The way you've presented the emotion-reason duet as a partnership rather than a rivalry is not wrong per se, in fact it's a truth only a fool would deny.

However, a different line of questioning will help in bringing out which of the two is the one who wears the pants in this relationship. Which would you prefer? Reason OR Emotion? This is an exclusive OR disjunction meaning only one must be selected to the exclusion of the other. I bet most if not all people will choose reason over emotion any day but that's just my opinion of course. I'd be very surprised indeed if people answered my question differently.

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That's okay, I am being sincere when I say that the problem has me pretty stumped and I'm definitely working on intuition, among other things, in order to try and tackle it.

If I am understanding your criticism correctly, you are also suggesting that my answer to the problem makes it harder for me to consider and trust any other answer charitably. Would this be a fair assessment? Or does this not really reflect what you were saying?

I definitely feel embarrassed by all my attempts to answer the question. As you'd think the writer of the question would have some say.

If we apply the rules of creating riddles, is my interpretation of the answer, the answer? Or am I only saying that to win a game? — MSC

:point: In Defense Of The Defenders Of Reason

All I'm saying is your view on the issue - the possibility that there could be more than one personality inhabiting an individual - needs to be taken seriously or, at the very least, can't be laughed off the stage.

Moral absolutism would necessitate that moral universalism be true, yes, but proving some moral principle is absolute is a bigger task than proving that whatever is moral is moral to everyone. So to prove moral absolutism you would pretty much have to prove moral universalism along the way... which is why absolutism necessitates universalism. — Pfhorrest

I agree :up:

At face value, is there something philosophical to be written about it?
I've thought of a lot of reasonable answers to it, but none of them seem to come close to the real issue, by engaging with the problem, you enter into a language game where the same rules apply. You are effectively deciding for yourself if you have answered correctly or not. And the entire game of who wins and loses is a foregone conclusion. Ultimately, your answer says more about you than it does about what the objectively true answer might be. If the answer is that; the person playing themselves decides what the answer is, but I watch you engaging with the same problem then what can I say about your answer? Did you win and lose at the same time? Did you already decide the outcome before the match started?
What if we had changed a rule? If the rule had been that black moves first and the same moves had been made out of a 53 move total, would black have won? If I say that a part of me wanted to win, and a part of me wanted to lose then aren't I saying I held two contradictory beliefs at once? Is it even possible to consider it a game if the winner is also the loser? What if the game takes 53 days and you make a move as black on even numbers and as white on odd numbers?

If we say the game was a stalemate, then we are changing the rules of chess. A checkmate is only possible if someone wins and loses, so how could the game be a stalemate?
Is the game actually between the writer of the problem and the problem solver? Or am I just as unable to provide an answer we can be reasonably certain is true, as you are?
My own answer is just to say "I am reasonably sure that I think there is a paradox here.". Its the closest I can get to an objectively true answer. But I too am under the spell of being in a language game with myself by answering it. I can choose to believe I solved something, even though for the purpose of the game I had to have also pretend I didn't know what the answer was in order to play the game. A part of me had a conclusion that had to be correct and another part that had concluded incorrectly in order to play the game instead of rejecting it as a useless and meaningless exercise.

Rejecting it as a useless and meaningless exercise, is also still an attempt to answer it. So is still a part of the game of playing against ourselves. — MSC

All I'm doing is working with you and your intuition on the subject at hand. It is quite clear that if I utter an obvious contradiction such as "I am here and I am not here" alarm bells go off inside my head but when the contradiction is buried under a mass of ideas as is usually the case, it slips through our inconsistency/contradiction, or if you prefer, bullshit, detector and gets incorporated into what then becomes a self-refuting worldview or belief system.

Notice however that once an inconsistency is discovered, the one holding it becomes embarrassed and immediately kicks off a campaign to remove the inconsistency. Does this mean that the ubiquitous presence of inconsistencies in our beliefs means only that the volume of ideas we have to deal with make it nigh impossible to detect them and that it isn't true that there are two or more personalities involved?

Possibly but how does one explain internal conflicts - contradictory desires - which your chess enthusiast who's playing against himself represents? It looks like there are two things to consider here - emotion and reason. These two aspects of our psyche are not always usually not in agreement. Emotion seems to bypass the rational part of our mind and elicits immediate responses - attraction/repulsion/indifference. Once the rational half of the mind kicks in it, by force of habit, weighs the pros and cons and sometimes, not always, it decides, with good reasons to back it up, that our response (attraction/repulsion/indifference) is totally inappropriate - issues of cost, practicality, etc. crop up. By no means is this final word on the topic though. I'm simply offering an interpretation that's as old as the hills - I believe it goes right back to Socrates and Plato.

My favorite technique, not because it's the best but because it's the one I use most often, is trial and error. It doesn't require genius - children use it - but you have to be patient - it's time consuming.

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@Hippyhead :rofl:

do agree with you that philosophy is esoteric in itself and it does contain many puzzles.
I will continue walking in the mazes of my soapbox opera of a life and maybe you will write your futuristic novel. At some point I want to write a novel, possibly of the steampunk genre.
Perhaps the esoteric matter of philosophy can be expressed better in fiction and a lot of philosophers have written fiction as well as non fiction — Jack Cummins

I suggest you type in "problem philosophy" and "paradox" in Google's search box and you'll probably end up with a list that'll keep you busy in the universe's esoteric department for the rest of your life which I hope is going to be blissful and long.

They are both good responses though. Not dull to me. There is a third option however, that the person playing with themselves are not just them self but also someone else too. The more you think about identity the more you start to wonder who really won the game. Which part of you won, which part of you lost? If the answer is, a part of you wanted to win and a part of you wanted to lose, you end up with a paradox of belief where we are forced to accept that a person can believe and desire two things at once, even though those two things are in complete opposition to each other.

Lets expand on the problem a bit and not focus on the creative side of it too much, as I did put some detail into the problem that is more so just to be entertaining and it draws your attention away from the content of the problem.

Thank you for engaging with this by the way. I'm trying to test this paradox to see if it is worth putting into the start of my book.

Now, the game ended on the 27th move and white won. Which means between both players, there was a total of 53 moves made.

Let's say the match started on a Monday, and only one of the 53 moves was made each day. Which means the match took 54 days to complete. The game didn't end until black looked at the board to find out they had lost on the 54th day. This means that every second day you tried to win as black and every odd numbered day you played to win as white. — MSC

You've hit upon a very intriguing fact. We're all accustomed to, in philosophy especially, consistency as a necessary feature of the rational mind. If I were to say god exists and then deny it, whether explicitly or in some implicatory sense, people would immediately call me out on it. I daresay most of us subscribe to a worldview with contradictions, obvious and not so obvious. One way of making sense of this would be to say that two different personalities are involved - one of them believes in, say, X and the other doesn't.

Watch this video:

"Philosophy can be said to consist of three activities: to see the commonsense answer, to get yourself so deeply into the problem that the common sense answer is unbearable, and to get from that situation back to the commonsense answer.” - Wittgenstein — Paul

At this point I feel the need to ask, what is common sense? Also, most importantly, is Wittgenstein's observation on philosophy something someone just using common sense would say? I'd say if everything is simply a matter of common sense it takes a person with an uncommon sense to notice it - someone like Wittgenstein for example - and that amounts to self-refutation.

How do you think Susan and Socrates would behave, if for example a psychiatrist traveled back in time and gave Socrates a diagnosis? Would Susan feel more at home if she went back in time? Or vice versa? — telex

Did you forget about religion and the widespread belief in evil spirits? The word "deamon" also means an [evil] spirit I believe. What about belief in bodily humors as a basis for disease? However, the psychiatrist, if well-trained and qualified, a psychiatrist worth his/her salt, would put beliefs in the context of the relevant time-period and should, in my humble opinion, withhold the diagnosis of schizophrenia in Susan and Socrates.

Interesting thought, much similar to my own. I too, after many videos on youtube and some book I read when I was young, believed that the vastness of the cosmos must be taken into consideration before we act/react in/to reality. Thinking this way, according to some, puts things in [the right] perspective or so its claimed but then it doesn't take long for the state of mind thus achieved- advertised as sagacious equipoise - to be violently undone by the very things such a mindset proposes we ignore. Like you said:

Watch out for the predator, and grab the banana, that's how we survived this far. — Hippyhead

Jesus was in communion with God, no less but it took only 3 nails to kill him. Am I off topic? :grin:

I do agree that the fundamental basis is based on knowledge of oneself. This is the main problem with the selflessnes preached in some religious teachings. I was told by my parents and others to be selfless and I know that I made a lot of wrong choices based on this. — Jack Cummins

I suppose so.

Also, with regard to empathy the particular basis of it is also founded on the ability to conceive of other people's minds. I did work with people on the autistic spectrum and read research in this area and one major idea was that people with autism have difficulty relating to others and lack empathy because they lack awareness of others' mental approach although I do think that this may well be due to deficiencies in ego development — Jack Cummins

I hope so.

