Comments

  • The Bodies
    a word which turns a person from a critical observer to a person who needs a cure? — Moliere

    Sounds like a magic spell. The sort of delegitimising incantation a psychiatrist uses by way of dehumanising his clients into patients. Your thoughts are sick, and the cure can only begin with your acquiescence . And low, the prince is turned into a frog. Personally, I'm a sceptic, so I always kiss every frog I meet, just in case.
  • Greater Good Theodicy, Toy Worlds, Invincible Arguments
    Now, if you agree that I can change the physics of The Matrix, let's talk about physical suffering. Have you ever played a video game and used a "god mode" cheat code where, no matter how much damage you're supposed to take, you don't take any of the damage? Bullets hit you, but your health doesn't go down, for instance. Well, that is very crude, but isn't it conceivable that I could change this Matrix so that the people in it don't suffer damage from being hit by bullets in the same way? — Astro Cat

    Excellent analogy. A game you cannot lose is a dull game where winning is no achievement and has no value. Games have to have baddies so that they can be overcome. A life without danger and suffering is a life without meaning. Heaven is intolerably dull, and that is why we are all here in this miserable world, trying to imagine heaven, and realise it on Earth. When god makes everything right, it's game over. No point in cooking, everything tastes wonderful, no point climbing mountains, you can never fall off. No point in philosophy, all the answers are available to everyone already.
  • Philosophy Is Comedy
    ↪ucarr
    No reason to get excited, the thief, he kindly spoke
    There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke
    But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate
    So let us not talk falsely, the hour is getting late     — Bob somebody-or-other
  • The Bodies
    Step one is to identify the specific measurable problem you have, step two is to arrive at some theoretically reasonable method for resolving it, step three is to implement that method, and step four is to measure your results to determine if you've been able to resolve the problem identified in step one. — Hanover

    1. This is insane.
    2. There can be no objective method for dealing with subjects.
    3. The results of personal interactions are immeasurable.
    4. The uselessness of this approach is easily measurable by the vast increase in mental illness that so-called scientific psychology has produced by its attempt to objectify social relations between subjects.

    If you treat people as objects, you will only learn how to manipulate them; people subjected to manipulation will suffer damage.
  • Philosophy Is Comedy
    ...philosophy is life. — ucarr
    Philosophy Is Comedy. — ucarr

    Divine comedy therefore.
  • Finding Love in Friendship
    Hi there, Royal Bank of Scotland. Well this is what matters in this life isn't it? Not a dull topic at all. Can we call it sexual attraction?

    look at it from a different angel — RBS

    I'm not sure if Eros/Cupid is an angel or not, but we have a void in modern society where there used to be religion and propriety. We have to negotiate relationships that might include helpless infants on an ad hoc, individual basis. There is a thing called 'commitment'; you know that 'for better or worse' clause that used to be in a marriage. "I might kill my wife, but not divorce her."

    Romance is mostly fantasy, and that is dangerous. There is a delicate balance of friendship and hard work that goes in to a long term relationship, that ideally will keep the flame of passion alight in the long term. R_E_S_P_E_C_T goes along way, as the song has it.

    What will you put up with from a friend? Can you have a really irritating friend? How many good orgasms will make you put up with an arsehole?Who gets to keep the kids and the record collection? I'm not sure what your real question is...
  • What happened to the Weltanschauung thread?
    ↪Agent Smith
    I just don't see the sinister or aggression of an Agent - no insult intended.
  • What happened to the Weltanschauung thread?
    ↪Agent Smith
    Other than that, you're charitable and friendly in your interactions and we would like to be able to keep you here if we can. — Baden

    This is Eddie, your shipboard computer, and I'm feeling just great, guys, and I know I'm just going to get a bundle of kicks out of any program you care to run through me. — Heart of Gold computer
  • Brexit
    ↪Benkei
    Yeah, and look how well the NHS is doing on the extra £450M. per week!
  • What is Aloneness and the Significance of Other Minds?
    Who said united we stand, divided we fall? What about Ben Franklin who said "we must hang together or assuredly we will all hang separately " — Agent Smith

