I’m a chess player too and I really enjoyed reading this! :)

Sounds like me a little haha I’m an aggressive player too although I’m probably nowhere near this guys level. I’ve won 52% of all 121 of my recorded matches. That’s a vast improvement to when I started recording though. :)

I got into 1 minute games on various websites. It was a blast, but it made me a worse player. I just couldn't resist turning it into art, making mad sacrifices, playing on the time/panic element.

Another great game is Stratego, which is best modified so that each player starts with maybe 10 pieces (from some varying menu). This adds the element of bluff, and all that space makes the scouts especially important.

Then you have Shogi from Japan, 9 and 6 men Morris and so much more I forget how many I’ve played now. Shogi is much harder than chess though and I suck at it.

I've looked into Shogi. Fascinating! I've actually invented quite a few games, some of them with psychedelic rules. One of these days (so I tell myself), I'll make an app or at least put the ideas out there.

I need moderation in EVERYTHING too many "truths" I do not handle well in large doses, I need a balance of alternative perspectives and constant discussion - not just 'swallowing pills' to be swallowing - I need examination, and stretching... maybe that is what philosophy is - although I don't think philosophy is necessarily swallowing a red pill (e.g. accepting all things/whatever as true), but the preference to examining various 'red' and 'blue' pills & compare/contrast - examine - and pose necessary (healthy) clashes between on another... So say, if someone offered me a 'philosophy red pill' it is unlikely I would take it before cutting it open and examining the contents, lowering it's potency, then taking the inner goo as it comes.

Doing excessive pill swallowing of anything is bad for my mental health. Philosophy, logic I need moderation, because yes both can induce stress to some degree if I don't take breaks. Math follows similar. But at the same time, I can't imagine it's good for my 'head' health when I do more than 2 hours of it, because I start developing headaches (LOL). I can't say I know ANYONE that is substantially mentally healthy under the age of 30 that does nothing but take red pills - so I think psychology must be considered along side philosophy - especially for newbies and the younger generation (or for anyone..) that are not skilled in handling such truths and managing copes.

I will say this, Ethics greatly improves my mental health and makes me feel wonderful. My favorite branch of philosophy is ethics, if I had to name anything, for this reason.

I study law, and I love the ethics and theatrical portion. I love Nussbaum's take on Philosophy and Law for that reason. Yes, because WITHOUT this consideration law can cause great depression in all things really, and brain melt when you so detached and not attending to your emotional health - without moderation anything has the tendency to depress you very quickly unless you practice stoicism and such. I do not practice stoicism in any degree, so you can imagine shit effects me in many ways.

I will say this, talking/discussing philosophy with others I find very stressful. I find this forum stressful as hell. Half of it is just folks throwing bad medicine laced with nonsense and cheap red paint at others, that NO ONE is opening their mouth OR minds for.

I find this forum stressful as hell. — Swan

Why are you here then? (That's not meant to be snide, I sincerely don't understand why you'd hang around a place on the internet that stresses you out).

Has anyone had that Nietzschean moment where you come down from the mountain, so to speak, and applied your philosophy to living and to the people around us? I find that if I don’t live up to my philosophies and apply them to life, I get a growing cognitive dissonance. These pangs of conscience, I suppose a sort of hypocrisy, compel me to act. This acting out of a philosophy puts my principles to trial and error (I may refine or lose some here and there] but I feel that I’m not lying to myself.

I find this forum stressful as hell.
— Swan

Why are you here then? (That's not meant to be snide, I sincerely don't understand why you'd hang around a place on the internet that stresses you out). — Pfhorrest

I suppose the same could be said (about) Sisyphus and her stone ...

Has anyone had that Nietzschean moment where you come down from the mountain, so to speak, and applied your philosophy to living... — NOS4A2

I would not know what philosophy would even look like if it wasn't continually being applied to everyday real life events.

What else could test it?

