Right, but what I'm saying is that, assuming that's true, I would rather live in a world where the bourgeoisie do control reality and establish what we have now than to live in one where I have to live in constant fear that someone's going to self-actualize themselves into a dragon or mind flayer or something and burn down my house or force me to obey their every whim. There are a lot of things I don't like about this reality, war, exploitation, inequality, but if individuals have the power to reshape reality itself into whatever they like, that's not going to solve any of that. The situation is not going to be improved by allowing Jeff Bezos to turn into an immortal lich.

Fortunately, there are ways in which we can change reality without that happening. By studying theory and history, looking at evidence, and focusing our efforts on things that have been proven to work and materially improve people's lives. There are people in the world who are suffering from extreme poverty, and that poverty could be alleviated if they had access to the means of production. Under neocolonialism, the natural resources of developing countries often still belong to the decedents of the people who stole them through brazen aggression, and these countries do not have autonomy over their domestic policy because of requirements placed on them by the IMF. As difficult as it may be, it's possible for that to change. There are also people suffering from preventable diseases, people who don't have access to basic medicine like vaccines, or mosquito nets for malaria. That can be changed too. Materially.

A better world is possible, and it's not easy, but it's real. I understand the appeal of these desperate, escapist fantasies but they aren't actually going to do anything to improve anybody's life. You can believe whatever you want, but personally, I made this commitment to myself, that I would always face the truth, no matter how grim, even when I can't do anything about it. You don't have to share that commitment, it's not always an easy thing to do, psychologically speaking. But even if you're not going to do that, you shouldn't pretend like you're helping when you're not. By retreating into this stuff, you're just conceding the whole of reality to the bourgeoisie without a fight.

There's a lot of stuff that I can't change myself, but there's at least one thing that I have: I stopped eating meat. Many animal lives that would have suffered and died on my behalf will now be spared from that suffering. That wasn't because of any fancy magical reshaping of reality, it was because I took a concrete, material action based on basic empathy and a frank, honest assessment of the existent conditions. You don't have to agree with my specific approaches, but if you investigate honestly and frankly into the state of the world and what you care about, then I believe you'll find a way to meaningfully impact it, through means that are logical, real, and proven.

Of course, reality will never stack up against fantasy. Fantasy has the luxury of being able to reshape itself into whatever form appeals to you specifically. The problem is that fantasy isn't true.

I'm glad you enjoyed it! I will say to the people in your Discord: it's idealist because it's a parody of an idealist ideology, and, it's not "a bunch of Enlightenment thought guys" it's pretty much just me having fun. Also I'm definitely not "the mainstream," though I suppose if you're in a sufficiently distant stream, anything else is "mainstream." I do not actually represent any kind of larger organization, Technocratic or otherwise, I'm just a random person who stumbled across your ideology.

I'm sure y'all get plenty of people telling you all the time that what you're saying is impossible, and if appeals to reason and evidence could convince you, you wouldn't believe it in the first place. Imo it can sometimes be more effective to play along with people's nonsense than to flatly deny it. Like many niche communities, you have a set of counterarguments prepared for all the common responses you get, and since most people write you off without serious engagement, it works. My hope was to take you off-script (and also to have a laugh) by walking right past all your outlandish claims about reality and criticizing your position from an angle you hadn't seen before.

A soulist utopia will not look like the pre-consensus-reality that Objection describes. It will be a world where everyone is a mage. Where everyone has freedom over their own perceptual world.

Here you fall into Utopian thinking. This is the same sort of reasoning that I often saw back when I wasted my time arguing with "anarcho-capitalists," "This mechanism could be used harmfully," "Oh, well we don't support it being used harmfully, we only support creating it so that it can be used for positive results." No no no, that's not how this works. There's no form of power than cannot be utilized for harmful purposes. Ancaps love to talk about boycotts and loss of reputation keeping companies from doing evil things - putting aside whether that could be enough (it wouldn't) - there were times in history where a company doing business with a black man could tank it's reputation in a community and cause racists to boycott it. If boycotts can be used to enforce the values of a community, then they can be used to enforce the values of a community even when those values are bad.

It's the same sort of thing with this. Putting aside the question of whether it's possible to change reality to make people into mages (it's not), you still have to accept the possibility that, given the power to reshape reality, there are going to be bad actors using that power to harm others. There is no actual reason why I could not turn myself into a dragon and start burning down cities, except that it conflicts with your perfect idealized vision of how things would play out.

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Anyway, in the grand scheme of things your community isn't a big deal to me. It's a unique set of brainworms to unravel so it's kinda fun to engage with, but it's ultimately harmless nonsense, so long as y'all don't start stepping in front of trains to prove they're not real or something. I do find it annoying when y'all try to bring this into politics and try to divert energy from projects grounded in materialism and reality, but you know, I enjoy playing Mage: the Ascension and if you wanna go super hard into method acting or whatever with it then it's no skin off my back.

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Edit: looking over it again:

Where everyone has freedom over their own perceptual world.

This is literally just solipsism.

You say on a platform developed by "tankies"

Atlanta, Denver, somewhere in Virginia, Maryland, or DC, or possibly Ohio or Pennsylvania. There's places like Austin and some places in Florida that might have cool people, but the state government is trash.

I saw Greenville recommended, and this is anecdotal, but last time I was there visiting friends, we (visibly queer) got followed around by this crazy guy with a metal pipe making all kinds of death threats. I love my friends but that sealed the deal for me on not wanting to live there. There are some neat places there ngl, the sex themed desert restaurant was a fun place for a queerplatonic hangout, but in general it's not exactly going to be a refuge from Trump supporters.

Yes, to make a point about the reliability of hearsay.

So's this

I'm familiar with psychology. Nothing about psychology suggests that it's possible to collectively reshape the physical world through thought if enough people believe hard enough. I'd love to see some academic work that supports that claim.

And in the entire rest of the world outside of the US. See the Liberal Democrats of the UK for example. Or, like, formal/academic discussion even within the US. John Locke was a classical liberal, Ronald Reagan was a neoliberal, etc.

It's only informally, when the right started using it as a scare word, that people started using it differently, and that was relatively recent considering the history of the word.

A chaser is someone who fetishizes and objectifies trans people.

I didn’t choose to term anti-science beliefs as reality. Society did, and then I went along with it so as not to be incomprehensible to you. If by “reality”, we mean “An objectively extant world”, then there’s no such thing, and I oppose belief in such a thing. But if by reality we mean “The world society thinks is objectively extant”, then that thing is anti-science.

That which has the potential to smack you if you pretend it doesn't exist is objectively real. It is nonsense to say that that is not real or that anything else is more real than that. There is no "world society thinks is objectively extant." Society contains a lot of people who disagree on a lot of things. Scientists and supporters of trans rights are part of society.

Please don’t begrudge me for accepting your premise that consensus reality is reality.

Never said that. That's your position, isn't it? My position is that there is an objective reality that exists regardless of what people believe.

Cause the brain doesn’t work like that, you dipshit. Didn’t I say our perceptual reality is governed by cognitive laws? Cognitive laws don’t allow me to just do that. Weren’t you paying attention, or do you just have a kindergartener’s understanding of psychology?

Sorry, I suppose I've only been schooled in laws that, uh, actually exist and are observable and testable. I suppose I do have a kindergartener's understanding of these magical psychic laws you've made up, I know nothing about how they supposedly work, please excuse my ignorance.

Y'all only know how to engage through ad hominem, huh.

This may come as a surprise to you, but there are plenty of people who I disagree with who don't baselessly accuse everyone they disagree with of being Russian bots. There happens to be a shit ton of overlap between liberals and people who subscribe to that particular conspiracy theory.

I called you a supporter of capitalism because you objected to criticism of supporters of capitalism. You can identify how you please, but if you quack, I'm gonna assume you're a duck. Doesn't mean I accuse everyone of being ducks.

"Libs" is short for "liberal," meaning a supporter of capitalism. Those on the American right who aren't fascists are generally liberals, though they often don't know what it means. When I criticize liberals, it's from a leftist/anti-capitalist perspective.

The benefit Hoffman’s theory does us is that is reveals the universe is governed not by physical laws, but by cognitive laws, of which apparent physical laws are a contextually dependent subset.

This is not what he says at all, and if he has any credibility as a scientist and doesn't want to change careers to cult leader, he would completely disavow what you just said.

And we can use that, because it means reality can be manipulated not just by physical technology, but also by psychological technology.

This is complete nonsense.

That’s precisely the situation our civilisation now finds itself in.

No it absolutely is not.

