It's mostly hyperbole such as describing low unemployment of 3.5% as catastrophic. It's not some neo-classical "optimum" level of unemployment (to make the rich class richer) but it's far from a "catastrophe". — boethius

Well I'm not sure, but I understood that to be a translation snarl. If one put it in the negative - as 96.5% employment, it would be catastrophic, because the old, the infirm, the sick, the insane, and children would be working in huge numbers. And that would be the result of the "disappearance" of men of working age either abroad or into the army/casualty lists.

A purpose is somewhat like a row.

Sometimes, it is possible to get your ducks in a row. But when your ducks are in a row, you do not have your ducks and a row.

there exists an X such that 1) X provides purpose in the world, and 2) if there be no X, then there is no purpose, — tim wood

There is no X such that X provides the rowness to the ducks, rather it is the relations between the ducks that sometimes has the form of a row; it is not an extra something in addition to the ducks.

This modern stuff all sounds the same to me. Here's something a bit different.

What if we stopped trying to "bring up" children to our high level, and instead tried to bring ourselves up to their high level?
What if we treated children like high ambassadors and dignitaries from a foreign land, who were ignorant of our barbaric and primitive customs and language, but had their own, that we might learn something of if we were not so condescending to their apparent smallness and frailty? What if we had all, from an early age, been treated with generosity and respect?

This is rather long. But I think it is worth plodding through, and thinking about. For instance, the simple notion that the largest waste product of modern human society currently by tonnage is... CO2.

In general, it is a great introduction to ecological theory and the comparison with economic theory is particularly cogent and revealing. But you might need to keep your happy pills handy.

I didn't say there are two types of people — flannel jesus

No, I said it, but i was only joking. Sorry if I offended. But in general, I think it is an always a mistake to psychologise philosophies and philosophers, and particularly so in the case of terms of mental health diagnostics. Nihilism can be a joyous liberation just as well as an oppressive vacuous prison.

There are two types of people; those who think people are always one type or another, and the rest of us. :wink:

In contradiction to the thesis of the op, I present the witness, Kurt Vonnegut.

And I’ve had a hell of a good time. I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.

https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2017/11/18/we-are-here-on-earth-to-fart-around-and-dont-let-anybody-tell-you-any-different/

But on reflection, he's not a moral nihilist at all, but an anti-authoritarian.

Now since I've defined what I'm talking about this much do you finally get it? — Echogem222

No, the more you define things the less understandable you become.

Take a coffee cup. there is a hole that I can fill with coffee, and then there is a hole on the side I can put my fingers through to pick it up which is formed by the handle. These are topologically distinct, because the handle-hole one can pass something through, whereas where the coffee goes in, it has to come out the same way. But both holes are distinguished by and from their surroundings, or to put it another way 'a hole has to be a hole in something', and this seems to make the distinction between PV and NV impossible to sustain, beyond the way you arbitrarily decide to regard a particular hole.

A word has meaning to the extent that it makes a distinction between that which it indicates, and that which it does not indicate.

To exist is to stand out, to be distinguishable from - let's say as vaguely as possible - "the background". Thus a hole in the road, for example, stands out as a feature from the background levelness of the rest of the road. This is the opposite standing out, geometrically, to the way a mountain stands out from the plain or an island from the sea.

There is no need to resort to quantum mechanics to understand basic English. Anyone who thinks that holes don't exist should be dropped down a mineshaft until they realise and admit their mistake.

I have not fact-checked this, but offer it as is:– sneer, dismiss, disprove, approve, or something else; personally, I cried, but I am a milk and water liberal pantywaist.

A fundamental law of Trumpism is projection.

This isn't about taking sides. — Tzeentch

Oh yes it is. We are on the side of truth, and they are the enemy.

Fortunately, its always the other side one has to fact check, one's own group being open and honest about everything.

living by that principle is inconvenient. — Vera Mont

Indeed, that's why only the virtuous do it. Even Trump/Putin/the boogieman will tell the truth when it's convenient.

Further suppose those agents start breaking the guy's fingers and he spills his guts about how to disarm the bomb and they disarm it.
— RogueAI
His fingers and toes are all broken, and he still doesn't know how to disarm the bomb, because he didn't make it or arm it. He doesn't know who they are or where they are. The terrorists are smart enough to send an ignorant mule to plant it. — Vera Mont

Yes, but suppose they catch one of the smart guys one day...

One ought to assume that sometimes torture is efficacious, otherwise no one would ever be tempted. One thing it is efficacious for, is to instil terror, for example; it functions as a deterrent.

It is not immoral to torture people because it is ineffectual; that is an argument of despair one resorts to with the totally amoral, to whom moral arguments have no meaning. Hurt and harm imposed on another are the basis for calling it immoral. And if hurt and harm should not to be imposed on us, then it should not to be imposed on them either. This simple principle is why the first step in any crime against humanity is "dehumanising". This produces "edge-cases".

