Icelander said:

I also find that determinism can lead to a lot more compassion, compared to free will. It gives me a lot more reason to empathize with another's upbringing of why he's a criminal, instead of making the judgement that he's inherently a bad person or that he chose to be a bad person. It's too easy to point fingers, and a lot more difficult to think about the environment probably plays a much bigger role than we give it credit for.


What a beautiful post friend, especially this^.  It gratifies me to no end to see such wisdom in the youth of today. (I assume you are young)

Anyway thanks for making such a fine entrance and welcome to you.  I would like to invite you to the forum just above this one.  You are just the type for debate oriented discussion imo.

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Thanks , I'll check it out

Silversoul said:

Karl Popper once famously pointed out that with relativity and quantum physics, materialism had transcended itself.  That is, what we once thought of as "matter" turns out to be energy.  So what is energy?  This is the part where people don't seem to inquire further.  A lot of New Age types tend to think of energy as some sort of plasma-like substance.  But if you look at how energy is defined scientifically, whether we're talking kinetic, potential, gravitational, or any other kind of energy, it seems to be a property of objects that relates to other objects.  Yet if these objects are composed of matter, which is composed of energy, which is a kind of relation to other objects, then it seems we are stuck in a strange loop:  it's all relations between relations between relations, all the way down.  Energy seems to be a kind of principle of change.  So it appears that there might be something to Heraclitus' statement that "all is flux."

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Relativity and quantum mechanics are unequivocally at odds with the Cartesian framework.  This is not a secret, and this is not news.  If relativity and quantum mechanics are correct, the way western civilization is thinking about them is wholly dysfunctional and wrong.

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The way western civilization thinks about most things in life, is IMO at least dubious and suspect, if not all the way dysfunctional and wrong. A constant putting of the cart before the horse, as it were. Personally I think it has to do with leftover Christian influence, bad habits developed under that kind of twisted mindset, and also it has to do with a diet very very poor in psychedelics. That's what monkeys do when they haven't had access to a more encompassing, integrating, liquid mental state. They get caught up in rigid thinking, get territorial (not just about land but about beliefs and opinions and models of the world) and let's not forget unimaginative.

I wish I was a physicist, to be able to ask the visions about how all this works and be able to formulate it back in physics terms, but oh well, I'm an artist this particular lifetime. Maybe the next time around

But I will say we are most definitely NOT a culture of materialism. Like Alan Watts says, someone who is a materialist would care about materials, not be content with cheap mass produced everything, plastics, microwaved food and so on. We would not live and work in lifeless rectangular sardine boxes painted in a lifeless boring color, usually white. We'd have more imaginative ideas about windows, other than "more rectangles".

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Although, I'm curious to know what wonder and mystery there is for those reasonable mindsets that live in the materialism world.

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Great wonder and mystery actually. When the eyes are open, any point of focus provides endless wonder and joy. You can say that most of this forum is deeply materialistic, in the sense that it's driven by deep fascination with one kind of material, a certain kind of molecules and how they function when played with

But for that you have to take your materialism and follow it to where it leads, whereas a lot of Western society doesn't really do that. They try or claim they do, but don't really stick with it for too long.

That's why for instance most smokers smoke crappy commercial cigarettes, not fancy pipes filled with studied-at-length tobacco, or better yet some carefully designed home made blend from different plants. Most coffee drinkers have never had a cup of freshly roasted coffee, just stale week-old or month-old stuff, focusing instead of the minutia of packaging or what shirt or clever glasses the Starbucks guy was wearing. We'd all be way better off if we followed actual materialism, and the rest of society did as well.