Metaphysics, Consciousness, Nature of Reality: a Thread from the ET Forum

Ed. note - One of the best decisions we ever made at Epsilon Theory was to limit the ability to comment on our notes to paid subscribers. It's amazing how $20/month will eliminate the trolls! We took that philosophy into our creation of the ET Forum - a paid subscriber-only community that IMO has become the best thing on the Internet today, a place where several thousand men and women of vastly different political beliefs, from all over the world and from all walks of life, come together and actually talk TO each other rather than THROUGH each other. Do we talk about politics? Sure. But not to score points with some social media audience. Because there is no audience! There's just us. Actual people with actual thoughts and questions with an opportunity to talk with other actual people with actual thoughts and questions. Just us. Just our Pack.

And the craziest thing happens when there's no audience, when you're talking with other actual human beings for the right reasons ... you not only have actual conversations, you not only move quickly past politics into subjects that are far more interesting and far more relevant to our actual lives than politics, but you make actual friends.

Crazy right?

When's the last time you made a friend?

Haha! I honestly thought it was impossible to make new friends in this insanely polarized, alienating Fiat World of always-on social media. Certainly impossible to make new friends ON social media.

And yet here we are.

So I decided to show the world what it looks like when actual human beings start having actual conversations and become actual friends.

This is an ET Forum thread that started about six weeks ago, rather intimidatingly titled Metaphysics, Consciousness, Nature of Reality, but it's really not intimidating at all. Here's the original post that started the thread ...

Starting this thread as a fork from a prior ‘narrative’ thread that starting diverging somewhat and becoming quite metaphysical. I hope this is helpful and not meddlesome (also if anyone knows if there is a better way to do this type of fork, or if it is not useful, happy to hear that). I’ve had some prior, private conversations with a few pack members that got into this subject and I imagine there are many people who might have a lot to say :). And of course there are few topics more fun.

Amongst things that Neal Stephenson taught me is a love of Leibniz, who referred to the “two great labyrinths of the mind”, namely “the composition of the continuum and the concurrence of God”. A bit of a passion of mine as a physicist and someone prone to philosophizing (but not a philosopher) has been using these two labyrinths as the lens for viewing the entire history of science and philosophy. I love that Leibniz recognized this in the 1700s and that it is still true today (with the deviation that the concurrence of God is better phrased these days as the existence of free will/nature of consciousness). I’ll stop there for this intro comment and copy in the other comments from the prior thread that started the fork.

Adam

And in the comment section below you'll see the conversation it sparked. I'm just going to leave it all here, warts and all. Zero editing, just actual people trying to figure important stuff out. Together.

There are hundreds of threads just like this on the ET Forum.

If this looks like your kind of community, where clear-eyed friends-in-the-making engage with each other in a full-hearted spirit of cooperation and respect ... join us!