As a child, I spelt the word differently. Then I moved to England and started intentionally spelling it the British way. I still live in Britain so I don't want to change that.

If I now decide to move to the US, I might decide to start spelling it the American way, and if I put in a little effort to change that habit I think I would be able to achieve that.

Personality, behaviour, habits etc... are not static. We're constantly shaped by our experiences in life. That includes- but is not limited to- the experiences we have early in life. But that doesn't say anything about our ability to change behaviour later in life.

Nobody knows reality. There is nothing to ignore. You just think you know something

Not to get all Foucauldian or anything, but I wonder how our cultural understanding of the presumptive answer to this question (matter comes first) is influenced by power. Seems like we’re mostly English-speaking here, most of us probably from the US or another European country, or at least one that has reaped the benefits of a global capitalist order built on colonialism and imperialism. Undoubtedly, the people who have maintained power in our world get a bigger say in knowledge production and have since knowledge was produced (person who killed someone else gets to produce knowledge, the killed person does not). It makes sense that people who survive and thrive in power would claim that the material world comes first because the belief and articulation of a consciousness-first world would leave more open-ended ethical questions that one would be keen to answer.

How one came to not have an “all in” mentality or pattern of behavior in response to their own thoughts and feelings is very relevant to this topic. Self-conditioning a new pattern of behavior in response to stimuli and then practicing it is how people can gain or lose mentalities.

First of all, this makes my mind hurt a little...!

But then come thoughts of destiny, am I/was I destined to be who I am?

Or the old science fiction time travel premise of being the "same person" but in a different time and place.

I also think about these things when I vacation. I ponder what it would be like if I had grown up in this place. Granted, I am typically in a pleasant location. I rarely have these thoughts when in the "bad part of town" :)

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I don't ignore reality and I still believe in an afterlife 🤷‍♀️

yeah exactly and this good action might still be bad for you because you have another commitment.

for many people saying yes is a very tempting thing

It primarily depends on preexisting patterns of thought.

Dang you're totally right... I guess only my last sentence there is the point left to make

>Our lives and behaviour as adults are significantly different to when we were children.

One can see by the "u" in your 'behavior' (😎) an automatic indicator that how one is raised influences choices later in life.

Seconded

Fascinating considering my mind is about as fragmented as it gets yet I never give into temptation. I've always been very disciplined and very stubborn.

That framing makes it sound like the truth is out there, and the razor points at it. But rather, reality can be modeled by many combination of logical statements—and we use the razor to select one we call the true one.

Truth is a consequence of us deciding on a set of unfalsified "empirical statements" arranged in a certain way, and one of our requirements is simplicity

What do you mean by "matter became alive"? What is alive? Where does our mental life live? The "big problem of consciousness" is real and unsolved. We do not know where consciousness comes from but to suggest that it is nothing and comes from nowhere isn't that helpful.

edit: also, semantically, everything in the universe, is the universe

I always feel it isn't quite right to say that Newtonian physics is wrong.

Yes it's true that it is a case within the more general theory; but, in a way, you can always say this is likely true of even the new wider case theory. You will never be able to say you are sure there aren't exceptions, new cases, wider more general laws, than the ones we arrive at through scientific method. It is a baseline assumption of science that such is the case at all times.

And did Newtonian physics ever claim to be universally functional in all conditions and places? It was derived for use terrestrially. It continues to work for that. The evidences found still hold true. Only a fool would have claimed they knew it would work outside of the known realm of it's usage and verification. No theory is absolute. The universe has no objective truth to it, only one that has relative mechanisms and one that describes things in a way that is useful within certain conditions.

Do we likewise refute that solid objects don't exist? In broader theory, solid is an illusion. It is only electromagnetism that prevents your hand from moving straight through a tabletop. Not "physical contact." And yet we can also accept that this is just what is meant by physical contact. It is a construct of desciption developed and still used because it is the functional way for us to view it.

I'm a mechanical engineer by trade. What I can tell you is that no one stopped using Newtonian physics. Nobody uses anything else to design things today. It's still fully correct. In fact, using relativity and/or quantum mechanics would be a worse solution. It would be bulky, less intuitive, therefore stifling ease of innovation or fluidity of discretionary usages, and lead to higher frequency of errors, reducing the quality of the final product.

So does Occams not work? Rather it did. It was right. It is irrelevant that you can dig deeper and produce a more general solution. The correct solution today is to still use Newtonian physics for everything terrestrial. A careful follower of science would have never claimed it was any good for anything beyond those boundaries. The truly wonderful thing about science is it literally cannot be wrong. Only a person's interpretation can be wrong. Science never claims to know what it doesn't know. People do. Science never said there wasn't going to be more to it, or that Newtonian physics would work elsewhere. It can't have done as no evidence or experiments showed such. Once we tried, we found the evidence, which is why we then produced new theories.

The article directly backs what I say. Perhaps there is confusion here though. The astronomy example in the article is the opposite of the newtonian example. In that one, while the old model can still produce results, it is clunky. The new model simplifies and provides for cleaner usage. The reverse is true for Newtonian physics. It isn't old stubbornness; we will never stop using newtonian physics as we do because it remains superior. It always will be. It is the true way to go about it.

