syncretik

Part 1

At some point I've come to realize that I've been underestimating the role of mental life conventional people call "imagination." From the POV of convention imagination serves as inspiration for art and science, but more often than not imagination is something that is said to take people away from the so-called "reality." Thus the term "imagination" has a lot of pejorative uses from the POV of convention.

From the POV of subjective idealism, imagination is any kind of experience. Why so? Because when no experience can be said to be informative or conclusive, it has to be understood as imaginary. Experiences are merely suggestive because there is always a choice in how to interpret and how to relate to them. This is what allows a peer to perform subjectively strange transformations of experiences. Experience is malleable and so it can be bent, shaped, molded, restructured, orchestrated, charmed, enchanted, cajoled, invited, attracted or repelled, guided, to name only a few possibilities. And experience is malleable precisely because it is merely suggestive and isn't informative.

If a person believes in an objective domain of some sort, then they typically will view some of their experiences as hailing from that domain, and therefore will view such experiences as being informative. For a subjective idealist an objective domain is only at best a play-pretend commitment to an imaginary mental fabrication.

For the purpose of this article I want the reader to be aware that imagination can be extremely varied. It can be any sort of concrete imagery, such as what happens when visualizing a tree along with some scenery. And it can also be supremely abstract, such as what is experienced during abstract thinking. One can imagine different ways of structuring experience, and that's something very abstract.

I find it useful to distinguish subjectively different grades or types of imagination. Ultimately all imaginary activity can be understood to belong to a smooth continuum of imagination, but for the sake of communication I will identify a few types. However any time I talk about the types of imagination the reader should realize that I don't want to imply rigid and always unambiguous distinctions between these types.

I think it's best to start with the most obvious and proceed toward the most subtle.

The most obvious type of imagination is the content of the 5 conventional senses: sight, sound, human body sense (touch, heat/cold, up/down, hunger, thirst, internal pressure, etc.), taste, smell. This content often hovers like a very dynamic cloud right at the center of one's experience, and it tends to be very structured, patterned and cyclical for a typical reader whom I imagine is reading this. And the reader maybe imagines someone must have written this post. This sort of imagination could be called central or centered potential. It's that which has been most emphasized in the mind.

Next is the imaginary near potential. So for example, if you see an electronic screen in front of you right now, it's very easy to imagine the same screen being slightly to the left of where it is now. Notice, I am not necessarily talking about visualizing yet. Visualization is a kind of imagination too, but imagination is not limited to only visualization. For the purpose of this article being able to conceive of a possibility is also a kind of imagination. So it's easy to imagine the screen being in a slightly different position. It's also easy to imagine some of the words in this post being slightly different while retaining the same meaning and so on. Most conventional possibilities may belong here. Very well practiced magickal transformations belong here. So for example, if you're a practiced lucid dreamer, then the possibility of a lucid dream will be in the near potential. Thus you can imagine yourself having a lucid dream and this falls firmly with the range of expected and reliable possibilities.

Next is the imaginary medium potential. This is something that you believe is hard, but possible. So maybe you can imagine your body lifting a very heavy weight that is somewhat heavier than the heaviest you remember yourself lifting before. In terms of convention, you might imagine a type of device that could conceivably be engineered within say 20 years of research and development. As far as magickal transformations go, think of some that you think you could achieve in this lifetime, but haven't yet. Or think of those transformations that don't work very reliably.

Next is the imaginary far potential. Far potential is everything that's pretty much subjectively ludicrous, but still imaginable. So for example, let's say I imagine my body going through a wall during the so-called "waking" state. (My body goes through my wall.) I can imagine that. I can imagine myself creating a universe or twisting space and time. Presently it doesn't feel like such things are in the cards, so to speak, but because I can conceive of them they are contained in my imaginary far potential.

Next is the infinite region of imagination that is imaginable only in principle, but is presently unimaginable. This is a very important type of imagination. If anyone is interested in mastery of imagination, then it's crucial to recognize that imagination is not limited to only that which you can presently imagine.

Originally posted by u/mindseal on 2016-05-15 15:30:31

Part 1

I want to present some ideas I’ve been having. I’m sure some of you will see holes in my il/logic or errors in my understanding, so I’m open to critique. I also apologize if I’m simply repeating ideas in other posts in this sub that I have not yet read. Also, fair warning, a lot of Tibetan philosophy is wrapped up in this post.

These ideas are around how it is both possible and profound to use a framework of animism within an overall framework of subjective idealism.

Animism can embody a physicalist mindset or can fall on the side of idealism. I would say that animist frameworks would most often fall in the middle with some form of objective idealism—a philosophy that asserts that common-sense physical matter actually exists and that mind/spirit/consciousness inhabits or interplays with this matter. A mind/spirit may exist as some sort of ideal state of the matter itself. It could be perceived as something like the forms of Plato’s allegory of the cave or as a perfected archetype of its manifest self–one that holds the true mind of that individual. On the slightly more physicalist side, you have panpsychism, and on the slightly more idealist side, pantheism, both of which can fall, in a general way, under the umbrella of animism, though animism does usually account for greater individuation of being than those do.

I’m relatively new to subjective idealism in a western sense. Solipsism seems a popular topic on this sub, as it seems to be a very powerful form of subjective idealism and perhaps its most extreme expression. Don’t get me wrong, solipsism interests me, and dabbling in it certainly has revealed it to be powerful, but it also feels lacking to me, like it’s missing something important, and I have felt drawn toward other frameworks within the overall framework of subjective idealism.

This may due to having been deeply involved in the Bön tradition for the last five years or so. Bön, I’ll argue, practices what could be considered a hybrid of subjective idealism and animism.

In general, Buddhism (Bön included in this usage) is considered to espouse its own form of subjective idealism. (See the Wikepedia page of Idealism, where it differentiates between the Pantheism/Panentheism/Objective Idealism of the Hindus and the Subjective Idealism of the Buddhists.)

Tibetan Buddhism is a culturally-specific expression of vajrayana/tantric buddhism, with much of the culture, and spiritual practices originally based on the indigenous Old Bön animist paradigm. While this has carried through into Tibetan Buddhism (brought to Tibet from India), it perhaps carried through even more strongly into the Yungdrung Bön (brought to Tibet from Zhangzhung), but both of these, at their core, hold subjective idealist paradigms.

