Maybe you’re an empiricist, and you think seeing is believing. But how did you verify that your visual processing cortex is showing accurate data?
Maybe you’re a rationalist, and you think that logic can reason us towards objectivity. But syllogism requires premises. Premises require evidence or axioms. How did you choose your axioms?
Maybe you’re a conformist, and you think agreement with other people will correct errors in your individual perception. But other people are human too. How are you going to correct for errors in the collective genome? How do you know other people exist?
Donald Hoffman ran thousands of evolutionary simulations. He compared organisms that perceive the simulated world accurately with organisms that perceive only fitness payoffs. Fitness always beats truth. Truth always goes extinct. Your ancestors were the creatures that used hacks and oversimplifications to turn the complicated world around them into a simple mental model. That simple mental model is your perception of the universe.
There is no scientific definition of an object. What makes some molecules one object and not another? Human convenience of perception. You’re not even a single species. You have tiny bacteria in every cell of your body with their own separate genome, processing glucose into ATP for you. Not to mention bacteria such as firmicutes and bacteriodes that help your digestive system process food. And are you the body containing all of these different organisms, or just a pattern of neural impulses? If your brain were simulated by an advanced computer, copying the function of every neuron, would it be you?
Well I don’t believe matter or spacetime objectively exist, so I don’t think gravity objectively exists either. To borrow from Donald Hoffman’s language, I take gravity seriously but not literally. I know that gravity represents something which is important to our species’ survival, which is why we all perceive it. But I do not think it is as simple as we perceive it to be with our eyes. I do not think it is even as simple as Einstein described it. I think the truth is much, much more complicated.
That’s at least admitting that something exists, but it’s more complicated than what we currently understand of it!
My current standing is with “poetic naturalism”, in which we acknowledge that something exists and that we build, based on our subjective experience, models of knowledge. And that we must use epistemic tools (ex: the scientific method) to overcome our subjectivity.
Overcome subjectivity? No, no, no! The desire for objectivity makes us weak and easy to control. The rich use their control of the media to exploit that desire for their own gain. They’ve created a subjective reality, pretending to be objective, which upholds the evils of capitalism. You mustn’t try to overcome subjectivity.
Subjectivity is freedom. If everything is subjective, and we understand the rules of that subjectivity, then we have the power to reinterpret our condition according to our own sense of justice. We can make ourselves a new subjective unreality, based on fairness and justice. We can create a multiverse of unrealities, and travel between them as easily as believing.
Take gender, for example. Traditional western culture tells us (as children) that gender is objective, and the answers are to be found in the biology of the cell. Written into our genes is the objective truth of gender, if only we have the curiosity to find it. This desire for objectivity is poison. Those who have clung to it into adulthood have become bitter and hateful, and have sought to take away our right to medicine.
But I know that gender is subjective. It’s socially constructed, and we should choose to reconstruct it in the best way possible, that makes everyone happy. Let people have whatever gender they want. Choose to believe in new genders, choose to perceive new gender presentations. Choose freedom through subjectivity.
The whole point of objectivity is that it allows for cooperation and understanding between people with different experiences. People can invent whatever ideas they like, but by testing those ideas against an objective physical standard, it becomes possible to determine which one is more correct. Without that, when views diverge, people default to stuff like “might makes right.”
Critical thinking is a process of examining and questioning of one’s preexisting beliefs, through rationality. Without that process, what you have is either the ideas that you have passively absorbed through society (primarily, the ideas of the ruling class), or your own made up stuff that other people have no reason to agree with, leading to an inability to unite around an alternative and a de facto victory for the status quo. Subjectivity is not true freedom, because it leads to division and confusion, and division is incapable of resisting oppression, “For what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?”
It’s such a pet peeve for me the way you’re always trying to tie the validity of trans identities to a rejection of objectivity. Trans rights are objective! It is factual, testable, observable, that supporting trans identities has a positive effect on people’s mental health. In rejecting objectivity, you are, in fact, opening the door to say that subjective perspectives that are transphobic are just as true as anything else.
That which is subjective is debatable, and trans rights are not up for debate.
If really love to be able to subjectively stop eating and sleeping, waste of time… I’d be free from that.
There are many social constructs about which what you say is possible, but there is still some underlying world which will nit change.
Ignoring all of the world’s problems will not make them go away, you have to acknowledge them and face them. Although it’s okay to take breaks from the world to rest and recuperate! But don’t simply escape reality and let the bad people take it all…
I believe you’ve mistaken My intentions of how I plan to use this principle of antirealism. I had hoped to imply by My use of the words “fairness” and “justice” that I am not interested in creating a perfect unreality only for Myself. That would be selfish. I have no intention of leaving humanity to rot and wallow in the capitalist consensus reality. I seek to spread this power and freedom to all the working class people of the world. I am an advocate, a politician. I want to kill the capitalist mind prison by convincing every person in the world to abandon objectivity. Let us work together to build our unreal multiverse.
My first moment of unreality came when I was an unhappy “cis” “boy”, scrolling through Reddit. I saw a meme with a simple message: If you want to be a different gender, don’t rely on some external sign of the truth. Just do it. Make your own truth.
So I did. And starting from that one act of defiance against the gender binary, I have followed My joy to make My own truth, all the way beyond consensus reality. I am now happy. But I’m also angry. I’m angry because there are so many other trans kids in the world letting society tell them what objective reality is. There are people committing suicide because their subjective reality is unbearable. One of them was My sister. Another, My friend. I don’t believe in criminalising or stigmatising suicide. I believe in criminalising and stigmatising the practices that make good people want suicide. Nobody should feel like they need an escape from the universe they live in.
If you want to live in a different universe, you should already have the training required to imagine yourself into a different subjective universe. Suicide is a problem of people believing their circumstances are objective. I know the mental techniques required to reprogram My perceptions. I call those techniques magic, because they are changing My unreality through belief. I am angry that other people do not have the same techniques. I will teach those techniques to the people. And the first step is to embrace your subjectivity as a source of freedom and power.
The more subjectivity you can find, the more fulcrums you have on which to balance your mental levers. Those mental levers are your mastery of your own beliefs.
Give Me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum on which to balance it, and I shall move the Earth.
Truth is subjective.
Maybe you’re an empiricist, and you think seeing is believing. But how did you verify that your visual processing cortex is showing accurate data?
Maybe you’re a rationalist, and you think that logic can reason us towards objectivity. But syllogism requires premises. Premises require evidence or axioms. How did you choose your axioms?
Maybe you’re a conformist, and you think agreement with other people will correct errors in your individual perception. But other people are human too. How are you going to correct for errors in the collective genome? How do you know other people exist?
Donald Hoffman ran thousands of evolutionary simulations. He compared organisms that perceive the simulated world accurately with organisms that perceive only fitness payoffs. Fitness always beats truth. Truth always goes extinct. Your ancestors were the creatures that used hacks and oversimplifications to turn the complicated world around them into a simple mental model. That simple mental model is your perception of the universe.
There is no scientific definition of an object. What makes some molecules one object and not another? Human convenience of perception. You’re not even a single species. You have tiny bacteria in every cell of your body with their own separate genome, processing glucose into ATP for you. Not to mention bacteria such as firmicutes and bacteriodes that help your digestive system process food. And are you the body containing all of these different organisms, or just a pattern of neural impulses? If your brain were simulated by an advanced computer, copying the function of every neuron, would it be you?
It’s subjective.
What about gravity? It doesn’t exist, we just collectively hallucinate that stuff falls
That’s just nihilism.
Well I don’t believe matter or spacetime objectively exist, so I don’t think gravity objectively exists either. To borrow from Donald Hoffman’s language, I take gravity seriously but not literally. I know that gravity represents something which is important to our species’ survival, which is why we all perceive it. But I do not think it is as simple as we perceive it to be with our eyes. I do not think it is even as simple as Einstein described it. I think the truth is much, much more complicated.
That’s at least admitting that something exists, but it’s more complicated than what we currently understand of it!
My current standing is with “poetic naturalism”, in which we acknowledge that something exists and that we build, based on our subjective experience, models of knowledge. And that we must use epistemic tools (ex: the scientific method) to overcome our subjectivity.
Overcome subjectivity? No, no, no! The desire for objectivity makes us weak and easy to control. The rich use their control of the media to exploit that desire for their own gain. They’ve created a subjective reality, pretending to be objective, which upholds the evils of capitalism. You mustn’t try to overcome subjectivity.
Subjectivity is freedom. If everything is subjective, and we understand the rules of that subjectivity, then we have the power to reinterpret our condition according to our own sense of justice. We can make ourselves a new subjective unreality, based on fairness and justice. We can create a multiverse of unrealities, and travel between them as easily as believing.
Take gender, for example. Traditional western culture tells us (as children) that gender is objective, and the answers are to be found in the biology of the cell. Written into our genes is the objective truth of gender, if only we have the curiosity to find it. This desire for objectivity is poison. Those who have clung to it into adulthood have become bitter and hateful, and have sought to take away our right to medicine.
But I know that gender is subjective. It’s socially constructed, and we should choose to reconstruct it in the best way possible, that makes everyone happy. Let people have whatever gender they want. Choose to believe in new genders, choose to perceive new gender presentations. Choose freedom through subjectivity.
The whole point of objectivity is that it allows for cooperation and understanding between people with different experiences. People can invent whatever ideas they like, but by testing those ideas against an objective physical standard, it becomes possible to determine which one is more correct. Without that, when views diverge, people default to stuff like “might makes right.”
Critical thinking is a process of examining and questioning of one’s preexisting beliefs, through rationality. Without that process, what you have is either the ideas that you have passively absorbed through society (primarily, the ideas of the ruling class), or your own made up stuff that other people have no reason to agree with, leading to an inability to unite around an alternative and a de facto victory for the status quo. Subjectivity is not true freedom, because it leads to division and confusion, and division is incapable of resisting oppression, “For what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?”
It’s such a pet peeve for me the way you’re always trying to tie the validity of trans identities to a rejection of objectivity. Trans rights are objective! It is factual, testable, observable, that supporting trans identities has a positive effect on people’s mental health. In rejecting objectivity, you are, in fact, opening the door to say that subjective perspectives that are transphobic are just as true as anything else.
That which is subjective is debatable, and trans rights are not up for debate.
If really love to be able to subjectively stop eating and sleeping, waste of time… I’d be free from that.
There are many social constructs about which what you say is possible, but there is still some underlying world which will nit change.
Ignoring all of the world’s problems will not make them go away, you have to acknowledge them and face them. Although it’s okay to take breaks from the world to rest and recuperate! But don’t simply escape reality and let the bad people take it all…
I believe you’ve mistaken My intentions of how I plan to use this principle of antirealism. I had hoped to imply by My use of the words “fairness” and “justice” that I am not interested in creating a perfect unreality only for Myself. That would be selfish. I have no intention of leaving humanity to rot and wallow in the capitalist consensus reality. I seek to spread this power and freedom to all the working class people of the world. I am an advocate, a politician. I want to kill the capitalist mind prison by convincing every person in the world to abandon objectivity. Let us work together to build our unreal multiverse.
My first moment of unreality came when I was an unhappy “cis” “boy”, scrolling through Reddit. I saw a meme with a simple message: If you want to be a different gender, don’t rely on some external sign of the truth. Just do it. Make your own truth.
So I did. And starting from that one act of defiance against the gender binary, I have followed My joy to make My own truth, all the way beyond consensus reality. I am now happy. But I’m also angry. I’m angry because there are so many other trans kids in the world letting society tell them what objective reality is. There are people committing suicide because their subjective reality is unbearable. One of them was My sister. Another, My friend. I don’t believe in criminalising or stigmatising suicide. I believe in criminalising and stigmatising the practices that make good people want suicide. Nobody should feel like they need an escape from the universe they live in.
If you want to live in a different universe, you should already have the training required to imagine yourself into a different subjective universe. Suicide is a problem of people believing their circumstances are objective. I know the mental techniques required to reprogram My perceptions. I call those techniques magic, because they are changing My unreality through belief. I am angry that other people do not have the same techniques. I will teach those techniques to the people. And the first step is to embrace your subjectivity as a source of freedom and power.
The more subjectivity you can find, the more fulcrums you have on which to balance your mental levers. Those mental levers are your mastery of your own beliefs.
Give Me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum on which to balance it, and I shall move the Earth.