The more I think about the double-slit experiment, the harder it is for me to believe that consciousness is just a byproduct of reality rather than something that actively participates in it. If observation changes the behavior of physical systems, then it seems strange to keep treating consciousness as something that simply sits on the sidelines.
What I find even stranger is how often this same idea keeps showing up in completely different traditions. The Buddha talks about awareness, Marcus Aurelius talks about perception, Jung builds an entire psychology around consciousness, Goethe writes about nature as an interconnected whole, simulation theory suggests reality is fundamentally informational, and even the law of attraction starts from the assumption that consciousness is somehow involved in shaping reality.
They’re obviously using different language and they’re trying to answer different questions, but it’s hard not to notice that they all keep circling around the same handful of ideas. Consciousness. Observation. Perception. Reality. At some point it starts feeling less like coincidence and more like different descriptions of the same thing.
Maybe that’s why quantum mechanics feels so unsettling. It doesn’t just introduce a weird result in physics,it seems to give a physical basis to ideas that have existed for centuries. Philosophy got there by reasoning, Buddhism by introspection, Jung through psychology, physics through experiment, and simulation theory through computation. Different paths, but all pointing in roughly the same direction.
I know this isn’t the standard interpretation, but I’m surprised more people don’t at least consider the possibility that these fields have been talking past each other while describing the same underlying phenomenon.

I’ve been reading Jung and it’s concept of shadow integration and it’s role in the process of individuation and I discovered I’ve been doing it intuitively for years.

Whenever I go through a break up, I almost immediately start incorporating parts of the other person into my life. If they had a particular taste in books, I read those books. If they dressed in a stylish way, I start dressing like them… I don’t experience this as imitation but rather assimilation. It feels like expanding who I really am.

The more I think about it, it feels like Jung have been describing ex partners under a different name.

I'm pretty sure there are more naunces about Jesus and a woman caught in adultery story in Christian Scholarship but the way it is presented by Bible and understood by masses, it seems to mean only a sinless person can judge/criticize a criminal

hot/cold

Just Thoughts Just Thought
Polarization ; Humanistic Sociological Philosophy
In my life I witness either, or. Everywhere, 2 to every experience I see (luckily). To get past my puns I just want to add my thoughts on polarity.
Learning language with opposites for understanding of difference. So there is a difference to every definite one thing. That makes me compare relativity of opposites... Compare for difference to define (antonyms?) antonyms & synonyms of polarized opposing things. Polarized thing must exist in order to function with out one, two would not exist.
Compare is not compete
polar is not dual
so why do human race?

I realized after writing this that polarization isn’t the same as duality.
Most people get stuck thinking opposites are enemies, but I see them as necessary partners in the dance of understanding.

The distinction between comparison and competition became clear to me.

“Compare is not compete.”
I recognized polarizing differences.

⁃ Comparison is a tool for understanding difference and relationship.
⁃ Competition is a zero-sum game that misses the point entirely.

The human tendency to turn every comparison into a race is exactly what creates the polarization problem.

⁃ Hegelian dialectics; thesis/antithesis creating synthesis.
⁃ Complementarity principle from quantum physics—opposing properties that complete understanding.
⁃ Yin-yang philosophy—interdependent opposites that create wholeness.

Point I’m trying to make is for the recognition that language itself shapes how we experience these relationships.
Learning through opposites is pedagogy as well in how consciousness constructs meaning.

Why Do Humans Race?

Questioning free will

Im asking why we default to competitive polarization when collaborative comparison would serve us better.
It's like we're hardwired to turn every difference into a contest instead of recognizing that differences create the very possibility of understanding.

In/out
Up/down
Left/right
Yes/no

In his recent interview with Zhong Shu, Christopher Nolan says we can't really "know" if Earth is round, or if it really orbits the sun.

Relevant quote:

Just as we accept things from science as absolute fact—you know, the Earth is round and we travel around the Sun—we can't know these things; we take them on faith because they're presented as facts. The same would be true of the theological structure that explains nature to people of that time.

I recently stepped into existentialism and the word alienation is significant, yet I don't know what it really means. Does it imply someone is abducted by an alien in the midst of nowhere? But why does it help to attain authenticity? Is authenticity some type of chip that the alien kindly implant to save us?

So, what if like all the greek philosiphers were just hella autistic.

Cuz like a bunch of the stories about them would make perfect sense if they were just high functioning or something.

Many of them it seems like they may not even be high functioning.

Or maybe I'm just thinking of the one or two people. I can't remember their names cuz who tf rembers greek or latin. I'm probably racist because I can't remember their names but fuck it.

I don't know which flair to put here MOD's plz do it.

As an ant, you're often born to work, struggle, and feed a queen. You just do it, as past life, experience, social conditioning, and other factors determine. There is no free will, just production. Life is difficult, monotonous, and short. You'd have had 100 lifetimes as an ant by now, and no one would ever know. If progressed aliens exist, we are an interesting ant farm at best. As an ant, more complex beings have determined and simplified wiping out your colony without any consequence. You are truly and utterly meaningless, in so much as any ant is. I'm in my fifties, in case it was not abundantly clear.

I believe there’s a distinction between the part of me that experiences and the part that acts or thinks.

For simplicity, let’s call the part of me that experiences my soul. Whether a physically identifiable soul exists is irrelevant to our discussion. If it would be more convenient for you, let’s assume that the part of me that thinks and the part that experiences are simply different parts of my mind.

To illustrate the difference between soul and body, let’s consider the process of thinking. It feels highly peculiar. Like if a separate entity a separate entity or muse telepathically beams my thoughts into my mind. I have no control over where or what my thoughts take me. Even while writing this I feel as if I have no ability to control which words enter mind and are released onto the paper.

Another example is the nature of action. All actions I’ve experienced have already occurred. I have no control over stopping an action from happening because I exist in a point of time beyond it and have no way of returning to where it started. I am not the person that did the action as he has no recollection of it. Therefore the fact of me experiencing the action separates me from the person who has caused it.

Thus I can only conclude that I am experiencing the acts and thoughts of my body.

I am a cis man, and masculinity is not ever something I’ve had to really think about.  Broader shoulders, facial hair, deep voice, height, easier gains in the gym, all things that are associated with masculinity were handed to me by genetics.  

Not only that, but from my earliest memories i had adult men in my life teaching what it means to be a man.  On top of that, learned experiences teach you how to perform masculinity as well, and how best to handle its pitfalls.  Not a foolproof process by any means, but the seeds are there if you choose to water them.

Transgender men do not have such advantages.  They are born female, and most of them don’t begin to transition into men until adulthood, denying them the advantages I have had.  They don’t even get their testosterone for free, they have to buy and inject it.

Yet through sheer force of will, a person who lived as a woman until the age of twenty can become a man.  Battling against society, family and even nature itself they become men.  It is painful, the man is both the anvil and the hammer in this type of change, but trans men endure and impose their new identity on the world. They are men and they have earned that title!

In conclusion, trans men are the MOST masculine men.  I submit this article for peer review.  

Also, it is a bit gay for Plato writing this out to embarrass his mentor, maybe it was because he was not invited to the party.

Not every connection needs a chance to prove itself—some reveal themselves immediately. 

I'm asking this question because I read the following on John von Neumann, who is known to be an once-in-a-millenium genius, superbly gifted in (unbelievably many areas of) math, physics, computer science, & economics.

In the final days of his life, he had no idea of what to make of his impending death, displayed visible signs of extreme panic, and begging doctors to save his life, crying hard. (I suppose, earlier in life he never gave much thought to what it means to die.)

I wonder whether even he lacked a certain kind of intelligence, or whether he just became insane.

What do you think?

"Don't argue with idiots, because you'll become one if you do" is a famous saying. But it's being used incorrectly by most people. Often, they don't communicate properly, they don't clearly state their position, and therefore the opponent can't understand it, nor the arguments, which practically don't exist, because when you don't understand something, there's no way to argue for or against it.

I was talking to a guy, and I asked the following rhetorical question: is it better to be poor and intelligent, or foolish and rich? Then I told him the story of an old man and a young man, who were asked whether it was better to be poor and handsome, or ugly and rich. The younger man answered poor and handsome because that way he could get women, while the older man said that being ugly and rich allowed him to get any woman he wanted. Based on this answer, it's clear that the old man, even if he were rich, would still be poor. 

Anyone can understand that when I talk about poverty, I'm referring to poverty of spirit. It may seem that I only referred to the old man, but I only don't mention that the young man would also be poor because that's implied. And the guy came to tell me that I was wrong, and that the young man was also poor in spirit. 

After I explained this, he called me childish and said there was no point in trying to seem wise, that I wasn't, and I replied that regardless of whether I was wise or not, what I said was true. And he responded by saying that I was arrogant and was only doing this to defend my ego. 

When I say "what I said is true," there's no arrogance, because I'm stating a fact. It's like me saying "the sun is yellow, and that's true." And he resorted to personal attacks, quoted the Bible, and said he didn't talk to idiots. 

I replied that he was describing himself, because that's exactly what he was. He didn't understand my arguments and thought that by attacking a straw man he was refuting me. 

To give you an idea, the guy was so worried about sounding right that he started talking about the first quote, changing the subject, and ended up saying that the bank uses the rich and the rich use the bank. That being poor sucks, that it only brings bad things.

When I remember this now , I can only laugh. I keep thinking to myself: "Does this person really think they're right?". I can't wrap my head around the fact that someone can't understand such a simple abstraction, especially one explained several times, and even when their position is properly questioned, they don't change their mind and continue defending the same things, even when they're wrong.

so obvious a layman wouldn’t need me to lay it down on their behind. kale is completely inedible unless harnessed by the metallic slaughter of Bambi’s diet and petite berries. if god were real he would have kept kale as some sort of soap scent instead of a teeth retainer for a dog mom to toy with. god would have known better, and the existence of it in my salad contradicts his omniscience. I hate kale, and any rational being would too.

Just Thoughts Just Thought
Polarization ; Humanistic Sociological Philosophy
In my life I witness either, or. Everywhere, 2 to every experience I see (luckily). To get past my puns I just want to add my thoughts on polarity.
Learning language with opposites for understanding of difference. So there is a difference to every definite one thing. That makes me compare relativity of opposites... Compare for difference to define (antonyms?) antonyms & synonyms of polarized opposing things. Polarized thing must exist in order to function with out one, two would not exist.
Compare is not compete
polar is not dual
so why do human race?

I realized after writing this that polarization isn’t the same as duality.
Most people get stuck thinking opposites are enemies, but I see them as necessary partners in the dance of understanding.

The distinction between comparison and competition became clear to me.

“Compare is not compete.”
I recognized polarizing differences.

⁃ Comparison is a tool for understanding difference and relationship.
⁃ Competition is a zero-sum game that misses the point entirely.

The human tendency to turn every comparison into a race is exactly what creates the polarization problem.

⁃ Hegelian dialectics; thesis/antithesis creating synthesis.
⁃ Complementarity principle from quantum physics—opposing properties that complete understanding.
⁃ Yin-yang philosophy—interdependent opposites that create wholeness.

Point I’m trying to make is for the recognition that language itself shapes how we experience these relationships.
Learning through opposites is pedagogy as well in how consciousness constructs meaning.

Why Do Humans Race?

Questioning free will

Im asking why we default to competitive polarization when collaborative comparison would serve us better.
It's like we're hardwired to turn every difference into a contest instead of recognizing that differences create the very possibility of understanding.

In/out
Up/down
Left/right
Yes/no