To illustrate this greater level of animist qualities, my teacher, a Bön monk, often tells stories of how when someone in Tibet in real physical need, be it health problems, mental problems, spirit problems, or similar, the Tibetan Buddhists would often send that person to the Bön yogi as a last resort (something they would never do if the issue related to buddhist doctrine or attaining enlightenment). Apparently, the Bön are particularly respected for their ability to manipulate reality in order to heal/exorcise/etc.

Bön has three forms of practice, Sutra, Tantra and Dzogchen. Sutra (which has the closest to a physicalist view, but is still idealist), is where one works toward enlightenment gradually and which, while being the most scriptural/philosophical/vow-oriented, also deals with the reality of spirits. For example, the famous Lu Bum text (a sacred text on the philosophies and rites for dealing with naga spirits), falls into the category of Sutra.

But within Tantra and Dzogchen, when understood correctly, there is a much stronger non-dual, subjective-idealist perspective. In tantra, spirits are now only seen as ‘poisonous’ aspects of the practitioner’s mind, while simultaneously understanding the emptiness of any inherent self. The deities that the practitioner transforms into simply constitute a magical paradigm shift. It is an overlaying the illusion of existence with a constructed illusion of perfected wisdom, compassion, power, and peaceful or wrathful energy -- depending on the deity. The texts are all clear that these deities are not inherently existent (because nothing is).

In the view (which can be different than the actual practice) of Dzogchen (a subdivision of tantra), “spirits,” like all of existence, are simply ephemeral displays of the mind, there one second and gone the next. In the true dzogchen state, there is neither self nor other, physical nor spiritual, mind nor matter. All is a perfected awareness of ultimate emptiness and clear light, and its spontaneous apparitions that are constantly on display.

Tantra and Dzogchen can be compared in some ways to active and passive subjective idealism. While one is manifesting effortlessly but interacts with that manifestation and transforms it with her Will, the other also manifests “reality” effortlessly, but within a state of realization that there is nothing that needs to be changed within that apparitional display.

However, because Dzogchen is considered the highest view of Bön, the Sutra and Tantra practices/texts are both colored by this ultimate understanding. Conversely, even within the context of tantra and dzogchen practice, preliminary rites related to appeasing natural wild spirits are performed. Within these contexts, the practitioner must hold multiple views within their mind at once. On one level—one that has a noticeable effect in the conventional world—spirits are “real” (as much as anything can be), while simultaneously within the realization that the spirits, the performance of the rite, and the practitioners themselves are all ephemeral displays of the natural state of mind. While holding seeming paradoxical understandings of reality simultaneously, a few things happen: the rites have the power to effect conventional reality while simultaneously advancing the awakening process in the practitioner. A middle way is achieved.

Furthermore, when one has a high enough realization/lucidity within the dream of subjective idealism, one can completely become the dream—they are completely transformed into the prayer or ritual that is unfolding within the dream. This adds an incredible layer of power to a conventional animist perspective, let alone the true or awakened understanding of its underlying reality.

This is the type of power you get what when you cross an animistic culture (Old Bön) with subjective-idealist ones (Vajrayana Buddhism and Yungdrung Bön).

I know this was long, but it’s easy for me to use Bön philosophies as a jumping off point for what I want to talk about, which is a generic inter-framework of Weirdway Animism…

I once read a comment from u/Nefandi that he did not like the Six Yogas of Naropa because they talked too much of the body’s central channel as if it were a real thing, and it talked about the subjective visions of old yogis as if they were real. These are texts that fall within a weirdway-animist framework. The animist portion is simply the tool for advancing the ultimate stance of subjective idealism, while simultaneously creating change within conventional reality.

The thing is, real Tibetan Bön and Buddhist yogis, the actual enlightened ones, understand that these visions/energies/energy channels/spirits are only “real” within the context of that particular tantric practice. Like any framework within an ultimate framework of subjective idealism, they are a tool—perhaps one of our most ancient ones to us as “humans.” They are a way to shift our mind. And these forms, such as energy channels within the body, or mountain spirits that become happier upon receiving offerings, or prayer flags that spread their blessings over the valley, are forms of animism that have WORKED for a large number of people for millennia. Using them within a context of subjective idealism adds power to BOTH the reality of the animist spirits and to the realization that this is a dream and that “you” are in control, should you choose to be.

Originally posted by u/nuadu on 2019-02-09 04:05:54

Part 1

For the purpose of this post I am defining enlightenment as a kind of practico-theoretical dream wisdom in line with what we're discussing here on this sub.

First, substance. One way to define substance is to say it is that which allows observation from multiple perspectives. And the corollary to this is that if we say things lack substance, we are saying things appear as they appear to a single perspective, yours, and whatever other perspective observes, is not the same thing at all. Or in effect, you're not observing things! You are observing only the emanational consequences of your own commitment. Because a different perspective will involve a different commitment (the total state of one's volition, conscious and unconscious regions thereof), they observe something almost entirely unique.

So when I see a chair, I am looking at a consequence of my own commitment rather than some external object. Therefore when someone else observes a chair what actually happens is that I observe both the chair and the someone else, and I myself grant that the someone else has a valid narrative input on the chair. But all this is 100% internal to my point of view. If I were to grant true being to external observers, I would no longer have the authority to take their narratives as informative, because I would then not be able to tie up all the loose ends myself. Ironic.

Now what about perspectives themselves? Can these be said to have substance? Again, how can one's perspective be observed externally? If you realize that you're always observing consequences of your own commitment, then you know you're not observing something called "Nefandi's perspective." My perspective is my way of relating all things, but that's only knowable to me. To see something called "Nefandi" from the outside you have to have your own way of relating things where Nefandi is but one tiny element of a bigger network, so the Nefandi you know is not whatsoever the Nefandi that I know. The Nefandi I know is my way of relating all things. It is my subjectivity itself in its generality and specificity. But the Nefandi you know is just some sensory phenomenon, and nothing more. Those are two very different "things."

That's the background. It's the plate.

Now the fried potatoes that go on that plate.