Other way around: moral absolutism can only be true if moral universalism is true. But universalism can be true — every particular event can be non-relatively good or bad or permissible or impermissible etc — without moral absolutism being true — without every instance of a general kind of action always being good or bad etc regardless of circumstances. — Pfhorrest

Indeed, moral universalism, the way it's defined in terms of the domain of its validity, it being universally applicable, enjoys a degree of freedom that seems almost necessary if one wants morality to be, well, universal given the fact that no moral truths that are absolute have been uncovered. Moral universalism is more of an attitude than a moral truth in this sense; like a band of thieves voting unanimously that a given code of honor will apply to all members with no exceptions despite having no real reason for it be so. It looks like if moral absolutes are real, it would serve as the best justification for moral universalism. Am I correct?

When your opponent is you, thinking ahead courts defeat because you've likely already decided which colour is going to win and which will lose. Meaning if you have decided that black is going to lose, you are going to lose as black. You will also win as white. You will have effectively won and lost the same game of chess. Is this even still winning?

So is it possible to play yourself at chess and still have it be called a game? Or can a game only happen between two players each with one colour, not one player with two? — MSC

Aah! I had an inkling that's what you were driving at. Let's analyze this logically shall we? First things first, there are three possible outcomes in a game (of chess):

1) Win
2) Lose
3) Draw

The three outcomes are mutually exclusive and and jointly exhaustive. It isn't possible for more than one of them to be true and at least one of them has to be true. In these few words lie the answer to your question. Given what I said, it's logically impossible that the same person both win and lose and this is exactly what happens when you play with yourself.

Either

1. You're not playing [a game] at all, as implied by the contradiction (reductio ad absurdum)

Or

2. Playing with yourself must be considered an exception to the rule that the same person can't both win and lose

1 is clearly not the case since you are playing albeit with yourself. So, 2 must be the correct choice here. The idea that winning and losing are contraries must be abandoned but only when you have yourself as an opponent. In other words, it's possible for the same person to win and lose. A dull as ditchwater solution to a seemingly interesting problem.

The problem lies in the rules of people and the little language games they play. — MSC

I'm thoroughly confused here. Do you mind explaining?

Ultimately the only way to make a game with yourself a real challenge is to play reactively, to not think multiple steps ahead but just focus on the next move. — MSC

This is like asking someone to satisfy their hunger without eating Isn't stratregizing the whole point of chess? Thinking multiple steps ahead of your opponent is the essence of chess. To not do that would be to not understand the spirit of the game.

Moral absolutism is the belief that all actions are intrinsically right or wrong, there being no circumstances that could put that into doubt. In other words, something like stealing or murder is wrong anywhere and everytime as per this definition. — TheMadFool

Just a small point of clarification for now:

The opposite of moral relativism is moral objectivism or universalism, not necessarily "absolutism".

Moral absolutism is the opposite of things like consequentialism, such as (for a Christian example for you) "situationism".

You can be a non-absolutist, like a consequentialist, while still being an objectivist or universalist, not a relativist. — Pfhorrest

:up:

Moral universalism (also called moral objectivism) is the meta-ethical position that some system of ethics, or a universal ethic, applies universally, that is, for "all similarly situated individuals",[1] regardless of culture, race, sex, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, or any other distinguishing feature. — Wikpedia

This is possible only if moral absolutism is true, right? On what basis other than moral absolutism can moral universalism be a valid position?

I don't believe that [white has an advantage] at all. I said White statistically wins more often. — MSC

Isn't that a contradiction?

The meaning of the OP is more nuanced than that — MSC

Highly likely as I'm a total failure when it comes to nuances.

I'm talking about the rules of playing chess with yourself and the entire thing is supposed to tell a story. — MSC

To be honest, it doesn't make sense to play with yourself although I do recommend masturbation as an occasional fun activity. You know your own intentions and the scenario reduces to a game between "two" omniscient players viz. you and yourself. There can be no real winner in the sense of one outwitting the other and that is the sense in which winners are defined.

If a winner emerges then there are two possibilities:

1. It has to do with game mechanics like the advantage you mentioned white has.

2. You making a mistake when playing one side and noticing it when you play the other side.

I asked you who won? — MSC

Well, you framed the question in a way that suggested you were under the impression that the player playing white had an unfair advantage. No, s/he doesn't.

I would like to know what is un-relative(absolute moral?)moral?And what is relative moral theories?I am a Christian then I need to know those to practice the absolute moral. — nguyen dung

Moral absolutism is the belief that all actions are intrinsically right or wrong, there being no circumstances that could put that into doubt. In other words, something like stealing or murder is wrong anywhere and everytime as per this definition.

I don't know any principles in ludology or game theory that states that the side that makes the first move is at an advantage/disadvantage but I can tell you this: in chess each side gets an equal opportunity to play either black or white. So if there's a tournament with 4 matches between two players, each side plays white twice out of these 4 matches. Shouldn't that level the playing field?

Egoism needs to be balanced with compassion — Jack Cummins

As far as I can see, compassion boils down to being able to put yourself in another person's shoes - feel what s/he feels - and this ability is called empathy, it's the bedrock of the ubiquitous moral principle known as the golden rule.

Notice though that the measure used in compassion, empathy, and the golden rule, is the self. Compassion and its retinue of beliefs/emotions is all about getting in touch with the feelings of others. That, however, is restricted/privileged information - it's impossible to know what another person is actually thinking/feeling. The only option then is to imagine yourself into other people's situation and get an idea of what you yourself would feel in it. In other words, you're confined, even in the most selfless sense of true compassion, to your own ego.

I don't think that's entirely true. One book on philosophy, actually critical thinking but critical thinking is the meat-and-potatoes of philosophy, I read went out of its way to point out that looking at issues from all sides - all perspectives - will give a more complete, truer, picture of reality. That's relativity, right?

That said, philosophy has the notion of objective truth, truth that doesn't, shouldn't, change with perspective and oddly, many of these objective truths are intimately tied to physical properties like mass and spatial extension which, Einstein's theory demonstrates, are relative. It looks like philosophical objectivity, if the best examples of it are the physical properties mass and spatial extension, is nothing more than a fairy tale.

Then there's the matter of personal bias. Bringing your own personal perspective makes for a fine contribution in a group discussion but what we have to watch out for is biases/prejudices which will, according to the experts, distort the truth in such a way that it seems pleasing to your eyes but you know for a fact, all that glitters is not gold. Objectivity then is a way of avoiding this pitfall that waits with infinite patience for the unwary traveler. If by relativity in philosophy you mean to include even ]personal bias then it's something undesirable and thus must be steered clear off.

Can we institute an automatic ban on anyone who uses this phrase in an OP? — Banno

There doesn't seem to be an issue if you look up the word's definition, theory (noun): a plausible [or scientifically acceptable] set of general principles or body of principles offered to explain phenomena

Maybe I'm missing something.

Thank you - This publication was the first time I made it public, and I am honored to have the first positive feedback from someone other than from Brazil - — Gus Lamarch

:up:

Comes to mind the view that a psychiatrist is from one viewpoint a prostitute: he or she gives you as a professional service something that satisfies a need that usually would be given in a functioning intimate relationship with another person. Yet the relationship is made easy as he or she is a professional and you are his or her patient. And you pay for this service.

Yet I think that people that use a porter for their luggage aren't in any way incapable of doing the task themselves if they use a porter. They could indeed use a trolley themselves easily, but if there are people working as porters, let's say on an airport, railway station or in a hotel, they will use the services of a porter as they don't want to look to be parsimonious and understand that porters have low income. So why to be stingy and not pay 5 bucks or so for some ease? After all, you have reserved and hence bought a room in an expensive hotel. — ssu

Yes, the details are a bit sketchy with my analogy as you've noticed. The exchange between a porter and the person who employs one isn't equal - the porter usually gets the short end of the stick. Also, it's not always the case that someone hires a porter because the luggage is too heavy to handle - sometimes people are just plain lazy.

However, there's enough of a resemblance between real porters and my hypothetical ones to get my point across.

My point with this publication is to be approved and my article to be edited for the articles section of the forum. The discussion can start after that moment. — Gus Lamarch

Good Luck, It's a well-written piece of work and in the end I did agree with you :grin:

I explicitly focus only on humanity. I do not consider the essence of other animals or other beings in my article. — Gus Lamarch

Even among humans there's a gradation in intelligence that matches the gradation in morality. Apart from the familiar trope of hyper-intelligent super-villains in comics and movies, most philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, most scholars, who make up the brains of society are, well, good people. When was the last time you heard of a scandal involving a philosopher? Even if you did, it's rare, very rare indeed.

The greatest virtue should be your own well-being. — Gus Lamarch

At this point I'd like to call on stage the notion of altruism by which I mean taking an interest in the well-being of others. There are two forms altruism can take that don't differ in terms of outcomes - both forms manifest as being good to others - but they're different nonetheless - different in their rationale.

One form of altruism I'll refer to as my altruism - she is my wife, he is my friend, this is my family, community, town, city, state, country, world, and last but not the least, universe.. This type of altruism is a case of one's ego expanding itself to include other things like those I mentioned above. In essence this is still egoism because the other people/things you care about have value only because of their association to you.

The other kind of altruism is what I call your altruism - I am your husband, I am your friend, I am your son, I am your citizen, your tenant (of the universe). In yours altruism you submit yourself to someone else's ego and this type of altruism can be taken to the extreme - to the point where your ego completely disappears from the set of equations that describe reality.

Since the outcomes are indistinguishable betwen these two varieties of altruism, from a consequentialist standpoint, egoism seems compatible with virtue and morality and if you really look at it my egoism makes more sense than your egoism because in the former case everyone benefits but in the latter there's someone who doesn't, viz you.

I'm not playing your games. Your inability after numerous requests to give a clear explanation of your terms demonstrates that you yourself don't understand what you're saying.

I give you the last word in this fruitless exchange. — EricH

Sorry if it seems like I'm playing games. I'm not. What I've said is what (I think) is the truth which is that there's no real attribute that can be said to unite the contents of our universe as one single unit apart from what can be referred to as their thingness.

Well, I find philosophy, in and of itself, pretty esoteric. Things you see discussed in philosophy and its allied subjects logic and math are either possessed of a deepness and profundity or are entirely devoid of these attributes and both states are of great interest to anyone seeking truth in one form or another. Might I add that despite the immense volumes written on philosophical matters it only takes a little bit of investigative effort to come to the realization that the foundations of philosophy are littered with unsolved, and probably unsolvable ( :sad: ) puzzles.

Are you looking for temporary or permanent transfer? — Possibility

The first step would be to investigate the feasibility of such a transfer. Is it possible?

Now that I think of it, I think it's a great plot for a movie/play/book in a futuristic setting.

I don't think such a service is possible, and I think the closest thing you're going to get to relieving psychological pain is drugs. — BitconnectCarlos

I was thinking about something with no minuses whatsoever - between the porter who carries your bags and you there's no net loss - you're disburdened and the porter gets paid. A win-win situation.

I suppose psychiatry comes closest to what I have in mind. The only difference is that the "porters" I'm talking about relieve you of stress that's considered normal like worrying about your family, exam anxiety, fear of death, grieving over a loved one's death.

The topic here is the question, 'Is Technology a New Religion,' you are talking about people deriving pleasure or satisfaction from religion. — JerseyFlight

Although I'm not referring to religion per se, the question is about whether technology is a religion.

Scroll down to Google's Vocabulary Test

You'll be asked the question: Which word is similar to the word "object"?

Your notion of natural egoism is a description of a fact and means, all living things, humans included, are naturally egoistic. We could say that egoism is our baseline attitude or approach to reality.

However, virtue, by extension morality, is, as you already know, about ought, distinctly not, in fact antagonistic to, is. In essence then virtues and morality are born in an environment of dissastisfaction, our difficulty with accepting the natural state of being which likely includes your notion of natural egoism. Now, I'm not denying the fact of natural egoism; I'm only asking that you consider the possibility that it may not be a virtue. After all, egoism is part of the complex of attributes that represent what is in moral terms the is of our nature and we know that virtues and morality are, on the whole, rejections of this our natural state of being.

Too, consider another aspect of the issue. You made a mention of rational egoism and we would be tempted to think that egoism has something to do with rationality. Yet, animals without brains behave exclusively in an egoistic manner. To that add the fact that only animals with more advanced brains behave non-egoistically although not exclusively so. I don't know about you but to me this suggests that there's something irrational about egoism.

My two cents.

Who was right on certainty...Descartes or Lichtenburg?

Wittgenstein — Banno

:rofl: :up:

Yet as you must be aware, language is a source of confusion like no other, especially when used by people who don't actually think it means anything... — Olivier5

:up:

Are you seriously suggesting that radio waves and thoughts are physical objects at the human scale? — EricH

We're in search of something that runs like a thread through all physical phenomena, in effect unifying them, just as producing milk for offspring unifies a segment of the living world as mammals.

Your question is odd since you brought up the issue atoms. Doesn't that make anything, radio and thoughts, fair game for this discussion? By the way, the wavelength of radiowaves are, if I'm correct, in the meters and that's human scale, right?