Thoughts and Comments on Terrence Howard / Eric Weinstein on JRE.
It might be my favorite Rogan episode!
It might be my favorite Rogan episode!
Just finished watching JRE #2171. (If you haven’t seen it yet, highly recommended).
Weinstein was the PERFECT person to sit down and hash through Howard’s ideas.
My favorite part — Stanley Jordan had also worked on a vibratory map of the periodic table based on harmonic extrapolation of elemental frequencies.
I am nerding-out on that tidbit especially, as it has implications for dreams that I have had that I have never really had context for.
I am digging into Stanley Jordan’s ideas now, I was completely unaware of his work there.
Overall, Weinstein didn’t play the role of “debunker” as much as one might expect.
I am very pleasantly surprised.
Weinstein’s approach is exactly what I’d hoped for. (Which is the approach I wished people took with every “new” idea they are exposed to).
Weinstein must continue to ask questions because he “doesn’t know if he’s attacking the model of Terrence’s ideas he has built in his own mind” — from knee jerk emotional reactions to specific keywords, mispronunciations, etc. (What 99.9999% of us are doing).
This demonstrates total emotional detachment from needing to perceive Terrence or his ideas as ridiculous or not, and a great basis to start a real conversation and professional critique.
Until Weinstein listens long enough to get a thorough idea of Terrence’s coherence or lack of, any critique is equally as pointless as any possible baseless theories he might be critiquing. It is clear that he wants to start the convo on even ground.
Unlike those who jeer, mock, and ultimately, demonstrate (masturbate) their own need to put another down before actually debating the substance of ideas, Weinstein’s approach was that of a true Philospher and Scholar.
Good on Weinstein also for pointing out that Neil DeGrasse Tyson didn’t even really seem to understand the ideas he was critiquing. He didn’t. 🤷♂️
If you have seen Tyson’s response, it reeks of the usual brand of personal attack and not debating the actual ideas.
And it’s even funnier that Weinstein points out that Tyson pulled his own Dunning-Krueger while trying to label Terrance as a Dunning-Krueger.
Weinstein refers to “Dunning-Krueger” as the “mid-wits endpoint”!
HILARIOUS.
It’s so true.
Those who abuse that term to label anyone they don’t understand are the very substance of the term they are mis-using.
Mid-wit indeed.
But we are all a bit Mid-witted at times. Every wit was once a mid-wit. 😉
I think Howard ultimately has the same goal as Weinstein, which is interesting, and it’s fun to see them circle each other approaching the same problems with radically different perspectives.
One person with ZERO accredited university background, only a mind that dreams + lots of reading, and a formally educated mathmatician and arguable polymath who lacks ego and the need to make fun, and is emotionally honest emotionally open and honest about his own reactions to Howard’s way of saying things and using terms incorrectly.
Brilliant. Beautiful.
Weinstein for instance, is strongly opposed to the direction string theory has veered because it takes us into hazy byways that do not translate into practical physics and have yet to produce anything but theory.
Howard very much wants math to be oriented towards tangible engineering and geometry/physics, and for some reason he is really hung on the anomalies of 2. (Which are VERY interesting, and to pretend it’s not is kind of …. Uncurious? Unscientific? Where is your sense of awe at things which deserve it?)
Yet, at the core of his views, Weinstein establishes that mathematics is separate from physics and it doesn’t need to exist in direct relationship to exist as a framework/model. Which essentially makes a lot of math more of a ….theoretical discipline?
Maybe I’m oversimplifying it but I want to say “well, there’s your problem right there”.
Terrence comes across as genuine to me, because he doesn’t get upset or defensive about his ideas.
But I think people are misinterpreting Howard’s zeal as trying to become a guru.
He was very open to critique and welcomed it. This is not the response I would expect from someone posturing and trying to build an identity for the sake of identity (being a guru, or as a good friend of mine calls it, the “savior complex”).
His physics seems to be borrowed and repurposed.
I can relate to Howard because it seems like he has reached an Altered State in layers of the dreaming mind that I have experienced — a place where we intuitively “know” everything and see the connective tissue behind all things, and sometimes “beings” lead us around and show us things.
Note : this does NOT mean you come out of the experience ready to intellectually parse what you have experienced, using all the proper terms and substantiated science. And I am totally open to the idea that the “beings” are amazing creations of my own mind, and not actually what they seem to be in the experience.
I rarely speak of these things outside of certain circles, precisely because it causes blowback and can be disruptive to your life — but screw it, might as well open up about it.
Psychedelics, Occult methods, etc — can create Altered States of consciousness.
It takes a certain kind of mind to have the experiences Howard claims to be having, and I recognize parts of myself in him. Some have these experiences by accident, others use arcane formula to create the experiences by effort.
And Weinstein was spot-on in pointing out that the experience of seeing the patterns in everything can be likened to a “drug” and you can get high on your own incomplete revelations.
When I come out of the “I see the connection between everything” state, it’s like Ghostbusters slime and I want to tell the world about how everything connects, but I don’t have words or syntax to properly describe the things that I saw/experienced while I was in that state. So I grasp straws and try to piece together a coherent simulacrum to be able to describe the connective tissue to others. The coherence slowly fades after the experience because waking consciousness is not the same as the altered state.
After experiencing that state — linear “daytime awake” consciousness seems more like a small flashlight in a giant dark room.