Your own enlightenment is partway realization and partway practical perfection of that same realization as it occurs inside your own perspective. This by its very nature will make things better for you. You will become less dependent on society and on circumstances as a result. You will become less influenced by praise and blame. You will become less controllable, which is good for you. And how this feels on the inside you can only know once you get "there." In fact no one can even know if you got "there" or not, it's something only you know (or decide).

But looooong before you reach a decent level of enlightenment you are guaranteed to fantasize about enlightenment as a remote possibility. When you fantasize about enlightenment as a remote possibility you imagine other people "out there" are enlightened. That's the sensory symbolic representation of your own future enlightenment. But this imagination by necessity is based on a gross misunderstanding of enlightenment! You're imagining all this while in the throws of gross ignorance. Thus all the so-called "enlightened people" are nothing but hopes of a feverishly ignorant mind. And those hopes are just wrong in so many ways, but you won't know how or why until you're a long way into the process yourself, and then you'll start to realize how stupid you were for thinking Buddha or Zhuangzi or anyone else (I do mean anyone) were even remotely enlightened. Such suggestive sensory phenomena accompanied by narratives are nothing but the products of your own pre-enlightened (read: largely ignorant) perspective. These fragments can never be enlightened (nor can they be ignorant or unenlightened, lol, they're just not anything specific at all, but they're helpless victims of whatever dark pre-weird dream you're having).

Put another way, your own enlightenment is your own idealization of the best way of being. Whereas other people's enlightenment is your own idealization of the best possible way you can be treated by an (believed to be) external being. These can almost never be the same thing.

So for example, if I am always insecure, the best thing I can imagine from an ordinary point of view is to be surrounded by people who constantly boost my confidence and put winds in my sails. So I then might imagine how people who do this flawlessly are enlightened. Why? Because that's what a perfect servant would be. An externally enlightened person is a perfect servant of myself. They boost my confidence when I am insecure. They chastise me when I get reckless thus saving me from accidents. They feed me when I am hungry, even selflessly sacrificing their bodies to feed me. They present their wisdom in the form of entertaining and easily digestible tales. They teach me how I can become stronger in a step by step manner tailored to my needs. These folks take the time to familiarize themselves with the peculiarities of my unique ignorance so that they can speak to me in a way that will connect with me. So that's the ideal of an external enlightenment.

External enlightenment is a servant of all your flaws. You're insecure, so external enlightenment is there to dote on you. You're becoming reckless and mindless and external enlightenment is there to put the breaks on you so you don't have to do so yourself. You're bored, and external enlightenment is there to entertain you all the while also giving you spiritual calories that are good for you. Basically the idea of external enlightenment is someone who is totally your bitch. They exist totally for you. They have no self interest because it's a full time job to serve your interest.

But what about internal enlightenment? Does anyone really dream of becoming a slave? Think about it. Do you want to become more free or more bound? Do you want to have more obligations or fewer? Do you want more options in your life or fewer options? Do you want a greater scope for your volition or a narrower scope?

Also consider this. If everyone reached perfection in terms of an external enlightenment ideal, who would be the beneficiary? The whole point of external enlightenment is that you serve those who are less enlightened than you. But if everyone is equally 'external-ideal' enlightened, whom do they serve? They're like slaves without a master. They fall by the wayside. The ideal of external enlightenment is basically a dead end. The ideal of external enlightenment requires ignorant and spiritually inadequate people to be valid. A bottle cap requires some bottle to be a cap of. Without the bottles bottle caps are just piss poor tiny tea cups or something. Probably just landfill.

Internal enlightenment has no such flaws. Once you become internally enlightened you become liberated in every sense of the word. You no longer depend on any specific scenario to be useful. You can create and abolish any scenarios. You can be useful to yourself and to others and even to other internally enlightened people (enlightened according to an internal ideal), and if there are no people at all, you can still be useful to yourself. You know how to keep yourself happy. It's an endlessly resourceful and endlessly rich state of being. It leads toward infinity. You're nobody's and nothing's slave. This is something very scary to normal people. Think about it...

Originally posted by u/mindseal on 2016-05-02 01:12:09

Part 1

Background Ideas

First, all of these modes of reality construction are contrasted in terms of how you relate your perspective to other perspectives. This is the essential differentiating idea. So, what is a perspective? At root, a perspective is a set of memories, beliefs, expectations, experiences, etc. which is contrasted with other sets of memories, beliefs, expectations, experiences, etc. (other perspectives). A perspective is a shape that intent can take. Your intent can take infinite shapes, so there are infinite perspectives available to you in the realm of potentiality. Whatever shape your intent presently takes is your actual, or manifest, perspective, as opposed to all the potential, or unmanifest, perspectives. (Don't take the distinction between actual and potential 100% literally here. The two blur into each other)

Objects and appearances

Second, let's look at what our idea of an 'object' is. An object is different from an object-appearance. The object-appearance is the immediate phenomenal aspect of an object. For a tree, the object-appearance is the visual appearances of the treebark and the leaves, the tactile appearances of the roughness of bark and smoothness of leaves, the fragrence of the flowers, etc. This is the object-appearance of a tree. Now what is our idea of the tree itself apart from these immediate appearances? We think the tree as a history as part of the world. And a future. We think the tree-appearance will transform and change in a coherent way according to the laws of nature which we think govern the transformation of tree-appearances. Our expectation that the tree consists of certain other tree-appearances if we touch it or look at it from a different spatial position than present. All of this can be summarized by saying that we have beliefs about how tree-appearances manifest and transform in our experience and world. The 'object' that is the tree is your memories, beliefs, expectations, narratives, etc. about this tree-appearance beyond it's immediate phenomenal character. The 'object' that is a tree is your idea of the tree. So, we have objects, and object-appearances (also, don't take the distinction between objects and object-appearences 100% literally. However it is very useful at this level of contemplation, imo).

Bodies and perspectives

Third, most objects that appear to us are conceptualized as in some way being dead. That is, they are not sentient – they are rigid material mechanisms, or rigid energetic flows, guided by some dead, fixed principles of motion and transformation. However, some objects are associated with perspectives. They are objects associated with life and sentience. We call these objects bodies. What are bodies and how do they work? How do we associate perspectives with bodies?

