You personally don’t have to engage at all. In fact with the way algorithms work, very specifically do NOT engage if you’re not ready to go all in. But be aware that there are plenty of people out there ready to fill the information void with whatever nonsense that benefits them.
Nobody has to be a crusader against misinformation, but I’d strongly caution against thinking that just ignoring the problem will make it go away.
If you define this subjectively, from where comes the wording “we must” and “we need to” in your earlier messages?
Your words: “we must destroy consensus reality” “We need to kill the idea of objective reality”
In your world of free, subjective experience first, are people not allowed to form consensus that disagrees with your subjective ideals?
How do you define what a realist cage is without being informed by objective reality?
…no? Help me out?
Edit: Sorry, I misunderstood you lol
Neither. I just enjoy picking apart philosophical arguments.
If objective reality doesn’t exist, then your definition of ‘subjective’ is just a consensus-based hallucination you inherited from your own comfort. How do you know your ‘multiverse’ isn’t just a realist’s cage you haven’t recognized yet? Your own argument destroys the premise upon which it rests. Also, what if my subjective experience includes what I would characterize as objective reality? You would be imposing your own definition on to me, again destroying your own premise.
Good on you for asking! Dawkins doesn’t prove there’s no God; he argues the idea isn’t necessary to explain reality. The burden of proof isn’t on him to disprove an unfalsifiable claim, it’s on those making the claim to provide testable evidence. That’s how critical thinking works.
https://youtu.be/Qf03U04rqGQ?t=301
As for “How do you learn without learning?” you don’t. But a lot of people confuse rote repetition (parroting Dawkins or the Bible) with understanding (grappling with the arguments themselves). One’s memorization; the other’s understanding.
Wow, that’s… not quite what I meant. The goal isn’t to reject objective reality, it’s to question how we define it and who gets to decide what counts as “real.” Pushing people to explore their own perspectives is one thing, but encouraging pure solipsism just replaces one dogma with another. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater, yeah?
Oh my gosh, thank you for responding this way 😭
I feel like on Lemmy it’s really difficult to ever post anything but total agreement without it immediately becoming an argument. Glad we found common ground!
I get what you’re saying, but you’re kind of setting up a strawman yourself here here. Not every idea deserves endless debate, sure, it’s about the habit of dismissing things as “stupid” without even considering them. Sure, lizard people and bricks fixing teeth are absurd. But those examples are extreme on purpose, and they don’t really address the core of people rejecting ideas out of hand just because they’re unfamiliar or uncomfortable. If an idea is actually bad, it will fall apart under scrutiny. But if the default response is just “that’s dumb,” we’re not thinking critically, we’re just avoiding the work, and worse, we are participating in a culture where it’s okay to do so. Which is exactly what leads to people getting (and abusing) terrible ideas.
Remedy to stupidity isn’t LESS critical thinking.
I unironically think the braindead atheism online greatly contributed to the rise of Christian nationalism we’ve been seeing in the past decade…
Kinda. Or at least beginning to exit it. The Matrix has plenty of intentional Buddhist undertones. And Revolutions features a vedic hymn in its soundtrack, also signaling the idea of waking up from illusion.
Welcome ☺️ if you’re really interested, I frankly recommend trying meditation rather than try to understand the theory. The Way App from Henry Shukman is pretty good.
Op’s analogy isn’t about verifying meditation experiences as scientific facts, but about how both Zen and science are rigorous, disciplined studies of reality, just through different lenses. Zen isn’t about abstraction or quantification; it’s about direct, unmediated experience (and “peer review” happens with sangha and the teacher). The comparison is poetic, not literal. It’s kinda highlighting that both paths require clarity, humility, and a willingness to see things as they are, not as we wish them to be.
Yeah, if you really start breaking down sentences, to their individual words and their respective concepts, everything falls apart.
Yes.
Yes.
Go on. Read that again. Or write that again, slowly.
Yes, this is pretty much exactly what happens. It’s the map-territory problem, but with every single word. We have rough agreements on what some words mean. Easy enough with what we take to be solid objects. This X is a cross, like two objects intersecting. Yes, we know what X is. Okay, now do the same thing to every word in this sentence. And then again to every word in this sentence. Oh… how about subjective experiences? Love. Sadness. What are those? How did you come to think of those words when describing love? Were you born with language? You don’t inherently know what anything is. You just have a bunch of code in your head.
So we got right back to where we started.
I rather practice Buddhism.