POSITIVE REALIZATIONS

Positing More Coherent Systems

Like everything, it has many names.

Sometimes I like to use the buzz words to surf the positive-association waves…

so I call it a “First-principles, systematic, phenomenological metaphysics”

Sometimes I like to smoosh lots of words together and create new words to capture the interconnection of many important parts…

so I call it an ethico-onto-epistemic-monism. And I say it describes the scientific conscience of expanding existence: “exispanscience”, or simply, expansivism.

Sometimes I describe it by the kinds of more recognized, general categories it falls into:

It’s a form of animism, idealism, non-dualism, pan-psychism, pan-experientialism, and pan-logism; it’s a rationalist-spiritual philosophy, or a super-rationalist universalism, and a socio-cultural-political philosophy; it’s both a radical empiricism and radical rationalism; a compatibilism of determinism and indeterminism, and of correspondence-realist epistemology and pragmatism. It prioritizes experience, consciousness, logic, fundamental and universal reason, unity, coherence, cooperation, resolution, synthesis, comprehensiveness, inclusiveness, integration, holism, expansion, positivity. It advocates for expansivism, coherentism, evolutionism.

Sometimes I describe it by it’s main argument:

All knowledge that we have is a form of experience. So, all we know about the world comes through our experience. In other words, all we know and can expect to ever know about the world — all our actual, real knowledge — always includes experience. Therefore, reality, from our perspective, must always include experience. Experience is fundamental to our reality — it is universal, and this consistency of experience is the bedrock of the criteria of truth: consistency along all dimensions — coherence, comprehensiveness, reliability, correspondence between varying forms of experience, varying contexts. Therefore, reality itself desires more positivity, growth, expansion.

All this can be summed up by:

POSITIVE REALIZATIONS

Here is a taste. Full meal available at your leisure.

Positive Realizations:

Positing More Coherent Systems

Priming Posits

Collective Intention

1. We take it as self-evident that we all search for better systems — more coherent and useful understandings about ourselves and our world to guide our action/reaction to those around us. All of our learning represents our pursuit of better systems, or better lives. Everyone has their own philosophy, framework, network of values and beliefs, or narrative about the world that guides their life. The better our guidelines, the better we can guide our lives. And, the more we agree on some framework, the more support there is for the values that underpin it. Although our frameworks vary, it’s clear that everyone agrees on some things, and that’s a good place to start.

2. We sense a widespread desire for a more clear and concise grand narrative — one that can create broader agreement and deeper collaboration. We attempt to unite our collective efforts towards more comprehensive, coherent systems of relating with all those around us — building alignment, cooperation, mutual understanding and shared intentions — so we can be more successful in achieving what we desire. Everyone wants better outcomes for themselves and those they care about, and some focus more on improving human society or life itself. Both focuses — more immediate/internal and more distant/external — are driven by the desire for positive change. Regardless of our particular identity — whether we are highly political or not, far ‘left’ or ‘right’, deeply religious or atheist, health-conscious or money-focused, a sugar addict or psychonaut, younger or older — we all want some things to change for the better.

3. Though we share this, we are presented with innumerable challenges and uncertainties about how positive change can best occur. Investigating the relationship of truth and desire connects disparate perspectives on meaning and value, and paves the way towards more meaningful and valuable realizations most broadly. In our exploration of truth (knowledge) and success (creating what we desire), we find our way to more expansive relationships with ourselves and others, creating more coherent systems of communication, thought, action, and expectation. This process is about all of us — we need as much engagement as possible (“real-maximal” engagement) from everyone, because cooperation drives empowerment. We’re creating a compelling new paradigm for ourselves — one which invites you to engage as fully as you can. We live in a rapidly transforming world. To ride on that wave, rather than be sucked underneath, we need your transformative efforts.

Formatting Creativity

1. Both philosophy and science attempt to pursue truth, sometimes more effectively, sometimes less. Insofar as science is concerned with truth, philosophy is the most pure science. Insofar as philosophy explains things science cannot, it goes beyond it. We can consider philosophy as the most generalized science, and science as philosophy applied to more particular tasks. The most philosophical sections (in Positing The Real, numbered 2.0-3.0) leave references implicit, as the truth and value of general self-understanding outweighs more particular social relationships (e.g. histories, notable names, or tangential implications). In our primary task of investigating the truths of life, we learn about ourselves by engaging with the world — stepping outwards to generality by turning inwards — and vice versa. Like drawing a circle, we complete ourselves by moving away from our starting place while still returning back to it, outlining our centerpoint in the process. In our search, we circle back to our beginning, seemingly making little progress — a bit like trying to unearth the Earth itself. Still, we can walk across the land, just as we can explore our own experience, reaffirming that everywhere there is something to stand on, and that even at the bottom of the deepest ocean, there is a ground.

2. Double quotation marks are reserved for direct quotes, whereas single quotation marks are used in place of italics to emphasize a concept or reference the ‘incompleteness’ of the common usage of some term. Italics have been reserved for special occasions for extra emphasis. Bold font has been used for more formal or refined concepts, and highlights continuity through the progression of ideas. Hyphens and dashes have been used creatively to link concepts more tightly together, sidestepping the attempt to define concepts rigidly with the fewest number of terms. Slashes have been used to indicate the underlying unity/identity of concepts. We use definitions and grammar fluidly, emphasizing the continuity/relationality between seemingly disparate areas and their evolution towards synthesis and integration. Some pre-established rules are less vital than the creative progression of ideas. We use the term ‘we’ to refer to both the author(s) and reader(s), the social collective, and to the innumerable influences which converged to produce this work (creating an expansive network of authors, so to speak). We represent all others to the degree we are similar. We encourage interpreting the use of ‘we’ in whatever way seems most appropriate.

3. In the later sections (numbered 3.0 and on), we engage the ideas of some organizations and individuals with similar values and aims who we hope to collaborate more fully with on this project. We also acknowledge the innumerable others who share our ideals and carry on similar efforts, and hope to support their efforts in building a more aligned movement for change. One vital way to enhance this effort is to engage. As this (and all) work rests on collective knowledge, capacity, and growth, readers are invited and encouraged to contribute by adding feedback with comments on this Google Doc.

Self-Reference

1. As this project demands interdisciplinarity and holistic exploration, we invite all readers to first take some time (about a minute each) to answer each of these questions:

   1. Stepping back: What do you notice when you widen your awareness to your general experience?

   2. Stepping in: What is most important for you at this moment — what do you want most for yourself right now, and why?

   3. Stepping forward: What are you most hoping for from the approaching experience?

Positing The Real

Knowing-Experiencing

1. There are some things that we can agree on. At the very least, it’s clear that you are experiencing; something is happening from your perspective. Can you deny this?

   1. Many ancient spiritual traditions have claimed that the experience of the self is illusory - that our understanding is limited and that we are connected to all other things. Still, claiming that there is no experience, and therefore that there is nothing whatsoever, is inconsistent with what is immediately apparent to us, and is therefore minimally functional or meaningful. What could it even mean?

   2. We can all agree that our experience really exists from our perspective. Our immediate, undeniable experience reveals the relationship between our perception (‘subjective’) and what we perceive (‘objective’). Perceiving relationships requires distance, separation, difference, or partitions in our experience, implying the internal (self) and external (other). Our experience of self-and-others really exists, so we know that ‘we’ exist along with our relationship to ‘others’.

   3. Our Experience = Our Knowledge = Our Existence

2. Through self-reflection, we seem to have come to a high degree of clarity and certainty we can consider to be the most self-evident, obvious, and clearly apparent — a certain truth or a positive realization. Further self-reflection carries on this process to deepen and broaden our clarity into experience, knowledge, and truth about the world. Though only you have full or direct access to your own experience, we all know things about others’ experience, too. What do we know about others?