Balance has to be reached between personal and civic commitment, a compromise that respects subjective experience while not detracting from the possibility of objectivity. — Enrique

I agree that we cannot get rid of categories and ideas based on objectivity. It is just impossible. The problem is how to make a fruitful relation between these things. I don’t think a good solution is some sort of half subjectivity/half objectivity, like saying that a lot of things are subjective, but a lot are objective as well. This would sound to me like just giving up in finding a real relation between the two things.
I would express the situation in these terms: we see that we exist in a world of subjectivity, but we cannot even think of it without using objective categories and reference points. I think that what makes them really connected is the context of ideas of human experience: we realize that we are subjects who, for some mysterious reason, perceive in their existence a lot of inexorable things that look nothing but undeniable objectivity. It is an existential condition.
I think this is different both from saying that everything is subjective and from saying that objectivity exists for sure. I think that this kind of existentialism is a ground different from both things. In existentialism, subjectivity is not like a soap bubble where we are imprisoned; rather, it is the source of art, expressivity, creativity, perception of freedom. Objectivity is not the level of certainty, reality out there, values valid for everybody and everywhere; rather, it is the human experience of being subject to things that we are unable to master, like death, competition between subjects, materiality, things that actually can be turned into positive experiences if we have some patience to work on them and harmonize them with subjectivity.
In this context, scientific research on consciousness can be helpful if it recognizes its limits. There is no point in establishing in advance what science is unable to reach, but also there is no point in thinking that science, sooner or later, has the potentiality to master absolutely everything. This claim would mean exactly forgetting the existential perspective I suggested.

A consequence of what I said is that it is impossible not only to understand how it is being like a bat, but actually it is impossible to me to understand how it is being like me. The moment I realize something, I am already referring to something belonging to the past. Knowledge of the present is impossible: if I think of the present, what I am thinking is a thinkable aspect of the experience, the experience that I needed to abandon, for a moment, to be able to think of the thinkable part of it. This means that the moment I think of consciousness, I am not experiencing it anymore, because my attention is taken by expressing it to myself. If I stop expressing it to myself, then I am experiencing consciousness. We can combine in our present, probably, thinking and experiencing, but, anyway, what we are thinking can never coincide with what we are experiencing; it is always just a copy of some thinkable part of it.

models of psychology and brain function can enhance subjective self-awareness — Enrique

We shouldn’t confuse enhanced perception with the basic phenomenon of subjectivity.
Of course perception can be enhanced by knowledge. For example, if I get the knowledge that certain feeling unwell is caused by chemicals present in the air, I learn to mentally connect these things, I can learn the smell of that polluted air, learn how its presence slowly acts in my feeling, so, I get a completely different interpretation of what initially was just a generic and confused feeling unwell. The same way people can educate their taste, becoming able to recognize shades in the taste of a special wine, or harmonies and styles in music. But all of this doesn’t touch in the least the fact that, whatever my interpretation of my feelings is, it remains unique and impossible to express even to myself: even the memory that I can have of my past feelings will never be able to give me again the experience that is definitely lost in the past. It is a question about being internal: I am internal to myself and I cannot absolutely make anyone else internal to me; I am internal to my present and I cannot absolutely make myself internal again to a moment of mine of the past, even of just one second ago; each part of the space is internal to itself and it cannot be repeated by any other part of the space, for a simple reason: because it is not the same part, it is another one. Two atoms are not the same atom. Two moments are not and will never be able to be the same moment. The hidden ambition of science of consciousness is to defeat the problem of non repeatability. Science is based of repeatability. What cannot be repeated cannot be scientific. Consciousness is feeling the non repeatable. When we make a photo, we have some hidden ambition to make that moment repeatable, but we have to realize that the photo witnesses the opposite: that moment is definitely lost. It is the same dismay we feel when somebody we knew very well dies: how is it possible that the experience of the presence and life of that person is definitely cancelled, definitely lost in the past? So, I would even say that all this science about consciousness and magic quantum physics hides inside it the ancient human desire to defeat death without our own existential involvement.