First, we need to differentiate three things here: body-appearances, bodies, and perspectives. Body-appearances and bodies are respectively a form of object-appearances and objects. The body-appearance of my friend is the way his body and face look, the way his voice sounds, or the way his body feels if touched. The body of my friend is my conception of that appearance associated with a 3D spatial object that I believe can be viewed from all sides, can move and transform according to certain physical rules, etc. The perspective is the state of mind I think of as governing the motion and changes of the body. This is in contrast to that which I conceptualize as governing the motion of dead objects: the laws of nature.

Just as the laws of nature are something I conceptualize as governing objects (which are ideas I use to give meaning to object-appearances), so too are other-perspectives something I conceptualize as governing bodies (which are ideas I use to give meaning to body-appearances). When I conceptualize an other-perspective, I can only imagine it as a perspective I could have. I cannot imagine a perspective from an outside POV. That's impossible (which is why we call perspectives subjective).

Observation v. Magick

Now, in general there are two opposing ways to approach apparent objects in the world. Either you watch your unconscious habitual manifestations of object-appearances and learn your unconscious ways of modeling objects, and you strengthen and reify those models (this is what implicitly happens when people assume objects are self-existent and external), or you exercise conscious magical transformative power over your idea of the object and the object appearance, to adjust your models of how objects and appearances unfold and manifest.

Of course, this applies to objects like trees. When we assume the world is self-existing, i.e. when we want to understand our own habitual models of manifestation without destroying them, then we observe the world. By doing so we learn what patterns of manifestation are normal. As we develop an understanding of our own intentions and make them conscious, we can learn to use those understandings to interact with the world consciously and meaningfully. This is how we can come to learn how trees, or metals function in the world. We don't tamper with those manifestations consciously (for the most part anyway), and instead learn to understand them. Similarly, you can learn to make your intentions of how trees function conscious and familiar to you and then transform those intentions consciously. This transformation is called magick. Magick, or direct willful transformation of your intentions rather than the strict observation of them, is the way you control your body.

However, this also applies to the perspectives of others. When we assume other perspectives are self-existing, i.e. when we want to understand our own habitually manifested models of other-perspectives, then we observe the bodies of others. By doing so, we learn what sorts of intentions these other-perspectives consist of. We can only do this if we have a system of translating the actions of bodies into understandable intentions. But, the details of how that functions, and how from that language develops, are for another post. Anyway, as we develop an understanding of our own intentionally othered-perspectives and make them conscious, we can learn to use those understandings to interact with others consciously and meaningfully. This is how we can come to learn about the perspectives of others in the world. We don't tamper with those manifested perspectives consciously (for the most part anyway), and instead learn to understand them. Similarly to with objects, you can learn to make your intentionally othered perspectives conscious and familiar to you and then transform those perspectives consciously. This transformation is also called magick (specifically telepathic influence magick, and is often looked down on by humans)...

Originally posted by u/AesirAnatman on 2016-05-04 13:01:33

Part 1

Physicalism is the philosophical perspective that everything which exists is either physical or reducible to the physical. The physicalist therefore naturally contends that the “ontological primitives”, or fundamental constituents of all of reality, are a handful of subatomic particles. The physicalist’s worldview, when boiled down to its most straightforward form, is that every phenomenon in nature can be, and has been, constructed from the dynamics of these particles and the peculiar, quantum laws which they obey. While physicalism is a fashionable and popular philosophical position today, it is not free of critique. The most notorious and difficult of these critiques of the physicalist’s model is the famous “hard problem of consciousness”. The consciousness problem goes as follows: these subatomic, quantum primitives are apparently not conscious and the emergence of consciousness from an interplay of inert, non-conscious “stuff” is inexplicable. Physicalists have had a hard time reconciling this, and have largely ignored the problem and continued to reduce consciousness to the physical.

The most popular form of physicalism, for example, is of a reductionist variety: reducing the experiential nature of the world to the functions of the physical brain. Reducing experience to the functioning of an organ, adding this intermediary between the experienced world and the experiencer, may seem natural and intuitive to those familiar with neuroscience, but is actually rather problematic. Granting that it would be possible for conscious experience to emerge from the purely non-conscious matter of the brain (which remains inexplicable) the worldview that results from this understanding is bizarrely self-defeating. There is almost no difference, in this brain-consciousness model of physicalism, between dreams, hallucinations, and waking life. The latter is apparently the result of electromagnetic stimulation arriving to your brain from an external world (although we never have direct access to this world) whereas the former two are a sort of masturbatory self-stimulation of the brain without this external input. In the case of all three, our experience of the world is, in fact, an experience of our brains and only our brains – and never an experience of the world itself. In other words, at best, we can experience an imperfect copy of reality, filtered by a lens which cuts out more than it allows through. We are sitting in the electro-chemical movie theater of our skulls and played a film which, apparently, gives us a glimpse into an inaccessible world beyond the theater.

What reason do we have to believe that the film is providing us with a comprehensive worldview? Or even a particularly accurate one? Or, given the theory of evolution, one which is not merely adapted to our particular biological needs but genuinely representative of objective reality? We have none. The brain-physicalist’s world beyond the theater of our skulls is odorless, tasteless, and colorless, mathematical and electromagnetic, lacking nearly all of the traits we associate with the world that we experience. The physicalist here has stretched to create, in essence, two separate realities: the one which corresponds to all of our experiences, and the one which, despite its inaccessibility to us, is “out there”, underlying the reality we experience despite being derived and understood entirely through the lens of the film. And, of course, given our experience with dreams and hallucinations, can we ever know that the waking life we experience is not merely some Matrix-esque simulation? To test a copy, one needs access to the original, and we have no such access and are, in fact, forever shut off from it. The internal reality of our experiences, inescapable and imperfect, is the only source of information we have about the inaccessible external reality, and is the source of all of our theories about the external reality’s existence at all. In other words, if brain-physicalism is correct, it casts doubt on itself; it is metaphysics deduced exclusively through a kaleidoscope.

Those physicalists who avoid this approach may, and sometimes do, go so far as to simply avoid the issue by denying the existence of consciousness at all. Galen Strawson describes this denial as, “the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought, not just the whole history of philosophy.” Strawson’s approach is one of the relatively few alternatives to reduction or denial and his theory claims to circumvent the problem of consciousness’ emergence while nevertheless maintaining a variant of physicalism. He does this by defending a philosophy called panpsychism, which argues that all matter is conscious, or “experiential”, although the intensity or quality of that experientiality will correspond with the complexity and arrangement of the matter. It borders on a modern retelling of animism, but it does resolve the issue of the emergence of consciousness: it can now be deduced from its constituent physical components as all physical matter is simultaneously experiential. The panpsychist wishes to note that emergence, in this sense, is no longer exceptional. One example might be the existence of the property of liquidity, which emerges only when a sufficient number of hydrogen and oxygen atoms are arranged just so. In this case, none of the individual atoms can be said to possess the property of liquidity, and yet in sufficient combination, this property seems to arrive from an ontological nowhere. In the case of liquidity, or countless others, however, we do not find this apparent emergence to be philosophically unsupportable. We can understand a higher-level property such as liquidity as being ultimately deducible from the lower-level properties of the constituent substances. In other words, we can conceive of a computer program which could simulate liquidity given nothing but a full knowledge of the laws of physics and the nature of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. We can conceive of some property of “proto-liquidity” possessed by the atoms, some logical attribute which allows liquidity to explicably emerge. Just so, argues Strawson, with consciousness.

The question becomes, however, can we really conceive of subatomic particles possessing a “proto-consciousness”? Is it equally conceivable to imagine the emergence of conscious experience (e.g. red-ness or sweet-ness) from any properties of inert, physical material no matter how dynamic and complex? We have not the slightest reason to think that the inanimate physical particles of a rock or a table each possess an individual potential for consciousness, and that further each group or division of such particles possess a collective potential for consciousness. With no clear delineation, are we left to believe that at some very basic level, the constituents of self-awareness reside in rocks and tables? The merit of panpsychism may be merely that it at least allows for physicalism to work, but even there, it is only semantically a physicalist philosophy at all. Panpsychism is a capitulation of physicalism rather than its preservation, as the panpsychist by definition defers that consciousness is foundational.

If we are not to accept brain-consciousness, consciousness denial, or panpsychism, where do we turn? Can physicalism be preserved at all? A final nail in the coffin may well be the problem of Boltzmann Brains. Even if physicalism is true, despite our inability to identify a consistent explanation of our observable reality in physicalist terms, physicalism itself predicts its own utter unlikelihood. Physics predicts that it is far more parsimonious, more likely, more Occam-friendly, and least extravagant to assume that only a free-floating brain exists and nothing else. In other words, because brains can produce waking-quality experience during dreaming, which apparently doesn't require external-to-brain matter, it makes sense that for a statistical distribution of possibilities of matter arrangements, for every brain-in-addition-to-a-universe matter arrangement there must be countless brain-in-a-thermodynamic-soup arrangements according to nothing more than the foundational laws of thermodynamics. While the laws of physics, of course, do not explicitly rule out the possibility of a universe in which both brains and external physical objects exist, they propose that it is exceedingly unlikely that your specific brain is one that's surrounded by matter which exists in parallel to all of the subjective experiences you’re having (as opposed to the vastly more likely possibility of your brain hanging in the void of space, essentially dreaming).

So, rather than specifically strive to preserve physicalism, let’s instead get to the heart of the matter. We must, as in any good philosophy, first do away with our presumptions and cut straight to the empirical reality of what we actually know. Immediately, the critical philosopher will discover that it is impossible to possess any information about reality which is not experiential and perspectival. This is the antithesis of the consciousness denial argument, the Cartesian fundamental. We know, first and primarily, that our consciousness exists. From here, rather than searching for an explanation for the emergence of consciousness in the world, we are, in fact, searching for an explanation of the world within our consciousness, for our conscious experience and perspective is already a given – and it is the only given, the only absolute certainty. Therefore before we attempt to define the world that exists outside, or external, to our conscious experience, we have to first establish that such a world exists at all...

Originally posted by u/Utthana on 2016-05-10 03:37:30

There is this popular conception that floats around, and I think it's often an incredibly damaging one. The idea is that whatever you are like on the inside somehow spreads out and infects the outside or it somehow gets mirrored in the external world.

So for example, if you're generous, that somehow infects other people with generosity and forces them to be generous to you back. Or if you're constantly fair when dealing with the others it in some way obliges others to be fair when dealing with you.

I don't think this is true in most cases. Why not? Because we generally emanate beings through the veil of othering. We generally will want those beings to appear truly unique and independent and therefore quite intentionally and on a very profoundly deep level we would not want those beings to be mere mirrors of our own conventional being. So we get a situation where not everyone is going to be generous even if you are. Not everyone is going to be fair even if you are.

The only way to make sure that people appear in some specific configuration, and mirroring is a very specific configuration, is to intend it directly from a very deep place in your being, without any hidden counter-desires messing things up (so this state of mind has to be very internally coherent). If you intend people to be mirrors and not to be free agents, then and only then will people begin being mirrors. I claim most people will not enjoy this style of emanation. Generally people want surprises, diversity and some degree of discord to make for a believable appearance of unique individuals as opposed to clones. Who wants to live in a sea of clones who copy every one of your "good" habits? On the other hand, we also wouldn't want to live in an environment where we're constantly brutalized no matter what.

This idea that what appears externally is a copy of what appears internally is potentially dangerous. In most cases it is a gross simplification, it's a distorted caricature of a greater truth. If people don't understand how gnarly and profound their own intentionality is and begin expecting a simplistic system of clones and mirrors when on some subconscious level they vehemently don't want to live among clones and mirrors, there is going to be a lot of unhappiness.

What's going to happen is, you'll be nice and you'll expect reciprocation. Any time someone fails to reciprocate you'll either get angry like "damn I was nice, now it's your turn, what the fuck?" Or you'll get depressed like "woa, I was nice and why isn't it working? Why isn't my niceness being cloned how I expect it to be? Why isn't everyone just a copy of my personality here? Damn it... nothing works.... it's all screwed." Or you'll begin to get very demanding and pushy with yourself like this "OK so I was nice but that wasn't cloned as I expected. So it means I must have been a dick on some subtle level. Damn, I suck. Why can't I be really nice??!!! If I am really nice, for sure that's going to become cloned all over the world. For sure. I need to try harder. I am not doing well enough. If I were, it would be visible externally." Etc.

