Could you spell out how you think such a concern would be relevant? Trying to see where your question is coming from.

Why should I? And who are you quoting? Just a bit earlier you were telling us how all Platonists, even modern Platonists-about-this-or-that, were all thoroughly compromised at their metaphysical foundation by Plato's "shitstain" — SophistiCat

As was pointed out I was quoting none other than you, and, if whatever Platonism you have in mind shares with Plato his mimetic or participatory understanding of the Ideas, then they necessarily carry into them the moral valences in which those things that best resemble or more properly participate in the Idea are judged to be, in whatever way appropriate to their context, better or more virtuous. This being a basic structural property of Platonism. And a shitty one at that.

The one thing I'd add to my earlier comments to make the stakes a little clearer is that questions of sufficiency are, at base, questions of modality - that is, of necessity and contingency. If you're asking 'why this rather than that (or literally anything else), you're asking what force of necessity was in play to bring about the thing in question. If, one imagines, there might be many reasons why something is as it is, the criterion of sufficiency asks after the necessity that things played out exactly as they did, and not otherwise (again, the importance of the 'and not otherwise' cannot be understated).

How are the Schopenhauerean conclusions overwrought though? — schopenhauer1

I was not discussing Schopenhauer.

We are bound by the conditions of our physical existence. — schopenhauer1

But this is simply an analytic statement - which is to say, a tautology: "bachelors are bound by the condition of being unmarried". Well no shit. But from this triviality you want to draw some kind of overwrought profundity by playing on the laden poetics of 'boundedness'. "Woe is the bachelor!". But this is wordplay, nothing more.

"We are conditioned by the conditions of our condition". Please.

Well gee you could have just said that instead of asking how one might go about 'proving a value' as though that made any sense at all.

And yet no mention...

And no mention of this curious idea of 'proving values'.

You think axiology largely deals with proving values?

If perchance you could lay out their 'Platonic take on humanity', perhaps we might go from there.

what counts to you as a "legitimate" (streetlightx approved) way to prove a value? — schopenhauer1

I'm not sure what it means to 'prove a value'. This strikes me as bad grammar.

You said entropy is 'applied to' negentropy. That's what I said makes no grammatical sense. As for this:

"Sure it does. Negentropy is a temporary state of order (like life), where organization is increasing, but these clumps of orderliness are following principles of entropy and eventually contribute to universal disorder. And we are living out the principles of this temporary state of orderliness and thermodynamics. All the principles from biochemical/cellular development, evolution, to the complex minds of animals, are working on this general principle. But, as a thinking, feeling, self-aware human, it is seen in our experiences of life, and specifically in the WORK we do in survival/maintenance/entertainment- what one might call the phenomenological aspect of being a normally enculturated human being."

This seems fine to me, given that's it's more or less a mere description of things, although the significance you seem to want to impute to this 'it is seen in' and 'work' is lost on me.

Edit: Ah right, there it is, the balderdash about suffering.

I don’t think entropy too general a principle when applied specifically to its more complex version of negentropy. — schopenhauer1

This is not a sentence that makes sense in English, and is not what I said.

Again, these are value judgements imposed from without, and which also, I might add, do not respect the level of generality at which entropy operates. In any case, pessimism is not philosophy, just a quirk of psychology mistaken for it. As Agamben once said: "Pessimism and optimism are two psychological categories that have nothing to do with philosophical thought. Let them be left to fools."

The striving of the human animal, as seen in our goals mitigated through language/enculturation is a manifestation of this proscription... — schopenhauer1

....Among other things, sure. It still seems like you're trying to read much too much into it.

Sure I do, but is this 'striving' my 'root' or 'essence'? Does this question even make sense? What would even motivate this line of questioning? Surely nothing about the cold and mundane fact of entropy. No, the motivation comes from elsewhere, and there is no reason to take it seriously.

Root? Again, from what POV? And why afford it any significance? These are value judgements, imposed from without, unmotivated but for a taste for shitty ancient metaphysical claptrap.

The point is that BEING localized negentropy, we can be characterized, at essence, — schopenhauer1

Can be, yes, but I see no reason to. Nor even adopt or rather import and impose the langauge of 'essence' on the discussion, which is just alien vocabulary.

The stresses of life, the stresses of society, the stresses of psychology, the stresses of circumstances of the animal vs. the environment, this is all just localized negentropy — schopenhauer1

I take issue with this 'just' here. Surely, all the things you mention are indeed cases of localized negentropy, but they are quite plainly not only cases of localized negentropy. They are, well, anything they can possibly be from points of view other than that of entropy. The privilege afforded to the entropic POV seems unmotivated and at the very least unjustified so far.

Or rather, I know exactly what your motivations are and I think you're leaveraging those motivations to draw conclusions from entropy that are not warranted by it.

To the degree that entropy is a principle it is a peculiar one insofar as it doesn't actually prescribe anything in particular (it might be better to say it proscribes things in general): from the point of view of existing things, its structure is closer to that of a double-negative*: you can't not put in work in order to sustain a particular organization of matter. Framing it this way makes it kind of like a meta-rule for organized structures: whatever structures there are (planets, plants, or pond ecosystems), they can't not be kept fed with energy if they are to persist. I'm fudging the language a bit (our linguistic resources are poor when it comes to this sort of thing), but the point is that entropy says nothing, strictly speaking, about how that imperative or constraint is to be satisfied - it is 'multiply reliazable', and further, it is utterly silent about how or what those realizations will be or arise. Meaning simply that entropy leaves alot of room for a great deal of stuff, without saying much about the details of that stuff, which are goverened by other, finer-grained parameters.

In any case, the langauge of 'purpose', as ordinarily understood ('that for the sake of which', roughly), does seem a poor fit to speak about it.

*Perhaps this framing as a double-negative also does some justice to @Bannos intuition that entropy is in some sense derivative?

Both, but especially practice. Not for this thread tho.

Oh, man, don't get me started on liberalism ("Liberalism, the most dogged enemy of freedom" - Domenico Losurdo) :vomit:

I have little regard for such speculative sociopsychology. — SophistiCat

The recognition that a philosophy is of its time is hardly 'speculative sociopsychology'; it's an effort to stave off the supreme naivety of thinking that philosophical systems spring forth from the good graces of capital-R Reason (or atomized and inscrutable individual desires for that matter) as if the weight of history and context of society were merely an inconvenience or hobbyist's curiosity. That others have unthinkingly inherited - despite every reason not to - the terms in which Plato defines his inquiries - stopping only to squabble over things like which essence is the right one, as opposed to rejecting as maleficent the entire idea of essences (understood Platonically) - makes them more and not less complicit in the ethical failures of Platonism.

I don't really believe that these ideas are separable from 'Plato's views' (on women, on slaves, on foreigners), as though an amendment or rider tacked-on at the end. Credit given where credit's due, Platonic metaphysics is so enduring precisely on account of its rigorous internal consistency in which the entire metaphysical edifice is built in order to affect such exclusions and subordinations so as to justify them. The invocation of Newtonian mechanics is simply disanalogous here - the mechanics does not 'build-in' chauvinism from the get-go, whereas Plato's entire system, right down to it's very poetics and use of imagery, is orientated and premised on the naturalization of ancient Greek prejudices arrogated to the status of metaphysical grandeur (Page Dubois* and Adriana Cavarero are among the best documenters of this that I know).

And while I understand that one speaks nowadays of Platoism-about-this-or-that, in ways different from Plato himself, these Ideas are compromised right at the level of their form, and not merely their content. They were built, from the bottom-up, to stigmatize and dominate, regardless of the many attempts - over millennia - to simply rejig and redesignate the objects of such stipulated inferiority. The model is broken, not merely the parameters.

*PD: "The social conflicts of the fourth century, the greater dependence on slavery, after a decline at the end of the Peloponnesian War, made [Plato's] attempt to justify and rationalize the social relationships of the polis comprehensible. Difference had invaded and disrupted the city, and was acknowledged and almost despaired of by Euripides. Plato's response to the presence of difference was to look even more deeply inward and to justify the differences within the city in terms of an attribute of the citizen, logos. The Greek male human being thus reconstructed his notion of the world; the dominance of the citizen, the philosopher, was justified not in terms of autarkeia, but rather in terms of inevitable and natural superiority. The contradictory position of women, in which they were both objects of exchange necessary for the reproduction of the city, and outsiders, bestial and irrational, was also rationalized in a new way. Women were associated with the body, which was inferior to the mind; thus they, like the body, served the soul, the head, the philosopher, the male".

I not sure about all the internet stuff though... — Posty McPostface

It's not entirely unmotivated. I've been reading Aden Even's book on the digital, and although he doesn't mention Leibniz at all, I'm almost entirely certain he's drawing on him when he speaks of the subjectivity involved in surfing the web, constituted wholly by the click of the mouse:

"The diminutive single click... sustains the user as a (unique) subject and so also the web as a medium. A minimal resistance, the quantum unit (one bit) of information, the single click (or rather, the option to withhold that click) holds at bay the entirety of the World Wide Web, placing just this page before the user and not the others. Absent the click ... the user would no longer be separate from the data and would drown in those data, user and data dissolving into the formless digital that makes no distinction without a subject. Choosing not to click, or choosing to click here and not there, the user defines her unique perspective on the WWW, establishes her own experience as limited and tied to a place and time. Choosing not to click, the subject staves off the collapse of the Web into itself and the collapse of the subject into the Web.

The single click, therefore, defines the subject as a subject; it represents her sole power not only to choose which pages appears before her, but also to separate herself from the mass of data that is the Web. Maintaining her subjectivity [via the option of the click], the single click renders the Web a medium, for only as what stands between the subject and the data is the Web medial... As the clickable passage from page to page, the hyperlink represents the immediate proximity of every linked page, the tie that binds. ... But inasmuch as each page contains only certain links and not others, the reality of the hyperlink (as opposed to its fantasy) is to render only a tiny subset of the Web immediately available. the logical space of the WWW consists of numerous organizations or perspectives, wherein each page brings near some part of the web and places more distant the rest.

Just as the resistance of the single click makes the user a subject and the Web a medium, so each page constitutes a unique perspective on the Web, an organizational overview of the information space (literally) underlining some pages and leaving most of the space of the web to hover implicitly in the background" (Evens, The Logic of the Digital). This analysis struck me as Leibnizian through and through.

So, you take one paragraph from a philosopher who wrote volumes, and refer to this to judge him as a shitstain of a philosopher. — Metaphysician Undercover

Not at all. I quoted a representative study of Plato's thought. And yes, Plato's philosophy is full of just those kinds of retrospectively ratiocinated origin myths, which he variously pulls out of his arse to justify and pseudo-rationalize his usually awful opinions on just about everything.

some individuals are closer to the human ideal — SophistiCat

Yes, those individuals being Greek, male, and - serendipitous delight! - philosophers. Animals, females, slaves, labourers, and foreigners all being unsurprisingly not all that close to the 'human ideal': "The philosopher maintains his closeness to the divine, moving upward in the scale of beings, while men who fail in the effort of philosophy are punished by becoming women in their second lives. No woman can be a philosopher; she must wait until after death, when her soul might be reincarnated in the body of a man. In a descending ladder of creation, Plato lays out the structure of the kosmos. Just as in the myth of the metals, difference is defined in terms of relative value, and of progressive estrangement from the good. The Greek male citizen is no longer at the center surrounded by "others;" as the philosopher, he stands at the top of the chain of being, closest to the divine and to immortality. As the man of gold, the best, the aristos, he rules over all who live in the republic.

...The male sex is assimilated to the divine part of the soul; men, like that divine soul, must be protected from the miasma, the pollution represented by women. That worse part of the soul, likened to women, is superior to the worse of the body, which is like an animal .... Anger and appetite, bestiality and women, are metaphorically associated here.... Women, like slaves, like animals, are by their nature inferior; each is in varying degrees deprived of proximity to the divine. The fantastic creation myth of the Timaeus, which establishes the creation of various creatures in order, according to the behavior of the soul in its first incarnation, justifies the hierarchization of kinds in the present. Within the state, as within the body, appetite, anger, female, slave, animal, must be restrained and excluded from the places where decisions are made" (Dubois, Centaurs and Amazons).

2000 years later and we still treat this shitstain of a philosopher as authoritative.

https://www.amazon.com/Surfing-Uncertainty-Prediction-Action-Embodied/dp/0190217014/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1532235990&sr=8-1&keywords=Surfing+Uncertainty

Positing a Platonic idea or exemplar implies, for example, that some individuals are more human (better reflect the exemplar) than others. This can only foster prejudice and injustice. — Dfpolis

:up: Yep. Platonism is philosophy for fascists and slave-owners.

"In a midrash that bears the title “Massekhta Satan” (“Treatise on Satan”), God has Satan appear before him on the last day to judge him. The accusation that he directs at him is accusation itself: Satan is accused of having constantly accused humanity and, in this way, the works of creation. He accused Adam and Eve, so that God had to drive them out of Paradise; he accused the people of the generation of the flood, and to punish them God produced the catastrophe of the universal Deluge; he accused the people of the Tower of Babel, and for this reason God had to divide them and confound their tongues; he accused the Israelites at the time of the first and second destruction of the Temple, and God twice destroyed the sanctuary and scattered his people in exile among the nations.

For this reason God condemns the accuser to vanish from the world, which must be renewed in a new creation. Satan does not accept the sentence and objects to his judge: “You say to me: Vanish from the world! Yet I resemble you because I am associated with you: you created the heavens and the earth, and I created hell”. Up to the last moment, when God expels him eternally into the depths of darkness, he continues to level his objection against God: “Lord of the world, all the power you have demonstrated by descending into the flames to condemn me really does not belong to you: above you, there is another Power.”

From Giorgio Agamben, Karman.

Giorgio Agamben - The Adventure
Giorgio Agamben - The Fire and the Tale

It's not a bad idea in principle - and yeah, ideas like it have been raised before - but 1) the forum mainpage software wouldn't distinguish between L-plate posts and proper ones, meaning the clutter of bad posts will still be there, and 2) we (mods) are primarily here to keep good discussion in place, not - as charitible as it would be - to pull up the socks of bad discussions. We're users before we are mods, here to participate in discussion like everyone else, and spending time and effort to correct subpar posts by usually subpar posters (the bar is not high, and to fall below it usually takes a special kind of bad post/er) is simply not something anyone - mod or not - wants to do.

And yeah, Posty had his 'draft' thread which fall away pretty quickly, because its clear no one is here to play janitor.

I had to study the American penal situation once. It was horrific, and remains so. It makes me sad when I say that although I haven't heard of that particular case, I'm also not surprised by it.

I think there are few ideas more pernicious and ignorant than that which says that being educated about the reality of racial politics and racial history is itself a contributor to racism. Not only does it obscure the quite basic point that racism is perpetuated primarily by racists, who, regardless of what you think will treat you like shit anyway, but it also then aims to turn the problem around and pin the responsibility for racism upon those who would try and articulate the experience of race by drawing upon the powerful and indispensable resources of history and sociology (to mention the two disciplines invoked in the OP). It is a silencing manoeuvre that effectively deprives one of the language of history and the language of society as means to address and make sense of what happens to those subjected to racism.

Only someone who doesn't have to deal with the reality of racism can be so oblivious as to say that, if only we just pretended it didn't exist, it would just go away. Most of the racially vilified simply don't have that luxury, reserved only for those who are imbecilic enough to intellectualize racism as a matter of thought. Racism is being denied a job and being spat on because of the colour of your skin; it sure as hell isn't being educated about racial history, and the latter sure as hell isn't a cause of the former.

The opposite Tiff. That's what the thread said. I closed it. My point is that it's silly to say I acted out of some 'lefty' bias - the thread's premise was critical of your President.

Hey now, the thread spoke of Trump's 'intellectual primitivism' and his 'truths' as being 'held by the herd'. This of course is fake news and any self-respecting non-lefty would agree with shutting that down!

Your ostensible point for moving the thread (effectively deleting it) was that it pertains to Donald Trump — Marcus de Brun

No, my 'ostensible point' for moving the thread was that it was a rubbish thread. While it's cute that you arrogate yourself so that any action upon it is some kind of attack on thought or philosophy itself, consider that, no, it was just a badly composed thread.

For the record, I merged your 'Naked Truth' thread into the Trump thread as an alternative to straight up deleting it, which is, as a thread, what it deserved.

:rofl:

Its hilarious that for someone whose writing was so overwrought and affected, the best he could do was a simple and vulgar 'fuck you'.