It should be relatively clear from the other thread that when it comes to this topic I lean far more toward a phenomenology investigation so talking about what ‘exists’ isn’t really something that concerns me.

The only other reasonable approach is through the cognitive neurosciences as far as I’m concerned.

I think most other philosophical ideas have pretty much run their full course. There is likely more life left in the idea of Language as Consciousness, not to mean as a positive approach, but the area of linguistics combined with cognitive neurosciences is certainly an intriguing area - again though, I think a partially phenomenological approach would help there too.

To add to this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zNRAF3AFlqM

I never said you were? I certainly wasn’t suggesting you were calling for outrage. We seem to agree. I admit it’s tough to be charitable with some statements made.

I don’t really know what those sentences mean if I’m being completely honest. If you could rephrase (possibly add more detail) from “If ...” onward I may be able to respond better.

Thanks

All you have to do is use your eyes and you can see that blacks are not worse off now than they were in 1964. — Harry Hindu

Assuming you’re talking about the US here, just because things are ‘better’ doesn’t mean they cannot be better still. I don’t believe it is justifiable to suggest things are completely equal between blacks, asians, causasians, Italians, Irish, Jews and latinos in the US. The recent historical shifts (and historically we’re talking relatively recent) are still clearly felt throughout US society. That said I wouldn’t be entirely opposed to any statement saying it’s been talked about for too long, but I wouldn’t side with that position because such a history that effects, and has affected, generations living today it about as clear as can be. I’m not fooled by the occasional overly outraged cry from any position and I’m human enough (just about) to understand the emotion involved nevertheless.

It's not really that simple. When it comes to politically loaded terms, definitions can have important consequences. If you dilute the definition of racism too much, it helps those with ulterior political motives to forge false equivalencies between very disparate groups—for example, those proposing affirmative action and white supremacists. That's really what's at issue here. Attempts to gerrymander a definition in support of a political point. And I suspect the point that's being pushed for under the guise of a very liberal-sounding anti-racism is that a lack of colour-blindness as advocated for in the OP can be considered a form of racism.

But regardless of whether that's the intention or not, no sensible debate can be conducted until an agreement is reached on the meaning of the terms under debate. And the arbiter of such meanings has to be some kind of mutually recognized authority interpreted correctly. — Baden

I do think it is as simple as I made it out to be in order to have a rational exchange. Just because it is ‘simple’ I didn’t for one second mean to imply that it would be easy.

It may take some strength on an individual’s part not to be baited into outrage - they will suffer the consequences eventually if they lack the strength.

There is no ‘dilution’ of the term here as far as I can see. I can then ask you where you see this, could you be overreacting, what can we do about it, how can we use the term, and what other means we have of using the term for civil progress? There are many more questions of course.

No one is suggesting that white supremacists aren’t racist because many of them believe in genetic superiority. They are deluded, confused and/or pushing unfounded prejudices for personal gain. Politics can be, and is often, used as a means of exploiting human frailties.

I am NOT insisting on a universal use of the terminology. All I am, and have been, saying is that to insist someone use your nuanced definition of a term without the other person knowing how you’re using it is a fruitless endeavor and likely to increase friction, misunderstandings, misinterpretations, thus playing directly into the hands of those I believe we’re both essentially opposed against: those using these terms to gain unfounded and irrational political leverage.

This isn’t as big a problem as some here seem to be making it out to be. The terms are used publicly and in different technical fields of research.

When I use ‘race’ in cultural terms I make sure it is clear enough in the context. In scientific terms there are no human races, yet there are some extremely subtle differences within the gene pool. It should be noted that there are larger differences within any give group of people than there are between groups.

The problem that does persist, as I pointed out several pages back, is the ill-informed opinion that conflates ‘race’ (scientific definition) with ‘race’ (cultural definition). We are not going to eradicate the term ‘race’ from the English vocabulary and given the growth of our understanding over time - when we were mistaken into thinking that relatively small differences in appearances are key to determining scientific demarcations - we’ve naturally dragged along outdated, and misused, terminology into today’s world.

All you have to do is state clearly how you are using the term as honestly as possible and bring understanding to the discussion that some people are going to get twitchy about the subject matter given the historical implications, different national attitudes, and/or there scientific inclinations.

I don’t think it helps matters when people insist their definition is the true definition. In those situations the best thing to do is to express your understanding of their term and then state as clearly as possible what your take is and ask how they would articulate your definition as best they can.

If these forums are good for anything surely they offer the opportunity to educate ourselves about the perspectives of another. The more opposed the perspectives involved the more room there is to gain understanding.

I think it was Hegel who said something like that? To paraphrase, ‘Education for society is about understanding people’s different perspectives’.

What fascinates me is that points have been made and few seem willing to accept another’s perspective being more inclined to shout out there own under the delusion of actually having a rational impact in the discussion.

No doubt I’ll be called patronizing again. It’s fine. I don’t really mind. It appears that Vagabond has managed to make a very rational post, but I do wonder if some people bothered to read it?

Agreement is useless without a willingness to simply accept someone else’s perspective.

If you don't like that, how about I say consciousness is nothing else but sum of all the inner feelings and external sensations? — Zelebg

That’s about as broad and accurate a definition as there can be. The main issue is how we then unpack what this means and what use it is to us to say so.

Note: the dichotic utterance of ‘inner’ and ‘external’ has always been a hazardous field of play - hence dualistic notions and no logical means to claw our way around such attitudes and keep a reasonable dialogue flowing.

This is the bit I hit a wall with. We 'regard' a phenomena, yes? So having regarded it, we presumably then want to say something about it? Otherwise the activity is simply silent meditation. So when it comes to saying something about it, the words we use must have some effect on the community to whom we're speaking, which means they must either already know, or be able to gather by your actions, what to do with the word you've used. (more simply, what the word refers to, but I'm trying to be accurate here and words do not always refer).

So I kind of get how introspection might allow us to recognise a focus on different models (intentionality?), I get how we could conduct thought experiments on such modes to find out more about them. I'm stuck on how we could ever communicate the results to anyone without invoking community-held (objective) definitions for the words we're using, which means the referrents for those words have to be objectively verifiable to some loose extent. — Isaac

I admit that the use of ‘regard’ has to be taken in a broad and abstract manner here. I am not talking about my ‘regard’ for an object anymore than I mean my ‘intention’ when talking about ‘Intentionality’. The ‘regard’ is the ‘mode’ in the sense I meant it.

Phenomenon is what is ‘apparent’ and Phenomenology is the investigation into the ‘modes’ (intentionality) that ‘give aboutness’.

The phenomenon is the subjective regard. — I like sushi

That sentence was more of an afterthought. Probably better to put a line through it as an attempt to explain my understanding of Phenomenology rather than as a certified exemplar of what phenomenology is about.

I am puzzled by how so many people see Heidegger and/or Gadamer as doing something different than what Husserl set out. From my reading they have helped elucidate certain aspects of phenomenology, but that is exactly the problem as well - meaning they appear, to me at least, to have taken a part as the whole (note: please ignore this paragraph if you want. Just voicing a point that has bothered me for a while.)

I think this ability is closely tied to written language though, its more possible to remember hours of writing than hours of speech. This is maybe one of the reasons why myth exists, errors continually entered orally transmitted narratives until these stories did not reference what anyone had ever experienced. — Enrique

Look up Lynne Kelly.

I’m really not sure what you mean here. I just pointed out that ‘existence’ is a ‘mode’ of regard. You seemed to be accusing me of some ‘objective’/‘subjective’ dichotomy. I tried to explain further.

To explain further the ‘it-ness’ is an ‘existential mode’ of intentionality.

If you wish try and untangle where you see possible conflicts of terminology.

I’m just laying out as best I can as how I understand phenomenology. I’ve done this by drawing on the example of natural science being inclined toward an objective approach that actively seeks to leave out subjective perspectives as much as possible. It is probably helpful to view phenomenology as a mirror of this where leaving out what is objectively determined by the naturalistic attitude is a means to investigating subjectivity.

The existent items are not the direct concern of phenomenology, yet ‘existence’ as a ‘mode’ is as a phenomenal ‘object’ of experience - the ‘horizon’.

As what I hope is a more tangible way of expressing this we don’t tend to consider being on Earth orbiting the Sun. We are, yet now that I’ve drawn attention to this our ‘intentionality’ shifts. As soon as the question of ‘existence’ is brought into play then our ‘intentionality’ shifts to phenomenon as existing ‘objects’.

I’m happy to accept that generally people say ‘real’ to talk about number and word concepts and ‘existent’ to talk about this or that ‘box’, ‘chair’ or ‘table’. For phenomenological investigation the ‘real’ or ‘existent’ are only ‘modes of intentionality’; meaning they are not of direct concern for the itemization of ‘objects’ as ‘real’ or ‘existent’. The phenomenon is the subjective regard.

Maybe that only makes partial sense? I’d appreciate it if you could see a way to build a bridge of understanding here and tell me. We certainly seem to be in roughly the same area here.

What are you actually talking about here? Are you talking about the evolution of the brain? We can see that many other animals possess various aspects of human language - assuming you’ve done some research into cognitive neurosciences - yet we’re different in that we hold many different ‘lingual’ capacities in one brain where other sections of the animal kingdom have more splintered pieces.

If you’re just referring to something along the lines of cultural ‘memes’ (Dawkins) in combination with an innate language facility (Chomsky) then where and when are you talking at this progression from lower to high contrast language? From a biological perspective we can view the progress of human development reasonably well by observing how children acquire language - Refer to link above about some commonly held misconceptions about language acquisition and age.

What I find interesting is how feral children brought back into civilization cannot fully acquire what we colloquially refer to as ‘language’, yet the Mexican guy (the man with no language) could acquire language at the age of 28. This, I believe, indicates that much of what we call ‘language’ is more about our naturalistically acquired relation to the world about us. Meaning girls brought up by wolves in a jungle grew up in a world where ‘tables’, ‘windows’ and other such mundane items of human civilization, were absent from their conceptual world (the wolf world). The guy from Mexico was fully embedded in the human civilized world so he had a conceptual, non-worded, understanding of the functionality of various mundane items such as ‘tables’, ‘windows’ and ‘chairs’, so he was able to bind these lived experiences with symbolic meaning.

One particular interest if mine is the role of memory, language, narrative and writing. Oral traditions are quite capable of holding encyclopedic knowledge. We’ve become more and more reliant upon physically recorded data over the eras though.

No probs. I’m probably just another idiot who thinks they know more than they do. In my experience that is the general disposition of nearly every human alive :D

At the end of the day one method will work better for someone more than for another. If the OP views his writing as a means of psychoanalysis I’d say they’re off. His bombastic style is quite funny (I thought so anyway). The self critique in the preface to Birth of Tragedy is an insight into how harsh he was on his on thoughts too, not just his impressions of others.

The key for me was reading Aristotle’s Poetics and having a vested interest in storytelling and narrative structures alongside how memory functions and the fascinating discoveries of over the past few decades in the cognitive neurosciences.

It seems a little contrary to tell someone, as I do, that in order to understand Nietzsche you need to start reading elsewhere.

I imagine his ideas appeal more to those who kind of hold a partial dislike toward what we call ‘philosophy’ today. He certainly does a decent job of uncloaking a certain atmosphere of pretension in regard to those who claim the self-proclaimed title of ‘philosopher’. Kant is another heavyweight who pretty much said something along the same lines, that is - to poorly paraphrase - ‘To call yourself a philosopher is the height of arrogance.’ Much like Plato tried to frame the ‘ideal’ ruler I believe we should also regard the title of ‘philosopher’ in the very same manner: as an idealised and unobtainable pole around which we can rotate but never possess. That is likely why much of ancient thought of those times was encapsulated in Christian, and other religious, mythos. The ideal for humanity is an unseen target, yet we can vaguely make out some rough idea of ‘betterment’/‘flourishing’. This is what I am quite strongly inclined to believe Nietzsche was flitting around - especially in Beyond Good and Evil, which is backed up by his words in On the Gen ...