They don’t have the slightest idea of what they are talking about. From a scientific point of view, there is nothing to explain, everything is already explained the moment you say that consciousness is a product of the brain. All the rest is scientific details that have nothing to do with philosophy. It is like explaining how it is possible that our body moves. Once you understood that your muscles make the movement, all other thousands of books are just details that add nothing to the basic idea that you already have.
So, there is a basic first mistake in all these discussions: pretending that we don’t know the basics of the scientific point of view.
The other mistake is that whatever science explains is the shareable aspect. Science is completely unable to deal with things that are impossible to share. Consciousness is a word that works tremendously well to create this ambiguity. It can be even referred to plants, the moment we see that plants are able to react to something. So, consciousness is a tremendously good topic, because of its greatly confused ambiguity, to create endless and sterile discussions.
The most essential aspect of consciousness, if we really want to avoid ambiguity and confusion, is the one that is impossible to talk about: it is your own experience about yourself, your perceptions, your emotions, whatever you perceive inside you. The moment we talk about it, we aren’t talking anymore about it, because we have immediately automatically selected, isolated, those aspects that we can talk about, leaving apart what is impossible to communicate, that is, the real experience of consciousness.
Of course, I know that this applies now to me as well: what am I talking about? I am talking about what I can’t describe by words, because I cannot make you enter inside myself, inside my way of perceiving myself, my feelings. Do you feel that such an incommunicable experience happens to you? Well, that is consciousness. If you don’t realize anything incommunicable inside the experience of yourself, then you will never be able to understand anything about consciousness: in this case, what you will talk and think about will always be what is expressible by words, not the real experience of consciousness.

why would you question the wisdom of many theologians & non-theologians — Agent Smith

Wow! At this point, the only thing I can do is to bow to the immense wisdom of those high level people. As they say in an Italian comedy “with my face under their feet, without even asking them to keep still”.

Some claim metaphysics is not open to empirical testing i.e. you can't verify/falsify them via experience and yet, we have the so-called problem of evil (divine predicates incompatible with observation). — Agent Smith

That’s why the problem of evil is not a metaphysical one: you cannot prove metaphysically that either good or evil exist, because they depend entirely on subjective evaluations.

The historical - cultural context of the biblical text you quoted has nothing to do with metaphysics. In that context the relationship with God was personal, social, existential, non philosophical. If I ask a friend to give me evidence of his friendship, or seriousness, or loyalty, I am not doing metaphysics, I am acting in a context of human relationship. Otherwise even a dog sniffing something to get evidence of what it is becomes a dog who has a metaphysical mentality.

I think what you quoted is still different from what I mean. It seems to me that Evan Thompson deals with phenomenology and emotions by using an analytical an rational mind. Does Evan Thompson base his own research on his own emotions as an instrument of research?
I mean, there is a difference between studying music and playing music. Evan Thompson, in this metaphor, studies music, while what I am talking about is playing music.
This would rise the question how philosophy will be different from literature and poetry. I think it can be different, while still adopting their similar ways of expressing things.

Yes, that is actually the core question, I think. My perception is that philosophy today is going to be stuck either in being a copycat of science, or endlessly and unfruitfully discussions in deciding if reality exists or not, or other reflections that look to me like just trying how some ideas interact together, with the same criterion we use to test computers and software. So, I thought something common to these sterile activities is that they ignore the emotional, spiritual side of us as humans.
I think that, as a consequence, the work of philosophy should be a kind of research that tries to connect reasoning and emotions, rather than dealing with them as with alternative worlds. For example: we can discuss technically about the problem if reality exists: this is one side, the rational side. Or we can discuss how the existence or non existence of reality involves our emotions: this is the emotional side. So far, they have been treated still as divorced fields. The connection happens if we ask: can we make a decision, if reality exists or not, based on our emotions? Does it make any sense to decide that we will consider reality existent or non existent depending on our mood? Does it make sense to consider the world of our emotions and feelings as the real world and, as a consequence, the rational reflections about it just as a derivative part? Does it make sense to philosophize with the conscious intention of experiencing some emotional feelings, produced by our artistic playing with ideas, rather than considering ideas as a way to reach truth and reality? Does it make sense to consider philosophy like a kind of “playing ideas”, the same way one can play a piano, or a guitar?

Of course they are subjective: are you able to think of them without automatically conditioning them with your brain? In other words: are you able to think of them without using your brain, that is, to think of them without thinking?

Isn't this a loud contradiction? — Alkis Piskas

The contradiction is not in me, it is in the idea of truth. My reasoning starts from adopting the idea that truth exists and then I show that this adoption leads us to doubt, skepticism and agnosticism about truth. In other words, the reasoning that I show is: if truth exists, then the consequence of this is that it doesn't exist.

Doubts should always exist, but they should serve as a path in establishing truths and knowledge. Isn't this the purpose of philosophy and the philosophers? — Alkis Piskas

I don’t think so. Establishing that the purpose of philosophy is establishing truths and knowledge means that these reference points will be treated as beyond dispute. But the history of philosophy gives evidence that the very existence of truth has been questioned since the beginning: think, for example, about the sophists, who tried to show how tricky our language and our thinking is; think about Heraclitus: if everything is becoming, then an established truth cannot exist, it will be becoming as well; think of Nietsche, who said that we don’t know where to go, there is no up, no down, no orientation. You might object that all these positions can be considered as efforts to establish truth: the truth that truth is becoming, or even the truth that truth does not exist. But this objection works like a closed system: closed systems works always, independently from their content. For example, it is impossible to question that everything is number, because such a system will be always able to answer that any objection can be traced back to a structure of numbers. This way, even saying that the essence of reality is, let’s say, tomatoes, or horses, is able to be an invulnerable system. For this reason, any invulnerable system is meaningless, because it is able to maintain anything and the opposite of anything. This means that the idea of truth itself is meaningless.

If he were always and constantly in doubt about everything, he would be a mentally ill person — Alkis Piskas

I don’t think so. I have adopted the perspective of doubting about everything for dozens of years now and I don’t think I am mentally ill: currently I work at a hospital and I don’t think they would allow a mentally ill person to work in my position.

if I live in a constant doubt, it means that I would also doubt that I doubt. Which leads to vicious circle — Alkis Piskas

Doubting of doubting is not a vicious, but a virtuous circle: it is a circle that reinforces itself, similar to certain phisical phenomenons, like the audio feedback effect in microphones. Doubting of doubting just confirms that I cannot trust anything, I cannot even trust my doubting. Not trusting my doubting means just that I cannot rest firmly and comfortably in a simple methodology of doubting: I need to always question my questioning as well. Where is the problem in this?

And then of course to an asylum — Alkis Piskas

I agree that we need some kind of asylum, but not because of any philosophical principle. We need some kind of asylum because we are humans, we are not machines, we get tired, our emotions need to find some kind of rest on something. But, since this is not a philosophical, but a human need, the solution is not any philosophical thought, but some practical instruments, like periodically going to bed, having experiences of love and friendship, having a home, or a tent, having periods of rest.

A persons's reality may include doubts but it cannot be built on doubting evertyting. It is mainly build on knowledge and certitudes — Alkis Piskas

I think here again you confuse philosophical with human needs. If I go shopping, I cannot answer the teller “You don’t know if the things in my bag exists, you don’t know if my money exists”. I just need to pay. But this is a human and practical need, not a philosophical one. Practically I need just to pay and not to create problems to the teller, but all the doubts I expressed are true (I know I used the word “true” now, but this is needed by language, not by philosophy).
There is a solution that is better than certitudes and knowledge, that actually are very misleading concepts. The solution is trust. Although everything is exposed to doubt, my being human forces me to trust a lot of things and people. So, I pay my money to the teller not because I have any certainty that my money or the teller exist, but because my human condition forces me to trust some practical assumptions and treat them as if they were something “true”. I don’t “know” if fire would burn my hand, but my human condition forces me to treat it as if it was something true.

