All by itself, space doesn't have directions like left and right. — frank

That seems intuitively true.

Left-right confusion is surprisingly common. I have known three otherwise smart adults who can't tell the difference and need constant prompting. According to Wiki 15% of people have LRC.

On what basis do you make this distinction? Is it a matter of experiencing the world through a human body? Or is there something objective about it? — frank

I think of myself as having two halves and I know the left is the side I don't write with. I think that's how I tell the difference. Is it objective? It's certainly an intersubjective agreement shared by culture - a tool we use to organise space. While there might be some who are confused as to which is which. Those who can tell will always agree as to which is which. Does that make it objective? Of course, further complicating this is that left or right change depending upon one's position or perspective - they are not like compass points.

:up: Interesting about the word 'unbearable'. A fine thing Kundera said, and I am paraphrasing - You build a utopia and pretty soon you're going to need to build a small concentration camp.

The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia. — javi2541997

I don't think I fully understand what this is supposed to mean. I do agree that nostalgia is often unbearable (cloying and tawdry) but what is unbearable nostalgia? Is this what happens when gown men in their 50's collect Star Wars action figures in some attempt to recapture the summer of 1977? :wink:

I'm not a poetry enthusiast, so while I admire the technical skill of some poetic works, poems generally do not move me. I find essays (another form of compressed writing) more affecting.

If a poem uses language in a way that makes it memorable and cathartic, how exactly does this become nostalgia (a sentimental longing for a time past)? I'm assuming that the point of K's writing here is that we look back on the experince of encountering that moment in print with a nostalgia? The way we might feel when we remember hearing soem significant music for the first time.

I have no theory, I only propose that psychoanalysis has done more wrong for the average person and it shouldn't be a first place resource except for those who need it. — Abdul

Psychiatry isn't psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a very old fashioned approach, practiced by a handful of boutique, middle-class therapists.

For the most part psychiatry is built around the client's needs, around robust diagnostic criteria.

Your concern is perhaps more about the wellness and psychology industries that are not generally connected to psychiatry and are closer to Oprah Winfrey than Freud.

Like religion, which says we are all sinners who need god to be saved, psychology can sometimes fall into the trap of saying we are all bungled and need insight through treatment.

This is a very complex field, full of great and some terrible work. The psychiatrists I have worked with over the past 30 years (in public mental health) generally dislike psychology and are not especially tolerant of the self-help industry. They would rather people develop their own skills and resilience than make them dependent upon theories or ongoing counselling.

Psychiatry is of course poorly understood and one of the great bogeymen of popular culture and many people are incapable of considering the subject rationally ( also like religion) There have been some spectacular examples of poor practice and oppression from some sections of the mental health community, as there have been in many professions.

Most people are quite sane and therefore very capable and totally self-sufficient. But by increasing the distance between your intuition and your experience of the world, we destroy the tools you need to be self-sufficient.
Most people are healthy and therefore are not, as is commonly thought, a product of their past or of a mental condition that inhibits them from self-realization. The very idea of assuming oneself to be something that needs to be "fixed" or "corrected" is the disease of the modern world of abstractions — Abdul

Most psychiatrists I have worked with would agree with you that most people do not require their help or any treatment.

Brigitte Bardot is still living; she was making movies seven decades ago.

What is it? Not available in my country.

What would do if something awful happened and as far as you know, you are the only one to survive? — Athena

I don't know how I'd feel if it were for real, but it gives me enormous peace of mind to imagine all people gone and only me to potter about in an empty world.

Many are quite happy doing a bullshit job as long as it is engaging and provides community connection. In Graeber's seminal book on this, the key problems seem to be the waste, boredom and alienation. I would think there are bullshit jobs that are fun.

If one holds a critical view of human culture and society, it is pretty clear that the category of bullshit jobs can be enlarged beyond mere box ticking pointlessness to include CEO roles, marketing, conference organizing, consultants (in almost any area) management theorists, sociologists and a host of others. Obviously, this category of 'bullshit' is dependent upon what presuppositions one holds about purpose and value.

But there are carpenters, bakers, and chocolate makers who truly enjoy their labor. — L'éléphant

Indeed.

Thanks. All very interesting.

Please clarify. Not sure to what you are referring.

Interesting comments.

We are now more able than Plato was to acknowledge our finitude.

Far fewer people today believe in an afterlife. Whether or not one does, we are able to question such assumptions freely in the West. — Fooloso4

Indeed. Would you say this is an advance in human thinking or is this too value laden?

I got ya. Nicely put. Nevertheless I think I tend to sympathise with Rorty on this to some extent, but I totally see how for many his take would be anathema. Rorty is a divisive figure. My view is that what humans do is invent stories, some of these are more useful for certain functions than others, but at no point do we make contact with reality as such, we just manufacture defeasible, contingent and often poetic understandings of our situation. I can see the argument that Platonism (and its children) has been superseded (regardless of whatever wisdom there may be in Plato's broader writings). I think what Rorty is getting at is the (no doubt debatable) proposition that the quest for the transcendent is over and pointless and that poetry will do instead. Particularly if you are dying. All we really have is words and language games and we really don't know how (or if) words map on reality.

But this is too small a matter and too big a subject for me to venture much further.

You say "So?" Hey, you brought the whole thing up. — T Clark

I only said 'so?' because you didn't explain your comment. Now you have explained it. :wink:

Rorty's explication of poetry reminds me of an atheist trying to give an open-minded and sympathetic explanation of religion without really having any idea what it's about. — T Clark

That's a good line. But does this imply that Rorty has poetry wrong and therefore can't really be valuing it properly? Or are you saying that his way of understanding and valuing poetry is different to yours?

Not to be unkind to Mr. Rorty - or you - but his explication is very far from my thoughts about, or experience of, poetry. — T Clark

So? I don't share Rorty's views and, as I have said elsewhere, I have little interest in poetry. But I am interested in what others think, particularly influential philosophers.

I don't think we can learn anything worthy from Donald Trump and 2024 U.S. Elections threads. — javi2541997

I tend to find them more interesting threads - they explore, more or less in practice, the nature of politics, value, truth and social policy. I get less from threads on perception or reality.


Richard Rorty said that 'the purpose of philosophy is not to discover timeless truths, but rather to provide better ways of living and understanding.' This opens things up. Philsophy seems to be one of those subjects where the framing is wide or narrow depending upon one's biases.

Here is a short and famous piece he wrote on poetry and philosophy.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/68949/the-fire-of-life

Fair enough. Of those, the only ones I liked/enjoyed were Leon; Natural Born Killers; Pulp Fiction. :wink:

No, I never crossed paths with Sagan or Clairvision.

Fin de siècle aside, I'm not especially keen on 1999's flicks. I don't have a favourite year, but my favourite decade is the 1970's. Most of those films I didn't see until the 1990's, when every film I saw from the 70's shat on the things being made then (and now). Or something like that.

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls000019899/

In Melbourne? I had a short foray in the area (intellectual area) and Melbourne was a hot bed at the time (circa 2010-2015). I still quite like the Thesophical Society Bookstore — AmadeusD

Yep, Melbourne. They used to be in a really coool 1920's building which was sadly demolished a couple of years ago. Now they're around the corner in Flinders Lane. In the 1980's I used to almost live in that bookshop.

However, I think I have found a semi-objective basis for morality. — Brendan Golledge

Lots of people attempt this move. As you probably know, Sam Harris wrote a book on secular morality based around the principle of wellbeing (The Moral Landscape 2010) . As you've already suggested, if you can get people to agree upon a presupposition (or some foundational values) you can build a moral system from there. But the challenge is getting people to share those presuppositions. I'll leave this kind of task to the system builders. :wink:

Consciously thinking about what things we ought to consider good and bad is the point of this discussion. Because of the arbitrariness of value-assertion, using an external guide as a rule (such as a religious tradition) can be very helpful. — Brendan Golledge

Are you particularly concerned by what we use as an external guide? Isn't this itself arbitrary too? We can pick secular humanism, a political ideology or fundamentalist Islam. How do we know which oughts and ought nots within a system are useful or 'correct'. Seems we have to step outside of the external guide to make an assessment.

Where we obtain our oughts from is itself a curious thing - it appears to be contingent and may have nothing to do with right or wrong (in a more transcendent sense), just perceptions of right or wrong. Isn't it the case that oughts and ought nots are located in the contingent system of values we gain through culture and experience? Some of these might coalesce into a system of sorts. Isn't morality essentially an intersubjective agreement, with many outliers and willing transgressors?

I am sorry for your bad experiences. — boundless

The people were 'bad' but I regret nothing.

even if the bad practicioners, teachers etc were the majority, this doesn't a priori negate the validity of a particular tradition. — boundless

Of course - and if I argued that I'd be making a fallacy. I make no claim about higher consciousness as an idea, I was referring to who the subject seems to attract and the innate difficulty (perhaps impossibility) of persuing it a useful way. But I'll leave this to others who are more interested.

(and here I mean the unsophisticated kind which is IMO the true naive realism, not more 'refined' ones that are actually not naive realism), then one accepts automatically some kind of notion of 'two truths'. Naive realism errs in interpreting pragmatic 'truths' as ontological ones. — boundless

I think phenomenology may do away with the need to pars the world into realism or indirect realism or idealism models, but I am not sufficiently versed in the thinking to articulate an argument.

Naive realism errs in interpreting pragmatic 'truths' as ontological ones. — boundless

That's fair. I'm skeptical that we can access ontological truths, or that we should we be overly concerned to identify them. I'm content with tentative models of the world, which is all science can provide. But even an idealist becomes a naive realist when he leaves the house to go to work. That's paraphrasing Simon Blackburn. Which comes back to my take on all this. None of it much matters since the world we inhabit can't be denied in practice and for the most part it makes no difference to how we live if we believe that all is an illusion.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
— Franz Kafka
— T Clark

I'd never heard that quote before. Maybe I should read Franz Kafka. — Brendan Golledge

There's a kind of companion quote which I prefer and it comes from Pascal - “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Re Kafka - I suspect that if you don't discover him in your 20's, he may be less affecting. I like The Metamorphosis and The Trial best.

:up: Glad Viz is remembered.

Thanks for the considered reply and interesting comments. I was connected the New Age movement and the Theosophical Society through the 1980's and into the 1990's, so I am moderately familiar with the thinking. Most of the folk I knew in those days were as anxious, status seeking, consumer obsessed and money oriented as any contemporary yuppie. But I guess the serious thinkers are always in the minority. I have never arrived at a reason to take this kind of metaphysics seriously. True or not, it makes no practical difference to how I conduct my life. I suspect a lot of this comes down to person's disposition. Some of us are unhappy in particular ways that seem to be ameliorated by philosophy and thoughts of higher consciousness. And perhaps some of us ruminate less and are more distractible. :wink:

I’ll just say this:

….Kant’s thought is the thing-in-itself was required for the things that appear;
….the thing of the thing-in-itself just is the thing that appears;
….phenomena are not that which appears, but represent things that appear.

….noumena are never even in the conversation, they do nothing, are nothing, and cannot ever be anything, to us. They were never meant to be the same, never meant to be understood as similar or identical, as the thing-in-itself, but were only ever to be treated in the same way, re: as some complete, whole yet entirely unknowable something, by the cognitive system from which they both arise.

…..Kant says things-in-themselves are real existent objects (Bxx), but never once says noumena are anything more than “…a thing which must be cogitated not as an object of sense, but solely through the pure understanding….” (B310). — Mww

Cool Kant mini-primer... :wink:

Anyway, while I believe that in Buddhist schools the formulation is more clear (after all, in their view it also had a salvific importance), the distinction is also present even in pre-socratic greek philosophers. Parmenides, for instance, developed a version of the 'two truths' doctrine similar to Advaita Vedanta. — boundless

While I find this quite interesting, I wonder to what extent we should care about the second truth or the reality beyond our own. There may well be a Paramarthika Satya or ultimate realm beyond the empirical, but what of it? Can a good case be made that we should care about this and to what end? Asking for a friend...

