Fair enough. Totally understandable. I'm into Marx and Adorno, two significantly Hegelian philosophers, and I haven't even read Hegel either (not much of him anyway). I'm thinking of tackling the Phenomenology next year. Maybe with a reading group here on TPF. — Jamal

I'm assuming you're probably not into Max Stirner if you prefer Marx? He was also a Hegelian philosopher, yet in the end he expressed more interest in using the Hegelian dialectic to reject it.

Max Stirner was one of the origins for my current fascination with philosophy, even though i'm not a big fan of individualism per say (Max Stirner didn't call himself an individualist, even though his later advocates promoted individualism over collectivist ethical frameworks)

And we should avoid the contradiction of thinking simultaneously that (a) it's not worth studying Plato and Aristotle because we refuse the canonical authority of philosophical texts; and (b) relying on the authority of secondary literature to tell us what is in those texts! — Jamal

yes i think that can be a big, which is ultimately why I reject reddit as a source of philosophy information. It seemed to me that a lot of folks on the Nietzsche sub did not understand Nietzsche, even the ones clearly have read his works.

However, like I was trying to explain with the Hegel example, there also can't be anything wrong with refusing to read unnecessarily impenetrable texts. Reading difficult texts can be challenging, as if you're uncovering something special and going on an adventure, yet I simply can't read everything. I like to buy paperback books if it's something I intend to spend a lot of time thinking about, but I will probably never buy anything that was written by Hegel. I'd prefer some reliable academic explanation of what he was getting at....i think Coplestone will probably cover it briefly when I get to that era...

For example, Plato is pretty crucial for understanding philosophy history, yet you can go even further back, even though the texts are naturally more sparse. For example, there is a poem that was written by Parmenides: it's a decent poem and it does help you to understand his monism better.

"putting words in someone's mouth" is radically different interpreting someone's text. Have a nice life, this is getting really pedantic.

Again, both Huxley and Orwell made utopias that worked almost flwalessly, but that were completly devoid of -oh the subjectivity- of humanity. — Oppida

their "utopias" were criticisms of utopian (huxley, in brave new world) and authoritarian (orwell, in 1984) governments. Neither one was described as being flawless, but reflections of where they thought society was heading through their observations. Orwell thought socialism would give rise to the thought police: people who you could not escape no matter how hard you tried to hide your dissidence, within a world that made it hard to conceive of anything beyond this fictional socialist dictatorship called. One of the strong, organizing principals of the society is a reverse cult-of-personality figure named Emmanual Goldstein, who the citizens are directed to hate and show rage towards periodically as the enemy of the society (similar to "the terrorists" in the west, and how russians describe "imperialist america" in the east). This world is split into two geo-political factions, and i don't remember what they are called or much about the ideological underpinnings.

Huxley conceived of a scientifically crafted test-tube baby society, with a great utopian drug called Soma, and open, genderless sexual relations that were devoid of any sort of passion or romance. The rebel in this latter world is someone who learns to return to the ways of nature, but they are ridiculed by the utopians near the end of the book.

You've reminded me that i have forgotten much of the content of "brave new world", but my description of 1984 is pretty accurate since i read that again fairly recently.

I can't remember exactly what was said or who, but a Taoist descendant of Lao Tzu name Chuang Tzu commented on the value of worthlessness. The example he gave was a large tree not suitable to be cut down; if such tree was useful, it would be cut down and processed for whatever purpose the ancient chinese had for it. Just for context, the earliest taoists who i mentioned existed over 2,000 years ago.

There's also this neat random quote that I saw recently by an american president, of course spoken much later:

Wherever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship. — Harry Truman

So in this light, the question then becomes why would efficiency be desirable at all? The cost of what corporations refer to as "efficiency" makes it seem in-efficient at times. For example, let's use A.I. like you mentioned in the OP: how much time does it take dealing with the false claims it generates and errors it makes?

Doesn't efficient industry produce a lot of waste, in the form of garbage etc.? Clearly people do not like to do more work than necessary, or expend more effort than necessary, but how can we keep efficiency from creating different external costs?

There's lots of interesting criticism to chew on in the OP: however, i think the conversion of the natural world into quantities began long before galileo. Once you start creating number systems (as simple as 1, 2, 3, even...) you begin a process where people no longer see each thing individually, when you have a quantity, each thing you count becomes identical (at least temporarily). Let's use money as an example: having 20 dollars is better than having 5 dollars, and in each case, you don't care about "which dollar", because each one is the same to you.

Seems to me we’re still arguing about the same things Aristotle and Confucius did. — T Clark

there is a cyclical current to debate, even though there are indeed some things that science has clearly proven to be false or invalid.

I updated myself on the thread beginnings and the behavior of that user so that i can form some opinions on where they're coming from:

-Moliere has erased at least one of their posts. Nothing wrong with this, as they have been a good deal more open about it than a lot of moderators i have been "graced to know" in some shabbier and less well-maintained corners of the internet. However, knowing that makes the situation harder to judge, as that user's first post in the thread was among the posts to be erased.

-The problem with that kind of attitude they have towards this thread is that the basis of the whole thing was concerns about the awful things that almost undoubtedly are going to happen.

-I didn't really sympathize with any of their statistical approaches against the alarmism, it's just "fact-vs-fact" instead of philosophy discussion.

I appreciate naming the things we are referring to in discussion overall, just because i literally did think you were hinting that maybe i was "the troll" since I responded to unenlightened in an almost opposite way. You all can worry about inevitable global warming from behind a computer screen (sometimes i do since the wildfires create air pollution, and GW could lead to extra crop failures and water shortages), but talking about it through computers is not really addressing the problem, or coming anywhere close to lowering the carbon emissions.

For example, it's important to know that militaries disproportionately create carbon emissions. Why this tends to stay out of news media discussions is beyond me, except maybe it doesn't mesh with the profit motive of the news industry. The U.S. military in particular is massive, i've read that it produces equal carbon emissions as the rest of the people in the united states do through normal consumption. So what exactly can anyone whatsoever do, given that the worst polluters are the least likely to change their behavior? Other people were bringing up the fact that the less dirty sources of energy would still require a lot of fossil fuel consumption to get fully operational (or at least that's how i interpreted the conversation).

Do not ever elevate the work because of the author.
— Philosophim

I don’t actually disagree with this, but I sometimes find it useful to bring in the words of well-known philosophers as a way of showing that a particular idea is not that far out of the mainstream. — T Clark

There are great works out there in which an academic interpreter was speaking for someone else, yet, for it to be memorable, it has to do more than that. For example, I think Walter Kaufman was the best Nietzsche translator. I've read plenty of the other english translations as well; part of what allowed me to read N's provocative works with confidence and pleasure is that Kaufman explains a lot of the errors that N oppponents make, and points genuine flaws in his reasoning. The hollingdale translations came later and "won" historically, but I think Kaufman's selections in translation style reflect more of a holistic attention to Nietzsche's works (rather than just picking and choosing the right words and leaving footnotes, which is the way hollingdale's translations looks to me at times...). Like philosophism pointed out, the language barrier is a whole other issue in itself, so in the end there can't be a superior Nietzsche translator...the hollingdale, kaufman, and stanford press editions are all sufficient at least for discussion.

thanks for being specific, ill check it out.

That's an excellent approach, and i commend your clear and sectioned response. Writing is not easy. I wrote a book of poetry years ago, but it took me regular discussions and test runs with a poetry group before I had enough material for a book.

I guess the hardest part with philosophy is that it's harder to be original and also communicable. We have inhereted a rationalist/secular mentality that allows us to come to easy conclusions quickly. For example, my response to the "all belief is irrational" thread was original in wording, but very similar to all the other critics who participated in terms of finding the error in the OP.

I'm currently more interested in the history of philosophy at the moment than I am in writing a book or internet essay for this reason...i recently wrote an alternative position to free will, determinism, and compatibilism, but i just don't know how to polish it so that others will get where I am coming from. The satisfaction of coining a new term for a position is not trivial, but that's not nearly enough for sharing it...sometimes i'm impressed with the knowledge people have on here about philosophy positions, but in the end we are all just coming from different vantage points.

that's fine, i was well aware that i was making the issues raised more complex than people often make them. Luckily in my case, there are days like this one where i could be here all day if i wanted...

So it seems that the line between legal and illegal is not discovered, it’s negotiated. What matters isn’t whether a law corresponds to some deep moral truth, but whether it works well enough for the purposes of reducing cruelty, minimising conflict, and keeping social life manageable. So the foundation of most moral systems seems to be preventing harm and promoting wellbeing. We can certainly decide not to do this and see what happens. — Tom Storm

I don't think you're giving your 100% correct ideas about this the credibility they deserve: legality absolutely is a negotiation at every level. When something is argued in court, it's always a process of mediation (because you can always just accept the demands to surrender if it's you vs. the state). Even when there's an attempt to make a set of laws seem more absolute, like what was perhaps going on in the Old Testament, the various groups and societies still had to adjust their administration and make changes to them later on. In modern life, seeing how a criminal charge quickly changes in nature during the legal process is a demonstration of this.

Do you think that 'punishments' (in a quite broad sense of the term) can never be means of education? Do you think that it is always possible to avoid 'punishments' and still educate efficiently?

'Punishment' here means either causing or allowing some kind of painful or unpleasant experience. — boundless

"education", to me at least, is besides the point, because education and learning are radically different things. Education can't really exist without some institution that requires it, whereas learning is a constant process we all face that never ends.

I was never intending to imply that punishment always does more harm than good, or cannot be justifiable, but that we cannot ignore the stance and selfish ends of the punisher. I felt your examples of the parent chastising the kid for stealing, and the state punishing someone for driving aggressively, were too standard and lacked the day-to-day complications of ethical decision making. I still can't just complacently accept those vague examples as a lesson in the "always good". Punishers are capable of making dubious claims about the actions of others and their intentions, and probably do so on a regular basis. Trying to exclude any punishment from ethical and moral standards makes absolutely no sense if you are indeed trying to make the best decisions for everyone involved.

Not every unpleasant social reaction can be adequately described as a punishment either. For example, a baby crying might feel like a punishment, but it would be absurd to try to argue that a baby cries as a natural, divine punishment for the sexual behavior of the parents. It's pretty typical for people to moralize about anything to do with children, which is a pretty huge motivator for me not to have children. If I can't always control myself and I make mistakes, then why burden myself with someone who I have even less control over? It's still entirely possible that I will have kids anyways, yet having to repeat very common ideas just to cover my ass.... "don't take that candy bar off the shelf without paying for it! If you want something, ask me to buy it for you", or, "well, it's your fault the state is fining you this large amount, you shouldn't be driving so recklessly"...seems to detract from the joy of the experience. The thought of me repeating the second moral lesson is even worse I.M.O., because then I'm stepping into the dicey territory of blaming someone else for a choice made by a police officer, which seems to be hypocritical. On top of that, traffic fines and punishments are a pretty clear example of extortion, no matter how much sense it makes on the surface...

However, I would indeed tell my children both of those things if i had them, as my child stealing or [later] driving recklessly would leave me no choice. I guess a more interesting moral question to me would be, when do you stand up for your kid when someone else punishes them? How far should I go in shaming them over inappropriate sexual expression and language?

Yes, indeed the issue here is that "not normal" does not mean pathological, but unfortunately, emotive and hostile reactions to abnormality...even when it's pretty benign and non-threatening...is a pretty normal phenomenon for humans. Those doctors mutilated the clitori of those intersex people just because marking "male" or "female" on a form is really THAT important to them. I don't really agree with the assertion that it's genocide, especially since killing was not really part of the mindset, just people being very rigid, fragile, and afraid.

Perhaps in some cases yes. In some cases no. Not sure why one would like to think that in the case I was thinking. Let's say that the stolen item was quite costly and if done by an adult the act could be considered a somewhat serious instance of theft. — boundless

i can't really imagine that a parent, who probably wishes other people saw them as a "good parent", can really see the difference though. I'm trying to point out that someone trying to protect their image is a natural part of also wanting to protect their child. Unfortunately, families tend to be isolated units, so image protection becomes a real problem for the parents. Who is going to help them take care of their kids, or let them have momentary relief from their work and parenting duties, if outsiders are judging them for failing to keep up with the local standards?

This is a little bit of a "shifting goal posts" issue in your examples: at what point can you really say the behavior is wrong? So, if an adolescent steals something expensive, then they've clearly passed the threshold of childhood and can now make decisions that have real gravity? Most (if not all) court systems in the U.S. completely disagree with you: a 13 year old would rarely get punished to the same degree for stealing a car as a real adult, and there are age of consent laws to prevent real adults from even considering having sexual relationships with adolescents.

I guess in a way, it's good to be as un-conflicted about moral dilemmas as you are, I wish I could look at crime and punishment with lower degrees of skepticism.

You're making completely hypocritical arguments though: you condemn me for not reading every single thing you posted in the thread (lazily calling that "cherrypicking"). If you forgot what you posted...

It is those that insist on controlling other's speech that are the ones that lack a sense of being open-minded. It doesn't mean you can't call yourself a woman - only that you cannot make me call you a woman. — Harry Hindu

Oh, poor you: some want to control your speech, but you can't even get me to read all your posts! I understand you must feel so inadequate, and it's my fault. Maybe you should talk to a therapist about it and take some pills. You seem confused.

Yes, I see. But I am suggesting that punishments and fear of punishments is a necessary (or perhaps inevitable) part of education. In my example of an adolescent that steals from a shop, the parent decision to lead the child to give back the item stolen and apologize to the shop owner is certainly a punishment even if educative. — boundless

Wilhelm Reich might argue that people perform this particular punishment as part of their "character armor" instead of it being selfless education. In other words, it's not really about the kid deserving to be treated so harshly, but about the parent's fears about how the child will make them look in the future.

I'm not saying i wouldn't do something like that example as a parent, yet when a child can't use money to the extent their parents can, it seems absurb to look at the item stolen as being sacred and inviolable. Maybe stirnly telling the kid "You didn't pay for that: go put it back.", could be more educational and simple, but i'm not a parent. Simple as possible seems to best suit children rather than dramatic performances.

Geologically we are speaking in million-year or even billion-year time frames. Civilization only goes back thousands of years which on this time scale is hardly noticeable. Geologically we are and we are not, no matter. Global warming is only an issue to us because humanity, in a broad sense, is endangering its very frail short-lived outlier existence on a temporarily hospitable planet. — magritte

Yes, that's very possible, but there's still a lot of unknown, which makes this all more interesting.

Well at least the troll (don’t mention him by name) has left the thread.

Maybe we can now get back to serious discussion. — Punshhh

Kind of funny how anyone using this message board would imply they are really doing some serious work while "the trolls" are not...

Just to let you know, *hint* *hint* mentioning someone isn't as graceful as you think it is, because you have no idea who reads these conversations.

Not sure you will do about the climate, the biggest abusers are militaries, and they tend to not listen to arguments for change. You can guilt trip yourself and others about their piddily squat emissions, but i'm confused about the scientific or philosophical justifications for such behavior.

While we're discussing, all that said--and all of it blatantly enough evidencing the natural biological diversity within the human species as regards sex--I have yet to understand something about ancient cultures in which homosexuality was accepted and relatively wide spread (well known and documented examples include Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and the less known in the west Ancient Japan, at least prior to Christian cultural "influences")):

Though homosexuality was by comparison rampant and readily accepted--and they no doubt had the same percentage of intersexed individuals--there is no historical record I can find of transgendered individuals in these cultures. Maybe I haven't looked deeply enough into the matter. Or maybe it might be the case that being transgendered is in some as of yet mysterious, at least to me, way intimately related with the culture(s) we ourselves are living in??? Then again, some of them Ancients wore togas most all the time, which kind'a look like skirts, so who knows? — javra

And there are ancient records of anal sex practices...

As far as transgendered people existing in those cultures, maybe it simply wasn't recorded or expressed as openly. You also bring up something I have thought about a lot, maybe there are certain mysterious purely psychological factors that drive people to have trans identities that are put into place by modern culture and social norms. If I had to guess, there would be some subtle biological and psychological aspects at work here.

up to nearly 2% of the global human populous might well be intersexed ... with a more or less absolute minimum of 0.018%, which is still quite a lot considering. — javra

yeah, 2% is roughly the same percentage of people who identify as transgender, even though the two conditions are very different. We're talking very small minorities, but overall very large numbers of people...

i had to update myself on this information a little (as i saw that documentary on the transgender hermaphrodite over 20 years ago)...what i'm reading is that hermaphrodite humans cannot reproduce at all, even though there are some intersex people who can.

Hermaphroditism wherein the lifeform reproduces with another such that both impregnate each other and become impregnated by the other does not occur in humans — javra

"hermaphrodites" in human terms just mean that the person has both forms of genitalia, and like i said: they're not both sexually functional, and very rare:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkjhpu6JnS0

no matter how many people want to believe that humans can only be grouped in the "male and female dichotomy"...does not mean it will happen...

From this, it can be concluded that most Germans derived sadistic pleasure from carrying out the Holocaust, and this sadism became a need for them. — Linkey

i wouldn't say this about the general population, as they were just swayed by sentiment and strong leadership: but this is probably an accurate statement when it comes to people who served the third reich directly (such as the SS and other branches of their military).

I'm only questioning this because some germans later on were disgusted with seeing the result of the rhetoric. The Nazis are a great example of why authority in general should be watched and questioned, not just specific "bad" authority figures.

I think you're almost right, unless the believer applies induction: which is technically reasoned belief or evidence-based belief. "The sun will rise again tomorrow because it did today". Then, we are in the territory of "half psychosis", or partially imposed imagination. David Hume questioned induction's ability to prove, but often we have nothing else to go on beyond induction in the process of decision making, so we can't throw out all belief and faith.

This would be great news for those of us who want a truly human world. Big pill to swallow, though. — Millard J Melnyk

Seems like a belief in the good of humanity ;-)

Hmm. 2 months since my last post, and 4months since anyone else's.

There really is nothing to discuss is there? It's all our funerals, and so no one will attend. — unenlightened

Heavy is the head that wears the climate...

There will likely be hotter temperatures globally and intense storm activities.

It might help you to know that our times are still one of the cooler ones geologically speaking: there have been periods of time on earth that had flourishing life and much hotter temperatures.

It's also possible that our activities will lead to mass extinctions, which isn't 100% a bad thing, since these cycles dominate the universe.

With the trans folk or the ones doing the anti-trans posting? — Banno

I was referring to trans folks, but what i said interestingly applies to the people here who have been wanting to invalidate trans as a type of person as well...

It's all pretty tendentious. And after 15 pages, tedious — Banno

Some people try to make solipsistic arguments, then accuse others of not understanding them, insisting that you didn't read enough of their posts. I don't understand these arguments that transgenderism is just a logical flaw. There's clearly more going on with these people than mental illness.

I saw a documentary about a real hermaphrodite who had non-functional sex organs, it's extremely rare, but i was not imagining what i saw. Don't believe everything you read online.

Then don't expect your cherry-picked posts and strawmen to deserve a response. — Harry Hindu

Wow.

Once you remove that framework (gender neutral), there’s no conflict — just human behavioral and psychological diversity. — Harry Hindu

The problem is that this just isn't based on any real culture: real cultures just have different ideas about biological sex and gender than others. Some cultures were possibly so simple that there was no need to discuss gender or an equivalent concept. Trying to logically invalidate transgenderism just won't work out.

Nature doesn't even conform to simple, binary ideas about sex. Hermaphrodites aren't just a mythological concept, but there have been real human heraphrodites. There have also been other kinds of transgender conceptualizations, like "two spirit" in native american culture. Trying to reduce trans to a logical error just isn't correct or based on modern medical and scientific understandings of transgender issues.

Please read my all my posts thoroughly because you are just straw-manning me. — Harry Hindu

I'm not straw manning you; the issue is that people who want you to call them a man, when you see them as a woman, are in disagreement. How you handle the disagreement is completely up to you. Don't try and force me to read all of your posts. In the end, gender is both about congruence and conformity...if you think trans is a sign of mental illness or poor health, this proves my point.

Could you describe them for us? — Wayfarer

haha, touche...pretty ironic for me to say that, right? It's whatever exists besides you thinking and writing messages on here (as the buddhists and new age people talk about: "feeling the breath coming in your nose", etc.)

As for Hegel, I'd say that Will is the culminating synthesis of self-determining awareness that coincides with these 'wordless and indescribable existences.' — Pantagruel

Huh, i thought that was the hallmark of shopenhauer. I suppose we would have to consult the german translation.

A further point I would add is that the idea that what we are most directly aware of is thought if true at all, would seem to be true only in moments of linguistically mediated self-reflection. If that were so, it shows us only how language might make things seem to us, and that says nothing about the arguably more fundamental pre-linguistic experience of the world. — Janus

this is why I don't fully subscribe to idealism; I accept it on the basis that thought = perception, and those perceptions can "create reality", yet it seems that people like Hegel and Descartes can't really acknowledge the wordless and indescribable aspects of existing.

....

I figured that the error is in saying "i think therefore i am", which many criticize as false since existing seems to come before thinking...

Maybe cartesian logic would be more cogent if it was "i am, therefore i think"

I am not sure which category(ies) pinkness falls under: I’ll have to think about that more. What are your thoughts? — Bob Ross

Using your framework, it's symbolically feminine as pink can be associated with girliness, gentleness, affection, lightheartedness...but that's only because our culture repeats this imagery (for example, manufacturing pink colored toys for little girls). I've read that in early 1900's america, pink was what boys wore, blue was what girls wore.

There is. Gender isn't a role like an actor or actress in Hollywood where the role is fictional, segregated from reality. Gender is more of a social expectation of the sexes. Society is not saying, "you are a woman because you wear a dress". Society is saying that "you are already defined as a woman because of your biology, and because society also has a rule that exposing yourself is illegal, then we expect you to wear certain clothing to symbolize your sex under the clothing so that people of specific SEXUAL orientations can find mates that align with their SEXUAL preferences". — Harry Hindu

I guess the thing that concerns me the most about these arguments is that you are implying that blind conformity to social expectations is inherently good, and disobedience is inherently bad. I'd rather surround myself with people who were more open minded so i could be more honest and less irritated with them.

For example, in the more renaissance time periods in europe, it was considered shameful for a woman to show her ankles in public in christian societies. Now, the expectations are much looser in western countries. In some Muslim countries, it's considered shameful to take off your head scarf unless you are around your immediate family (and once again, the stricter onus is on the women, as muslim men do not always need to cover their faces). If any of these things you or Bob Ross are saying is true about gender ideas being objective, or about trans identity being a mental illness, then how could any of these cultural conflicts exist? Would you ever question an authority figure's ideas about anything?