• Drug Illegalization/Legalization and the Ethical Life
    All fair points. It’s sort of a question of whether the state should involve itself in the moral life of citizens. Lycurgus of ancient Sparta became known for involving the state in ethical life straight out of childhood where citizens would become normalized to having no limits of love, community, and military honour. For instance, the state allowed adultery if the players were in love, and there were requirements for people of different economic classes to dine together and eat the same meals. The Spartans were highly regarded by some for these as philosophical accomplishments and they endured for many generations after Lycurgus’ death.

    That being said, does the state have any duty to guide citizens into a life of satisfaction, fulfilment, and happiness, or should we agree simply to submit that the exceptions are the rule? I mean, how many drug users do you know whom you would call satisfied and fulfilled individuals (… be honest)?
  • Would a purely hedonistic society be a destructive one ?
    I disagree. (I held back a much ruder response. Where the hell do get these simplistic 1/0 ideas?)
    Good... good... feel the hate swell within you. It will bring you great pleasure to strike me down. And all the while you come closer and closer to the dark side. -The Emporer
  • Drug Illegalization/Legalization and the Ethical Life
    What about my other points?
    They may be right, but it's impossible to believe they tell the whole story here. You shared some positive viewpoints on the topic, but they don't tell me much about why it is the case in the real world. It's like saying, 'drugs are illegal because the authorities said so, and they don't know what they're doing.' OK, well the state acts in accordance with it's own agenda. The individual does not dictate that agenda, but that does not necessarily mean it is a separable unconnected body that the individual is supposed to consider as alien and foreign.

    If there is no reason why the content of drugs should be avoided, why spend all the effort brainwashing children and teenagers to avoid them? It really doesn't sound like a big deal to anyone so long as they don't spread addiction. I'd like to ask you what you think causes the ethical problem for these so-called 'uptight conservatives.'
  • Drug Illegalization/Legalization and the Ethical Life
    There is no "we" or "global society". There are separate, quite different societies with rules based on very different belief-systems and moral principles.

    It doesn't seem that complex. A certain drug has neurological effects that span gender, race, and personality. For one, they instill a sense of the transcendence of self between conscious states. I can choose a state and yet still remain myself, representing the idea of a permanent and absolute self. Outward-facing exposed libidinal activity overtakes a restrained self-obscured type.

    Another, would be that the brain has parts that interact in complex ways and sometimes makes use of the same parts for different things. For example, a part used in aggression may also interact in sexuality, and this complex shared framework may change with drug use. It then becomes difficult for my libidinal representations to be understood by others. Activities like going to bars, enjoying certain types of stories or products in society are no longer communicable and ritual experiences.

    But if these are also the effects of globalization. Drug use seems more or less small fry by comparison when this is sort of considered normal life now.
  • Drug Illegalization/Legalization and the Ethical Life
    But in the usual sense of most religious believers it's because of a religious impulse: it's just bad, and that's that.

    But that's what I'm most interested in. The 'that's that.' When something reaches pure independence, it is where the reasons are the most strong and solidified. So there is strong ideological difference between the two, which is defined to be something undefined and obscure. But it seems we always just leave it there and go no farther.
  • Would a purely hedonistic society be a destructive one ?
    Why? I've been involved in a number of encounters wherein pleasure was mutual, shared and reciprocal.

    I mean to say that pleasure always has both moments, the negative and positive. For instance, how often to you feel pleased at taking a shower, or having mashed potatoes? Five hundred years ago, half of the world would consider that a great pleasure. We see it in the pain of another who feels their lack in our place. Pleasure is a psycho-active identification of pain in another. It has a positive aspect too, but this negative side is always there alongside it.
  • Drug Illegalization/Legalization and the Ethical Life
    And a 10-minute performance for the camera, however surprised the audience may be, doesn't prevent the performer going to their job, feeding their kids, crossing on green lights or paying their taxes.

    OK, it sounds like what you're saying is that drug use should not be illegal, but drug addiction should be. So anyone should be free to do drugs so long as it does not spread addiction. It is then a moral rule, configured by judgement and subjective viewpoint. We, as a global society, have no problem with the sorts of ideas that drug use perpetuates, such as the idea of excess, lust, gluttony, self-indulgence, hedonism, etc. ?
  • Drug Illegalization/Legalization and the Ethical Life
    There is a fear of neuro-atypicals, especially among conservatives, who demand and take comfort in conformity. Drugs mechanically induce atypical thoughts and behavior, which must seem fearful to the conservative mindset.

    True, but this is only half of the story. There are some who take comfort in normal behaviour, but honestly isn't this point a little old fashioned now? You can do pretty much anything nowadays and get away with it more or less. If atypical behaviour were unacceptable to this group, people would be arrested for perversion, indecency, or funny dress. There would have to be an overwhelming majority of individuals who think this way to keep drugs illegal, so there must be some sort of real harm done or else they wouldn't care.

    What you seem to be saying is that drugs are made illegal because they make people act strange, but honestly isn't that sort of normal now without drugs?
  • Drug Illegalization/Legalization and the Ethical Life
    People taking drugs are unpredictable. A society of unpredictable people becomes difficult to control, to police, to hold to a production or payment schedule, to recruit for national service and international conflict, to maintain communication with, to collect taxes from, to enforce any kind of law over.

    As you make it sound as if this concern is almost totally obsolete and void. After all, in the future society - even current society - being unpredictable, rebellious, and individualistic will be a pro and not a con. The techno-individual expresses masculinity as a type of consumed power of physical and mental ability; individualist and anti-objective. In a war-less and class-less society, individual feats of preparedness are the value structure of belonging. How else can strong and weak be discerned?

    If so, why is unpredictability still to be avoided? We presently give money to YouTube entertainers for their unpredictability.
  • Would a purely hedonistic society be a destructive one ?
    Energy is neither created nor destroyed. If one feels pleasure, another must feel pain. What the real question is, is 'Would a world based on competition for sensually pleasurable things (I guess you could substitute the word 'resources to power') be a good one?

    It sounds like the already existing natural world. The whole foundation of civilization is built upon collective strength and thus individual weakness.
  • Drug Illegalization/Legalization and the Ethical Life
    The widespread effects would be catastrophic imo yet at the same time they also conflict with individual freedom as to how one should live their life.

    How so? I observe the point that governments don't want individuals addicted, but there must be more to it than that. After all, the decisions in government give and take from the collective will or collective unconscious. If that were the only case, why deal out punishment that is so harsh compared to the severity of the crime? After all, there isn't much wrong with being addicted to something if that something is socially acceptable. We not only deter drug use, but we systematically brainwash youth to avoid it. That is pretty severe for 'I don't want people to enjoy it too much.'
  • Sartre's Interpretation of the Cartesian Cogito
    One might think by consciousness we are talking about all that proceeds from human existence and perception. Whether that be conditioned by existence, passed through it, or otherwise. To me, starting upon consciousness in this manner bears more of a resemblance to the cogito than a difference, because it seems to take as given the scientific understanding of humanity, which is itself a kind of subjective point of view.
  • Sartre's Interpretation of the Cartesian Cogito
    This presupposes a subject-object dichotomy, since we have already classed the positional subject as ‘not object.’
  • Sartre's Interpretation of the Cartesian Cogito
    The reflected consciousness, or consciousness in the second degree, (Descartes' Cogito) claims to be a positional consciousness of the self, when, in fact, it is a consciousness which falsely posits and misrepresents the subject, which is an absolute inwardness, as if it were an intended transcendent object (the "I" of psychology).

    How is it that an absolute inwardness is not positional ? Does an inwardness not presuppose a content or a negation thereof for it to be directed to?
  • "Beware of unearned wisdom."
    One of the recent philosophical trends that I've noticed welling-up across the Internet is the perspective that if one doesn't work hard, suffer and overcome ignorance through labor, that the begotten wisdom is dangerous to the individual.

    Does it make someone smart just because they can learn easily? Someone who can learn to advantage themselves is considered intelligent, but if they really are intelligent they are just learning easily. Maybe pain and strife make them more worthy of praise as intelligent, or maybe it is more a question of a will to power. If the smart one is the person who has and the dumb who has not, the measure of intellect may take place mostly in deception and betrayal.

    I find that whole wisdom of antiquity refreshing. There's so much we can pick up on the way to knowledge and understanding. Like Blaise Pascal and his triangles, Euclid with his geometry, and Descartes coordinate system, patience and contemplation is enough to arrive at something all the books (or websites) in the world can't teach you. It's one thing to hold knowledge in brain cells, and a whole other game to contribute and build upon it.
  • AI and subjectivity?
    Exactly… this whole thing is about violence and libido. It has nothing to do with the inward subjectivity other than in the form of a featureless surface.
  • AI and subjectivity?
    What we take today as an algorithm in programming will one day be a synthetic egoic witness to and in a problem solving matrix.

    If so, it will be nothing more than a reflection of its human creator, subject to the same limitations that we willfully accept in an unthinking manner. It will be more or less human pride made tangible. Future aliens will laugh at our naïveté.
  • AI and subjectivity?
    This ambition to make a machine with subjective thoughts suffers from the fatal flaw that it assumes that its creator has an unmediated idea of subjective thought. It all seems to boil down to the need to reproduce something exactly like onesself: it is sexual, but also the need to produce something that will destroy: be violent. If you really want to make them like us, just have them screw and kill each other.
  • G.W.F. Hegel
    OK, but what is need for the term 'universe'?
  • G.W.F. Hegel
    So my question on this thread is how we can know whether we are finite or infinite and what this means. Hegel seems to develop an argument about the infinity of the mind from the simple fact that we can think of infinity itself as an object of the mind....
    ...So maybe the question is, if there is and can be something infinite, what would that be?

    Are you looking for an infinite thing, or something determined to be infinite? It sounds like you are trying to classify the infinite using what Hegel calls the 'understanding,' which would be a type of bad-infinity. Bad infinity being the infinity of earlier philosophers such as Locke and Leibniz who would derived infinity from traditional metaphysics as a iterative process.
  • The (possible) Dangers of of AI Technology
    I'm wondering if anyone on this site can maybe enlighten me more about this subject and explain what they know and/or personal opinions about it, so I can understand better whether there really is a potential threat or if it doesn't really exist with what is currently possible with available AI.

    The 'I' in AI, as others in this thread have noted, is disputable. What is this quality we are calling 'intelligence' ? After all, each time we say it, don't we associate more and more the idea with a certain form? As in Francis Bacon's work on learning, human knowledge is more than the sum of mere computations. We have to ask ourselves, what it is really contributing to knowledge and intelligence to develop an idea that computation based on past forms is the sum of intelligence itself?
  • Born with no identity. Nameless "being".
    What I find interesting is the transition from non-being to being. My earliest memories constitute my awareness of being/becoming but seems completely arbitrary being arbitrarily bought into existence in a particular body on a particular planet.

    What is it about space and time that makes them inherently 'for themselves?' It seems necessary to think of living one's life as simple passing through time and space, and that the idea of living an individual life has to include this notion. However, everything we are seems to convey a single coordinate or 'asymptote,' and that identity feels inescapable in our conscious life, to be a 'placing' of this identity against existence that is increasingly remote or arbitrary. I suspect the idea of simultaneous convergence and divergence to be integral to this relationship.
  • Addiction & Consumer Choice under Neoliberalism
    Isn't the underlying argument not societal but individual, that really pain and conflict are prerequisites to our taking life seriously? Labels like 'neo-liberal,' 'consumerist,' etc. are just used as stand-ins meaning effectively, 'existentially docile.' One has only the illusory choice whether or not to see the pain and suffering of the world, but in pain and death the re-framing of the opposition is presented immediately.
  • "Beauty noise" , when art is too worked on
    ...A sign you have been on the forums long enough.
  • "Beauty noise" , when art is too worked on
    Many are asking 'What is this Kool-Aid?' right now. For those wondering: Kool Aid is a powder based fruit drink occasionally used for homicidal purposes.
  • "Beauty noise" , when art is too worked on
    Beauty is normally divided between something produced versus something appreciated. One can enact beauty and feel no pleasure but the pleasure of another. That this can become a role, as something possible and really institutionalized or custom-ized, underlies the pure exchange. There really isn't anything of this super-structure in mechanical reproduction, the lack of anything besides what is produced and what is consumed is the ideology and serves the ends of modern art: exchange, identity, pleasure, voyeurism. These products will produce the dopamine effect in the viewer and are part of the overall tactility-orientation of the Internet art medium. It is like a new set of genitals that we explore in a constant state of puberty.
  • About Human Morality
    Do you really want that ? A world that abhors pain. The lamb hates the eagle that hunts it, but at the same time loves it, because it is through the Eagle that it appropriates itself. Isn’t moral life sort of a similar? Do you truly hate your villains or envy them?
  • About Human Morality
    Morality is good at defining good and evil, i. e. what we would like others (and ourselves) to do. But it is bad at making people do good and avoid evil. (I am talking about adults.)

    Well said.

    It is true, it does no harm to say "Be good!" but it is also useless, at least in my opinion. People always do what is in accordance with their nature.

    If it is in our nature to do bad, how can it at the same time not be in our nature to do good? What you say is that we should expect moral law, custom, and rule to be transgressed. Doesn’t this seem ridiculous to you? I guess that’s why people who really believe in this seem sad to me. This makes them look ridiculous.
  • About Human Morality
    I also disagree that it disables the main thesis. It didn’t strike me as an attempt to position morality in something inhuman, external, and certainly not something distant. Human interest is distant, since we only really deal with it in inferences and probabilities and not the real thing; after all, how can a computer program know how it has failed? Kant’s work was attempting to get acquainted with this in his moral philosophy.
  • About Human Morality
    Moral life is itself a problem even for itself. Which is ironic, but also kind of sad…
  • About Human Morality

    I really like this aphorism. I feel like moral life is a difficult beast. It entangles us in words, representations, and ideas. But none of it makes sense unless one chooses to be moral. This is why most famed philosophers utterly fail to write coherently about it. These majors all have skeletons in their own closets that drive their excellence, but to know morality you need to ask the ones who didn’t get their badge of honour. Kant is still top of my list in this domain, nobody else I’ve encountered has dug deeper yet.
  • Christians Should Question their Beliefs
    Plus, isn’t it better to believe in something you understand rather than just blindly believing what you’re told? As a kid, I blindly believed, and I thought it was wrong to question, but questioning only leads to more understanding, and that can’t be wrong.

    I consider the belief to be in a strange kind of way the activity of faith. Belief – even blind belief – can assert a greater religious freedom in some sense, since it disseminates the idea of freedom of the religious doctrine. However, one who believes blindly also trusts in their society, their family, and friends to direct them towards their best interests. In this I see it as a symbol of religion, and something that sets it apart from plain ideology since it is self-reflexive; it is the activity of faith that defines it. I agree that only through self-reflection, philosophizing, and dialectic questioning is it really fully free.
  • Corporeality and Interpersonal Being
    One has to understand oneself and reality in a way that is unique to onself. We're all wearing, how should I say this?, a pair of unique-to-us tinted glasses. The hue of the universe is determined by those glasses and when we self-reflect, as by looking in a mirror, the effect of the glasses is still there.

    I know you are going to find my response to this mundane, predictable, and eighteenth century, but I’m going to try to put it in a way that is as little Hegel as possible to avoid us having to unpack that whole logic; but I indeed took the Science of Logic seriously. Do we see mediated Being through the glasses or is that already crossing the ‘objectifying Being’ no-fly zone? In the finite subjectivity view we have dialectically ‘othered’ Being into an objectivity that is a similitude with the idea of persona. That’s all well and good, but to call it an impasse that prevents knowing the outer world inclusive of our inner Being would be tragic.
  • Corporeality and Interpersonal Being
    I think this sort of self is a superstructure, a persona, to go back to Freud. I can lose my persona and yet still experience that loss; so it can’t be an essentially ‘complete’ determination. ‘Ego’ is more appropriate, something that can modularly reference unconscious, subconscious, and conscious drives at appropriate times within a characteristic personality so as to organize them to appear to fulfill drives with apparent fluidity.

    It should be a system that fits gracefully in with itself with as little effort as possible. Unconscious motives must remain not worth knowing to itself, so it can rest comfortably inside it’s shell.
  • Corporeality and Interpersonal Being
    It must be discussed. Your post uses Being to describe this universe, so Being is already there acting as it would anywhere else.
  • Corporeality and Interpersonal Being
    I don’t fully agree that the self is an illusion. It’s practically the most authentic thing there is. That is to say, not that it is more authentic, but everything else seems less so.
  • Corporeality and Interpersonal Being
    But so do you. Everything about you devolves into linguistics, including your innermost thoughts and ideology. That’s exactly what makes it possible to speak about you; and what makes that worth doing.
  • Corporeality and Interpersonal Being
    No analysis required. Self and being are objective insofar as the self calls the death instinct characteristic. Is your point that Being is unspeakable as an object? I would both agree and disagree. Unfortunately, it’s not optional, but self-mediating; it’d be way simpler if it weren’t, but that’s the main premise. Using language to discuss it, my sole intention was to bring it into a deeper subjectivity.
  • Corporeality and Interpersonal Being
    OK cutting corners usually doesn't pay. However. it is sort of ambitious to suggest that one has shed oneself completely of the mediated categorization of Being. Much of the category of being takes form before the observer has developed a coherent idea of self. That its substance is neither discretely particular or universal is its more advanced development, but it is prone to organize itself according to a Natural teleology, because it is its characteristic idea. But it's whole universe seems to be consumed into that characteristic idea, like an equation plotted on a graph that is bounded to infinity comprises contiguous points, but a hyperbolic function can have two such possibilities. Being only seems to be comprehensible as a contiguity.