Antirealists demand that the government pour more research money into developing psychological technologies that alter our perception of reality.

Yes, I figured this was about getting high and seeing pretty colors.

Why do you need the government for this? If you need more funds, why don't you just alter reality to manifest them into existence?

For example, the technology to see a trans person as their preferred gender presentation regardless of their physical form.

Again, respecting a trans person's identity does not require a denial of reality or of our physical forms. If the physical form of a trans person wasn't objectively different from that of a cis person of the same gender, then we would not need any of the medications or treatments that we do - we wouldn't even have the terms "trans" and "cis." Please stop talking as if trans identities are somehow a denial of reality.

We are fighting an anti-science platform

If you respond to nothing else I say, then at least answer me this: why have you chosen to term something that is anti-science as "reality?" It makes absolutely no sense. Just say that science is real, that trans identities are real, and that transphobes are pushing a false and unreal narrative.

Try to pay attention to the language we've all agreed on.

I don't use it that way. There are plenty of people I disagree with who aren't libs. But in this case I was talking about a specific group of conspiracy theorists who are active on Lemmy who are, general speaking, libs.

You don't need to tell me that .world'ers don't like critiques of capitalism/liberalism.

Why on earth would you think I'm on the American right?

I watched the whole 20 minute video, just for you. I'm not interested in reading more from him as I was not impressed.

Welcome to philosophy. These ideas are not remotely new, they've been discussed for literally thousands of years. Obviously there's a difference between sensation and perception, and obviously it's possible for senses to be fooled, and obviously optical illusions exist. No one denies these things.

One thing that he is wrong about near the end is the rather arrogant idea that reason and logic are somehow magically immune to evolutionary pressures. The whole host of cognitive biases we experience as humans are grounded in the fact that we evolved in contexts where group cohesion was important to survival. He doesn't seem like a particularly knowledgeable cognitive scientist if he either isn't aware of the bandwagon effect (for instance), or if he can't see the obvious connection between that and the need to fit in with a tribal community.

But more to the point of his thesis, the reason it's trash is because it fails it's own test. It's indeed possible that, contrary to all evidence and observations, we're living in a simulation, or whatever gobbledyremoved he said about conscious beings creating reality - the problem is, so what? By definition, this theory is unfalsifiable, and it is not capable of helping us do anything at all.

There is a saying in science, "All models are wrong - but some are useful." Physicists are well aware that when we draw a diagram of an atom on a piece of paper, it differs from an actual atom in several crucial ways. It's very large, for instance, meaning that the drawing can absorb and emit photons without really changing. Our mental models of atoms are necessarily imperfect, the only perfect representation of an atom is the atom itself. However, we still use these imperfect drawings and mental models because they help us navigate reality and predict events. This person's theory does none of that.

It appears that he has conjured up an imaginary, unobservable world, that does not interact with us in any way, and he has, for some bizarre reason, chosen to dub that with the moniker of "reality," instead of the actual, you know, reality that we can sense and perceive, that is testable and verifiable, that is necessary to navigate in order to survive. Why he's chosen to call his fantasy reality and reality an illusion, I don't know.

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Now look, this whole thing you've come up with seems like a fun little form of escapism, and I don't have a problem with that in itself. The problem I have is when you start trying to interject it into actual politics, when you actively try to divert energy away from engaging with reality, the thing that actually exists and can measurably improve or harm people's mental and physical states, and instead towards your fantasy. That's when it starts sounding more like a cult.

Your kind of thinking is responsible for countless New Age spiritualists telling people they don't need medicine, that they can just cure diseases, like AIDS, through the power of belief. You can indulge whatever fantasy you feel like, but when push comes to shove, medicine fucking works, the train will kill you if you step in front of it, etc. The speaker in your video at least acknowledged that, even if by doing so, he undermined everything else he said - at the end of the day, he has to submit to that which he labeled "illusory" and deny that which he labeled "real." And so should you. And that means that you have to engage with materialist and empirically backed theories of psychology, sociology, politics, economics, etc. Which means, get your nonsense ideology out of here.

You consider yourself a socialist but don't like people criticizing liberals? Do words mean things? Liberal means you support capitalism.

Realism is anti-science.

Absolute nonsense.

but soulists say the outside body is a mental construct, and cannot be taken as fact in any sense.

Of course the body exists, in the same way that anything exists. It is an objective fact, and denying that doesn't help anyone.