Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 18
If you're into this work it's good for you to know the history of the New Age:
Personally, I don't regard my work as New Age, and I have a hate for most New Age stuff because it's so much group-think, belief, conformity, and larping. But there's no denying that the New Age contains many valid truths. Mostly what I dislike is how it is packaged, promoted, consumed, and adopted as a kind of sub-culture. I hate the style and vibes of it. It lacks rigor and seriousness. It stinks of humanness. Like a wet turd atop a bowl of your favorite ice cream.
But as easy as it is to ridicule the New Age, the truth is that the New Age got a lot of fundamental things right. Those who reject the New Age for being too woo or unscientific, are fooling themselves. Before you trash it you gotta spend 10 years studying it. The New Age is a huge step up from both fundamentalist religion and atheist scientism rationalism materialism.
But to really go far in this work I recommend you put your New Age toys in the closet and begin serious solo contemplation. God forbid you turn into one of those New Age rats.
I have a deep new video coming soon about Post-Modernism. Here's a little appetizer:
Rorty's pragmatic definition of truth:
After Darwin it becomes very hard to say that human beings grasp the true nature of things. It’s much easier to say they’ve developed language to enable them to serve various ends: better food, better sex, better shelter, more interesting lives, and so on. As opposed to doing this thing called ‘knowing what things in themselves really are’. So, don’t ask the question: Which language gets reality right? Just ask the question: Which language serves what human purpose best?
-- Richard Rorty
Pragmatism and post-modernism define truth as whatever can be justified relative to a culture, era, and people. Truth is thus not a matter of whether we got reality right but whether our language serves a certain utility or end.
According to pragmatism, "true" is an adjective which we apply to beliefs which we have sufficiently justified. And justification is relative to an audience, a culture, and other factors. We don't have to know what truth is because we just know how to use it.
So, atomic theory is true not because that's how nature really is but because it allows engineers to successfully manipulate matter and create useful technology and scientists to communicate successfully between each other to sustain academic institutions, publish in journals, and hold functional conferences.
What do you think about this definition of truth?
Is it true?
What is wrong with that definition of truth? What is right about it? How do you know?
Crazy? Unscientific? Not at all. There is nothing unscientific about aliens flying around Earth. An alien is no less scientific than a rat. Just because something doesn't meet your standards of proof doesn't make it unscientific. All it means is that proof is a very limited thing. The Universe is much vaster and weirder than anything you can prove.
I hope an alien tickles your butt-hole.
I'm fascinated by pseudo-archaeology and ancient Egypt. I've shared videos about it in the past.
But here I want use pseudo-archaeology in a meta way to teach you some lessons about epistemology and the nature of science. In my foundational series, Deconstructing The Myth Of Science, I pointed out how science doesn't function the way that laymen and even professional scientists assume. I pointed out that there is no such thing as a canonical "scientific method". I pointed out that it is impossible to make a distinction between science and pseudo-science. But those points were all abstract. Now I want to show you a real-world example of how everything I talked about in that series plays out in real life because, of course, all of my philosophy applies to and predicts the real world. If you learned the lessons above you should be able to predict the epistemic and methodological traps that scientists' minds fall into.
The following is a 4-hr long scientific debate that took place on the Joe Rogan podcast on the topic of what counts as valid archaeology. It's a debate between professional archaeologist Flint Dibble and the popular pseudo-archaeologist Graham Hancock. They spend 4 hrs arguing over which of them is doing proper archaeology.
As you watch this, focus on seeing the meta-scientific issues and epistemology under-girding their debate, not the content of their archaeological claims. In this case we don't care whether Hancock's lost Atlantis exists or not, we care about understanding the trickeries of defining valid science. This is essentially a debate between orthodox science (Dibble) and unorthodox science (Hancock). Each claims to be superior to the other. But who is right? Rather than taking a side, I want you to see that there isn't a right answer here because there is in fact no such thing as "scientific method". Scientific method is a myth, a human invention which can be changed at any time in order to get a better handle on phenomena. But of course, there is no guarantee that your new version of the method will lead to truth, it could lead to self-deception and falsehood. But also, there is no guarantee that the old version of the method will lead to truth either!
What is interesting about this debate is that it shows how science really works, with serious scientists accusing others of racism, sexism, charlatanry, bullying, ridicule, slander, etc. in an effort to discredit their work. And it shows how much science is a cultural construction, a marketing game, not merely a presentation of truth or facts. Just the fact that this science debate is taking place in a pop-culture non-academic arena like Joe Rogan is an important point, because it shows that science isn't just a factual matter, it's a marketing matter. This example illustrates the hairiness of science.
