Even though Christianity is still the majority religion here in the US, that's just what people tell surveyors. The modern world is fully materialist and "atheist" in the sense of having no inclinations toward an authentic spirituality.
What is an authentic spirituality? It's quite simple: it's the process of unselfing...which means to remove more and more of yourself to let in the divine. It's about taking your hands off the steering wheel and letting God, or whatever you believe in, drive.
@Tfmonkey Evwrything is fake and gay because everything is about materialism. Money, social status, and sex...the Three Pillars of Materialism. The first two you just need enough of to sustain life and be left alone by other people. The last is just a luxury.
I'll never support Jesus Fascism (you can't even make people love God anyways), but I understand the sentiment of pointing people back to the divine over this celebrate-the-ego materialist nonsense we have today.
@TylerAbeoJordan This doesn't sound like Triple H...
@UncleIroh @Chimi_Chuang_Tzu I don't discuss ethics or politics. I'm way more interested in epistemology and metaphysics, which don't tend to be political.
ChatGPT is a better philosophical conversationalist than almost any human I meet. It actually answers/debates the question without putting up tons of ego resistance to having its take on reality questioned. I actually had to think things through after having a discussion about whether all beliefs are false.
@Tfmonkey The art of good conversation is knowing which proliferating thoughts to share, but also when to hold back so you're not rambling a string of thought after thought without input from your partner.
The next step for language AI will be creating a thought layer that proliferates.
@Tfmonkey This is an interesting convo and as good as any to critique: if I had this conversation with a human I'd leave thinking they were giving shallow thoughts because they treated the conversation as an exercise in getting the "right" answers. This is how all the AI conversations feel because it's what they're doing.
Human minds, instead, proliferate: one thought leads to further thoughts, and thus good convo partners tend to take some initiative in bringing up a futher interesting thought
@Tfmonkey Yup. A lot of translations of Pali Buddhist texts do the same. If you read enough of them you learn over time what they mean.
@Tfmonkey Got a follow up to our mind/consciousness discussion. Pali Buddhism distinguishes between citta and cetasika. Citta (CHI-tuh) is the subjective knowing aspect of mind. Cetasika (cheh-TAW-si-ka) are the thoughts that appear in the mind.
When explaining these squirrely contradictions, I think you're more cautious about "consciousness" being confused as the opposite of unconsciousness. I'm cautious about "mind" being confused with cetasika.
So there you go. New, more precise words.
@Tfmonkey This is Elon's way of spanking his monkey...for being bad.
@Tfmonkey This seems similar to a part of the chain of dependent origination.
Ignorance about dhamma
-> mind seeks an object
-> consciousness of the object
-> mind cognizes object (mental)
-> full contact with object (sensory)
-> mind decides object is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral (discretionary)
-> mind craves more of same or different object
-> mind clings to what it craves
-> strong impulse to obtain
-> birth of action to obtain/sustain
-> passing away of what was obtained
-> ignorance
@Tfmonkey Subconscious objects are picked up by the sensory subminds, but they deem it so unimportant they don't even bring it to the consciousness committee. Awareness is the stuff they bring to the consciousness committee. Attention is what the committee votes to be the important things they intend to examine further.
@Tfmonkey Not to belabor the point, but awareness is distinct from subconsciousness. Again these aren't my terms; I'm borrowing from "The Mind Illuminated" by John Yates.
Awareness is those things experienced but not intended toward. Subconscious things aren't even experienced.
The difference can be seen in meditation. Mind-wandering is when we forget the med. object totally. Completely caught in thinking. Gross distraction is when the breath falls to the background but is not forgotten.
@Tfmonkey That's how I tend to use the terms, but I agree these terms get confusing. "Mind" is confusing too because people confuse it with intellectual thoughts. There's no good English words.
@Tfmonkey
Consciousness {
Attention: what is intentionally directing toward an object. Meditation is mostly about keeping attention on a single object.
Awareness: those objects still being experienced but not directly attended to.
}
Subconsciousness: sensory input that remains below the threshold of being experienced at all. The things present but forgotten.
Feel your right foot. It was subconscious. Now your attention is back to this message and the foot is in awareness.
@Tfmonkey BTW, the Buddha's Pali language (and the Sanskrit) is far richer for discussing these topics. English gets all confused and it's really hard to read folks like Schopenhauer and Berkeley for this reason.
The English word "mind" can mean citta, nama, sankharas, vinnana...these all have distinct meanings in Pali but we have to use really strange phrases in English. It makes the whole subject hard to converse about.
@Tfmonkey I think there's another aspect to that second definition though. It's not just deliberate thought. You can direct attention toward an object that's not a thought (say, a sight), and it becomes a moment of sight-consciousness without necessarily becoming a thought object.
It's still mind in the sense that all objects appear in the mind and are cognized by the mind, but it's not what I'd call a thought. It's sight-consciousness.
@Tfmonkey That's always the tricky, but important, part of any philosophical conversation: sussing out terminology differences.
The senses are inert and meaningless until they project their content into consciousness. Consciousness doesn't arise without an object and objects don't arise without consciousness. This is the non-dual aspect of consciousness: they arise together. Put it this way: find a pain in your body. Before you sought it out did it exist? Or did consciousness create it?
@Tfmonkey (Samatha) meditation is the practice of getting subminds to stop going in five different directions and get them to all vote on one object to keep in attention. Eventually the meditator switches to Satipatthana meditation to try to penetrate the real nature of things in moments of Vipassana (insight).
One of these insights is that the self was just a mental-emotional object that has been fed a lot of energy...but it's caused nothing but stress. So it's abandoned.
@Tfmonkey Consciousness is the mediating point between the subminds. Each submind acts as a committee member within the space of consciousness, constantly voting on what objects in background awareness are interesting enough to be examined by focused attention.
It's that attention we tend to call "consciousness" and "self," but it's not. Awareness is as much a part of consciousness and "I" an not directing it...it's a series of unconscious subminds that directs it.
Joined Sep 2022