This is (pace those people here who want me to be severe, exact and giving strict evidence of my statements :grin: ) Heidegger: being does not exist; being is our human condition of being immersed in time, in our needs, in our mental limits.

I think that one of the hardest difficulties that both philosophy and science have met in their history is when they said “Of course!” about anything. “Of course!” means “There's no need to inquire!”. This kills research, progress, dialectic, debate. So, I would say that, with your message, you have given your contribution to prevent both philosophy and science from progressing.
Please, don’t take this personally: I have just used a method that is extremely frequently used in philosophy, that is, applying statements to themselves and seeing what happens. Frequently the result is a paradox, like “I am lying”, or it can be an instrument for progress like Descartes doubting about his doubts and taking the result as a positive resource.

I think the OP has nothing to do with any religious or spiritual doctrine about karma; I think it is rather a very philosophical question, but it creates some confusion because of the use of the word “karma”, that immediately sends us to religions and spiritualities.
I would express the OT this way: if the nature of this world is able to completely annihilate any human effort to do something good, to improve, to be more generous, altruist, what’s the point of making any effort in trying to be better? I mean annihilate at all levels, including the very person who is trying to be better. In other words, we have absolutely no evidence that anything good causes anything else good.
My answer is that the motivation to be or to do anything good cannot rely on anything objective. It can only be a choice, based on the whole of ourselves, our humanity, our emotions, our sensitivity, without excluding some reasoning.

we know how to use it and can predict what other utilities it can be practical for — Benj96

Whatever happens in pragmatism is always interpreted by us. When you see that a watch works, you can predict its behaviour and you can build more watches, all these things are under your interpretation, so that ultimately you cannot say what is really happening when you see that the watch works, that what you predict happens, that you can build more watches. In one word: we cannot know anything ultimately for sure. Working things are not evidence that we are in contact with reality, because the fact that they work is an intepretation of ours as well.

What would be the point in any pursuit of knowledge, insight and wisdom because it can never be objective true — Benj96

Philosophy is not technology: it doesn’t matter if its results are weird, not practical, not comfortable, or useless. Philosophy is exploration of the most ultimate things that we are able to think of.
After doing philosophy, we can work on the utility of its results, how they can be used, we can do whatever we want with the results. But this is a next step. The first step must be free from any pre-decision, otherwise your exploration is already limited in advance to what you decided is acceptable, or useful, or whatever. What’s the point of doing philosophy after having established in advance any conditions? If there are conditions, then it is not philosophy. We can discuss these conditions and it is already philosophy, because it is already an effort to explore the most ultimate things that we are able to think about.

Yes, I think that not reading my posts is an option that deserves high respect.

Yes, I was a bit surprised by this question: didn’t the very term “metaphysics” come from the name they gave to some Aristotle’s books sorted after the “physics” ones, and then metaphysics became based on what Aristotle wrote on those books? I know that now “metaphysics” means a lot of things, even contradictory things, but, again, if we turn this thread into a debate on what metaphysics is, we just leave my main point. I have no interest here in discussing deeply what metaphysics is today: let’s do this way: everybody in this discussion gives to every word whatever meaning they consider the most appropriate, while understanding that other people can have a different approach. Otherwise we will just pass the time in the definition of each word, that actually seems very similar to those who see the trees, but can’t see the forest.

A lot of topics would distract from my main point. Let's say that I am interpreting Heidegger my way, or I am drawing some consequences from his philosophy, or whatever. I just need Heidegger as a starting point because he made impossible carrying on while considering being as an abstract, perfect and independent philosophical concept. In other words, after Heidegger, certain metaphysical philosophers like Parmenides and Aristotle cannot be agreed anymore as if nothing happened after them. What is important is that Heidegger proceeded in a very systematic, methodologic, severe way, so that it is ontology itself that forces ontology to be connected with time and human condition. This means that human condition and time, that are unreliable and subjective experiences, actually are also unavoidable and necessary, because of the demolition of objective ontology made by Heidegger.