Criminal trial: day 1.

I think there is a persistent confusion between self and consciousness which messes up a lot of the discourse.
— bert1
So then "consciousness" is impersonal? For instance, my awareness of being self-aware isn't actually mine? :chin: — 180 Proof

It seems to be localised. If consciousness is transparent, to the extent that one cannot see the rose tint, or whatever the opposite is (blue?), then this body's consciousness is this body's, and that explains the persistent illusion that the body image is the consciousness, because otherwise it is mere breath (aka 'spirit'). In which case "what it is like to be a bat" is intelligible as being just like being a little furry flying me that is shortsighted and can echo-locate.

And that understanding would seem to lead very naturally to a common-sense ethic - if all consciousness is 'the same', then 'do not do to yourself over there what you would not like if you were over there, because you are over there as well as here.

What's the difference between a loaf of bread and a slice of bread?

Good grief!

I don't really know what the OP hopes to achieve with his tautology — Leontiskos

It's a preamble to casting the first stone, obviously.

https://global-tipping-points.org

Here is a large report that explains some of the tipping points and what we might expect and what we ought to be doing about it politically. It's fairly up to date, and well researched. Seems mightily optimistic to me about the ability/possibility for human society to find its own transformative positive tipping points in terms of world governance and mitigating technologies and lifestyle adaptation. But hope springs 'til the last minute.

Another rat departs the hopefully sinking ship, armed with enough insider testimony to plea bargain his own case.



Meanwhile, the twenty year long conspiracy to pervert the course of British justice that is the Post Office False Prosecutions Scandal remains without a single arrest of an official or the payment of any compensation. (This in case the US government and its fans feel lonely in their corruption.)

the user who deliberately put himself on his own ignore list remains unnoticed by this fact. — javi2541997

I particularly like the idea of the facts not noticing me. Please share that strange liquid with me!

Unfortunately, it turns out not to be possible to put oneself on one's ignore list. So one has no other recourse but to be an intelligent and interesting interlocutor, or be irritated.

My question is how does one know when that is the case - ie they're chatting sh*t. And to the contrary, when they really do know what they're talking about. — Benj96

What one knows is what has been. What another knows one might learn if one pays attention quietly to what they are saying without rehearsing what one knows over, to compare. Your question arises when there is a conflict. One thinks one knows and then discovers that one was wrong, and there is no conflict if one is ready to learn. Only if one tries to hold on to one's knowing does the conflict arise. So one learns that a conflicted mind is the infallible sign.

One piece of evidence is that I don't seem to be struggling against "reality" as much as I used to. — BC

This!

Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it?
I do not believe it can be done.

The universe is sacred.
You cannot improve it.
If you try to change it, you will ruin it.
If you try to hold it, you will lose it.

So sometimes things are ahead and sometimes they are behind;
Sometimes breathing is hard, sometimes it comes easily;
Sometimes there is strength and sometimes weakness;
Sometimes one is up and sometimes down.

Therefore the sage avoids extremes, excesses, and complacency. — Tao Te Ching

Some interesting (to me) discussion of the inexplicable (to me) convergence of the right and the evangelicals here in the first 25mins of this.

As editor of the Parisian daily Combat, the successor of a Resistance newssheet run largely by Camus, he held an independent left-wing position based on the ideals of justice and truth and the belief that all political action must have a solid moral basis. Later, the old-style expediency of both Left and Right brought increasing disillusion, and in 1947 he severed his connection with Combat.

[snip]

As novelist and playwright, moralist and political theorist, Albert Camus after World War II became the spokesman of his own generation and the mentor of the next, not only in France but also in Europe and eventually the world. His writings, which addressed themselves mainly to the isolation of man in an alien universe, the estrangement of the individual from himself, the problem of evil, and the pressing finality of death, accurately reflected the alienation and disillusionment of the postwar intellectual. He is remembered, with Sartre, as a leading practitioner of the existential novel. Though he understood the nihilism of many of his contemporaries, Camus also argued the necessity of defending such values as truth, moderation, and justice. In his last works he sketched the outlines of a liberal humanism that rejected the dogmatic aspects of both Christianity and Marxism.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Albert-Camus

Not a moral nihilist at all, but a deeply moral thinker. Perhaps it is not so much John Deigh who misunderstands Camus, as the contributors to this thread.

I almost never make arguments; I prefer analysis, explanation, analogy, illustration, even pontification.

Yeah, but that's not an argument.

First of all, does it make sense to speak of shared sensations? — sime

In a word — no. The word "red" and the meaning "stop" are reliably connected with the top light of the traffic signal. This is what we need to agree on and can agree on even if some of us are colour-blind.