Gotta go ...

Because phenomenology is concerned with the ‘horizon’ of experience, with ‘intentionality’. By intentionality we’re talking about a ‘mode’ of being. A ‘mode of regard’ toward an ‘object’, yet the ‘object’ is the ‘horizon’ of experience NOT some realised concrete item ‘out there’. That is why you hear phrases like ‘mode of looking’, rather than ‘mode of looking at’, because there is no ‘looking at something’ only a ‘mode of regard’.

The successes snd precision of the natural sciences is due to the utilisation of objective measurement, the holding fast to absconding from subjective noise. The point of phenomenology is to give a means of exploring and making use of the subjective by absconding from objective noise - not to deny it, but to bolster it by establishing the grounding of all human knowledge and experience which necessarily stems from the subjectivity of being not the objectively assembled naturalistic attitude.

I am not pretending to have a full grasp of this. It’s an difficult shift in thinking to make and it’s not one that comes without resistance.

We cannot measure subjectivity by objective means. That is the heart of the issue many either cannot see or refuse to accept. Probably because it’s quite a worrying thought to say that the ‘essence’ of what we regard as most dear (our experience of life) is effectively out of the reach of objective measurement making it seem by the scientific attitude as either trivial, illusional and/or removed of essential ‘value’.

It's existence makes no difference, — Isaac

It’s like you read what I wrote with the singular intent to disagree. Yet you agreed and didn’t realise. I plainly said it wasn’t about what exists. I then said ‘existence’ as an ‘object’ of consciousness does matter.

What does that mean? ‘Thought and belief’? Go intricate, give me more. I used to say something similar myself, but it’s hardly revealing anything much to anyone.

I never said object. I said ‘object’, as in intentionality, ‘conscious of’, not some noumena fancy. ‘Object’ in the sense of this discussion isn’t an existent object, ‘existence’ is an ‘object’ of intentional experience.

I find this whole thread kind of strange when the primary questioning is of the phenomenal, of subjective experience, and of consciousness. Phenomenology (Husserlian) is precisely a field of philosophical thought that came into being to deal with these questions.

Instead a see the same old repetition where people get bogged down in arguments about dualism, reality, and naive realism.

It might help if you talk about what constitutes specific experiences. Already mentioned this. For example think about what you can imagine and can’t imagine about some ‘object’ of experience (be it a sound, shape, colour etc.,.). You can’t imagine a sound with no frequency, a colour with no shade or a shape with no angles. If you see a chair you don’t hold hold the entirely of the chair in the moment as your scope is limited. Everything is ‘face on’

If you thought I was talking about that you completely missed the point. It’s all too common and precisely the exact thing I wasn’t saying.

I am talking about subjective experience. People here seem to be talking about subjective experience by attaching their position to a physical realist position that is only ground in scientific investigation. Be clear, VERY clear, science sets out to reduce the ‘subjective’ in favour of the ‘objective’.

Talk about eyes, occipital lobes and retinas is not an experiential investigation.

This, in the sense everyone here seems to be talking, is wrong.

To be explicit - I’m sure some folks here are ignoring this because it’s inconvenient - we don’t ‘see’ a chair. Our immediate field of vision is miniscule. The majority of subjective visual perception is ‘painted in’. There are other instances that show our limited means of focus and attention of how we become primed for certain experiences. If everyone here focuses only some proposed set of ‘input’/‘output’ and ‘processing’ then you’re all missing the point of the subjective experience by pretending what you see with your eyes/occipital lobe/language is the focus of the experiencing ‘act’ ... clearly it isn’t. Don’t confuse the experience with the directedness of subjective experiencing. Don’t ignore the how experience is spacial and temporal simply because you cannot quite reconcile ‘experience’ with these terms in an articulate manner.

In this light we don’t experience an apple or a chair, we experience our intentionality constituted through intersubjective perception.

Expanding language leads to expanding our time consciousness. If you negate terminology from a language you confine conscious understanding. This isn’t something I am making up. There are clear cases that show how language affects time comprehension - to the point where grown adults act like infants being unable to hold and compare two separate concepts (eg. colour and location). These adults were not mentally deficient and some did pick up the ability to hold two concepts at once (because of exposure to a more complex language that took into account connected concepts).

Be wary of those that dodge any possible use of a new concept. Such thinking is essentially dogmatic. That said I do often try and avoid crazy word salads, but not because I don’t find a broader lexicon as useful or insightful, but simply because it’s bloody hard work and once the task is done you’re never sure if you’re going to achieve anything by stepping out of common parse

This is perhaps a little short sighted as religious institutions have safe guarded many philosophical ideas and helped perpetuate philosophical thought through the Dark Ages.

Theology is a ripe field for hypothetical discussions that can be extremely interesting. I don’t believe this forum allows for religious preaching though.

Also, keep in mind that it is likely I good idea to allow people easier access to less theological topics. Someone coming here to discuss the proposed existence of god and what that even means may be inclined to jump into ethical discussions and explore epistemic problems and other extensions of the issue into many other branches of philosophy.

Another issue is the stereotypical image of someone who is religious. Not every single person of belief holds to some dogmatic view. A great many religious people are very intelligent and don’t take every piece of scripture as literal rulebook for life.

I’m more opposed to strong anti-theistic attitudes than mild theistic ones. Anyone ‘opposed’ to theism, in terms of ‘anti-theistic’, is coming from an extreme position. This is not to say it is necessarily bad to oppose religions (I am NOT saying that at all), but an ‘anti-theistic’ attitude is actively trying to belittle and shutdown religious dialogue.

So I’d side with the ‘theist’ over the ‘anti-theist’ as stated above. Please note I am not equating ‘anti-‘ with ‘opposed to’. I interpret the first prefix as purposefully destructive and the later as being open to discussion and questioning.

I think some folks are possibly conflating ‘imagining’ with ‘feeling’. If so perhaps pointing out that you cannot live out - experientially - an old experience. You can only adumbrate the feeling not feel it as it was.

I can remember/imagine the taste of chocolate, but I cannot taste chocolate now. In certain states - like dreaming - I can taste chocolate (the dream is a direct experience as is a hallucination, being difficult to distinguish between waking, or ‘normal’,states of consciousness).

Too much jargon, not enough substance. No one will bother reading this book if it looks anything like this. You seem to have outlined oral tradition as non-technical and somewhat minimalist too (completely untrue). If you haven’t meant to outline oral tradition in that manner compared to written narratives then you’ve done a very poor job of showing this.

Already I have serious doubts about your knowledge in this area and your capacity to articulate your point with any precision.

Not exasperated? This area had fascinated me for decades.

I wasn’t coming to his defense. Btw it makes no sense to suggest there is no better order to read his works in even if you read them all.

Doesn’t matter. Appears we do generally agree.

Boring :(

What about the cases where it actually is the case they have no value (to people/society in general)? Do you think that life has something above and beyond the contents of that life? — DingoJones

Now you’re saying, ‘What if X has no value, can X have value?’ Adding ‘What’ doesn’t change the underlying stance you’ve taken. Just stop. Move on to someone else. I’ve also answered the second bizarre extension of the question too. It depends on who is making the value judgement.

Do I value my life over some random murderer or rapist? Of course. Is there a circumstance where I wouldn’t? Anything is possible, yet I’d say it’s unlikely.

Why not ask about a mother in labor? Is her life more precious than her child’s?

The question is about a judgement on the value of ‘life’ - any life in general. I value life in general. I also make judgements about individual lives. Don’t conflate the two questions and pretend they are one and the same.

If a terminally ill child was going to die tomorrow would you still feed the child or think, ‘What’s the value in that?’ If Charles Manson was going to die tomorrow would you still feed him or think, ‘What’d the value in that?’. I understand that most people’s initial reactions would different between the two, but I do think that if we cannot see past the wrongs of our fellows (and understand their capacity as reflective of our capacity) then we’re probably lacking something.