Yes, this is what I mean.

Heidegger was later continued by Gadamer. Everything is interpretation and we cannot do but interpret.

You may use whatever synonym or appropriate replacement for “set-up” as you please. “Established”, “came to fruition”, “exists”, “acts in a certain predictable manner” etc etc. But as you’ll see from the thread the discussion is about whether the properties of the universe are predetermined from the beginning or if they emerged randomly and symbiotically like an evolution. “Set-up” I’m pretty sure falls somewhere in that spectrum. — Benj96

This doesn't change the validity of my criticism. What you said is "I am not talking about my interpretation of the universe, but about the universe itself and how it works itself". But this way you don't realize that, even when you refer to the universe itself, or to its rules themselves, you are still talking about your interpretation of these things. In other words, it is impossible to refer to anything objectively, to anything itself, because when we say "anything itself" we are already applying our interpretation of what we are referring to. In other words, it is impossible to refer to being itself, because whenever we say it we are already interpreting it. This is just Heidegger.

I think you are mistaking the map for the territory.
The universe is not “set up” in any way. It is us who interpret the universe as universe and building mental frames, schemes, ideas, concepts, to try to understand it.
It is even bizarre that, after we devise a mental scheme to understand what we call “the universe”, then we forget what we have done and we pretend that the universe is “set up” or obeys according to the schemes we built.

Let’s consider some things.
Let’s imagine that you were the only person with blonde hair in the world and in history. Would this make you “the unique person who you are”? I am sure it wouldn’t. All other aspects of you, including your personality, whatever is part of your psychology, work like your being blonde: they are just accessory aspects attached to you. I think the essence of this is that all we are talking about are objective things. Whenever we talk of something, it becomes automatically an object; even when we say “subjectivity”, what we are talking about is subjectivity treated as an object, so, actually we are not really talking about subjectivity.
I think the true, real subjectivity is the experience you make when you realize that you are the only person in the world able to perceive your will, your choices, your decisions, like “Now I decide to move my arm; now I decide to think this number”. Perhaps in the future it will be possible to remotely command your arms and even your thoughts. But, even if this was possible in the future, who was the author of those thoughts? Let’s imagine a technology making me able to force your brain to think number “5”, so that you realized that your brain really thought the number I decided it to think of. Even if I was able to make you wanting to think number “5”, in that case you were forced to want something, but the ultimate source of this will was still me.
So, I would say that the real experience of uniqueness of you is when you feel, you experiment a will coming from you. Even if that will was caused by something different from your will, nonetheless what you perceive is your will, it doesn’t matter if it is the real origin of your thoughts or if it was forced by something else.
This means that you are the only person in the world able to perceive yourself willing something. This cannot be transferred, nor cloned, nor anything, by any technology or disease, or malfunction of the brain. I mean, even if you are wrong in thinking that it is really your will, actually you are right, because it is your will manoeuvered by something else. If you perceive your will, then your will is there. This is different from Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”, because the experience I am talking about is entirely subjective, exclusive to you, you cannot express it to other people, so, it isn’t at all a certainty, which instead Descartes thought it was about his thinking.
We can make a computer able to think that it was able to want something, but we have absolutely no idea how this can be evaluated, compared to our DNA making us feeling our ability to want something.
What I am saying is that this way I have not at all proved your uniqueness, nor the existence of your will. You are the only person in the world able to decide if your perception of your will makes you unique.
I said that saying “subjectivity” is still an objectivation of the concept of subjectivity. The same way, all the things I said now are an objectivation as well. I just tried to express my subjective experience, trying to see if you feel something similar. Whatever you answer, I won’t ever be able to have evidence of your experience.
So, our uniqueness is confined inside our subjectivty and we can talk about it only subjectively, that is without any possibility of getting any evidence. This is, I think, the only way to make an idea, but it is better to say “an attempt to share an experience”, of our uniqueness. It is like a message in a bottle, that I try to send from the island of my subjectivity. It is just a hope, an attempt. All the rest is condemned to be objective and, as such, not unique.

You have just built a self interpreting system. As such, it cannot fail, because it is closed. It is a frequent mistake in philosophy. This way you can explain everything with everything: it will just work, always. You can say that the roots of religions are, let’s say, dogs, or tomatoes, or maths. Once the starting idea is made, it will be a matter of moments to build a whole working system.

Aren't wishful thinking, Plato and Christianity products of the non-dumb universe as well?

If we are a product of the universe, and the universe is not dumb, where does the error of believing in an eternal soul come from?

I agree. When I talk about harsh criticism, I don’t mean interpreting art and heart by science. I mean a kind of serious criticism that can come from philosophy, literary critique, art critique, theology.
For example, I think that, if we say "idealism” or “romanticism”, we are talking about cultural currents that have been studied deeply and also with a lot of debates and criticism about their literature, art, paintings, so that I feel that when I hear “romanticism” we are talking about something really serious and culturally substantial. But what about “oneness”, or “awareness”, “selflessness”? They seem to me things that I would compare to the cultural currents I quoted like pseudoscience is compared to science.
I mean, are there artists, literary critique experts, who have somewhat explored extensively these latter concepts? I would say that, at least, they are very young concepts.

There is an essential, potential or actual, mistake, that I have seen made in several stories, videos, accounts, books talking about these things. It is the mistake of treating these experiences as if they were something defined and clear, while instead they have nothing defined, nothing clear.
So, for example, I see that even Freud referred to some sort of “oceanic feeling”, but does this mean that now it is a well defined category, like, for example, “joy”, “conflict”, “trauma”, “beauty”? I think it is obvious that the more we ignore the unclear condition of these concepts, the less serious what we say becomes. It becomes easily exposed to a lot of criticism.
This does not mean that talking of these feelings and using this language should be avoided. Rather, we should connect them to other concepts that have a more solid ground, a better explored context.
So, I would encourage research and exchange of experiences about these things, but serious research means intentionally challenging them with a lot of hard, or even harsh, criticism and self-criticism, otherwise it is like a treasure that we reduce to vague romantic words full of charm, but empty of any useful and serious substance.

I think you have just described, with non technical words, what Heidegger described with more technical ones, by saying that death is the possibility of impossibilty.

The problem with your reasoning is that you are using the same method used to solve the problem of theodicy. A common answer to the problem of theodicy is that a lot of things are beyond our understanding and we can trust God’s goodness all the same. Now you are using the same structure: if something works, then you accept to welcome it into the realm of things that we can understand. If something doesn’t work, then you solve it by referring to God being able to do things beyond our understanding. This method is equivalent to say that God must always come out right by definition. If anything doesn’t work, the problem, by definition, must be found in anything, but not God. God must be always untouchable. A lot of believers, unfortunately, make use of this logic as well: if something is wrong, somebody is to be blamed; God must never be blamed, by definition; as a consequence, the only remaining subject that can be blamed is humans. So, when things go well, it is God’s merit; when things go bad, it is humans’ fault.
The problem with this is that reasoning has absolutely no value, no importance in all of this. This contradicts the very activity of

- doing theology: if reasoning has absolutely no value, what’s the point of working on doing theology?

- and human intelligence: isn’t reasoning a God’s gift? So, what’s the point of treating it as having absolutely no value? Even if we consider that God’s plan was to give us a limited intelligence, then the question is: why? Why did God decide to give us such a limited intelligence? Why didn’t he make us Gods as well, equal to him?

In short, the ultimate flaw in the problem of theodicy, as well as in the reasoning you described, is that it doesn’t take seriously human intelligence. Why should we believe in a God who doesn’t take seriously our intelligence, either by escaping into his unreachable superiority or by creating us with such a limited intelligence, if compared to his supposed one?

You assumed the concept of something, that is free will, for which we have absolutely no evidence, and then you tried to find it in structures and functions of the brain.
This way, if we instruct a computer so that it is able to say “I am a person”, it won’t be difficult to find reasons for the computer being a person in its structures and functions.
It becomes easy even to find the structures and functions that can explain the existence of Santa Claus: quantum physics, with all their magics, have become now the magic hat that makes possible to find the physical reason for the existence of whatever we like to believe or to dream of. It is so sweetly romantic: we exist! Thank you, quantum physics!

I am afraid the topic will become too wide now, but maybe it is worth it. Just some notes.

I have studied the Bible in the past and now I know that not a single word is translated properly in any translation of any language. It is not translators’ fault, of course. So, when I want to read the Bible, if I have patience and time, I go directly to the text in the original language, although I frequently need to check dictionaries. When I am lazy I go to a translation, or I don’t read at all. :grin:

But, at least, this gives me a strong awareness: I can never be sure that I really understood the text. Even scholars struggle frequently in discussing the concept behind a word.

In this context, we can realize that plain translations, although they give an impression of being easy and clear, exactly for this reason they are very dangerous: they can give you the illusion, they can make you persuaded that you understood and that the topic and the discussion is simple and clear. Actually, the humblest people are exactly those who are more competent about that text: because of their competence they are extremely humble and cautious about how to understand a text. So, what happens in practice is something bizarre: normally ignorant, uneducated people are those who think they have clear, simple and strong ideas, while scholars, professionals, researchers, are inifinetely modest, humble, unsure, because they know how many questions and uncertainties are behind each word.

This opens another dramatic problem: are non-professional people condemned to be excluded from understanding anything? I would answer dramatically: “Unfortunately, yes”. This means that if somebody decided to dedicate their entire life to music, for example, they cannot expect to decently understand, for example, Van Gogh, or theology, or philosophy, and viceversa. The only thing we can do in this case is to enjoy the wisdom of being humble.

So, I think that by struggling with the problem you said, you are actually gaining something invaluable: the awareness of how complex the book “Being and Time” is. This is much better than those who have harsh debates in forums simply because each of them thinks they have got the right and correct idea.

We need some compromise, of course, some understanding is possible, we aren’t entirely in the dark, nor we like it, nor it is correct to encourage it. So, I am not saying that you are entirely wrong. I am sure that that translation could be made in a much better way, with better notes, to help readers. So, fundamentally I agree with you, because I have experienced the same frustration. Let’s just take also the positive aspects of it.

It is not bullshit at all; quite the opposite, it is intention to be serious, academic, scientific. If you ever tried to seriously translate something, you’d quickly realize how difficult finding matching words between different languages is. We can even say that the very activity of translating in an illusion, or a rough attempt to say something similar in a different language. Philosophical books are frequently full of words left in their original language and it is rather normal reading them with dictionaries near you. This is because it is extremely easy to misunderstand philosophical concepts, even more if they come from ancient texts. Today this job is made much easier because we have the internet, Wikipedia and a lot of other resources. Think about the old times, when philosophers didn’t have these fast instruments, so that they needed to spend much more time whenever they found an unclear or untranslated word: philosophy itself was forced to be a much slower work, and I think that this was not completely a negative aspect: this way philosophy was forced to be something much closer to what it was in its origins: meditation, contemplation, a spiritual exercise. Today we pretend to make philosophy with the technological mentality of being fast, quick, efficient, productive, clever, all things that make me think of just one thing: America, at least as it was or is traditionally in some clichés. The results are under our nose: today philosophers are very oriented towards science, pretending to quickly grasp, to conquer, to dominate with a scientific mentality the most difficult and deep concepts.
I agree that slowness can be frustrating, but don't forget its importance and necessity to make philosophy possible and authentic.

