So I am not sure what you are getting at. — schopenhauer1

Do you believe that being an airatarian is conceivable dietary choice?

Foremost Breatharian, Jasmuheen, formerly Ellen Greve, is credited with starting today's Breatharian movement. Her Prana Program advises followers to convert to Breatharianism gradually: Become a vegetarian; become a vegan; move to raw foods, then fruits, then liquids and finally prana. You replace physical food with air and light as well as metaphysical nourishment.

Apokrisis thinks that we should X, so we should X. — schopenhauer1

Why do you persist with this strawman? I simply point out that there are constraints. And so also the resulting freedoms.

You can pick your nose or scratch you bum and it makes no difference to me. You just can't pick my nose or scratch my bum without some very good medical reason and appropriate qualifications. :razz:

Not really what I am getting at. Rather, why we do anything. Our motivation. Our goals. Our decisions. It isn't simply dictated by instinctual drives. It isn't even that we have some learning mechanisms. We have symbolic brains that make meaning of the world by parsing them out into conceptual frameworks, by iterative interactions of individual and the group. — schopenhauer1

So now you are rehashing what I said about semiosis in humans involving a hierarchy of levels.

But @180 Proof said it. The giving of lingusitic reasons for every action we take is (mostly) ex post facto rationalizations. A rational society doesn't require that kind of deliberation beyond the point that it has some collective utility.

We aren't doing things because apokrisis thinks there needs to be balance. — schopenhauer1

Strawman.

It's just apokrisis' ideas on X, nothing more. — schopenhauer1

Again you have utterly failed to reply to my argument, just tried to strawman your way out of it in tedious fashion.

Indeeed, to sum up the OP, our wants/needs (reasons) are not our own i.e. we didn't choose them nor were we consulted when they were installed in our minds and to that extent it is a cross to bear. I wish I was an airatarian but I'm not and that statement encapsulates the key point in the OP.

I wish life were an endlessly fascinating riddle to be solved.

Oh wait. It is!

I wish life were an endlessly fascinating riddle to be solved.

Oh wait. It is! — apokrisis

Ok, but there's gotta be something you don't like about yourself, oui monsieur? Nobody's that perfect!

Life in general is like that. A mix of general constraints and particularised choices. We can turn food into a moral dilemma. But we still must eat food. Go figure. And I didn’t invent this world. I just comment on how it is. — apokrisis

Having a good understanding of how the world works is a prerequisite for living life in relative comfort and avoiding the worst that it has to throw at you. It is good advice to tell someone that they must learn to set more modest expectations for reality; to correctly perceive nature and by doing so learn to participate in it. Go with the flow.

That being said, the human mind dreams about how the world could be better, even if it contradicts fundamental constraints of reality. It is in the nature of a human being that they will strive for conditions that are impossible to attain.

Perhaps if a square were conscious, it might wish it were a cube - but it is stuck in two-dimensional geometry. If reality is a river, then humans are the little eddies that briefly emerge, opposing the current, before being swallowed up again.

Metaphors aside, humans want more than reality can provide. We always have and we always will.

That being said, the human mind dreams about how the world could be better, even if it contradicts fundamental constraints of reality. — _db

My argument is that this is a historically recent thing. And predicated on the "unlimited" energetic resources unleashed by the Industrial Revolution.

The Enlightenment was the precursor in it got us thinking about how to transcend the old social order to become more rationally organised as a species.

But inadvertently that led to the world of "satanic mills". Dreams of better became dreams of power and consumption.

@schopenhauer1 says this means the whole Enlightenment project is a sham, a ruse, an enslavement. I say it could be merely the right dream derailed. We could fix it.

(Of course that is a little too late now. We don't have the controls even to lay our hands on.)

Metaphors aside, humans want more than reality can provide. We always have and we always will. — _db

Ever had contact with people living simple lives? It isn't that impossible to match your ambition to your possibilities. It is only been a short time – since the industrial revolution – that the dream of being the "limitless" species has become socially institutionalised.

Just do it, as the adverts say. And why would they say that?

We don't know this. Reason may be a more or less affair, with sudden leaps in capacities due to the development of something like the language faculty (which animals lack, though they don't lack communication) and the emergence of self-consciousness.

Animals may have rudimentary reason, though less likely self-consciousness or reflection. But we cannot rule this out. Reasons can lead us to problems, sure, but they offer solutions to problems, which is rather helpful.

development of something like the language faculty (which animals lack, though they don't lack communication) and the emergence of self-consciousness. — Manuel

Yes, I said as much that it has to do with language in my OP.

Do you believe that being an airatarian is conceivable dietary choice? — apokrisis

Traditional practicing Jainists reason to die of starvation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sallekhana

So yeah people can even "reason" to starve themselves to death. It's rare, but that's not the point. The point is there is no fixed instincts anymore. There are definitely drives, but through the mediation of our language-cultural-personality contexted brains, it doesn't just present as.. see food/eat food as you well know.

A rational society doesn't require that kind of deliberation beyond the point that it has some collective utility. — apokrisis

And that brings me to the larger point that you seem to be giving a prescription for a description. We SHOULD do X is a prescription. But there is no one way that LIFE (for humans) has to proceed. We CAN decide to not have children, to suicide, to do any number of things. There is much contingency in human decisions. Of course we are limited.. by gravitation, by the laws of the physical universe.. But that would be a gross straw man to equivocate that with the types of human reasons I am discussing here. To do so would be either highly ignorant or purposefully misleading. Either way, it would be incorrect.

The point is there is no fixed instincts anymore. — schopenhauer1

Still strawmanning.

But that would be a gross straw man to equivocate that with the types of human reasons I am discussing here. — schopenhauer1

My point is that existence is a hierarchy of constraints. And that constraints indeed define the freedoms at each stage.

You are thus not free to choose your freedoms. They emerge from the system of constraints. That is why you can complain that your choices are imposed on you and feel like a burden. Or instead, you can be grateful to have so much sophisticated choice in living a human level of life.

My point is that existence is a hierarchy of constraints. And that constraints indeed define the freedoms at each stage.

You are thus not free to choose your freedoms. They emerge from the system of constraints. — apokrisis

So how was I not agreeing here in different wording?

Of course we are limited.. by gravitation, by the laws of the physical universe.. But that would be a gross straw man to equivocate that with the types of human reasons I am discussing here. — schopenhauer1

Anyways, now we are just talking past each other. You are trying to describe the emergence of degrees of freedom, and I am talking about what it means to have these freedoms as a species. The implications of being a species with reasons rather than mainly instincts (I will include in that conditioning, etc.).
.

Anyways, now we are just talking past each other. — schopenhauer1

That is another way of saying you were strawmanning me. :up:

I mean, I have no problem with your theory of constraints.. As far as I know that's not too controversial.. Maybe a bit beyond the physics to a sort of meta-physics (in the literal sense of the meta theory of the field of physics). But the topic of having reasons that I am discussing is what it means to be a species that has reasons.. The fact that we can do things a different way.. That there is no right way for anything. Any time you put a goal in mind, you are simply putting your "spin" on it. I called that a hypothetical imperative. Yes, if you WANT that, one way to get that is THIS. But no one has to want that by necessity nor do it in that way that is prescribed.

Any time you try to define a "way" you are now just giving your "reason". That is fine, but the ruse comes in when you mistake the reason for a definitive REASON as if it is a necessity. Rather, it's what you think makes sense, but that's just what you think. It aligns with your reasons and reasonsings. At best, it's a hypothetical imperative for providing ways to attain ends, which people may want or not want.

But the topic of having reasons that I am discussing is what it means to be a species that has reasons.. The fact that we can do things a different way.. That there is no right way for anything. — schopenhauer1

To have reasons but no purposes is incoherent.

As humans, we are constrained by meanings. Our worlds are constructed to have preferences and intentions that we can actually apply our intelligence to.

You seem to be conflating the two senses of the word "reason". One talks about our reason to aim our efforts towards some end. The other talks about how we could then rationally act towards that purpose.

So one is the final cause, the other the formal cause. They do go together in being the downward acting causes in the Aristotelean causal analysis – the complex systems approach. But this seems a sign of how your argument is all confused.

Any time you put a goal in mind, you are simply putting your "spin" on it. I called that a hypothetical imperative. Yes, if you WANT that, one way to get that is THIS. But no one has to want that by necessity nor do it in that way that is prescribed. — schopenhauer1

And so we disappear back into your confused story where all possible desires are simply arbitrary and dispensible.

We can eat only air and starve. That is "reasonable" as one could decide this is a good way to die.

If your goal is indeed death, then wouldn't it be reasonable to pick what you consider the best way out?

What would be your preferred choice? Your worldview might demand it be as horrible and messy an exit as can be imagined as that would be most in keeping with the extreme pessimist perspective on how nasty it is to be alive in any way. :smile: