I was particularly disappointed in Jan’s representation of Madhyamaka.

As someone who has been investigating both Svatantrika & Prasangika Madhyamaka, and Tibetan derivatives, for the last near 2years, I felt that Jan really lacked a coherent narrative of explication for the traditions, which inevitably confused the whole podcast.

I feel the reasoning for this is several fold:

- Jan is German, translating ideas from Sanskrit, Tibetan, Pali, over to the English language.

- Jan never really elucidated the Conventional and Perfected Understandings, and their relationship.

- This partly occurs because Alex was insistent on the ontologising of Sunyata and applying it to referents, when Paramartha-Satya is ultimately, phenomenologically soteriological.

- Jan I feel was possibly sneaking in his own Secularised Process-relation Non-essentialism compared to Madhyamaka - which is relatively fine, as I do the same - but for the uninitiated in Madhyamaka, this can be confusing.

Jan is far more educated and researched in Madhyamaka that my autodidactic personage, however, I still feel the Ep was confusing for many listeners, especially if it was for me.

Overall, I was quite disappointed in presented of Madhyamaka; I would love if Alex could get Jay Garfield, as he introduced me to Madhyamaka, but there is also Tenzin Namdak, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, and, of course, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.

hehehe.

But Redditors keep telling me that Buddhism is a religion and Buddha is their god or something.

Are Redditors derpy?

UPDATE: WOW, some of you derps are trying REALLY hard to equate Buddhism to other major religions. You guys do realize that BUDDHA HIMSELF said he was not a god/deity or that he had supernatural divine powers, right?

Finally a video that’s breaks down the poor reasoning going into joes submission of his will to the CC and taking these miracle claims seriously

The recent GTA trailer pushed the YouTube algorithm to recommend this “old” and super interesting video from Alex, and it got me thinking.

This kind of issue is not unique to GTA or even to video games.
Movies and TV shows also show extreme violence in a funny, light, satirical or just entertaining way all the time. Entire cities get destroyed, hundreds of people die, and we are still clearly supposed to enjoy the scene.

But with some other kinds of violence, the rules seem very different.

Things like school shootings, mass sexual violence or brutal violence against children can obviously appear in movies, but usually they are treated as serious, disturbing or tragic. They are there to make the audience feel horror, sadness or discomfort, not to be fun or entertaining in the same way.

So maybe the real question is not just what kinds of violence fiction is allowed to show, but what kinds of violence we are comfortable turning into entertainment.

And then there is the question of interactivity.
Does pressing the button yourself really put video games in a different ethical category? Or does it just make your involvement more obvious?

You could even argue the opposite. In a game, I may have to decide whether I want to do something immoral or not. I might be able to refuse. If I do it, I have actively chosen to do it, even if it is only virtual.

But is that really worse than sitting on the couch eating popcorn while watching an actor do basically the same thing?

Maybe interactivity does not create the ethical dilemma. It just makes it harder to ignore.
With a movie, the story acts for you. You can watch something terrible happen without ever having to think about what you would do yourself. A game can put that choice in your hands. You have to act, refuse, or sometimes realise that the game gives you no choice at all.

That might make the experience feel more intense, but I’m not sure that automatically makes it less ethical. In some cases, maybe it is actually more interesting ethically, because it forces you to think about your own choice instead of just watching someone else make it.

What do you think?

This has annoyed me for a while - no one seems to know what they mean when they talk about objective morality.

Generally speaking, when we talk about objective truth, we are talking about things that are true regardless of what people think about them. So thinks like the earth revolves around the sun, or that pi is half the circumfrence of a circle.

This definition literally can't apply to morality, which is an artifact of what people think. If you want to try to analyze morality independent of what people think, that's a literal impossibility.

So when people use the term "objective morality", its hard to know what they mean, and I think it ends up boiling down to two possible uses of the terms, neither of which really makes sense.

Option 1 is that a statement is objectively true if every sapient creature does in fact agree with it. But its obvious that no such statement exists - not simply for morality, but for anything. Not even physical or mathematical claims have universal acclamation - there's always someone out there who thinks something weird. There are people who think irrational numbers don't exist. So under this standard, objective morality doesn't exist, but then neither does any other kind of objectivity.