So there are all these myriad of ways to get wrapped up and to hurt yourself and others because you misunderstand something very secret and deep inside yourself: you generally do NOT want to live in a sea of clones and do NOT want to live in a world of mere mirrors. You intend a complex world and you get a complex world. You're a Buddha but not everyone around you is a Buddha. You're nice but not everyone around you is nice. Etc. It's a complex world because generally in most cases that's what you'd want: a complex, gnarly, strange, twisted, surprising, living breathing world where you can get lost, where you don't know everything in advance, etc.

I say "generally" because for a trained and very wise practitioner it will indeed be possible to emanate a sea of clones and mirrors and anything else! You could emanate some truly bizarre and common-logic-defying worlds. You could emanate a deliberately simple and deliberately symmetrical world. You could emanate a world with 3 body types and 2 personality types. So the possibilities are there, but you have to check yourself: is this where your heart is at? Do you expect a gnarly complex unpredictable world? Do you expect beings to look and smell and walk and talk like they have free will? Don't fool yourself no matter what it is. Whatever your deepest intent is, you have to meet that intent face to face if you want to achieve mastery of emanation.

A typical person who hangs around here is not interested in a world of clones and doesn't have the intentionality or the wisdom to pull something like that off. No you cannot just pretend everyone is a Buddha and force everyone to become a Buddha that way. That's not going to work assuming on a much deeper and more hidden level you want to encounter genuinely unique and surprising beings who seem to have their own quirks and interests in mind, sometimes even conflicting interests to your own.

Generally when we want to get lost in a world, we want that world to seem complex and not too predictable. If everything was just a mirror image of your conventional human personality it would be a small and boring world and we wouldn't even find it believable or worth getting lost in. There might be some exceptions to this, but I think in most cases what I say holds. I know for sure I don't want people to just be clones of me. That doesn't mean I don't want people to reciprocate. That's not the point. I want to feel like reciprocation is an option and not a given. If I feel it's not automatic, that creates the illusion of free will in the othered space, which generally speaking is very desirable.

Plus, if I am only doing something nice because I expect it to bounce back on me, I am not really being nice, am I? I am being self-serving. And if I want to be self-serving, I have more honest and more direct ways of serving my interests as an aspirant. I don't have to get other people involved in my self-serving trickiness by demanding that the other people invariably bounce everything back to me like helpless clones.

The world is a reflection of one's fullest and deepest commitment but one's fullest commitment is generally very complex. If you don't respect that complexity you're going to get snagged. I described how one can get snagged above, but there are many ways to get snagged besides the ones I described. Only people who properly understand the true and full depth of their own intentionality are free from being snagged by their own tacit secret commitments.

In the context of subjective idealism all the various concrete experiences are unable to supply any kind of final meaning. Such experiences are hypothetical or suggestive, which means they fail to bring any kind of conclusiveness or finality to the narrative. And yet the narrative must flow subjectively. So what is it then that dots all the i's in one's own subjective sphere? That would be one's own volition.

And generally there are two major ways to structure one's volition, and we could provisionally call them 'source' and 'destination.' A 'source' is a set of some hypothetical principles one takes as one's axioms in life. This doesn't have to be conscious or enunciated to be effective. In fact some of the strongest possible axioms might function tacitly. Take for example an axiom that no two objects may occupy the same space. Did your mother and father ever have to teach you that? Axioms such as these are necessary volitional preconditions before one can attempt to have an experience of the conventional world as we now know it. If I thought that everything I know about in this room is also in the same exact space rather than scattered through space, I'd have a drastically different perception of phenomenal reality.

And a 'destination' is one's ideal vision, the best possible scenario, toward which one strives. As with the source this can fall at any point within the conscious-unconscious continuum. This too affects the state of one's volition. One's destination may take one's source axioms as acceptable or necessary, or it may seek to modify the source axioms. So a physicalist who strives to overcome one's own physicalism is in that latter category. In this case one's source axioms are that of physicalism, but one's ideal life lies beyond the confines of physicalism.

If one doesn't have a specific destination then one is an aimless drifter for whom the only constant are the voluntarily axiomatic principles of the source.

Generally the sorts of beings we meet have mentalities that overlap our own. So we know that generally the mentalities of others resemble our own because of the fact that when they express something through speech or the movements of the body, we can relate. We understand what they want to tell us. We can usually easily imagine ourselves saying similar things or expressing similar bodily forms. That's because we share all the same core assumptions, for the most part. There are some exceptions here, such as for example a profoundly autistic person who may live in a parallel dimension without the slightest way to communicate. In some cases I am fortunate to hear about people like Daniel Tammet who lives in a world significantly different from mine, but who can tell me about his world in a way I can sort of understand. Of course I can barely imagine what it's like to be Daniel even after reading his books.

It's important to realize when I talk in this way I don't mean to imply these dimensions are necessarily real. Once I can conceive of such dimensions, I can relate to them as real. Or I can relate to them as unreal. The choice is mine and subjective idealism respects that choice.

However, because destination is something that's not yet the case, precisely because it's a personal teleology, there is no strong pressure for that to be the same for everyone. Thus destination can be highly divergent for people and the world is not going to lose any of its seeming coherence because of that. Divergence in destination is something that's postponed and so doesn't need to be resolved and made coherent right now.

And this brings me to my first main point. For a subjective idealist such as myself the differences in bodies and mundane qualities are not all that interesting. Do you have two arms or one arm? Is your body's skin this or that color? Is your hair like this or like that? All such differences are boring, and because of that, do not form the most interesting element of one's personal identity for me. Instead the most interesting difference between all the people I encounter is their destination, their personal teleology. This is also expressed in a question: "What are your highest aspirations?" Or "What is your dream?" Or "What is your vision of ideal life?"

