Slavery and servitude were part of life for thousands of years, since the dawn of civilization, and dying to escape it was certainly unappealing to most people. Spartacus marched those men as if they were pigs to a slaughter, which is drastically different from simply being given a choice between slavery and freedom. Also, not all slaves would have been as fit to fight or as courageous or suicidal, and many would have been content, or at least complacent as you mentioned. In the end, it was free men who died by the hundreds of thousands to end slavery.

We aren't free in many ways, but I think much of history has demonstrated that a willingness toward servitude is where most people feel safe. An exercise of willingness under social pressure is mistaken for freedom. Freedom is also an illusion of equality of opportunity, which is relatively fair.

I don't think freedom is possible, but if it was, I don't think anyone would want to see how it compares to willing servitude in hindsight.

You don't need to read Plato to learn about philosophy, or to be a veteran, whatever is meant by that. And no, there's no deeper meaning, these ancient men had as their primary objective to dominate the masses by forcing ignorance on them. They engineered super men from among the elite to oppress the ignorant masses, and they called it "education".

They were primitive, insatiable and sociopathic and held back human progress for centuries. As far as I'm concerned, every time someone mentions them it's an echo of the massive stumbling block they dropped in the path of our species.

Sometimes things are excluded as a matter of efficiency. How much would science have failed humanity if it had spent its entire history chasing unicorns? It would just be another religion, and maybe for some it is. But it isn't conceptually a failure, it's rather a good idea. Either way, I don't rely indiscriminately on science. And I use the term "objective" very loosely.

It isn't that way by design, it's that way by ignorance of its design. When conducted properly, it should be objective, or as close to objectivity as possible with the information available. The problem isn't science, it's people. I don't accept the views of every celebrity scientist who takes to a stage, neither should many of them stand up to public scrutiny.

There's no confirmation bias where there's nothing to confirm or deny and no reason to attempt to confirm or deny it.

To isolate Nietzsche's work to a few aphorisms is impatient and short sighted. If only reading was so easy as finishing one sentence before throwing the book into a bonfire with all the others.

He doesn't attack without quarter though, he continually points to redeeming qualities in traditional values amid his seething rants but then proposes such qualities can later be found in the absence of tradition. He admits that abandonment of traditional valuation is foreboding beyond comprehension and condemns the nihilist for doing what it is bound to do.

He also holds to objective (subjective) truths even while contesting them.

The nihilist cherry-picks phrases and takes passages out of context in an attempt to fill its emptiness with the words of its enemy, to fill its mind with the ambitions and intentions of its alleged oppressor, which is ironically how people often treat heroes.

The association between the "post-modernist" title and its recipients makes no sense to me, and it's impossible to evaluate the corresponding "humanities" rhetoric because it's such senseless drivel that it brings on a headache. Gender studies is inventing conflict to gratify an addiction and promoting victimhood for the sake of political leverage--it's not destroying tradition, it's validating it, placing it on a pedestal. Meanwhile, it despises the very people it pats itself on the back for defending. It's a snake so busy eating its own tail that it can't reach all the other tails it's trying to eat.

In response to the title of the thread, I haven't bothered much with some of the other names you've listed as "post-modernist" thinkers, but with Nietzsche in particular, there is a mirror being held to the face of philosophy, and it is urged to examine its own ugliness.

He was also a language and literature specialist and has had some of his works, chiefly those written prior to his mental breakdown, deemed some of the most eloquently written words in the German language. I don't intend to imply agreement or disagreement with this claim. I don't read German. What I'm saying is that his work might be given credit more for its style and effect than for any philosophical interpretation of its contents.

I would be flabbergasted if I ever witnessed someone demonstrating even a rudimentary understanding of Nietzsche. I've actually seen many people attempt to discuss him for maybe ten minutes before admitting that they haven't read more than a few of his sentences.