    Yes, leaders always want to unite us. Yes, loyalty is a good thing if society is good. But Hitler was a leader who united people, and all too few of his people stood against the tide. Sometimes falling is what is needful for a society gone rogue. Sheep are social, men sometimes need to discriminate, and may sometimes need to stand alone. In a sense, that is what makes a leader - one who does not just follow.
  • What is Aloneness and the Significance of Other Minds?
    the objective here seems to be to teach a lesson to wit that you won't last 5 minutes in the wild unless you have someone watching your six. Our ancestors were no fools, mon ami. — Agent Smith

    That was not my experience. What I learned from spending time alone is that my feeling experience comes from within; there are happy days and miserable days, calm days and agitated days, and this emotional weather, if I may put it that way, is nothing to do with other people or the environment. This gives one a different perspective on all the social relationships one has, and one's relationship to the vicissitudes of life. One understands better what one brings to a relationship or a situation, and how one is responsible for one's response to it. In this way, time alone teaches one how to be socially responsible, which means knowing when to cooperate, and when to stand alone and in opposition. This latter is terribly important if one is going to be something more than a sheep in one's social relations.
  • What is Aloneness and the Significance of Other Minds?
    Humans are social creatures and there's an instinctive desire for company. I believe there are psychological studies that show those who live solitary lives have shorter lifespans and suffer more illnesses. As Jack Cummins alluded to, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is on target (social life is a sine qua non). — Agent Smith

    Yes. But whence the stress? If you don't know, that's fine, or if you don't care. I stress the word 'stress' there to emphasise the tension between what you said for yourself, and what you say above for humanity.

    Maslow's hierarchy of needs is on target (social life is a sine qua non). — Agent Smith

    It is a sine qua non for infants and children. However, there is a tradition in some tribes that the adolescent needs to go alone to the wilderness, or perhaps on a pilgrimage to 'find themselves' or to find their 'spirit animal', or their vocation, or God. Zarathustra goes up into the mountains, and then returns changed to give something to society instead of just taking from it.
  • What is Aloneness and the Significance of Other Minds?
    Being alone is stressful, as I said. — Agent Smith

    Can you explain why, or how, the stress arises? In engineering, stress is produced when there are two or more forces working against each other. The left hand pushes against the bow as the right hand pulls back the bowstring.

    So on the face of it, I would expect that stress would be produced when two people are wanting different things - Smith wants companionship, but Cummins wants to be alone, maybe. But you say that Smith alone is more stressed?

    I'm wondering if other people function as a distraction rather than a relaxant, from a stress that is always there in the background?
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    If one were to change the language just a little...

    Why can human understanding not understand human understanding?

    ... it becomes rather easy to see that the mind is not big enough to encompass the mind, and if it were big enough, it would be too big to be encompassed by the mind.

    One cannot stand under oneself.
  • What are you listening to right now?
    ↪Changeling
    Ok, but don't bet on it.
  • Ahmaud Arbery: How common is it?
    You must not misconstrue my words — Agent Smith

    Your words are very clear and you claim is very common.
  • Ahmaud Arbery: How common is it?
    I'm calling to my assistance statistical data to make the case that racial profiling is, though lamentable, justified. — Agent Smith

    Yes. I know what you are doing because it has been going on for generations. It is a racist justification, akin to the racist justification for mortgage zoning.

    Prejudice produces injustice.This has been known for long enough that the depiction of justice personified has a blindfold. But Agent Smith and the police do not care about justice so much as they care about their own interest.
  • Corporeality and Interpersonal Being
    In short, why do we experience this person? — kudos

    In very short, myopia. These are my fingers because I can type with them, and those are not my fingers because they type and type-not according (as I imagine) to some other will. The limitations of the senses can be somewhat overcome by communication and empathy, but these are not enough to dissolve the constantly reinforced horizon of sensitivity such that when you eat, my hunger is not satisfied, but only brought more to my attention.

