It’s not really worth conversing with that one - except if you agree with him and you want reassurance and a sense of belonging to a tribe. Give it a go though if you want to try it out for yourself. Funnily enough, if I’m a broken computer, he’s a broken record - the chip I’ve put on his shoulder from demolishing him constantly for about a year really took a toll on him, he still can’t shut up about me
I would take exception to common sense winning every time. That’s no slight to common sense - there is a ruthless society-wide refinement that goes into forming it, but this is also its weakness. Its whole point is to homogenise into a simple, singular, mediocre “common” sense for common people. It’s adverse to new creative thinking, which you might call rare sense. I’m well aware that I’m furthering a worldview of rare sense that flies in the face of common sense in many ways, but the fact that it solves so many traditionally problematic philosophical conundrums in a relatively simple way makes it really promising in my opinion - and absolutely worth exploring.
It’s an original philosophy that I came up with many years ago, which I dubbed “Experientialism”.
And I wouldn’t say I am incredulous, because I am able to believe in identity - as I prove through my use of it in communication and casual social interaction (I would be seen as extremely weird to common people if I didn’t conform to such basic linguistic traditions in everyday conversation!) I have just adopted far more rigorous standards of knowledge than usual, which identity does not pass, and so using these standards it can no longer be said to be “true”. However I think I can say differently about you and others, who won’t/can’t believe the consequences of adopting standards of knowledge as rigorous as I am using. To borrow your analogy, I’m not walking around the cliffs, I am walking on what you thought was over the edge, but actually isn’t.
Sure, that seems fine.
I can see now that you’ve been using the word “contradiction” in the layman way - where it is acceptable to say things like “your words contradict your actions”. I’ve been using the technical way this whole time - the one that is applicable to logic. Sure, in layman’s terms my words “contradict” my actions. But there is no logical contradiction there if using the term as it is used in logic.
It’s funny to me, to see people reacting so negatively to someone such as me who knows the truth but acts differently just to be able to operate normally with regular people. I have no bad faith or cognitive dissonance because I understand and accept what I’m doing perfectly.
Regular people make a virtue out of acting in accordance with what you say/think - on one hand - but on the other hand they all believe their own narratives. Consider the modern western attitude towards religion: none of these people believe the stories are actually true anymore, but they see the wisdom in them and act accordingly. That is to say: they don’t think or say the stories are true, they don’t believe in them, but they believe in acting according to them - which is what I’m being accused of like it’s a negative thing.
All narratives are merely a conduit - a medium to translate meaning. They’re all removed from reality and put into the form of a story, and there’s no need whatsoever to believe in the story or think/say it’s true, whilst also living by it. People already do it all the time. It’s only the religious nuts who turn this on its head by insisting the stories are 100% true, to justify the fact that they live by them, and to make sure their actions match what they believe is true.
You have zero access to the consciousness that others seem to have, other than taking their word for it, intuiting through empathy using your mirror neurons, and generally using your imagination based on your own consciousness. You create this narrative that is “their identity”, but the thing is you do the exact same thing for yourself. Common experience such as what you learn to be “your hands”, “your legs”, “your reflection”, “your sense of balance and coordination” etc. reinforce themselves through repeated exposure to form this shopping basket that comes to form this idea of “identity” if enough of these things are in the basket at any one time. Lose enough of these things, or change them, and people say “you’ve changed”, or “you’re not you anymore”.
I’m not wrong here, and this is all perfectly consistent with my own philosophy, Determinism and the arguments I’m making here. Understand and seriously consider what I’m saying here long enough and you might even come to realise it solves a lot of problems - simply by differentiating between truth and utility.
You keep going on about genius, well this is what it looks like right here.
I’m far away from any corner you think you ever put me in - we’ve only been following one line of reasoning: the one I found most interesting to discuss. Even if you decided you weren’t interested in truth and wanted to operate from utility and then revisit your initial argument, I still have my 3 main arguments against Free Will that nobody’s even attempted to get around:
- Possibility is not actuality: the feeling that you could have chosen differently doesn’t make it an actual choice. Only actually choosing makes something actually possible.
- The mind-body problem. Not a problem in the sense that it could have a solution, but a problem in the sense that it’s an unavoidable obstacle to any degree of Free Will at all.
- How can you be influenced by circumstance, in order to have something to make a decision about, without being influenced by circumstance, in order for your decision to be free from said influence? Free or Will? Not both.
I find my “View of Life” is just “Is” but I wouldn’t say I’m “Enlightened” in any “spiritual” sense that one might associate with things like Eastern religion or meditation etc. I don’t meditate and I am averse to anything religious, I’ve just realised life just “Is” and this is how I think of it, simply through thinking philosophically so unremittingly for so long. My emotional state isn’t “Ineffable”, but the fundamental concept of Experientialism that is “Continuous Experience” is ineffable. I don’t really have an emotional state, someone I worked with once mistook me for the happiest person they’ve ever met, but another colleague corrected it to more like “content” - I don’t have any of this “Energetic Frequency”, I just “am” - but not even that. Not needing an ego, as is consistent with Experientialism and Determinism, is a significant ingredient of getting to where I have. I’ve not tried to get anywhere, I just ended up here. From what little I know of what I think is Buddhism, my way is consistent with not needing attachment. “Neutral” seems wrong, I find life neither satisfactory nor unsatisfactory - all of the other views of life don’t apply to me. I have my weaknesses that drop me a few tiers in the rare occasion that I am confronted with them, sure. As has been pointed out, it’s a fun schematic to explore, but not really as discrete as it is laid out to be: another example of “Discrete Experience” distorting Continuous Experience for the sake of utility over truth.