Criticism

[Eugene I]

You are experiencing consciousness only in relation to something being experienced. To claim otherwise is to need to explain how you could possibly come up with everything you experience.

That's right. If you look at you direct conscious experience, you may notice that you can never separate "what is experiencing" from "what is experienced". You can only make such distinction by intellectual dissection of your experience. But as a matter of fact of your actual direct conscious experience, they are inseparable. At the moment you have and experience a thought you cannot say "here is the thought, and here is the thinking of the thought apart from the thought, and here is conscious experiencing of that thought". No, as a fact of direct experience the thought and the thinking and the experiencing are the same inseparable "thing". It's only when we are analyzing and abstracting this fact intellectually, we invent the abstract ideas about "thinking" and "thoughts" as some separate entities, and then also invent the concept of "something that produces/causes the thought (be it energy, brain or whatever)". But in fact all we know from our direct experience is thinking/experiencing of conscious phenomena inseparably and simultaneously.

[JeffreyW]

That we entangle in consciousness does not in any way imply we and what we entangled with are the same thing. Further, thought does not immediately occur in that entanglement, but is processed from the sense data which we receive as energy and transmit to the brain as energy.

[Eugene I]

Here you are conflating a thing with its mathematical abstraction. Energy existed long before man came to abstract anything and acts upon us whether or not we abstract from it.

If the "energy" you are referring to is something fundamentally different from phenomena of conscious experience, then how can you ever know and prove that such "thing" exists at all? It may or may not exists, but the only thing you can do about it is to have a mathematical/intellectual abstraction of it, because you can never have a direct conscious observation of it to prove its existence. (Because If you could have such observation, then such "thing" itself would automatically have to be a conscious phenomenon).

[Mark Tetzner]

Unhappy as in angry that somebody would have the audacity to critique him as I did. Our mutual friend tends toward thinking the videos were unfair hatchet jobs, but again he has no background in these subjects.

He himself talks about the all the funding behind Essentia Foundation and he is following the same business model as other marketers selling themselves as the solution to your problems, such as Chopra, Peterson and Osteen. As they demonstrate, there is tremendous money in books and seminars - not so much in legitimate philosophy. Nietzsche lost money oh his self-published books and Wittgenstein needed about a decade to find a publisher for the Tractatus and never really made much money. He supported himself by teaching grammar school and his family inheritance, Heidegger was the rare exception, with Sein und Zeit as the biggest selling philosophy book of the 20th Century.

I hate to speculate about whether he believes what he’s saying or not. Probably does but isn’t all that confident he can defend it against someone with real knowledge of physics and philosophy. If he has time to respond to others on Twitter, he has time to respond to me also.

Ok, this business-model stuff is in my view just wrong, it is questionable at least in my mind, that that are his motives.
To me these are all Unterstellungen and I dont see how this essentiafoundation is taking of in any serious way (yet) and
if there is serious funding available I am missing the cues that tell me this is so. But I can not know and could be wrong.
It is also not impossible to find a sponsor or metaphysical "sugar-daddy/ who funds him so he can do his work and have a good life,
but I have no reason to believe that because his output would have to be much higher.

Maybe he has just become weary from too many interviews and is taking a step back.....all within his rights.

The question would be of course what the funding, if it exists, would be for. It can only be either for research, but
not sure why it would get funds for research, other than maybe Daniel Hoffmann.

Or, to spread the word around as a project fueled by pure passion, but I dont see any marketing-activity, which in turn doesnt necessarily mean anything but its speculative. But the youtube-channel should normally grow or anything that makes me think funds flow into this and that marketing-bucks are being spent.

When I click on any amazon-book by him I dont even get retargeted, to me this is not what is happening.

It doesnt have to take of in any of these ways, it gives meaning to peoples lives.

But I am sure that he is doing all this for genuine motives and not business-motives. If anything, the funding
is to drive the cause and I think you have turned him into a Feindbild,. To me: too many Unterstellungen.
That you can not see his passion and think this is a business-model: Its funny you think that its almost
definitely wrong.

