Any view can lead to nihilism, although some more than others, and anyone can be happy under any of them—nihilism is a reflection of one’s psychology and nothing more. — Bob Ross

I agree.

But the underlying philosophical point is mistaking the illusory for the real, although of course for that to be meaningful, there must be some kind of inkling of a higher reality, which is also pretty non-PC in today's culture. — Wayfarer

I understand the lineage of this this view, I'm just wondering how it helps to think this way.

Wouldn't be much of a leap to take the view that the world is malignant, that birth and children are a curse and take up a position wherein nuclear annihilation might be a useful way to demolish this metaphysical Bastille. Isn't climate change ultimately coming to liberate us from the cycle of death and rebrith? Why act to prevent it?

The world as prison... Not sure that quote helps.

A wise response, Janus.

For example, it seems to me that very often, if not always, the motivation for believing in idealism is the hope that the self does not perish with the body. — Janus

Of course, and like an idiot I didn't even consider this aspect.

Only a few brain-washed nuts actually attempt to walk through walls, which, according to subatomic physics, are 99% empty space (image below). — Gnomon

A cryptic answer to my question. I'm not sure I follow you.

As per Kastrup; mentation presents itself to us in the peculiar way we have come to understand as physical. We can leave this aspect of idealism in brackets.

My question is pragmatic and existential. I am a pragmatist - in the non-philosophical sense of this word.

Here we have a significant debate about ontology. I wonder what follows from one of the answers. How does how we live change if idealism is true?

I hear you. For me, with a mindset of philosophical ignorance, almost everything sounds like a violation of common sense. :razz:

As far as I can tell, the Universal Mind adheres to strict laws.
— Bob Ross

There’s no legitimate reason to think that, insofar as it contradicts the notion that the universal mind does no meta-cognitive deliberations, which it would have to do in order to determine what laws are, and the conditions under which they legislate what it can do, which determines what it is. — Mww

Could it be that Universal Mind "adhering to strict laws" is merely the wrong choice of words? Maybe he means that reality (including laws of logic, physics, etc) have universal mind as their source. The foundations of reality are grounded in Universal Mind. Or something like that.

Interesting question. I suspect that boredom and sadness come in soft and hard forms and both are probably unendurable when experience with intensity for an extended period. I've not often been sad, but I have often been bored (the soft variety). The problem with boredom is an inability to pay attention for extended periods. My boredom often means I can't watch long-form TV or sit through a movie or finish a book. Detail is painful or puts me to sleep. Boredom feels like tedium, restlessness, weariness, and a frustrated attempt to find engagement. In its extreme form, it probably does feel like anhedonia (and even physical pain) as you suggest.

I really like how that was worded.

We really have no idea what either physicality or mentality are in any substantial sense. — Janus

I think this touches on something important. I've heard Chomsky make a similar statement. And of course, Chomsky concedes he is a Kantian in relation to human sense making and language being aspects of the human cognitive apparatus - we are 'contained' by these. But we keep wanting to escape our cognitive limitations and make pronouncements about reality as it is in itself.

Out of interest - let's assume we do accept analytic idealism as our ontological situation - what practical changes would this initiate in terms of human behavior? How much changes in terms of morality, human rights, climate change, political discourse, in short, how we live?

I think that Foucault's The Care of the Self is a close examination of this "Epicurean" virtue. — Paine

Thanks. That's that's come up a bit. I need to find time to investigate it.

I am fascinated by how possessions seem to be used to construct a kind of wish fulfilment identity and manage feelings of inadequacy.

In general there are several codified shapes in UAP land. The saucer is one, cigar shapes and more famously, tic tacs (as recorded on US Navy videos and famously seen by Commander David Fraver) and large black triangles, are also key in eyewitness accounts.

Do you wish that UFOs, Alien Abductions, and Alien Visits were, in fact, REAL, meaning our planet has been visited by aliens from another star system, and that aliens may be present on our planet right now? — BC

No. Unless it means aliens can save us from ourselves - climate change, nuclear war, etc.

Or, do you fear that UFO stories may actually be true, and it frightens you greatly? — BC

I don't know anything factual about aliens. I do believe people see UAP's (as they are now known) but I have little idea what these are. Probably a mix of phenomena.

Or, do you think this is all malarky? — BC

I don't know that it's all malarkey. I think there are sometimes phenomena that we have no explanation for. This means I do not believe that UAP's are aliens visiting earth but I don't say there is no such thing.

If aliens have technology that can 'bypass' the laws of physics we know and travel light years in little time, then they may well be so advanced that talking to them would be for them what talking to a chimp might be for us.