But philosophers talk of sensations, formerly of impressions, currently of qualia, as internal subjective and radically private. Cue Wittgenstein's private language argument.

The only way to describe the sensation of the top traffic light that we have agreed to call "red" is to associate it analogically with other sensations - loud, angry, hot, that sort of thing. And this too becomes an agreed set of associations such that one cannot oneself know if they are personal to one's actual sensation or learned socially.

In the end, if we propose a possible sensation that is radically private (and all sensations are such), we cannot say anything about them at all. Certainly one can propose that my sensation of the top light is "the same" as your sensation of the bottom light, and vice versa, but this inversion can never be detected, by definition of the term 'sensation', and so such talk is meaningless.

To me that leans too far. You can so lean, as the lines are extremely blurry. But I can’t unsee the lines. I still see enough to call being in the middle something happening. — Fire Ologist

To who? I talk about identity as if i have none and for sure that leans too far. But perhaps "we" can find the balance together? Something and nothing — someone and no one.. When philosophy fails, maybe try poetry.

I would hate to think that it undermines all attempts to articulate ideas rationally - though I agree that many people have taken it that way. — Ludwig V

I wouldn't take it that way, but I would take it as undermining any attempt to claim that the male of the species is more rational than the female, and any position that relies on that thesis.

All, for human beings, is in the middle. — Fire Ologist

Indeed, one is always in a mid-life crisis whenever one philosophises - in the middle of a muddle.

Life is only completed by death. and identity is merely what one writes on another's tombstone. Everything is becoming except oneself, and that remains forever empty, though the world pours in at every sense.

Being just is, and only nothing happens.

It's a puzzle. That's all I'm saying. — Ludwig V

It is a puzzle because for a few centuries one experience has been taught as if it were the only experience that had meaning. to hear that there is another experience seems shocking, and to notice that it has been the experience of half of humanity all this time and has been studiously ignored and denigrated as 'illogical', is such wilful blindness and illogicality that it undermines the rationalist position from start to finish.
That's how I put the pieces together, anyway.

If it is an intuition, would it be shared by a pregnant women? — Banno

Dilato ergo summus.

I'm unmarried and so don't have a real insight into what she's saying. — Moliere

No objection from me. We all have mothers after all.

A whole philosophical tradition discovered it was unreasonable in declaring that "all swans are white".

The phrase "black swan" derives from a Latin expression; its oldest known occurrence is from the 2nd-century Roman poet Juvenal's characterization in his Satire VI of something being "rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno" ("a bird as rare upon the earth as a black swan").[4]: 165 [5][6] When the phrase was coined, the black swan was presumed by Romans not to exist.[1] The importance of the metaphor lies in its analogy to the fragility of any system of thought. A set of conclusions is potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved. In this case, the observation of a single black swan would be the undoing of the logic of any system of thought, as well as any reasoning that followed from that underlying logic.
Juvenal's phrase was a common expression in 16th century London as a statement of impossibility.[7] The London expression derives from the Old World presumption that all swans must be white because all historical records of swans reported that they had white feathers.[8] In that context, a black swan was impossible or at least nonexistent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kant_and_the_Platypus
(The platypus is an anomolous creature that transcended the category mammal when discovered by both suckling its young and laying eggs rather than live young, thereby irritating many tidy minds.)

One discovers, when reality bites, rather than when the king of the internet argues.

In the realm of expressing thoughts and opinions, I have identified two forms: — Judaka

What you are talking about is subjectivism and objectivity. It's covered in Philosophy 101. — alan1000

Explicitly, from the beginning, the op declares that the division he is expressing is "Non-externalised", which I take it that @alan1000 is identifying as "subjectivism".

However, I also take it from the reference to "Philosophy 101" that @alan 1000 takes his distinction to be externalised/objective.

And that curious circumstance leads me to suggest that the distinction cannot be made absolutely clear. Rather, distinctions are always made by subjects, but since language is shared, their expression always depends upon a shared object world.

It is about growing up, and being human, and the inherent limits of great men. — Banno

And that explains entirely its unpopularity both here/now, and at the time. From the isolated SUM comes not so much science, which is irrevocably polyphonic and communal, as capitalism, and fascism.

But of course I would say that!

A discussion of various things, that might be of interest.

Well, there's the solipsistic outtake - we should stop talking about this because we can't know anything. — Malcolm Lett

Well this is the fundamental difficulty of such arguments: "How come you know so much about how deluded we all are?" If the world we see is not the world, how can you talk about the world? It looks like some esoteric wisdom you have to claim there.

Now me, I claim that I am real and the world is real, and I don't know everything, but I know how many beans make five and that shit smells.

Toccata and fugue, on a friggin'harp? Oh yeah, and for the first time, it makes sense!