Interesting in this context is completely divorced from morally good/bad. Could be any group from any area at any time in history. I’ll start with a few, followers of the cult of pythagoras, contemporary black Hebrew Israelites, antiracist skinheads and the Amish (neo-luddites in general). Don’t be racist or a prick to other people discussing.
Yeah I get you, there’s enough death cults trying to end the world already. I mean one can take it in different ways. In the most grounded sense it’s physically true. Like there’s not actually a gap between physics, chemistry, biology, sociology and so on, it’s one singular continuous reality. There’s no actual barrier between your body and everything else, that’s just a perception mainly due to a limited awareness.
Of course one can take it in a pansychism manner and I often do. It’s not too difficult to get there for a more rigid materially minded individual. As you already have one just has to make a trip through epistemology first. Like classic arguments such as Descartes demon, Plato’s cave, Chung Tzu’s butterfly, Boltzmann brains, and last Thursdayism. That is the most grounded science based version of reality isn’t as concrete as most minds would prefer it to be. If you don’t know those epistemological arguments I highly suggest looking them up.
I agree, a human mind’s version is likely limited. Like we’re aware of the limited perception of ants and chimps yet often assume we are not similarly limited. Another one I play with is causality. Like if it’s always true then everything in this moment was caused by something in a previous and those by something previous and so on until infinity or something happened that was not caused or causality and human thought isn’t capable of capturing reality as it is.
All the fun stories aside I always come back to base faith. That is it doesn’t matter if I’m a Boltzmann brain and reality just came into being a moment ago, the goal is to reduce needless and avoidable suffering for all minds whenever and wherever I can. Of course I suck at doing that sometimes (a lot of the time) but try not to dwell on the failures beyond the learning experience they can provide.
Like Ram Dass likes to say, be love now. If nothing matters I can still enjoy internally and externally manifesting the waking sensation of love all the same.
Luckily I know at least some philosophical basics, so I do think I understand your talking points. (And essentially Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, lead me on this extreme path of epistemological masochism.)
Infinity is actually a very good example I think, that shows us we are perceiving something weirdly. There exist no measurable, conrete infinity in the physical universe, as far as we know; even the space itself has its limits. Yet we understand the concept of infinity, so it exists in some form, in the reality we are perceiving. But then, we can have infinities that are bigger and smaller than each other… the way we are perceiving this is quite paradoxal! Or, at least it appears to us as such.
And be love now, really is a wonderful line of thinking. I fully agree, that it really does not matter, what is the Real Truth or if it exists at all, since all we have is ourselves, right now. If we all focused more on loving and less on all the bad shit, our human realities would definitely improve in multiple ways… but we are flawed beings, so sometimes we can only try… the path towards Good is a difficult one, that I also often struggle with.
That’s to say most people start with a very grounded sense of reality until they encounter something that model can’t deal with such as those epistemological arguments. Science like everything else is built from assumptions, things that seem true but we can’t prove. Stuff like didn’t the past actually happen. It’s typically when one notices reality is stranger than science can manage that one allows themselves to entertain other concepts.
Just a quick quip, it may literally be the case the universe is indeed physically infinite. We don’t know if it is or isn’t. That said, yeah we can indeed create mental constructs that don’t have to obey reality. Linguistically I can create contradictions. I can say on a flat plane there is a square with five sides which is even mathematically impossible yet I can put the words together, create the idea of it. Also yeah Cantor and the scale of infinities is fun. It may be the case we discovered the mathematics for something we’ve yet to discover in reality which happens from time to time.
As they say if it’s worth while it’s probably not easy, if its easy it’s probably not worthwhile. Hate and resentment are easy, forgiveness and peace is difficult. Until one’s enemy is their friend the war is never over. The best war is won without ever taking a single shot. Many things turn into this multivariate balancing act where there really isn’t an ultimate good option, something will have to give here or there, but as you said the intention and the attempt alone are commendable.