James Ellis, Raising the Conversation Past Level Zero |473|

James Ellis is a philosopher and creator of the Hermitix podcast where level three conversations are routine.

[00:00:04] Forgive the longer than normal opening clip, but sometimes a little snow piercer, Gnosticism is therapeutic.

[00:00:50] Today philosophy with the very excellent James Ellis from Hermitix.

James Ellis: [00:01:03] Not the zero I talk of a lot, but level zero for what the people online called normies because I don’t think most people are operating on there. The level of level one. I’m not saying I’m above them. There’s nothing wrong with just living your life and getting on with it. But in terms of like everyday conversation where people are saying things like, how are you, you know, how was your weekend? Those dead statements, that needs to be like level zero, where there’s just no content.

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Alex Tsakiris: [00:01:28] Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris and today we welcome James Ellis. Was it okay to out you James, because you were flying under the radar for a while?

James Ellis: [00:01:49] Yeah, and I’ve been under the name Meta-Nomad for like… since 2017 I’ve been blogging and writing under that name. I just about remember the old days old days of the internet, where forums were full of anonymous people with cool sounding names, and I really miss that anonymity. So that was one reason and also just so you don’t get the two things crossed. And then I started doing things, like courses where I thought just for like legitimization I need to do the whole real-life thing, a real-life name. So yeah, James Ellis is fine is that the short answer to that?

Alex Tsakiris: [00:02:30] Well, great. I mean, you know, like we were just chatting about just a second ago. There are so many jumping off points for folks like you and I really am open to thinking, kind of in these parallel and non-parallel kind of ways, you know, what is reality, What is anonymity anymore and what is identity and all that kind of stuff. But we should just jump right into this and let people know that we’re kind of doing a swapcast here, but I’m primarily interviewing you for Skeptiko and then this may go out on your excellent feed, the Hermitix podcast. Let me pull it up here for people because we were just chatting about it a minute ago if anyone’s watching on YouTube. But really some great stuff here a lot of very, very insightful, deep, philosophical level three, as I like to call them, kind of conversations.

James Ellis: [00:03:27] Sorry. What’s level three?

Alex Tsakiris: [00:03:31] Okay. Well level three. First what’s level one? What’s level one is like science. So science is level one. Is there science? Like that’s one of the survey questions we’re going to go over. And what is the meaning of science? Is science obsoleted by consciousness, an understanding of consciousness that consciousness is fundamental and that maybe idealism is a better way of thinking about what we experience than is scientific materialism? So that’s kind of level one.

And then level two is conspiracy, really, which is if you get there and you say, wow, it’s really an absurd idea to think that consciousness is an illusion,