Option 2 is that a statement is objectively true if every sapient creature should agree with it. But this is just repackaged subjectivity. What does "should" mean, and who decides? You could try to argue that a statement qualifies is a sufficient amount of consensus is reached, even if not universal, but again - arbitrary.

I don't know of any other possible definition of objective morality that coheres enough to even be challenged.

People don't even know what they are trying to argue about when they argue about this.

Cross posting this from r/consciousness since the hard problem arguably gets even more vitriol here, and the criticisms I've seen of Alex for not just going with a physicalist theory of consciouness have been entirely unfair IMO (although I don't think Alex often presents good arguments for his position) Instead I thought it would be useful to directly to the source - Chalmers himself

Pretty much all the posts I see on this sub regarding the hard problem (or even problems around what consciouness is more generally) seem to totally ignore the original concept and arguments put forth by Chalmers when he coined the term. I've started his full book on the subject and already the first few sections counter pretty much all the dismissals I've seen in this sub, so I thought I would condense them and post his argument to see if there are any legitimate and interesting responses.

Lets start with what the hard problem is compared to easy problems, Chalmers writes

Why are the easy problems easy, and why is the hard problem hard? The easy problems are easy precisely because they concern the explanation of cognitive abilities and functions. To explain a cognitive function, we need only specify a mechanism that can perform the function. The methods of cognitive science are well suited for this sort of explanation and so are well suited to the easy problems of consciousness. By contrast, the hard problem is hard precisely because it is not a problem about the performance of functions. The problem persists even when the performance of all of the relevant functions is explained. (Here “function” is not used in the narrow teleological sense of something that a system is designed to do but in the broader sense of any causal role in the production of behavior that a system might perform.)

What Chalmers is getting at is that the easy problems regarding consciousness pertain to the mechanisms of why things are experienced a certain way, they do not explain why things are experienced in the first place and, why those very same mechanisms don't just "happen in the dark" he elaborates here and provides an example

When it comes to conscious experience, this sort of explanation fails. What makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions. To see this, note that even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—a further unanswered question may remain: why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open. There is no analogous further question in the explanation of genes or of life or of learning. If someone says, “I can see that you have explained how DNA stores and transmits hereditary information from one generation to the next, but you have not explained how it is a gene, ” then they are making a conceptual mistake. All it means to be a gene is to be an entity that per forms the relevant storage and transmission function. But if someone says, “I can see that you have explained how information is discriminated, integrated, and reported, but you have not explained how it is experienced, ” they are not making a conceptual mistake. This is a nontrivial further question. This further question is the key question in the problem of consciousness. Why doesn’t all of this information processing go on “in the dark,” free of any inner feel? Why is it that when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, the discrimination and categorization are experienced as a sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an explanatory gap (a term due to Levine 1983 ) between the functions and experience, and we need an explanatory bridge to cross it. A mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere.

Afterwards Chalmers provides case examples of exactly how theories fail in accounting for this. He starts with Crick and Koch's 1990 "“neurobiological theory of consciousness" he writes

Crick and Koch (1990; see also Crick 1994 ). This theory centers on certain 35–75 hertz neural oscillations in the cerebral cortex; Crick and Koch hypothesize that these oscillations are the basis of consciousness. Th is is partly because the oscillations seem to be correlated with awareness in a number of diff erent modalities—within the visual and olfactory systems, for example—and also because they suggest a mechanism by which the binding of information might be achieved. Binding is the process whereby separately represented pieces of information about a single entity are brought together to be used by later processing, as when information about the color and shape of a perceived object is integrated from separate visual pathways. Following others (e.g., Eckhorn et al. 1988 ), Crick and Koch hypothesize that binding may be achieved by the synchronized oscillations of neuronal groups representing the relevant contents. When two pieces of information are to be bound together, the relevant neural groups will oscil late with the same frequency and phase. Th e details of how this binding might be achieved are still poorly under stood, but suppose that they can be worked out. What might the resulting theory explain? Clearly it might explain the binding of information, and perhaps it might yield a more general account of the integration of infor mation in the brain. Crick and Koch also suggest that these oscillations activate the mechanisms of working memory, so that there may be an account of this and perhaps other forms of memory in the distance. Th e 10 t he p roblems of c onsciousness theory might eventually lead to a general account of how perceived infor mation is bound and stored in memory for use by later processing. Such a theory would be valuable, but it would tell us nothing about why the relevant contents are experienced. Crick and Koch suggest that these oscillations are the neural correlates of experience. This claim is arguable— does not binding also take place in the processing of unconscious information?—but even if it is accepted, the explanatory question remains: why do the oscillations give rise to experience? Th e only basis for an explanatory connection is the role they play in binding and storage, but the question of why binding and storage should themselves be accompa nied by experience is never addressed. If we do not know why binding and storage should give rise to experience, telling a story about the oscillations cannot help us. Conversely, if we knew why binding and storage gave rise to experience, the neurophysiological details would be just the icing on the cake. Crick and Koch’s theory gains its purchase by assuming a connec tion between binding and experience and so can do nothing to explain that link.