Paying attention to the differences in people's highest aspirations shines a very bright light on the non-obvious qualities of people. A person whose highest hope is to raise a family in the context of a life on Earth as understood from a physicalist framework is what I'd call an "ordinary person." This sort of person is not someone I regard as a peer. Someone whose personal aspirations are out of this world is someone who is eligible to deserve my special consideration and there is a chance I may consider such one a peer. Try to imagine yourself saying this in the 1st person POV instead of imagining someone saying it to you from a 2nd person POV.

Of course people generally don't go around announcing their highest aspirations, but this often becomes evident by paying careful attention to what they say and do, when, how, etc.

And finally I want to clarify an important point about what it means for an aspiration to be "highest."

One's highest aspiration may have its maturation "date" far in the vision of the future, but it weighs heavily and dominates every thought and deed right now. So it's essential not to be confused and deceived by someone who wants to become enlightened after 100 lives with a kind of "maybe later" procrastinating attitude. So "highest aspiration" does not mean an aspriation one is comfortable postponing the most!! Far from it! The opposite is the case. So a long visionary time frame can suggest a grandness of vision or it can suggest an immense degree of procrastination and postponing. There is a crucial difference between the first and the second quality!

The highest aspiration is one with a potentially extended maturation date (speaking of time in a visionary sense), but what makes it "highest" is that it is most pressing right now, one that guides and inspires the most right now. So a person for whom enlightenment is their highest aspiration is going to accept that they might not be fully enlightened in this lifetime but will think and behave as if this is the only chance they have to become enlightened and as if there will be no other chances later. In other words, there will be zero procrastination and the priorities will all fall in line in such a way that the highest aspiration becomes uppermost.

I was using "enlightenment" only as an example. I believe there are all sorts of excellent aspirations that transcend and surpass the human ideals in beautiful ways.

The mind is a threefold capacity to know, to will and to experience.

I call it a "threefold capacity" because there is no knowing without willing and experiencing. No experiencing without knowing and willing. No willing without knowing and experiencing. In other words, the capacity is one indivisible whole, but for convenience we can identify three sides to it. There is a side of knowing. There is a side of willing. And a side of experiencing.

So from this it should be obvious that the mind as such is not any of the specific mental states, individually or in any combination.

So why don't I call it "consciousness" like some others? That's because we have a concept of subconsciousness, and there is even a concept of superconsciousness. Both sub- and super- are outside the range of customary awareness, but sub- is kind of dumb and it's best at following orders, whereas super- is more intelligent than your customary level of intelligence and is omniscient.

So because consciousness is bracketed by super- and sub- I find it best not to take consciousness as the ultimate ground. Instead I take mind as the ultimate ground. This avoids a mistake of taking the most obvious level of appearance as something ultimate. And this is consistent with a subjective idealist position of anti-realism, which is an idea that how things appear is not how they are. Another way to say this is that appearances are suggestive rather than informative. Appearances are subjective. They pertain to a certain commitment, to a certain manner of dreaming, and are not indications of anything "out there."

Also, knowledge with the most experience-defining power is tacit knowledge. The strongest and most influential knowledge is outside the customary range of consciousness, so drawing people's attention to consciousness will be bad form for the weird way. If you're going to want to play with your experience at the most profound level you will need to become reacquainted with the deepest and most implicit forms of knowledge. You'll have to make conscious what formerly was sub- and super- conscious so that you understand what's going on and why it's going that way. Once you understand it, you have the power to change it. You cannot change something you don't understand. If you don't understand yourself, you cannot change yourself. If you don't understand the world-appearance, you cannot manipulate it. You cannot manipulate a black box.

Or put another way, you're already always manipulating everything, but because of the narrowing of consciousness and because of being obsessive about certain narratives (primarily physicalism, but not limited to that), you lose awareness of the options that you still have and it then feels like things are beyond your control. In fact getting things to feel as though they are outside your control is one kind of magick in and of itself.

So then what is knowledge? What's the difference between thinking and knowing or believing and knowing?

Knowledge is an assertion you're willing to stand on without hesitation and without wavering. Because such assertions are ultimately not grounded in anything other than your own commitment to them, they're in a sense insane (depending on how we define insanity). So all knowledge, as my friend Aesir puts it can be regarded as a form of insanity:

If we start with the conventional idea that having confidence in a belief without justification is irrational and insane, then all beliefs, all possible perspectives, are insane. There are no objective, perspectiveless perspectives. All belief systems are fundamentally irrational and baseless. Because you must adopt some perspective to live, consider your present mode of insanity. Understand it, and find the ungrounded assumptions which guide your life. Is this the insanity you desire over all other possible insanities? Is your subjective reality working the way you want?

I am pretty fond of this paragraph.

So thinking is the most volatile mental activity, and believing is when some ideas begin to gain prominence in your mind as your commitment deepens. Beliefs affect behaviors and major life choices. And the strongest and most implicit form of commitment is knowledge. Compare "I believe the sun will rise tomorrow" to "I know the sun will rise tomorrow."

Probably most knowledge of the kind we'd be interested investigating is something habituated and tacit because once you refuse to waver on an assertion and begin living with it, it becomes more and more automatic, and once it becomes fully automatic it slides away from your consciousness, you don't notice it anymore per se, unless you remain vigilant. But when potential knowledge drops down to its tacit form and becomes actual lived knowledge, it's the most powerful! So for example, how much do you doubt that the sun will rise tomorrow? How often do you think about the sun rising tomorrow? I bet zero times on most days? Probably zero times in any given decade? If you ever doubted such a thing, it's probably just now. But probably not even now. Probably even me asking the question about the sun maybe not rising tomorrow is not enough to stir genuine doubt. This is the power of knowledge. You know the sun will rise tomorrow. That's the power of your subjectivity!

Subjectivity is not a gradient. It's not possible for you to be more subjective or less. It's not possible for anything else to be more or less subjective. For something to be subjective it must pertain to a point of view. What does it mean something pertains to a point of view? It means something only makes sense or only appears under certain mental conditions and at no other time. If something pertains to a point of view, it means outside of that specific point of view, it is inaccessible, unknowable. If you understand subjective idealism, you have to realize that all specific features of your experience from the subtlest to the grossest levels are private and unique to your point of view.