    So while it is true that 'No man is an island...', yet the loss of a stranger's life is less to me than the loss of my hair, which although I do not sense it directly, yet has accompanied me constantly all these years.
  • Ahmaud Arbery: How common is it?
    Imagine a village of 100 people, 50 are Christians and 50 are Muslims. Of the 50 Muslims, 20 are criminals and of the 50 Christians, 30 are criminals. — Agent Smith

    Imagine a police force that thinks falsely that this is the case. Their prejudicial behaviour will mean that Muslims are lightly policed and Christians are heavily policed. That obviously results in skewed statistics that reinforce and justify the prejudice. Imagine this going on for generation after generation until becomes a universally accepted truth amongst Christians and Muslims and even atheist philosophers. Imagine folks conforming to the stereotypes they are brought up with. Imagine folks rationalising racism in all seriousness on a philosophical website and folks completely agreeing with them.
  • Deaths of Despair
    A policy can only have impact if it forces someone to do something or act in a particular way. The repealing or absence of such a policy does not because nothing bears on no one. The absence of a gun control law, for instance, does not make people go out and shoot another any more than it makes them go out and not shoot another. So these kind of connections invariably try to connect an effect to a false cause, a common fallacy. — NOS4A2

    And the absence of food does not cause starvation.
  • Superficiality and Illusions within Identity
    As I said we could be, probably are, deluded. The self is non-predicable. It can't be said to be this or that, it just is (patior ergo sum) ... as a/the thinker, a thinking thing. — Agent Smith

    Yeah, whatever. I think you are missing my point. You are adding two thoughts together and creating reality. I don't think the world works like that. There are not three dwellings, but only one.You cannot live in an address or live in architect's plans. So your list does not work and your math doesn't work.

    If I have a drawing of an apple, a photo of an apple and an apple, how many apples do I have?
  • Superficiality and Illusions within Identity
    There are 3 selves (identities)
    1. Who others think you are (So)
    2. Who you think you are (Ss)
    3. Who you really are (Sr)     — Agent Smith

    Curious. Note that 1 and 2 are thoughts, whereas 3 is not.

    Try an analogy.

    There are three dwellings.

    1 is the architect's plan
    2 is your address.
    3 is the building you live in.
  • What are you listening to right now?
    You nicked this musical raise thing off unenlightened — Changeling

    No, no, I do proper thread theme tunes that relate to the topic, like this:-

  • Why do we get Upset?
    To be alive is to be sensitive and to be sensitive is to be vulnerable. I want to have that sensitivity that can be hurt, because it it is the effect of connectedness. One can be touched by another's words and the touch can be kind or cruel. If one is never hurt by what others say, it is because one is not listening and has become numb.

    But the trick is to allow the blow to strike, the knife to penetrate fully without denial or angry defence. Sometimes I forget this in the moment, but when one feels the hurt fully, it passes immediately.
  • Deaths of Despair
    So you think the statistics is bull!? — Agent Smith

    No. I think the word 'statistics' used without any statistics or reference to statistics is bull. Hence my, by my own criterion, unbelievable comment.
  • Deaths of Despair
    There will always be boxes to carry, buttons to push, cartons to fill, or whatever. — Hanover

    Of course there will; my grape peeler will always have a job, as long as his tone of voice is more pleasingly subservient than the robot grape peeler. But a chap needs a handful of servants these days, not an army. Even the army can be operated remotely by a few chaps in a bunker instead of all those expensive grunts. The working class is no longer needed, therefore it must cease to exist.
  • Deaths of Despair
    In other news, we are entering a post mass-production economy. It used to be that the masses were necessary as both labour and consumer to produce from that cycle a surplus for the great and the good. Robotics and digital printing are ending the need for the working class. The sooner they slaughter each other in civil war, the better. The despair comes from the dawning awareness of this, encouraged by the great and the good such as Trump, actively inciting that despair and the resulting conflict.
  • Deaths of Despair
    Statistics show — Agent Smith

    Show those statistics.

    Statistics show that 97% of claims prefaced by 'Statistics show' are a steaming pile of male bovine excrement. The other 3% already show their statistics.
  • Homeless Psychosis : Poverty Ideology
    Homelessness is not that much of a problem; why else can governments ignore it? — Agent Smith

    Excuse me Agent, but this bids fair to be the silliest thing you have ever proposed. A tribe living in mud huts has no difficulty in meeting and deciding where to build a new hut whenever one is required. But governments are not in the business of solving such problems, but of creating them. Simple economics dictate, apparently, a certain level of unemployment to keep inflation down and noses to the grindstone. The poor and destitute have an important function in society to 'encourage the others' rather like the prison population. Homelessness is not a problem at all for governments, but the very foundation of capitalist society.

