RE: Barriers to Change: Fear, Being a Victim, and Not Saying No is Automatically Saying Yes
Such a great post! I like it all, but especially the deeper philosophical ones like this.
I found myself spending almost all weekend thinking about reality and my relation to it. It began with a listen to Jeff Berwick's interview of Bernhard Guenther and progressing to his Veil of Reality website. I watched 2 of his videos and felt a cognitive dissonance building within me. It deepened as I went on to watch Steve Richards videos on the Holographic Kinetics website.
I am highly skeptical, yet open minded.
When I think of this world and the state it's in I see many cause and effect relationships. Is there any "top" of the pyramid? Man thinks he's at the top of the food chain but is he? Is consciouness an infinite chain of fractal relationships between entities? If so it isn't possible for a particular fractal instance to know where it exists in the hierarchy.
My former religious orientation leaves me susceptible to manipulation when it comes to such topics, but by scientific / engineering mindset and knowledge of the Trivium Method trigger questions I cannot answer for lack of data.
Why do I feel compelled to find a conclusion to the question "What is reality" or "What is consciousness" when clearly the data is limited? We are all groping in the dark for answers. If we rigidly adhere only to empirical evidence we will not be open to new discoveries. Forming a question implies you don't have an answer to it. It is an unknown and the opposite of empirical data.
Questions push us beyond the empirical in an attempt to add to the empirical. Where does intuition and inspiration come from? Are they simply internal and external triggers that stimulate a creative process from the raw material of our memory?
Thanks for the feedback. Accept not having an answer. That's part of the path to REAL knowledge. Many fantasies and beliefs, purported and accepted as "truth", are derived because of this insecurity we have, of not knowing and needing to invent an answer. I have done quite a bit of work on that aspect as well hehe. You can find my first posts on such issues of Symbolism and Belief, and truth as well.
Some questions can't be answered, yet we can't accept that so we invent fantasies to fill the gaps in our comprehension. It's dangerous, not knowledge and make us fools.
Question anything, but don't fabricate answers as if they are "truth" when thy are only invented speculations of belief in imagination. ;)
There is an eternal battle between truth and falsity, and belief is the middle ground of discovery where many get lost.
Intuition and inspiration are capacities of consciousness which emerges from a brain. Consciousness is not demonstrable as an expression existing outside of a body. Existence comes first, then consciousness. Look into objectivism for the basics of a grounded philosophy.