This is a website where I add anything worth sharing. Note that whatever recommendations I have here are anecdotal; they consist in things that have worked for me or that I have found interesting. -Zac
This is a website where I add anything worth sharing. Note that whatever recommendations I have here are anecdotal; they consist in things that have worked for me or that I have found interesting. -Zac
Physicalism is untenable in any form. See the self-titled Compilation of Arguments section for a collection of arguments against it, however I will refrain from referring to that material here. Instead, I will highlight the reasoning that has led me to Transcendental Solipsism. The post below was a comment I made on youtube that sums up its issues.
The claim that consciousness emerges from brain states is neither metaphysically feasible nor explanatorily sufficient. Emergence, in its strong form, posits that wholly novel properties—such as subjective awareness—arise from entirely non-experiential constituents, yet offers no intelligible mechanism for how the qualitative arises from the quantitative. This explanatory gap is not analogous to ordinary scientific uncertainty but reflects a principled incommensurability between physical structure and phenomenal content. Appeals to neuroscience merely correlate patterns of brain activity with reported experience but never deduce why or how such activity should yield experience in the first place. Moreover, the mere correlation between brain states and consciousness offers no metaphysical import, as both idealism—wherein brain states are the extrinsic image of mental processes—and physicalism can explain the correlation in a way that makes neither theory more evidentially supported than the other. The post hoc labeling of brain states as "consciousness-supporting" is not explanation but re-description. Nor is physicalism more parsimonious: it smuggles in the reality of consciousness as an effect while denying its causal or ontological role, thus invoking more conceptual entities—hidden laws of emergence, representational architecture—than a view that takes experience as basic. Finally, to claim that consciousness is an illusion is self-refuting, for illusion itself is a mode of consciousness. There is no coherent sense in which experience can appear to exist without actually existing. Hence, the view that brain states give rise to experience not only fails to account for what needs explaining but also depends on the very phenomenon it denies, collapsing into contradiction.
Basically, Physicalism is explanatorily insufficient and incoherent due to its treatment of consciousness. It fails when redefining consciousness as emergent (especially in the strongly emergent sense, which borders on the magical), when attempting to reduce it materially, and when denying it altogether (see the article on Illusionism linked above, where I say illusion itself is a mode of consciousness, and what I have in the Compilation of Arguments section). There is no possible evidence that could validate Physicalism's claim that consciousness arises from or is reducible to brain states, especially given that all such evidence appears within consciousness. Moreover, Physicalism suffers from deep epistemological problems: physicalists who affirm metaphysics have no non-question-begging justification for the existence of mind-independent matter, while those who reject metaphysics, i.e. pragmatists, suspend judgment on what exists and instead emphasize minimal conceptual frameworks built for predictive validity. But such pragmatists are hardly physicalists at all since they abstain from any ontological/metaphysical claim (though they often have a high credence in the existence of the external world and other minds, which is erroneous for reasons I shall get into as it involves transcendental illusion). That leaves Dualism, Panpsychism, and Idealism. However, Dualism suffers from the intractable interaction problem. Panpsychism suffers from the combination problem. That leaves Idealism. However, most forms of Idealism make the error of asserting the existence of an Absolute, a universal Will, or a Mind-at-Large. These are metaphysical posits that exceed the boundaries of possible experience, committing what Kant described as transcendental illusion. If all knowledge is conditioned by experience, then any claim about a reality beyond consciousness lacks epistemic warrant. Transcendental Solipsism avoids this mistake. It holds that all things (self, world, thought, and differentiation) occur within consciousness, and that there is no epistemic basis for knowledge concerning the existence of anything beyond it. Transcendental Solipsism, unlike other metaphysical positions, does not dogmatically deny the existence of the external world or other minds. Instead, it suspends judgment. It affirms only what is immediately given—consciousness and its contents—while recognizing that inferences beyond this are inherently unverifiable. The question of whether other minds or a world beyond consciousness exist cannot be answered through experience, for any evidence we might invoke necessarily appears within consciousness itself. There is no standpoint outside consciousness from which such claims can be justified. As a result, realism and metaphysical solipsism remain equally conceivable, equally consistent with the structure of experience, and equally unprovable. TS does not assert that only the self exists in a dogmatic sense but rather that there is no epistemic basis to privilege the hypothesis of a world beyond experience over the hypothesis that experience is all there is. Any move to affirm realism—whether scientific, commonsense, or metaphysical—requires positing what is not, and cannot be, given. This does not render realism false, but rather highlights that it is not, and never could be, known. TS is therefore assertoric, not speculative: it asserts only what is necessarily presupposed in the act of appearing, without inflating those appearances into metaphysical claims. In doing so, it preserves the integrity of critique while dissolving the illusions that have long haunted metaphysical thought.
Taking thyroid permanently resolved my chronic insomnia as I was running on stress hormones (always wired but tired). Nothing else would work at that time, including heavy doses of trazodone. It also fixed my poor circulation (though I found t3+t4 more helpful than t3 alone; for instance in taking that combination my body temperature would increase significantly after heavy meals). Thiamine megadoses are interesting; once I had to go to work without having had any sleep the night before, and in taking about 2500mg or more of thiamine, I felt like I had microdosed LSD. I've found Cyproheptadine reliable during times where I needed as much sleep as possible for the day after. It's a serotonin antagonist, anti-histamine, and quite the helpful sleeping aid. However, if taken rarely, it will leave you feeling drowsy the day after use, increasing the chances of sleeping in (which can be suboptimal during the week, but therapeutic during the weekend). Recently I tried metergoline, a serotonin antagonist, light dopamine agonist, and anti-prolactin drug, and while I felt normal inside, upon going outside it gave me a psychedelic feeling. I felt extremely present, to the point where I was slightly overstimulated (however, doing exercise got rid of that feeling), the world looked brighter, and I felt that it was more beautiful. In the past I found that low doses of methylene blue (5-10mg) plus 500mg sodium bicarbonate would result in long lasting energy, where typically the fatigue after a day of work or hiking would become minimal. However the last few times I had 500mg of sodium bicarb, it didn't sit right in my stomach. My PH might be too basic, but since starting the honey diet on the last week of May, my PH should become more acidic due to increased black coffee and oj consumption (before the diet, I'd typically have milk in my coffee).