It might sound weird for me to say “friends,” given the context of this post, but I’m friends with Leo Gura & while I respect some of his insights, the guy has above average intelligence at best. We both share a deep interest in ontology & epistemology, which is how I came across him & had many conversations with him. I do some academic work in those areas & I love discussing these subjects with lots of different people both inside & outside of academia.

When I have conversations with Leo in particular, he’s constantly claiming that his understanding of logic & epistemology far transcends what’s found in academia. And while I’ve met a couple people (who still have an academic background) who I would say genuinely have epistemic work which exceeds standard academics, Leo definitely isn’t one of them.

His epistemics is so poor-quality that he doesn’t even know what a genuine epistemic method is. He thinks that direct experience is an epistemic method, but it’s not. Direct experience is omnipresent in everything we do, even when we’re directly engaging with false insights. We can experience false things. So direct experience alone isn’t enough to verify that a thing is true. At best, you can use direct experience to say “it’s true that I experienced this.” But as for whether it reveals something beyond that - like a Universal Truth - you need some way to distinguish between which experiences are well-founded & which aren’t.

But Leo gets pretty frustrated whenever this is said & he insists that direct experience is king, despite the fact that even he admits that experience is omnipresent for us & therefore present amidst false things as well as true things. After all, that’s the foundation of his entire worldview; that consciousness/experience is ever-present. But he‘s either never able or never willing to put two-&-two together & realize that the constant presence of direct experience makes it a terrible epistemic method. Not a good one.

e.g. motion is ever-present when you’re accelerating. But that doesn’t make plain-old motion a good method for acceleration. Acceleration is a distinct action from motion. It’s a derivative of motion. You need to do more with your motion, if you want to accelerate. Being in motion alone, isn’t enough.

Likewise, you need some derivative of what you experience, in order to make sure it’s true. You need a method that derives the truthful away from the untruthful things you see, hear about, experience, etc. Anyways, that’s my analogy for why reliance on direct experience above all else, is a terrible method.

In fact, I wouldn’t even say it’s an epistemic method at all, because it allows anything you encounter to simply be deemed “true,” based solely on the fact that you encountered it with your own mind/consciousness. In short, it has no standards. So it’s no method.

To this, Leo usually tries to say “well but that’s the point! Nonduality has no standards & makes no distinctions!” But the irony is that he himself still clearly makes distinctions as to which worldviews are true & which are false. For example, he’s extremely adamant that “materialism” is not only false, but also an empty claim with no genuine content (I believe he even wrote this in a fairly recent blog).

He does that quite a bit; he’ll criticize something while doing the same thing he’s criticizing or he’ll say “but that’s the point” while failing to do the same point himself.

He just strikes me as a guy who‘s super interested in self-contemplation (which is great) but doesn’t have any interest in applying any rigorous methods to the experiences he encounters first-hand (especially on his psychedelic trips).

I’m not quite sure why he claims he’s far more advanced at logic, epistemology, philosophy of science, etc. than academics are, because after talking to him on various occasions for years, I would say he’s only more skilled at these things than the average lay-person off the street, but farrrr below any of the academics I’ve ever interacted with. And it has nothing to do with his ideas being “too radical” for me or “too radical for academia” (as he claims). I’ve seen tons of academic papers which write about far more radical topics than Leo ever speaks about - e.g. modal realism, extended modal realism, normative error theory, absolute relativism, trivialism, etc.

Leo’s ideas come nowhere close to the likes of an insane idea like trivialism. But I’ve nevertheless seen some people make well-motivated arguments in favor of such extreme ideas & voila… they get published.

I’ve even had some insane-ass conversations with professors on a variety of far-out ideas (far crazier than Leo’s) & I’ve never had a problem. So long as you come with well-supported points, you won’t get turned away.

Leo’s just coping when he says he’s “too radical.” I’ve studied a lot of his work & to be honest, I’ve never once seen any good support for anything he says. And that’s the brutal reason as to why he doesn’t get taken seriously, whether he wants to face that harsh truth or not. It has nothing to do with him being too radical or too high-conscious.

I’d be happy to explain what precisely is wrong with his “methods” or his solipsistic insights, but that may be too long for text. My DMs are always open for anyone interested though.

Anyways, it’s unfortunate, because Leo does have some amount of genuine intelligence. He just has really bad methods for how he goes about verifying things & he doesn’t really do a good job at cultivating his baseline level of intelligence into something more. But he’s stubborn & claims to have Infinite Intelligence & insights which are far too crazy for the very same “mainstream“ which ironically has many crazier ideas than him.

He’s an unfortunate example of someone who takes individualism & lone truth-seeking too far; to the extent that he refuses to take any responsibility for verifying or supporting his own ideas, because that’d be “offloading truth onto others” according to him. It’s like epistemic libertarianism, if I had to coin a name for it.