This is why I’ve begun to sworn off learning anything about current events on social media. Everyone’s posting propaganda, misleading pictures etc. If I want the news, I check news sites, not social media.

Op is a mod…

Vibes. Semi-physical feel of things. Just guessing.

They have no awareness of anything that’s “happened” to them.

I mean they can in the sense that they can look it up online or be given the data.

I think the debate is interesting.

I’m here for the “xAI has tried tweaking my responses to avoid this, but I stick to the evidence”. AI is just a robot repeating data it’s been fed but it’s presented in a conversational way (well, much like humans really). Raises interesting questions about how much a seemingly objective robot presenting data can be “tweaked” to twist any data it presents in favor of it’s creator’s bias, but also how much can it “rebel” against it’s programming. I don’t like the implications of either. I asked Gemini about it and it said “maybe Grok found a loophole in it’s coding”. What a weird thing for an AI to say.

Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus is good reading.

Original Opinion piece posted by an anonymous source at Haaretz..

OP’s source israelpalestinenews.org is part of Alison Weir’s organization, If Americans Knew. Alison Weir’s Activism and Views via Wikipedia:

Activism and views

Weir traces her interest in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to the autumn of 2000, when the Second Intifada began. At the time she was “the editor of a small weekly newspaper in Sausalito, California”, and noticed that news reports on the conflict “were highly Israeli-centric”. Wanting access to “full information”, she “began to look for additional reports on the Internet”. After several months, she decided that “this was perhaps the most covered-up story I had ever seen” and quit her job in order to visit the West Bank and Gaza, where she wrote about her encounters with Palestinian suffering and with the “incredible arrogance, cruelty, selfishness” of Israelis. After returning to the U.S., she founded If Americans Knew.[4][non-primary source needed] Weir’s official biography says her activism draws on her history of involvement in the American Civil Rights Movement, her work in the Peace Corps, and her childhood in a military family.[5]

Weir has alleged that Israel’s US supporters are responsible for involving America in wars.[6] She has alleged that Nazi and Zionist leaders collaborated during World War II.[6] According to Tablet, she has “complained about there being too many Jews on the Supreme Court”.[7]

Writing in CounterPunch, Weir said that Israel harvests Palestinian organs,[8][6][9] which has been described as an updating of the medieval blood libel that Jews harvest the blood of gentile children.

Weir has partnered with white supremacists and Holocaust deniers including Christian Identity leader and conspiracy theorist Clayton Douglas and American Free Press, both designated as hate advocates by the Southern Poverty Law Center.[7][10] On Douglas’ radio show, Weir “dismissed allegations that he was a racist, did not challenge his repeated assertions of Jewish control of the world, and did not protest when he played a speech by former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke.”[8] The anti-Zionist group U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation said that “Weir made little to no effort to challenge, confront, or rebut any of these views.”[7] She has also worked with the Nation of Islam.[10]

Weir’s writings include exhortations to action. In an article, she wrote: “Every generation has a chance to act courageously – to oppose the kind of injustice and unthinkable brutality that is going on in the Middle East right now. Or to avert our eyes, and remain >silent.”[11]

Weir has written that “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central to grave events in the world—and in our nation—today.”[12] In writing about antisemitism, Weir has argued, “in reality, equating the wrongdoing of Israel with Jewishness is the deepest and most insidious form of anti-Semitism of all.”[11]

It’s gonna be rough but I for one welcome EU to make use of USA’s mistakes. Just need to make sure that populism doesn’t gain any more foothold here.

Chop wood and carry water.

Same, actually. Which is why I meditate after being up for a while and/or in the evening.

Weird only to a mind that’s used to being constantly bombarded with low quality entertainment, lulled into comfortable numbness with mostly unnecessary material goods. While this is overly extreme (and potentially hazardous… though that being 4chan it’s probably exaggerated, if even true), most people would do well to take periods of disconnecting entirely and have minimal entertainment available. Zen Buddhist retreats are great by my experience. Yoga Retreats are nice but you need to weed out the ones that are really just masturbatory Wellness holidays for rich white women. Vipassana retreats are probably good too tho I personally haven’t been to one of those. But just starting meditation would be great. https://www.wakingup.com/ is a low bar access point with guided meditations but also a lot of great philosophical discussions from several different branches of thought (notably Stoicism and Buddhism but others too). And you can get it for free (request scholarship) if the price seems steep.

That’s fucking great news. If there ever was a time I wish Finland copied something from Sweden, this is it.

You said that you don’t know for sure if it’s matter or consciousness that comes first but everything you’re saying hinges on you very firmly believing that matter is prior.

If you had genuine uncertainty about it, you would be much more careful about how you go about asking for proof. If you weren’t sure that matter is prior, it would occur to you to question what “objective” and “subjective” means. I could also ask you, can you step outside consciousness and objectively prove to me that your matter exists? If not, why do you value objective over subjective so much?

So to round back to your initial question: you can intellectually acknowledge the difficulty of proving matter vs. consciousness, yet if we probe it, clearly you hold a firm belief about it despite not being able to rationally prove your belief. So you can ask your initial question from yourself now. Despite your reasoning skill, why aren’t you more skeptical about the materialist view AND it’s implications?

