You mean bone-headed, dismissive reason.reductive Reason — Gnomon
Except that sex gets stale, money does not.Sex is like money: some people have a lot of it, most people have some but nothing to brag about, and some don't have any. — _db
It is not. At least not mathematically. "Times" is the inverse of division. Try, ten times weaker. Does that sound like the phrase "5 times fewer"?It seems like a poor use of phrasing many people use. — TiredThinker
I'm not following what's going on in the war. Who did bad faith?You can't negotiate with bad faith. It's why the whole thing started anyway: a party that makes clear that they are only willing to deal in bad faith makes thereby clear that they understand only one thing: lethal force. — baker
If I've come across an explanation I will post it here.While I’m hesitant to accept this, I won’t reject it either, without some proper argument to judge it by. — Mww
While I haven't explained how we broke away from the collective awareness, the plurality, to self-consciousness, I'm telling you that there was no reasoning or deduction that went into it. Rational thinking of the "I" did not happen before when there was only the "we". When Descartes, for example, wrote the meditation, he wasn't starting from the beginning of self-awareness. Descartes, after all, was operating in the modern world, where our knowledge was already sophisticated and advance..from which the deduction of the self must have already been established, insofar as there must already be that to which the understanding of “we” belongs. Hence the presupposed necessary singular subject. — Mww
Yes, I admit we're both struggling and grappling with this idea that humans didn't begin thinking in the "I" tense. It's hard to understand that we didn't have this. What we did have in the primordial understanding of everything was the "we".Can’t have an understanding without that which understands. That the self to which understanding belongs, represented as “I”, is only a speculative metaphysical determination of pure reason. — Mww
The freedom which therefore cannot be encountered in the operari must lie in the esse. It has been a fundamental error of all ages, an unwarranted inversion (hysteron-proteron), to attribute necessity to the esse and freedom to the operari. The converse is true: freedom lies in the esse alone, but the operari follows necessarily from it and the motives.
From what we do we know what we are. On this, and not on the pre sumed liberum arbitrium indifferentiae, rests the conscious ness of responsibility and the moral tendency of life. Every thing depends on what one is; what he does will follow therefrom of itself, as a necessary corollary. The consciousness of self-determination and originality which undeniably ac companies all our acts, and by virtue of which they are our acts, is therefore not deceptive, in spite of their dependence on motives.
But its true content reaches further than the acts and begins higher up. In truth it includes our being and essence itself, from which all acts proceed necessarily when motives arise. In this sense that consciousness of self-determination and originality, as well as the consciousness of responsibility accompanying our actions, can be compared to a hand which points to an object more remote than the one nearer by to which it seems to be pointing. In a word: man does at all times only what he wills, and yet he does this necessarily.
…
Consequently, my exposition does not eliminate freedom. It merely moves it out, namely, out of the area of simple actions, where it demonstrably cannot be found, up to a region which lies higher, but is not so easily accessible to our knowledge. In other words, freedom is transcendental. And this is also the sense in which I should like to interpret the statement of Malebranche,3 la liberte est un mystere, under whose aegis the present dissertation has attempted to solve the problem set by the Royal Society.
So then the one thing we could deduce from it is that there was no understanding of self prior, since there was no understanding of singular subject. It's a primordial phenomenon that there was no "I" consciousness. It's hard to wrap one's head around it but that's what philosophers have posited.Except understanding itself presupposes a necessary singular subject, which couldn’t be any other that an “I”. “We” only indicates a multiplicity of singular subjects, doesn’t it? — Mww
No, he didn't. Not in the sense you're thinking. But he demonstrated in cogito that our thinking can be.I'm not sure Descartes declared we had free will. — Philosophim
I am in the group that believes there is free will in thought. Like I said in my OP, we tend to focus on action -- that our actions are determined. But if these philosophers posit that thinking is the springboard to action, and that there's freewill in thinking, let's start there. Aristotle's insistence on deliberation as future-oriented thinking implies the freedom of the will. We think of possibilities, we think of different scenarios, and we think logically. For example, there are truths (principles) to discover. If we do not have that freedom in thought, we would never discover these principles. Apparently, he believed that we could.What does freedom mean to you? — Philosophim
"Propaganda" and "agenda" are words that aren't used by the government or nation or state -- only the critics used them. Because they are politically negative charged ideas.What's crucial to understand that there is an agenda, and objective to be reached with the actions.
We have to understand that the act of propaganda is used by a multitude of actors. — ssu
I'm not sure I understand this point. Please clarify as to your reaction to what I said regarding the change in wisdom.Are you arguing our brains do not change as we age leading to greater wisdom with age? — Athena
I'm thinking cause they're choleric -- easily irritated. So, your posts are doing their job just fine.My practical question for this thread, is why do Anti-Metaphysics Trolls, waste their valuable on-line time, trying to defeat something that they assume to be already dead, and although perhaps a ghostly nuisance, cannot by their definition, make any difference in the Real world? — Gnomon
Yup! Interesting. Thanks for the link.Theories of Preception :
The four main bottom-up theories of form and pattern perception are direct perception, template theories, feature theories, and recognition-by-components theory. Bottom-up theories describe approaches where perception starts with the stimuli whose appearance you take in through your eye.
https://philpapers.org/browse/the-causal-theory-of-perception — Gnomon
:grin:Emission theory (vision) :
Emission theory or extramission theory (variants: extromission) or extromissionism is the proposal that visual perception is accomplished by eye beams ... — Gnomon
You probably need to draw the line between what you call ascetic (monk living) and living with just the basic necessities, which many ordinary people are able to do. I have already mentioned my own experience in another thread, but I will repeat it again here. I lived the bare minimum when I stayed away from the city and the grind -- I was still wired, meaning connected to internet and phone. It was great. That is, if you don't have to worry about bills. So it is realistic to think of living happily (no anxiety and worries).I continuously think about these things and I just want to know other people's perspectives. If there is a chance to be relatively happy and cause minimal suffering in the world through living like a monk why would we not do it? Is it because temporary/materialistic pleasures (new cars, fancy computers, good food, sex) ARE NEEDED for some people's happiness? Are things like music and movies/stories/art needed for your happiness? If these things were not available in the world and everyone meditated, socialised, volunteered and lived simply all day, there would be MUCH less non-human and potentially human suffering AND we could still possibly attain happiness? — Troyster