I'm giving up on "witchy" s**t

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I don’t care if altruism is ultimately selfish; we still need it.

The Netflix show about Ram Dass that follows his last days was pretty good.

I'm not giving up cartomancy, but I'm cooling it on other esoteric stuff. I snapped because my mom went off on me about how witchcraft will never cure my diabetes and I just kinda threw away all the junk on my altar out of spite but at least saved my cards that have been bought for me as gifts over the years, in case anybody was wondering.

That's sort of a shakeout and I've been through similar things. You overdo it and something or someone pops your bubble, then you under-do it and life hardship proves that as a tool for calibrating and preserving your internal dials it has some value, and you'll continue to go over/under but to less dramatic degrees until you start closing in on a center point - at least if your life doesn't take some dramatic turn that either forces you significantly more outward or inward.

Often the bubble is popped by ourselves. I think our internal compass tells us we are relying too much on authority figures when we should experience this for ourselves.

I don't believe humans have an "internal compass". If they did they wouldn't be so easily manipulated by propaganda. Oh and baaahhhh

Can you do me a favor - is it possible, when we're chatting, that you can talk to me with the assumption that I can see past my nose? There's lots of 'tech swallows any guru' loaded in that last sentence as well as previous comments, just unpack it in detail and check to see if any of your assumptions are actually correct rather than telling me who I am based on your best guesses.

Like earlier, with what I was chasing after you a bit on - I was talking practical psychology and I couldn't even get a signal that you saw that. So much of what we're doing is trying to maintain homeostatic balance and, when our lives are getting throttled, extra technique (so long as we're on top of it and not letting it run away with us) helps.

I remember I PM'd you on a discussion back in August of last year related to Karl Friston, not an armchair philosopher but one of the top neuroscientists in the field whose been working with others (like Michael Levin) on the through-lines between psychology, biology, and physics. John Vervaeke, who I brought up earlier, is a 4E cognitive scientist. I'm getting the sense that what you're chasing me around over is a ton of completely unchecked assumptions, and when they not only remain unchecked but seem to show zero curiosity as to whether your speculations are accurate it seems like I'm just dealing with snide, and when dealing with snide I've come to understand there's zero pursuit of truth, it's just a power game posing as dialog and so I return snide with snide because I realize 'explaining' is a mismatch to the actual objective of the exchange.

That's why I'd ask you, if you're not just playing games, unpack what you're actually saying rather than quoting my every comment with vague insinuation (the old game of 'give him enough rope to hang himself'), or this strange sort behavior where you (insinuate that) you know way better than people who've been performing actual scientific work on cognition, living systems, etc. and acting as if they're all gurus talking about 100% subjective things that no one has any answers on, that they don't either (because you know this with a strange certainty without ever having read or listened to them), and then heckling my every response to DeathFlowerKing, someone who I've been talking to for a long time about these things as if it's a problem that needs your expert intervention. If you talk to people with an assumption that they're stupid and they're not complete pushovers or wallflowers it's not going to go well.

So I'll leave the ball in your court - you either want to communicate or you don't, and if you don't you're just heckling, and if you're heckling I have an obligation to be snide and rude right back.

The other part - if you're going to say that any physicist, any cognitive scientist, any experimentalist, etc. is offering inferior knowledge to direct experience (not even something to look at to triangulate private experience or consider evaluating for useful concepts) - that's something a crank does, like a naive realist saying that Einstein is pseudoscience because QM and GR doesn't make intuitive sense to them. It's one thing for someone to run around and say 'subconcious is woo because Dan Dennett says so' whereas lots of people would find his illusionism as a bold attempt to delete a paradox that makes him (or Sean Carroll for that matter) uncomfortable. I'm not parroting any dogma but rather checking up on where the work of various scientists triangulate with my own actual / private experience and checking where they're getting increasing attention as having ground-breaking work that's updating how we think about mind, biology, etc. (which they are).

You can either point out specific details of what I'm saying and bring up concrete rebuttals or keep giving responses where, if I unpacked them myself, you could always say "Ah - I never said that! You see - that's your stuff you're projecting on me!". If it's the later that's a one-upmanship game, not a dialog.

It’s almost spring in southern Georgia.

Rake in those peaches!

The humanistic perspective in psychology states all humans have an internal compass. Whether we rely on this compass or defer our judgement to the Kardashians or Donald Trump is another matter of course.

I apologise if that was what you inferred from my posts. I assumed you were only referring to philosophical essays, I did not realise some of the authors you were quoting were neuroscientists/cognitive scientists.

Philosophy is the root of modern psychology but modern thinkers haven't caught up, Relying on philosophical debate is a circular pathway that yields nothing tangible in terms of truth, I tend to prefer thinking like a scientist and apply critical thought that uses evidence based data.

There are some interesting writings on the topic of psychology and the meaning of life (beyond the "witchy" stuff). I was hoping to steer the discussion in that direction.

We never had a chance to clear that up to begin with because the one-liners came out immediately.