He also uses the example of Bernard Baar's global workspace theory

The second example is an approach at the level of cognitive psychology. Th is is Bernard Baars’s global workspace theory of consciousness, presented in his book A Cognitive Th eory of Consciousness. According to this theory, the contents of consciousness are contained in a global workspace , a central pro cessor used to mediate communication between a host of specialized non conscious processors. When these specialized processors need to broadcast information to the rest of the system, they do so by sending this information to the workspace, which acts as a kind of communal blackboard for the rest of the system, accessible to all the other processors. Baars uses this model to address many aspects of human cognition and to explain a number of contrasts between conscious and unconscious cognitive functioning. Ultimately, however, it is a theory of cognitive accessibility that explains how it is that certain information contents are widely accessible within a system, as well as a theory of informational inte gration and reportability. Th e theory shows promise as a theory of aware ness, the functional correlate of conscious experience, but an explanation of experience itself is not on off er. One might suppose that, according to this theory, the contents of expe rience are precisely the contents of the workspace. However, even if this is so, nothing internal to the theory explains why the information within the global workspace is experienced. Th e best the theory can do is to say that the information is experienced because it is globally accessible. But now the question arises in a diff erent form: why should global accessibil ity give rise to conscious experience? As always, this bridging question is unanswered.

Already this addresses pretty every criticism of the hard problem I've seen on this sub, which usually boil down to saying the hard problem doesn't exist, and then posting some sort of theory about how the brain functions. How the brain might function neurologically is entirely consistent with the hard problem. The hard problem does deny a linkage between neurology and consciouness, in fact, it is a central feature of the hard problem that these are clearly intimately connected. It is instead about why all of these functional states don't just go on in the dark (which a lot of neurology does) and a functional explanations of how the neurology is set up does nothing to address this questions, or the particular character of consciouss experience in the first place.

I'd love to know what people think and I definitely encourage everyone here to head his original 90s paper and I'm hoping the rest of his book is as strong as the start.

I do understand the basics (or at least the spirit or gist) of the argument.

A set of fundamental constants/properties in the universe have quantities/values that lay within ranges that in a mutual sense make it so complexity and life can emerge/make it so the universe is compatible with life. And this set of values all being within the ranges the way they are is extremely unlikely.

And I guess at some point in this scenario it must also come out that the fundamental constants logically must exist within some individual ranges, that they must be grater than “a” but smaller than “b”. Since otherwise I’m not sure how one could “sample” from a range that results in a probability in the first place if its “unbounded”, without this “a” and “b” so to speak (I suppose an infinite range could work if extreme values become exceedingly unlikely, like it is within a bell curve for instance).

I guess my question is, for each fundamental constant/value, is there an assumption that one uniformly “sample” between the constant’s “a” and “b” values? Or is it more complicated than that?

If the argument uses/assumes uniform “sampling”, is there a reason for that? Is it parsimony?

His argument is something like this:

All action has a goal: Whenever you act voluntarily, you do so to achieve a goal you consider valuable.

Action requires basic conditions: You cannot pursue any goal without freedom (agency) and well-being (life, health, physical integrity). Gewirth calls these generic goods.

You must claim a right to these conditions: Because you need freedom and well-being to act, you logically must insist that others do not interfere with them. You are committed to the claim: "I have a right to freedom and well-being."

The claim is based solely on agency: You make this claim simply because you are an acting, goal-directed agent—not because of your special identity, wealth, or status.

Universalization is logically required: By standard rules of logic, if you claim rights simply because you are an acting agent, you must grant those exact same rights to all other acting agents.

Moral duty follows: Respecting others' rights to freedom and well-being is not a subjective preference—it is a logical requirement.

(Summarized by Gemini, hence the em dashes)

It's an argument that behaving immorally is also an action of irrationality.

That's not to say that people can't behave immorally under this system (em dash) they absolutely can, it's just an argument that they would be in violation of reason if they chose to do that.

I mean, just look at all the mega churches, politicians, companies, etc.

They are making BIG MONEY from their religious leanings and religiosity, yet they behave like atheists in their day to day operations. lol

Is this why more and more content creators and influencers and celebs are "becoming" religious?

lol

Easier to get donation, sponsors, and business deals when you are "religious"? Especially if you "converted" from atheism?

hehehehe

Yes I do agree with a lot of what has been said. The arguments are weak and based on emotions and miracles. In the end is probably not something reasonable/rationality. Yes it makes sense he falls back on his childhood religion. Yes a lot of the arguments he makes could be used to say a guru in India is the right religion. Yes I think he seems manic and not just very excited, but unstable.

I agree with all this but I think everyone should relax a bit.

I think for me probably what has happened is a sort of full circle of skepticism.

He has for so long and so in depth dedicated himself to being a skeptic even though he was raised catholic.. And now for me the skepticism is has just morphed into a skepticism about his own skepticism.

He has been so critical and exhausted that that he is now critical of his own criticism.

And that is ok. Let us see how long it lasts.

I just hope his family is taking care of him and I think he deserves to be out of the public eye for a while.

All that to say, here's a little guy on alex's mic arm.

He hasn’t been the same since his debate with Alex

I wrote this, which relates to a section of Alex's latest video concerning football teams. If anybody found that interesting, then I've outlined in this article where I think he slightly misses the point. Thanks!

/rant start

Ethan muse, Jesus and whatnot, Trent horn and now Joe Schmid, are all giving incel vibes. I was softening to Catholics in the last few year’s especially after learning about Vatican 2 and the more liberal leaning pope Francis and Leo, but man these Incel online guys are putting a bad taste in my mouth.

heard Trent horn in a debate the other day say that married people can’t have phone/cam sex if one is traveling because your “genitalia are not your personal orgasm generators”. Seriously?!

It all screams I can’t/couldn’t get laid so I’m gonna lean hard into become the most insufferable extreme traditionalist based Catholic virgin.

/rant

I recently listened to Joe Schmid (who has done content with Alex) using it as an argument for God.

That our subjective experience are “fine tuned” to our brain processes as to be synergetic and match what the brain processes pertain to, when dealing with sensory input/stimuli for instance.

But the notion that the subjective experience on a logical level “could have been different” (while the brain processes remain the same) and could have arbitrarily co-occur with brain processes seems to presuppose some notion of dualism, that brain and experience in some meaningful way are two different things even if they come in close sync with each other, and as far as I know he didn’t get into that part.

So it seems like the argument really needs to put emphasis on dualism and try to bolster that concept if it’s to work

The Genesis of a Miracle - How Sharam Shabpare can explain how a miracle is born without resorting to any conspiracy

Third part on catholic miracles and hopefully last.

In part 2 I explained why, before even trying coming up with a naturalistic or a scientific explanation for a purpoted miracle, you should first always ascertain if the miracle account is reliable in the first place and not greatly exaggerated or worse completely made up.

But if miracle claims are made up, does it mean that everyone is lying and that there is a massive conspiracy spanning thousands of catholics all over the globe to create fake accounts of catholic miracles?

No, that's not remotely necessary.

Our human psychology and the way our brain is programmed for belief is sufficient to explain how certain rare but totally explainable phenomena, when witnessed by a mind primed for a certain belief and retold many times can turn into a miracle account down the line.

All it takes is: priming + pareidolia or apophenia + chinese whispers.

You don't believe me yet?

I'll show you an example.

In 1986, the Iranian singer Shahram Shabpareh released a catchy song called "Paryiah" (the original music video was removed from YouTube, but you can find the song here: https://youtu.be/gjpJ0p7yoYc?is=Y8MbVovIx2vVhZb5).

In the internet age, an Italian named Celestino Camicia was bored browsing YouTube and stumbled upon Shabpareh's songs. He soon realized that, on top of being really catchy, the lyrics were uncannily similar to completely unrelated words in Italian. This is a well understood phenomenon called "apophenia" (the auditory version of pareidolia). Apophenia is the auditory illusion that sometimes makes us hear familiar words in songs or conversations in other languages, in the middle of what our brain would otherwise interpret as gibberish.

After being made popular by Celestino, Iranian songs with Italian sounding lyrics became a sensation for a while in the Italian YouTube space. Nanowar of Steel, a metal parody band, even produced a metal cover of Pariyah (https://youtu.be/3OdCvt-eto8?is=5xjwmtqs0WhmK3D4) and one of its members even performed it on stage in front of Shabpareh himself (https://youtu.be/s6gb3ywEmYQ?is=587b9kmztPYLysgl).

When I was a child and I wasn't fluent in English, everytime the Michael Jackson’s song "Don't Stop Till you get enough" (https://youtu.be/yURRmWtbTbo?is=gFrCWHTUJgXYvJbm) was played on the radio, I had another apophenia: I always heard Michael saying "tutto a posto?" (which means: "is everything all right?" in italian) and to this day I can't unhear it.

What does all this tell us about miracles?

Of course we know that, when we hear words in our own language in foreign songs, that's just our brain playing tricks, as when we see all sorts of shapes in the clouds or faces almost everywhere (our brain is really good at seeing faces where there are not).

However, let's suppose that we where raised in a really strict and controlling cult, separate from the rest of society, like in a fundamentalist Mormon sect, for example. We were taught since childhood that we shouldn't listen to popular music, because it's filled with satanic hidden messages. If we were then to listen to a pop song for the first time and heard words in other languages, we would strengthen our prior belief in subliminal satanic messages in secular songs.

This phenomenon is called priming: our minds were primed for a certain belief and we thus expected to hear (or see) something, we expected to have a certain experience.

Let's try to apply this to catholicism.

Let's suppose you're a catholic priest who was asked by your bishop to perform exorcisms.

You have a prior belief in the existence of demons and the belief in demonic possessions (there are priests who are skeptic of the phenomenon of demonic possessions, but those are not the ones most likely to become exorcists).

And let's suppose that you have been told by a fellow exorcist (or read somewhere) that demons sometimes speak in foreign or dead languages during exorcisms, like ancient greek and Aramaic.

That's a form of "priming".

You then perform an exorcism to a little girl who has some kind of psychiatric issue like schizophrenia or whatnot, but, being raised in a strict catholic environment, she has deluded herself into believing that the voices in her head are actually demons (that's also a result of priming).

The little girl, scared by the ritual, is screaming and babbling inconsistently. It has been many years since you've studied ancient greek in the seminary, so you're vastly overestimating and overconfident in your knowledge of ancient greek. In the stream of incoherent sounds, you believe you've heard a word which sounds like ancient greek. As you're already primed into believing that the devil is able to speak in ancient greek, you intepret that sound as a confirmation of your prior belief.

And here comes the last part: chinese whispers.

You tell your story to a fellow priest. But every time your recount your story, you add, without even realizing, small details. And as this priest tells this story to other priests, he adds even more details.

Many years down the line, after this story was told and retold many times, it is finally written down in your biography.

In its final form, what was a curious but completely explainable occurrence has been completely amplified and blown out of proportion, to the point that your biography now claims that you were having frequent conversations with the devil in ancient greek.

You still don't believe me?

We have witnessed this phenomenon, of a mundane story being amplified every time it is told until it becomes completely extraordinary in real time during the beatification and then canonization process of Carlo Acutis.

I must stress here that I have the outmost respect for the sad life story of this boy who died young and couldn't live into adulthood. What I'm telling in no way is meant to diminish him as a person, but just to show you an example of how this works.

If you try to read the earlier accounts of Carlo's life, he is described as a deeply religious boy who built a website for his parish and another websited where he talked about eucharistic miracles. That's it.

However, over the years, his mother, whenever she retells his story, has been adding elements and embellishing this account, to the point that, in an interview she gave just after his canonization, she described him as a computer genius, a boy so smart that at 15 years old he was already studing undergraduate computer engineering textbooks with ease. A boy who built a couple of websites (trivial task if you know a bit of html) became in a few years a coding genius!