You've thought of this very, very close to the way I have. No lie, I've always felt dating resembled a job interview.

I think it's way more complicated than that. Petrichor took the words out of my mouth. As the originator of this thread, I nominate his post for a good example of the problems I see.

There are those who are okay with being merchantable and there are those who aren't. Those who aren't see almost unlimited problems with the example of a job interview standing for a healthy human relationship. It has nothing to do with being a good employee. The format of it is like slave trade.

There's a precept from Hinduism, ahimsa, which states the most subtle form of violence is to make another feel inferior. You must admit the average interviewee feels inferior in an interview (since he has no power to be hired). Some of us try our best to create relationships where this sick superior-inferior pathology is dismantled.

Thank you for your thoughtful post. Perhaps, we can incorporate a few of these concepts from physics into understanding mental experience. The putative grasp of mind these days is commonly and sort of unreasonably constrained by classical physics. The nature of consciousness just isn't very clear and to think of it as an epiphenomenon of the brain same as bile secreted by the liver is falling short of explaining its "ethereal" quality. Sensory information is supposed to be transduced in the brain, and what is seen not what's "out there" but re-presented in the brain. This isn't intuitively satisfying...not wrong, but an incomplete grok. In some way, what is seen is really out there where it seems to be and not solely a representation in the brain. Something obvious like this isn't handled very well by classical physics. It's as though our eyes project images as well as receive them, don't ask me how (the information is both out there and in the brain at once, as it were). It's not a one-way conveyance of information, otherwise objects could not be out in the world where they saliently are by sight. Most will say the mind is not something which goes past sensed data...which again, really doesn't satisfy in completing the cryptic information of mind. Something of the mind does extend over the horizon, saying how so, is what I'm wondering here. Proponents of materialist monism, in attempting to shuttle all back to classical physics, tends to not ask questions that are good, honest ones to be asked. There is in all probability, information which includes consciousness and mind, we as yet know little of.

Someone will mention how it takes time for signals to travel from light reflected from an object to the retina, and so on. If the mind and body are out of communication, as the mind-body paradox is extant, we can't say for sure whether or not matter and mind obey the same spacetime. It may take time for signals to travel in a physical environoment, while from the perspective of idealist monism (or that all is mind "stuff"), maybe it doesn't work that way. Spacetime itself, even for a physicalist, is seen as one thing. To the physical monist, then, perhaps spacetime is a little spooky. The mind could be a little closer to mere spacetime, or on a different frequency than matter.

any group of somethings — tim wood

This "somethings" would require qualification. Some what? Some electrons, maybe? Electrons apparently are exactly the same. So when you count one you count them all. Even though they make up matter as far as we know, of the totality, every one is the same. This points to something fishy going on. Not sure what. It definitely is relevant what is being counted, moreso than the numbers tacked onto the quality of the "what.".

There is no mystery. There is only curiosity and curiosity killed the cat.

What is a mystery anyway? It's simply the need to answer the 7 basic questions: who? what? when? where? which? how? why?

What is interesting is questions don't stop. Infinite regress. The mystery never ends. — TheMadFool

Mystery is wonder renewing itself. Curiosity can be satisfied. Which is why the cat is killed. Wonder is a deep and peculiar well, that retains the ability to understand, while never making conclusions.

I feel like questions would stop for curiosity. One can only handle so many conclusive answers before his understanding starts to overflow. Verily, though, the mystery never ends.

There is some sort of hard to define infinite regress built into the primary process of consciousness that's a province of wonder. Curiosity, and its questions are part of a secondary process by comparison . Wonder will take us places curiosity can't enter, like trying to understand the infinite regress in our self-awareness...something is aware of something aware of something aware of something aware....self-similar, yet different, all the way down. We may find out the more we're staring infinite regress in the face, the less we can say what it is we're looking at.

but it just is not infinite. — tim wood

There is the limits of the known anent what is possible (or what seem possible or not) on one hand, and the infinite on the other. Although, we could say that a signal requires measurement or a receiver for it to be a signal. Then we see a communication forming between concepts of measurability and infinity. Then it becomes a matter of whether we might be unaware of unknown signals being measured by something (say, the body-mind) in a way we are unaware of from a place too far (perhaps outside spacetime delimitation) to be understood by known physics that govern spacetime locality. Quantum physics points us in some really strange directions in our attempt to understand the wave nature of electrons. The wave nature of matter, and superposition, hint at types of communication quantum physicists truly don't understand as yet. Standing waves appear to be quasi-holographic. Holograms contain the whole in the part, like Indra's Net. Hence I'm wondering if everything informs everything, if so, our body-mind would be no exception.

Basically what I mean, for the context of the OP, is (space) too far away to send a signal or message that obeys physics of spacetime locality as we know it. If one could somehow send messages outside of spacetime, then the difference that makes a difference wouldn't exist in the spacetime known by physics. Is there information which can exist outside spacetime, which, in turn, informs what is in spacetime?

Please make clear your understanding of "infinite." Too many people use the term without really knowing what it means. For example, we don't live in an infinite universe. — tim wood

Thanks for the constructive feedback. Generically, I mean space may be unlimited. There's probably such a conception as space that's far enough away, we can think of it as infinite for our purposes, whether it really is or not. Pretty sure it's much bigger than most realize. Will humans ever travel one light year? Probably not.

If Jesus was not a sinner, how could he have died? — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Better, why did he have to be baptized and receive Christos?

Death will be a relief from the overwhelming paradoxes of living. I'm not yet wise enough to say I'm happy to know it, as its still a source of significant anxiety. Though such anxiety leads to interesting thought, so it isn't so bad in a way.

In what way is legality the demarcation of morality? The constitution as an example is deeply inconsistent and flawed (mainly in refusing to acknowledge anything preterlegal) lacking internal consistency. An individual can be personally morally consistent far beyond the constitution or legal-illegal dichotomy. In other words, if any and all components of legalism are lacking internal consistency before a human being even becomes aware of them, the law has been broken by itself before it has even been applied. And only an internally inconsistent subject would rigidly adhere to such laws or assume morality and legality are related concepts. The question is barely moot inasmuch as this holds.

Confidence and delusion are probably hard to juggle sometimes. I wonder what becomes of self-esteem and self-image, etc., when self is seen as without substance? Perhaps this leads to fatalism, which is its own sort of illusion. The self has to be drained out to really even listen to another and fully receive their message. When I'm listening to what someone has to say, really taking it in, I invariably forget any comment that may have tried to flash through my mind while listening.

