We Who Are About To... by Joanna Russ.

If I die, nobody would truly care. This is even worse than if someone thinks negatively about you. When you pass unnoticed through life. — javi2541997

Remind me who you are?

I’m so droll. But seriously, you’re a likeable chap so don’t be so hard on yourself.

Hey wait a minute. If you were fishing for compliments, I took the bait as fast as a hungry flounder.

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." — BC

Finding happiness requires a whole bunch of circumstances to align just right, but there are infinitely many ways that it can remain unattained.

Or, unhappy families are more interesting to hear about from a storyteller, whereas happiness or contentment is always similarly boring from the outsiders' perspective. Every unhappy family's unhappiness has a unique drama.

I think we can say that there is truth to Tolstoy's opening line, although it may not be true without exception and without qualification. This is true of a lot of things you find in literature. Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde are full of stuff like that but they were not being stupid. Even just simple metaphors sound good but are in some sense false, at the same time as being good metaphors. As you get older, time flies, but it doesn't literally fly.

But here is my contender, which I think is truthful despite being false:

Only exaggeration is true. — Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

I think it was because you had said it was your first time writing a short story. Considering it was really good and you won the contest, I thought that was impressive, and was therefore surprised. — Noble Dust

Ah, that’s not so bad then :smile:

I thought that was impressive, and was therefore surprised. I was also sad to see you deleted it. Attempting publication perhaps? — Noble Dust

Yes, I regret doing that, since there was another way I could have hidden it from the internet. By the way, the Symposium is now private so stories no longer get indexed by search engines.

I'm wanting something from Kant that indicates he thinks we have an access to things-in-themselves — AmadeusD

I have never claimed anything like that, so I don’t know why you’d be looking for it from me.

Of course, I actually do. You’ve said it yourself: you think an external object just is a thing as it is in itself. But the latter is merely an aspect of an external object, the aspect that we logically cannot access (what it looks like when you’re not looking).

If you’d prefer to use a different scheme, one in which it’s all in the head, then do so if you’re into that, but don’t try to use Kant in support of your position. He doesn’t think what you think he thinks.

That said, he does appear to contradict himself quite a lot so I understand the misunderstandings.

This seems to be a fairly direct explication of what i'm positing - we can be 'sure' that intuition is 'caused by' external objects of whatever, unknowable, kind. But our experience is indirect and we do not have access to those objects. — AmadeusD

I think maybe you have misunderstood. He is saying that inner experience, unlike outer experience, is indirect.

Here he summarizes the idealist position:

Idealism assumed that the only direct experience is inner expe­rience and that from it we only infer external things; but we infer them only unreliably, as happens whenever we infer determinate causes from given effects, because the cause of the presentations that we ascribe—per­haps falsely—to external things may also reside in ourselves. — B276

Then he goes on to present his own contrasting position:

Yet here we have proved that outer experience is in fact direct, and that only by means of it can there be inner experience

In a footnote for “direct”:

In the preceding theorem, the direct consciousness of the existence of external things is not presupposed but proved, whether or not we have insight into the pos­ sibilitv of this consciousness.

Since we have direct access to external objects, their existence is not merely inferred.

So you say. But you have no addressed anything I've put forward as reasons for my position, so far. The tide example is a really good one, to my mind because (to the bolded) that isn't access to external objects. And your formulation earlier in this same comment seems to agree with that.

To the underlined: This seems to be an extremely restricted way of considering different view points. It's not idealism to contend that while we're able to reliably infer external objects (and take them as 'given' in some noumenal sense), we cannot access them. In fact, as best i can tell, that is exactly what 'transcendental idealism' amounts to. Again, why I think Kant's intention was never to pretend to overcome the mitigatory fact of sensory organs producing experience 'of the world'. — AmadeusD

Sorry, I didn’t read any of your previous posts in the thread so I don’t know your arguments. What’s the tide thing?

I won’t address your comments about transcendental idealism, because TI is not very relevant at this point. TI plays a special role in allowing Kant later on to establish human objective knowledge of the world.

Aside from Kant, for the sake of argument let’s say (which I would never say) that we infer external things. Why wouldn’t you accept that this inference is a neural component in our access to the world outside our skulls?

Does that track? — Mikie

I think of you as the Adam Sandler of TPF.

I don’t think you’re an asshole and I don’t think most people see you that way. Some do, but that’s what happens when you post in political discussions and get angry sometimes.

I legitimately have no idea what people think of me. Members educated extensively in philosophy may recognize me as a dilettante, and these days I’m more visible in the Shoutbox than anywhere else so I’m probably thought of as a buffoon, and perhaps an arrogant one.

I’ve had responses to my philosophical discussions revealing that there are members who’ve been around since the beginning who have no idea, and really no interest in, what I’m saying, despite knowing me for many years (and yet they go ahead and respond to my OPs).

Another time, @Noble Dust expressed disbelief on finding out that I wrote a certain short story that he liked a few years ago. That was weird to me. I wondered, why is he so surprised? Never did find out. I didn’t hold it against him though, I should add.

In a nutshell, I am none the wiser, and it’s probably not worth worrying about.

Absolutely. And again, we have no access to those objects (on my, and I am weakly confident, Kant's account). — AmadeusD

I know I said enough Kant, but just a small point about this. You make a good point, although in the Refutation he does state that “inner experience is itself only indirect and is possible only through outer experience.” (B277)

Whether he carries the argument from the existence of external things to the experience of those things, it’s obvious that he thinks the latter is possible.

Also, if you need me to get the bits where he sets out his empirical realism I guess I could do it tomorrow, if you’re interested. However, you are not precise enough in saying what you object to.

I do not think he intended, and absolutely reject that he succeeding, in establishing any way to access external objects. — AmadeusD

Maybe you’re thinking of a different philosopher, because this is a really odd thing to say about Kant. Your move at this point ought to be to say that for Kant, external objects, which we do have access to, are mere phenomena, and thus mind-dependent. I take issue with that too but it’s at least a decent interpretation.

But that’s probably enough Kant for now.

And If I am wrong, I am arguing against Kant, not you. But I maintain that we do not have that access. As noted earlier with, i think Janus, You absolutely cannot access an empty bay in Bengal by experiencing a tidal wave in Chile. — AmadeusD

You are most definitely arguing against me too. We are animals in direct sensorimotor engagement with the environment. To deny this like a 17th century philosopher is perverse.

It's not access at all. This is why I'm asking for passages - I recall, and can find, nothing to support this formulation. — AmadeusD

Which formulation, exactly? I’m not sure which passages I should be looking for, since all I did in that paragraph was remind you what Kant famously set out to do in the CPR.

Which things are not 'in-themselves' or external. — AmadeusD

This is crucial. Kant does not conflate the empirical with the internal. In other words, things perceived and theorized about are not in the head, for Kant. A way to think about it: just because we perceive external things under an aspect, i.e., in a certain way, or expressed more generally, as phenomena, it does not follow that we do not perceive external things. Kant is explicit that external things are things we can possibly experience. External = empirical, and Kant is an empirical realist.

There are those who claim that Kant failed in his efforts not to be construed as a subjective idealist, and they sometimes have a point—it was his own fault to some degree—however, I think the direction of his project is in a contrary direction, and of course he was explicit in rejecting that interpretation, e.g., in the Refutation of Idealism, in which he argues that perceiving your own inner states is dependent on the existence of objects in space, i.e., so-called external objects.

Note that everything I said was standard and uncontroversial, except for my bit about the “fleshly container”, which is a modern spin on it.

It seems he is deeply committed, whether he states it or not, to a barrier between the world and our ability to intuit.. anything. — AmadeusD

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Since intuition, in Kant’s technical sense, is the capacity to form representations, and since he spends a lot of time showing how important it is for us, it’s clear enough that he does not think we intuit nothing. But maybe that’s not what you mean.

Anyway, the barrier, such as there is, is between human knowledge and things as they are in themselves.

Your formulation doesn't strike me as particularly workable - where's the access, if the system necessarily precludes it? If you mean to say that Kant advises us that the access we do have, as indirect and unreliable as it is, is in fact access, i would reject it even if i read that into Kant. — AmadeusD

In the Critique of Pure Reason he sets out to show how synthetic a priori knowledge is possible, without considering that it is not. Synthetic a priori knowledge is knowledge that is informative, universal and necessary. This is the reliable access you seek, and our sensibility provides the direct access to things about which we can have this knowledge.

As I pretty much said, if you are instead seeking access to things that cannot be accessed (things as they are in themselves) you will struggle.

Krysař or The Pied Piper, a Czechoslovakian animated film from 1986.

Kant does not, anywhere I've seen, intimate we have any access whatsoever to the things-in-themselves. — AmadeusD

Yes, in Kant's scheme this is almost true by definition, since a thing-in-itself is a thing unintuited, i.e., not presented to our minds through sensation. But since that's how we access things, only some logically possible non-sensible intuition (like a God-like perception) could access them otherwise, whereby they would be noumena, not phenomena--and that's not a talent that creatures like us happen to have.

The objects he discusses are those of the mind, as a result of perception and understanding arranging sense-data into a lil movie for us to watch via the internal projection system of the visual cortex. — AmadeusD

Kant was so steeped in the philosophy of his time that he seems to be understood today as promoting the idea of a barrier between inside and outside, and that's a shame, because when you read him you see that this is not really what he's doing. Rather, he is emphasizing that perception is not a barrier so much as a guarantor of access, and that we really can and do know objective reality (this is the whole point of the Transcendental Analytic). So I'd say the thrust of his thinking is the opposite of how he tends to be taken now, at least in the Anglosphere.

He is certainly explicitly against any movie-in-the-head kind of idea. Think of his epistemology more as stating what was not so obvious at the time, namely that when you think or discuss things, you are doing it in the only way you can: using your faculties of perception and understanding, which have their own structures. You're not a mind in a fleshly container equipped with receptors; you are that container, which includes the brain, directly connected with the rest of the world.

:up:

Yeh, it's good that we're invitation-only.

Thank you for the heads-up. :smile:

Banned @Steven P Clum for low quality culture war stuff and throwing around accusations when criticized.

My guess is audio visual link. Video calls and video-conferencing, basically.

Also, Ive never left Chicago in my life. How is it different out there? Is the sky purple? — an-salad

I've never been to Chicago. Is it different there? Is the river green?

The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges.

You know, violent video games exist worldwide, but curiously, the shootings in schools happen on a large scale in the USA. — javi2541997

Video games in America are the same as everywhere else. If their implications would be grossly underestimated, then there ought to be more shootings in other countries, which don't have the mass shootings, but do have the same video games. — ssu

It could be the case that while violent video games are not enough on their own to cause school shootings, they do contribute to psychological and social developments which are manifested in school shootings under certain circumstances, in this case the American circumstance of a gun culture. It might be the case that violent video games are doing harm to all societies, but since those societies differ, the effects are not the same and are not equally visible everywhere.

:up:

It's maybe a little Austeresque too, certainly his more ambiguous and confusing stuff. Also reminded me of The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Thank you for your interest. If I wrote a review it would not be about me: not about the progress of my mind or my perspective, not about whether I have been improved by the experience, etc. There’s probably plenty of that stuff on Goodreads and YouTube.

Sorry to be an elitist dickhead :grin:

Actually I don’t think it’s necessarily elitist to expect a book review to be about the book rather than about the reviewer.

Ice by Anna Kavan.

Uncanny, haunting, and disorientating. Recommended.

Great stuff. Subscribed :up:

Learning From Le Guin | Kim Stanley Robinson

:cool:

Sounds a lot like Adorno's Hegelianism.

I've been on the fence about reading 100 years for a while now but it's obviously a must read. I think it's in the wife's library... — Pantagruel

I was the same. Glad I went for it.

The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System by Milovan Djilas, a 1950s critique of the Soviet system by a Yugoslav communist, showing that the nomenklatura and the elite of the CPSU had become a new class, and therefore that what is important is not just ownership of the means of production but control.

A car-centric infrastructure is stupid and evil in cities, but maybe not for transport between cities. Put another way, public transport, especially trains, is best for cities, but cars might be best between them, depending on how far apart they are etc.

So it's not so much cars themselves which are evil but the urban planning that prioritizes them. The prime example of this evil is stroads:



(And many of them are worse than this one; this one at least has sidewalks)

It's a road where there should be a street. Where I am in Moscow there are effectively similar roads in the city centre:





They turn what could be an extremely pleasant city into a hellscape, and they're really bad at moving people about compared to trains etc. (BTW Moscow does have some great public transport but it's not enough and the car is still allowed to dominate.)

Western European cities have begun to move away from the car-centric paradigm. A good YouTube channel that covers this stuff is NotJustBikes.

(And talk about big government and liberty is really not relevant or helpful. It's worth noting that the car-centrism that began early to mid-twentieth century was partly the result of oversized influence from the borderline monopolistic car industry (partly also some misguided aspects of modernist architecture))

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket — Pantagruel

Have you read his short stories "MS. Found in a Bottle," and "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall," written a few years before the novel? I've just read them and noticed that they both touch on the Hollow Earth theory, which is alluded to in the novel too, as I recall. Contrary to those critics who claim that Poe was just doing satire in these adventure stories, I reckon he was really into these theories.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez — Jamal

Finished. Jamal scores it 11/10.

Now reading Passing for Human by Jody Scott.

:up:

Btw I would never describe myself as being “offended” by such inaccurate rumours, and wouldn’t want to give that impression.

I hear Putin is even militarizing migrants — jgill

Thank you for your concern, but what do you mean by "militarizing"?

Conscription of foreigners is a rumour that has been spread before on this site and elsewhere. I have to say I find it pretty annoying, and even irresponsible. As far as I know, migrants can be drafted if they've attained citizenship, as you'd expect, and non-citizens cannot be drafted.

If you know otherwise, let me know.

My father used to listen to that song often. The lyrics annoyed me back then but now I get it.

Interesting that he wrote it no later than 1964, which seems pretty early to have already wised (wosen?) up to the bullshitness of that kind of sixties politics.

About a quarter way into Life And Fate by Vasily Grossman. I would have to be him to describe what it is like. — Paine

I read it a few years ago. Very good.

Discussions in the categories of Politics and Current Affairs, Humanities and Social Science, and Science and Technology, all live on the home page, belonging to Interesting stuff. Whether that’s good for a philosophy forum is debatable (generally I think it is, but the interminable and mostly very unphilosophical discussions like those on Ukraine or climate change seem to require some other way of organizing things); but I’m not sure if the Lounge is the right place for them.

Anyway, the OP under discussion here was moved because it was lazy and far too brief. OPs need to have more than “x says y, true or false”.

@boagie has been banned for low quality and toxicity.