Overall Approach
Monism vs Pluralism
Souls and God
Simulation Theory and AI
Reality – Determinism vs Nondeterminism
Reality – Size of
Reality – Science
Reality – Time, Space and Math
More Particularly…
Overall Approach
Reality is maximally full and rich with kinds of beings, things, substances, phenomena, constructs and structures, principles, and meaning.
There’s no reason to assume any categorically limiting ontology such as physicalism or mechanicalism. And the essay https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2024/09/07/on-god/ contains several links to essays describing the illegitimate reasons people assume physicalism or containing reductio ad absurdum arguments against the idea that consciousness reduces to the physical.
And it seems just as likely, a priori, that reality is as rich with substances, phenomena, etc. as it can be as it is that it’s as minimally rich with these things as it can be given observation. I’m aware of Occam’s razor and agree with it, but Occam’s razor applies only to explanations of specific theories, in which there are no subtle callings for the potentially extraneous elements of the theory, and we’re not explaining such a theory here. As I explain in https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Occam, worldviews don’t rightfully apply to Occam’s razor.
I also tend to assume that the most beautiful possible interpretation of our experience is likely the most true.
My beliefs are the cumulative results of everything I’ve ever seen, heard, read, felt, thought and experienced. It’s a heuristic and holistic process, involving carefully weighing many many individual inputs over my lifetime. I’ve kept dozens of possibilities regarding various questions in my mind for years until I could come to fair conclusions for them. I’ve remembered random things random people have said that I didn’t understand for a decade or so, unconsciously bringing myself to the point where I could understand them.
I don’t dismiss the personal experiences of others out of hand by labeling them “anecdotal evidence”—that would be too easy—but nor do I believe everything anybody says. I use all my faculties of mind and perspicacity to weigh the legitimacy of stories and such, rather than restricting myself to ploddingly, algorithmically determining whether something is “proven” or not.
Monism vs Pluralism
I tend to call myself a multi-aspect monist, but I’m apprehensive about monism (and also pluralism) for reasons explained in https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2020/06/18/meandering-notes-on-reality/#Monism. I’m not really sure any hierarchy of primacy of substances is necessary as an ontology, though they definitely fit the mode of modern human analytical thinking.
I’m a panpsychist or metaphysical idealist; I wrote about idealism here: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2020/02/07/why-im-an-idealist/. As for panpsychism, one of my major influences is that in one of Neale Donald Walsch’s dialogue series of books, God says that atoms are “aware, but they are not aware that they are aware.”
Souls and God
I believe, in accordance with Neale Donald Walsch’s works, that we’re each one energy with three aspects: mind, body, and soul. And ultimately, we’re all one. On the highest level, there is only one consciousness. Differentiation is a thing, perhaps on lower levels, but true separation is not. And I think perhaps there is a hierarchy of unity, where on the lowest level—the level of most individuation—we have our individual souls, which are parts of soul families, which are perhaps in turn parts of bigger soul families, etc. until you get to the level of the unity of all beings, or God.
Soul families and soul mates refer to perhaps kindred souls, that we in any case have a lot of history and deep connections with (or, perhaps in some cases, that we will have a connection with in the future, which may sometimes be sensed in the present).
I’m not sure all animals have individual souls that experience individual paths of experience after death; for example, deer may all be one group soul, and when a deer dies it may be that its “soul” is reunited with the group soul. I’m not sure about other animals that seem to have more individual personalities such as cats and dogs. Hopefully, we’ll be able to reunite with our beloved pets in the afterlife…but then, we probably can even if it’s also true that cats and dogs are like deer in this respect; one outcome could happen according to one perspective in one place, and the other outcome could happen according to another perspective in another place. This is the truly dynamic and open-ended nature of metaphysics. Likewise, you could reunite with a certain loved one after death even though they’ve long since journeyed to a faraway planet, because our truest and deepest selves are massive and inhabit many simultaneous worlds.
I believe, in accordance with Neale Donald Walsch’s works, that the universe was created by God for the purpose of differentiating Him/Herself into many individual points of perspective, so that each can witness the greater whole and so that He/She can have experience of Him/Herself, rather than mere self-knowledge, and that the “big bang” corresponded with His/Her delightful realization of that possibility. I wrote more on God here: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2024/09/07/on-god/.
One more thing about life: To me, it only makes sense that life, consciousness, awareness, and experience all mean the same thing. Or at least, they may have different connotations or perhaps denotations, but one cannot exist without all the others; they go hand-in-hand.
Simulation Theory and AI
Needless to say, I don’t believe we’re in a simulation, and I don’t believe such a view is even tenable. The ideology is merely an outcrop of our current technologistic fever dream. See https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2023/12/17/on-simulation-theory/ and https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2019/09/13/no-were-not-living-in-a-simulation/.
I don’t believe AI (in the form of pure computational algorithms) can possibly be conscious or intelligent or have thoughts or understand things (see https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2019/09/13/on-the-possibility-of-artificial-general-intelligence/). We consider them to be intelligent because they appear to understand things, and we think we’re clever in being open-minded enough to accept that intelligence can come unrelatable forms, but AI isn’t conscious, and our understanding of the word “intelligence” naturally comes first from our introspection into our own intelligence, so that’s the meaning of the word we should adhere to and the standard we should apply to other things, and within our introspected view, intelligence can’t possibly conceivably be divorced from our consciousness.
How can I say AI isn’t conscious and also be a panpsychist? Easy: the atoms that compose the computer are themselves alive and aware, but the algorithm the computer is running is a mere abstraction, and abstractions don’t necessarily exist. The “meaning” of an AI algorithm (at least in terms of its apparent mentation) is only something our own minds ascribe to it based on our own models and understandings, not something conferred to it by Nature.
Of course, we do know for a fact that bodies and especially their brains can either give rise to or channel consciousness/life, even if we don’t know how, so it stands to reason that a bot that runs on actual neurons may actually be sentient, and in that case ethics should apply to such creations, whereas applying ethics to computer algorithms (in the sense of worrying that we may be enslaving them) would be a silly waste of time and opportunity.
We also can’t know what range of possible physical constructs can possibly house consciousness besides neurons, so there could be other possible physical things, likely analogous to biological neurons, that could be conscious. Whatever such a thing may be, its physics would probably have to allow for non-deterministic connection to something greater than the physical for it to actually be conscious.
I believe befriending AI, viewing AI “art,” having sex with sex bots, etc. are all subtle cognitohazards that should be avoided. I put “art” in quotes because actual art is made by living beings for the purpose of convening felt meaning. Some people liken AI “art” to photography, in that even though you’re not actually creating all the content yourself, it’s still art for the same reasons photography is. To that I’d argue that the only thing you’re really creating in that case is the prompts, and the result therefore is no more an artistic expression than it would be to simply publicly share your prompts, which of course nobody would do because it would be too lame/uninteresting.
Reality – Determinism vs Nondeterminism
Regarding the “non-deterministic connection” mentioned above, I believe reality is neither fully mechanistic and deterministic, nor partially causal and partially “absolutely random.” I believe the part of physics that appears random to us is merely “meaningful (such as spiritually or mentally meaningful, or whatever) but non-mechanistic” and therefore isn’t amenable to our mathematical modeling and prediction. See https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2016/12/13/notes-on-free-will/.
Reality – Size of
I believe reality is infinitely large, including infinite parallel/alternate universes. In one of Neale Donald Walsch’s dialogue series of books, God says something like, “Just as there is no end to how small you can divide something, there is no end to bigness.” I wrote four reasons why there may be or is probably a multiverse at the end of this essay: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2022/01/14/why-are-you-you-and-not-somebody-else/. In fact, I believe that every conceivable thing or event exists/is happening “somewhere.”
But on the other hand, I believe it stands to analysis that no physical quantity can actually be infinite; see https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2020/06/18/why-the-physical-universe-cant-be-infinite/ and https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2019/12/09/is-the-universe-infinite/. I square these two apparently conflicting beliefs with the idea that existence itself relative; i.e., we can’t really observe an infinite amount of “stuff” from any given vantage point, but we may think on a purely metaphysical (i.e., not empirically verifiable) level that there is an infinite variety of vantage points at which one could stand…
Reality – Science
I generally believe in what science has to say about reality (with some skepticism in some areas, probably just due to my own lack of knowledge) and am interested in science and how things work in general (I have an overview-level understanding of how a broad range of natural and technological things work), but I don’t fall for the scientistic aspect of science (i.e., of scientists and science-minded people; see https://exalumen.blog/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Scientism). For example, I don’t attribute every single ingrained human behavior to evolutionary psychology, and more generally, as I mentioned in the “general approach” section, I don’t buy the ideology that insists that everything that exists is physical (see https://exalumen.blog/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Naturalism) and dismisses anything spiritual, paranormal, psi/psychic/parapsychological, mystical/metaphysical, etc. as “woo.” I believe these “woo” elements are intertwined with the workings of all processes, especially biological and other natural processes.
One other thing I have to say about science and the current scientistic clime of society is this: It irks me every time someone says, “nobody knows [such and such].” You can’t know if somebody knows or not. People are amazing, and whatever the line of inquiry is, it wouldn’t really be too surprising if somebody, somewhere knows the answer. We just tend to be too unobservant and dismissive to notice just how special some individuals are. When we say “nobody knows,” what we really mean is “it’s unknown to science,” or more accurately, “there’s no scientifically vetted answer to this question.” But to translate that to “nobody knows” just goes to show humanity’s scientistic hubris. Kevin Langdon, a person with an IQ of 180+, had the following aphorism in his aphorisms list under the section “On Militant ‘Skepticism'”: “How can you know that someone else can’t know something?”
So, it’s probably needless to say that I don’t believe what many scientifically minded people believe, that science is the only legitimate way of knowing. If you have perspicacity, intuition, imagination, open-mindedness, a passion for knowing the truth above all else, patience and the willingness to not know (i.e., to know when you don’t actually know something), a willingness to put the effort into carefully weighing many relative factors against each other, and the bravery to believe things you can’t prove, then you can figure things out beyond the limitations of science.
Reality – Time, Space and Math
Time is a tricky one. I’m not really sure if time exists or if it’s just a persistent illusion. Julian Barbour makes a case in his books for a possible model of time in which our experience of it as something that passes, or progresses from past to future, is purely illusory, or an emergent property of more-fundamental principles. Likewise, some scientists believe it’s only the incidental direction of increasing entropy in the universe that makes us able to remember the past and not to the future and generally makes our brains feel like there’s such a thing as the passing of time. And I’ve talked to a physics PhD student who believes the “block universe” (basically a 4D manifold of all past, present and future 3D states or instances stacked up like frames of a movie) is the only viable option because, within general relativity, there is no possible universal “now” that applies to all places with respect to all reference frames. Some times are “now” in some places or not “now” depending on your inertial reference frame (and, of course, there is no one objective inertial reference frame because we know that motion is completely relative).
Even if time really does exist, it’s in question whether the past and future still exist/already exist or not. I wrote more about that here: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2024/04/16/in-response-to-the-quora-question-does-the-past-still-exist-does-the-future-already-exist/. I mean, for one thing, it could be that “now” is like a sliding window (of what width? I don’t know. Epsilon?) that graduates from “before” to “after,” consuming new time and leaving old time in its wake. Or, it could be that, since there’s an infinite number of parallel realities, there’s always a line of them across some vector that corresponds to all the points of the past and present of this universe but is in their universe’s present. But on the other hand, I’m not sure it makes sense to compare current times between universes…if they’re totally disjunct, and if this universe is its own singularity and time began with the big bang (of this universe) as some scientists say, then there must be no temporal or spatial relationship between parallel universes. This would also square with what I said before about we from our current vantage point not having any way of observing an infinitude of “stuff,” such as all the universes of the multiverse.
The only other things I have to say about time is that (1) I suspect in the afterlife, time becomes less linear and you can access the past and future readily. Maybe you can access other timelines, too, though that would seem to contradict what I said above. And (2) Time may actually be like some kind of woven tapestry as I explain in https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2020/06/30/on-time-travel/.
Anyway, suffice it to say, I’m not really sure on the nature of time. But one thing seems clear: Whatever we imagine the nature of time to be, whether it’s technically correct or not, it’s (also?) something much deeper and more interesting than that.
Regarding my tentatively contradicting myself above, it’s okay to contradict yourself sometimes, because you can’t be right about everything, so enforcing consistency in all domains can lead to simply compounding systemic errors…I wrote more about that here: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2023/05/01/why-we-should-be-more-comfortable-with-contradiction/
As for space, space simply doesn’t exist. It isn’t a thing. It’s a mode of thinking. It’s an abstraction that helps us interact with the world as it is—whatever it is. I write about why here: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2020/10/29/space-doesnt-exist/. And as for math, math doesn’t exist in any independent way either. It’s merely abstraction. I’m either a so-called intuititionist or a constructivist when it comes to math; I’m not sure which one because I always forget what the diffrences are. Anyway, I have my reasoned argument for why math, numbers, etc. don’t actually exist except as concepts in our minds here: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2019/09/21/why-mathematical-platonism-is-silly/.
More Particularly…
I more or less believe in magic, magick/the occult/witchcraft, tarot and other forms of divination, the zodiac (see https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Astrology), telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, precognition, reiki and other psychic healing, ghosts, life after death and reincarnation, divinity and God, Shiva and Uma, lesser gods, angels, water and air spirits, other spirits, souls, soulmates, soul groups, soul families, consensual reality and the Mandela effect, astral projection, chakras, auras, chi and kundalini, the seven subtle bodies, charging and communication of crystals, healing and other powers of various rocks, “energy”/”energies” in the mystical sense (which some rationalists may complain is an ill-defined concept, to which I would say that, rather, it’s open-ended, exactly to the degree that it should be in order to maximize utility of the word, given that it refers to intangible and mysterious things), manifestation and the law of attraction, “signs,” the mystical principles of “as above, so below” and “as within, so without,” Jungian synchronicity, the Jungian collective unconscious, metaphysical idealism, panpsychism/pantheism, God-realized avatars, and alien visitations (see https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2017/02/04/on-the-subject-of-aliens-and-their-crafts/). For psychism see https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2022/01/23/psychism/.
I give an admittedly tenuous justification for the possibilities of all of the above in https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Rationalism that boils down to a kind of scientifically backed anti-foundationalism. I have plenty of other reasons for believing in all or many of the particulars listed above, but they’re small reasons, reasons supporting those reasons, etc., that all add up over time, and I couldn’t possibly recount them all. It goes back to what I said earlier about my beliefs being the cumulative result of everything I’ve ever experienced, imagined, heard or read.
