First of all I feel like it’s my mind holding my body together. My mind needs this otherwise everything disintegrates. The body held together in one piece seems imperative. Which is sort of odd, that the self needs the body, the material. So consequently, the anxiety over teletranspirtation.

philosophers are by their very nature, thinkers. which means that "doing philosophy" consists of sitting in a room with the curtains drawn, thinking, very hard, for long periods of time. this does not, on the face of it, seem to be the sort of thing that get up and go entrepreneurs do. — Kaarlo Tuomi

How do you know this?

Once again, if you believe this;

which benefits them and, no one else.
— Kaarlo Tuomi — Brett

then you don’t know what you’re talking about. But you do, don’t you? It’s just your ideology getting in the way.

Brett thinks that entrepreneurs create wealth — Kaarlo Tuomi

I’m pretty sure I haven’t said that.

how do you benefit from the wealth of Jeff Bezos? — Kaarlo Tuomi

I didn’t say all entrepreneurs were moral. Why ask me to defend Bezo? What does that have to do with your denial of any benefits from entrepreneurs?

he has also not provided any evidence that "wealth" is a thing that can benefit folk who do not possess it, — Kaarlo Tuomi

Nor did I state this. I said entrepreneurs benefit people through what they produce. Without entrepreneurs there would not be the products people use every day to get by.

Nor did I say wealth trickles down.

they are actually interested in the greater good of everyone — Kaarlo Tuomi

I didn’t say that so I’m not going to address your long list of complaints.

folk like Brett point to a company like Amazon and marvel at the utility of being able to order a replacement light bulb and have it delivered the next day, and they see this as a marvelous and wonderful thing that helps millions of families shop for essentials without wasting time driving to the shops and carting bags of essentials home again. instead, they get to spend more time with their kids, doing gardening, or playing online strip poker. — Kaarlo Tuomi

This is just an attempt to trivialise my point about what entrepreneurs create.

"
— Kaarlo Tuomi

which benefits them and, no one else. — Kaarlo Tuomi

The above is what I disagreed with, not your refutation of this;

"Entrepreneurs create wealth, they put ideas into practice, They make the world a better place for everyone".

with any benefit to the customers or employees seen as an unfortunately necessary cost that only impedes that core motivation. — Pfhorrest

So the customer is an impediment. Where do you imagine the profits come from? The customer doesn’t go in the cost margin, they go in the income margin.

The person that opened a cafe, the person that opened a factory to make shoes, the person who bought trucks to begin a transport business, the person who bought a farm and grew oranges? They aren’t employees.

So why aren’t the examples in my post entrepreneurs?

Not entrepreneurs, but people whose surplus value the entrepreneurs siphoned up. — Pfhorrest

Maybe there’s confusion here about what an entrepreneur is.

So what is fact? If there are none, — Outlander

I don’t know if I’ve ever said that. The earth orbiting the sun is a fact, what we think is happening is a fiction.

which benefits them and, no one else. — Kaarlo Tuomi

Who built the house you live in, who made the coffee you drink in the morning after you put on your pants that someone made, who opened the cafe where you had your breakfast, who transported the food across country, who produced the food, who made the bed you slept in, the table you sat at, the shoes you walked?

The earth orbiting the sun is not an idea.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

I have many dreams I don't understand. Plots, characters, situations, dialog, dilemmas for me (always the protagonist) to solve. I had one this morning. Perhaps it's a nonphysical realm trying to tell me something, if only I could understand. — fishfry

It’s interesting that we want to understand. Why aren’t we content with the experience? Why believe dreams refer to something? I’m not saying it’s pointless, but why do we believe there’s something there?

I know it leads into a hall of mirrors. But what else would you expect?

Some thoughts on knowledge/reality/the unknown.

The unknown is another fiction. Somehow we choose to believe it’s out there. We’ve tried to find it through rituals, religion and drugs.
There’s the idea that we need to be in another state to experience it. That state can’t be the same as our cognitive state. It’s more like a derangement of the senses, or a suspension of logical thought.

Schizophrenia: mental instability. (Isn’t that a loss of the subjective self?).
Sanity: mental stability by definition, which is, what, being able to function among others?

No one would want to be schizophrenic and plenty of people went that way on drugs.

Is there a reason for the unknown to be constructed in this way, as unreachable? Why construct a fiction about something that can’t be known? Or is it just the whole binary thing in action? Which means it just response. But what does “the known” mean, what are we responding to?

Is it necessary to know the unknown? Is there a benefit to its fictional existence? And if it’s a fiction then why try to find it?
Even if it’s to prove objective truths exist how is that going to work? What do we want from it?
In fact if we crossed the abyss would be be human any longer?

A caterpillar has a metaphysics. — fishfry

What do you mean?

It seems to me that all of us can think our way right up to the limits of knowledge and are then forced to turn back and reconsider or reexamine things. It also seems logical that we can never know the unknowable, that once we identify it we then begin labelling and creating fictions about it, which takes us back to the beginning. But we still have this desire to find it. And we can’t use logic, or even our own minds, to find it. Why do we seek this, is it a compulsion, is it logical to want to know, do we expect something from it? And what do we suspect will come from it?

So is this just psychology?

Edit: but then again isn’t the “unknown” another fiction?

but I'd imagine that's particularly difficult to prevent in a culture that so strongly idolizes opposing the establishment. — zookeeper

In western society we have real tolerance towards our children challenging authority. We virtually regard it as healthy and normal, a rite of passage. Rebelling against the father and so on. An immature generation no longer connected to tradition could easily take that on as a permanent state without fully comprehending why and what they’re doing.

Philosophy takes us to the limits of our knowledge, once there we’re alone. But then how do we comprehend the unknowable, how do we communicate with it or know it?

Shamans, witch doctors, priests have all suggested they’ve made the connection. But none of them said they did it by adding one plus one. They did it with, among other things, dance, song, drugs and rituals. Whether they did actually achieve it we’ll never really know. Many have been conned by spiritualists and gurus who claimed to know.

Maybe certain poetry attempts, like the symbolist poetry, or the Dadaists, to address the unknowable in such a way that it’s not actually confronted head on, not actually named, but addressed obliquely, because once our mind pounces on it then it’s defining it according to our limited knowledge. Maybe koans work like this as well.

The only way to encounter the unknowable is to quieten the mind, to not ask the question. I can only see two ways of doing this: action, which shuts down the cognitive mind, or sleeping, when the mind ceases to think and what we get instead are dreams, almost an unconscious language, which of course we don’t understand.

I've listed several sources that maybe you refused to even read that verifies my position. — Anaxagoras

My apologies. I thought your quotes were what a was to read. The actual source itself is more in depth.

But "hate speech" can be whatever you don't like. That just leads to another kind of tyranny. — Bitter Crank

Yes, there’s no end to this.

It seems to me that at this point we generally reach the limits of our reason, that we have knowledge because the human mind imposes conditions that make it true, which is all Kantian. From there we chose our philosopher of choice to look into the transendental which then flies off in all sorts of directions.

Edit: this sort of suggests that it’s the things we don’t know that are the truest.

the news is one of the most powerful forces in keeping the government honest. — Judaka

So even in its biased, economic based practices it still functions to the degree enough that governments are put on notice, where there is always the possibility they will be exposed. Obviously life without them would be far worse and China’s a good enough sample. And even if the public was educated enough to understand the manipulation of the press, or just the influence of imagery, they would still lean towards the news source that gelled with their own perspective. News outlets still get sued for distortion or misinformation, and their mistakes are always public for everyone to see because they’re always watching each other and waiting to pounce in their own interests. So in a way it works. Not perfect but not too bad either.

I mean that the content creator gets ads on their channel without creating a contract with the company paying for the ad because their contract is through youtube. As opposed to a direct relationship with greater influence for the companies over the image and reporting of the news company. I am pretty much at a point now where I don't think this idea will improve anything because of discussions in this thread and my own research. — Judaka

Interesting. Imagine if newspapers went that way; someone outside the “news” outlet, the man in the street with us phone, supplies the stories/news and shares the space on the pages with advertisers who pay for space. So the news is really there as a hook to the advertisers target audience, and the news content is also targeted at that same audience otherwise the advertisers would not have its target audience. So in the end “news” is any content that pulls in a target audience. There’s probably nothing new in that except that news outlets don’t really need journalists anymore, and they no longer pretend to be objective news sources.

But has it been naive of us to have gone along with the importance of “freedom of the press“ and the idea of the fourth estate?

I think it could be good to do an investigation on how the news makes it money and whether that incentivises practices that help inform the public fairly or not. — Judaka

There have been stories about advertisers pressuring media owners about content they’re not happy with by threatening to withdraw advertising. Usually it’s because of some aspect of their business (not just theirs but genetically, like cigarette companies) that has not looked good in the news. That’s not uncommon. Very big corporations can hurt media companies by pulling advertising. But then again if that media outlet has a big chunk of readership that includes their target audience then they’re not likely to walk away permanently. It’s more like a smack on the knuckles.

As your links suggest the public can make people feel their displeasure, like the NFL experienced. But if someone likes a newspaper or news channel then they are likely to return in the near future, despite some irritability over a story or opinion piece, because it’s their news outlet of choice.

The question is does advertising revenue affect content in terms of issues like politics and ultimately democratic process? News outlets had huge readership levels during Trump’s campaign. They new what was happening and they loved it. The NYT did very well, and they will again this year. The higher the readership levels the higher the advertising rates go.

Trump got a huge amount of coverage that others would have to pay for in advertising rates. So the news media will go where the readership goes, which for them equals advertising revenue. The interesting thing is how will the NYT run stories on Trump? If they ignore him they lose revenue. And they can’t support him. But they need him to sell more papers to get more advertising revenue, so they have to feature him. So in some ways they’re a victim. Of what though: politics or economics?

I don't even want to form an opinion until all the facts are out anyway. — Judaka

That’s an interesting point. Real information about an event or series of events is found in a booK on the subject, which takes months of research and writing. Even a documentary is caught in the process of production. So you end up getting a very detailed and analysed report but it comes to you sometime after the event. So it suggests in some ways that the dailies, tv and internet coverage cannot really give you reliable in depth reporting, which means the facts are very superficial and quite often incorrect in the rush get the story out. It’s more about the sensation of news, the dramatic headline and video that follow. If there’s no video there’s no story. So it’s the image that creates the importance of the story. And there’s no shortage of video available online; everyone has a phone. But there’s no time to verify the accuracy of the video supplied.

Ideas must have evolved over time. What an idea is itself must have evolved.
— Brett

Must they? Isn't evolution just another idea? If all ideas are fiction, then so is evolution, and the idea that ideas evolve... — Echarmion

Yes evolution is another idea. That animals have mutated overtime is not an idea. But putting these things together such that they add up to evolution is an idea.

You might be confused by my use of fiction. If I used concept it might help. I use fiction because it better explains the idea that ideas are agreed on to become “fact”. ‘All men are equal“ is not a fact. It’s an agreed on idea, a fiction.

You would disagree that ideas can evolve?

Is justified psychology being mentally healthy or just getting what you want?

I’m guessing you’re being facetious. I just wanted to be clear what we’re talking about in addressing Shawn’s post. You brought up mental health, so I asked is that what’s meant by justified psychology.

Is Shawn talking about being mentally healthy? What are the goals he’s talking about? What exactly is a justified psychology?

my advice to you is to get out and start being one. — tim wood

Yes but what do you need to be one? To attain goals I would suggest very sharp teeth to begin with.

I’m pushing thoughts around here.

Ideas must have evolved over time. What an idea is itself must have evolved.
The origins of ideas may lie in early, primitive emotions or responses. Ideas evolve in sophistication but still carry the residue of the early emotions and responses. These make our ideas unstable. But we still review the world through that instability. When we, in that unstable state, think of the mind it’s an inherently unstable idea, but we still act on it because it springs from the mind.
These ideas are still primitive responses and unreliable fictions. But if enough of us agree on it then it’s a truth, but a fictional, unstable truth and therefore barely workable. The idea that what we think comes from the mind helps in creating a sense of stability, but it’s neither true or stable. The mind’s reflection on itself is inherently unstable and so too the ideas as a result.

I do not believe the mind can be a creation of the mind. — fishfry

Thanks for your post. I made a mistake asking if the mind is a fiction of the mind, and should have asked “Is the mind a fiction?”. And a fiction of what?

The mind is the only thing that can NOT be a creation of the mind. — fishfry

By this I guess you’re suggesting that the mind is the source, or core, of what we are. But that doesn’t do it for me because the mind is still an idea. You equate “self” and “mind” in your quote by Descartes. Are they both the same thing?

It's fashionable these days to claim the opposite, that we're programs running in a cosmic computer that has figured out how to implement an actual mind. — fishfry

I agree that this is hard to take. You could just as easily substitute God in there.

Something we have no idea how to do because by definition, mind is subjective and is by definition not subject to science! — fishfry

My problem is that science is an idea, a fiction, of the mind. So many ideas coalesce that add up to science. Therefore it cannot be subject to science.

The "I" remains a mystery. Nobody knows how to create an "I", or even how to know if anyone else besides them has got one.

But that's an even worse scenario. If solipsism is true and I'm the only one here, then I'm the one who cooked up 2020. This is all my fault! — fishfry

Yes, so there cannot be an “I”, true?

There is another angle which is that our behaviour is determined by hormones, genes and synapsis, rather than free will. So there is no “I” except the one created, the fictional “I”. But that seems as random to me as the idea that science is ideas that coalesce into accepted workable patterns. It’s just like the genes, hormones and synapsis coalescing into an acceptable pattern that is not random but consistently human.

Would an idea disappear if two things happened: humans disappeared, or we no longer collectively believed in the idea. So the US Constituition exists because we all agree to accept it as fact, though it is obviously not a fact. It’s an agreed upon fiction.

An idea is a fiction.

What point were you bringing up about Al Jazeera? I hadn't heard of them. — Judaka

Because it’s a respected and state funded international news service owned by Qatari as opposed to private ownership.

Edit: the idea of the mind being what it is is no more a fact than the idea of God, or democracy or equality. — Brett

I just added that to my previous post.

How can technology be part of the outside world? The perception and truth of the outside world has changed with our mind’s perception of things. Technology is an idea.

Even if the outside world is merely a collection of fictions that happens to fit together, — Echarmion

That’s not quite what I said. The collection of fictions refers to my thoughts on technology.

I never used the term “illusion” which is not the same as “fiction”.

And the obvious question is how something can create a fiction of itself. — Echarmion

That’s my point. All things we think of are fictions. What else could they be? So where is the fiction of the mind coming from?

Edit: the idea of the mind being what it is is no more a fact than the idea of God, or democracy or equality.

I don't know anything about Al Jazeera. — Judaka

Nothing?

t seems Assange has jeopardized military and intelligence agencies by releasing sensitive material. — Judaka

Possibly true, but it begs the question about the role of the news media in a democracy; just how much freedom is needed to protect a democracy?

How does Al Jazeera and Julian Assange fit into all this?