Our entire species is pointing flashlights into the corners, and most of our species fits into a single corner — but no one is lighting up the insanely gigantic space, so it remains mostly black. When you enter whatever Altered State it happens to be that you see the connections between everything and communicate with “God” or “Entities”, and you intuitively seem to be able to call up information as easily as you can travel to a location just by thinking about it (out of body / “astral travel”) this State is like experiencing the entire giant room, brightly lit up, and you can see all of it at once.
Then you come out of that state, and you are now back in the giant dark room again with your flashlight, standing around wishing you could tell everyone about what the room really looked like, because you can still see it for a brief period in your minds eye after having experienced it, but now you have to try to explain what you saw to those who have only had their flashlights for their entire conscious experience. And as you start to explain it, the coherence fades like a dream memory.
Almost fruitlessly impossible, isn’t it?
But that the best way I can describe reaching that state and coming back out of it.
This state, in my own mind — must be what we are reaching to when we speak of “heaven”, the state of mind of near Omniscience, and if some people’s ideas prove correct, seems to be the State of Being that maybe used to be normal for us as a species, before some cataclysmic event traumatized us into a fractured state. (This seems to be what those who almost instinctually search for Lost Civilizations are pointing to, that we have DEVOLVED, in recent epochs, contrary to the mainstream “science”).
Was the Golden Age real?
I have no idea. I make no claim to the veracity of that. I just know what I have dreamed.
And I’ve never pushed forward the way Terrence Howard is doing.
If he is genuine about his dreams, I admire his tenacity to try to make more of his experiences beyond psychological re-arrangement of having a “life changing” perspective shift.
In the territory he is walking — it is unfortunately somewhat easy to fall into the mental trap of the emotional crowd-built feedback-loop phenomenon that creates cults and religions.
My only gaff with anything Howard has done is the ego factor and getting lost in promoting himself — which he catches himself now in the latest Rogan interview and stops himself several times to not take personal credit for concepts given to him by others.
But I have to admit, the part of me that is off-put by some of his ways of explaining things (Jim Crowe Laws of Mathematics LOL) — is the same part of me that wishes I was on Rogan having that convo with them too.
A little jealousy up in there.
I love Howard for having to guts to step forward and have conversations — he’s just going about it in a bombastic way and appealing to the gatekeepers of popularity (Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Rogan) instead of the gatekeepers of math and physics (who won’t even read a paper without initials after your name). That’s not exactly his fault either.
Weinstein is essentially correct about “peer review”, and I wish more science parrots had a grasp on it. It’s not what people think it is — at all — and it’s mostly utterly useless for those outside of academic credentials, which ironically, many inventors of new things have always fallen outside of.
It conjures somewhat of an “eye roll” in me when I hear one physicist telling another physicist (or even a physics enthusiast) to stay in their own lane or that they should be “remove themselves from the conversation” — As if every enthusiastic new pair of eyes doesn’t go through that annoying phase where they get ahead of themselves.
It’s very human.
Irony, I see religious mindset metastasizing in places where it is not supposed to exist.
The Halls of Science have become pretentiously Sacrosanct in many ways.
But Weinstein does a great job of explaining that too, and perhaps its just “par for the course” and a needed condition to prevent chaos.
Things like the Invention Secrecy Act don’t help the situation.
Weinstein’s exposition of the general attitude of his academic peers is something I wish more people would let sink in.
It makes me want to scream when someone just parrots like Neil DeGrasse Tyson did :
“This is why we have peer review <insert condescending over-simplified definition of peer review>”.
Weinstein is my hero for pointing that out. Tyson was either disingenuous about the peer-review process, or has no idea about it in the first place.
The idea that the physics and force reactions will speak for themselves is idealistic and just not true.
There is so much gatekeeping going on in all spheres of human activity that it’s also great to hear Weinstein point out that Rogan is one of the ONLY platforms where this kind of conversation can still happen, and that is truly sad.
This is why I regard Rogan’s show as so very important.
It’s more than a show.
It’s a meeting of diverse minds, without filter, and without cap, without pretense.
It is the definition of embracing diversity without it merely being a comfort coat of pretense and pseudo-moral identity.
A podcast doesn’t always need to explicate 100% truth at all times, such is unrealistic and impossible and driven to it’s extremes is just another cultish childish unrealistic expectation. Insane expectations, in fact.
Joe is helping re-increase attention spans and give people what they are thirsting for so badly in a world where everyone is posturing all the time — the ability to talk, without pretense, without posturing, and to be wrong without having someone try to crucify you for it.
Howard may not be right about a lot of the things he is piecing together, but it’s not easy to try to show people what you might have experienced in an Altered State that still may be very valid and profound.
You can also fall into the trap like Weinstein pointed out, of seeing the connections everywhere because you are superimposing them out of your own interpretations instead of doing the diligence on every facet of your ideas.
Many religions have been created by people who tried to relate what they experienced to others, but ended up with a crowd of believers who never had the experience themselves, but they use it to create personal meaning, and live to fight over the interpretations of an experience had by someone else.
“It’s hard out here for a pimp.”
Thank you for reading!
Until next time….
Onward and Upward Everybody!
-Chris
Automated Income Lifesyle w/ Chris Morton YouTube
#science #spirituality #metaphysics #physics #forcereactions #equations #terrancehoward #hardouthereforapimp