Wow, I just made myself conscious--for the first time--that things have me flirting with violence. It's not the kind or amount of violence that would get a movie "rated R for violence" or fill a horrible documentary or news report--it's just throwing reading material to the ground. — WISDOMfromPO-MO
I find (John Michael Greer's) writings on philosophy (which my friend, because of my interest in the subject, has several times recommended to me) to be quite basic and one-dimensiona — Janus
I mentioned in last month’s post here that our familiar term “world” is a rounded-off version of the Old English weorold, “man-old,” the time or age of human beings. That bit of etymology conceals more than one important insight. As I noted last month, it reminds us that this thing we call “the world” isn’t something wholly outside ourselves, something we experience in a detached and objective way. It’s something we create moment by moment in our minds, by piecing together the jumble of unconnected glimpses our senses give us—and we do the piecing according to a plan that’s partly given us by our biology, partly given us by our culture, and partly a function of our individual life experience.
That point is astonishingly easy to forget. I’ve long since lost track of the number of times I’ve watched distinguished scientists admit with one breath that the things we experience around us aren’t real—they’re just representations constructed by our sense organs and brains, reacting to an unimaginable reality of probability waves in four-dimensional space-time—and then go on with the very next breath to forget all that, and act as though matter, energy, space, time, and physical objects exactly as we perceive them are real in the most pigheadedly literal sort of objective sense, as though the human mind has nothing to do with any of them except as a detached observer. What’s more, many of those same scientists proceed to make sweeping claims about what human beings can and can’t know and do, in blithe disregard of the fact that these very claims depend on the same notion of the objective reality of the world of experience that they’ve just disproved. — John Michael Greer
It’s something we create moment by moment in our minds, by piecing together the jumble of unconnected glimpses our senses give us-and we do the piecing according to a plan that’s partly given us by our biology, partly given us by our culture, and partly a function of our individual life experience. — John Michael Greer
The Clenched Fist of Reason — Wayfarer
It's always a difficult thing to decide how ambitious you should be willing to go with the project compared to your skill level though :P It's not easy to decide. I've refused work before that I thought was "too out there" for me.I learned from books and took risks pushing myself to take on ever more ambitious projects which challenged my then current skill level. — Janus
Hmm - I suppose so, but if we are slaves, who is our master then? Because our master wouldn't be society or something external to us, but rather our own drives - our own need to survive, our conatus. So to say we are slaves in this sense entails creating a division in the self. One side of the self (the passions, need for food, shelter, etc.) is divided from the self conceived as a purely rational will. Then we look back at ourselves so to speak, and say that the purely rational self is a slave to our biological drives.What I meant, though, was that we are made slaves in a sense by the very need to earn a living. — Janus
Yes, I agree - the selling element is very important. Getting yourself out there gets you to some of the work, but if you need to grow and get bigger selling plays a crucial role. From what I see in my part of the world, business owners tend to focus mostly on recruiting and sales, and relatively little on the actual work, which is a bit strange. I'm also like you and very much of a perfectionist, so I've always been a bit "afraid" of hiring anyone to pass on work to them, because I know there's very few people who actually make sure the work is perfect, especially if they're not working for themselves.To be effective at the work or at promoting yourself you need to have discipline and application, which means you need to have motivation. I was motivated to the work because I enjoyed learning all the skills, and creating beautiful structures and environments, but I had almost no motivation to promote myself — Janus
Yes that does seem to be a very big problem. Quality always seems to tend to decrease when more people get involved. To a certain extent, in order to grow you need to sacrifice quality and just accept that a certain % of clients will be left with subpar work (and then seek to minimise that). That seems to be in the nature of industrialisation as well, where a certain batch of the products are assumed to end up faulty anyhows (for the sake of producing "in bulk")Because I am a perfectionist and insist, at any cost, on delivering what I promise to my clients, I was forever paying workers to fix problems that would never have occurred if they had listened to my instructions. — Janus
I can't help but laugh at this. You are saying that autonomy of the individual is garbage, as well as science. How does one express themselves for you to listen without autonomy? How do you listen to non-human life and the Earth without organizing that knowledge (science is organized knowledge) into something meaningful to even talk about for others to listen? You dictating what I can talk about is contradictory to your goal of listening, and thinking that such-and-such topic is "garbage" is subjective. Maybe others don't think that and you need to listen to that.
How do you expect to change people who aren't nice, into people who are without manipulating them? How do you expect self-centered people to listen to others without manipulating them - without giving them their right to express their self-centeredness and you listen and be nice? You are simply talking about how you'd like it to be and not everyone feels the same, which means that you'd have to limit what it is that they do or think that YOU don't like in favor of what YOU do like.
Also I like to listen to others except when they become nonsensical or hypocritical. After that, it becomes a waste of my time to listen to them. Once they insult my intelligence with what they say, being nice isn't part of my response. — Harry Hindu
I would say the subject is as much of an objective reality as the object is, — Janus
Of course it is generally accepted that there is a reality which is independent of human minds; no other way of thinking about the world makes any sense. — Janus
I think that this whole Enlightenment/modernist project of autonomous individual subjects objectifying things and using reason to manipulate, control and dominate the world needs to now be rejected. — WISDOMfromPO-MO
The point is, the subject is never an object of perception. We never know the subject as something 'in the world' - it's rather more that the world is something 'in the subject'. ('Every one finds himself to be subject, yet only in so far as he knows, not in so far as he is an object of knowledge.' Schopenhauer, 1) — Wayfarer
In one way, that is true, but in another way it isn't. You're imagining the world outside yourself, with mind 'here', 'inside', and the world 'out there' independently of 'the mind'. But all of this is also taking place in the mind. THE mind is not your mind or my mind - it is the faculty of understanding that exists in every rational sentient being. — Wayfarer
because what we don't see is the very act of seeing. Our seeing is the conditioned consequence of whole chain (of dependent origination, along one axis, and adaptive necessity, along another.) The 'act of seeing' brings all that together, into the subjective unity of consciousness, which is what designates things as "real" or "unreal". — Wayfarer
How is the world "in the subject"? :s If the world is in the subject, then I should expect to have some degree of control over it no? Afterall, one thing that distinguishes my body from the rest of the world is the control I have over it. Control is one of the factors I take into account in distinguishing myself from other things. But I have no control over when the sun rises, and the like. Therefore they aren't "in me".The point is, the subject is never an object of perception. We never know the subject as something 'in the world' - it's rather more that the world is something 'in the subject'. ('Every one finds himself to be subject, yet only in so far as he knows, not in so far as he is an object of knowledge.' Schopenhauer, 1) — Wayfarer
If you're just saying that we don't see the conditions that make sight possible, sure. But this doesn't help us very much...We cannot see the seer - it's like the hand attempting to grasp itself. That might sound trite, but it really isn't, because what we don't see is the very act of seeing. — Wayfarer
I definitely agree with this. Maybe Heidegger does have a point against substance metaphysics of the non-Spinozist kind >:) (although to be fair Spinoza's use of substance is deceiving...)And subjects are certainly "in the world"; they always find themselves in a world with others. As Heidegger points out 'being in the world' is the essence of the being of Dasein; Heidegger actually wants to get away altogether from the whole misleading notion of there being a subject in any substantive sense — Janus
If the world is in the subject, then I should expect to have some degree of control over it no? — Agustino
That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject. Thus it is the supporter of the world, that condition of all phenomena, of all objects which is always presupposed throughout experience; for all that exists, exists only for the subject. Every one finds himself to be subject, yet only in so far as he knows, not in so far as he is an object of knowledge. But his body is object, and therefore from this point of view we call it idea. For the body is an object among objects, and is conditioned by the laws of objects, although it is an immediate object. Like all objects of perception, it lies within the universal forms of knowledge, time and space, which are the conditions of multiplicity. The subject, on the contrary, which is always the knower, never the known, does not come under these forms, but is presupposed by them; it has therefore neither multiplicity nor its opposite unity. We never know it, but it is always the knower wherever there is knowledge. — Schopenhauer
When we see ourselves as a being in the world, then that itself is a representation. — Wayfarer
I definitely agree with this. Maybe Heidegger does have a point against substance metaphysics of the non-Spinozist kind >:) (although to be fair Spinoza's use of substance is deceiving...) — Agustino
Yes, actually we do have quite a bit of control over our digestive and metabolic processes. It's true that we don't have absolute control, but we can influence them. Some people, through meditative practices, can influence them to a greater degree than others - like this guy.Do you have any control over your digestive or metabolic processes? — Wayfarer
So time, space and causality are functions of the brain - and the brain is located in space, time and causality :sFor time, space, and causality, on which all those real and objective events rest, are themselves nothing more than functions of the brain
The subject-object divide is derivative though and learned. It's not given in experience but arrived at through a particular interpretation and way of relating to being. So Schopenhauer is reasoning backwards.That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject. Thus it is the supporter of the world, that condition of all phenomena, of all objects which is always presupposed throughout experience; for all that exists, exists only for the subject — Wayfarer
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