I think it's the concepts being unclear which makes them more universal than other concepts and as such more useful for understanding the universal, which, at least according to you, is the object of study of philosophy — Hello Human

As I said, philosophy wants to go to the roots, to the universal, but in this research philosophy cannot avoid to see that actually it is limited, because it is made by humans. This means that the very concept of universal is stupid: how can we, little microscopic, biased creatures of this universe pretend to get in our mind such a pretentious concept as “universal”? Whenever we think of the concept of universal, we are conditioned by our DNA, time, body, culture, epoch, geography, so, how can we think that what we are thinking is really universal? We humans are ridiculous in this pretence.

I agree that those concepts are quite unclear, but I do not understand what do you mean by them being rough, local and limited — Hello Human

Consider them as synonyms of unclear.

Your questions and the fact that this a philosophy forum made me think that you were talking about freewill. But now I can't understand what kind of answer you expect: a sociological answer? A historical one? Maybe psychological? I don't think that any of these three disciplines are able to give you an answer. So, what kind of discussion would you like to open?

You seem contradictory: you said that "freedom clearly exists", but you also wrote "Is our liberty the product or effect of causes we don’t control?" and a lot of other questions that essentially ask if freedom exists.

From an objective point of view, freedom is impossible to prove. From a subjective perspective we have, as humans, a perception, a feeling like if we have freedom. Both perspectives are exposed to criticism. So, I think the best question is not asking if we are free, but how deal with this condition of not knowing. I think the best way is to act as if freedom exists. Moreover, you can notice that, even assuming that freedom does not exist, this assumption does not have as a result anarchy or random behaviour: we can say that the mechanisms that manage our behaviour push us, drive us to behave as if we were free even after assuming that we are not.
Think about this: assume that you are just a machine. Assume that, as a consequence, you will decide to behave in a selfish way. This means that deciding to be selfish was not a free choice. If freedom does not exist, even the assumption that it does not exist should be considered a product of our being machines. This means that we have no way to know if freedom exists, because, if it doesn't exist we have no way to be aware of its non existence. Consciousness implies freedom and we don't know if either of the two exists. So, let's behave as if we were free, remembering that it is just an instrumental assumption.

If humans are so bad, why should this post of you be considered different?

All religions have a history, how they were born, what happened in different periods, what is happening to them now. In all periods of all histories of all religions there have always been, and still there are, differentiations between groups, intellectuals, representatives of institutions, high level scholars and mass people. Even already inside the Bible, even in the Old Testament, you can see that there were debates, disagreements and plurality of mentalities and beliefs between different groups of people.

We know that, to a wide extent, the history we know about everything is the history from the point of view of the winners, maybe sometimes the intellectual winners, for a simple reason: because it is much more difficult to find vestiges left by mass people. So, for example, the Bible we have now is the product of those who left something written, which means the intellectuals, or institutional people, or prophets. Even the informations we can get about the other people are given in the Bible from the perspective, from the filter of those who wrote the Bible, that is, not the mass people.

We should also consider that there is some tendency in the mass people to reinterpret the received religion in ways that adapt to their mentality, while instead intellectuals do some effort to reconnect to the most authentic and genuine contents of their religion, although, we know, intellectuals as well are subject to their own distortions, mentalities, perspectives.

So, we should consider that today the religion we can find in theologians has the characteristic of containing an effort to reconnect to the genuine message of the Bible and also to consider what happened along the entire history of their religion. In a synthesis, we can say that theologian’s religion is a kind of religion that contains a strong effort to be connected with its history, although it is anyway an interpreted history.

Since theologians are those who discuss, debate and, especially, write, the kind of religion that is going to be transmitted to next generations is that of theologians. Even if masses of people are much more numerous, their approach to their religion is destined to disappear, time by time, as has already happened about the biblical periods, as I already said, although apparently the mass approach seems the most popular.