Again the article backs this. At the end of the day, just like we arrived at what we say and call fact that the planets orbit the sun, we will always say and call fact the obvious functional description of newtonian physics. Just like we will continue to talk about solid objects, even though they don't actually exist.

I recommend watching the video but I'll try to explain, as it's not so cut-and-dry. He postulates that fragmentation within the mind makes it harder for us to avoid and resist temptations, because the effort of masking the parts of us that have been fragmented or compartmentalized, takes away from the effort required to combat the temptations. So reducing fragmentation allows more energy to be allocated towards avoiding and resisting the temptations.

The fragmentation is caused by you wanting the late-night food, but knowing that you shouldn't eat/order it. Your 'ideal' state is at odds with your 'desire' state, and the effort of that conflict makes it easier to ultimately succumb to the temptation. And after you succumb once, it's easier to do so each subsequent time you feel the temptation.

So it leaves in a conundrum where if we resist we're screwed due to further fragmentation, but also screwed if we yield to the temptations (and end up eating late-night junk food every night) because this too causes more fragmentation. So his thesis is 1. try to avoid the temptation altogether (i.e., go to bed before the late-night cravings hit), and 2. change your ideal state to be less at odds with your desire state - instead of beating yourself up about feeling the temptation, recognize that the ideal state is not fixed, and it in turn requires less effort within the mind to fragment those conflicting states, which leaves more energy for you to avoid and resist the temptations that still arise.

So it's a continuous process to reduce the existing fragmentation so that it in turn reduces the temptations you feel on a regular basis.

For me, it's relevant to my smoking habit. I know I shouldn't do it, and I feel a deep guilt and shame whenever I do. Yet I keep doing it (both due to chemical dependencies and the habit I've cultivated over the years) - the desire and disdain I feel simultaneously around the same action results in fragmentation. That guilt and shame from the fragmented sense of self (am I a smoker or am I not) leads me to want to smoke more (more fragmentation --> more temptation). Which then leads to more guilt. And the downward spiral continues.

He says, if you step back and recognize that a sense of self isn't so rigid, the fragmentation starts to break down. I don't have to feel bad about a temptation if I allow myself to be both a smoker and not a smoker vs. one over the other. Through introducing flexibility and forgiveness into my sense of self, the fragmentation and subsequent temptations seem to diminish. It's not a cure by any means, but it is a new perspective that I personally can see some value in adopting.

So my son doesn't really like marshmallows and probably would only want one... so does that count as a fail?

I've felt both, but it still doesn't lead me to believe consciousness is a universal property of matter. I mean, maybe there is some fundamental aspect of reality that facilitates consciousness, but I don't think matter is conscious in the sense we are.

I feel like pansychism and adjacent ideas are really a way of coping with the abundance of evidence we've gathered over the last 100 years that we are entirely biological and nothing survives our death. That's hard to deal with. It's why we invented the idea of an afterlife. Being alive is often nice, and it's sad to think it ends forever.

But it does end, even if there is some unifying consciousness, or whatever. You still will cease to exist, cease to enjoy beautiful sunsets, views of earth from space, ice cream, sex, spiritual moments. You will be annihilated, just like if you've experienced anaethesia; you cease to exist. There is no conscious experience that we can relate to, on any level. All time and space are gone. It's not even blackness. You're just gone. It's horrifying. I've experienced it. The most traumatic moment of my life so far was waking up from anaesthesia. The feeling of complete oblivion. Of being born out of nothing. That indescribable feeling that a million universes could have been born and died, or a microsecond could have passed. You just weren't there. It's so hard to describe, so all consuming. I still have nightmares and ruminate often on that oblivion. It's waiting for us all. It's not like sleep. It's like before you were born. You wont know a thing about it, and that's what makes it so awful. And you will never return, for all infinity. This is it. You could die this minute, and that's it.

It's horrifying, I'm now having an existential crisis and flashbacks to the time I came out of anaesthesia, and I absolutely understand why people choose to ignore reality and believe in an afterlife, and I also understand why those who choose to, or are forced to acknowledge reality, look for new and elaborate ways in which we might actually not be staring down oblivion.

Guy got high on his own stuff. Common mistake

This

That is indeed what I was getting at. Thank you

My friend emphasised to us, when meditating we can practise including more elements in our attention. For example, you are repeating a mantra in your head. You repeat the sound. With each syllable, you focus on the meaning of the syllable. You also concentrate on the overall meaning of the mantra. Then you visualise the written mantra, feel the truth of it, and so on.

In this manner, the awareness is carefully directed, unified, and able to hold multiple objects.

Close. I'd consider myself a Vedantin in essence.

Then doesnt that mean it is simply a more effective guide towards truth?

I thought that was the whole point behind a Razor.

I think I'm understanding the theory. The more you're at odds with yourself on things, the more... weakened you are in general when it comes to making executive decisions. Even though it sounds counterintuitive to think that getting rid of self-imposed rules and restrictions will actually help you to better follow them.

An analogy that might fit here is trying to grab a pile of sand. The more you want to hold onto it and the tighter you clench, the more sand that ends up falling out ironically.