Perhaps philosophy (similar to religion), is cosplay fantasy, to give reality a more interesting sense to it, and nothing more than this sensibility.

Philosophy, like other fields is bogged down by egoism. There are too many who idealize their devices and powers, and ignore the past with it's genealogy and independence in hopes of total domination of the present. The intended goal of mankind is one person or a small group that can reproduce themselves; the enlightened ones. Whereas the ordinary reach our eventual elimination. The supreme medium as message of Internet consumption is the condensation of mankind into perfect individuals in their perfect spontaneity, shining in brilliance.

What is this impulse in philosophy for an aesthetic view? What does it matter if the aesthetic view exists? Why are some people drawn to it and some not?

It's romanticism, the psychological rest state of the perfect individual is boredom. The 'aesthetic' is just an attempt to intervene with ourselves, which is also doomed to failure.

People today do not usually want their idols destroyed completely, but want to assuage their disappointment in a person with a phrase, but this meaning has drifted from the original story.

Firstly, welcome to the forum. Secondly, I agree. Especially the point that idol worship seems to carry along with it a type of ego-repression. The worshipper venerates the idol, and assigns feelings of elation and subsequent inner guilt and/or disappointment symbolic meaning as co-narratives; they have almost become metonymical with the idea of the idol. This is probably why the term 'idol' has generally been used negatively. The same way some take pleasure in violent or aggressive behaviour, I think these contradiction-narratives allows us to experience the missing antithesis in our daily lives. To experience a simulacrum of spiritual life through a return to childhood ego-narratives, while still appearing in the apparent form of rational necessity. It is the basic form of religion itself, only represented as purely incoherent content.

See, I don't believe that 'innocence' exists. It's a myth. We aren't born blank slates, white paper without a mark, the product of an immaculate conception.

But it’s an idea, so its non-existence is purely consequential of the fact that you don’t believe in it; it’s not like the belief just survives in society on its own by feeding on cattle at night, it must be earned. That’s like saying friendship or love don’t exist because there are no transcendent or complex relationships anymore, only superficiality.

During earlier times women and children were <thought> to be innocent.

I mean we are afflicted and conflicted from birth by desires, wishes, urges, fears, and WILL which prevents us from ever approaching innocence.

On one hand you’re calling innocence a trait of a person in isolation from their outer world, and on the other you claim it is beyond them because of factors (desires, urges, fears) that are largely conditioned upon them from outside. This is perhaps the difference showing itself a bit.

No, but why is satisfying your desires such a worthy business? More importantly, how does one know when their desires have been satiated in order to confirm agency?

Becoming a person in one's own right diminishes innocence.

I would normally distinguish between thinking of yourself as a person in their own right and being or becoming a person in its own right. You seem to call them the same thing. During earlier times women, for instance, were innocent. Would you consider women like Emily Brontë, diminished 'in her own right' in lieu of never having climbed tall mountains or gone on bestial sexual escapades?

We should distinguish the ability see 'see outside' a set of potential experiences as per @BC (NO! I will not eat that food, etc.) and 'seeing inside' (food eating is not questioned). 'Seeing outside' requires negating things in their existence. It coincides with 'having the answer' rather than 'asking the question.' Because the innocent, by definition in the manner earlier described, doesn't already have the answers to formal questions of life and behaviour. Thus, the manner of acquiring knowledge from convention and traditional wisdom can be supplanted by mere needs and desires. This parallels philosophical corruption by wealth, comforts, and sensual pleasures.

Thank you.

My argument to support the provocative title of this discussion is: AI is indeed intelligent in that it is able to find patterns in huge amounts of data but there is no way AI could reach to judgements like we humans can.

AI operates under a totally different set of motivations from real intelligence, and thereby is intelligence separated from particularity. It's like an anthropomorphic idea of human intelligence, hence the 'artificial' part. At a certain point, we must decide: is the expediency we are seeking also the idea of expediency? Which is more expedient, the factory that produces artwork as artificial production or the artist themself?

You allude to the corruption problem in general. To that I reply that reason must not just be found, but earned. And not just kept, but preserved.

The key idea is culturally a safe-zone was created where we differentiated wise and innocents, who are innocent of ‘evil’ because they don’t know it. The main thing isn’t what this process appears to be, and how it is used by consciousness, but it’s overall purpose as an objective thing in our civil world.

What do we need to do other than convince the innocent they are not capable or prepared to accept the whole truth of something. In a sense the intention is to prepare the subject for that ‘wisdom.’ And being conditioned by that preparation trains us in the discipline of philosophy and teaches us of its necessity. To understand, we use isolation and/or deconstruction, or decay.

Wisdom means "the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment".

Your description of why you are interested in philosophy matches almost exactly with your definition of love of wisdom that is its etymology. I personally don’t agree this captures the essence of the idea of wisdom, but for one person, sure.

Hasn’t this understanding of wisdom, and the accompanying tendency that it is good, done you any good? Or perhaps you dislike certain people’s wisdoms you believe are false, finding that the name has lended a false credibility? The belief of it as learned and experienced qualities to you makes them arbitrary?

“us”? I mean it’s great that we want to know:

the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence,

But why? And don’t just give me a vague “because we’re curious!” That’s like asking an alcoholic why they drink and getting “it tastes good.”

I don't like the terms innocence and wisdom; they're way too loaded to mean much.

And yet you find yourself on a philosophy forum, the word generally means 'love or pursuit of wisdom.' And we will happily watch reruns of Family Matters, but find innocence to be a dirty word...

Wisdom is the only word that really matters in philosophy, it's literally in the name.

Simultaneously, he or she has found the abstract notion of the self in language and it's essential quality of negation. Need I remind you that it is a philosophical idea that perpetuates it, they develop the idea of the self. Animals have this same notion, but it does not take the form of thinking for animals. What has happened is that an idea has being actualized in the child. But just because it is actual, doesn't make it deterministic.

In a similar vain, we have the idea of childhood innocence. It is a cultural idea, but that doesn't make it any less actual. And the main thesis of preserving innocence hinges on avoiding exposure to certain ideas and not allowing them to be actualized in the child because the effects are known to be negative to the subject and society. By preserving this transitional state, the innocent becomes more suggestible, because more content grows in the unconscious that isn't finding expression and actualization. I would argue that this process trains the user in desiring ideation and expression.

I guess you might call it the creative spark or the philosophical insight or the religious zeal or so forth. But I believe this process forms a positive idea in the innocent.

Experience impels us forward into the world. We find rich and interesting details in experience and we want more rich and interesting experiences. Curiosity, you know.

If you're saying that innocence means, in part, being open to rich and interesting experiences, then we are in full agreement. But certain experiences qualitatively bring about the loss of innocence and the development of wisdom. So innocence is simply a moment of wisdom, because the gain does not occur without the openness to it. To put it another way, someone who never stands outside the idea of the pursuit of philosophical wisdom can't actualize it. The actualization of wisdom and its attainment are two ways of saying the same thing.

Was just getting a little sentimental with the talk of Fox News and self-decapitation. Not exactly care-bears material. Anyway, where is this opposition between innocence and experience coming from? As you say, it's not possible to leave the womb without having experience of some kind. And yet, we believe the quality of innocence is not automatically lost within a certain time-frame of experience, but is lost qualitatively. So, I'm interested, what type of experience qualifies as anti-innocent and what does not?

If you are asking about the impulse to philosophy, I would think it often seems to be connected to unhappiness or dissatisfaction. People who are content may not need to ask such questions. — Tom Storm

It sounds like the point both BC and yourself are making is that when innocence tends to be insular and not ask questions of itself, it becomes plainly satisfied. That we need to be 'impelled' by something, no?

Isn't that simply a certain content and form of philosophy? What's wrong about living a simple life without worry or anxieties, supposing those questions bring with them those feelings?

@BC should I jump off the bridge now or later?

Or maybe we can... if you want to, don't mean to be bossy.

That makes sense because there's no way for philosophy to exist without experience and knowledge. But we 'can't go into Kant' (non-intended joke), we are assuming familiarity with Kant.

Being exposed to the satisfaction of thought archetypes and to constantly reinforce them causes the will to be content in understanding and to go no further. All media must reinforce and preserve, whereas with wisdom we must seek it out against those as obstacles. But how are shown to seek? Isn't innocence just that initial separation of the concepts we must eventually come to terms with, so as to identify their necessity internally.

We must act out the process of finding wisdom, it cannot just be handed to us; and I can't believe we just 'pick it up' by nature. The same way the individual through their subjective actions in capitalistic society is intended to do good to others through their internal mechanisms of form.

Well, "having experience, knowledge, and good judgment" allows one to avoid some of the errors we are prone to.

How did you learn what experience, knowledge and good judgement were, and where did you get the idea that they were better than the absence thereof? All solely from yourself?

We don't have a "drive for wisdom" as much as it takes time for individuals to develop it.

What gave you the idea that it was something worth finding to begin with?

Literally, kittens and puppies grow up to be killer cats and wolves. Children lose their temporary innocence-advantage pretty quickly. Urges and wishes, kindly and not, start arising fairly soon.

Would you equate these urges and wishes with wisdom? Almost all ancient philosophies worth caring about say something to the tune of wisdom is a level above simple animal urges and desires.

Social historians tell us that "childhood and adolescence" is a very recent view of childhood. As far as we can tell, ancient people on up to the recent times thought of children as miniature adults--not especially innocent and capable of economic contribution.

The more reason to think of it as a construction of Western reason. The way you word it sounds like you think it worth less because it's not a notion that has existed forever.

Honestly, this whole quibble over the use of the word 'genocide' is a colossal and immature waste of everyone's time. There are a multitude of different languages and cultures that all have different ideas of what this word means. Use whatever words are necessary for a given sentence and get on with it. You don't need the world's global consent as to their meaning, and I assure you, you will never get it. A comparison with genocide is is not the same of attributing universality, and the English language is not a five-year old's playground. End of ten-week-long discussion.

In the sphere of psychoanalysis, it would be characterized as something emerging from the unconscious that cannot be realized. Stuck, as it were, in a 'becoming' phase. You seem right to talk about things beyond one's control, and I believe this is what makes this subject such a problem for people. It is because anxiety as a notion does not fit nicely into any ordinary determination, and like art, it seems to always to be transitory and escaping the understanding. Is there such a thing as a philosophy of the unconscious? That seemed to be Jung's project, though it struggled at times with straining parallels between a human being's subjective and objective mind. The stoics were good in this arena because they knew their limits.

Could be true if we change one minor parameter:

I've used Universal Form (my term, don't think it exists elsewhere) a few times in a couple other threads. I think it's a good tool for materialistic philosophy.

Otherwise you are essentially turning philosophy in general into science. They are not the same thing.

In countries where assisted suicide and euthanasia are legal, the people are basically told, "If you can't live up to a certain psychological, physiological, social, and economical standard, then it's better that you die, and society will help you to die".

In culture, we sometimes play G-d to some extent. And in that sense, our creation comes to feel more real than ourselves.

I agree that the proper place for the question is religion, but doesn’t religion sort of become philosophy once we begin to place it’s notions in view through language?

I don’t know that much about Buddhism except it is kind of like a stoicism that hinges on consciousness. What I’m referring to also contrasts with stoicism in the sense that the self-destructive individual acts out inferiority, whereas the stoics envisioned a state of higher thinking that their acts represented.

I guess my point, if there is one, is that most of us are a result of imperialist empires such as Roman, Greek, British, German, Ottoman, Byzantine, Mongol, and countless others. These empires took over large quantities of resources, killed and dispersed large quantities of people, and in many cases – Roman in particular – found themselves upon narratives of deceit and betrayal. The people who survived during these times were less the ones that were un-paranoid, non-aggressive, and fully altruistic. It is unreasonable to expect everyone to suddenly be in 'happy bunny hour' all holding hands.

There isn't any question at present in the Western scientific community about whether the greenhouse effect is a real phenomena. You can test this in your own backyard. The majority of esteemed universities around where I live offer full courses about the effects of it and the US, Canada, Europe, China, and India, have already pledged trillions of dollars towards solutions. If you still have doubts, you can easily express your concerns to a professor and not a philosopher. If you win that argument, then you can approach ordinary citizens here with your scientific proof. However, it being scientific knowledge doesn't automatically mean it's true. After all, the sun revolving around the earth was previously common held as science. But conversely, it is a common logical error to think proving something is untrue proves its opposite to be true.

Consider the death, betrayal, and theft that brought most of the individuals involved this discussion right now into existence. Can it be ignored if it is a question of lying to oneself for a cause versus being honest? If so, it's a question of if the ends justify the means.

What would you do if you had to either save two strangers or your wife or daughter? I'd choose wife or daughter. It's a question of the type of history that brings us to this moment of choice.

Not to be too pessimistic, but in all realism the climate denial argument has shifted from a position of skepticism – which is now in the past – to being about action and practicality. If you really want to convince those in the thread, respond to the question,

"Why should I care about what happens to other people in other places and times, such as after I am no longer alive?"

The problem of climate denial is with a system of individual libertarian mindedness, not any special content of scientific evidence. Evidence actually tends to exacerbate it through its individualistic apparatus and the Cartesian-Augustinian subject, where deniers and pushers represent the same ideological form. At present it seems persuasion is of social, representational, and psychological expense rather than to do with anything of the natural world.

Their message seems to be: "If the problem comes down to individual action, information, and knowledge, then why should I care?" In my view, it seems a reflection of two different materialistic interpretations of Kant vs Hegel in the realm of morality.

Meaning to self-destruct? If one dies for a cause, that's one thing. But if one just waste away because of discontentment, then that's a problem.

It sounds like you are alluding to the utilitarian theory in your valuation of valid versus invalid self-destruction. If the destruction is considered to be doing the greatest good for the greatest number by the most widely held social sentiment, then it is acceptable. However, there are inherent problems with utilitarianism, which is why it is not used as a mechanistic model of moral good. The idea of social value determining the value scale of what is self-destructive is problematic because the act of self-destruction itself will always appear irrational to society, unless it is represented in an external place or time.

Take crime for an example. Any functioning society would say it is wrong to break the law in all cases except the moral one, where the function of breaking the law is to be in opposition to the former homogenizing mindset. No society would consider it favourable to break the law over a moral disagreement because moral disagreements are not supposed to exist, yet it is still paradoxically considered a good thing. We are getting into discussion of grounds that have predominantly actual basis. I would argue that the grounds of self-destructive behaviour are a kind of act of revival of the unity of the actual and rational where contingent rationality has become dogma.

No, you misunderstood. To him, any of the choices of punishment is like death. I mentioned those already -- exile, renounce his beliefs, and death are all similar in effect.

Aren't you sort of generalizing that all self-destructive people are irrational? Most people who choose a path, destructive or not, have some grounds for doing so. That part can be more or less assumed. Carrying over to the mainstream of the conversation, in a climate where your freedom of choice were under arrest, wouldn't a rebellious path with aim of liberating the freedom of the individual be worth taking? Otherwise, it would be likewise a kind of death of the individual.

Exile was not an option because he was old and didn't want to be separated from his loved ones. In essence, he was already destroyed by the powers that be. His choices -- exile, renounce his beliefs, or death -- all points towards the destruction of his identity.

So the choice was between renouncing beliefs -meaning teaching truth, wisdom, and philosophy to Athenian youths - and death. So how was it not self destructive to choose death?

Check this out, for example; and if you want, let me know how non-spiritual, anti-choice, or anti-agency it seems to you.

What I'm talking about is a kind of nihilism that is about the reality of choice and agency. But the reality we want means overcoming the little pods that our own mass media has embedded us into. In general, the commodity system creates needs for themselves that simultaneously present a lack in the individual in their negation. This is more like Head Like a Hole, but you could pick any NIN out of a hat and get more or less the same message. The thesis is that to really accept lack in general, and to rebelliously draw distinctions within it; to create a kind of empire of lack with the intention of attaining some kind of choice. Isn't that the only way to rebel against a self-generating need-machine: to become the machine yourself?

OP’s enquiry into self-destruction heavily reminds me of this song, which I generally like.

How nice to know that I'm successfully tapping into the debased individuals who make up the NIN fanbase. Looks like we're getting somewhere good now. Didn't Trent and Manson both satirize the illusion of choice and agency? Through their spectacular debauchery they exposed the asymptotic strivings of the autonomic continuation paradigm.

Observational approach to understanding the behavior of humans and animals points towards nurture and tenderness. We would not naturally seek chaos and suffering. So, establishing what's normal is really establishing the human psychology.

It would be appropriate at this point to ask you for clarifcation on what you mean by 'nurture and tenderness' and 'chaos and suffering.' This assessment would be opposite of someone who has achieved control over the 'will to power' as regards their attributed circumstances. Don't you find such individuals tend to come from backgrounds of adversity and pain? Would you represent this kind of character as common of someone who has been catered to every whim and pleasure their entire life?

Yeah, but what was he accused of, and why didn’t he stop?