I've wondered whether certain logical fallacies are possible to circumvent. Is it really possible to fully disengage in cognitive bias/confirmation bias? Confirmation of an idea would seem to be central to brainstorming. How is it possible to follow the associations of ideas without a touch of confirmation bias. And if you aren't confirming, perhaps the denying, insofar as it is seeded and framed by what is denied instead of confirmed is no less of a bias. Disconfirmation bias in this case. When a scientists formulates a question, it is an automatic cognitive bias, really, since predictions presuppose what doesn't actually exist evidentially.

Withal, are philosophy and psychology really so distinct ambits? I can't fathom how if so.

Egocentrism is mainly about not being able to differentiate self from other. Psychologizing is necessary as I see it, nowhere does it connote having an outward/external context. It means not being ignorant of one's own states of mind, foremost, and to be aware when one is starting to egocentrate, so as to nip it in the bud.

Ego is complemented by superego; narcissism needs collective narcissism. How someone relates to themselves when alone is of tremendous import as ego and narcissism aren't possible with a cloistered lifestyle.

Enter psychologizing, which for me is none different than auto-psychoanalysis. Completely necessary. Also, projection and introjection are often seen in severe mental illness. Why we wouldn't want to talk about this I can't understand. As said, ecocentrism is confusion of self and other...in other words precisely caused by projection and introjection,... these issues can't be ignored whatever term you choose to denominate the process.

I see. Not biting, mate. Though somehow, I don't know that my post is as empty of content as your response to it. If it's garbage, can you elaborate on that, or...

Nevermind. After looking at your other comments, it's clear you're a sadist. Good luck.

No. Nor do I want to be unhappy. Desiring happiness leads to unhappiness all too often. A controlling nature is, by default, often dovetailed to misery (and probably bipolar). Not that this is the only cause of depression or always true...just an observation.

If you think that we are subject to evolution, that our capacity for abstract thought, for words and actions other than those ruled by instinct serves no purpose except to follow instinct, then I can only conclude that you have shackled your own intelligence to a limited physical existence. — Possibility

In what way, do you propose, instinct isn't indomitable? Instinct does rule, save for perhaps Buddhas, or otherwise individuals who know how to balance Dionysus with Apollo; actually, modernity, with its increasingly rigid human order lain over the only one, is pissing instinct off quite significantly. No matter if it be secular rationalism or residue of mythological systems (religion), humans construct aggregations of beliefs to help them deny death or inevitability they don't like The most advanced humans don't say death is a disease and look to promissory materialism for an answer, or think we will move to Mars (no doubt it could be a planet of war in the future if humans move there), they figure out how to make a wreath around themselves with it and contemplate death often. Convenience and comfort also stand in the way of alignment with evolution and instinct.

Look at Down syndrome. Is it a flaw of evolution? Should it be gene edited out of existence, if possible? Wouldn't this be admitting we don't like Down syndrome on some level, that humans have become obsessed with efficiency and competence over all else. Why is it for humans to decide? For those who think times are patently getting better, there's a serious ethical dilemma in these sorts of issues. Science can be elegantly savage, which is a message for all people positing it has only helped. In exclusively admitting physical evidence/data and cognitive behaviorism (calling to mind the most ridiculous images like calculable emotion, 3+2=envy), the domain of virtue or morality (belonging to idealism, or proper philosophy/reason), isn't true for scientists. There's no way of proving people with DS aren't aliens or deities behaving the way they do for some bizarre fathomless reason, same with animals. An uncanny image, yet it is so.

Same with evolution. Humans are totally subject to evolution along with all else on Earth. Eventually humanists and their technics will regret tampering with the laws of nature, of this I have little doubt. It is a question to philosophy why this species thinks it is exempt from what other species are exposed to, as though men are gods.

It's hard divining how poisoned we are still from leaded gasoline, or to know if 5G technology will worsen glioblastomas. Pollution and war, or their absence, are indexes of human ability to to either accommodate nature/instinct or ignore it (someone will think war is instinct, though actually human nature is metacognition, it being what we have other animals don't; hesitation is also human nature/instinct). There are parallels of man's destructive repetitions in his emotion, which are a long way to being addressed...avarice, envy, anger, hate, frigidity...ok, here goes since I've always seen the truth in this...gluttony, sloth, pride, and lust (if not emotion, then delusion...delusion tends to be an blanket term, though). Acute neuroses are caused by cognitive behaviorism/materialism, being derived from scientist's irrational perversion over ignoring anything without evidence (honesty needs to take a good hard look at how big of a problem this is, actually; a thread might be forthcoming). Instinct doesn't like it there are those who think the primary process resembles AI or calculation in any way. To the extent h. sapiens live in a virtual reality, they don't live in the truth.

Indeed it would make more sense if it were a site to submit monographs to, and get feedback. People on here will complain if your post is too long. There's a lot of one liners...not very philosophical. A philosopher should suffer from logorrhea as a matter of course. Also, some want a handle or not to have to interpret what you're saying. When was the last time you read the work of a philosopher and easily understood all that was expressed? A philosopher definitely has a strong idiosyncratic side to him. Most here are scholars by comparison; topics center on cognitive science and materialism, which leaves little room for original thought, (cognitive) being so based on AI and neuroscience. Reading classical philosophy is, at times, more like reading poetry or mythology than anything in modern media, to be sure. The times are exceedingly material monistic, literal and prosaic; all you can do is look up facts, or rearrange what is already known, not arrive at truth through reason, that is from thought alone.

One of the more interesting things about the Gnostic hermeneutic is what it meant when Adam and Eve discovered they were naked. Having eaten from the tree of Good and Evil, they subsequently understood they were slaves and that slavery was evil; of course before this they thought they were in paradise. Slaves usually weren't allowed any raiment.

As to Stockholm syndrome. Yes, I believe its true Abrhamic religion is significantly seminal to this mental disease. In particular, the type of Christians that have no philosophical or theological backing to their "beliefs," tend to be the type that thinks politics (and otherwise worldly, secularism) and economics can in any way inform religion without turning it evil.

Hard work. Why, I wonder? Why not vegetate and introspect, slow things down a shade in a culture going into warp speed? Or WASP speed. What is up with those old Protestant values still resonating? Archonic influence from computerized mantis men? I weigh in as closer to a rustic beatnik who sees most of the conflict of our species coming from a paucity of self-reflection and self-regulation. What's the value of hard work in a market society? Getting more points, more tokens? Does it really parallel a caper to the arcade? Then it might be time to stop and exit the system that we can see it from outside. Go to sleep on it, and wake up to inevitable deconditioning from conventional values. Though, admittedly, every generation would seem to throw its venal types, with minimal intrinsic values, who are conditioned to never take their eye of the ball, so to speak.

Work as needed not as an invention(mechanical clocks) which receives no feedbacks, has no setpoints, or living servomechanisms from living systems would dictate; when you have your own system to look after, it means you have to look for feedback all the time, even in the middle of the night; the concept of menial labor dissolves entirely. Low impact living without stirring things up and setting in motion more concatenations of recalcitrant, causal complexity than necessary must be a mark of the damned. Then I'll be damned... \

One other thing. Hippies and Rednecks get along quite well sometimes. Hippies were about Vietnam and realizing your life could have been essentially murdered through the draft, then feeling a rush of freedom and mind expansion you weren't conscripted. Isn't it unaccountable when people suddenly stop competing with each other, leave the market society norms behind, and get along each time disaster strikes (9/11 in US; Chelyabinsk bolide, eg). What's up with this? Is it a symptom of something wrong? Of living a life of pretense and falsity? Anyway, if you want to call people hippies still, I'm a hippy and have redneck friends. We laugh at each other sometimes.

Country folks are similar in most ways...some are far more sophisticated than others, though. Not all rednecks get into botany and horticulture (though almost all country folks have a garden), for example, like hippies always do. Usually country people are naturalists to a greater or lesser degree. Though, ironically, those who work hard in the ag business often know very little about plants. This is always a sign of stupidity, if you know very little about what you do everyday...and are merely a hard worker, you might be living a failed life. As it's clear you'd rather be living some other one.

Thought this quote from St. John of the Cross might be relevant here: "The spiritual man aims at complete abstraction and forgetfulness so that , as much as possible, no knowledge of created things, as if they existed not, shall remain in his memory."

What has no exordium or eschaton is what is no self. We have at the core of our consciousness what has not existed from time immemorial and will not exist infinitely far into the future. We are dead while alive and death is the source of intelligence. To think you're fully alive is the tinge of self and imbecility. Judging a part of existence by existence is bias, judging existence by non-existence is where stupid atta can't enter. Thankfully, anatta has clearance.

intersubjectivity — Wallows

I've heard this term before. What ever does it mean? Who coined it? Subjectivity is a synonym for esoteric or occult in my dictionary. It describes what can't be shared, transferred, or translated in the mind of an individual, what only he can be responsible for, no exchange value.

Objective standards are the bane of my existence, an insult to intelligence. A word like "intersubjective," though, seems even worse. You might say "intrasubjective" ...though that would be a tautology. There's intrapersonal intelligence and interpersonal intelligence, and often they're mutually exclusive. This new, popular term makes me think of telepathy or some kind of ESP.

Isn't the courtroom automated yet? The Internet of Things could inform the courtroom quite easily. And a social credit system, taking China's example, married to the IoT would eliminate the need for a courtroom, including the psychopathic lawyers and judges that inhabit it.

I find it odd it isn't illegal not to know a certain amount of the law that can be held against you at any given time or place. You have to know the rules of the road and pass a test on paper to get your license to drive a car. Couldn't driving, then, be analogous to living subject to a jurisprudence system? And shouldn't it be the case we are all required to know a thing or two about the road we're driving on within said system? Nay, suddenly someone is plucked from the system by lottery and expected to know how the rules are applied. It has to be fairly flippant if you ask me. This must be why those who break the law most often and in variety of ways could be lawyers. How else can you test the bounds of legality through experience? As a natural anarchist, I'd make a horrible jurist. Whatever happens is allowed by the law. It's impossible to break the law. Now, whether you or someone else likes it or not is another story.

And herein is the problem, if one demands an objective standard, or claims that they have one, where none can be achieved, then that is plain and simple totalitarianism. — Wallows

Good point.

Anyway, "intersubjectivity" is suggestive of an objective standard when to be subjective connotes being unique and not inter-anything. Intelligence often blooms by finding the intellectual laziness which invariably looms in any standardization. IQ, a test developed from scientific racism, is still a widely used and referenced standard, as though intelligence could be generalized. From this, I've thought standardizing the mind in any way is sort of totalitarian; ranking people according to the same criteria produces the same strengths and weaknesses; this kind of sameness is lameness, as though there were intersubjective IQ test takers. Our subjectivities are what make us different from one another, they're the ways in which we have a hard time communicating with each other. Yet some anticommunication (anti-standardization) and individuality/subjectivity is necessary to combat social decay, and amplify synergy between people. Standardization is like suggestion, or hypnotic induction, precludes thought, destroys the thinking animal.

And the males in Iceland actually outlive females on average...strange.

I'll try to substantiate that claim. Not a master of history, so will have to go see where I read that. If I'm wrong, I'll admit it. Which culture do you think is/was most peaceful?

Of course I don't mean currently.

Yeah, maybe. But the practice of meditation is as individual as it gets. Nobody can know the truth for you, or the configuration of your own mind; this is the foremost responsibility then I'd think, not materialism or behaviorism, or of any kind of code you haven't submitted to vetting yourself. So romantic or no, is of no moment to me. Orienting and devoting to Eastern practices is of great benefit for mental health, if it isn't entertaining, then it can help a Westerner grow up beyond his need for things and hopefully help replace outer screens with the inner one. Knowing how to be alone with yourself (without internal conflict) and getting along with yourself is a prerequisite for getting along with others. This is more important than learning how to use the new operating system on your computer, to be sure. It just depends on what you value. Peace on Earth would be nice, worth being a dreamer for. Tibet was the most peaceful culture ever for a reason. Hardly a mistake or romantic. Some don't care for peace. Perhaps it isn't entertaining or inspiring to them. Most warriors are internally conflicted, violent, and in need of endless battles. The internal war in such people can be ignored as long as there's an outer war to "justify' the one they have within; unfortunately, commercial relationships basically mirror the competition and strife you see in war; and those who value money and profit motive should have been conscripted to be soldiers.

Buddhism helps separate suggestive influences and hypnotic induction from the what's really there within. In other words, it's beneficial to know my truth as it is separate from anyone else's. There's danger in representing anything or being a joiner of an organization; the danger is we start to mime what's in front of us or what we hear without fully examining the mental impression it makes in us. In this way, one may mistake the mind itself for mental impressions made in it. Being unable to make this distinction is something that should be feared.

There is also the approach of 'engaged Buddhism', popularised by Thich Nhat Hanh. It builds on the mahayana philosophy of the ' non-duality of samsara and nirvana' - that samsara is itself nirvana, if understood right (and arriving at this understanding is itself the purpose and also the method). Maybe this is analogous to the Christian understanding of deity as both immanent and transcendent - in the world while also beyond it. — Wayfarer

I know of Thich Nhat Hanh, and have listened to a few of his audio books. As an individualist, who feels only individuals, one by one, can self-regulate and handle their inward defilements, the Lesser Boat, Hinayana, has a little more appeal to me; Mahayana accommodates the social element and the place of bodhisattvas in helping, perhaps, mitigate suffering of others; withal, though, you can lead a horse to water and he may die of thirst.

There seems to be a conflict between individual virtue, Te, and group norms, however. If one places sociality at the center of being, then he also has to accept some of the obvious downward helices people around him are upholding, or even causing. TNH, as a Mahaynist is willing to endorse social norms as indomitable and to be accepted as part of the odyssey, no matter how wrongheaded they are.

The preceptor I've found most helpful is the Cambodian, Ajahn Chah, his teachings are more in line with my own fairly stubborn introversion. He will even recommend not thinking of others in order not to compare yourself to them. This chimes with one of the main issues, from my perspective, which is destroying relationships and generating noxious culture. The internet and social media, e.g., are tearing apart people's self-regulation, while extrinsic valorization and external locus of control vex to a large extent, anything remotely resembling equanimity, temperance, and quiescence necessary for a bhikku to enter the stream toward nirvana. One could ask whether it's even possible to enter the stream in modernity with driving algorithms rather stealing away self-regulation. I'd have to check where a bodhisattva falls on the spectrum of enlightenment...from stream entrant to once returner, and so on. Actually, he couldn't be a once returner, as he will have to return until everyone is wrangled into the stream. At any rate, I would think entering the stream requires internal orientation to an ever increasing extent as it parallels the delusion, anger, and greed prevalent in society.

As indicated in the post above, Christians (who have anything resembling a philosophical/theological backing...who aren't nominal, in other words, and their religion isn't only a feeling of operant obligation to them in averting hell's maw, but a primal interest) who are thinkers, can talk about cosmology, teleology, and eschatology; one of the images they share with eastern tenets, like anatta, is via negativa. Apophatic theology elucidates a lot for me, or perhaps I should say it darkens a lot for me (since neti neti =not this not that), inasmuch as darkness is a more apt image of non-existence than light (you can argue a blinding light covers all same as darkness...though it is hard to imagine such light compassing an object without some kind of limitation or source, which would give rise to opposition) . Perfect darkness is far more mysterious, the source of mystery perhaps, because it doesn't appear to have a source, it is the absence of a source, not really a contravention of anything imaginable. Darkness is a very refreshing "object" of mediation for me. Nothing can be crystallized or conditioned by it (nothing is its only condition), the way light freezes everything and subjects it to becoming (stale/old, conditioned responses).

I do see what you imply by a nonduality of samsara and nirvana, though nonduality itself is a concept and, ergo, a skhanda. Nonduality, e.g., is the antipode of duality. Immanence and transcendence, also, are in a fight with each other. Somehow, the gist of eastern though has its terminus in revealing a way out of all possible dichotomous elements at war with each other. Reconciliation of opposites. Of course, this is the Middle Way Buddha spoke of. A good metaphor from Ajahn Chah: we are floating down a river with serpents of defilement/vice on either side toward the ocean and we want to get to the ocean without ever being bit. Perhaps the banks are lighted with things we are afraid of or tempted by, appearing in the light, and as Buddhists, we try to stay in the darkness and to transcend the dichotomy of anything that has a source. Lasting peace has to find a way out of the battle.

It is a series of different loci of experience, always gaining and losing components. — darthbarracuda

Here you have nailed it. In Western culture, you find many, many pseudo Buddhists, who follow worldly Dhammas like assiduously seeking gain, failing to realize that gain is impermanent. Fame is impermanent. Honor is impermanent. Reputation is impermanent. Loss is ineluctable, shamelessness is one of the core teachings of Cynicism (very much like Buddhism), which claims we shouldn't recognize any shame and to reject reputation. The point being you find people who think they understand change, yet participate in a culture which enshrines certain unchanging values. It would seem then, knowing culture is a source of delusion is one of the first things understand. Blind faith in the conditioned responses and stereotypes of interiorized social norms are a major impediment to the Buddhist path.

Also, meditation is vegetation. Western culture is one of myrmidons. Being able to stop and establish quietude, stillness, and silence is seen as laziness. Yet it is precisely inaction which is necessary to watch the moving parts of the self and spy the inward defilement insinuated in us by the rat race or hedonic treadmill we were raised in, and conditioned by. It isn't possible to get out of the box by novelty seeking, novelty seeking becomes a repetitive, conditioned response like any other one. Only sitting still and vegetating allows us to see what never stops moving, and lucidly untie our Gordian knots; one of the main skills meditation conveys is how to live in a state of mind similar to the onset of sleep, not unlike hypnagogia(pompia), which is a state where subconscious syndromes more readily sally up for observation... making strenuous effort to get on top - and ambitiously pursuing rewards and goals, sticks and carrots - in an economic fundamentalist system totally negates this essential quality.

Thus I've come to realize practicing Buddhism in western culture is almost too difficult. Our culture is anti Buddhist in every conceivable way. It may be possible to apply bits and pieces of it in the morning and before bed; when the willy-nilly commercialized life takes over at work and in relationship, Buddhism isn't there..the worldly dhammas take control (learned classical conditioning).

Briefly, the eight worldly conditions which repeat through socially conditioned response (which few can undo): gain and loss, honor and dishonor, happiness and misery, praise and blame. If we see that everything changes...we should also see that these conditions change as well and set them down like a red hot ball of iron.

Generally, we are taught to increase our self as much as possible everyday. The wisdom of Taoism and Buddhism teach the opposite. Everyday we should peel back and drop another layer of the onion of the delusions of our self-concept, the box we're in made up of conditioned responses. It would be interesting to compare Western psychology's idea of self-concept to anatta; then it could be lucidly understood how different are Western egocentric sickness vis a vis Buddhism's no self. And how nearly impossible it is to apply anicca, dukkha, anatta to our lives. The skhandas are not really what we have to overcome having been steeped in Western conceptions of self, it is self concept, like self-image, self-esteem, ideal- self, future selves...and other defilements that have been bred into our schemas. The skhandas, I'm afraid will remain with us till the end in shallow celebrity culture. To overcome these, you'd have to move to a monastic setting. Then we should focus on what can be overcome, or be shed, such as self-concept.

There is something that doesn't change, it's what is used in meditation. Budhho, the one who knows. If you think about it, it would be impossible to see or track the intimations of our kaleidoscopic, conditioned responses if there were nothing in us different than they are (and not another changing element). It would be a phantasmagoria impossible to exit. Luckily, meditation gets us in contact with Buddho, the one who knows everything about us and is our aid in self-examination; without it we could probably never prune away delusion, anger, greed. That one of the skhandas is consciousness itself was always a tough one for me. Buddho would seem to be pure consciousness and the tool we use to take the discontinuous, quantum leap into via negativa and unity...apparently it is a tool to be jettisoned in the end, while the organism still lives of course (since consciousness, Buddho, is a skhanda). Those who enter nirvana have been absorbed. Western culture would call them lazy or autistic..and nobody wants to be a special needs person, at the very least we have been insinuated with the idea laziness is a virulent pestilence (but what if it was that we desired very little, ascetically? apparently we are still WASPs, and fear eternal damnation without working around the clock). See the problem. We had better settle for boddhisattvahood and retain Buddho to help others get out of this violent, Western apoplexy. Then we can communicate what we know about deconditioning. Then once we are all boddhisattvas, we can wink out of existence at once together.

It's as though we come to believe something like 'knowledge is power' or 'learning is power' when learning, experience, and memory are actually a record of endless rounds of becoming, births. When it's understood any possible aspect of self-concept is made of this record of learning, experience, and memory, that the bricks of self are made of these conditioned responses, it's patent the difficulty of exiting samsara. Unlearning, unexperiencing, and forgetting are essential to deconditioning. Escaping the box can't be done by visiting another culture while bringing your own background...or even by learning another culture if you didn't have an identity... Part of us is out of existence along with the part that is in it...we aren't fully in or out of existence...we can learn to decondition by following the part that's vanishing from existence. Trusting the noetic quality in ourselves is a requisite to this, and understanding that outside of egocentrism, we still have a knowing faculty to guide us. While this sounds mystical, intelligence itself is a kind of knowing independent from what is known (knowledge and experience, etc.)...it operates far too subtly to attribute to knowledge, reason, memory or any faculty that can be collocated beside karma, or personal history.

In what sense, I wonder, does the lifestyle of the average person gear toward survival in an honest, ontologically direct way in human society today? Self-preservation, it seems, hinges upon manipulation of symbols in between human life and what upholds it; most occupations have nothing to do with survival. Symbology, then, precedes life...money and the marketed man has become so associated with life, it's hard to tease the ontologies apart, and yet such decoupling is an absolute requisite to the sincerity and authenticity of meaning. The ontologies are completely unrelated. One is survival, the other is like playing a board game. If an individual human being is mechanically dependent on others for his survival...guess what...he is literally exactly like an ant and nothing like a higher life form. Algorithms have been developed from watching the movement of ants for something like handling internet traffic...so here we have a case of algorithm mania which tends to cloud judgment on a question of whether technology is related to any kind of higher faculties or meaning, or honest perdure IF it makes us admire lower life forms that have no privacy, autonomy, or self-regulation at the individual level.

In the age of automation and algorithms, can you honestly say perdure has any bearing on the meaning of life? Haven't we long passed a stage of appropriate technology and symbolic logic as it is sincere and ontologically associated with the kind of survival where a higher organism can care fore itself, that is keep itself alive? What lasts won't be what man believes will last, he is far too egocentric and superegocentric. The collective self of man has been thoroughly blurred together with collective other. As long as this is the case, the usual definitions of status quo today simply don't apply to any discussion of the meaning of life. Unless one is okay with living an untrue life according to false ontology, entirely dependent on the human system and with no relation to anything beyond it that will outlast all human "civilization," this isn't really that moot of a topic even.

Actually, few automated beings survive with much hangover of meaning; because they are so dependent on others of their kind, a human is a baby animal, which will die if not coddled by parents. Other people, within the market society, are like the parents of a baby to a supposed mature adult. Then why not ask what the meaning of life is to a baby beyond his ability to be fed by his mother's teat? All the hard work done for symbols and numbers is the equivalent of a baby's crying for milk in terms of self-sufficiency. Unless, of course, the individual's work is taking care of himself without the mother (other people/superego mind control).

Granted, there are some professions which are far more meaningful to perdure than others: say, carpentry and advanced gardening/permaculture; something like a clerk of at a department store is purely infantile in perdure value. Isn't this an honest perspective, or am I being dishonest somehow? Think of the concept of retirement for second. Once marketed man is put out to pasture, he essentially goes into a human landfill of capitalism, the same destination of consumer goods; once the goods and dependent human are consumed, they go into landfills of retirement. He is of no more use to the market society and resembles a neonate, which can even live in an automated home with a robot that feeds him and wipes his ass.

What causes us to be dishonest within and without ourselves? What causes us to ignore what is, such as the violence we have in ourselves? Why is the sum total of "reason" for certain types obedience to authority? Why does mimesis of authority equate to reason for certain types, as authority demands copying and imitation of itself by its thralls?

Anything that can only be completed one way is authority. This is the simplest and most subliminal ghost of authority. Pursuing goals militantly and authoritatively is often pendent with anger, impulsivity, violence. Ambition is authority, too much effort is the handmaiden of it as well. Collectively, it's safe to say, the human species tries way, way too hard. But then I have no doubt I'd be considered lazy by the status quo. And I would equally rebut it and accuse the status quo of being far too hyperactive and incapable of discipline to hold still. Men of action seldom comprehend.

Durkheim had an idea of group selection, which could explain some of this. It doesn't make sense to me, as I'm a full-blooded anti-authoritarian (even within myself, authority causes stagnation in desuetude of old structures of mind); withal, authority is one of the taproots of violence, or inversely, violent people seek escape from self-regulation by obeying authority at all costs. So, maybe people that contain more violence in them, for whatever reason, follow authority.

All it takes is two people to carry on life, a man and woman. They would have a better chance of survival, with offspring, separate from the group in a lot of scenarios. There are some truly genius families I've learned...entirely free from social engineering; in other words, the smartest families are open enough to circumvent most all authority.

At any rate, this is an important topic and shouldn't sink to bottom of threads. This topic is exactly one I would've started myself.

I don't agree the Dark Triad describes a small group of people. It describes a lot of successful people in a sick society. Honestly, it has to be considered whether Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy aren't seen in many successful people. How else did they get in high places? By being kind? Right. If you don't think self-interest, manipulation of others, and having to set aside emotions to way too large of an extent isn't required for success in the transactional values of the market society, it would be naive; when the system is a reinforced zero-sums game, people are going to be crooked and unempathetic. Also, be careful of just world fallacy...the human system doesn't positively or negatively reinforce anything but behaviorism, which is at best our extrinsically motivated animal nature (i.e., no inner world, mind or consciousness). How interesting it would be if people were rewarded for being coherent inside and without internal conflict (which comes as much from environmental and social conditions as anything); and those who're ugly and poorly communicated inside would be put in the nick. What a different humans system that would be.

As to what causes murder...a combination of nature and nurture, not one or the other. The nurture side of things, culture and mores, is worthy of more consideration than intellectual laziness showing itself in blaming the individual. After all, the evolutionary mismatch of humans indicates something gone terribly wrong; metabolic syndrome, extremely inordinate work stress, retarded immunity caused by safetyism of folks living in a bubble, gambling, addictions, and so on. People in developed countries are scared to death of communicable diseases, but for some unknown reason accept cancer and heart disease as normal even though these noncommunicable diseases are the outcome of too much work stress and having to live a mechanical lifestyle (environment). There's a spike in deaths after daylight savings time (mechanical) clock changes owing to disrespect of biological clock, why aren't we talking about this killer?

If you take this one environmental killer, mechanicalized time, and ask why it kills...it is revealing. Being compelled to live in perpetual falsity might have something to do with why some people can't handle such constrained life. I.e., time is not mechanical, it is basically feedback between complex systems. Everything that transpires in human institutions does so according to a device which, in itself, obeys no external feedback (it tics away like a militant and merciless slaver), and is as such, violating homeostasis of an organism.

To say that people require more freedom than the automated world allows would be a cogent statement. It is of interest the way some are aligned with the Spirit of Conquest which is seen in so many subsystems of society. Others, who require freedom rebel against being conquered. Also, I've learned that disorder doesn't derive from lack of order, it usually comes from too much order. It is of interest, actually, the masses of people have come to equate survival with a quality and quantity of order that clearly has little to do with survival.

Not that a human doesn't need some extra mental stimulation vis a vis other animals, but to the extent where we are today (virtual reality headsets a norm for kids; funnily enough, in a way, a kid sitting there with his face on the wall is the same thing; pretty damn eerie)? Comfort and convenience and entertainment aren't in any way associated with mental health, clarity, and intrapersonal intelligence. Isn't it patent enough modern man is too overstimulated? And when overstimulated, one tends to neglect needed introspection and contemplation necessary for mental health and to know whether one is oriented and devoted on the side of truth. Evolution appears to be misunderstood a lot of the time. Evolution doesn't care about humans any more than any of the other creatures it spawned. Either humanism will learn to remove itself from the center of its own attention and take what lasts (ecological cycles don't obey man, so man has to learn to obey them) as an example of orientation and devotion, or it will commit collective suicide and succumb to evolution far sooner than necessary. It's suicide because we know what we're doing speeding up planetary cycles, yet don't care; it's like smoking five packs of cigs everyday and ignoring that it is going to kill you eventually.

I feel that being compelled to mental time travel, constantly worrying about the future, has a lot to do with ignorance of an honest appraisal of what is in ourselves and our environment. The human system has done a great job of fooling so many people it will be able to take care of them interminably, and in turn has led people to give up everything to it as though it could stave off death. I.e., if you are on the side of the reality that adapts and evolves, you're already prepping for the the inevitable downfall, since even though it may be far off, it is an indisputable aspect of truth, and if it is an indisputable regard of truth, it is failure to ignore this. And in being prepared, you won't be contributing to said downfall, you will be a part of what adapts (so actually, it isn't even prepping, it's living according to the truth of the way things are). See, humans haven't even adapted as you've been led to believe. Homeostatic feedback is what adapts...no system with externalities is ever adapting. Your organism would instantly die if it were controlled by the same system that controls socio-economic fundamentalisms of man. It's the same for ego ridden people: the stronger the ego, the more narrow-minded and neurotic they are, and the more a part of themselves is left external to the ego to return as a disguised repressed derivative. Mental health dies. The repressed derivative of the planet's mind may come volcanically and in innumerous, devastating natural disasters... Though to put it like this isn't entirely correct. The planet doesn't repress, it is never ignorant of itself, it has no externalities, it has no ego. Actually, since ego is made of instinct, it is instinct with the reins, and it is instinct which enforces planetary feedback in the form of violent derivatives in the individual who has repressed.

Our species specializes in framing everything as a problem, which it confusedly likes to call problem solving as though it were smart or virtuous (i.e., in posing death as a problem or disease, transhumanists have unwittingly admitted life is a problem). Somehow, a new problem always replaces the old one (personally, I think it's because scientists and technologists don't know when to quit, but the militant spirit of conquest is overbearing in other professions as well, like business and war). Why is this, unless of course, h. sapiens is a problem generator because it can't solve itself. It's like the difference between curiosity and wonderment... Being curious about something means you are burning for an answer, as though the existence of the mystery of it can't be or you may be injured by it. Wonderment, however, is relishing in the refreshment of mystery, like being able to see everything you see as though for the first time. Wonder beats curiosity (in increasing enlightenment) every time. More, even from an analytical perspective, wonder prevents formation of fixed notions, which tend to stymie understanding or being able to see a new facet of a subject. When people are curious about something, once the answer is found, they become close-minded, playing with an unshuffled deck.

when have we not caught the universe doing sums? — Devans99

Only people have done this. You could only ever have seen people doing sums...what the logic and math describe is not the logic and math, but something different and something greater.

Is there not a moment when all that has happened has happened and all that will happen has yet to happen? There would be no motion in such a moment, and such a moment would be the present; any and all prediction can only be done in the present. Nothing has ever not happened in the present, nothing will ever happen not in the present. If we dig up documents (bones) of a dinosaur, it can only be done in the present. Quite literally, nothing can escape the present. There is mental time travel, which some consider to be magical thinking. Perhaps we can travel in akasha through time.

But logic predates, transcends and governs the universe, so yes, the universe has to behave logically. — Devans99

Very anthropic, macranthropic, even. Then we daren't ask the question that is always fair to ask: why is there something instead of nothing? Logic, eh? If we knew the answer to this unanswerable question, maybe it would be possible to replace the concept of God with logic, maybe it could be dubbed "Godgic." This is suggestive of the belief mathematics was discovered, not invented. Where have we caught the universe doing its sums or solving equations like some sort of school boy? Is the universe a school boy?

To say that logic predates the universe is clearly more an act of poetry than logic because one of the most defining human characteristics, logic, has been projected onto the cosmos, and thus the cosmos has become a synecdoche for man and his logic.

I mean to imply that since there is no way to reason with depressive ruminations or anxious neurosis, then one must wait for the storm to pass and clean up and salvage what can be salvaged after the storm. — Wallows

Think I see what you mean. Rumination is associated with the default mode network of the brain, so is self-referential thinking, other-referential thinking, mental time travel (which I think of as magical thinking), remembering the past or imagining the future, theory of mind, whatever else... it's thought to be associated with a whole host of mental illness from autism to depression.

What is recommended to contravene the DMN? Onset of sleep and sleep not REM, sleep deprivation, psychedelic drugs, deep brain stimulation (probably TMN and direct current TMN), meditation, psychotherapy, and anti-depressants (booo).

As for anxious neurosis, it's one type of neurosis amid myriad. Psychoneurosis is the more important, or capital affect of neuroses on mental health. This is what describes how blocked instinct returns in a disguised response or symptom (derived and disguised from the material that was originally repressed or denied). So psychoneurotic blocking often leads to mania and impulsiveness..or maybe anxiousness. Which is what I think of when I think of CBT's weakness. We ought not to seek to be disguised from our own recognition. Neurosis is as bad as psychosis, that neurosis is accepted as necessary to socio-economic functioning is a big blow to mental health of modernity. It must be something is wrong with the socio-economic values of the times they cause so much neuroses and mental illness (ego is necessary to function in the market society, where ego is essentially consubstantial with psychoneurosis). Diseases that stem from psychoneurosis, and their virulence, are fairly largely underappreciated.

Interesting. What is this Wu-wei, thing? — Wallows

It could be that effort or exertion is what leads to the tightening of the posterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex of the DMN. Lessening effort may lessen the open/existing paths in the brain and make them relax to more expansive routes and create new anastamotic branchings. This ceasing to try and relinquishing the struggle of existence, the fight...is possibly analogous to wu-wei (as I think of it). In the west, we've been insinuated with a false maxim you must use effort to advance in life. Violating this false maxim and unlearning that effort is necessary to get anywhere is probably beneficial to mental health. Wu-wei is a concept from Taoism.

Every doctor, therapist, or a psychiatrist is aware that in times of crisis people are overwhelmed with feelings of dread, despair, and a whole amalgamate of negative emotions that give momentum to self-destructive thoughts about suicide, homicide, and such matters. — Wallows

Sounds like you're describing a runaway positive feedback, not a healthy and necessary, negative one. What I've taken from CBT, which doesn't seem it will ever lead to mental health (for me anyway) compared to auto-psychoanalysis is that it recommends something like canceling negative thoughts. Of course we know from the genius of Freud, that whatever is denied or repressed has a boomerang effect, and returns as repressed derivatives (which are controlled by instinct's dominations). Canceling anything that goes through your thought-feelings isn't a good idea for mental health due to the above mentioned feedbacks/feedforwards we've known about for a long time now. We have depression and anxiety for a reason, it hasn't popped out of the blue.

Now, I have learned from this experience that has happened for more than once, that patience and impulsivity are two traits that can only help in times of trial and tribulations. — Wallows

What, now? Not sure what this means.

Meaning, that reasoning is quite hopeless in the face of such feelings. Yet, is it? — Wallows

The relationship between what you are conscious of and unconscious of is a place difficult to enter with reason, and maybe it's true it isn't enough. When you feel empty inside, running away from that feeling isn't going to help because that is what is. Never run away from what is. The trick is to have a psychopomp in you, or a Hermes or a Janus that can communicate between states of consciousness. Maybe when we are more self-aware, we are less conscious of our unconscious and when we are less self-aware, the unconscious is more conscious of the consciousness. There's nowhere consciousness doesn't exist, it's only awareness that does or doesn't exist in various states of mind.

Hume is known to have said that reason is the handmaiden of the passions. Is that true in light of this cognitive distortion that at times every one of us may face? — Wallows

I've given up on passion as a meaningful source of anything good or that will advance you wholistically. Passionate people are usually impulsive, compulsive, and infantile, myself included when I used to get passionate. Now the concept of least effort has replaced passion. Wu-wei is a much healthier and more intelligent substrate of psychological well-being and integration than passion. I'd recommend giving up passion and do all that is done in the spirit of Wu-wei (least effort).

As long as GDP, the stock market, and infinite economic growth (not even possible without renewable energy..) appears necessary for survival...we are doomed. None of these things have anything to do with survival. We live in an age where people have been insinuated with an idea that life is work...working to live is a lost notion. To the extent you work to live, you are less dependent on the economic games, and you are closer to being a drop out (where dropping out may be the only solution: dropping out and working to live, to survive; to wit, not working to keep industry and capital alive having unreflectingly convinced yourself you are working to live). Somehow I feel needed change would be seen in a massive decline of the entertainment industry as well,...which indexes people are being distracted from real issues. To the extent people need entertained mirrors the extent they refuse to see what is in themselves and in the world.

If you get a diagnosis of cancer, would you change your lifestyle? This is what it's like anent the humanism's disregard for anything not human: h. sapiens appear to be a species incapable of changing its collective lifestyle when facing a cancer diagnosis; unfortunately, this means we belong to a species that does nothing but exploit and consume each other and planetary resources until everything is without elan vitale as a proper measure of order, or if it can it will move to another planet with its wrecking ball.

An individual has the ability to change and reorder his life in a way impossible to the collective horde. It is high time each of us think about doing so. There are major obstacles. Market society, for example, and the idea of sacrificing your life to a romanticism of numbers (income/profit) and mechanicalized time...surely these aren't sane maxims. Once you start working to live and not living to work (i.e., the only self-preservation if we're being intellectually honest)...you separate from this insane perpetual mechanical living, your work is related only to the projects you have to get done, and not totally controlled by a device human's invented. You stop treating people as means to an end or objects to consume, whether for your entertainment, or for the mercenary valorization of transactionalism. The prognosis doesn't look good.

One thing I'll bet the farm on: humans are more distracted and overstimulated than ever before...you can be sure not too many people are really ready to give up their willy-nilly hyperstimulations and take an honest look at the state of the world. This is maybe the most troubling aspect of what's before us. And this is right where I'd begin teasing apart what could/should be done to reverse the madness. As an anti-humanist (that is, thinking science and technology devoid of reason and idealism are going to save us), and someone without a smartphone (mark of the beast...ha), I would suggest asking if people shouldn't disconnect from each other a little and reconnect with autochthonous, telluric values as the obvious place to start convalescing. People are blinded by themselves and their systems and institutions, this is clear. The looking glass is a narcissistic one, individual to collective, and this is a big part of why the individual and collective can't stop changing in needless ways, and start changing in needed ways.

My view is that morality is evolved thought, and in that sense is a something and not a nothing, certainly more than an individual's mere opinion. I'd even argue that to some degree morality is sure as arithmetic, but the world from time to time and here and there lapses into such barbarous immorality that either humanity is at times collectively both stupid and ignorant, or morality ultimately lacks apodeictic certainty (but that has some other kind of certainty). — tim wood

Evolution is propelled by natural selection. Nature was here before us, and it will be here after us thinking animals. Certain anthropocentric selective agents pretend to be natural selection and the difference between natural selection and anthropogenic selection tends to be where I apply morality (virtue is wiser than morality, however); humanism confuses anthropgenic selection (Anthropocene) with natural selection. Evolution occurs far slower than the life span of any one species. What will have happened if thought itself no longer exists? Evolution. Evolution, then, is far more encompassing than evolved thought.

It's not about Computers getting too smart, it's about us getting dumber. — ssu

Indeed. What do you think of this: Robo-grading. Dumb or no?

Perhaps they were thinking ahead? Visionaries do that out of habit I believe. — TheMadFool

I'm skeptical of faith based ideation (viz, future oriented descriptions of progress, etc., rather than looking evenhandedly and honestly at the present state of the world: what is rather than the acting out of the manic ego ideal or introjection of superego, both occurring on a species-wide scale; the moment can't be passed through from the past to the future without loss of truth). Stagnant, habitual thoughts and beliefs are rarely related to the fugitive, writhing of truth.

Anyway, how do we know that we (humans) are NOT machines? — TheMadFool

Not to overanalyze this, the parsimonious response is that I'm a living creature, vital; a machine is unliving, dead, non vital, like a puppet with a long nose. One can project his aliveness into his favorite automobile or the internet and therein feel he relates to it as a living thing...though the truth remains it's not alive in any conceivable way. Why it is there are people who act as though they would like to be a nonliving thing is an area of great interest for me. What's wrong with being alive, anyway? Is there something wrong with being alive? Consciousness is a burden much of the time, to be sure this is the challenge we face as intelligent life (while self-limiting consciousness and information is necessary to function, to self-limit consciousness in the same way a machine must limit its inputs and outputs to function as a machine, is tantamount to instant death of consciousness in organic, intelligent life; one shouldn't seek to function anything like a machine unless he for some reason thinks there's something wrong with being alive).

Add to that the scientific consensus that we evolved by random mutation. — TheMadFool

Random: a higher order humans don't understand. What is seen isn't what actually exists, but what exists after exposed to the limitations of the questioning of a limited profession. It's perfectly sensible rejecting the word "random."

The relationship between the Central Dogma of genetics and its addendum, epigenetics carries a wealth of mystery as it pertains to evolution. Why not ask what was going on with the epigenetics of our ancestors instead of a focus on mutations or natural selection? It's hard to say what all the early organism-environment was comprehensively, of early hominids. Certainly the environmental signals they were exposed to were determinants of their genetic expression in ways wholly unlike the manner in which the polluted environment of industrial man determines how his genes are expressed.

Don't you think a conscious effort, like we humans are investing on artificial intelligence, will yield ''better'' results? — TheMadFool

It depends. There are swarms of virtue questions around the AI enterprise anent human psychology. Maybe the conscious effort isn't as conscious as it seems. Social media is causing rank psychological problems in the human species, but since most people are using this media, any unsalutary affects go unnoticed, which is why these issues are seldom discussed (once awareness reaches social approval, it tends to shut down as it arrives at average awareness, the bandwagon). It's an argumentum ad populum fallacy leading to socially patterned defects.

AI is a major authority coming on the scene...and one of the main problems with devotion to authority is that it's often associated with copying and imitation (of what is determined or controlled by the authoritative platform).

How do we know when philosophy is just justifying the status quo of whatever is considered important for society to function. — schopenhauer1

Much is socially constructed...to wit, if you must believe in the existence of something before it exists (money, say)...it is a dubious claim on the truth, a false etymological position, which leads to blank, mimetic imitation of what everyone believes without any good reason (status quo). Most of what our species collectively takes for reality, can't possibly be reality because it is based on invisible, untenable systems of rule (money as a medium of social construction) (when an individual has invisible beliefs, or idiosyncratic motivations, that no one else has, he is considered deviant or perverse; but when a group of people agree to live by an agreed upon system of unassailable beliefs, it becomes the neurotic norm). Mechanistic science and peer-review, insofar as these beliefs are utterly deterministic to the perspective of the scientists, is redolent of how the collective belief in money makes it real. Where does social agreement (status quo) fall on a spectrum of "wisdom of the crowd"......to, say Freud's or Le Bon's views on the "popular mind/crowd psychology" (social constructed reality tending to lead to mimicry and diminishing of mental powers instead of being responsible for having a fecund, original mind)?

Lately, it has become apparent to me more potent philosophy is mainly pessimistic and skeptical inasmuch as it is all too easy to fall into an intellectual cul de sac of unexamined, collective agreement (derived from mindless groupthink without any close scrutiny to the content or context of such mores). Thus, fitting in socially precludes any real philosophizing. Sociocentrism, with its irresistible gravity to distract oneself from alienation, is all too often the first step away from philosophy concerned with subjective and objective veracity as a whole ( a phenomenon rampantly increased by impersonal communication, viz, telecom). An example, take scientism: starting with the enlightenment, the majority of people, perhaps straying from truth, don't accept reality unfiltered through logic and metrology (this being the status quo up to current). If we all have the same ruler, it's impossible to miss the truth, right? Or does it become impossible for us all not to miss exactly the same aspects of truth? People are ignorant of the same facets of truth as a result. This facet swells over time.

What's logical is informed by what's illogical; what can be measured is informed by what can't be; what's impossible is the context of what's possible; the thinkable is surrounded by the unthinkable, and so on. Believing apprehensibility of the truth is limited to one side or the other of these mutualisms is to project a standardized system (of agreement) onto the truth and thereby overlook it.

If you are not choosing it over responsibilities, and it's not a financial burden, is it really bad?

My main drug in question is marijuana.

Would it be more immoral to lie to people that "it makes them crazy, rapists, and killers?" — Drek

Certain chemicals lead to agency deconstruction-reconstruction, which isn't a bad thing at all. Entheogens are like teachers with a common message of renewal and pruning the Will of slag (after having shown what is closed to the habitually other-organized sense of agency, the mode of agency which rears against apprehension of the unconscious; we always have structure agentially, yet it can get caught up in a slavish external locus of control and make us unaware of the liminality between self and other; renewal, then, is simply honest regaining of autonomy).

Said chemicals, classic psychedelics, lead one away from the addiction model at the center of the market society, consumerism, etc. If you look into the default mode network of the brain, one of the main things you'll learn is that reward seeking behavior, not limited to drug use, but including gambling, work, consumerism, eating, sex, exercise, video games, the latest technology, etc. (many other forms of addiction besides), is what leads to a lack of mindfulness, which in turn may lead to delusions and immoral acts.

As to pot, it may not be great for those who place a premium on auto-psychoanalysis through dream work. It commonly precludes lucid dreaming and memory of dreams. Smoking weed sometimes makes me feel too much like Rip Van Winkle...causing very deep, maybe too deep, sleep. For people with insomnia or parasomnias, it would be a great herb to take some form of.

The issue of drugs and the extant authoritarian, punishment-obsessed (Jehovah-style), law is a farce, anyways, it is so concerning the treatment of naturally occurring (found or discovered) substances by the law. This said, hobby chemistry used to be a freer, thus more liberating, pursuit before the war on drugs campaign retarded socio-cultural openness. You and I are schedule one seeing as our bodies are chemical laboratories. That's right, our bodies produce chemicals that have been made illegal by the intensely confounded legislative system. Cannabanoids and DMT (naturally synthesized by the human body)...make us illegal. It's the statutes, the rules, which as you can see, are often morally corrupt and unmoored in any wholistic and salubrious contextual order.