World and Hexbear are both liberal cesspits. One is full of centrists who think they're leftists, and one is full of conservatives who think they're communists.
Look, you haven't sold me on the idea, but I'm going to upvote you because, if nothing else, this is an original take.
This just pretends democratic socialism doesn't exist. Like there's nothing between liberal and ML communist.
So, you are saying that if someone wants the same end goal as you, but has a differing opinion on how we accomplish that, you insult them. I'm sure you change a lot of minds and make a lot of friends with your method.
There is nothing between liberal and ML "communist". They're the same. Democratic socialism is to the left of both of those, and anarchist ideologies such as anarcho-communism, syndicalism, and mutualism are to the left of that. See, demsocs may not be the biggest fans of Marx, but they adhere far more closely to his ideas than Stalinists do.
I see now. Intriguing take you have. It's different than the way everybody else classifies things, but I guess I can see where you are coming from. In my opinion, ML theory is pretty left leaning when it comes to economics and the end goal of it, but the authoritarian plan for transitioning to it does not align with most other leftist virtues and ideas.
Stalinists are just so afraid to actually pursue their supposed end goal. They always say "I want a stateless, classless moneyless society", but if you say "Okay, let's have a communist revolution and get rid of all that garbage right now", they call you an idiot. "No, no, no", they say. "You have to have a socialist revolution, and then wait two hundred years for the state to dissolve itself." Well I'm sick of waiting. Russia never dissolved its socialist state, and China isn't going to either. But you know who didn't have a state, and still managed to fight bloody hard against the capitalists? Catalonia. They had the right idea, they just got rid of the state straight away. They were actually communists. I figure if the Stalinists keep saying no to communism, then they can't be communists at all.
ha!
"a plague on both your houses" rofl
Why do you think Hexbear are not Communists?
They don't want to have a communist revolution. They want to have a socialist revolution and then wait for the state to implement communism on its own. A true communist would act to bring about communism.
Have you by any chance read The Communist Manifesto or Critique of the Gotha Programme? Both are very short reads, and give some level of idea of what Marx is directly advocating for, as opposed to his general critique of Capitalism or his philosophical work on Dialectical Materialism. Marx was no Anarchist, he advocated for building Communism over time. This didn't mean "waiting for the state to one day turn on the Communism switch," that ignores his entire philosophy of Historical Materialism, whereby societal contradictions are worked out over time, as nothing is inherently static and everything is in motion.
None of this requires any of Lenin's work to be read at all.
If you're saying that a "True Communist" would somehow magically create Communism directly via revolution and not over time, then Marx was not a "True Communist." At this point, you're deeply silly, and simply redefining Anarchism as "True Communism" to win a game of semantics and label all non-Anarchists as conservatives.
Edit: oh, in another post you directly out yourself as a Soulist, and thus you disagree with Marx not only on his advocacy for Communism, but also his philosophy of Dialectical Materialism. At this point, you're content to deny science and Materialism for the sake of pushing forward the idea that ideas create reality, which is deeply unserious.
Dialectical materialism is a misnomer. I'll give you an example. Suppose Alice's boss pays her one dollar an hour, while Bob's boss pays him a thousand dollars an hour. A dollar is not a material object. It's a social construct. These quantities are, material, simply numbers in a bank account. Less than that, because numbers are social constructs too. Materially, these are magnetised bits on a hard drive. There is no material sense in which Bob earns more than Alice. The fact that Bob earns a thousand times as much is purely social, not material. Yet, as a result of the exchange of social constructs, Alice lives in a slum and cannot afford medical care for the tumor that will kill her in a year's time, and she is driven by necessity towards revolution. While Bob lives a life of privilege in a mcmansion with three healthy kids from three different ex-wives, and Bob is incentivised to maintain the status quo and oppose revolution.
If the dialectical philosophy of marxists were aptly named, it would be called dialectical determinism. Alice and Bob's lives are governed by cause and effect, not by materials. They are governed by the cause and effect of social constructs. We can say that materially, Bob is more wealthy because he has a mansion, but why does he have a mansion when Alice does not? Because of a social construct. Not a material. It is wrong to say Alice's desire for revolution is driven by materials. It is in fact driven by cause and effect, which is much more universal than mere matter.
Being a soulist does not make me the enemy of dialectical determinists, which is to say Marxists. But it does make me the enemy of realists, who misunderstand the lessons to be learned from Marx's writing and fixate upon the physical to the exclusion of truth.
Oh, it appears I was wrong. You reject all of Marxism, including his critique of Capitalism via rejection of the Labor Theory of Value. Money is a representation of Exchange-Value, it doesn't simply exist in our minds. Recognizing income differences is not an anti-Materialist take, pretending these happen for no reason is a rejection of attempting to understand Capitalism itself, and reality.
This is Idealism at its peak, and is a complete misunderstanding of what Materialists mean when referencing Social Relations. If you genuinely want to understand Dialectical Materialism, please read Elementary Principles of Philosophy by Politzer. Materialists understand social relations.
Alice's drive towards revolution is due to her material conditions, which are caused by the material reality of Capitalism.
You are an enemy of Marxism and Marxists because you reject all 3 pillars of Marxism: Critique of Capitalism via the Labor Theory of Value, advocacy for Socialism as a way to build towards Communism, and Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Pretending to be the "One True Communist" while completely disavowing history's most important Communist in every major manner is just anticommunism.
Love the argument. "No u". Great job telling me my own beliefs incorrectly. With skills like that, you could be a politician in the US.
Yes, your beliefs about Marxist beliefs are wrong, and your beliefs about your own reality are wrong. Avoiding actually engaging with the points I made by replacing them with a "no u" and attacking me personally is again deeply unserious behavior.
If you want me to take you seriously, maybe try having serious arguments.
What part wasn't serious?
The part where you completely misunderstood both Marx and my own arguments. But no, no, go ahead. I'm sure everyone at the clown college is very impressed with you.
How did I completely misunderstand both Marx and your own arguments? Saying "no u" and calling me a clown isn't how you win an argument.
I don't need to argue with you. The ridiculousness of your position speaks for itself.
This is the worst thing that I have ever read, so bad that it made me make an account just to tell you how wrong you are.
First of all, if you even, for a second, thought about what you were saying this immediately crumbles. You dedicate a significant portion to talking about the material differences in the lives of those individuals, the property they own, the health care they can access, but then proceed to deny that it is the material conditions, that you have just laid out, that drive people towards certain ideas! You utterly contradict yourself.
Secondly, you just completely ignore how reality works and draw an arbitrary start line where everything just begins in a highly developed manner. The workers are not preordained to be workers, the bourgeoisie are not preordained to be such either. The people in your thought experiment would be in such a position due to a very very very very long history of subjective action arising from objective material conditions and social relationships (those relationships also arising from material conditions). So, dialectical materialism is very aptly named!
Thirdly, you have no idea what dialectical means and it is agonisingly obvious. A dialectic is the relationship between the opposite aspects inherent within a thing. So, with any morsel of philosophical thought it is readily apparent that “dialectical determinism” is an oxymoron. And I know you lack that said morsel of philosophical thought, so I’m going to explain it to you. The dialectic in question is the subject-object relationship, otherwise known as historical materialism: so if you remove subjectivity (which is a necessary consequence of a deterministic world view) you are debasing the subject to a mere object; and if there is no subject, there’s no subject-object relationship and thus no dialectic.
To wrap things up, stop trying to talk about things you’re beyond clueless about!
True leftism is when you reject reality, and anyone that doesn't subscribe to your extremely niche, extremely online ideology is either a conservative or a centrist. Everyone who disagrees with you, whether on the basis of theory or history or material conditions or lived experience, is just too morally impure to achieve the same level of leftism as you, you are the One True Leftist, and you're not going to let little things like what things exist or are possible get in the way of that.
Wow, a fellow soulist. You're being a bit too evangelical, though. We actually have a discord server with over 70 members! https://discord.gg/nfbVVyXK. And if you don't like that one, there are two newer servers run by different mod teams. https://discord.com/invite/w7tvaR6s. https://discord.gg/5THVKZrk. Also, many soulists come from diverse walks of life and have more lived experience of realist oppression than nearly anyone. For example, I have schizotypal personality disorder, so my experience of reality is neurodivergent to begin with. There are many otherkin and plural systems within the community. Even material conditions, which are fake and socially constructed, can radicalise someone towards soulism. Over half of soulists are transgender. Obviously, soulism is more attractive to any trans person than realism, because it offers faster and more complete transition than any realist ideology.
I am not a soulist. In fact, I consider it to be an extremely dangerous ideology. If you're successful in undermining consensus reality, we're going to have dragons and vampires running around terrorizing people. The moment reality becomes mutable enough for someone to turn themselves into something with mind control powers, like a mind flayer, we're all fucked.
I am trans and neurodivergent, and I take offense at this statement:
Obviously, soulism is more attractive to any trans person than realism, because it offers faster and more complete transition than any realist ideology.
Trans identities are not a rejection of reality. I don't find your ideology appealing in the slightest. I believe in objective science, and the science is 100% on the side of trans people.
Of course the science is in support of trans people. Realism is anti-science. The scientific method points us inexorably towards antirealism. Soulists oppose the manufactured, false consensus reality which denies trans lives experiences. Because we're awesome. Mainstream movements say pre-transition trans women are female on the inside, but soulists say the outside body is a mental construct, and cannot be taken as fact in any sense.
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.
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.
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.
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. And we can use that, because it means reality can be manipulated not just by physical technology, but also by psychological technology. Imagine a civilisation only using half of science! It would look to the average person like a society practicing biology and medicine without ever discovering chemistry or physics. That's precisely the situation our civilisation now finds itself in. We are only using half the science that is available to us, and half of the technologies we could have already invented by now. Antirealists demand that the government pour more research money into developing psychological technologies that alter our perception of reality. And that the public embrace such psychological technologies as have already been invented. For example, the technology to see a trans person as their preferred gender presentation regardless of their physical form. That technology is essential to preventing suicides and many people refuse to adopt it. We are fighting an anti-science platform pushed by transphobes who want trans people dead.
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.
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.
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.
It's much the same language as an atheist might use to talk about the gods. The atheist would say "If by 'the gods', you mean 'almighty beings', then there's no such thing, and I oppose belief in such a thing. But if by 'the gods', you mean 'the almighty beings society believes in', then they are anti-science.
Please don't begrudge me for accepting your premise that consensus reality is reality. It's just a matter of convenience. I cannot at the same time believe that reality is true, and that reality is what the realists believe in. I have to pick one or the other.
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?
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?
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.
You see, denying the existence of the entire field of psychology and claiming I made it up is exactly what makes you an anti-science weirdo.
World and Hexbear are both liberal cesspits. One is full of centrists who think they're leftists, and one is full of conservatives who think they're communists.
Look, you haven't sold me on the idea, but I'm going to upvote you because, if nothing else, this is an original take.
https://lemmy.ca/post/22844022/9690280
This just pretends democratic socialism doesn't exist. Like there's nothing between liberal and ML communist.
So, you are saying that if someone wants the same end goal as you, but has a differing opinion on how we accomplish that, you insult them. I'm sure you change a lot of minds and make a lot of friends with your method.
There is nothing between liberal and ML "communist". They're the same. Democratic socialism is to the left of both of those, and anarchist ideologies such as anarcho-communism, syndicalism, and mutualism are to the left of that. See, demsocs may not be the biggest fans of Marx, but they adhere far more closely to his ideas than Stalinists do.
I see now. Intriguing take you have. It's different than the way everybody else classifies things, but I guess I can see where you are coming from. In my opinion, ML theory is pretty left leaning when it comes to economics and the end goal of it, but the authoritarian plan for transitioning to it does not align with most other leftist virtues and ideas.
Stalinists are just so afraid to actually pursue their supposed end goal. They always say "I want a stateless, classless moneyless society", but if you say "Okay, let's have a communist revolution and get rid of all that garbage right now", they call you an idiot. "No, no, no", they say. "You have to have a socialist revolution, and then wait two hundred years for the state to dissolve itself." Well I'm sick of waiting. Russia never dissolved its socialist state, and China isn't going to either. But you know who didn't have a state, and still managed to fight bloody hard against the capitalists? Catalonia. They had the right idea, they just got rid of the state straight away. They were actually communists. I figure if the Stalinists keep saying no to communism, then they can't be communists at all.
ha!
"a plague on both your houses" rofl
Why do you think Hexbear are not Communists?
They don't want to have a communist revolution. They want to have a socialist revolution and then wait for the state to implement communism on its own. A true communist would act to bring about communism.
Have you by any chance read The Communist Manifesto or Critique of the Gotha Programme? Both are very short reads, and give some level of idea of what Marx is directly advocating for, as opposed to his general critique of Capitalism or his philosophical work on Dialectical Materialism. Marx was no Anarchist, he advocated for building Communism over time. This didn't mean "waiting for the state to one day turn on the Communism switch," that ignores his entire philosophy of Historical Materialism, whereby societal contradictions are worked out over time, as nothing is inherently static and everything is in motion.
None of this requires any of Lenin's work to be read at all.
If you're saying that a "True Communist" would somehow magically create Communism directly via revolution and not over time, then Marx was not a "True Communist." At this point, you're deeply silly, and simply redefining Anarchism as "True Communism" to win a game of semantics and label all non-Anarchists as conservatives.
Edit: oh, in another post you directly out yourself as a Soulist, and thus you disagree with Marx not only on his advocacy for Communism, but also his philosophy of Dialectical Materialism. At this point, you're content to deny science and Materialism for the sake of pushing forward the idea that ideas create reality, which is deeply unserious.
Dialectical materialism is a misnomer. I'll give you an example. Suppose Alice's boss pays her one dollar an hour, while Bob's boss pays him a thousand dollars an hour. A dollar is not a material object. It's a social construct. These quantities are, material, simply numbers in a bank account. Less than that, because numbers are social constructs too. Materially, these are magnetised bits on a hard drive. There is no material sense in which Bob earns more than Alice. The fact that Bob earns a thousand times as much is purely social, not material. Yet, as a result of the exchange of social constructs, Alice lives in a slum and cannot afford medical care for the tumor that will kill her in a year's time, and she is driven by necessity towards revolution. While Bob lives a life of privilege in a mcmansion with three healthy kids from three different ex-wives, and Bob is incentivised to maintain the status quo and oppose revolution.
If the dialectical philosophy of marxists were aptly named, it would be called dialectical determinism. Alice and Bob's lives are governed by cause and effect, not by materials. They are governed by the cause and effect of social constructs. We can say that materially, Bob is more wealthy because he has a mansion, but why does he have a mansion when Alice does not? Because of a social construct. Not a material. It is wrong to say Alice's desire for revolution is driven by materials. It is in fact driven by cause and effect, which is much more universal than mere matter.
Being a soulist does not make me the enemy of dialectical determinists, which is to say Marxists. But it does make me the enemy of realists, who misunderstand the lessons to be learned from Marx's writing and fixate upon the physical to the exclusion of truth.
Oh, it appears I was wrong. You reject all of Marxism, including his critique of Capitalism via rejection of the Labor Theory of Value. Money is a representation of Exchange-Value, it doesn't simply exist in our minds. Recognizing income differences is not an anti-Materialist take, pretending these happen for no reason is a rejection of attempting to understand Capitalism itself, and reality.
This is Idealism at its peak, and is a complete misunderstanding of what Materialists mean when referencing Social Relations. If you genuinely want to understand Dialectical Materialism, please read Elementary Principles of Philosophy by Politzer. Materialists understand social relations.
Alice's drive towards revolution is due to her material conditions, which are caused by the material reality of Capitalism.
You are an enemy of Marxism and Marxists because you reject all 3 pillars of Marxism: Critique of Capitalism via the Labor Theory of Value, advocacy for Socialism as a way to build towards Communism, and Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Pretending to be the "One True Communist" while completely disavowing history's most important Communist in every major manner is just anticommunism.
Love the argument. "No u". Great job telling me my own beliefs incorrectly. With skills like that, you could be a politician in the US.
Yes, your beliefs about Marxist beliefs are wrong, and your beliefs about your own reality are wrong. Avoiding actually engaging with the points I made by replacing them with a "no u" and attacking me personally is again deeply unserious behavior.
If you want me to take you seriously, maybe try having serious arguments.
What part wasn't serious?
The part where you completely misunderstood both Marx and my own arguments. But no, no, go ahead. I'm sure everyone at the clown college is very impressed with you.
How did I completely misunderstand both Marx and your own arguments? Saying "no u" and calling me a clown isn't how you win an argument.
I don't need to argue with you. The ridiculousness of your position speaks for itself.
This is the worst thing that I have ever read, so bad that it made me make an account just to tell you how wrong you are.
First of all, if you even, for a second, thought about what you were saying this immediately crumbles. You dedicate a significant portion to talking about the material differences in the lives of those individuals, the property they own, the health care they can access, but then proceed to deny that it is the material conditions, that you have just laid out, that drive people towards certain ideas! You utterly contradict yourself.
Secondly, you just completely ignore how reality works and draw an arbitrary start line where everything just begins in a highly developed manner. The workers are not preordained to be workers, the bourgeoisie are not preordained to be such either. The people in your thought experiment would be in such a position due to a very very very very long history of subjective action arising from objective material conditions and social relationships (those relationships also arising from material conditions). So, dialectical materialism is very aptly named!
Thirdly, you have no idea what dialectical means and it is agonisingly obvious. A dialectic is the relationship between the opposite aspects inherent within a thing. So, with any morsel of philosophical thought it is readily apparent that “dialectical determinism” is an oxymoron. And I know you lack that said morsel of philosophical thought, so I’m going to explain it to you. The dialectic in question is the subject-object relationship, otherwise known as historical materialism: so if you remove subjectivity (which is a necessary consequence of a deterministic world view) you are debasing the subject to a mere object; and if there is no subject, there’s no subject-object relationship and thus no dialectic.
To wrap things up, stop trying to talk about things you’re beyond clueless about!
True leftism is when you reject reality, and anyone that doesn't subscribe to your extremely niche, extremely online ideology is either a conservative or a centrist. Everyone who disagrees with you, whether on the basis of theory or history or material conditions or lived experience, is just too morally impure to achieve the same level of leftism as you, you are the One True Leftist, and you're not going to let little things like what things exist or are possible get in the way of that.
Wow, a fellow soulist. You're being a bit too evangelical, though. We actually have a discord server with over 70 members! https://discord.gg/nfbVVyXK. And if you don't like that one, there are two newer servers run by different mod teams. https://discord.com/invite/w7tvaR6s. https://discord.gg/5THVKZrk. Also, many soulists come from diverse walks of life and have more lived experience of realist oppression than nearly anyone. For example, I have schizotypal personality disorder, so my experience of reality is neurodivergent to begin with. There are many otherkin and plural systems within the community. Even material conditions, which are fake and socially constructed, can radicalise someone towards soulism. Over half of soulists are transgender. Obviously, soulism is more attractive to any trans person than realism, because it offers faster and more complete transition than any realist ideology.
I am not a soulist. In fact, I consider it to be an extremely dangerous ideology. If you're successful in undermining consensus reality, we're going to have dragons and vampires running around terrorizing people. The moment reality becomes mutable enough for someone to turn themselves into something with mind control powers, like a mind flayer, we're all fucked.
I am trans and neurodivergent, and I take offense at this statement:
Trans identities are not a rejection of reality. I don't find your ideology appealing in the slightest. I believe in objective science, and the science is 100% on the side of trans people.
Of course the science is in support of trans people. Realism is anti-science. The scientific method points us inexorably towards antirealism. Soulists oppose the manufactured, false consensus reality which denies trans lives experiences. Because we're awesome. Mainstream movements say pre-transition trans women are female on the inside, but soulists say the outside body is a mental construct, and cannot be taken as fact in any sense.
Absolute nonsense.
Of course the body exists, in the same way that anything exists. It is an objective fact, and denying that doesn't help anyone.
You should watch cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman's TED talk about how our bodies aren't real. And here's a youtube link in case you have trouble with TED's website. And if you don't like video, you can read his book or an Atlantic article about his book. Or this blog review of his book.
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.
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.
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. And we can use that, because it means reality can be manipulated not just by physical technology, but also by psychological technology. Imagine a civilisation only using half of science! It would look to the average person like a society practicing biology and medicine without ever discovering chemistry or physics. That's precisely the situation our civilisation now finds itself in. We are only using half the science that is available to us, and half of the technologies we could have already invented by now. Antirealists demand that the government pour more research money into developing psychological technologies that alter our perception of reality. And that the public embrace such psychological technologies as have already been invented. For example, the technology to see a trans person as their preferred gender presentation regardless of their physical form. That technology is essential to preventing suicides and many people refuse to adopt it. We are fighting an anti-science platform pushed by transphobes who want trans people dead.
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.
This is complete nonsense.
No it absolutely is not.
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?
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.
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 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.
It's much the same language as an atheist might use to talk about the gods. The atheist would say "If by 'the gods', you mean 'almighty beings', then there's no such thing, and I oppose belief in such a thing. But if by 'the gods', you mean 'the almighty beings society believes in', then they are anti-science.
Please don't begrudge me for accepting your premise that consensus reality is reality. It's just a matter of convenience. I cannot at the same time believe that reality is true, and that reality is what the realists believe in. I have to pick one or the other.
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?
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.
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.
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.
You see, denying the existence of the entire field of psychology and claiming I made it up is exactly what makes you an anti-science weirdo.