I guess it's hard for me imagine how that bias would feel - just a sense you like the other person but you can't say why? — csalisbury
But, in any case, I think we agree that the desire not to hurt your family, even if condemns you to suffering, seems largely related to their having been close to you, yeah? — csalisbury
But that's the point. The closeness is what causes the suffering. And our closeness to those close enough to suffer is what leads us to prevent that sufferingMost people in the world obviously wouldn't even know if I died, of the few that did, most wouldn't care. The closeness of the family is simply what makes my death cause them suffering int he first place.
But what if everyone looks pretty much the same? — csalisbury
But that's the point. The closeness is what causes the suffering. — csalisbury
Say, for some reason, someone out there in Chicago, on campus, who you didn't personally feel close to, felt v close to you indeed. Who knows why, bizzare. And say you were in deep pain, but you knew your absence would make his or her life very hard. Would you suffer so that he or she didn't? — csalisbury
Reminds me of the creationists who think the world really is only 6000 years old but God/the Devil just made it look like it was 7 billion years old to test our faith/trick us. — darthbarracuda
You will always suffer, no matter what. Distance and closeness both cause suffering; everything causes suffering. — tgw
The closeness of the family is simply what makes my death cause them suffering int he first place. — tgw
This may be a moot point at this point, but I'd like to go back to Schopenhauer's idea of time, and my interpretation of this that in order for us to see time as stretching all the way back to the big bang, we have to have an ever present organism keeping the world of representation present.
This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared, this whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all. — Schop
But if you agree to all of this, I can't make sense of what you mean by there always having to be an organism from the beginning of time, or why you think this is necessary. Clearly it isn't necessary in the above sense. But if you don't mean this, what do you mean? There is the atemporal standing present, but there are no 'beginnings' of that, precisely because it is atemporal.
As for representation being necessary for the will, there is just no plausible reading of the text that supports that position. — The Great Whatever
This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared, this whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all. — Schop
So this I think we interpret the same- consciousness needs to be there in the picture for time to be there. — schopenhauer1
What we do not agree on is that representation is the flip side of Will. My argument is that representation is part of Schop's reality. All might be Will, but Will cannot create representation because create implies cause. How to solve the dilemma? The representation is right along with Will, being its flip side aspect. This means the organism which it is that representation "adheres" with also needs to be part of the flip side aspect. Will is not alone, but has the partner, representation. — schopenhauer1
Yes, but that doesn't mean that the consciousness had to be there 'all along' since the beginning of time. — The Great Whatever
In fact if the subject is the transcendental condition for time, that makes no sense. It would once again be treating time as either transcendentally real, instead of ideal, or as some kind of empirical object for the subject to be 'in.' — The Great Whatever
Representation is only the flip side of some very small parts of will. Most will does not objectify itself, and does not partake in representation at all. Even in representing animals, pleasure and pain, which are at the core of our lives, are not representations at all but direct affections of the will. — The Great Whatever
But it does. If consciousness is not there all along, how could it "come along" when Will has no "time" prior to the "time-in-consciousness" for there to be such a "first" or "prior to"? — schopenhauer1
This seems like a TGW interpretation. — schopenhauer1
You may only be able to talk about it as to what it is not, but not otherwise positive things other than what we can gleam from what we see from the perspective of a subject to object which is that everything is Will and it strives. — schopenhauer1
There is an atemporal present in which the subject exists, but since it is atemporal, there's no sense in which this can have been there 'since the beginning,' since beginnings exist only in time.
I really don't know what else to say about this unless you elaborate further on what your issue is. Repeating it isn't helping. — The Great Whatever
Schopenhauer is quite clear that representation is a function only of animals. — The Great Whatever
This is simply wrong. The way Schop. introduces the notion of will is through our own primitive knowledge of it through our own identity with it, via movements of our body and pleasure and pain. There is no subject/object distinction in these areas, though Schop. does say the form of time remains in some rudimentary form there (this latter point I would dispute, and admit it is my own interpretation, not his).
it is important to rememeber that Schop. thinks we are the thing in itself. For this reason we do not only glean what we can from observation, we also inhabit it. — The Great Whatever
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