:up:

I will say this, talking/discussing philosophy with others I find very stressful. I find this forum stressful as hell. Half of it is just folks throwing bad medicine laced with nonsense and cheap red paint at others, that NO ONE is opening their mouth OR minds for. — Swan

That's some of what I mean by the red pill --an exposure to voices, voices, voices. And what these voices talk about is the other voices. Interpretations of interpretations of interpretations...

'The spirit is a stomach.' The ability to digest the overwhelming plurality of dissonant voices does seem to depend on something solid, something not in doubt. Or something that only changes slowly. Sudden revolutions are dangerous. A gradual drift is maybe safer and more common.


I'll add a Nietzsche quote here that gets at this.

That imperious something which is popularly called "the spirit," wishes to be master internally and externally, and to feel itself master; it has the will of a multiplicity for a simplicity, a binding, taming, imperious, and essentially ruling will. Its requirements and capacities here, are the same as those assigned by physiologists to everything that lives, grows, and multiplies. The power of the spirit to appropriate foreign elements reveals itself in a strong tendency to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, to overlook or repudiate the absolutely contradictory; just as it arbitrarily re-underlines, makes prominent, and falsifies for itself certain traits and lines in the foreign elements, in every portion of the "outside world." Its object thereby is the incorporation of new "experiences," the assortment of new things in the old arrangements—in short, growth; or more properly, the FEELING of growth, the feeling of increased power—is its object. This same will has at its service an apparently opposed impulse of the spirit, a suddenly adopted preference of ignorance, of arbitrary shutting out, a closing of windows, an inner denial of this or that, a prohibition to approach, a sort of defensive attitude against much that is knowable, a contentment with obscurity, with the shutting-in horizon, an acceptance and approval of ignorance: as that which is all necessary according to the degree of its appropriating power, its "digestive power," to speak figuratively (and in fact "the spirit" resembles a stomach more than anything else). Here also belong an occasional propensity of the spirit to let itself be deceived (perhaps with a waggish suspicion that it is NOT so and so, but is only allowed to pass as such), a delight in uncertainty and ambiguity, an exulting enjoyment of arbitrary, out-of-the-way narrowness and mystery, of the too-near, of the foreground, of the magnified, the diminished, the misshapen, the beautified—an enjoyment of the arbitrariness of all these manifestations of power. Finally, in this connection, there is the not unscrupulous readiness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and dissemble before them—the constant pressing and straining of a creating, shaping, changeable power: the spirit enjoys therein its craftiness and its variety of disguises, it enjoys also its feeling of security therein—it is precisely by its Protean arts that it is best protected and concealed!—COUNTER TO this propensity for appearance, for simplification, for a disguise, for a cloak, in short, for an outside—for every outside is a cloak—there operates the sublime tendency of the man of knowledge, which takes, and INSISTS on taking things profoundly, variously, and thoroughly; as a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste, which every courageous thinker will acknowledge in himself, provided, as it ought to be, that he has sharpened and hardened his eye sufficiently long for introspection, and is accustomed to severe discipline and even severe words. He will say: "There is something cruel in the tendency of my spirit": let the virtuous and amiable try to convince him that it is not so! In fact, it would sound nicer, if, instead of our cruelty, perhaps our "extravagant honesty" were talked about, whispered about, and glorified—we free, VERY free spirits—and some day perhaps SUCH will actually be our—posthumous glory! Meanwhile—for there is plenty of time until then—we should be least inclined to deck ourselves out in such florid and fringed moral verbiage; our whole former work has just made us sick of this taste and its sprightly exuberance. They are beautiful, glistening, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge, heroism of the truthful—there is something in them that makes one's heart swell with pride. But we anchorites and marmots have long ago persuaded ourselves in all the secrecy of an anchorite's conscience, that this worthy parade of verbiage also belongs to the old false adornment, frippery, and gold-dust of unconscious human vanity, and that even under such flattering colour and repainting, the terrible original text HOMO NATURA must again be recognized. — Nietzsche

I suppose the same could be said (about) Sisyphus and the stone ... — 180 Proof

Sisyphus doesn't have a choice. I doubt Swan is trapped here in his own personal afterlife unable to die because he's already dead yet unable to truly live because he's forced to do nothing but read our philosophizing all day every day.

Yeah, my metaphor does have its limits, doesn't it? :roll: But also charms if you read me charitably as Swan might.

I would not know what philosophy would even look like if it wasn't continually being applied to everyday real life events.

Philosophers often use thought experiments to test their intuitions, replete with fantasies such as zombies and trolleys.

Yeah. I know.

Many philosophers posit impossible scenarios. Brains in vats are dead. There is never going to be a time where I sit and count people as a means to determine which ones I should push into the oncoming trolley, simply because some 'philosopher' type says I have to do it...

Whatever...

Has anyone had that Nietzschean moment where you come down from the mountain, so to speak, and applied your philosophy to living and to the people around us? I find that if I don’t live up to my philosophies and apply them to life, I get a growing cognitive dissonance. These pangs of conscience, I suppose a sort of hypocrisy, compel me to act. This acting out of a philosophy puts my principles to trial and error (I may refine or lose some here and there] but I feel that I’m not lying to myself. — NOS4A2

Yes indeed. To me that's how ideas are tested, and that's why book learning alone isn't worth much. Life evaluates the books as the books inspire life with new possibilities.

What's it to you..? Maybe ask yourself that. You are supposed to be ignoring me, as claimed in another thread.

Get a room.

All these voices are like an addictive drug. I get stressed in a pleasant way, so my problem is that I tend to find would I should be doing boring. My mind gets revved up. I keep thinking philosophy, philosophy, philosophy.

What, so you can peak through the curtains like the voyeur you obviously are..?

Confusing imagination with reality.

Stop calling me a dude. I'm plenty female.

That must be it.

↪Pfhorrest

Stop calling me a dude. I'm plenty female. — Swan

:smirk:

I welcome disputation and “red pills”. They’re challenging, but act as a grindstone and thickener of the skin. If one never hears another opinion he makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it (paraphrasing Thomas Paine).

Well put. Thomas Paine. One of my all time favorites when it somes to consifering when to decide that the government has made life worse than it would be without it.

:smile:

I sometimes get the feeling that you're a sheep in wolf's clothing.

That's some of what I mean by the red pill --an exposure to voices, voices, voices. And what these voices talk about is the other voices. Interpretations of interpretations of interpretations... — jellyfish

I think my gist may come from my experience with people that take high-doses of red-pill(s) have a high susceptibility to get dogmatic (and lower the receptivity of 'blue pillers' so to speak. crossing over) because it can be easily lost the examination of such voices & readily understanding what these truths mean & filtering through them in a useful fashion. I know for myself, my biggest issue is filtering through the 'right' red pills, such as taking large scale numbers and applying to them intimate settings where they are no longer useful.

Some fall into reckless ideologies - or start falling back into a religious state of mind. Take the scientism crowd for instance - I do not think red pills should become fetishistic placebos for (few joys) we happen to have in life. Moderation in all. Some red-pillers are often unskilled with managing their psychological health in accordance because they think that 'red pills' hold explanatory answers (that MUST be it, 42).

I like to think that I handle 'the voices' well, but too much of anything results in overexposure and high-sensitivity if I do not let myself desensitize in some fashion, because then you just get low-receptive people calling the dogmatics idiots (when they may or may not even be wrong).

Who's complaining about his pronouns now? I thought you were against that kind of thing.

(You know I'm just taking the piss out of you for fun and don't actually give a damn, right?)

But also charms if you read me charitably as Swan might. — 180 Proof

:smirk: — 180 Proof

*Does. :hearts: :kiss:

I welcome disputation and “red pills”. They’re challenging, but act as a grindstone and thickener of the skin. — NOS4A2

Edit: I read that wrong.

Here I agree.

If one never hears another opinion he makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it (paraphrasing Thomas Paine). — NOS4A2

Cannot disagree with that.