No doubt the quest for enlightenment or spiritual relaxation seems attractive to some but how likely is it you will arrive there? I often think that this quest is just a spiritual equivalent of consumer culture and status seeking. Thoughts?

Yes, I read Pagels back in the 1980's when Gnosticism was briefly trendy.

Understanding the history of the concept gave me context and helped me detach myself from that indoctrination. — Noble Dust

Thank you.

That’s so interesting. Are you able to say something about how her work helped?

So I think it's plainly misleading to say that belief is reality. — Wayfarer

I would have to agree. People can certainly live in a 'reality' of false beliefs and often do so and these can come crashing down.

It seems to me that the most generalized way of avoiding belief in falsehoods that feel good is to disbelieve in the statement, "Feeling good is intrinsically good." This would mean belief in an objective morality. That means that there is a distinction between what is actually good and what feels good. There is no concept of "truth" in the absence of an objective morality, because then there would be no value to tell you not to believe whatever makes you feel good. For a hedonist (which is what most people are), there is no difference between what is true and what makes them feel good. But a genuinely truthful person has to be willing to feel pain in order to know what is true. — Brendan Golledge

Sounds like a fairly conservative take on good. I am uncertain what 'good' means and how it can be identified. The only thing I can say is that to cause suffering deliberately would appear to be bad. Does it follow that to prevent suffering is good?

Aren't all human choices motivated by wanting to feel satisfied in some way, regardless of whether it involves pleasure or pain? Isn't that why we have the idea of psychological egoism? Even when people act in ways that appear to be self-sacrificing or aimed at benefiting others, they are actually motivated by the pursuit of personal satisfaction, whether it be through direct pleasure, the avoidance of guilt, or the fulfilment of a sense of duty.

Doing good to satisfy a philosophy or please a god would ultimately seem to be a pursuit of personal pleasure. Do you think one can transcend self-interest?

For a hedonist (which is what most people are), there is no difference between what is true and what makes them feel good. — Brendan Golledge

I'm not sure in what sense you mean this. Most people are not overly concerned by what is true. I would say a lot of hedonists I know feel some guilt about having pleasure while a relative or some other people are suffering. But they will justify or work to overlook this.

I read a book a long time ago called, "The History of God". — Brendan Golledge

I think you mean Karen Armstrong's, A History fo God. Armstrong is a former nun.

She is also one of the world's most popular writers on comparative religion. Amongst her works are a biography of Mohammad and a history of Islam.

I wouldn't say that myself, but you might be right. I find the left to be mostly a conga-line of hectoring fuck-sticks. And we certainly stole some of the progressive identity politics nonsense. But the right wing identity politics, as espoused by Abbot, Dutton, Morrison, et al, has often been very Republican and even Trump-like. Hence Fox News/Sky News consistent advocacy of our Liberal (right wing) Party in language that might make sense to Republicans, but not old school Australian Liberal Party voters. As a rule I don't follow politics. I detest it.

A solution inbetween trains and buses: — Lionino

Indeed. We call them trams and they run all over my city. There are 10 routes within 50 meters of my home. In my city, there are around 1,700 tram stops across 24 routes with 250 kilometres of urban tracks and a patronage of well over 200 million individual journeys a year. I do most of my reading going to and from places in trams.

Thanks for clarifying. I’m certainly familiar with the art movement.

What does it mean to say ideas are surreal? I haven't really been able to work out what you are asking exactly. Maybe I've missed something.

The term 'surreal' in my updated title is a way of seeing ideas and symbols as being a potential shift from metaphysics as absolutes, to the scope of a tentative notion of the metaphysical imagination. — Jack Cummins

I'm not sure what this means. Aren't all ideas humans hold tentative, even scientific ideas? Science is like a history of discarded ideas.

For something to be surreal, it needs to be bizarre and in conflict with ordinary reality (like a hallucination or dream). Are ideas like this?

:up: I hear you, Brother.

:up: