you can't always be responsible for what others will think and do about you words and actions. — dimosthenis9

Well I am saying you can always be responsible for whatever you are aware of but that does not mean you are to blame for it.

Thus I am aware that my prime minister, Boris Johnson, is incapable of telling the truth, and I therefore respond to what he says as information about his fantasy of what he wishes folk to think is true. This means I am in effect ungoverned. This is the shit I have to deal with in my life; it is my responsibility.

At the end we can't be inside anyone's head and predict all the outcomes that our words and actions will bring to him. — dimosthenis9

We can't predict everything but we can often predict some things. Whereof one is unaware, thereof one is not responsible.

For instance, how are we responsible for other’s thoughts? It depends on whether you are a behaviorist, classical cognitivist , phenomenologist or postmodern social constructionist. — Joshs

You are telling me this, therefore you are to some extent responsible for what I make of it. I cannot see how my or your general psychological/philosophical 'ism changes the fact?

For example I tell you "I like the way your girlfriend dresses" and then your mind goes "oh so he has a crush on my girl?! Oh damn that mother fucker and he was supposed to be my friend. Fuck off I will teach him a lesson". Am I responsible for that other person's complex that leaded into his thoughts and possible actions? It's not always clear the line of responsibility I should take for others thoughts and actions. — dimosthenis9

Well you weren't to know I am the paranoid suspicious controlling type. :rage: This is kind of close to blaming the victim and I certainly don't want to even hint at going there, even if you did know what I'm like. Fortunately there is a big difference between being responsible and being to blame. The paramedic is responsible for keeping folks alive until the doctor arrives, but she is not necessarily to blame for deaths in her care, unless she made a serious blunder.

Now you know my foibles though, you would be well advised to reassure me that your comment was just a queer eye'd sartorial appreciation, or some such.

I m responsible for what I say and do, — dimosthenis9

Well if you are not responsible for your upbringing, your thoughts, and therefore what you do and say are influenced by others as parents teachers media moguls, priests politicians. I don't see how one can maintain that we do not influence each other's thinking by our speech and other actions, in which case we are partially responsible for each other's thoughts. I call you an idiot, and I am responsible for what happens next, which is you having an angry thought and maybe saying something unpleasant back to me, or kicking the cat, or whatever. and then folks will read it and they too will be influenced to some extent. "No man is an island ..."

Materialism becomes idealism.

We have eyes, therefore we cannot see -> we have brains, therefore we cannot think.

Every awareness in the world is responsible for the world it is aware of. Here is a challenge; what is your response?
— unenlightened

I m not sure I got this. — dimosthenis9

I express a thought as follows: "Every awareness in the world is responsible for the world it is aware of."

You become aware of it, and you respond. ( you could have responded by ignoring it, that is often a good response) You express vague interest and puzzlement. Either way, in your response or ignoring, you become (somewhat) responsible for what follows, ie this response to you. Which means, as should have been obvious from the beginning, that in communication, we become responsible for each other's thoughts.

Likewise, if you become aware that your neighbour is beating his wife, you are responsible for for letting it continue or doing something about it. This is simply what awareness is for; responding to the world responsibly - which is to say, with the intention to make the world better.

Thus philosophy is the very queen of professions; for there is no better way of making the world better than by increasing awareness.

Well yeah, but there are things that we are totally responsible for. Many others not.Our words and actions are some of them, but thoughts aren't. — dimosthenis9

Are your words and actions not the expression of your thoughts? Mine are. That was my first post, that i am responsible for their expression and non-expression in the same way that I am responsible for my children. Thoughts are like children, and need to be guided and looked after and occasionally restrained from doing foolish, dangerous, or hurtful things.

Every awareness in the world is responsible for the world it is aware of. Here is a challenge; what is your response?

Ah yes, I forgot to mention, I do generally post things I have thought.

I hoped to provoke folks to consider all sorts of situations where we commonly talk about responsibility. The question itself is a bit pants really, though, as though one would only be responsible for things one could totally be in control of, which is nothing at all. It is fairly obvious that one is socialised and indoctrinated and educated in ways one has no control over. but one is still responsible for what one does with the fascistic fundamentalist bullshit one is immersed in from birth - who else is going to deal with it?

To want suffering to exist because you want to see people struggle and overcome hardships, can be construed as mildly sadistic. Just because it happens to be people's stance a lot of the times, doesn't mean it still isn't a great stance to have regarding what they want to see from other people. — schopenhauer1

That is a truly bizarre comment. What I or anyone wants is beside the point isn't it? Any being that lives, dies. Any being that lives, suffers harm. to live is to die, and therefore to live is to suffer harm. To notice this fact is not sadism, mild or bitter. That is an argument unworthy of you, and smacks of desperation. I'm stopping here, because it is clear that we have again reached the nub of our disagreement, and further discussion would be pointless suffering.

Do you think there is such thing as a mild form of sadism? — schopenhauer1

Yes, and an extreme form.

Am I being not just a little sadistic in my paternal amusement? — schopenhauer1

I don't know. It's your story you tell it. I do love gardening, mind.

The former.

You, the parent, aren't creating (unnecessarily) someone else who is harmed. — schopenhauer1

Yes. I have heard your argument. I don't have to procreate, and if I don't procreate I nobody will come into being to be harmed. If I do procreate, necessarily a being will come into being who will suffer.

I think we agree as to the facts. It's the morality that we differ on. you equate harm with evil, and I utterly reject it.

This is a case where you (the parent) can not create ANY harm for another person.. — schopenhauer1

Who?

Why do you, the parent, have to be the harbinger for other people's experiences? You are almost making the point I am trying to make to DA671 — schopenhauer1

That's just how it works, old man; the egg is necessary to the chicken, and the chicken is necessary to the egg. Hence the unanswerable question. It is not necessary to me to have children but it is necessary to my children that I had them; and their suffering is necessary to their lives as your suffering is necessary to yours.

You see, when you talk about what an individual has to do - what they find necessary, then you begin to talk sense; you don't have to have children; if you do have children they will suffer. These are bald facts; but there is no life without suffering, so there is no unnecessary suffering {apart from all the unnecessary suffering that we ought to avoid, by not putting ground glass in the bread and not shooting folks in the knee-cap etc.}

Being the harbinger of joy can be inestimably valuable — DA671

I reject the calculus of joy - suffering = value of life. A life of suffering is valuable. Fall in love, and be heartbroken; go climbing and break a leg and die of exposure; have children and agonise over their every grazed knee. Live much and suffer and die, and if there is joy sometimes, that is a bonus.

Give me a break — schopenhauer1

No. I refuse you a break.

if someone is going to be born into horrendous conditions, because the kid is not "existent" yet, none of this matters? — schopenhauer1

There is no 'if' about it. Every child suffers, and every child dies. This is an inescapable part of what being alive is. Harm is necessary to life, not unnecessary to life.

In your attempt to be clever with the non-identity argument you put yourself in a corner. — schopenhauer1

I have not made a non-identity argument. My argument is that life is good because without life there would be no antinatalism.

I am responsible for my posts; and I am also responsible for all the posts I think better of and do not post. This means i am responsible for your replies too, in the same way that I am responsible for my children breaking your window, or becoming fanatics and starting a war. There is no end to my responsibility; I am responsible for every starving child and every idiot politician. I should be more careful.

I am my brother's keeper.

Unnecessary to whom?
— unenlightened

Unnecessary to create it in the first place. — schopenhauer1

A non response. Unnecessary to create it in the first place to whom? Life is necessary as the precondition for saying "the first place". Therefore life is the first place. Life is necessary to life. Life is necessary to claiming that life is not necessary.

Life is contingent. Harm is necessary to life. Life is necessary to say that life is contingent.

Is creating unnecessary collateral damage for someone else ever ethical? — schopenhauer1

Unnecessary to whom? Death is necessary to life. Harm is necessary to life. Life is necessary to life.

Well, I think it is generally accepted that when we are overwhelmed by strong emotions, physical pain, etc., our capacity for rational thought can become impaired. In order to restore our reasoning faculty to its optimal or normal functional state, we need to release it from the grip of the factors that have caused the impairment. And this involves a degree of detachment or disengagement. — Apollodorus

I agree. That, as I said is the natural, and automatic response to trauma. The difficulty comes when the dissociated person finds that life without affect is flat and meaningless, but finds that the first feeling they come across is the same unprocessed feeling of horror or terror or agony with which they could not deal, that remains unexpressed because it has been dissociated from. That is to say, that the reasoning faculty has been maintained in a normal functional state at the cost of shutting off the feeling self. Acute anxiety has been exchanged for chronic depression.

But is the passive observation of the mind a valid concept? Doesn't the very act of paying attention to a thought create it? And how can one even choose to observe passively, given the fact that the very intention to be mindful is agenda-driven? — sime

One should certainly be mindful of these questions! :wink:

I would like to talk this evening about the quality of the meditative mind. It may be rather complex and abstract, but if one goes into it thoroughly - not so much in detail but to discover the nature of it, the feeling of it, the essence of it - , then perhaps it will be worthwhile; then perhaps without conscious effort and deliberate purpose, we shall be able to break through the shallow mind which makes our lives so empty, so superficial and so habit-ridden.
[...]
The effort to be, to become, to deny, to resist, to cultivate virtue, to suppress, to sublimate - all that is in essence the nature of a shallow mind. Probably most people will not agree with this, but it does not matter. It seems to me an obvious psychological fact.

Now, when one realizes this, when one is aware of it, sees the truth of it actually, not verbally, not intellectually, and does not allow the mind to ask innumerable questions as to how to change it, how to get out of this shallowness - all of which implies effort - , then the mind realizes that it cannot do anything about itself. All that it can do is to perceive, to see things ruthlessly, as they are, without distortion, without bringing in opinions about the fact; merely to observe. And it is extremely difficult, merely to observe, because our minds are trained to condemn, to compare, to compete, to justify, or to identify with what is seen. So it never sees things exactly as they are. To live with a feeling as it is - whether it is jealousy, envy, greed, ambition, or what you will - , to live with it without distorting it, without having any opinion or judgment about it, requires a mind that has energy to follow all the movements of that fact. A fact is never still; it is moving, it is living. But we want to make it still by capturing it with an opinion, a judgment. — J.Krishnamurti

Public Talk 10 London, England - 23 May 1961

Obviously, in psychological terms, observing mental processes in a detached or "impersonal" manner automatically leads to a state of enhanced emotional calm and mental clarity, as it represents the opposite of personal identification with those processes leading to one's conscious self being overwhelmed by emotions and thoughts causing stress. — Apollodorus

Obvious, it may be, but true, I think not. This dissociation of consciousness from feeling and mind from body is the natural response to trauma. So while it may 'work' in the sense of allowing thought to be calm, it increases the fragmentation of the self, and leaves the emotional self neglected.

There is an assumption that thought makes that thought is aware and emotion is not; that thought is important and emotion foolish and unnecessary. This is traumatised ideation. Now if mindfulness is to be therapeutic, it needs not to increase the fragmentation of the mind, but to unify it. This requires observation without detachment or separation. Observation of the whole by the whole. And that means the fragmented self seeing its fragmented state, it means reentering and reclaiming those trauma emotions from which one has dissociated.

But this is a very different approach from the mindfulness that is commonly taught and promoted as an alternative to the mind-numbing drugs that are even more commonly prescribed. It is not cheap, easy or safe.

I am not at all opposed to opposites; that would be a performative contradiction. Which would be a very suitable name: perco for short.

Have a look at conflict theory.
Polarisation can be defined as the alignment of conflicting interest groups. The archetypal case is N. Ireland during the 'Troubles'. There was a conflict between Catholics and Protestants. But Catholics were Republicans and Protestants were Loyalists, and Catholics were working-class, and Protestants were middle-class, and Catholics were SDLP and Protestants were DUP.

It is the alignment of these divisions or conflicts that tends to lead to actual physical conflict rather than compromise, whereas when they are not aligned, the individual contains the conflict, being allied with one group on one issue, religion, say, and another group on another issue, politics, say. If your relatives are opposed on some issues, your religious leader is opposed on some issues, your children on some issues, then you are less likely to take an extreme, intolerant, or violent stance. Thus the bubble forming nature of social media can be seen to be a factor tending towards polarisation.

Someone familiar with American society can probably better analyse the alignments there, but they are likely to be broadly the same dimensions of left/right, rich/poor, social/ individual, and perhaps not Protestant /Catholic, but Godly/Godless. Should I add White/non-white? Line them all up, and civil war is the likely outcome.

Are you now or have you ever been ... woke?

McCarthy was probably not the originator, but surely the epitome of cancel culture.

To a degree that they're somewhat disabled? It doesn't seem to say. — praxis

It doesn't say, and I'm not sure that 'somewhat disabled' is quantifiable. But my feeling is that 'most' folks who manage to achieve a mental diagnosis of any sort are probably somewhat disabled. It's not an attractive handy label that folks will go look for very much. In fact it would be crazy to do so.

“For most people, I think if you’re not suffering from any clinical issues, or illness, or from stress to a degree that you’re somewhat disabled, it’s fine,” he says.

1 in 4 people will experience a mental health problem of some kind each year in England .
1 in 6 people report experiencing a common mental health problem (like anxiety and depression) in any given week in England.

https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/statistics-and-facts-about-mental-health/how-common-are-mental-health-problems/

That "if", already qualified by "most", is itself quite large. The 'mostly harmless' epithet may literally be true, but that does not equate to 'safe'.

You should try mindfulness, Jack; it's great for peace of mind.

Metaphysics you are saying deals more in absolutes? — TiredThinker

Here is a necessary truth, a founding exemplar for something like a TRUE opposite.

'Up' is the opposite of 'down.' No one can argue with that!

Except that the world is round, and when an Australian points down, his pointing aligns with my English up.

So a necessarily true opposite is not necessarily opposite at all. Opposite is a useful term in many ordinary situations, but it is not a useful erm for philosophy.

For the god-Squad, speak instead of The practicing of the Presence.

The Christian monastic and mystical tradition is very close to Buddhist practice behind the veil of cultural embellishments. But these embellishments are essential to those that are themselves embedded in a particular culture.

And that I think is the source some dangers, that folks make use of what is potentially a powerful technique for clearing the mind, without having any real cultural ground, and this leaves one prey to all sorts of fancies and terrors with no defence. Thus schools use mindfulness as a pacifier and social control, resulting in self-hypnosis rather than any awakening. Stress is the appropriate response to most schools, and mindfulness is used to repress the stress, not to liberate.

David Shapiro, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, found that 63% of the group studied, who had varying degrees of experience in meditation and had each tried mindfulness, had suffered at least one negative effect from meditation retreats, while 7% reported profoundly adverse effects including panic, depression, pain and anxiety. Shapiro’s study was small-scale; several research papers, including a 2011 study by Duke University in North Carolina, have raised concerns at the lack of quality research on the impact of mindfulness, specifically the lack of controlled studies.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jan/23/is-mindfulness-making-us-ill

I'll just leave this here lest we become overly happy and clappy.

In general, a word has meaning by virtue of distinguishing that which it is from that which it is not.This is a cat, that is not a cat. But there is no opposite of a cat as anti-cat. This is flying, that is not flying, but falling with attitude. Sometimes it is worth talking loosely of opposition and opposites in various ways, but let's not try and make a metaphysics of it, because it will be the opposite of good philosophy, which as every schoolboy knows is bullshit.

The dude was my head of department in his dotage when he thought he had proved the existence of god after all.

I think the conception of religion as belief is mistaken in the first place. You continue that conception by positing faith as belief without evidence, or some such. I might say that I believe in justice, and not imagine that there is a fact that justice invariably prevails, or even usually prevails, corresponding to my belief. It is a principle to live by, a practice to seek to follow, not a fact or fantasy to believe.

One can decide to put one's faith in something, which is to hang one's life on it, as if it is a rope. One has to live for something or die for it, there has to be some centre to one's life, and that is where one has put one's faith. Flew put his faith in his own powers of argumentation, and they proved somewhat treacherous in the end.

I remember the bad old days when there were "no spitting" notices on public transport and other public spaces. What an outrageous curtailment of freedom that was in the name of public health! Almost as bad as the obligation to list the ingredients on food packaging, that still prevents us from selling ground glass enriched bread and so on. Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!

That is a mighty big pile of words, and I have read some of them. I am never inclined to think that piles of words can oblige things to be thus and not so, and what I understand is that an experience is being described.

The trauma of total consciousness fragments.

I recognise it.

But probably you prefer the details of theory...

I have now listened up to #37 which completes a series on Plato.

Now back when I was at ninnyversity (early 70's), Plato was presented as the founder of the philosophical method as it is here celebrated. Dialogue, argumentation, logic, and a healthy scepticism for ancient authority and tradition, religion, and anything remotely 'esoteric.

This view was clearly skewed and partial. But not only that, it was modern and novel at the time, and fashion has since moved on, or back, to a more complete and complex view.

The discussion of the divided line story in The Republic, for example, comes in the Republic just at the point in the text of the golden ratio. And the description of the divided line is such as to define the golden ratio. But the ratio is not mentioned.

And then there is Atlantis, a myth originating with Plato as far as is known, that surely ought to make more sense than it does. And, and, and ...

So at the least, there is much weirdness and many things alluded to but not spelled out, but left to the reader to work out.

I am staying esoteric in these comments as instructed, and just leaving a breadcrumb trail of my progress, but feel free to make comments out of sync with me.

if America wins, — Apollodorus

If America wins what? You think Russia and America are going to war?

Because history, and/or geography, 'we', the righteous, will not be defending Ukraine. So Putin's calculation will be the cost/benefit analysis of invasion and occupation. War with Europe and the US is not a risk, but sanctions are, and the possibility of a protracted destabilising resistance also. As against the prospect of an uncontested win against the West, consolidation of gains in Crimea, Kudos from the folks, respect from China, and the prospect of Europe getting gas hungry. What else? Or the laugh of the ungodly getting their knickers in a twist over some military manoeuvres.

Are you chaps aware of the concept of tokenism? It's the grownup version of Uncle Tom. So, for example, you promote a vertically challenged lesbian female to be head of the Metropolitan Police, on the understanding that she will both exemplify the non existence of, and vigorously deny the existence of, misogyny and homophobia, (and racism, for good luck) in the police. I imagine the Supreme Court works the same way.

"Is anything ruled out?"

Ruled out by what?

In chess, it is ruled out by the rules of the game that a bishop can move from a black square to a white square or vice-versa.

In language, it is ruled out that up can be down.

But if reality decides that the world is round and folks on opposite sides of it point up in opposite directions, language had better learn to accommodate this inconvenient fact.

In general, the rules of science are descriptive not prescriptive. This means that they do not rule anything out, but merely describe the fact that some things do not happen.

"Cows do not lay eggs." This is a generalised observation, not a rule. Here is another generalised observation: "Reality is not ruled by thoughts or words." Traditionally, it was supposed that God said stuff, and it was so. Sometimes when a tyrant says stuff, it is so, but even Canute proverbially could not rule the tides. To suppose that words can rule things in or out is magical thinking. Conform your thoughts to the way things are, and be ruled by that.

Having said that, there is much also to be said for that kind of magical thinking that is called 'design and planning'. An engineer designs a non-existent bridge, and builders realise his ideas. Many of mankind's magical imaginings have been realised in this way - I myself have a magic mirror that enables me to see and speak to my daughter on the other side of the world, and send messages to philosophers that I have never even met. My daughter put on wings and flew seven times seven leagues; and so on.