I won't correct everything I find wrong, but I felt that the "Understanding Suffering" section was completely off. I will just mention one of the major points:
Remember, enlightenment means that you no longer experience emotional pain as aversive. In other words, you continue to have “negative” emotions like fear, anger, jealousy, and so on - you just don’t mind having them.
This is utterly wrong. Enlightenment in Buddhism means emotional pain cannot arise, period. In Buddhism, there are five "hindrances" or negative mental states: desire, aversion, compulsion/agitation, slothfulness and remorse. This list is said to encapsulate all possible negative feelings. In an enlightened person, these hindrances cannot arise. The "fetter", the bond which causes a person to experience these is uprooted.
Secondly, in Buddhism, it's believed that negative mental states are always a bad and painful experience so it's impossible to not mind having them. If you think about it, you can't be sad and not mind it. You can't be angry but not mind it. There are a few Buddhist circles which believe you can be detached from anger or desire, but this doesn't make sense because in Buddhist theory, such mental states arise from attachment in the first place.
Small typos in Section: Purposefulness
These is a sense that one's live has meaning
Consciousness is a deep the experience of that self-evident value
Interesting post!
I take back this comment
"So does it boil down to, “I believe the photon goes on existing as it wings
off to nowhere, because my priors say it’s simpler for it to go on existing than
to disappear”?
This is what I thought at first, but on reflection, it’s not quite right. (And
not just because it opens the door to obvious abuses.)
I would boil it down to a distinction between belief in the implied invisible,
and belief in the additional invisible."
Eliezer, what are these obvious abuses?
-Conceivability vs Actual Logical Possibility
-Mysteriousness is our projection of it/how we view it, nothing is inherently mysterious - reductionism
I remember reading that Aristotle initially thought that the brain was meant for cooling the blood. That was my basis in physicalism, super humbling and it made me think about all this stuff in terms of how it would be discover something or formulate a theory for the first time, to get rid of the "conventionally known" fact realm for everything I knew and seeing how I would think out the problem. Made me feel like a caveman, but a rational one.
Number 9, "dis ease" typo
My point was that we're talking about getting the best answer assuming the professors also know the best answer. I feel like it's nitpicking to go around diving deep in arguing about the assumptions. The point of the article still stands.
I don't have anything important to add but the inability to visualize is called Aphantasia and some people still have it today.
Based on the link, it seems you follow the Theravada tradition. The ideas you give go against the Theravada ideas. You need to go study the Pali Canon. This information is all wrong I'm afraid. I won't talk more on the matter.