It's crucial to understand what a "point of view" really is. It's not the case that Nefandi has one point of view and Aesir another and so on for everyone of 7 billion people. No, no, no. That's not subjective idealism at all. In subjective idealism the understanding is that I have a point of view. From that singular point of view I experience Nefandi and all the other people. All these experiences pertain to this one singular point of view of mine. And because of that, once I begin dreaming, I usually don't know about Aesir, since it's not pertinent in most of my nighttime dreams. Of course the potential to restore the waking context exists in a typical nighttime dream, and thus subconsciously the notion of Aesir is still available as part of my commitment (overall mindset). But the point is, everything I know about any other person I only know because I have a point of view! In other words, I can't really know something that's not my point of view. I have no access to such!

So subjectivity is total and it doesn't come in degrees. Subjectivity doesn't increase or decrease. Instead the content of subjectivity can change. But the fact that all content is subjective is not going to change. The changes in content will fall along customary patterns most of the time, but if you change your commitment, the change in experiential pattern can be radical.

Generally the mind tends to operate in a certain style. It means certain themes are recurrent. Certain types of mental activity are habitual and recur regularly. A style of mental life can be called 'a mindset.' It is crucial to be able to distinguish the mind from a mindset.

The mind is a threefold capacity to know, to will and to experience. But a mindset is a specific style, a specific manner of using that capacity. That specific manner of using mental capacity can also be referred to as 'a commitment.' It's a commitment when you park on it and stay there. So you develop a certain style of mentation centered on certain postulates, and you park there. Once that's done, your postulates (gradually) acquire the weight of knowledge and drop away from your customary consciousness (unless you're doing something weird with your mind), and at that same time these postulates gain immense power, even to the point where people feel trapped by those postulates and begin seeking liberation.

If you understand anything I am talking about here you must immediately realize something like, "wait a second, so ultimately I am not even a human being." If you're thinking that way, you're probably really getting what I am talking about. If it never occurred to you to question your humanity or your membership on planet Earth, then you are reading what I am saying without any significant understanding.

First, a few questions to consider: do animals have minds and perspectives? Do all humans in the waking realm? Do dream characters? How about demons and angels encountered in magickal workings? Did you have a mind and a perspective in the past? Will you in the future?

Second, let's remember that, conventionally, no one knows whether or not other people have minds and perspectives (or 'subjectivity' or 'consciousness'). It's impossible in principle, according to human convention, to actually access the mind and perspective of another human. Otherwise, we wouldn't have distinct minds and perspectives. No amount of brain science on others and no amount of conversation with others can definitely answer that question, just like no amount of science can prove that this is a real, external material reality and not an illusory, internal mental reality.

So, whether or not there are other minds is a matter of perspective, like the question of whether or not there is a material world. And like with a material world, the difference between believing and not believing is not a matter of whether or not there are actually other minds. It's a matter of whether you are manifesting your imagination and experience in such a way that it you have experience suggestive of other minds or not.

There is a difference in the way that humans relate to and manifest dream people v. waking people. Generally, humans consider dream people to be mindless and okay to toy with and generally consider waking people to be minded and important to treat with respect. To make the point even stronger, some people consider waking animals to have perspectives and others do not.

Now, imagine that you could telepathically read and influence other people's perspectives. How might that work? It could turn out that their perspectives were accessible and adjustable to you in a way similar to the way that your memories of your past perspectives are accessible and adjustable to you. That would mean that their perspectives are not distinct objects from your mind, but are unconscious aspects of your perspective that you can focus on like your memories. However, in this view, that also means that what you presently identify as your human perspective is only another aspect of your mind that you are accustomed to focusing on more than other aspects of your mind.

Further, imagine that in this state you decided that you didn't like always controlling and knowing other peoples's perspectives. You actively practiced focusing on what we ordinarily call your human perspective without ever focusing on the other perspectives. Imagine that after doing this for thousands of lifetimes you forgot that you weren't just this perspective and forgot that you could read and influence apparently other perspectives – you start to regard them as other. Your perception of the perspectives of others would be essentially what your perception of others is now, abstractly. You would think that those unconscious aspects of your mind were other than you, and you would be mistakenly identifying your mind with your human role, like a person can mistakenly identify with their job or personality or wealth.

Similarly, imagine that some other individual could telepathically read and influence your perspective. It would feel like your perspective was only an aspect of their mind. But, your perspective is an aspect of your own mind, so in this view, too, your minds must not be distinct. From your perspective, they are an aspect of your mind that you are unconscious of that you are at some level allowing to have an influential relationship with your conventional human perspective. From their perspective, you are an aspect of their mind as in the last example.

If we were to imagine that our perspectives had no telepathic influence on each other then we would not be able to interact with one another in any way. If we imagine that our perspectives were completely telepathically intertwined, then there would be no illusion of separation. However, in the conventional world, we imagine that our perspectives only telepathically influence each other in a limited manner – you can directly manipulate my perception of your body and I can directly manipulate your perception of my body. And we imagine that neither of us can directly manipulate either our own or each others's perception of the material world.

Imagine is the operative word here (you could replace it with 'believe' if you prefer). I imagine a perspective that I call you, and you imagine a perspective that you call me. I also imagine that you imagine a perspective that you call me, and you also imagine that I imagine a perspective that I call you. Your idea of other people and your idea of yourself as a person are only ideas in your mind.

Think about it like this. Your beliefs and memories and expectations and values and desires are all intentional mental structures. None of those are you at your core, because you could in principle have different memories or different desires and still be you. Now, imagine that all of your beliefs and memories and expectations and values and desires and all other aspects of your perspective were replaced with mine. Now, you and I are the same.

I only understand and interact with your perspective, with you, as a potential perspective that I could have that I do not. When I interact with you, I am only interacting with an aspect of myself. Similarly, when you interact with me, you are only interacting with an aspect of yourself.

So, in my view, there is only one mind. From my perspective, it is my mind. From your perspective, it is your mind. From any perspective, the mind is their own. So, in my view, there is no distinction between you or I at the level of mind. But there are infinite possible perspectives the mind can take which we can somewhat arbitrarily divide into categories like you, me, him, and her in the same way that we can somewhat arbitrarily divide the infinite colors into categories like blue, red, lavender, warm colors, etc.