I continually see his name in reference to "post-modernist thinking", yet throughout the course of his own written words he continually chastises both those who argue against him and those who emulate him as having misinterpreted his position.

That anyone would find inspiration in his words toward nihilism or social revolution or any of what I've come to recognize as "post-modernism" is the epitome of irony.

I think it should be obvious that his work openly mocks the very people who pay it homage and opposes the very people who believe they've found value in its contents. How can someone lack awareness to such an extent that they take his criticism, sarcasm and cynicism literally and out of context in order to generate their own positions from it that so deeply contradict his overall tone and message?

I guess you've never done acid.

I already posited a model with no first cause, but all you heard was the inside of your own head. The question can't presently be answered. You haven't given a shred of evidence.



Also, the models you presented don't demonstrate cause.

There are no valid arguments or counter arguments concerning something that is presently impossible to determine. There is evidence, or there is a lack thereof. You talk about proof as if stringing words together is incontrovertible by default. If this is the case then you are both correct and incorrect at all times and so is everyone else.

There is no evidence of what you call first cause. There is certainly no proof of it. There is presently no way to determine it. There will probably never be a way to determine it.

There are numerous extensive and intensive methods of observing reality and describing its contents and its laws, yet no god or grand cause has ever been demonstrated. There has never been a motive apart from such conditions as overactive imagination, desperation for meaning, lack of awareness or assertion of dominance to proselytize this ideology you deem as proof.

There is no scenario in which attempted logic will ever succeed after beginning with a blind assumption.

To search for something for which there's no reason to search and through means that are incapable of discovering it is unconditionally unproductive and no string of words can demonstrate otherwise. To attempt to dissuade others from such a search is potentially productive.

I intentionally left an inconclusive ending to my comment to illustrate the going-around-in-circles of the god argument.

Every "Proof" someone provides of the existence of god, whether it's accompanied by a description or definition or none, begins with the assumption that god exists. Logic and reason don't function properly when they begin by assuming something exists in the absence of its demonstration. Logic has been pathologically misused for many centuries in this way.

I hear you continually claim that there are many "Proofs" for god and none against it. This is because those who argue on behalf of the existence of god make bold irrational and illogical claims and attempt to disguise them as rational and logical, and confirmation bias on the part of the reader can result in belief regardless how nonsensical the thing believed is then rationally and logically demonstrated to be.

You haven't sufficiently demonstrated any of the things you're stating as if they're incontrovertible facts.

There have been numerous speculations, theories and observations concerning "big bang" events. The big bang is not believed to have been an isolated incident, and there is a growing body of evidence in support of this. At present, even with science and physics in support of such a concept, I believe it's premature to make bold claims of Proof either way.

How can you discuss the attributes of something that is impossible for any natural thing to interact with, something supernatural? Shouldn't you first demonstrate that your creator is something other than a natural phenomenon with a beginning and an end? I don't need to read your Proof again.

What you're basically arguing is that the Big Bang is God.

You can't prove creation, and in no way in any of your commentary have you pointed to anything but its absence.

You can move goal posts around to suit your fancy, and you can define whatever word as whatever meaning regardless of the tradition of language, but if you continue to do so no rational person will take your position seriously, and you'll only succeed in contradicting yourself. People will argue with you only because it's easy or humorous, or people will ignore you because you speak only of Truth and Proof in relation to paradoxes.

My point is that someone explained to you that all phenomena are natural, and if there's ever a phenomenon that is supernatural, the natural world can never interact with it. You disregarded this and proceeded with repetitions of previous claims regarding the supernatural, which is by definition and by valid argument impossible for you to discuss. What you insist is supernatural is based on the natural world and your perception of it, yet you maintain a stance whereby you preach its Truth as though incontrovertible.

I was in simplistic terms conveying the humour I see in your paradoxical message of Truth and total disregard for rationality.

The one I highlighted, if you click on the link of your name, it'll take you to it.

It's strange that you would attempt to counter a valid argument by validating it.

If someone points to a house and says "that's a house", would you then say "yes, it's a tree, but it's also a dolphin"?

From one philosopher to the next you see plain language and pathologically specialized language respectively, so is it any wonder that context and concepts become lost in translation? And then there's this whole business of people deceiving themselves. And then there are deep rooted differences in comprehension for more reasons than I'll list here.

Saying that emotions are required for rational thought seems misleading. Emotions are sort of "omnipresent" in human thought. This doesn't necessarily mean that they're required for rational thought as much as that they're required in general and so happen to accompany thought, rational or irrational. In practice, it seems that emotion has a drastic impact on rational discourse. Also, much of our communication is either ingrained or rehearsed in the brain long before it's written or spoken. It seems as though we reach for previously catalogued ideas on certain emotion cues, but if I was going to entertain the notion that emotion "assists" rationalization in any way, I'd have to see the details of such a study.

It's been happening since whenever the first two simultaneous philosophers lived.

It's interesting that education goes to such lengths to infect everyone with a compulsion to prove and deny reality simultaneously.

Unless you have a history of mental illness accompanied by severe delusions, or you've been taking some serious drugs, it's pretty safe to say the fridge is real. This is the problem with philosophy and those indoctrinated into it, there's always some lame excuse for everything, some fire escape out of reality, it's no more than mythology with pathologically specialized language.

It's belief, or it's knowledge, or it's a reference to nothing by someone who doesn't exist.

There are numerous online resources composed by people who are alleged to know what they're talking about.

It's not my place to enlighten anyone, and not everyone can experience the enlightenment of which you speak.

You appear to have zero understanding in your comments.

There is no reaching you. You are incapable of rational discourse.

They're becoming the most despised aspects of the most pessimistic grievances of a bygone philosophical era while calling themselves "progressive".

In both a narrow and a broader context, he's invariably attacking what stems from religious morality, and if you look at his life and times, there are reasons for this, though they're not necessarily "reasonable" reasons.

He also attacks the results, both in his time and in the future he imagines, of the removal of subjective morality. Anyone who takes from his writing that they should follow suit or live by any code or invent any philosophy based on the emptiness of morality he describes he actually condemns them to the nihilism he sees burgeoning in his time--within that same writing.

I haven't read enough Schopenhauer to comment on his interpretation of the man's work, but I do know that in Nietzsche's time, numerous philosophers were misinterpreting each other's work, and he noted instances of this about his own work. The same misinterpretations are happening to this day, so it seems.

Post-modernism as I understand the movement, maybe not well enough, is pushing its philosophy in precisely such a direction as Nietzsche condemned as a phase of vapidity and ignorance before philosophy would perhaps gradually get back on track.

To predict something is not the same as to encourage it, especially when it's being openly discouraged I would say. To take everything a philosopher despises about a potential future and become it is not to be influenced by that philosopher--it is to be in opposition to that philosopher.

And so they willfully embrace their ignorance while impressing it on young minds under the thin veil of "higher education".

No one can do that, next.

Did you just go watch 2001: A Space Odyssey and think to yourself "now I know everything there is to know about artificial intelligence"?

You're misconstruing what I'm trying to communicate. I haven't classified any experience as coming through or filtered by anything. I've classified experience as something that only happens to senses.

I haven't assumed that anything that exists is attainable, I've posited that it is sensed, or experienced at a sensory level. I'm more inclined to assert that the mind is nothing than that it's matter or that it can be described because obviously the mind can't be described.

If the mind is nothing, then the perceiver of the mind is not experiencing anything. If I've eliminated the mind as the experiencer and limited experience to the senses, what's left is the notion that after experiencing something, the senses send information to the brain, and the brain constructs a memory of the experience of the senses. This is not an experience, it's a data sequence, a memory of past experience.

I can't trust anything while senses are incapable of experiencing everything that exists because there will always be something that evades them.

I'm not "equating the mind with brain processes", that's a gross generalization. I'm saying that the mind is a subset of processes within a broader spectrum of processes in the brain.

We don't need to measure or comprehend these processes, and we're in fact incapable of doing so. It's the compulsion to measure and comprehend ourselves that drives us toward ironically replacing ourselves with something non-organic that does understand us. Life on this planet is incapable of outlasting or escaping the death of the solar system and is motivated by necessity to imprint itself on something that has potential to do so.

I may be assuming a lot, but I'm not doing so without reason.

Because theists ask for evidence against gods, when clearly there is none. And on and on it goes, because it's impossible to prove or disprove that something that doesn't exist either exists or doesn't. Therefore, that it doesn't exist seems the obvious conclusion, or does it?

"The singularity" is a concept, and concepts don't have their own aims, because they're not sentient.

The idea that all human problems will be solved by a machine that humans build within the next two decades has been put forth by a fringe handful of sensationalist pseudo-scientists in order to make noise and sell books. It's a farce.

To answer your ridiculous questionnaire:

1. Not much.
2. It would respect us less than we respect bacteria.
3. Not if it has 1 million IQ and thinks of humans as having less value than bacteria.
4. We would not be in danger if we were extinct.
5. We should do whatever we do, there isn't a choice.

6.

It's ironic, the notion that post-modernism has been influenced by Nietzsche.

So much of philosophy has been about either a) why humans are so fantastic or b) given that humans are so fantastic why do they do things that are not fantastic.

It never gets down to brass tacks, animal nature, naked truth. It's always too busy being super philosophical.

In morality, there's "good" and "bad", and what is "good" is considered moral, and what is "bad" is considered immoral. But what is "bad" is objectively just as moral as what is "good".

We are animals, and we are subject to the same laws as animals, and we behave similarly to animals, there are actually remarkable similarities between the behaviors of humans and bacteria. If humans observed humans the way animals observe humans, philosophy would be "a very different animal".

It is memory combined with subjectivity, this awareness and observance of the self, and in turn the other, that generates in us a concept of morality as something separate from ourselves, some "higher order" of behaviour that is mistakenly objective. Morality, like other compulsions, is a facet of our genetic coding. It is directly related to survival, but it is also one of a series of aspects of humanity that are perfectly suited to support the compulsion to replicate sentience in some non-organic form.

"Real intellect" is an avoidance of this human tendency toward bias. If a person can't consider data objectively, then they have no business pretending to be philosophically or scientifically minded.

Bias is irrational and avoidable.

Nothing is experienced through the mind or by the the mind--it doesn't experience processes. The brain stores and transmits information--everything is experienced through the senses or by the senses. Things that you perceive as in your mind are information stored in your brain after experiences, from fractions of a second after an experience to years later, plus a memory or an awareness of self, which is a process that serves numerous functions in the body and outside it. It is directly linked to survival.

Morality has as many faces as humanity has. It varies even within a singular sect of a singular religion. There's a set of interpretive and often loosely-adhered-to ideals and morals that binds a group of people together, and it tends to undergo continual alteration. The natural tendency of the individual within a mob is to compromise its ideals and morals to such an extent that it necessarily sacrifices its identity for the sake of the greater good. This is plain to see in protests, riots, political parties, churches, etc.

Religious morality doesn't factor into the science of cloning, it opposes it from outside looking in. This moral holding back of scientific progress can be useful at times, although never sensible or practical, as a voice among many voices in the public domain, but religious morality certainly shouldn't be considered the only test or the most reliable test of the moral implications of a human endeavour. This is one way that democracy can fall flat on its face.

No. Mind is an illusion. Take for example one of the many sensations of "mind"--that it can be perceived as vast internal space. Do you believe that vast space exists within the human brain, or is it more likely that such a sensation results from something happening within the material of the brain? Or would you believe that it's some other plane of existence where "mind" or "spirit" exists apart from all material things, which can't be demonstrated even to the self?