He is evading you alright and that he is doing it for the resasons you like to think is nothing that can be ruled out.
Maybe he is not responding because its hard do do so on 5 bottles of wine which he now has to drink
because you have shattered his world-view.

But there have been others here who said things like "if you want to play with the big boys you have to talk to me"
but that person was more of an idiot. You are not an idiot and I said from the getgo I would like to see how the convo
unfolds. But he could have a ton of reasons for not responding, he maybe does not want to be drawn into something
that could take weeks of his time. If he responds you will be challenging him again and that he wont be interested
to dedicate his entire life to you is something you can probably understand though I am sure you would like it the
other way around. Human nature.

There is ill-will in the way you approach this and interpret him, that could be another reason.

There is also a good chance it doesnt even phase him.

In the end, who knows, its all speculative.

Time will tell.

We will just have to disagree on that.

sure thing.

[Eugene I]

That we entangle in consciousness does not in any way imply we and what we entangled with are the same thing. Further, thought does not immediately occur in that entanglement, but is processed from the sense data which we receive as energy and transmit to the brain as energy.

All you are talking about here are only metaphysical abstractions. As I said above, you can never directly experience "energy" (let alone "brain"), you can only hypothesize its existence by your thinking (which is a process of abstraction and projection away from your given direct conscious experience of the flow of conscious phenomena at the present moment).

Calling it different names ("energy" as opposed to "matter") does not change anything here. Whatever it is called, if it is something fundamentally different from conscious experience, then it cannot be directly consciously experienced (duhh!), therefore the only way you can know anything about it is by abstracting it intellectually (even if it is done intuitively and non-discursively).

[JeffreyW]

We know energy exists because we directly experience it as such and because we measure it. You are confusing objective/rational thought with esthetic thought and experience. And what we perceive does not need to be a conscious phenomenon, but merely something that came into our own consciousness - an event of that became a conscious phenomenon to our own consciousness. The consciousness lies on our side of the experience. There is no basis to claim that consciousness existed outside our own consciousness.

[JeffreyW]

That we entangle in consciousness does not in any way imply we and what we entangled with are the same thing. Further, thought does not immediately occur in that entanglement, but is processed from the sense data which we receive as energy and transmit to the brain as energy.

All you are talking about here are only metaphysical abstractions. As I said above, you can never directly experience "energy" (let alone "brain"), you can only hypothesize its existence by your thinking (which is a process of abstraction and projection away from your given direct conscious experience of the flow of conscious phenomena at the present moment).

An electric shock is in no way an abstraction.

[AshvinP]

That we entangle in consciousness does not in any way imply we and what we entangled with are the same thing. Further, thought does not immediately occur in that entanglement, but is processed from the sense data which we receive as energy and transmit to the brain as energy.

Eugene is correct here. Physicalism and its concepts of mind-independent "energy", "fields", etc. is no less a modern metaphysical abstraction than the "consciousness" of idealism. They are both thoroughly metaphysical assumptions and unwarranted under any phenomenological investigation of our experience. Reducing our willing-feeling-thinking activity to abstract "energy" is practically the same as reducing it to abstract "consciousness". Whatever we know about experience, and whenever we know it, thinking-thoughts are already present. All claims to experience-knowledge presuppose thinking. It is only dualist prejudice of the modern age, which allows speculation from a non-existent 3rd person perspective, that convinces us there can be a state of existence prior to any thought.

[Eugene I]

An electric shock is in no way an abstraction.

Right, and it is the case exactly because the electric shock is actually your direct conscious experience, your direct sensations. But intellectually explaining it by using the concept of "energy" (that you can never experience directly) is abstraction.

[JeffreyW]

Which makes the actual perception of energy prior to conceptualization. Even Kastrup didn’t go to this extreme when he declared ATP as a marker of consciousness, thereby reducing consciousness to energy. It undermined his the basic claim of his metaphysics that consciousness is irreducible. It’s foolish to claim any concept as the irreducible ontological primitive, but energy is the most elemental existence we now know.