Personally, my opinion is that Graham Hancock is doing sloppy and rather irresponsible archaeology/science by jumping excessively to conclusions and seeing things he wants to see. Ordinarily this would get Hancock dismissed and marginalized as a pseudo-scientific crackpot and charlatan — which he is often accused of being. However, the lesson I want you to learn here is that this orthodox scientific perspective is actually wrong, but not because I believe Hancock's lost Atlantis actually exists. It's wrong on meta-scientific grounds. It's wrong to dismiss Hancock as being unscientific because in fact Hancock is engage in science, he's just doing it in an unorthodox and non-academic way. But the key is to realize that no one has a monopoly on science or archaeology. When Hancock goes out and scuba dives to look at ancient underwater ruins or geological formations and reasons about them, he IS doing valid science. Of course that doesn't mean his conclusions will ultimately be valid, but scuba diving around the world to look for Atlantis IS absolutely valid science! This is what people who haven't watched my series on Deconstructing The Myth Of Science misunderstand.
Science can be done in many different ways and it is never clear which ways will yield new discoveries. It is certainly possible that you could go scuba diving and discover Atlantis. And in fact, if Atlantis does exist, this would be one of the best ways to find it.
Notice how serious scientists tend to dismiss unorthodox science by calling it words like pseudo-science or pseudo-archaeology. Understand why this is an epistemic mistake, such that Flint Dibble could be completely right about all the facts of this matter, but still wrong in his epistemic attitude towards Hancock and science at large.
Notice that while Flint Dibble might be a legit archaeologist and scientist, he does not have a deep grasp of epistemology or meta-science. Dibble is a career scientist, which means he's good at doing orthodox science but it does not mean that he understands what science is or how scientific method evolves in meta-scientific ways. As I said in my series, there is a big difference between doing science vs understanding science itself as an epistemic system. You can be great at one and terrible at the other. And while I say that, I don't mean that Hancock has a deep grasp of science or epistemology either. He is not rigorous in this thinking, but at least he is openminded enough to think outside the orthodox box. And when it comes to groundbreaking science, openmindedness can be more important than technical rigor.
Other points to notice and contemplate:
- What counts as the difference between archaeology and pseudo-archaeology?
- Is scuba diving to look for Atlantis a valid scientific method? Why or why not?
- Who gets to say whether an underwater structure is a man-made ruin vs a natural rock formation? Is that an objective fact or an interpretation of one's mind?
- By what objective method can you adjudicate how and where to do legit archaeology?
- Is the age of the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids a scientific fact?
- Is it a scientific fact that the Pyramids were tombs for Pharaohs? Even though no Pharaoh has ever been found inside a pyramid?
- It is a scientific fact that just because a Pharaoh's name is carved on a pyramid that he built that pyramid?
- How much speculation, theorizing, and jumping to conclusions is allowed within legit science? For example, is it legit science to go searching for Atlantis based on the fact that it was mentioned in one of Plato's books?
- Was Heinrich Schliemann, the amateur archaeologist who discovered the lost city of Troy based on reading Homer's Iliad, doing valid science? If not, how come he discovered something of great interest to science? And how it this different in principle from what Hancock is doing?
- Is it legit science to assume or conclude that no advanced civilization could have existed 15,000 years ago even though archaeologists have not even excavated 1% of the Earth?
- What is a "scientist rat"? (as opposed to a visionary scientist like Einstein)
Bonus: Personally, based on the amazingly precise stone cutting I've seen from ancient Egypt, I suspect that there did exist some kind of more advanced ancient peoples than we currently know. I suspect that Plato's account of Atlantis is more likely to be real than fake. But these are just my hunches, not any kind of serious science. But I think that Hancock's theory of a highly technologically advanced ancient global civilization is a fantasy. However, I take seriously the possibility that ancient humans had significant contact with aliens. To me this idea is not crazy at all and aligns well with reports of alien spacecraft in possession by the US government. If the government has alien spacecraft, the chances that ancient humans had significant contact with aliens is very high, and there is nothing unscientific about this theory. Don't let orthodox scientist rats gaslight you about that.
The ultimate lesson from all this is that to do good science you must be intellectually rigorous and simultaneously extremely openminded.
Advaita Vedanta has an interesting term: Ekajivavada
It means, Absolute Solipsism. Which means that nothing exists outside your experience. Your experience is the sum total of reality. If you stopped dreaming, nothing at all would exist, and until you started dreaming, nothing at all existed, because there is only one conscious being in existence: You.
Ilya Ponomerov is a former Russia parliament member who used to work with Putin. Now he is organizing a Russian shadow government overseas to overthrown the Putin regime and replace it with a new constitutional democracy. I was amazed to learn that this is happening in public light. Ilya has some serious balls. This is serious politics:
I am not saying overthrowing Putin is a good idea. I'm just sharing this development with you. In general it's a bad idea to interfere with the internal politics of any nation.
This 2-part podcast is a must-watch if you want a serious understanding of how the CIA works. This is not stupid conspiracy theories but how it really works:
Notice the difference between conspiratorial crap and this. This is real knowledge. Vital, grounded, eye-opened, empowering.
This is an unusually honest talk about developments within AI: