Reddit mentions of Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

Reasons I Believe In Setianism

1. It started with the rejection of materialism
   
   
2. Then I came to Platonism
   
   
3. I realized Platonism logically led to polytheism
   
   
4. I learned about Life-Fields and the Teleology they imply
   
   
5. I learned the myths of the ancient Egyptians
   
   
6. I accepted the position that best fit this knowledge, Setian Metaphysics
   
   Resources:
   
   [1] More against materialism
   
   • Rejection of Materialism
   
   • Wiki
   
   • Why Materialism is Baloney
   
   • Dualism
   
   • Substance Dualism
   
   • Against Materialism
   
   [2-3] More on Platonism
   
   • Mathematics and Physicalism
   
   • Theory of Forms
   
   • Arguments for Forms
   
   • Plato
   
   • Short
   
   • Platonic Polytheism
   
   [4] More on Life-Fields
   
   • Scientific Evidence
   
   • Evidence 2
   
   • Summary
   
   • By Dr. Burr
   
   • Dr. Aquino
   
   [5] More on Egypt
   
   • [Setian Pyramid Texts] (http://orderoftheserpent.org/forum/index.php?topic=35.msg150#msg150)
   
   • Seth God of Confusion
   
   • Images of Set
   
   • Mysteries of Horus and Set
   
   [6] More on Metaphysics
   
   • Self Actualization
   
   • O.S. AMA
   
   • O.S. statement
   
   • Metaphysics

I'm new to Neoplatonism myself. (I also wish this sub was more active so it's a nice coincidence that you posted...)

Anyway, after Thomas Taylor's Platonic Philospher's Creed which outlines the core beliefs of Neoplatonism, I'm moving on to Taylor's translation of Sallustius' On the Gods, then either his Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato followed by his translation of (and introduction to) Proclus' On the Theology of Plato, or vice versa. Or something like that :) Those are all available online for free and it's nice to see Neoplatonism continuing into more modern times through Taylor.

Since I like to read about something at the same time I'm reading it, I'm going to read Thomas Whitaker's The Neoplatonists: A Study in the History of Hellenism.

After that I'm going on to Plotinus... and probably Guthrie's Plotinus.

One thing I should mention is that I became interested in Neoplatonism because of my Hellenic Polytheism combined with monistic idealism. A good introduction to monistic idealism (the philosophical position that everything is in one consciousness or mind (nous)) is Bernardo Kastrup's recent book, Why Materialism is Baloney. A good author on Hellenic religion is Karl Kerenyi, his Gods of the Greeks is excellent.

In general the http://www.platonic-philosophy.org/ site looks like a good resource as well. There's also an International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, and the Prometheus Trust has files to download as well.

Anyway, enjoy your studies!

edits: filling in the links

I think we are essentially agreed. I don't really mean 'assigning' as a label attachment - that returns us to conceptualisation - so much as doing-with-purpose. It's simultaneous. The language is introducing a duality here where there is none. Another way I see this is a 'releasing into a direction'. When we walk forwards, we release ourselves in that direction, as an analogy.

I believe intention is the fundamental thing. It's a muddied word. Are we better to just jump in and say it's free will and we have free will because we are the fabric of experience, and so can shape ourselves however we choose?

Excuse this extended quote, but it's from a decent recent book which tries to capture some of what we've been discussing, without me having to type too much (Bernardo: see this as promotional!):

>So, in the context of all these metaphors, what is it that makes mind move?

>Notice that the answer to this question cannot be a phenomenon of experience, since experience is already mind in motion! Whatever the primary cause of the movement of mind is, it cannot itself be a movement of mind. Thus, we cannot find the primary cause in physics, biology, psychology, or any area of knowledge. The difficulty here is the same one behind the impossibility to describe the medium of mind itself: since all knowledge is a movement of the medium of mind, that which sets mind in motion cannot be known directly. But we can gain intuition about it indirectly, by observing its most immediate effects in experience and then trying to infer their invisible source.

>Our ordinary lives entail unfathomably complex chains of cause and effect: one thing leading to another, which in turn leads to another …and another, along the outlines of a blooming, unfolding pattern that we call the laws of nature. But at the very root of the chain of causality there seems to be something ineffable, tantalizingly close to experience, yet just beyond it: freewill.

>Whenever you make a decision, like choosing to close your hand into a fist, you have a strong sense that you were free to make the choice. But usually that sense comes only after the choice is made –immediately after – in the form of the heartfelt certainty that you could have made a different choice. The direct experience of freewill, however, remains ambiguous: before you make the choice it is not there; and then the very next experience seems to be already that of having made the choice. The experience of making the choice seems lost in a kind of vanishing in-between limbo, too elusive and slippery to catch at work. It is as though freewill were outside time, only its effects insinuating themselves into time.

>Yet, freewill can be so tantalizingly close to experience – perhaps arbitrarily close – that many people are convinced that they feel the actual choice being made. Personally, despite having paid careful attention, I have never managed to satisfactorily ‘catch’ this elusive experience in an unambiguous manner. I can’t prove it is not there, but I hope to have evoked enough doubt about it that you are open to the possibility that choice itself is outside experience. We only really experience the prelude and the immediate aftermath of choice, never the making of a choice.

>Though I am aware that this is the trickiest element of my entire argument – resting, as it does, more on introspection than logic –I contend that freewill proper is the primary cause of all movements of mind; the freewill of the one subject of all existence. Freewill can never be experienced directly: it is the driving force behind all experience and, thus, never an experience itself. But we can infer its existence from the retroactive sense of free choice that we have immediately after making a decision. This sense of free choice is, so to speak, the ‘echo’ of the primary cause reverberating within our psychic structures.

• From Why Materialism is Baloney - Bernardo Kastrup