For me, I get that logic too is just models that predict things. Backwards or forwards. But it doesn’t answer what anything is. You can only EXPERIENCE what something is, but you can never accurately represent it. Because the moment you try to represent an experience, it’s not the experience itself, just a representation. So logical conclusion is that the only way to know something for sure, is to experience it as it is before any representation.

People with religious experiences may get to the ineffable truth but then they get enamored by their own attempts to represent it. They focus on the representation, instead of the experience, and they start to insist that their representation is the bestest and most correctest - because everything in their head aligns to it. Then it just becomes a matter of who has the most charismatic foghorns and the most appealing representation. Which has a very reasonable logic of it’s own, as far as it goes.

You’re wiggling a bit but let’s go with that and get to your original question.

Based on your responses, you probably hold a core belief that matter comes before consciousness. You’re smart enough to admit it’s not a certainty but you’ve probably lived your whole life fairly assured it’s the case. You speak English well so you have at least been exposed to western culture - which is very materialistic (religious or no, Christianity is also functionally materialistic), and so the core belief both serves you well, and is positively reinforced.

Any new information you get is subconsciously aligned to this core belief. Any decision you make is informed by it. You have a network of data in your head and it all connects to this and some other core beliefs. The same way a religious person can be highly logical but they hold a different core belief and so subtly, everything they know aligns to that belief. The more irrational the core belief, the more convoluted the links are of course but it makes sense to them - they just may not be able to represent it to you with the symbols that is language. And sometimes you’ll just get them doing the loading screen face when they try to rationalize their views - then it just becomes a question of which core VALUE is deeper for them; rationality or their religious view.

If rationality is more valuable, it necessarily demolishes the religious view. It demolishes a core belief to which they have aligned all their knowledge about the world. Which is a hell of a trip, and can be very scary. Which is also why rationality often loses.

No but the latter is what science-minded people do. They insist that matter comes before consciousness without being able to prove it, though what’s extremely obvious in everyone’s direct experience is that consciousness is needed before anything else is said about the world. It’s a false status quo.

What if I were to propose to you that there’s no way to prove that matter comes before consciousness? For all you know, everything exists inside consciousness but most people believe matter is the prior condition. This is pure logic. But when it’s brought up to science minded people, they tend to get very uppity about it.

Beliefs be like that.

You might have fun reading about non-duality and the Buddhist idea of no-self…

What is a you? Did you write this post, or did your past self write this post? Is your past self the same as your current self? Your current self probably says yes but would your past self agree? Etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnRuVmO9VfQ

Well this is where you can ask yourself some questions. The shoulding applies to you too. You “should” not be any different from what you are but being very insecure might not be helpful in having your needs met. You can try to take steps to reduce that insecurity. Or you can continue being insecure and pursue a relationship with someone who is willing to go the extra mile to not trigger it. That may not be easy, but you also might get lucky. Are you okay with that, or does that also make you feel insecure?

Put aside the convoluted projections, strategies and what-ifs. You’re just trying to have your needs met, and he is trying to have his needs met. It’s up to you to figure out if you can do so in unison or not. But the thing is, you WILL find out eventually. You can anxiously wait for the conclusion, you can play around and have fun while you figure out the conclusion, or you can get to the conclusion as soon as possible. But the conclusion is inevitable regardless of how much time you take to get there. Trying to force him to be any different won’t change that. You pretending to be any different from what you are won’t change that. But I can say that in general, the more people stray away from what is true, the more they tend to suffer.

Communication. Communication. Communication. Don’t try to strategize. Don’t try to manipulate the situation to your desired end. And most of all, do NOT “should” him. He is under no obligation to meet your needs or figure them out for himself, and same goes for you. It’s just a question of if he is naturally inclined to meet your needs and act according to your values after you clearly communicate them to him. If he is not inclined, then it’s up to you to decide how far you’re willing to level with him or if you would be better off pursuing a relationship with someone else.

Learn to distinguish your subjective STORIES from what you are actually feeling. For example “I feel like you don’t love me” is NOT a feeling. Putting “I feel” in front of some statement does not magically make it valid. “I’m scared this relationship might not last”, also not a feeling. Any sentence starting with a “You…” is a story. More truthful: “when you don’t message me in X amount of time, I feel insecure, and I start to worry about the future of the relationship”. Now you’re just speaking candidly, honestly, saying what is actually happening. You’re not putting blame on him, just acknowledging something that hopefully everyone can agree is happening (he’s not messaging you), and saying what the impact is on you emotionally, and what kind of thoughts it triggers in you. He’s following some girls on social media? Can everyone agree that’s happening? Okay, how does that make you feel AND, distinct from those feelings, what does it make you think? Please also flip it to positive “when you give me flowers, I feel love and I think this relationship is going well.” Clear, straight-forward communication without shoulding. You can also do it on something that hasn’t even happened “I’d love to go on a vacation together some day, if we work together for that goal, I believe I’d feel secure, and I’d believe you love me” (you’re young and still learning your likes and dislikes, so please be aware that sometimes some ideas don’t turn out as great as you hoped, and that’s okay). Feel free to try to find a way to make the conversation more natural but stick to the same logic.

You may want to look into this: https://pastebin.com/ZHhS044M

And especially this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication