Problems arise when you think you know everything and you actually don't. We see this on both sides and it's only really not a problem when you are knowledgeable and active in both philosophy and the relevant sciences. — darthbarracuda

Really? I thought scientists were more bigoted than philosophers. A lot of science types I have met seem to think that we can know everything there is to ever know and that we will find a theory of everything even despite me pointing out that they are a finite brain with limited computational resources.

Shouldn't we be discussing that Pussy IS Really a Source for Meaningful Life and Optimism? Sorry... I meant "relationships"?

There are no objective truths, by your definition, so the "truth" part of the statement "All truths are subjective" does not correspond to anything objective.
And by definition the subjective part does not correspond to anything objective.
The statement "All truths are subjective" does not correspond to any objective fact. — m-theory

This is what I was saying to you the other day about all facts being an interpretation but yet you still disagreed with me. You insisted you were 6-foot tall, 6 foot tall where? in your mind? or in my mind?

No it doesn't. There is no "valuing something truthfully." — Terrapin Station

You assume truth is objective. If I perceive something truthfully then that means as close to a true subjective interpretation as possible, nor marred with false interpretation, delusion or prejudice etc.

You can't have some narrow preconception of what those things should be like, and then effectively trash what you've got just because it doesn't closely resemble your preconception. You have to appreciate what you've got for what it is. That goes for everything else, too. — Terrapin Station

But how do you appreciate it for what it is without preconceived notions about what it is, what you expect and where it sits in with those expectations?

To appreciate it for what it is means to value it truthfully and truth is just a term used in this context for relative worth compared to other circumstances your life, your job, your girlfriend could be in.

Wait, but it sounded like you were complaining about how your friends are. You're talking about their faults, their hypocrisy, you're saying that you called them out on something, etc. I wouldn't say that's being comfortable with how they behave (in the respects you're discussing, at least). — Terrapin Station

Yes and as I said that is "something we all do as humans" but I am not "OVERLY critical or judgemental".

If someone twitches, has tendency to be aggressive, complains a lot... you notice it, everyone does... that is not because you are OVERLY critical or judgemental but because you are a human.

I also said that honesty in these areas can inform opinions about your personality from different viewpoints which enables you to better understand or develop yourself.

I wouldn't want friends to "tell me about my personality" unless it were a specific issue, such as "I'm trying to get work in such and such social milieu and I'm having no luck--any ideas?" And likewise, I wouldn't "tell them about their personalities." — Terrapin Station

That is exactly what that person thought too and despite everything I have already written on the flaw in that thinking you haven't provided any argumentation for it. All you have said is 'oh yeah, i do the same thing'.

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“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. — Terrapin Station

I welcome it, thence I will grow. Yet this person denies this and selects "only the finest breed" to do the job, lol.

If your friends are highly judgmental, if they have "critic" personalities, if they tend to be hypocritical about that, if they can't take criticism themselves, and if you're uncomfortable with this, I'd simply look for new friends. — Terrapin Station

No, that is not it. They are not overly critical or judgemental. It is just something we all do as humans and IMO we should talk about it so that we can better develop ourselves. The problem is that I AM COMFORTABLE with it, THEY ARE NOT. At least not with anyone, they want to be selective with people they "trust" probably because they trust them to only to say "your fiiine dollface, there is nothing wrong with you"

. There are people out there who are not normally (negatively) judgmental. I don't like hanging out with people who are chronically negatively judgmental myself. I wouldn't have offline friends like that. I gravitate to people who are mellow, positive-minded, tolerant of difference, who like experiencing a bunch of different things and appreciating it all for what it is. — Terrapin Station

Yes I agree and am much the same, I don't judge excessively but unconsciously everyone's brains picks up on traits as they meet new people and figure them out. I would definitely say I am a mellow, positive-minded fellow who is tolerant of difference to a degree but I do not like when people try to hide their opinions or not give them when asked for them, especially when they contradict themselves for saying that they place so much value on being open and honest/sincere.

That's one of the things that frustrates me about message boards like this--they tend to be full of "critic" personalities, where that personality is often accompanied by arrogance, too, plus a lot of hypocrisy of course. And sometimes I let myself get drawn into that negativity, which I don't like, but it's difficult to not sink into it when you're surrounded by personalities like that. But for the boards I'm talking about, it's my only outlet for discussing those topics. — Terrapin Station

I totally agree and see it every time I am on here. I think that is the reason why threads go on for so long like they do is because people just want to be "right" and have the last "official" say as opposed to learning new perspectives. I have had to catch myself a few times on here doing this. What are your other outlets? backdoorsluts.com/forum ???

The one thing that I do agree with your friends on, though, is the idea that not everyone is equally qualified to judge various things, but what sort of friend is going to get into a long discussion with you about something where they believe that you're not qualified to make judgments about it? — Terrapin Station

I wouldn't trust a homeless man to engineer a building but hearing a diverse range of opinions is how we get the most out of knowing a true reflection of ourselves. If you select only the people you resonate with to tell you about your personality... what do you think your going to fucking get back?

This isn't about discussing qualified judgements, it's discussing the general impression that you got from a one off meeting of one another's personalities. Something which most people (especially women) openly divulge to their friends anyway when they get home (IE what was he like? was he cute? omg he had the most confrontational demeanour ever! but he was such a gentlemen though.. etc. etc.)

Perhaps you could just like your own posts instead? — John

I do like sniffing my own butt soooo...

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I wouldn't want to see it getting out of hand. — jamalrob

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except a thumbs-up in response to another post — jamalrob

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I personally have no objection — jamalrob

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Oh the irony of animal lovers/leftists. Most vehement advocates of animals "rights", own animals in captivity. — Emptyheady

lol, true but domestication = no suffering because genetic brainwashing forces dogs at least in to enjoying the protection and affection.

If animals do have rights, when can we start locking up animals in prison for killing other animals or making other animals suffer? — Emptyheady

As far as I can tell... rationality = morals. Also there is no objective morality, I guess that is way nature is so fucking ruthless. But if you know better (have rationality and morality) then we chould exclude ourselves from natures evil reign. Two wrongs don't make a right and...

... at the end of all of this, we humans will point to nature with blame and lock it up for all eternity for it's shameful actions of millions of years. >:O

I don't mind analytic philosophy, in fact I study it often. It's just that it has the tendency to create over-specialization and cottage industries: professional philosophers writing for professional philosophers. Nobody else, except the oddball like myself who takes a glance at their work. Analytic philosophy, especially metaphysics and epistemology, is largely irrelevant to other fields and society at large. — darthbarracuda

Can't that be said for all academia though? Usually after you studied you are so specialized that it makes no sense to make it public to people because they don't understand. That is the essence of why we create groups in the first place, to gather with people who know all the relevant information on how to be a klu klux klan etc.

Suppose I tell you my height is 6 ft tall.
How is that fact just an interpretation? — m-theory

Because you have to interpret what 6 foots means, you have to interpret what the visual image of you are.

There is observable phenomena, and the repeatability + logic = it's fact.

Did anyone mention that Decartes used to torture animals because he didn't believe they had "consciousness"?

If you want to say it is wrong to subject other creatures (even of lower intelligence) to imprisonment then you might as well have to disagree with how nature/evolution designed most of it's animals to eat each other. Subjecting creatures to your will which they don't agree with, whether it be imprisonment or murder, is committing the same act of immorality.

Let's face it, this place is horrendously vicious... would you sign up for a game where all animals are just fucking stupid and go around trying to eat each other all day? Fuck That! Fuck Nature! and rationality doesn't always force that viciousness out of the world either, in fact it enhances it sometimes (hitler).

Easy. Animals have no rights and can therefore be used as property/utility by moral agents (i.e. humans). — Emptyheady

What makes us moral agents and them not?
Consiousness?
Rationality? — Ovaloid

What properties do humans have that give them those rights?
Would you be ok with being used as property/utility by beings with more of said properties? — Ovaloid

If a more intelligent/rational being encapsulated me in a zoo, would it be worse than we imprisoning lower creatures you mean? Isn't that what the earth is already? The aliens are watching over as maaaaaan.

Whut? but there was a reply/? Prove to me facts aren't just interpretations.

physical — John

By physical do you think he means external instead? Physical substance isn't really physical afaik and doesn't exist how we think it does, so how could anyone say it has truth if all it is is a misunderstood system in/of existence?

If they added it to the dictionary, it must be regularly in use, no? I thought that was a criterion for the admission of new words. The thing is, though, that I've not really seen anyone using "post-truth." Is there some milieu I don't pay much attention to where it's a popular term? LitCrit papers or something maybe? — Terrapin Station

It's used in politics mainly https://twitter.com/hashtag/posttruth

Objective facts can be changed, and therefore changing them is deciding what the truth is. I see nothing wrong with post-truth, it's merely the logical conclusion of the identity of truth and empirical reality that happened after the advent of post-modernism. Truth no longer corresponds to a metaphysical reality, which no physics could ever change or alter, but to the reality of physics itself — Agustino

Objective facts can't be changed, only the interpretation of them can. At least as far as physicalism is concerned.

It should rather be called anti-truth. Saying post implies there is some kind of time limit to truth, lol.

Philosophy has become the act of taking the simple and making it sound far more complicated than it is. — Jeremiah

You really have a bad habit of saying simple things while thinking that they are easily understood. This is a forum and sentences can have multiple meanings, that is why we go in to detail and flesh out what it is we are trying to say.

When you make broad statements like "Let's get realistic here, the base concept is not that hard to grasp." You have entirely left out what concept however base it is that is not that hard to grasp.

In fact that statement really doesn't say anything about anything apart from "this is easy".

The next statement "Philosophy has become the act of taking the simple and making it sound far more complicated than it is." is a quote i have heard many times and doesn't really contribute anything to what has been said.

If you want to make good conversations then you have to address SPECIFICALLY what someone has said and not just make brief statements that could exist on there own without any context to this thread.

Also this brings up the idea that we do not need to progress humanity. What for? Why are we pumping more units of people out there? So Jeremiah can be on a philosophy forum and comment? So you can really "do" something? Why create the "do something" in the first place? Why do we need to create people so they can do something? So basic, but no one really has a good answer, without sounding like a smug, arrogant prick. — schopenhauer1

Yes, Is everything futile?

I don't like how they use the word truth to define something that is a falsehood, even if there is a "post" before it.

The term Post-Modernism denotes something after Modernism. But truth is an absolute that isn't a period in time and remains unchanged, yet our perception of it changes as it is multitudinally appercepted.

Seems more like a meme-title than a fucking word. Stupid oxford.

From what I can see in western society people HATE philosophy! They only want to talk and "deep and meaningfuls" with the ones they love at very specific times and even then it only breaks the surface of "i wonder if there is anyone else out there".

No sir, they like their iphones and their facebooky feeds about crap nonsense and laughs and thats aboooout it. You get the odd few who actually ENJOYED university and studying something like Law, History etc. but it's dependant on their personality.

With the squareheads, I do as someone else stated here... ask them questions about their believes and them laugh at them and point out how stupid they are whilst lifting my chin, pouting and walking away with grace.

Many heads nodded in agreement and two days later I received an envelope in the mail asking if I wished to be the head lecturer at my university's philosophy department. I declined, of course, because I won't support the nihilistic regime known as contemporary analytic philosophy.

This is 100% true. — darthbarracuda

:D haha! Explain plz why you no like the analytic philosophy?

Futility is a limitation in terms of something else. Fighting a one-man revolution is an exercise in futility, for example. Trying to bring back the dead is futile. Proving God's existence on pure reason alone is an exercise in futility, despite what some super-sophisticated theologians might pretend to know.

Not everything is futile so long as it's described within a context that makes action worthwhile.

But if we're talking about the state of the world, where it's going, where we are going as a species, what we're doing and why we're doing it in the first place, all within a broad, existential cosmic context, then I would say it's pretty obvious that we spend a great deal of effort fighting the unstoppable force of entropy. That surely is futility. — darthbarracuda

I see this trend in many others areas of philosophy. A categorical distinction between words that describe simple, practical, dependant and finite processes (such as Fighting a one-man revolution, Trying to bring back the dead, Proving God's existence on pure reason, which you so elegantly laid out for us) and there is the other class which is defined in terms of absolute, universal, "cosmic".

It seems you can have non-futile actions if a futile universe. What sense does it even make to call a universe futile though? If it has no purpose, then it is futile. I doubt we can find out the answer to that so the best we can do is imagine both states where it is futile and where it isn't and decide what the differences are.

As pointed out a number of times it depends on what you are talking about. — Jeremiah

That is a pretty simple statement, so vague it has many interpretations.

With the unicorn example, what's at issue is whether a particular sort of creature exists, where we're talking about something external to one's mind.

When we're talking about usefulness or value or assessments of whether something smells good or bad, etc., we're talking about something that isn't at all external to one's mind. We're talking about something that solely occurs as an individual's present/conscious mental phenomenon at a particular time. — Terrapin Station

So if there was no mind to think of unicorns, how would they think about them? AFAIK unicorns are imaginary and imagination is a product of the mind. The analogy is no different as it's purpose was to point out the ridiculousness of believable ideas that can be justified by the self alone.

Anyway, you really didn't respond to any of the issues I raised about self-justification and circularity which I was hoping you would.

Screwdrivers make useless teapots.

Until you set out to do something, yes, everything is futile.

But as soon as you decide to do something... — Banno

Cool post. Is not that something that you set out to do ultimately futile though? Seeing as it was futile before as a default state, then you begin your endeavour to obtain a goal within that state of futility.

One possible meaning is 'absurd', in which case the statement is just a less elegant restatement of Camus' famous observation of life's absurdity which, seemingly paradoxically, can be a magnificently life-affirming statement. — andrewk

So I could say back to them "Life is not futile, but it is absurd". Because life is useful to me if I am to enjoy living. Is that circular though?

Another meaning is something like Keynes's observation that 'In the long run we are all dead'. When Keynes says it, he's making an important point about economics, that while we do need to focus on long term as well as short term goals, there is a diminishing utility as that long term gets further away. But some nihilists adopt this to mean that there's no point in doing anything here and now - which begs the question 'what do you mean by no point?'. To me there's plenty of point. If I can create pleasure or remove harm from somebody else or for myself, that is all the point I need. — andrewk

Yes, I have made a thread on this "why do you need to live for ever in order for life to be meaningful". When I hear 'In the long run we are all dead' it sounds so intuitively true that because we die, nothing matters. But then when you ask "why do you need to live for ever in order for life to be meaningful" it suddenly becomes clear how absurd it is to think like that. Nevertheless, I STILL THINK LIKE THAT! lol, I just can't get away from it. Maybe it has something to do with copying the same reasoning of smaller process that occur in shorter periods of time like say a person who is bugging you. You can say to yourself "oh well, they will only be around for a few more minutes, therefore it is not that bad".

Trust me friends, don't knock it until you've tried it!

A like system has fuck all to do with anything philosophy related, however. *shrug* — Heister Eggcart

Yes it does. That is like saying the letter Z doesn't have anything to do with philosophy even though it used to say "zombie".

Likewise, if you have a philosophy forum that has a like option then that is part of a forum dedicated to philosophy and therefor has something TO DO with philosophy. Just like mouths have something to do with philosophy.

If we have to bring back the like system, make it transparent so that only those receiving the likes are notified. Nobody really needs to know how popular an opinion is. — darthbarracuda

It's more of a way to quickly tell someone:

Yes I agree with you

or

That was excellently written

That results in sheer abuse, as it did on the old forum. This better not turn into Reddit, which is an absolute pit. — Thorongil

No I don't think so. People are not that bad come on...

Another function to fuel pseudo philosophers' egos on a philosophy forum, just what we needed. — Heister Eggcart

Naaaaah, as long as you have a downvote option as well. What really fuels ego is people tongue in check response and edgy attitudes that force people into want to "be right". A like option has fuck all to do with that.

I hate "like" buttons. Long live the Grinch.

They are too blunt a facebooky instrument. How about 3 emoji that indicate:

want to vomit
don't give a rat's ass
thrilled to pieces — Bitter Crank

Typical bitter crank, at least it would be better than nothing!

Whaaat? That is such bullshit. They used to have it on The PF before it went buggy. I would like to hear the arguments against it, cant think there would be any!