What are the benefits of being religious?

restlessridge36 said:Krešo, you aren't even remotely correct. The only reality you need to concern yourself with is your own illiteracy. 😬 😱

Thanks for the heads-up—fixed those typos as best I could (see below)...
Alright, give it a read and tell me—why am I not even close to being right?... 🙂

fadedbison17 said:Sandra Wilson68,

You're saying: active and engaged consciousness = reality = awareness.

Looking at your whole post, I feel like you're mixing up terms—kind of swapping their meanings... you're jumping from one perspective (reality depends on consciousness) to another (consciousness depends on reality), which makes sense since you've basically merged them together.

Let me lay out my take and why I think you've got it wrong:
Consciousness has to be active and engaged. Simple proof—try to prove it isn't, and just notice what happens... you end up thinking about the process and using your own consciousness (meaning, you're conscious).

I really think it's vital to separate consciousness from reality.
Not everything (reality) relies on consciousness; consciousness just serves to perceive reality (and that's pretty much its whole job).

So how does consciousness actually work?
*Consciousness handles extraspection (that outward-facing perception of things existing in the external world) and introspection (the inward-facing process of understanding your own psychological moves relative to what's happening in the outside world; things like thinking, feeling, remembering, etc. Consciousness perceives reality—that’s all it does.

Just to reiterate since this seems fuzzy to you—how can consciousness *do that? Because reality exists (which is something distinct from consciousness).

I want to be as clear as possible so we're on the same page, so here are a few examples to help distinguish reality from consciousness:
- imagine a guy sitting in a field in Montana, watching a river flow in the distance. That river is part of reality (outside of consciousness) and it keeps flowing whether he's thinking about it or not. So, reality doesn't depend on consciousness. For anything to be perceived—for there to even be awareness—that river has to exist first (reality, something independent of consciousness).
- if a guy comes home exhausted from a shift at Ford and his wife starts yelling at him, he feels this mix of helplessness and anger (caused by the wife—the trigger isn't his consciousness, it's reality, something existing outside of himself).
- if a guy is dwelling on something that happened, he's using consciousness to replay an event that took place in reality, outside of his mind.

In the real world, we notice that certain entities (things that exist in reality) possess consciousness.
We reached that conclusion just by observing these entities. Basically, we noticed some entities (humans and certain animals) have the ability to perceive. We called that ability "awareness," and the entity that makes it possible is what we call "consciousness."
Some entities (like a rock, water, etc.) don't have consciousness. We came up with the word "consciousness" to differentiate the traits of entities that have it from those that don't—if everything was consciousness, there'd be no way to tell one thing from another, and we wouldn't even have a name for it.

What is consciousness? It's a characteristic of an entity (a human or certain animals). Without those entities, there is no consciousness. All entities are part of reality.

People don't use the word "consciousness" to explain every single thing in existence; they used it to name the specific ability that allows them to make sense of reality.
That ability (awareness), much like everything else that exists (reality), has its own specific traits and functions (it can be directed outward, inward, etc.).

Does that make sense?

Louis, you're basically trying to claim everything is a cognitive faculty by denying the existence of cognitive faculties itself. You deny what consciousness is, then turn around and say everything *is* consciousness... I just can't get behind that definition. You even admitted that terms like "consciousness" and "awareness" are already defined based on existing human knowledge—so maybe pick a word that actually fits what you’re trying to describe?

I'm not sure what that word would be, but maybe if you tried walking through your logic step-by-step—showing how you landed on this one word that supposedly covers everything—you'd see how many concepts and definitions you've had to twist just to make them fit your philosophy. Then, maybe, you'd find an expression that actually suits the concept you're explaining.

I think if you want anyone else to actually buy into your philosophy, the first thing you need to do is fix that part... otherwise, you're just asking people to agree with you based on faith (basically, just accepting your personal assumptions about what words mean), and I'm guessing that's not really the goal for a philosopher.

I honestly can't follow your train of thought because you take terms that seem perfectly clear to me and use them differently without explaining why... it makes it impossible to grasp. I'm trying to wrap my head around the metaphysical and epistemological sides of your ideas, but since your terminology is so ambiguous, the link between those two branches stays blurry. It doesn't even offer simple questions or answers because of all that vagueness.

The only reason you can even use terms like "consciousness" or "awareness" is because they already have established meanings—since humans discovered and defined them—so it's a bit weird to expect others (from my perspective, anyway) to understand you when you use those same words to explain your philosophy while giving them totally different meanings. If none of the terms actually mean anything, then nothing you're explaining makes sense.

In my view, the foundation of any philosophy should be its metaphysics—answering "what exists?"—which then leads to epistemology, answering "how do I know?".
Based on your posts, I'd say your metaphysics is pretty hazy and arbitrary, which spills over into your epistemology where words don't have fixed meanings, just whatever you decide they are at the moment.
If the main trait of your philosophy is just being arbitrary, then it isn't something applicable to everyone—it only works for someone who chooses to believe you. When you say, "the answer is self-evident here," it doesn't hold water because you're stripping the meaning away from the very words you're using.

Can I throw out one epistemological question? How do you actually construct your concepts and definitions? For example, what is a chair, and how did you arrive at that conclusion?

Hope I'm not being a pain, just trying to pull the discussion back a step so we can actually understand each other...

fadedbison17 said:Thanks for the heads-up—fixed those typos as best I could (see below)...
Alright, give it a read and tell me—why am I not even close to being right?... 🙂

Louis explained everything perfectly. There is no need for me to repeat him. You are looking at this from the wrong perspective—"without color or warmth." You need to "shift" your mindset to actually see and understand; you have to "train" yourself.😁 You are dug in, stubbornly clinging to your own narrow view.

restlessridge36 said:Louis explained everything perfectly. There is no need for me to repeat him. You are looking at this from the wrong perspective—"without color or warmth." You need to "shift" your mindset to actually see and understand; you have to "train" yourself.😁 You are dug in, stubbornly clinging to your own narrow view.

I don't really see the point in bending my mind to fit whatever someone else is preaching—so maybe that makes me seem stubborn. It’s not that I’m dismissing people just because I don't vibe with them; I just want to figure out what they’re actually trying to say from an angle that makes sense to me (logic over "vibes," you know?).
To me, philosophy should be clear-cut and precise, not some mystical, emotional thing. If it isn't accessible to anyone with a basic education, then it isn't philosophy—it's just a cult where a few "enlightened" elites dictate reality to everyone else. Not my style, thanks 🙂

Kobe Bryant

Based on your posts, I’d say your whole philosophical foundation is pretty blurry and arbitrary. It bleeds right into your epistemology because your words don't actually mean anything specific—you just make them up as you go. If "randomness" is the defining trait of your worldview, then it isn't even a real philosophy. It doesn't apply to everyone; it only works for people gullible enough to just take your word for it.

Look, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt here. Maybe you aren't catching my drift because some of the slang I use carries a different weight with you. If we aren't using the same playbook for these words, then it's obvious why everything I'm trying to break down ends up sounding like gibberish to you.

The issue is I have no clue which specific words you think mean something different to you than they do to me. In my mind, the vocabulary I’m using is pretty much universal—words mean what they mean, so there shouldn't be any confusion. You brought up the word "chair" earlier and asked me to use it as an example to explain how I build my definitions. Look, "chair" is a single, straightforward concept. It doesn't need a deep dive. The same goes for words like "effort," "movement," "observation," "feeling," "memory," "opinion," or "understanding." I use those terms to tackle the three big existential questions: what, how, and why we exist. They're simple. They're direct. To me, they carry no more weight than how any regular person uses them in everyday conversation. Honestly, it trips me out that you can't follow my logic well enough to realize that my way of speaking isn't some kind of personal "belief system" or creed.

I’m not even mad at you. This isn't the first time people have completely missed my point and then tried to claim I’m pushing some kind of religious agenda. Honestly, it just blows my mind. How can people—without me even saying anything—fail to grasp the basic cause-and-effect relationship between physical and mental processes? It's the very foundation of how they exist and how reality itself works. People just make stuff up, turn those fabrications into global religions, and call it a day. There’s zero philosophy or "wisdom" in what I’m saying. There’s no belief system here. I’m just describing things. I'm trying to map out that cause-and-effect loop by using the human conscious "I" as an example—how it operates through a sort of "survival instinct"—and then applying that same logic to nature as a whole. My goal is to show that all of nature functions the exact same way to sustain itself. If someone actually understood how they exist, they wouldn't be stupid enough to claim that only humans and maybe a few animals have consciousness while rocks and everything else have nothing. That kind of thinking is just a baseless, nonsensical belief. You can't have consciousness in a vacuum because a human is a system made of elements. If you strip away every single component that makes up a person, there’s nothing left. And "nothing" can't be conscious. You're left with the elements that build the system. Those elements couldn't even form a human if they didn't possess the capacity for effort, movement, perception, feeling, memory, thought, and understanding. Those abilities are the fundamental actions that make consciousness possible. Since there is absolutely no difference between the elements that make up a human body and the elements that make up the entire universe, the rules are the same. Everything exists under the same laws and possibilities. These rules are baked into those seven physical and mental actions I keep bringing up: effort, movement, perception, feeling, memory, thought, and understanding. Without them, there is nothing. For reality to exist, the matter it's made of must possess these capabilities. That is the law of existence. Without these abilities, matter wouldn't just fail to evolve or transform; it wouldn't even be able to exist in the first place.

Look, it’s just like how a person doesn't "possess" consciousness—meaning they don't just own those physical and mental faculties that define awareness—in the same way you're right that a rock doesn't have consciousness or anything else. But the actual matter that makes up everything, even a stone, does. The matter within a rock has the inherent capacity to develop, through specific processes, into a human being. Just as the matter that forms a person can, under certain conditions, revert back into stone. Without those seven physical and mental capacities, none of this would be possible. That's why these abilities are essentially the LAW of all existence.

If you can't wrap your head around this right now, don't sweat it. Just start studying yourself—the rules and ways you actually exist—and eventually, things will click. I get that you can't grasp everything overnight, especially when someone is dead set on believing things work differently. If you're interested and actually have the time, you can check out my more detailed breakdowns at this link. I don't think the terms I use will trip you up if you read carefully; I try to keep my language straightforward. I do my best to avoid using overly complex jargon that feels unnatural. http://home.primus.ca/~milanpanic/

Later.

Sandra Wilson68 said:Kobe Bryant

Based on your posts, I’d say your whole philosophical foundation is pretty blurry and arbitrary. It bleeds right into your epistemology because your words don't actually mean anything specific—you just make them up as you go. If "randomness" is the defining trait of your worldview, then it isn't even a real philosophy. It doesn't apply to everyone; it only works for people gullible enough to just take your word for it.

Look, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt here. Maybe you aren't catching my drift because some of the slang I use carries a different weight with you. If we aren't using the same playbook for these words, then it's obvious why everything I'm trying to break down ends up sounding like gibberish to you.

The issue is I have no clue which specific words you think mean something different to you than they do to me. In my mind, the vocabulary I’m using is pretty much universal—words mean what they mean, so there shouldn't be any confusion. You brought up the word "chair" earlier and asked me to use it as an example to explain how I build my definitions. Look, "chair" is a single, straightforward concept. It doesn't need a deep dive. The same goes for words like "effort," "movement," "observation," "feeling," "memory," "opinion," or "understanding." I use those terms to tackle the three big existential questions: what, how, and why we exist. They're simple. They're direct. To me, they carry no more weight than how any regular person uses them in everyday conversation. Honestly, it trips me out that you can't follow my logic well enough to realize that my way of speaking isn't some kind of personal "belief system" or creed.

I’m not even mad at you. This isn't the first time people have completely missed my point and then tried to claim I’m pushing some kind of religious agenda. Honestly, it just blows my mind. How can people—without me even saying anything—fail to grasp the basic cause-and-effect relationship between physical and mental processes? It's the very foundation of how they exist and how reality itself works. People just make stuff up, turn those fabrications into global religions, and call it a day. There’s zero philosophy or "wisdom" in what I’m saying. There’s no belief system here. I’m just describing things. I'm trying to map out that cause-and-effect loop by using the human conscious "I" as an example—how it operates through a sort of "survival instinct"—and then applying that same logic to nature as a whole. My goal is to show that all of nature functions the exact same way to sustain itself. If someone actually understood how they exist, they wouldn't be stupid enough to claim that only humans and maybe a few animals have consciousness while rocks and everything else have nothing. That kind of thinking is just a baseless, nonsensical belief. You can't have consciousness in a vacuum because a human is a system made of elements. If you strip away every single component that makes up a person, there’s nothing left. And "nothing" can't be conscious. You're left with the elements that build the system. Those elements couldn't even form a human if they didn't possess the capacity for effort, movement, perception, feeling, memory, thought, and understanding. Those abilities are the fundamental actions that make consciousness possible. Since there is absolutely no difference between the elements that make up a human body and the elements that make up the entire universe, the rules are the same. Everything exists under the same laws and possibilities. These rules are baked into those seven physical and mental actions I keep bringing up: effort, movement, perception, feeling, memory, thought, and understanding. Without them, there is nothing. For reality to exist, the matter it's made of must possess these capabilities. That is the law of existence. Without these abilities, matter wouldn't just fail to evolve or transform; it wouldn't even be able to exist in the first place.

Look, it’s just like how a person doesn't "possess" consciousness—meaning they don't just own those physical and mental faculties that define awareness—in the same way you're right that a rock doesn't have consciousness or anything else. But the actual matter that makes up everything, even a stone, does. The matter within a rock has the inherent capacity to develop, through specific processes, into a human being. Just as the matter that forms a person can, under certain conditions, revert back into stone. Without those seven physical and mental capacities, none of this would be possible. That's why these abilities are essentially the LAW of all existence.

If you can't wrap your head around this right now, don't sweat it. Just start studying yourself—the rules and ways you actually exist—and eventually, things will click. I get that you can't grasp everything overnight, especially when someone is dead set on believing things work differently. If you're interested and actually have the time, you can check out my more detailed breakdowns at this link. I don't think the terms I use will trip you up if you read carefully; I try to keep my language straightforward. I do my best to avoid using overly complex jargon that feels unnatural. http://home.primus.ca/~milanpanic/

Later.

There are really only four psychological functions: thinking-feeling, and intuition-sensing. They're the tools we use to perceive things, and they complement each other. Everything else is just part of that.

Morgan Hernandez5 said:There are really only four psychological functions: thinking-feeling, and intuition-sensing. They're the tools we use to perceive things, and they complement each other. Everything else is just part of that.

I’m honestly not sure if these benefits actually apply to you, luiz.☕

Louis,

There are really just four psychological functions at play here: thinking and feeling, plus intuition and sensation—those are our perception tools. They complement each other. Everything else just falls under those umbrellas.

Memory isn't just some subset of thinking, feeling, or perceiving; it’s its own distinct mental faculty and action, which is why I’m calling it out specifically. I also see understanding as its own unique process, even though it relies entirely on everything else—perception, feeling, memory, and thought. We’re talking about understanding the past we’ve perceived, felt, remembered, and thought through so we can actually plan for the future. Basically, you have to grasp the good and bad experiences from your past to figure out what comes next. You use that insight to build the will to dodge the bad stuff and chase the good. This constant cycle of understanding right from wrong is what allows consciousness to evolve. Without the ability to make sense of the good and evil we've lived through, the universe would just stay stuck in a permanent state of chaos.

You can't talk about these mental processes without including physical movement and effort. Without them, there’s nothing to perceive or feel in the first place. And if there’s nothing to perceive or feel, there’s nothing to remember, think about, or understand. Physicality and psychology are inseparable. They’re locked together, constantly feeding into one another in real-time. They always come as a package deal.

Sandra Wilson68,
I honestly can't tell what you're even trying to prove here—it's all a bit fuzzy—so I don't really see the point in clicking those links you posted (btw, I did check them out, and yeah... just as confusing)
But hey, no biggie. Have a good one! 😉

Hey, Chris!

fadedbison17 said:Look, people have a set way of processing reality—you've got specific cognitive abilities, and that's the only lens you've got to work with.

Reality is singular, but every single person perceives it differently.
Think about it—say you and someone who's blind are in the same room.
They’re going to be aware of the room and what's going on in a totally different way than you are, but you're both experiencing the exact same room (the same reality)...

Everyone builds their own version of reality—yeah, if you mean that humans have consciousness and can only understand things through that.

That second part of yours—'...that it affects their interpretation of the environment'—is a bit fuzzy for me. A person can't really choose their cognitive faculties.
You can shift your focus—like leaning more into sight than hearing, for example—but you can't just invent a new sense out of thin air, any more than you could invent a new aspect of reality itself...

We on the same page?

I absolutely agree.

Your second sentence—'...that it affects one's interpretation of the surroundings'—doesn't quite follow for me. A person can't simply choose their cognitive faculties.
One might direct focus more toward sight than hearing, sure, but you can't just invent a new sense any more than you can invent a new aspect of physical reality.

The truth is, we are constantly bombarded by mountains of data from our environment. To make sense of what's happening, we have to filter it—discarding the noise and shaping the essential bits into something coherent.
Those filters that allow us to grasp the world are built on beliefs. I don't mean religious dogma here—I mean the fundamental connections between concepts that we all share. You see what you believe.
By shifting those underlying convictions, you shift your reality. Things start looking different. You interpret events differently. They take on entirely new cause-and-effect patterns.

Nick can't wrap his head around reality until he actually figures himself out. And honestly, I don't get why you guys are so convinced that studying "objective reality" matters more than understanding yourself as the entity doing the perceiving. For any conscious being, their own existence is way more significant than some external thing outside of them. The real question is "Who am I? How do I function? Why am I here?" It’s not about some distant star in the sky or wondering if there’s another galaxy beyond that one which we can't see. It’s not even about whether that star looks the way we think it does or how a blind person might perceive it.

Real, absolute reality isn't what you pick up through your five senses. It’s the stuff that *makes up* the world we perceive—the foundation that our senses can't actually touch. That's something you can only find within yourself, stripped of sensory input. True reality is simply what we are at our core: CONSCIOUSNESS. If someone doesn't understand what consciousness is, they need to go deep and study themselves—who they are, what they are, how they exist, and why. Once they do that, they'll get it. They'll understand the what, the how, and the why of everything, because everything that exists is just consciousness.

You don't need a PhD or anyone else's help to understand yourself as consciousness. All the data you need is already right there, because every single one of us *is* consciousness. You just need to pay attention to those facts and make sense of them.

placidranger said:I absolutely agree.

Your second sentence—'...that it affects one's interpretation of the surroundings'—doesn't quite follow for me. A person can't simply choose their cognitive faculties.
One might direct focus more toward sight than hearing, sure, but you can't just invent a new sense any more than you can invent a new aspect of physical reality.

The truth is, we are constantly bombarded by mountains of data from our environment. To make sense of what's happening, we have to filter it—discarding the noise and shaping the essential bits into something coherent.
Those filters that allow us to grasp the world are built on beliefs. I don't mean religious dogma here—I mean the fundamental connections between concepts that we all share. You see what you believe.
By shifting those underlying convictions, you shift your reality. Things start looking different. You interpret events differently. They take on entirely new cause-and-effect patterns.

Yup, I'm with you.
Nobody can know "everything"—you just know what matters within your own context.

We just need to distinguish "reality" from "personal reality."
What you’re calling "personal reality," I’d call a self-concept. It's a process driven by a value system someone adopts—the thing they act on (mentally and physically) to categorize and integrate everything they learn.
I'd call that value system a philosophy (basically, how everything in existence relates to me).

When a person changes their philosophy, they change how they perceive—or relate to—the world around them. They aren't changing the universe itself, just themselves.
Reality is just reality; it doesn't care which philosophy you pick. Everyone exists within reality regardless of their outlook—I'm talking about the relationship between consciousness and reality at any given moment. In that moment, things are what they are, no matter how someone chooses to label them or how they use their consciousness (like self-delusion or trying to wish things were different). That doesn't mean people are just passive victims of nature, though—it means being effective comes from understanding reality, not ignoring it.

Sorry if I'm being nitpicky here—if we're gonna dive deep, better if we're both talking about the same thing... 🙂