Also, from a more Kantian perspective - what if human cognitive apparatus allows us to see a version of reality that does not include alien reality? Could not an advanced species, with different cognitive capacity and an alternate physicality, inhabit the 'space' we do not experience?

In any case, he’s not a climate denier and seems to reject capitalism, so he’s certainly not doing any harm, in my view. — Mikie

:lol:

I prefer to think of these displays as worship of Lucasfilm before the reformation.

Cool. It's a theme I've been thinking about a lot since I joined this site.

Nice. Yes, I can see how this might get messy.

But it could also be interpreted not as an exaggeration. What is it to “have reasons”? If it’s to have arrived at the love through ratiocination, or if it means that reasons are somehow constitutive of it, or are the motivation for it, then the statement is accurate. I don’t decide to love someone based on a deduction.

So under that interpretation, giving or thinking of reasons post hoc is not what “having reasons” means.

Neither does it mean the causes of your love. An omniscient psychologist’s discovery of the objective reasons that you love a person—the causes of your love—is not what is being discussed. What it’s about is having reasons of your own, as justification for your feeling.

It’s a rich insight (though hardly an original one), so try to understand before rejecting. Be curious. — Jamal

I think that's a useful frame and it is insightful. I've generally held that most of the things I am passionate about did not come about through reasoning - music, art, books, films, people. Much of my reasoning about things is post hoc - I'm not sure if these are 'justifications', since I feel they are true to or integrated with my thinking and beliefs. I am fairly sure in life we have emotional impulses (inclinations/interests) and we fill these in with reasoning after the fact. My wording is a bit clumsy, but you know what I mean?

Cool, thanks. Yeah, I heard him say that Butler is a 'good friend' of his.

He's a serious philosopher who made the "mistake" of having a sense of humour, being entertaining, and relating his work to everyday life. — Baden

Ha! He seems very likable.

I think it would be very difficult on reading and understanding one of his books to come to that conclusion. I've fully read "Violence", "Enjoy your Symptom", and "How to Read Lacan" so far, as well as much of "the Parallax View" and "the Sublime Object of ldeology". — Baden

Interesting. Would it be fair to say he is a divisive figure?

I'm never going to get into Lacan or Hegel - it's just not an interest of mine and I am too old - does he have a useful reading of these guys?

I understand. I came to many of the same positions Epicureanism seems to hold by myself, without reading the work. Apart from abusing alcohol for many years, I have never been much interested in food, money, or consumer goods. I long to live without a car. I am a half-arsed or 'soft' minimalist and came to this outlook back in 1990. I own almost no appliances and minimal furniture. I was so repelled by the 1980's, selfish, consumerist, 'greed is good' culture that I went in this direction in reaction.

Having the feelings I have is no effort at all for me, I love my wife and my children unconditionally or a Zizek says, 'for no reason' - unreasonably. And when one of them screams at me and rushes off slamming the door, it hurts, and I still love them. And there is no reason why. — unenlightened

I have to I am sympathetic to this view. Love and reason do seem unconnected to me too. However to say categorically there is no reason may be pushing things. Could there not be reasons we are unaware of, or dimly ware of? We are attracted to people for reasons that are, possibly, hard wired in us. We go for certain types of people or genders and we are attracted to certain types of appearances, personalities and behaviors. It isn't a rational process, I agree, but there are still reasons. I am attracted to generosity and kindness and intelligence and humor. If the people I am attracted to hang around long enough, I may also grow to love them.

I am interested in you critiquing reason several times on this thread. Do I take it you believe the enlightenment project was largely a failure and that reason (which became a new god) has acquired a poisonous dimension under secular materialistic culture?

No one seems to discuss his ideas or contributions, although he’s published books. — Mikie

Yes, that's kind of what I was wondering about.

Keyword: things. Logic is not a thing. If a label is required for some reason, I’d just call it a condition, or maybe a axiom or fundamental principle of a theory. Heck, maybe just a merely necessary presupposition, in order to ground all that follows from it. All of which lend themselves quite readily to analysis. This is metaphysics after all, immune to proof from experience, so there are some permissible procedural liberties, so maybe logic is just that which prohibits such liberties from running amuck.

Besides, it is possible that the human intellect is itself naturally predisposed to what we eventually derive as logical conditions, so maybe we put so much trust in the power of pure logic for no other reason than we just are logical intelligences. Maybe we just can’t be not logically inclined. — Mww

I like it. Nicely expressed.

Nice answer. I appreciate it. Thanks for the reading list. :pray:

:up:

t's the only school of philosophy to which I ever felt attracted. Not a card-carrying member, mind you, but it sure sounds better than most of them. — Vera Mont

Me too.

Further Epicurus' theory gets at something fundamental about desire -- that our desires can be the reason we are unhappy, rather than us being unhappy because we're not satisfying those desires, and so the cure of unhappiness is to remove the desire rather than pursue it. Which is a very different kind of hedonism from our usual understanding of the word since it's centered around limiting desire such that they can always be satisfied and you don't have to worry about them rather than pursuing any and all of them. — Moliere

Indeed. Philosophy educator Alain de Botton wrote I nice essay on this in his early book The Consolations of Philosophy.

This passage struck me and rings true for the wealthy, ostentatious people I've met.

The desire for riches should perhaps not always be understood as a simple hunger for a luxurious life, a more important motive might be the wish to be appreciated and treated nicely. We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us. Epicurus, discerning our underlying need, recognised that a handful of true friends could deliver the love and respect that even a fortune may not.

Feel pity for the guy driving the Maserati - he's just working hard to be noticed and loved. :wink:

I don't know what they all saw. I think the story, which has various parts, is a mosaic of bits remembered and bits imagined. I think it could have been a cigar shaped target tug being towed by a plane on a military exercise.

I've always used 'confidence' as one of several definitions of faith. I think that does fine.

I would say that "confidence" is often directed towards oneself, internally, as an attitude toward one's own actions, while "faith" is most often directed outward, as an attitude towards what is external to oneself. — Metaphysician Undercover

I generally have confidence in things outside myself - relationships, the sun coming up, catching a plane, my roof holding the rain back.

Economics is entirely faith based - but they call it "confidence" — unenlightened

And when it works, it's a 'confidence trick'.

It's basically an American phenomenon, because only Americans can both distrust their own government and yet think their government bureaucracies can be so capable at the same time to have these huge cover ups. — ssu

Maybe, but here in Australia we had a major UFO event in 1966 called the Westall Incident. I knew one of the teachers involved who saw the UFO flying over a school for an extended period, with dozens of children. Conspiracy (in the form of traditional government cover up and interference) has followed this one since 1966, since before X Files and before Roswell was revived and spun as a grand conspiracy theory in the 1970's.

I have made no defence of religion. I am appealing for an attempt at understanding the meaning of religious texts to people, which I believe is rather more than mere the commercial advertising bullshit of the marketplace. — unenlightened

Cheers, yes. I think this is also a good point.

Do economists really believe in the invisible hand? This is a fatuous ignorant insulting question, surely. — unenlightened

Hmm...I studied economics back in the 1990's and what I found was a largely faith based dogma.

This is very binary, and rather the problem with this thread - and that is my fault for framing things that way. — unenlightened

I think this forum is full of folk who want the best for our planet - they proffer answers based on their own experience, intuitions and judgements. It all seems so 'self-evident'. Then there's the issue of tribalism and dualistic thinking and it can get messy. Not your fault.

Rationalist politics is necessarily dehumanising, because the defining feature of life is emotion. to be alive is to care about something. Having a home, for example. Accordingly, a worldview that rejects everything that is not rational or factual, is inimical to life. — unenlightened

I think that's a good point, my list of things that cause frequent harm to humanity include, nationalism, scientism, marketing, capitalism, materialism. And, unlike you, I would add religion as one of humanity's many problematic ideas. Do I want to ban it? No. Do I hate religion? No. But I admit to often being bigoted about it. And bigoted about capitalism, marketing, materialism, etc. I feel similar shudders whether I am driving past a church, an advertising agency or a shopping mall.

Yes. I am a reluctant post-modernist.
— Tom Storm

That's a pity. You're missing out. The original guys enjoyed it. (The dialogue between Searle and Derrida is a good example.) It was having a sure-fire way of tweaking the lion's tail - where the lion was the orthodox academy. The sense of fun that I found in them was part of the appeal. (I also realized that it must have been part of Socrates' appeal when he revealed Socratic method to his friends. I suspect that it was one of the reasons he lost the trial.) — Ludwig V

I was just making a mild joke that many of us are postmodernists reluctantly through the influence the ideas have had on our culture. I tend towards anti-foundationalist skepticism myself. I've done some desultory reading, but I have never privileged any philosophy in my life as I've had other priorities. Which is why I am here; to get a taste of what I might have missed.

Lot of renewed interest in UFO's and some real characters shilling crazy tales on YouTube - Jeremy Corbell, Bob Lazar, Robert Bigelow, Luis Elizondo spring to mind.

I agree with you - the actual content is slender, with inferences as shaky as the video footage we get. No one doubts that people see and photograph things in the sky from time to time, it just doesn't seem to amount to much. Set the tales in the context of a government conspiracy and stories accrue an instant allure.

My experiences of writing philosophy include the slightly weird experience of finding an argument taking charge and leading me down a path I didn't intend to go down and don't want to go down. — Ludwig V

I can see that. Characters in fiction often do the same thing.

That's a situation that post-modernists particularly enjoy(ed). — Ludwig V

Yes. I am a reluctant post-modernist.

But sometimes people forget that many texts are read and are important to audiences far beyond their original context The question of interpreting them in those circumstances must go beyond their origins. Indeed the problem starts to arise as soon as the text is published. — Ludwig V

Yes. I've always held that any text is redolent with potential meanings so settling on a 'right' one suggests a paucity of imagination and joy.

Welcome. Nice pellucid writing, I have no useful opinion on any of it, but I appreciate your clarity and collegial approach.

:up: Creativity is undomesticated and capricious, the artist is not always in charge.

But are you really telling me you didn't know what you intended to write, that you just had some kind of vagae association, when you were writing it? — Vera Mont

I think you are missing the nuances. I probably can't explain it to you any clearer.

I once wrote a magazine story about the art of writing sitcoms - my intention was to describe how they were written and produced. What people got out of it was a different story - how the talent of a comic actor can make bad material come alive through interpretation. Sure it was in there, but I wasn't trying to write about that. It's what most people told me they took from the piece. My editor didn't even register what I thought the piece was about; he saw it as an amusing analysis of the role of performance. If you were to read that 20 year-old piece today, you'd probably talk about how it was about the days before streaming, when network TV called the shots and when they produced shows in house in powerful TV studios - a microcosm of that era. Sure that's there too, but I didn't intend to focus on that. By now my original intention for writing the piece has been eclipsed. It has new life as a historical document about how TV used to work, certainly not the art of sitcom writing. My experience as a writer and from knowing writers is that this is often how a work ends up being reinterpreted and shaped by time and individual readings.

I see ↪Tom Storm has made pretty much the same point. Perhaps it's different for different writers. Anyway, I'm happy to leave it there and agree to disagree, because neither of us is going to be able to prove their point. — Janus

Maybe it's one of those points you either see or don't. A bit like god... :razz:

The only thing I will not countenance is : "He didn't know what he meant." — Vera Mont

It's not that simple. I worked as a published writer for 20 years (side hustle) - mainly non-fiction but some fiction and drama. I have often encountered people who have commented upon what I wrote and come to me with interpretations of my work I did not consciously intend but, on reflection, where defiantly there. I might have gone in wanting to say X (and partly achieved that) but what the story really demonstrated is Y. I think writing often works that way and certainly the other writers I've known - and there's been a good dozen - mostly find the same. We tell richer or poorer stories than we intend to.

Is that not the story of Jesus, whose necessity arose from the eating of that impregnated apple?

But that's not a story I focus on, but I get it. We don't need any actual apples, serpents, or crucifixions for that to have meaning.

Importantly, that story has the attention of a culture, and so it matters. That is where we look for meaning, so that's where we find it. — Hanover

Thanks for this account. It doesn't personally resonate with me but I get it. Sort of. Much human behaviour and many beliefs make no real sense to me, including Free Masonry, libertarianism, sport, fishing, and progressive religious beliefs.

I've mentioned throughout that it's partly the fault of literalist theists who insist on the truth of the scriptures that this is a common line of attack. Many an atheist, and I include myself in this group, has been dissuaded byof theological convictions on the basis of literal interpretations of scripture being a central part of a particular community. — Moliere

Well, whoever's fault it is, the fact remains that many theists are literalists. In America and Saudi Arabia (Islam) that group is so huge that they determine social policy and governments. So for me, there is justification for secular humanist education and some forms of assertive atheism. I've met too many atheists who left fundamentalism after hearing better arguments during their time as apologists.

So to insist on the truth of talking snakes or the existence of Jesus is to miss out on what makes these stories compelling. — Moliere

Interesting. Talking snakes is one thing. But dismissing the existence of Jesus would undermine Christianity, surely? How many practicing Christians would there be who think Jesus never lived? If everything comes down to compelling stories rather than truth then Hamlet or David Copperfield may was well be worshiped (actually I think Harold Bloom did just that).

How exactly does an allegory work to provide sustenance to a believer, any suggestions?