about it.

What I mean by that is this; most of us have a series of very potent internal experiences that may have generated some highly unusual anomalies in life that we can't statistically explain but we're still left on razor's edge where we can say with clarity that something highly unusual happened but it's very difficult to either say exactly what it was at base level or to buy in fully to what we've seen as the underlying actuality. For people who have had enough expriences to close that gap there's no part of their evidence that's transferable, and whatever words they'd use to describe it on one hand won't carry a replica of their experience as it occurred and on the other hand, especially online where no one knows your integrity with any certainty, there's no way for anyone to establish another person's subjective experience and a lot of temptation to take the difference in realities out on the avatar associated with the text (ie. a person they can't even see let alone vet the honesty of).

What I'm truly amazed by, for what we've found out about the human mind, evolution, neurology, etc.., is that we can generate active personas the way we do at all. I'm even more impressed that we can jump over external hurdles and create smoothing gradients in our own software to make up the difference where our lives are externally grinding, and furthermore its even more impressive that something as parsimonious as the human nervous system could cough up anything from NDE's to people having such experiences as lucid dreams, divine encounters, travel on the paths of the Tree of Life, or any of that at all.

Part of why this subject really interests me - I've come to realize just how much of a difference philosophy can make in both the quality of a person's internal life and, if it catches, the ways in which it can improve our culture if people actually apply it. When people talk about the supernatural, ceremonial magick, etc.. the most fascinating thing is that people can give not only such powerful suggestions to get changes in themselves but come up with such a structured set of arguments within those internal suggestions that they can get themselves out of some really tight places in life as well as give themselves the ability to be a lot happier, even with a lot less, just by how they play with their own tuning.

I've been listening to the audio book Gulag Archipelago recently and I can't help but wonder, under the kinds of stress those people were under, who'd be able to hold themselves together through that kind of thing and come out the other side of it with some collection of their sanity. It seems like it takes a lot to go through even moderate setbacks in life and I can't help but take the stand that a person who actively has internal resource that's not just reactionary to the environment but manually and deliberately developed to their best service are the kinds of people that others look at and end up wondering what enables to them to be way out in front of the world around them with respect to integrity.

That's part of why I think philosophy is so important - our integrity, our happiness, our suffering, all of that's really linked to what kind of software we're running in our heads. If that software is really robust we can survive quite a bit with a lot less permanent trauma and scarring. If that software is weak a good wind could shatter us. The philosophers of the past three thousand years, from the Egyptians and Greeks up through those of the 18th and 19th century - a lot of those people saw things that we could barely imagine, outside of perhaps some WP'ers who've lived in war torn environments and had atrocities hit close to home. It was a world under much more wrath of nature that came up with these solutions, and I think we pay dearly if we discard what they have to say about subjective development.

I'd love to have a much deeper and more meaningful dialog with people across WP on things like that, on different ideas that various philosophers had on ontology, civics, sociology, etc.. and in a way it could be like a little bit of social software dev forum . Seeing people talk politics at a higher level would also be great because you'd really have people thinking about things rather than just complaining about em.



The other thing I think people have to realize is that the popular buckets on this are really arbitrary. There's no inherent link for example between the existence if spiritual entities and the existence of a united godhead. If anything, looking at what the world goes through and suffering people have endured in many places, it seems quite difficult to argue for a personal god at all. As above so below could work on a macroorganism where it would be about as aware of terror and anguish on our planet as I am of the torments of a particular community of fungi in my intestines. Calling such a macroorganism God in the sense of omnipotent/omnipresent/omniscient wouldn't really work because it would fail the first and last as well as just being 'really big' rather than universal.

Any which way I think we have enough tricks up our sleeves and available in our brains, whether our consciousness is strictly neurological or whether it's based in an energy that picks up and drops bodies like clothing without losing its posture. It's also just as important to explore either way; for example having a lot of very constructive, nourishing, and strengthening fantasies at deliberate intervals and having good social consequences is way better than us being 'enlightened and free of inaccuracies' (whatever that means in this context...), taking the overdeveloped animals thing too dutifully, and starting to act on the nihilistic impulse at a broader level when there's really no need to.

Would a carefully worded POLL placed in Gen.Aut. section be useful to gauge interest level?

Have a Politics & Religion section where it's made clear that it is "fight club" (like PPR is now).

....and have a Philosophy, Metaphysics & Mysticism Subforum where it is clear that ONLY high level(erudite), supportive, reflective, and respectful discussion is permitted.

It could.

A few concerns though:

One is that if a lot of the moderators have been having trouble with keeping that corner of the forum civil I'm not sure whether this should solely hang on a poll. Although the following question is probably unanswerable I still think its also worth contemplating: if we have a lot of people who've come through and had a particularly intense interest in philosophic discussion and didn't find it - how many of them are still here? We may either prove that enough people are interested, or that most people are indifferent to philosophy, or that the only votes we get are the slice of WP'ers who are in the revolving door between coming and going.

That's part of why at gut level I almost feel like I'd rather just get a good discussion going with WP's top-brass and get consensus to either move forward, do it differently, or do nothing.

Similarly I don't know that we have a litmus test or a % threshold for popular opinion poll results that would make sense as a good rule to approve or disapprove re-establishing a particular folder or creating new ones. If we agreed on what that % looked like - would it be the same as what the poll participants would expect for a fair outcome if, say, 40% said no, 25% said don't know/don't care, 35% said yes, and we decided 30% was enough to go ahead with it? Also an up vote would mean precisely nothing as well if the poll didn't have Alex's weight and credit behind it prior to launch.

well said
i think your concerns are valid

perhaps it would be best to broach the issue with the Mods and AP, and keep it at that level exclusively

WP fails to retain MANY good people b/c of site bugs(esp. CAPTCHAS) AND the adversarial behavior.
Those that ask for acct deletions often cite the above as the reason for their departure.

This site's potential is excellent but the execution is lackluster...despite the best efforts of many damn fine Mods. Many problems are beyond Mod authority anyway.

Something really funny just happened.

Ana posted in PPR about Gnostic Aeons some time last night it looks like. I was in the middle of posting a short reply to her that what she was talking about were archetypal ideas rather than Aeons, I hit send and realized that someone had moved her post about Gnostic Aeons to Random Discussion.

I'm really wondering who did that or why. If they did it because they didn't know what an Aeon was and didn't feel like it was a topic relevant to politics, philosophy, or religion then I'm somewhat worried that they don't understand the purpose of the PPR folder - all kinds of gangly things from the latest gaff by a presidential candidate to the most obscure philosophy or religion are all supposed to dwell under that same roof.

That's another fun one. I have an invisible advertisement blasting my ears about the Trolls movie and I can't find it anywhere on my browser to turn the audio off. If that becomes pervasive to the site it'll mean that listening to music or listening to a Youtube lecture and browsing WP will be mutually exclusive activities.

sheesh!
very annoying

With regards to this problem, you can mute individual tabs in a lot of browsers. Right-click on the tab and see if it offers it.

I was also the one who moved Ana's thread. It seemed at the time to have a very tenuous link to philosophy, but I see why you disagree with the move and you're right, I should have been more cautious.