    Notice for example how a 'refugee crisis' is not at all depicted as a problem for refugees, but as one for the native population who need protection from them 'flooding' the country and displacing the natives from their homes and jobs. Notice too, how even on this site one is liable to hear, if one ventures a criticism of the system, 'well if you don't like it, go and live somewhere else.' Homelessness is a very real threat that keeps citizens in line.
  • Bannings
    Fish in the sea, you know how I feel
    River running free, you know how I feel
    Blossom on the tree, you know how I feel
    It's a new dawn
    It's a new day
    It's a new life for me
    And I'm feeling good.     — Nina Simone
  • Color code
    Given that they are meaningless, how are they to be understood? — introbert

    Given that the above black shapes are meaningless, I seem to be able nonetheless to understand and respond. This is because we share the socially constructed written language. I can read traffic lights too.

    If you talk to insects, there will be some difficulty, because they tend to see colour better than humans, but they clearly have meaning to them in terms of identifying flowers; bright colours mean tasty nectar.

    I feel I must be missing your point though; what is the difficulty with colour? Signs can be entirely arbitrary like words and letters, or entirely natural, like footprints, or a combination of the two.
  • Life is a competition. There are winners, and there are losers. That's a scary & depressing reality.
    ↪niki wonoto
    That life is a competition is a nonsense promoted by folks who have been lucky, because it makes it seem that they deserve their luck. It is good fortune to be born in a peaceful prosperous family with good health. It is goodfortune to be talented and to have the opportunity to develop one's talent. Dismiss this nonsense of competition; most of us never stood a chance because the playing field is full of deep holes and most of us cannot get out of the hole we were born in.

    On the contrary, life for humans is a cooperative game, a game of loving and caring for each other, and this is a much better game because we all can win. Even the most helpless and feeble has a role and can add to the happiness of the world. Even if you are alone in a hole you cannot get out of, you can decorate your hole and make it the best hole you can.

    And your English is good by the way, welcome to the site.
  • What’s wrong with free speech absolutism?
    So government employees ought be allowed to share military intelligence with foreign nations? — Michael

    Yes, I think so. Secret government is necessarily undemocratic government. That is to say, if there is a feeling in the workforce that they do not want to share it, then they won't, but the law should not be involved in the 'suppression of truth'. Where I think I would draw a line is at personal information, some protection for the individual's privacy seems reasonable. Though largely unobtainable alas.
  • What’s wrong with free speech absolutism?
    What happens to hypothesis? Art? All that’s left is dogma. — NOS4A2

    That is not true. I am presenting a view that is open to challenge and might be wrong, it is a hypothesis. But it is not wrong because it rules out fiction, because it does no such thing. It only rules out presenting fiction as fact.
  • What’s wrong with free speech absolutism?
    What’s wrong with free speech absolutism? — NOS4A2

    https://www.storyarts.org/library/aesops/stories/boy.html

    Rugged individualists have a difficulty understanding the "co" in communication. Communication, which speech is a variety of, has a function. The function is social, it is to bring individuals together and allow them to coordinate in just the same way that the nervous system allows communication within the individual and allows coordination of the limbs. It is sadly apparent when the nervous system sends wrong information; shakes and spasms, phantom limb pain, and so on.

    Thus speech is always a cooperative social enterprise and is liable to go wrong in various ways. Untimely, false, or incomprehensible, information prevents appropriate responses and coordination of action. Snake oil salesmen, pranksters, dishonest politicians, coercive controllers, and others of that ilk exploit the communal communication system of language for their own purposes that are manipulative rather than communicative. This manipulation has a high social and individual cost and no doubt everyone has suffered that cost at times. Ultimately, the loss of trust in the language itself results in a disengagement from social life and this is apparent in politics. Thus free speech that allows lies the same protection as truth is corrosive to democracy in particular.

    So I am a truth and honesty absolutist, not a lies and bullshit absolutist. And the question arises as to who one can trust to sort the lies from the truths. One has at any rate to trust oneself, and then one has to trust oneself to know who to trust. And the more that lies abound. the less there will be trust. If there is no trust, there is no meaning, and I have been wasting my time pressing keys for nothing. But I trust some will understand.
  • Is pornography a problem?
    The appetite for pornography seems insatiable. — Shawn

    Certainly, enough is never enough for long. Last week an avocado suite was the height of bathroom excellence. This week it is unbearably gauche and must be ripped out at once. This week we must all have stand-alone baths with a view and waterfall taps; next week ... The question should really be 'what happens to appetite without commodification?' We live in a world where male sexual appetite is natural and good and violent, and female sexual appetite is disgusting, aberrant and unimaginable apart from as a performance in male fantasy.

    Imagine a woman of seventy having sex and that being ordinary. It's not in the business of being arousing, or even interesting to anyone but the participants - and that is the magic of advertising, to twist the mundane of human coupling into an endlessly fascinating obsession. Like any sport, it should be of great interest to the participants and of very little interest to the rest of the world. But alas :

    I can see that your head
    Has been twisted and fed
    With worthless foam from the mouth
    I can tell you are torn
    Between stayin' and returnin'
    Back to the South
    You've been fooled into thinking
    That the finishin' end is at hand
    Yet there's no one to beat you
    No one t' defeat you
    'Cept the thoughts of yourself feeling bad
    I've heard you say many times
    That you're better than no one
    And no one is better than you
    If you really believe that
    You know you have
    Nothing to win and nothing to lose
    From fixtures and forces and friends
    Your sorrow does stem
    That hype you and type you
    Making you feel
    That you gotta be exactly like them     — To Ramona, Bob Dylan
  • Is pornography a problem?
    Are there any ethical detriments you can think of in regards to the young being exposed to pornography? — Shawn

    I wanted to point out that the greatest danger, whether apparent or not, of pornography is seen through the eyes of the religious and conservative types. — Shawn

    Bonobos (our closest relatives) are highly promiscuous and use sex to defuse tensions avoid fights, and promote social cohesion. For humans, it is much more a matter of status, and therefore it is socially controlled. Specifically, society is patriarchal and patrilineal, and this necessarily leads to the need to control women's sexual activity, because while the mother is easily known by the fact of giving birth, the father must be presumed. Thus we arrive at the notion of women as property, assets for reproduction that need to be guarded. Religion serves the nobility, the propertied class, to protect their bloodline from pollution. This is why female prostitutes are tolerated, but wives must be virginal. See Charles and Diana for example.

    This is the background into which pornography is projected. Women are already commodified as assets to be owned or rented.

    Pornography is both advertising and product. It functions to create the need that it then satisfies momentarily, and unsatisfactorily. So it induces addiction, and deliberately. And the nature of all addiction and all advertising is that the hunger is stimulated more than it is satisfied.

    The primary illusion of advertising is to suggest that there is an inner need that can be satisfied by the product, and the inner need is almost always social status. The suggestion is that if you buy the expensive new car, the road ahead will be magically clear, or that if you don't buy air freshener, your visitors will think you smelly and disgusting.

    The illusion of pornography is that women want to be treated as commodities and are aroused by it. The damage done to ordinary men and women is that they both come to believe it. This produces miserable abusive relationships that neither party can understand or improve. One buys the new car, and finds one can never get out of second gear, because of the traffic. One finds one's relationships are ephemeral, and one is addicted to images of sexual violence.
  • Top Ten Favorite Films
    What about Bob — BC

    Best psychodrama since unsliced Cuckoo's nest. When are y'all going to make the film of Sometimes a Great Notion by the way?.
  • Top Ten Favorite Films
    Some Jolly good British films to do you all good!

    Mike Leigh films:
    Mr Turner.
    Happy-go-Lucky.
    Vera Drake.

    Ken Loach films:
    Cathy Come Home.
    I, Daniel Blake.
    Kes.

    Other films wot I like:
    The Bedsitting-room.
    Educating Rita.
    Shirley Valentine.
    Passport to Pimlico
    Kind Hearts and Coronets
    The Railway Children.
    Trainspotting.

    Edit: Dennis Potter films ( well more series really):
    The Singing Detective.
    Cold Lazarus.
    Pennies from Heaven.
  • Hindsight Analysis
    the value of your efforts needs to help predict outcomes or it's useless. — Judaka

    Indeed, and how do you find out whether or not it does? I do it by waiting and seeing how things turn out. That is to say, with hindsight.
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