Anyway, thanks for pressing. It turns out I did have something more to say :) just goes to show that persistence does sometimes pay off :D Thanks again

There are plenty of studies that show ‘reciprocity’ among primates. Fairness is a human extension of this. I wouldn’t suggest that other primates are aware of the concept of ‘fairness’ or ‘justice’ though. That is like saying a dog can understand who wins a football match just because it is present to experience a football match.

You just repeated my point. You’ve already decided. I cannot talk you around if you’ve denied the possibility of some murderous individual as having value.

I understand what you’re trying to say here but it’s unworkable. To ignore differences only works from a level playing field. ‘Race’ also goes beyond mere skin tone - genocides happen between/within groups of the same skin colour.

Anyway, there is surely more damage involved if those groups treated differently are without protection from the law. If the idea that people can be racist is inhibited then there can be no accusations of racism where racism exists. It’s better to see the scars and wounds of society in the open rather than let them fester and slough off sections of human culture simply by averting our gazes.

It is certainly a conundrum. It makes sense not to make too big a deal out of every apparent ‘racist’ comment, yet it also makes sense to not belittle every ‘racist’ comment. Simply ‘de-naming’ a social problem doesn’t make it disappear. We wouldn’t tell doctors to stop writing ‘cause of death starvation’ and then think starvation had ended.

Note: This is not to say some people won’t go too far. The unfounded accusations are a necessary trade off against a greater a more virulent catastrophe.

It literally makes no sense. It’s a contrary statement.

Effectively you just asked ‘If X has no value what value does X have?’ ... you don’t need us to answer that. You’ve already decided.

I’m here. Magic!

We can, and have, set up limited systems within which rigid rules operate. To put forward the ‘chair’ example is to side on the position that there is no exact, but a ‘chair’ isn’t a universal term. Chairs exist in the physical world in numerous forms.

I’ve recently used the game tic-tac-toe as an example. The rules are clear enough, and limited enough, for us to learn without any disagreement about how to play and how to win. For young children there are possible misinterpretations and mistakes because they don’t have the capacity to see all the possibilities in their minds eye. The same goes for us and a ‘chair’. We lack the capacity to see all possibilities of chair because the ‘limit’ chair operates in is ... well, ‘limitless’ as far as we can see.

As we’re able to extend our thought further into time by the facility of ‘language’ we’re able to encapsulate set parameters for our understanding and expand our abstract capacities.

The fallacy is the overextension of rules beyond set parameters. The thing is we’re always, at least partially, inclined to do this. We also do reap the reward of the occasional happy accident of such over-extensions. A so-called ‘cognitive bias’ can prove fruitful in realms no person without such bias would even consider looking. The human ‘flaw’ is necessarily a ‘boon’ in some occasions.

Mentioning the cognitive bias doesn’t make you immune to it though. It’s a lazy slight used far too often on forums to shut people down.

Then again, a little kick up the arse can prove productive ... I’ve not been following every word of the discussion so maybe HH will respond better to a prod or choke than to a parley?

Is it a "human thing" or a "white thing" to have prejudices and biases and should we have equal expectations of all humans, regardless of race, when it comes to restraining your biases and prejudices? — Harry Hindu

We probably ‘should’, but it’s far easier to work from assumptions based on hearsay and perpetuated ideologies. We’re only human, don’t be so harsh on everyone.

Some people will be obstinate about their positions, some flexible, and some seemingly groundless, but you can pretty much always guarantee that nearly all of us idiots think we’re more ‘centred’ than the idiot standing next to us.

One day we die. In the meantime we can choose to try an accept that other people have different ideas and used of terms and carefully tread around what they say, what they may mean, and what we may be thinking they mean that they don’t.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to argue against someone else’s definition of ‘racism’ too harshly. Simply state your view and make clear it is okay to have some slight differences of opinion and then work toward a workable definition that covers the problems embedded within the disagreement of ‘meaning’.

OR get stuck amending a singular statement for several pages on a forum.

My own view is that the term ‘racism’ is more about cultural differences than skintone. Tribes go to war over numerous differences and the visual prompts just so happen to be easier to distinguish.

What concerns me more than anything is how to tell what has happened to a society where ‘racism’ isn’t a topic of any concern. If such a day comes would this mean we’ve risen above such silly prejudices (institutionalised or otherwise), buried the ‘racism’ from view, and/or shifted our prejudices (institutionalised or otherwise) to other areas: such as religion, height, age, language, etc.,.

We’re ‘expressions’ of life after all when you think about it. I make moral judgements about other ‘expressions’ of life, but to judge ‘life’ seems rather contrary if that is what you are getting at?

I didn’t. I said ‘even if ...’

I value life probably due to the bias of being among the living. I kind of enjoy being alive. I’m also glad that I’ll die too or life wouldn’t really have ‘meaning’ for me without regard for mortality.

If you don’t find life of value you’ll probably not live much longer.

In that case I’d say the occasional punch in the face is valuable for humanity - I’d just rather it wasn’t always the same person getting punched in the face, but the law of averages dictates that someone will inevitably get an uneven share.

We used to burn people as witches. People like Sapolsky think we’ll look back to today’s age and comment that how we treated Charles Manson was inhumane - because he merely had a cognitive defect that they can ‘correct’.

If there is anything to value in the universe I’d say ‘life’ is something that seems quite a rarity and quite fleeting. Even if life is abundant - although nothing seems to point to that being the case - I’d still rank it as of inherent value (I’m bias of course!)

Clearly his life has value now. We know who you’re talking about, so there is clear value there. How he is of value is another question entirely. I imagine for criminal psychologists he is an extremely fascinating character. For the families of his victims the ‘value’ is most probably going to be quite, quite different - maybe blaming the ‘system’ or blaming the individual himself?

There is an echo here of what I was talking about in the thread on humanity’s ‘destructive’ capacities.

We’re all fabricated stories. Just because I am a story doesn’t make the insignificant.

The Enlightenment is also a story. We’re all stories of stories ... Shakespeare was pretty insightful in this regard.

The biggest problem contemporary society seems to be be facing is how to reconcile narratives with scientific facts and physical evidence. This has also been an issue for human society but I’d say things have come to head in our revolutionary age. Never before in the history of humanity has factual evidence and narrative been so explicit in pop-culture. There is a fuzziness now as we find ourselves in a hall of mirrors and mistaken the image for the observer over and over again, clutching at the ‘presentation’ of ‘cultures’ we see as defining our limited horizon. Some refuse to stretch their horizons and none of us can actually exist beyond them - hence the clinging regard to the ‘presentation’, the ‘image in the mirror’ as ‘us’.

Seems kind of ironic that we cannot cope with the ‘other’ yet constantly view ourselves as some ‘out there’ presentation. The unity of being is a necessary sacrifice for the measuring capacity of language.

Refer to Kant’s “positive noumenon”. It is basically a reference - pointing nowhere - to some contrariness of language that presents the illusion of ‘existent nothingness’.

Note: I’ve never read anything of Satre myself. I guess one day I’ll take a quick look beyond the superficial image I have of him.

Thank you very much for taking the time to outline what you mean by the terms used :D

Other posters of new threads please take note. Meaning we’re all quite capable of using a dictionary. Dictionaries don’t suffice when we get into detailed analysis though.

Anyway, little complaint over :)

Dingo ... I guess it’s simply down to how we view ‘value’. Life for me has intrinsic value because it is a very curious phenomenon. I would even argue against saying that ‘selfishness’ or ‘misery’ is inherently void of any merit. That said I’m deeply suspicious of certain forms of moral relativism.

I would perhaps ask you where/if you can distinguish between value judgements? Meaning ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in terms of morality, aesthetic tastes, reason, etc.,. I don’t mean to burrow into a semantic debate, nor to play an endless game of reduction, but to at least open up the discussion to explore and out to use categories of ‘value’ that can then be applied to the question at hand in order to reveal a possible common thread (if possible?).

Still makes me tear up. When you really think about this guy ... wow!