Of course nobody wishes...to fall into severe addiction or substance abuse... — Outlander

Ah, sorry...just can't help responding to this one. When you say "fall into", you mean as if one slipped on the bank and fell into the river? This is a sloppy use of a pat expression which is hopefully not reflective of your thinking. Saying that "I fell into drug abuse" is akin to the young lad saying "that rock broke your window, Mr.Jones", as opposed to "I broke your window with that rock, Mr. Jones"...a linguistic evasion of responsibility. Better had you simply said "Of course nobody wishes...to become a severe addict or substance abuser."

NO ONE WANTS TO BE JUST A HOUSEWIFE!
— Athena

Just a housewife? Oh.. oh wow. My dear lady, with all due respect have you gone mad? What greater role is there in human development than the role of a constantly present and nurturing mother? — Outlander

I think you might have misread Athena's use of this expression. Rather, I think she(?) used it as exemplary of the social thinking against which she is railing with this thread, the fact of which becomes clear from her following sentence:

NO ONE WANTS TO BE JUST A HOUSEWIFE! How well I remember the "New Woman" magazine and the destruction of the value of a full-time homemaker. — Athena

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

and as Hitler and Neitzche, the cry is to be superior and crush the weak. — Athena

As did Adolf Hitler, Athena, you completely...utterly misunderstand Nietzsche, which is easy enough to do as he often wrote in allegory, but I enjoin you to read him a bit more deeply, and with some guidance if that is found necessary. You cheapen he who was a profound thinker when you place him in category alongside someone like Hitler. In a nutshell, Neitzsche's "will to power" did not describe the striving to be superior over others, it described the striving of one's own will against other wills, in other words the striving to have one's own will done, as well as the striving to self-mastery, and his "Ubermensch" is he who has perfected self-mastery. @Joshs renders a clear though succinct exposition of this in my current "will" thread. Wait...am I still on the "Philosophy Forum" site??

Loyalty to the family has gone to hell and dependence on the state has increased. — Athena

Personally, I believe family is more important than individuals. Love of state over love of family is reminiscent of Hitler's fascism. — Athena

Your thesis in brief. I agree with your observations for the most part, but I disagree with your conception of the mechanism at work. I don't think that the percieved "decline of the family" is caused by an increased dependence upon the state. Rather, I think that the erosion of the concept of family, and particularly of "lineage", attended the revolutionary genesis of the American nation. This country was formed as a reaction against aristocracy, and by extension thereof, as a reaction against the concept of "lineage". This anti-lineage stance was early on codified within American law within such principles as "the Rule Against Perpetuities". The results of this today are that the concept if "lineage" has been so weakened in the American mind, that the expression of that concept is usually met with reactions of incredulity.

When you do away with the "lineage", all you are left with for a concept of "the family", is the impotent "nuclear family", which is not a strong enough conception to withstand the onslaught of society's claims upon the individual person, and the claims of the nationalistic spirit for the affections of the individual. Why do you think we have the national anthem, the "pledge of allegiance" to the flag, various allegorical stories about the "founding fathers" of the country (many of which are utterly fabricated, like the G. Washington "cherry tree" fable, or embellished to the point of unrecognizability, like the "Paul Revere's Ride" nonsense), and other similar nationalistic devices? These are simply items of propaganda meant to secure the affections of a people left rootless by the destruction of the concept of "lineage", to a giant abstraction called "the state". This, of course, supported by more recent types of propaganda emanating from socialist thought (oddly placing nationalism and socialism in bed together), has been wildly successful in America, and are the reason for the diminishment of the weak "nuclear family". I might agree with @James Riley about the importance of community within a tribalistic or small communistic context, but within the context of "the state", the word "community" loses all of it's meaning, since the state makes all of the claims upon the individual that the community once did. This claiming obscures the fact that there is no true community within the context of the state. In the end, all who buy into the state's remonstration about "community" are left as no more than isolated individuals dependent upon and utilizing the state's willingness to mediate all traditional community functions in the creation of a type of "community by proxy", which leaves the state as the intermediary and arbiter of all function.

Biden’s new choice for Comptroller of the Currency, who supervises national banks, is Saule Omarova, a veritable commie. First Biden wants to monitor American’s accounts if they have total annual deposits or withdrawals worth more than $600, now he has chosen a bank regulator who thinks asset prices, pay scales, capital and credit should be dictated by the federal government... — NOS4A2

Yes, these are true concerns. I almost expect to hear a daily cry of, "(Big)Daddy(government)'s home!", and I almost want to say that everybody should go on out and buy their 800 pound safe right now... Our government appears implacable in it's desire to know everything about us, and to live our lives for us. I would have thought that the Snowden (heroic fellow) affair would have softened the appetite for domestic espionage.

@T Clark, don't know if you have ever read this one (I'd be surprised, since it is fairly well known), but it's long been a favorite of mine. It is a statement about human nature thought processes, and interactions.

A Poison Tree

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I waterd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night.
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.
And into my garden stole,
When the night had veild the pole;
In the morning glad I see;
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

- William Blake

:up:

How about following the stupidity? — ssu

Nope, they ain't stupid...but they're rich, and getting richer (and I'm envious).

. Does the ammeter too have a subjective sense of electrical current? — TheMadFool

A rhetorical question, but let's spell it out, nonetheless. The ammeter, not possessing a brain, and so without a mind, can have neither intellectual nor emotional response to the electric current running through it. A better question in this case, is whether said electric current amounts to an "experience" for the ammeter, given the fact that the ammeter has no awareness of the event (here we go into semantics again...'ts why math is so beautiful...no messy semantic ambiguities to obscure the real problems).

Does Mary learn anything new when she actually sees red? — TheMadFool

Yes, certainly. She either may or may not learn something new about the external reality...what I like to call "the universe", but at the same time, she definitely learns something new about herself. The questions here appear to be: is "knowledge" equivalent to "perception", and is "learning" the equivalent of "experience"? The answers seem to be "no", since learning and knowledge cannot impart similar personal understanding, or elicit the same type of emotional content as can experiential perception. Learning about, and so gaining knowledge about something yields an intellectual response, while experiencing the same thing yields both intellectual and emotional responses.

Every football coach knows that, no matter how thorough the preparation and the resultant game plan is, the experience of the game is going to teach something new to everybody on the field. This is the basis of Vince Lombardi's famous saying that (I paraphrase) "any team can beat any other team on a given Sunday". Mike Tyson, not a philosopher, understood this intuitively, and as a result of his own personal experiences; his comment, made during the period of his incredible dominance of the boxing world (most of his victories by knockout in the first or second round), upon being confronted with the assertion that one of his opponents had a solid plan of how to beat him in their upcoming match is one of my all-time favorites, particularly for drawing the distinction between knowledge and experience: "Everybody has a plan until they get a punch in the mouth." In other words, knowledge does not prepare one fully for experience. The boxer who gets a solid punch in the jaw quickly learns many things about himself, things physical and things non-physical.

Even when the experience is not so...um..."forthright" as a punch in the mouth, it can teach us much about ourselves which a foreknowledge of the event could not. A rather simple example: I am, have always been, an inveterate star gazer and amateur astronomer, and a great lover of the night sky. Clear, dark, moonless nights will often find me out in the yard looking up, or looking through the telescope. At various times in my life, I had been told how the night sky looked when you were well away from alot of light pollution, way out in the country. Of course, I live in the northeastern U.S., within the great urban corridor that runs from Washington in the south to Boston in the north (particularly in between Boston and New York), so light pollution is a constant fact of life for me. I had, upon occasion, had fully described to me what it was like to be able to fully see the Milky Way. This in no way prepared me for my experience of seeing the night sky when I served with the U.S. Army in Kuwait and Iraq. I was involved in the so-called "Left Hook" action during the "Gulf War", which took me fairly far west into the desert of Iraq, well to the west-southwest of Basrah (which itself was fairly blacked out for the occasion of the war). There was very little, if any, light pollution, and no buildings or trees to obscure the dome of the sky. When I looked up into the night sky, I definitely learned something new about myself...I learned of my own capacity for awe.

one thing that I have gathered from this thread, is that I will have to remember you and @dimosthenis9 as my go to guys for all things Nietzsche, providing contrasting opinions.

Your post has me quite excited for digging into the heart of what I am trying to understand about "the will": what position does it occupy within the architecture of the human mind, and how can we best describe what it is and what it does?

'willing’, like ‘thinking’ is not a unitary phenomenon, but a multiplicity of tensions. — Joshs

I never thought to regard "willing" and "thinking" as a dichotomy, but now that you mention it, it can certainly be regarded as such! Let me ask you: if the "will" forms a dichotomy or duality with the "intellect", the rational dimension of the mind, how do you opine it relates to the "affect", the affective dimension of the mind...the seat of the emotions? I ask this because I have long considered "will" to be emotionally based, and so constituent of the affective mind, but after thinking about the matter in creating and observing this thread, I am no longer sure that such a notion is reflective of psychic reality, but rather that "the will" is either separate from both thinking and feeling, and working in concert therewith, or rather, which is different, "will" is a product of the 'marriage' of feeling and thinking.

Let us say: in every act of willing there is, to begin with, a plurality of feelings, namely: the feeling of the state away from which, the feeling of the state towards which, and the feeling of this “away from” and “towards” themselves...feeling – and indeed many feelings – must be recognized as ingredients of the will [...] the will is not just a complex of feeling and thinking; rather, it is fundamentally an affect: and specifically the affect of the command. What is called “freedom of the will” is essentially the affect of superiority with respect to something that must obey... — Joshs

When you use the term "affect", do you essentially mean "emotion" or "feeling", as I do, or something else? It seems almost as if you might be using "affect" to mean "faculty". An incomplete understanding of meaning can lead one terribly astray when working with another to understand anything highly abstract. By "affect of command (self-command?), do you mean "feeling of command", or perhaps "faculty of self-command"?

Could it be that "will" arises when perception, being closely attended (as it ever is) by a "feeling", a particular complex of emotions, results in an imperative thought...a "thought of command"? If so, what does this tell us that "the will" is, and where does it reside with respect to the major dimensions of the mind? In other words, perhaps we can better understand, at least theoretically, what "the will" is by concieving the relationships between the acts of "willing", "thinking" and "feeling". The primary question pertaining to the development of such a conception would seem to involve whether "willing" is validly considered as a domain equal to those described by the words "feeling" and "thinking".

It gets complicated for Nietzsche when you try and parse what ‘my will’ refers to. — Joshs

Nietzsche's "will to power" seems as if it would be an independent concept, even to Nietzsche himself, from bare "will". Given the semantics of the noun phrase, one could say that "will" in "will to power" might mean "desire"/"longing", as in Merriam-Webster. Alternatively, which I rather think the case, it might refer to the concept of "will" posited by Schopenhauer, who seems to have had a significant influence on Nietzsche's philosophical development, and so "a ceaseless, endless striving". Of course, it might also mean the stronger "lust", as in Augustine of Hippo's "libido dominandi", but I rather think not.. Would you fellows say that this seems correct?

what I mean by saying that I "consider myself a pagan", is that I have personally renounced theism as a tenable belief system, and am seeking to find or invent an alternative which will allow for something akin to religious expression.

I never said that. The discussion is about 'will' and Crowley (regardless of what you think of him) did have some things to say about 'will' in a more 'religious' sense...If you can get past that you'll find an interesting story. — I like sushi

Ah, sorry about that. I didn't mean to insinuate anything about yourself. Considering myself a pagan, I have things against folks like Crowley, Helena Blavatsky, and Edgar Cayce who, drawing from the more superstitious elements of ancient paganistic systems and employing them often bufoonishly, give paganism in general a bad name. As for Crowley in particular, some of his thought sits well with me, but even with that the mode of expression and the antics bother me. :victory:

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" - Crowley. [...] To me this means irrespective of what other deem as 'good' or 'bad,' or 'right' or 'wrong' I should act as my will dictates and follow my path for my reasons not those imposed upon me by ideologies that possess people en masse. [...] A better quote would be (to paraphrase) 'the biggest mistake is to set obtainable goals'.

Given Crowley's libertine lifestyle, I'm not sure that you are reading this quote from him quite right, but I like the ideas that you have derived from it, nonetheless.

Best, most unique definition presupposes there is one. — Mww

@I like sushi initiated a thread in which he used the unique term "philossilized" in decribing certain lemmas. I suggest that "will" is quite an "unphilossilized" term, with meanings having historically been whatever the individual philosopher determined. In this, it has seemed like a type of "floating" term with meanings varying within a range. That is one of the reasons underlying this thread.

and you liken him to...categorize him alongside F. Nietzsche?

The fact regarding Crowley is, that I would not have expected to find such a man's, make that such a showman's, "philosophy" (used loosely) to be taken seriously by anybody on this site. I don't know a whole lot about the man, but he does appear to have been more than a bit deviant, in all senses of that word. Not that I purport to ajudge a person by his looks, at least by his looks alone, but simply regarding a photograph of Crowley seems to tell all kinds of tales.

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" - Crowley. — I like sushi

Good heavens, this is not Aleister Crowley, the English occultist, is it?

In the most colloquial sense 'will' could perhaps be parsed as 'pure determination'. — I like sushi

This accords well with the definition of "will" as "firmity of purpose" or "fixity of intent". As I say, however, I think this only part of the picture.

Well, fellows, thank you for redeeming my thread with some interesting banter, and thus saving it from ignominy. This has been a question in the back of my mind for awhile now, and I am glad that the expression of it is not found to be utterly inane.

Schopenhauer would say that it strives to interpret and reconcile external objects to a coherent subjective worldview.
— Michael Zwingli

That's odd, if he truly thought it to be not just blind, not just unconscious, but aimless as well. — Ciceronianus

Oh, good catch! This might be an example of my imposing my own definition upon the old German's ideas. You are right, of course: while "blindness" might be able to jibe with the effort that I describe, "unconsciousness" and "aimlessness" cannot. As previously stated, my personal view of the "will" as a unique term (one which has a meaning not shared by any other lemmas, so having no synonyms) is that it means the incessant, insatiable drive (or instinct, if you will) to conform objective reality to a subjective worldview. Though I agree it is "blind" in it's need to conform all reality to a particular worldview, I do not share Schopenhauer's opinion this will is necessarily unconscious or at all aimless. Rather, I feel it to act quite within the realm of consciousness, as an individual percieves an aspect of reality and determines either that, "I agree with this...let this stand", or that, "I do not want this...I will not abide this". Because the will strives constantly to realize a particular subjective worldview, neither is it aimless.

The part of the things that happen in someone's life and he actually has a "say" on that. He can interfere with his thoughts, choices and acts. — dimosthenis9

That's a good consideration as well. It jibes somewhat with my own definition of "will" as "the inner drive to control events and to establish situations which are in concordance with a personal purpose, goal or desire".

Bloody killjoy! :razz: — Tom Storm

Heheh... No sweeties coming my way from Baden this time, eh?

Verbal senses:
1. I will take you home. [assurance (of a future event)]
2. You will do as you're told. [coercion]
3. The rock will fall. [inevitable]

Nominal sense:
4. It's God's will. [desire]
and in addition:
5. I will do as my will moves me. [personal faculty of choice]
6. During his captivity in Vietnam, John McCain showed himself to be a man of iron will. [firmity or fixity of purpose]

...which makes me think that the history of "will" as an English lemma plays a part in this. I personally don't know that history, whether "will" actually was first used in English as a auxiliary verb or as a noun. I feel that this is an important consideration, though.

Thus will is about ineluctability, like under duress, and an agency that desires that. In short, it's got to do with participation in the causal web as a cause and when that cause (agency) itself is causeless, we have free will. — TheMadFool

Yes, I like those ideas, and the expression thereof.

thanks much for replying; I was about to cry and ask @Baden to give me a gobstopper. I realize that lexically, "will" has a somewhat, though not extremely, broad semantic field, and the term has been used to mean different things by different people at various times. I guess what I am driving at with this, is that given those facts, what would seem to be the best, most unique (lacking semantic overlap) definition of the term?

. To me the end of history has meant the end of the linear nature of life, i.e. progress. — T Clark

This is the meaning that Francis Fukuyama gave to his "end of history" thesis in his book "The End of History and the Last Man", which posits that the "liberally democratic state" is the apotheosis and the natural terminus of political evolution. Frankly, I find Fukuyama's thesis both more serious and more challenging than Baudrillard's. After reading "The End of History, etc.", I found myself, as an anarchist...uh...Libertarian, dismayed by the force of Fukuyama's reasoning, wondering if any serious challenge could ever be made to the democratic nation-state, or if any eventuality might break what I view as the soul-crushing monotonous security provided thereby. A discussion of Fukuyama might, indeed, make a good thread. As for Baudrillard, his thesis seems a bit far-fetched. I fully expect that one late night during a bout with insomnia, I will turn on Coast to Coast AM, and hear George Noory interviewing Baudrillard about his latest book.

↪James Riley Should we also reject the periodic table because it is a social construct? — Xanatos

The analogy fails. You may reject the periodic table for being a social construct based upon rheorization, but if you do, there yet remains the fundamental objective reality of the various elements and their chemical properties, which the table comprises, and which one cannot similarly reject. There is no analogous objective reality underlying the concept of human race. Rather, distinctions of "race" involve the artificial imposition of categories upon the uncategorizable.

So you hear (the performance of) the Bach. And hearing the Bach think little more about it - but it's a version of perfection the appreciation of which is gained through an open and attentive listening and also through the experience of imperfect or lesser versions. — tim wood

I have always found it much more difficult to distinguish preformances of Baroque music, when played by two competent musicians, in contrast to, say, two performances of Romantic or even Classical music, in which there seems to have been much more latitude for individual expression.

And it strikes me - that I'll share with Amity as well - that appreciation of the other is also the other's enabling thee and me to appreciate ourselves. — tim wood

Quite profound. I will be heading down East tomorrow morning with a buddy to canoe the Damariscotta and Penobscot Bay. I will ponder that as I paddle...

@tim wood, much historical comment has been made about Glenn Gould's interpretations/recordings of Bach, especially of the Goldbergs. I have listened to them many times, without having been able to discern what all the fuss is about, and so have remained curious. (Though I appreciate "art music", I am not very well educated about the appreciation thereof.) Since you seem a fairly well educated appreciator of music, would you care to take a shot at enlightening me?

Start new threads, as the above is off-topic here. See you there. — baker

You asked, and I answered. In fact, the instant conversation was entirely in response to a question that you yourself asked:

I asked you whether you knew better than than the Buddha. Do you? — baker

...to which I, being in fact stringently anti-messianist in general (a certain result of my having been raised Christian), felt compelled to respond. I agree that it has strayed from @Banno's intent, though, so you are certainly right in suggesting that we drop it.

@Xtrix, here below find an article which I have just encountered, pertaining to my above alluded to fears regarding uncontrolled deficit spending by our government. There are real dangers to our collective welfare from this practice.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/28/business/jamie-dimon-jpmorgan-us-default/?iid=ob_mobile_article_footer_expansion

Oh, he believed those things? Then it shouldn't be difficult for you to provide some citations for your claim.
1h — baker

I have read a teaspoon's worth of text about Buddhism, not because of any of it's doctrines, but rather because I feel that the basic methodology involved therein violates basic human nature, and so involves a renunciation of human nature (I personally believe that aggression is the defining characteristic of maleness, and hold my animal nature dearly, even if it does cause me psychic pain and frustration). Even so, I do know that the achievement of moksha, which I believe to be the eschatological goal of Buddhist philosophy, is the release from samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth impelled by karmic law, and so the end of reincarnation. How, then, could the Buddha not have believed in reincarnation, and how can one accept reincarnation to be true without believing in the incorporeal self, aka "the soul"?

There is dialectic apodicticity and rhetorical apodicticity. — tim wood

Remind me never to argue a point with you, Tim.

Why would you think that? — Isaac

There is too much at stake, politically. The FDA is part of the Executive Branch, which is now headed by a man who, unlike former President Trump, is highly concerned about optics.

I do not deny the existence of arrogant prevarication and certainly even of graft within such agencies as the FDA, but I think given the high-profile nature of the COVID epidemic, most if not all of that type of "hanky-panky" was surely forestalled.

:up:

sure, but we are talking about a vaccine here, not a pharmacological therapeutic, a series of vaccines which have evinced a certain definite efficacy.

Prishon? I have missed you....

So the contingent/indeterminate v. the apodictic. 2+2=4 and that's an end of it, and somtimes the Germans are better and sometimes the Brazilians. The question here being if there is anything apodictic about Covid vaccination. And I think there is. And thus anti-vaxxing is a taking from me for no good reason something that is mine. And that leaves no room for respect, nor is fair. — tim wood

We are in general agreement about this. I think that the only point of disagreement between us revolves around the issues of confidence in the efficacy of the current vaccines, and probably the danger posed by this virus in general. With respect to these, I think that no pretense of apodeicticity can be made. I may not be as conversant with the efficacy studies as yourself, but my confidence is derived from a general surety that the FDA would not allow vaccines onto the market which endangered people by severely lacking efficacy, in conjunction with an impression that the danger from this virus was somewhat overblown from the start. We're not exactly talking about the Bubonic Plague here; nobody is driving up the streets crying "Bring out your dead!". Sure, many died in 2020, but many people worldwide die of the flu in any given year. I myself think that everybody should just get the damned vaccine; I can't imagine why they don't just walk into a CVS or Walgreen's and do so, especially as many of those who are so deathly afraid of the vaccine have spent the last year sitting on the couch in front of the television set, collecting a fattened unemployment check and eating all kinds of fattening crap that is going to cause them to die prematurely of heart disease. Thus far, since the late fall of 2019, a period of nearly two years, 701,000 people have died of COVID in the U.S. Each year, an average of 660,000 people die of heart disease in the U.S. There is the matter of perspective.

, I can respect that; we have a fair difference of opinion.

given the realities of Covid, your "don't care" means you're good with your friends, family, even yourself getting possibly very sick, even dying — tim wood

But, Tim, this only pertains if you lack confidence in the vaccine. With as reasonable a man as you appear, all your loved ones should have their heads screwed on right, and so should be vaccinated already. As for the kookoos who think that someone might be putting mercury, or anything else harmful into the vaccine, they are writing their own script... Both you and I know that the only reason the Biden Administration appears to be having an existential crisis right now, is the consideration of "optics", they cannot politically be viewed as lacking concern for anybody. This is just typical political behavior.

And where have we got? The reasonable get vaccinated; it's the right thing to do for - as a practical matter - everyone. And there was a time when most folks in the US did the reasonable and right thing. But now the stupid hold sway with outrageous and absurd conspiracy theories and ideas. It's a call to battle. Sometimes the stakes are a joke in themselves and sometimes deadly serious. — tim wood

I don't even understand the issue that people, both people in government and folks on this site, are having at this point in time. The vaccine is readily available. Those of us who are not plagued by excessive suspicion or conspiracy theorism have been vaccinated (even those of us, like myself, who were never particularly worried about this bullshit virus in the first place), and have had our loved ones vaccinated. As for the rest of the population, what's the concern? They've made their decisions based upon their own irrational fears. If they catch it and die, or spread it to their own loved ones who die, well then... (gigantic shrug). Know what I mean? Just open everything up, and let all of these die. I do not consider this an inhumane stance. As for me, I'm fairly confident in the vaccine; if the girl was fine enough, I'd stick my tongue down her throat even if I was sure she had the virus. Of course, I think I had it before I was vaccinated, and it really "wasn't shit"...basically, a chest cold in my case.

I'm not sure that what we clumsily call the "belief" that there are "external objects" is up to us, no matter how much physicists futz with the definition of "object". Ditto for space, time, who knows what else.
— Srap Tasmaner

Actually there's been some very interesting work by Susan Hespos on exactly what else. She's been trying to work out what laws of physics babies take to be innate and what they don't — Isaac

All "external objects" are the products of experience based upon the shortcomings of our human sensibilities, and so lie within the realm of subjective reality. These "objects" have no "objective" reality as they appear to us. I would love to read the findings of Hespos' research...

He didn't actually believe in the soul. — Janus

Having not studied or deeply investigated Buddhism, I have no knowledge of whether this belief was overtly stated, but it is certainly implied, in my view. I think that a belief in reincarnation must be preceded by a belief in some incorporeal aspect of the person ("soul"), which inhabits the various carnations, no? If not, then what can one given carnation possibly have to do with another; how can they be differing carnations of the same "being"? In this way, the idea of reincarnation seems dependent upon that of "soul". Note that I do not mean to insinuate that Gautama's conception of such a "soul" bears any resemblance to the Christian concept, but it appears equally fallacious, anyways.

I call them fallacies because there appears no evidence for them. The burden of providing evidence is an incumbency of the claimant of a supernatural claim. The indirect object of an act of supernatural claiming, the hearer of the claim, has no similar onus to provide evidence for his doubt. A supernatural claim unsupported by evidence has assumed the character of fallacy ab initio, and retains such until evidence is proffered.

...I don't see what possible evidence there could be to justify believing in them either, so I remain uncommitted and unconcerned. It has nothing to do with me, and I nothing to do with it. — Janus

That is precisely my stance regarding such claims (which, btw, include the claim that "there is s God"). I have no evidence > these are apparent/assumed fallacies > I remain, as you have well said, "uncommitted and unconcerned".

I know that such a stance takes a bit of the romance out of one's worldview, but I have learned that it is necessary in the evaluation of the multivarious supernatural claims with which we are bombarded even in our scientifically oriented age. To not maintain this stance appears to entail dangers to one's material and psychological welfare. I have personally seen people suffer psychic damage, greatly damaging disappointment, by involving and investing themselves in various types of Christian "charismata", for instance. Because of this, I feel it best that we retain a certain rigor in evaluating the claims that are thrust upon us.

You deny the Buddha? You know better than the Buddha?
— baker

I don't accept any man as a final authority on anything, Baker. If you do, that's your choice.
— Janus

I asked you whether you knew better than than the Buddha. Do you? — baker

I do. If I don't "know better" than an Iron Age philosopher, given all that humanity has learned in the interim, then God help me. Old Siddhartha believed in the "soul" and in reincarnation (and most certainly in the pantheon of Hindu gods to one or another extent), both obvious fallacies, and the latter an obviously ridiculous fallacy, to a logical positivist like me.

My mother long ago defining a gentleman as a man who never hurt anyone by accident... — tim wood

This is a really succinct, really full, really nuanced, and really subtle definition. Basically, I take it to mean that a "gentleman" is a man who is ever thoughtful and aware. I can find no fault with this, particularly as it leaves plenty of leeway for intentionally hurting those who subjectively appear to deserve it. Your mom seems to have "known what time it was".