Self-Bias - Why All Worldviews Are So Skewed

• On Epistemology and Self-bias: Leo Gura coins the term 'self-bias' to describe the tendency innate in humans and their intellectual pursuits, particularly philosophical schools, where arguments are made in favor of one's own position and against others. This self-bias becomes an obstacle to discovering truth as it hampers impartiality and objectivity.
• Problem of Self-bias in Philosophy: Gura observes that the problem with philosophical schools is their inherent self-bias: atheists arguing against the existence of God, Christians arguing for their faith, and similarly scientists, rationalists, skeptics, conservative and liberal philosophers all arguing in favor of their own worldviews. This bias becomes an impediment to genuinely inquiring into the nature of reality and discovering truth.
• On Nature of Self-bias: Gura asserts that every philosophy or worldview has a self-bias. The specific danger lies in the individual or group being unaware of this bias, thereby making their worldview question-begging. This occurs when a person assumes their worldview is valid and often fails to seriously question or challenge their basic assumptions.
• Implications of Self-bias: Gura elucidates that self-bias can lead to the creation of talking points that aim to persuade others and oneself of the validity of one's standpoint, rather than seeking truth. The presentation of skewed arguments in favor of one's theories restricts the opportunity for genuine inquiry into the nature of reality.
• Becoming Objective: Gura stresses the importance of impartiality and objectivity in epistemology but also acknowledges the challenge. Who is going to judge whether one is being objective or impartial? The characteristics of self-bias make it difficult to acknowledge and relinquish, causing individuals to believe they are being objective when they are not.
• Circular Reasoning in Self-bias: Gura argues that to address the problem of self-bias and establish truth, we must stop using self-bias to prove self-bias. All worldviews, positions, and philosophies are assumed to be correct and then used to validate themselves. This is where circular reasoning comes into play, reinforcing the inherent self-bias.
• A Personal Experience with Self-bias: Gura shares his personal experience with self-bias, tracing it back to his teenage years. Observing this pattern of self-bias in different philosophies and intellectual pursuits shook him and initiated his serious investigation into the nature of life, reality, and human knowledge. This led him to the enlightenment teachings of actualized.org and mysticism.
• Impacting Science and Research: Gura points out that self-bias exists within scientific domains. Scientists, believing in their objectivity, could also resort to circular reasoning by assuming science as true and then using it to validate itself. This demonstrates that bias is not limited to philosophy or religion, but extends to all intellectual pursuits.
• Obstacles to Truth Discovery: Gura identifies self-bias as the biggest obstacle in philosophy and the discovery of truth. Self-bias can act as a persuasive tool rather than a means of inquiry into reality's nature. The denial of self-bias, despite its presence in all philosophical schools and worldviews, further complicates the discovery of truth.
• Self-bias and skepticism: Leo Gura identifies self-bias in skeptics, noting that they often favor their own intellectual positions above others and struggle to evaluate their own beliefs objectively. He explains this bias as the mind's propensity to favor its worldview, constructing arguments and double standards that make their perspective seem superior. For example, atheists may employ logic to differentiate themselves from theists while assuming atheism as a given without proper inquiry.
• Self-bias in professional settings: Gura recounts his realization about self-bias in the professional world. He initially wanted to become a professional philosopher and planned to introduce skepticism into philosophy, disrupting established worldviews. However, he realized that professional philosophy, and by extension western civilization, is built upon reinforcing rather than dismantling worldviews. This revelation led him to abandon his career plans.
• The legal system and self-bias: Self-bias plays a significant role in the legal system, prompting the implementation of conflict of interest and recusal guidelines. Judges and lawyers must withdraw from cases where they have a personal or material interest to maintain impartiality. However, Gura argues that survival instincts can obstruct clear judgement and allow personal interests to take precedence over objectivity.
• The mind, self-bias, and distortion of reality: Gura notes that self-bias, inherent in a person's identity, heavily influences perception of reality, including science, logic, and relationships. The desire for an accurate depiction of reality, or the pursuit of truth, necessitates careful consideration of self-bias. Overcoming such biases requires acknowledgment and active relinquishment of these biases, which many people are unwilling to do, particularly when their survival is at stake.
• Impartiality against survival instincts: Gura discusses the difficulty of maintaining impartiality amid pressing survival instincts. Using a hypothetical scenario with a financially struggling, gambling-addicted judge, Gura shows how conflict of interest can easily affect impartiality when personal survival is at stake. The truth is often sacrificed to resolve personal issues unless one exceedingly values integrity and truth.
• Importance of Self Bias Awareness: Leo Gura explains that pursuing the truth often comes at a great cost to our personal survival and comfort, hence the development of self biases. Our minds naturally construct justifications and defenses to uphold our core metaphysical positions that serve our survival.
• Denial of Self Bias: People deny their self bias because recognizing it threatens their worldview and creates existential doubts which can corrode their foundational beliefs. Personal benefit, lack of awareness of circular thinking within personal worldviews, and the conflating of selfishness with truth contribute to this denial.
• Defending Against Truth: People often use philosophical and worldview constructs as elaborate defense mechanisms against truth, a concept that is threatening to all points of view. In order to deceive others convincingly, individuals first deceive themselves, blinding themselves to how their minds construct reality towards their survival.
• Misleading Nature of Evidence and Logic: Gura asserts that evidence, proof, and logic cannot be fully trusted as they are often corrupted by self bias. This is evident in the numerous individuals throughout history who used these elements to uphold false or misguided beliefs, which were later disproven.
• Difficulty in Recognizing Self Bias: Recognizing self bias in oneself is significantly harder than identifying it in others. This realization can lead to self-doubt, which forms the very foundation of skepticism. The lower an individual's level of consciousness, the more self biased they are likely to be, given their extensive use of defense mechanisms and rationalizations.
• Understanding of Low Consciousness and Violence: Low consciousness and violence exist when societies or individuals deploy severe defense mechanisms to prevent the questioning of their beliefs. This can escalate to violent extremes, wherein lives may be threatened when beliefs are contested.
• All Entities Exhibit Self-Bias: All ideologies, philosophies, organizations, countries, and political movements are self-biased. Even spiritual schools, which are thought to be unbiased, can be self-biased as well.
• Pragmatism is Self-Biased: Pragmatism, the philosophy of pursuing practical, tangible results, is as self-biased as highly theoretical positions. Regardless of the position, every point of view has inherent self-bias.
• Nihilism is Self-Biased: Nihilists, who believe life has no meaning, are also guilty of self-bias, as their worldviews stem from a personal lens of understanding.
• American Dictators and Tyrants are Self-Biased: Dictators and authoritarian figures like Donald Trump are self-biased. They have a lust for power, prioritize their own survival, and lack the ability to acknowledge guilt, leading to selfish acts that disregard others' wellbeing.
• Colonialism is Self-Biased: The European attitude towards Native Americans during colonial times was highly self-biased, leading to the wholesale disrespect, subjugation, and exploitation of indigenous cultures.
• The Self-biased Actions of Conquistadors: The actions of explorers such as Magellan, who held a bloodthirsty and self-biased regard for non-Christians, further highlight historical self-bias. Such attitudes resulted in violence, oppression, and the decimation of indigenous populations.
• European Colonialism and Treatment of Native People: Leo highlights the history of European colonialism wherein colonial parties, exploiting their technological and strategic advancements, bullied and exploited native societies. Colonialism often required these parties to view the native people as inferior, enabling desecration of their culture, forced labor, and violence. It's identified as a mass-scale societal version of self-bias, prioritizing the needs and superiority of one's own group over others.
• Slavery: Slavery is considered the epitome of self-bias. Slave owners viewed their slaves as sub-humans, justifying their ownership and maltreatment of enslaved people.
• Human's Treatment of Animals: The manner in which humans use and exploit animals is presented as evidence of self-bias. Assuming animals' lives to be less worthwhile than human lives, humans have justified overworking animals, slaughtering them for food, and treating them as disposable, without considering the animals' experiences or perspectives.
• Corporate Corruption: Corporate lobbying and corruption are explained as self-bias at play within the corporate world. Companies involved often genuinely believe they are benefiting society, despite evidence to the contrary.
• Nationalism and Ethnocentrism: Nationalistic sentiments and ethnocentrism are marked as manifestations of self-bias across different cultures, each favoring their own culture and perceiving it as superior without objectively evaluating other cultures.
• Right-wing Ideologies: Right-wing ideologies, exemplified by Fox News, are critiqued for propagating high levels of self-bias. Leo concedes that left-wing ideologies are also self-biased, but contends right-wing ideology tends to demonstrate greater degrees of information distortion and self-bias.
• Self-Bias in Personal Perspective: (The text appears to continue on and discuss how self-bias operates at personal levels, but the excerpt is incomplete.) Leo remarks on how individuals may accuse others of being biased while denying their own biases, espousing the notion that bias is pervasive, inherent, and often unconscious. This complication makes striving for objectivity challenging, but necessary, to view differing perspectives accurately and fairly.
• The Problem of Self-Bias in Men's Rights Movements and Wartime: Leo discusses the self-bias seen in different men's rights movements like pick-up ideology, MOG Tao ideology, red pill ideology, and incel ideology. He mentions that these ideologies often present warped perspectives on women and femininity as young men link their sexual needs and frustrations to their worldview, leading to an extremely biased idea of women and society. These ideologies act as masks to hide their own inadequacies and insecurities. Leo then shifts to discussing how self bias can be found during wartime, indicating that both sides of a war typically demonize the other and create biased narratives. Examples provided include the Romans VS. the Carthaginians, Romans VS Barbarians, Athens VS Sparta, and modern conflicts such as Americans against Nazis, Japanese, and Muslims during various wars. He concludes that this bias often arises when personal interests and survival are at stake.
• Problem of bias in everyday and institutional situations: Leo Gura explores the prevalence of self-bias in various everyday and institutional contexts such as car purchase negotiations, partisanship in politics, family, romantic relationships, and gerrymandering. He explains how people tend to prioritize their interests over understanding the other party's perspective, often leading to conflict and flawed judgement.
• Self-bias in religious institutions: Leo discusses how religious organizations, including the Catholic church, and spiritual schools succumb to self-bias by believing in their superiority and denying any faults within their system.
• Self-bias in professional science: Leo highlights the existence of self-bias in the field of professional science. The bias manifests in making unwarranted metaphysical assumptions, focusing strictly on quantifiable evidence, and rejecting areas outside their current paradigms, such as mysticism, spirituality, and the paranormal.
• Epistemic self-bias reflected in reductionism and nepotism: Discusses how self-bias taints reductionism, leading reductionists to dismiss phenomena that can't be broken down to molecules, atoms, and physics. Leo also points out nepotism as an example of self-bias, where family members are favored over more qualified individuals in positions of power.
• Impact of self-bias on romantic relationships and debates: Leo argues that most relationships fail due to self-bias, as individuals in a relationship focus on meeting their own needs without considering their partner's needs. He also mentions that debates are often unproductive due to the prevalence of self-bias in the participants' arguments.
• Self-bias in debates and conflicts: Debates serve self-bias as individuals argue for their own positions rather than the truth. One's view of who wins a debate is commonly based on alignment with one's own bias. This involves conflicts on a macro level (such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), and on a micro level (such as judging someone for poor parking).
• Western culture's self-bias: Western culture exhibits self-bias with values of rationality over emotion, materialism over spirituality, and individualism over collectivism. Cultural epistemologies are differentiated as masculine or feminine, with Western culture largely dominated by masculine epistemology until the recent emergence of feminist epistemologists. These biases extend to U.S. foreign policy, which typically interferes with other nations' sovereignty for its own interests.
• Self-bias in intellectual discourse: Many popular internet intellectuals, like Jordan Peterson and Neil deGrasse Tyson, are criticized for being self-biased and lacking deep understanding. This self-bias is prevalent across humanity, leading to a belief in human superiority which disregards the rights and knowledge of other species.
• Effects of self-bias: Self-bias undermines self-reflection and questioning of fundamental assumptions, leading to distorted views of reality and potential negative consequences. Self-bias is also synonymous with selfishness, intellectual dishonesty, survival, self-deception, and conflict of interest, among others.
• Objectivity as an antidote to self-bias: Being objective and mindful of biases, including double standards and self-interests, can help combat self-bias. Achieving objectivity is not a simple fix but requires continuous vigilance, consciousness, and energy. It often involves stepping outside of personal comfort zones and breaking loyalty with oneself. Despite the challenges, the reward for objectivity is truth.
• Acknowledgement of biased perspectives: It's crucial to acknowledge that one's perspective is inherently biased. Such biases include twisted and limited views of life, reality, and human knowledge. Therefore, one should constantly strive to question their opinions and beliefs, reflecting on them and making necessary adjustments.
• Death and suffering caused by self bias: Self bias leads to a range of societal and personal problems including violence, hatred, judgment, demonization of others, oppression, exploitation, criminality, corruption, nepotism, and the retardation of societal evolution. This bias creates a barrier to responsibility-taking, healthy relationships, and authentic communication, effectively birthing what we perceive as evil.
• Self bias affects perception of others' issues: People, due to self bias, do not genuinely empathise with others' problems unless they directly experience them, highlighting the lack of consciousness and compassion in society.
• Preference for own culture due to self bias: People hold biased views about their own cultures, cuisines, traditions, and races leading to a misplaced sense of superiority over others due to self bias.
• Human indifference towards death and suffering of other species: Humans generally do not care about the death and suffering of other species due to self bias and a lack of objective value for life regardless of species.
• Accusation of disloyalty for objectivity: People who attempt to unbiasedly point out societal and personal issues are often demonized or accused of disloyalty by those who are called out, as they see objectivity and impartiality as threats and align them with evil.
• Attack on selfless and unbiased individuals: Selfless, conscious, loving, unbiased individuals are most often attacked and labelled as selfish, egotistical, narcissistic, amoral, subjective, biased, and unscientific precisely because they work to correct these problems. This is the result of the "devil" or the self-biased ego's projection of its flaws onto those trying to remedy them.
• Self bias reinforced by conformity: Self bias can be reinforced among groups where like-minded individuals justify and normalize each other's biases. This collective denial allows people to avoid acknowledging their own biases, thereby perpetuating the problem.
• On the prevalence of self-bias in media organizations: Leo Gura highlights Fox News as an example of a media outlet that unknowingly perpetuates self-bias due to the shared biases of its employees and viewers. He underlines that this shared bias creates a collective identity that people find comforting.
• On impartiality and objectivity: Gura insists that the alternative to self-bias is impartiality and objectivity, using examples from art history to illustrate these qualities. He discusses two paintings: "The Death of Socrates" and "The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons" from Jacques-Louis David, the former exemplifying Socrates' non-fearful approach to death and the latter showing Brutus's sacrifice of personal attachment for political ideals.
• Contrasting examples of objectivity: Gura contrasts the objectivity displayed in the above-mentioned scenarios with behavior in contemporary politics, speculation whether a figure like Donald Trump would hold similar levels of impartiality and objectivity as Socrates or Brutus when faced with similar situations.
• Acknowledging personal biases: Gura admits to his own biases and emphasizes the importance of self-reflection to gain awareness of these biases. He highlights that he exercises vigilance in recognizing and dealing with his self-biases as part of his personal growth process.
• The limitations of educational institutions: Leo asserts that objectivity and impartiality are often neglected in educational institutions because these qualities could undermine their foundational beliefs. He also states that his approach with Actualized.org is distinct because it encourages impartiality and objectivity.
• The ongoing journey to overcome self-biases: Leo emphasizes that overcoming self-bias is a continuous process, requiring constant vigilance, self-awareness, and self-growth. Ideally, learning should involve actively seeking divergent points of view.
• Accessing absolute truth: While acknowledging the existence and influence of self-bias, Leo holds that accessing absolute truth is possible through deep introspection and the deconstruction of human subjectivity, leading to a state of 'Awakening'.
• The challenge of determining unbiased thinking: When asked for a concrete metric to determine unbiased thinking, Leo states that there isn't one. True unbiased thinking is elusive and challenging to achieve, making continuous self-reflection and consciousness vital in seeking it.
• Addressing Self Bias: Understanding and tackling self bias is a continuous process. First, individuals must be alert to and acknowledge their self biases, ranging from minor to major ones. Spotting scenarios where double standards are applied and refraining from prioritizing personal interests can help. Developing and nurturing a genuine interest for truth, irrespective of personal costs, can be instrumental. Studying divergent points of view and stepping out of propaganda bubbles helps to expose one's own self bias.
• Admitting Self Bias: Individuals should possess the courage to first admit their self biases internally, and then take it a step further by disclosing it publicly. Following this, they must challenge themselves to let go of these biases, which often requires stepping out of comfort zones.
• Misinterpretation of Non-Duality: Some people may argue that non-duality could be viewed as a self bias. However, non-duality isn't a self bias, but instead a transcendence of all self biases. Achieving a state of non-duality leads to absolute truth, God, immortality, and infinite love.
• Breaking Loyalty to Self: An essential but challenging step towards removing bias is breaking loyalty with oneself and various personal identities. Throwing out these loyalties may seem difficult, but it is key to improve life quality.
• Understanding Rewards: The rewards of living an unbiased life, such as immortality and infinite love, can only be fully understood once a person actualizes living an unbiased life.
• Implementing an Unbiased Life: Living a life free from bias requires surrender of all biases. Regular practices such as yoga, meditation, and psychedelic use can help individuals become aware of their self biases, but it always requires constant consciousness and vigilance.
• Overcoming Self Bias: Eradicating self bias involves constant self-reflection and maintaining a path of integrity. Always questioning one's justifications and showing integrity in interactions helps in this process.
• Expanding Perspectives: Reading widely and encountering diverse viewpoints can play a critical role in broadening perspectives and reducing biases. Remaining open to different perspectives, even in challenging situations, fosters self-improvement.
• Improving Life Quality: The ultimate goal is to shed all self-biases and preoccupations. Achieving this leads to an improved life and the discovery of truth, but it requires constant effort and a willingness to discomfort oneself for growth. While the path isn't always easy, the reward is a life of truth and objectivity.
• Biases in Teachings: Gura acknowledges that his teachings, like any others, have inherent biases owing to his personality and approach. However, he endorses the exploration of diverse sources and ideas to prevent falling into toxic ideologies or restrictive outlooks.