You want my primary, or secondary reaction to your OP?

The primary is that it makes my hair wants to escape my scalp.

The secondary is non-existent (MY secondary; I am not speaking for others), because please see my "agnosticism" thread. I tried to prove, inconclusively at best, that you must believe in something; but some people debunked my argument, and now I am freed to not believe anything.

Freedom is liberating, but it hurts.

Beware binary, either-or, thinking.
Beware classification as an extension of binary thinking.
Beware thinking as avoidance of living.

Value and savor the strawberry. And then value and savor the memory.

http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans/18aparable.html :
Buddha told a parable in sutra:

A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.

Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

Beware binary, either-or, thinking.
Beware classification as an extension of binary thinking.
Beware thinking as avoidance of living. — tim wood

... Beware thinking as a replacement for thinking.

The first order reaction is mainly instinctual, emotional, and prone to conditioning. The second order reaction is where meta-beliefs take place. — Shawn

Not being a philosopher I interpret this as instinctive (fight or flee), and thoughtful (typical low-pressured problem solving). Am I missing a subtlety? Is this philosophy? :roll:

Is this philosophy? — jgill

Now, that's a doser of a question. We know "you can't step twice in a river with the same foot forward" is philosophy, but "what is our first response to events" takes thousands of years to debate whether it's philosophy or not.

I use the following practical guide to decide what's philosophy and what's something else:

"Philosophy... is a walk on a slippery rock, religion... is a light in fog. Philosophy... is a talk on some cereal box, religion... is a smile on a dog." -- Edie Brickell.

This actually gives more of a definition to religion than to philosophy... it gives some limitations to what philosophy has as characteristics (in the first of Brickell's sentences), but it gives no guiding descriptive meaning in its definition.

So... very sorry, but you are on your own in finding the answer to your question.

It just is a philosophy of mind notion that might be elucidating if people thought of other people as behaviorist automata...

The central thesis is a dichotomy between two modes of thought: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. — Wikipedia on 'Thinking, Fast and Slow'

I think the Stoics would agree with this proposition. We do not have control over a thing, merely control over our reaction to it.

Bingo! :up: