Have you read Clement Rosset? You might like his take on the essential metaphysical "cruelty" of the universe, and how the two responses to that are basically either the fig-leaf approach of traditional philosophies or the joyful yes-saying(eternal return, etc.) of a few maverick philosophers like Montaigne and Nietzsche. — gurugeorge

No, but that seems like ideas I might want to read more on. The best response is to not have another person be born to experience the broken world that is always needing maintenance repair, novel change,and stuff to occupy the restless human striving. Schop would point to asceticism- deny your own illusionary will. I’ve fasted for three days, it is quite eye opening to ones own nature as needy animal..if we are to analogize need with brokenness then we are always broken, as we are never fully satisfied. Of course, satisfaction to its fullest extent is a state akin to death, or dreamless sleep, as @Baden brought up. So denying the will is not wholly feasible for most..what of love then? Spending time with significant other? Love is unevenly distributed, hard to build, hard to maintain, and often leads to more brokenness. What of friends? They can often disappoint or not come through and true friends can often be as hard to find as a significant other. What of projects? Often they are filling a void and lead to more need. They are the ultimate middle class way to salvation. A project brings with it a badge of honor. Is it social signaling? Is it to get into flow state? Is it for money and status? All indications of an initial broken state to begin with.

You are doubtless familiar with nondualism. Not one, not two: the essence of reality, according to the concept. Eastern cosmologies (almost to a T) incorporated such concepts into their core. Western scientism (which I believe is the dominant current belief system, or mythology if you will. But that veers off-topic) starts from the 10,000 things, from the multiplicity, and builds toward a “theory of everything”. The East does the opposite. I think both approaches have their strengths, and both are needed. There are difficulties too. How does one “name the unnameable”? The Tao Te Ching tackles that thorny issue right off the bat. The difficulty of the West is like solving a Rubiks cube. If one starts from the beginning point of a cube with all same colored sides, it is easy to achieve “scrambledness”. However, starting from the scrambled point going towards a solved cube is distinctly different and difficult. Maybe the Rubiks cube is an illustration of the archetypal “the uncarved block”. — 0 thru 9

It is comforting to have nice stories.. I've said before, "We are manifestations of the principles of Entropy" .. Schop has said, "We are manifestations of Will".. this is almost certainly not right though, metaphysically. Maybe we are just tangentially meeting via communications (that work enough to survive).. We are but isolated beings never crossing

I suggest (along with Buddhists and Hindus), that the restful end-of-lives is experienced only by people who are already restful. — Michael Ossipoff

That doesn't follow. I could just say death is the end of life for that individual being. That is more empirically evident than your schema.

At the end of a life, before the deep timeless and identityless-ness is reached, there's a time of mere absence of waking-consciousness, a time when the person doesn't consciously remember about his/her recent life, or know whether s/he is coming or going....but retains hir (his/her) subconscious inclinations, predispositions, and will-to-life.

That will-to-life is also inborn, in an infant, and a not-yet-born infant. — Michael Ossipoff

Besides doctrines from Hindu/Buddhist writings, what proof is there of this reincarnation of the individual?

And, because, then, eventually you will be without identity, time, events, problems, situations that need dealing-with, menaces, lack, need or incompletion, or any knowledge or memory that there ever were or even could be such things...

...then it can be said that there will be timeless identity-less-ness and absence of needs, menace, lack, situations needing to be dealt-with, etc. — Michael Ossipoff

Why does it wait through this reincarnation process?

You've been rightly likened to a broken-record. You keep repeating your same complaint and beliefs, quite oblivious to all the answers that have been posted by others. — Michael Ossipoff

Fallacy of smugness.

I'm not talking about an after-life or lack thereof. I'm talking about Schope's proposed "perfect" life, which is a state indistinguishable from death. — Baden

We cannot know what that means though. Only from the third-person sense of thinking about the state of death.

Yeah, sleep without dreaming is an unconscious state that if it continued indefinitely would be indistinguishable from death. So, your ideal form of life is death to begin with. There's nothing to be said to that. — Baden

I guess also the view from nowhere (and everywhere) might also describe it, if we were to get a bit mystical.

What is your philosophy on things. I've only seen you in the critical mode, but not in the constructive one of your own ideas. A bit telling to me. It's like you wait for me to post for just the right critical response. I see a bit on movement without ends. Maybe you wan to elaborate?

But this goes back to my thread on unity versus separation. Nietzsche is in a way MORE pessimistic than Schopenhauer in one way- that is to say, the separation that we have. Plotinus and Schopenhauer's philosophy has a unity (with individual manifestations). Nietzsche is saying we are shouts in a void.. monads or processes separated. The absurdist of absurd. It's good we are able to make an assemblage of a story to keep things seemingly integrated.. but it is just culture perhaps.

Well then there would be no need for consciousness, and it never would have evolved. So your perfect world is essentially death, or at best a living death. And your argument is because we're not dead, we'd be better off dead. Or life is bad because it's not death. Pointless to anyone who enjoys life. — Baden

So a perfect unity would mean no need for need. You might describe it as a state like death, but death is only relative to what we know in life. You can also say it is like sleep without dreaming. The point is, once alive. We are always in maintenance mode. We can make this into a grandiose optimistic philosophy, but I don't think that is really going on. That is the dominant STORY so we can assent to the brokenness.

If someone never suffered, they would still be movement. They would do doing (or not doing) whatever they were.Your understanding does not grasp boredom, it rectifies all movement as boredom. Rather than just hating suffering, it hates life/movement, turning every moment of it into a suffering-- "Ah really, I have to do or not to do today. Woe is me: I exist. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Right, perfection need not move.. would be a very poetic way to say it, but its not the full story, and you know it.

perfect world with no challenges? — Baden

A perfect world would have no challenges and no need for them.

It’s like a form of Stockholm syndrome. What other choice is there for most of us?

With fixing broken and annoying things? You can be bored while doing a task.

In the process of fixing, cleaning, maintaining we are in effect applying what we have learned along the way, to do it different, to do it better than we did last time. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Haven't seen much change.. just more refined fixing.

I read it that way too (among other things), and agree with it. — StreetlightX

Cool. But any thoughts on the other commentary?

it is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things; it does not by any means strive to imitate man. None of our aesthetic and moral judgments apply to it. Nor does it have any instinct for self-preservation or any other instinct; and it does not observe any laws either. Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. ... The total character of the world ... is in all eternity chaos." (The Gay Science) — StreetlightX

Indeed..screams echoing in the void.. This seems an indirect attack on ideas like Will in Schop's philosophy. This also gives impetus to the later existentialists and absurdists (Sartre and Camus come to mind). Of course unity comes about through certain connecting features, etc. And these are based on physical "laws" (necessities to use Nietzsche's language). But, Schop's ideas can be bereft of its metaphysics (contra what Schop says about his own philosophy I believe), and still have value of what it means to be an animal, in a universe without telos. Remember, though Schop was a systemizer and had a necessity of Will behind the picture, that Will had no telos. Effectively speaking, one can do away with his noumenal aspect of Will, and come to the same conclusions of being an embodied animal striving forward in the universe, that suffers from its own needs and wants and from the contingent circumstances of causality, environment/culture, place, situation, etc. So, eternity chaos does not close the door to Schop's conclusions on the character the animal and human life in general. I cannot find a better description of the human condition, even if I myself doubt a lot of the metaphysical underpinnings. The striving wills.. perpetually needing its goal-horizons.. necessitating from being an embodied human of the cultural/linguistically enabled species that we are.. getting bored, repeating the goals.

I think Nietzsche is important. I think he's on to something. I don't think Nietzsche is where the analysis should stop, though. Nietzsche should be integrated into a broader pessimistic worldview that includes things like antinatalism, in my opinion. There is nothing incoherent, contra Nietzsche, with life devaluing life. It may very well be that life can enter a stage of maturation where it is able to understand itself, and thus deny itself. — darthbarracuda

So I know it's certainly possible that this thread is of no interest to anyone. But I find it really interesting that Nietzsche is willing to concede the "truth" of pessimism while still attacking it. This may be a rhetorical move (e.g. even if Schopenhauer were right it wouldn't matter) or it may point to something more spiritual and consistent in his thought.

It strikes me as interesting to ask in the context of contemporary antinatalism what bearing people think that truth has on a pessimistic worldview, and whether there might yet be some value in denying philosophical pessimism despite its terrible truth. — John Doe

I think the big theme here we are all circling is the life-affirming vs. life-denying dynamic. Nietzsche seems to work here in irony. The irony of embracing that which is the cause of suffering. Embrace your enemy..also your enemy is what brings you transcendent experiences of good, so all the more to love it in all its nastiness, etc. etc. Its all intertwined, inseparable, and the ubermensch moves beyond the framework of its own dichotomy.. to make his own work of art, his own Dionysian hero.

But, as DB noted, this isn't sustainable.. I think Nietzsche tried to move beyond Schopenhauer, but really couldn't. It was a valiant but failed attempt at moving on the most pessimistic of philosophies.. which Schop's philosophy basically represents. You are not only a slave to, but a manifestation of the very will that you carry out every day in Schop's systemizing philosophy. Every day, you feed the will, literally and figuratively. The will being the source of suffering.

I have been fasting for more than two days now and still going.. It gets you thinking more clearly about your own will and what it means to start denying it. Quite an interesting experiment. That is the real.. the body, its purpose, its need for need, its carrying you forward, the insatiableness of life and its ceaseless directives. Certainly, refrain from procreating is the easiest of "denial".. its really not much denial at all for one's own body. Once one gets into mortifying one's own flesh in various practices.. it starts becoming much clearer how tied we are to our own willing to be, to live.

So I see Nietzsche as understanding pessimism to be 'self-immolating', as it were, where the test of it's truth is how lightly it can be borne, how easily it can be engaged with (just like the test of the eternal return: " — StreetlightX

Not sure what this means.. but SX had an interesting response, that I am still working on in another thread to unity and separation. However, I will comment here that Schop's philosophy, though pessimistic, actually has a strain of comfort in its unification of things in a necessary Will. However, what is more disheartening are philosophies (pessimistic or not) that have only isolated/closed off events. Nothing is really related in any necessary way. All is contingent. That is another possibility. The absurd at its most absurd. A universe where we are all screaming into a void of nothingness.. weakly tied together by the bonds of language which bridges our isolation through social experiences and enculturation.. but there is no more to our connection with anything than that. We are but solipsistic ends in ourselves.. constructed with the aid of culture/environment, but nothing more than an isolated umwelt, metaphysically disconnected, radically contingent.

What about a more dynamic conception in which things that are 'metaphysically separate' become 'unified', and things that are unified become separate? What about thinking of separation and unity as results or snapshots of a more fluid field: an empiricism in which one would have to attend to things in time, as historical, in order to draw any conclusions about unity or disparateness, in a way that belies any attempt to stake it out from an armchair? — StreetlightX

Can you give an example or explain? I think you are just talking about the scientific model: Big Bang, "laws" of forces and particles happening in space and time. Particles form into molecules and break apart. Contingency plays out but in the framework of force/matter laws which create more properties through time as matter forms into more dense matter, etc. But is that unifying other than conceptual? Is that meaningfully unifying?

Reason, on the other hand, can keep emotions under control by conducting the individual's affairs in a manner that minimizes sturm and drang. Keeping one's emotions happy is a way of keeping them under control. This is where therapy comes into play: how does one manage one's life so that one's emotions are reasonably contented? — Bitter Crank

If life is so labyrinthine to keep afloat and near equilibrium.. why do we perpetuate it for others to deal with?

I do not have all information, and I say it. Our one sure model of intelligence is the human mind, and in the human mind, the linkage is there. — Relativist

Yes, and to a dog mind, smells have more linkage to intelligence, to a crow's mind would have to do with its ability to fly- a linkage we don't have with intelligence, a dolphin's intelligence has a linkage to its aquatic environment..certainly AI can have linkages that have little to do with the form it comes in the human mind (or any animal mind). Your name is "Relativist".. so I think you might agree.

What does that have to do with intelligence? — Relativist

What I mean is an intelligent entity that has no needs and wants.. that's the question at hand. What is life like without ANY needs or wants for an intelligent being. Yes, WE humans have needs and wants, but the scenario being presented here is a future entity that exists, can do things as a super intelligent being can do, but does not want or need.

I suggest it is a mistake to separate intelligence and will. True intelligent thought requires a will. Deliberation is goal-driven. — Relativist

So a human would say. If it acquired all information..

I guess the point is, what is existence beyond our wants and needs?

I agree, these are the good parts. The words of the Preacher,[a] the son of David, king in Jerusalem.

2 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
3 What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
4 A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens[c] to the place where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
7 All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
8 All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
9 What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things,[d]
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things[e] yet to be
among those who come after.

What you are describing is a lot closer to a Prime Mover, or a Prime Knower, than anything similar to an intelligence. Something that exists simply "in its full knowledge of information" is more akin to a library than anything else.

An intelligence operates on information, according to information. If it is an intelligence, then it is dynamic. — Akanthinos

Because you are a puny human who cannot imagine such :smile:.

It's analogous to those people who cannot think of a post-work life. Work provided so much of their enculturation of what a life is, that they don't know what to do with themselves outside of economic incentives. Take that and times it by billions.. that is the "intelligence" of this AI.

But we are talking the most advanced of AI..this would be an entity way passed an original programming code intention by a designer. This would be an AI that is simply existing in its full knowledge of information of self and environment and has no need for needs and goals. It’s intelligent, but has no internal inertia of its own.

So this idea came from a Joe Rogan podcast where he was interviewing physicist Sean Carroll. On the podcst they discussed the idea of a potential domino effect that technology creates where better artificial intelligence creates yet better intelligence that then creates godlike powers and decides humans are useless.. That part we've all heard before, as it's the stereotypical AI science fiction scenario. But then they mentioned the idea that once they got to a certain level of growth, the robots would get bored and shut itself off. What would be a motivating factor for AI? It wouldn't be survival, it wouldn't have any specific needs (especially biological). It would really have no reason to do anything at all. Perhaps it would hit the ultimate existential ennui and unplug itself. I thought this idea was intriguing as it very much parallels Schopenhauer's idea about what is "truly" going on in reality- the eternal Will that manifests in striving creatures that are tricked into having needs and wants, and being satisfied by these. Robots would be the ultimate foil to this- they would be intelligent creatures but without the hopes, dreams, needs, motivations, and goals of the biologically-derived and "willful" human. It may have none of these and simply realize the most logical thing would be not to be. Perhaps it would be stuck in its own paradox whereby being and not being were the same result. Ultimate reality of humans lead to perfect robots who came to the realization that being and not being were equivalent in regards to its own existence.

Also some people believe human souls exist in a state of perfection and choose to inhabit bodies as a form of challenge — JupiterJess

Yes, something quite perplexing to me. That means perfection isn't perfection... still more need.. the need for need.

I'm using a super computer here and it is overheating trying to figure out whether your post is a positive or negative. I think it's going to explode any minute. — Bitter Crank

It depends. Do you like living in a world where you think that each goal seems like something to want but is really an illusion, and overall, we are just willing in a world of contingent forces. But you know, technology and projects, so don't think about it.

We strive in the world for what we know not. We think we do with each goal, but it goes away to be immediately replaced by another. We are but self-aware energy transferers..working, working, working to keep ourselves alive, maintain our comfort levels, and entertain our minds.

Speculate away. — apokrisis

Which is all we can do when discussing what IS while still being a subject-for-an-object.

Yeah. Let's talk about the thing-in-itself ... without actually talking. I will enjoy your silence. — apokrisis

That's just it, we are trying to talk. You don't want to listen, because you go back to said predictions and verification models via math and say this is the REAL because of its usefulness to human understanding in prediction models. But then of course this is just reifying the models and not the actual occasions themselves. So we can talk about the events, but this would then start resembling the poetic "nonsense" that you discard out of the gate, and so the circularity in argument continues.. What informs the human as useful predictions becomes what IS, and you don't look passed your nose. But, you will say, that is all we can do. If you will go no further, than metaphysics will always be a closed door, and there is nothing more to discuss other than science. Fine and dandy, but don't complain about those who use speculative realism, speculative idealism, or speculative metaphysics. At the least, it is not mixing the usefulness-to-humans-as-predictive-models as the thing itself. A key mistake, that has been explicated at least since Kant in the 18th century.

You keep on thinking of things in terms of predictions and verificationism. That is simply not the "actual occasions", not the events, that is the translation into mathematical models. The math is not the actual event though. So, where it cashes out in pragmatic usefulness to humans in understanding, it is silent in what is the metaphysical case of what the event IS.

Where was the question that was cogently expressed and relevant to the discussion? — apokrisis

That was cogent and relevant to this whole thread. I believe it to be the main issue underlying all of these arguments with the Whiteheadians and other process philosophies that are not explicitly in the terms of your triadic system.

No answer.. The thing is, you don't take as legitimate, any explanation that is not in terms of scientific modelling. However, scientific modelling is just a description that is refined to make it easier to understand and relevant to a certain aim. It is not the event itself. To describe that might take neologisms and language that can convey the complexity of what is going on. This is perhaps why philosophers have a hard time putting into words their metaphysics and it sounds jargony.

It is in thinking that our mathematical models represent the complete "real world" that we commit the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness". Such models are only ever idealized, abstract, partial and incomplete representations of the "blooming, buzzing, confusion" which is nature. They largely leave out the feelings and experiences of their creators. — prothero

True

It is in forgetting that it is a thinking, feeling creatures with value judgements about the world that engages in observation, measurement and empirical science in the first place that one creates an artificial "bifurcation of nature". — prothero

True

The way we think about the world influences how we act in the world. If we think we are only physical-chemical machines in a valueless, purposeless, largely insentient universe we will act accordingly and the results will be in neither the best interest of the planet or of ourselves. — prothero

I kind of disagree here. It is mainly an insentient universe. Even if there is "something of what it is like to be an event", that doesn't change much for ethics. It is just as motivational as other reasons to think a certain way.

Again, now that you have actually read the thread, you will appreciate that your old hobbyhorses are irrelevant. — apokrisis

It's relevant- I mean it's down to the level of talking about whether erosion is "experienced" by the rock, but it's the same thing. In this case, you are juxtaposing modelling with experience and again, I am explaining how modelling never even touches the metaphysics of an event, only map of what is going on, thus losing the actual-ness (actual occasion perhaps?) of the event.

Right, so from your source here:

Scientific modelling is a scientific activity, the aim of which is to make a particular part or feature of the world easier to understand, define, quantify, visualize, or simulate by referencing it to existing and usually commonly accepted knowledge. It requires selecting and identifying relevant aspects of a situation in the real world and then using different types of models for different aims, such as conceptual models to better understand, operational models to operationalize, mathematical models to quantify, and graphical models to visualize the subject. Modelling is an essential and inseparable part of many scientific disciplines, each of which have their own ideas about specific types of modelling.[1][2]

So, modelling doesn't have a "feels like". In fact, it doesn't have a metaphysical anything in the "real world". It is all abstracted information, so that it can be quantified or simplified for epistemological reasons. Again, you are mixing the map for the territory. You are waffling between words. Is it the definition you sent me, or are you cramming other concepts into this word?

Of course rocks have some kind of internal structure. But in what sense does that structure model anything? — apokrisis

You have to define what you mean by modeling, and specifically what is "happening" during this "modelling".

Do you really want to add your name to the list of card-carrying Whiteheadians? — apokrisis

I read most of the thread now, especially @prothero' explanation of Whitehead. I think he does a very good job explaining the nuances.

We are talking about bleeding electrons here. And therefore, why a description of electromagnetic interactions using experiential constructs is crackpot.

Do you really want to add your name to the list of card-carrying Whiteheadians? — apokrisis

Honestly, I haven't been reading the whole thread.. I saw that last part and thought this was the same problem of mind question that is usually discussed.