Like who? We had Jesus... Mohammad... Moses... Buddha, Krishnamurti, bla bla bla. Same problem if we expect it from others and not ourselves. — Wallows

I'm counting myself as (barely) one of "the few people who are functional enough to work against the systemic dysfunction". I have very little power, so I can't pull very hard, but I'm at least still clear-headed enough at the moment to see the problem and do what little I can about it. Talking to people, learning, teaching, exercising the minuscule influence I have on the political process. Most people don't even vote, don't even think about these issues. I'm not saying what I do is very much, but I'm not just relying on others, I'm doing what little I can. And hoping that others that can do a little will, too, and in the end there will be enough of us who can do enough to make a noticeable difference.

Because people are short-sighted. Mostly as a consequence of being lazy and greedy and stupid. Mostly as a consequence of being overworked, traumatized, under constant threat, etc. Or of bring raised by people who were like that and instilled their own bad habits formed from their traumas on their developing children. Our whole society is mentally ill, as a system not just as a bunch of individuals, and it’s a chicken and egg problem how to fix the system that could help fix the individuals who run the system without first fixing those individuals while they are still part of a broken system.

Best I can hope for is that the few people who are functional enough to work against the systemic dysfunction can over time pull hard enough long enough to pull the whole system back to functionality eventually.

How on earth do you see prescriptions having a bearing on that? — frank

I gave you my impression of Bernie's aesthetics directly without mentioning anything prescriptive. Then you asked me which side of a divide about supporting or not-supporting a non-Bernie candidate I would fall on. Supporting is a prescriptive thing.

I was asking if you understand that if Bernie loses the nomination, you should still vote for a Democrat if want RBG's seat to go to a freaking liberal. I was not asking for you to virtue signal. — frank

"Should" is a prescriptive thing. And I clarified that for me personally, living in a state where all electoral votes are going to whoever gets the Democratic nomination regardless of how I personally vote, the "should" statement you make above is actually false, but that I do understand that it is true for people who live in swing states. That's the entire "sermon" that apparently triggered you so hard.

Your confusion is an indication of your inability to remove emotion from your mind long enough to look at anything mechanically. — frank

Straw Vulcan is not a good look (just to bring things back to aesthetics for you).

What about learning how to change things you cannot change now? — god must be atheist

If there is a way to change it that you can learn, that makes it a kind of thing you can change. Learning how to make that change is just part of making the change. So in addition to the serenity to accept things you cannot change, yes, you also need courage to change things you can -- including by learning more.

Not only that, but there are tons of things in life we try to change, unsuccessfully, although by rights we ought to be able to change them. — god must be atheist

That is the part that I've always found difficult. Accepting things you're absolutely certain you can't or shouldn't change, and acting to change things you're absolutely certain you can and should, have always seemed easy to me. The hard part seems to be the wisdom to know the difference: to tell when you can and should from when you can't or shouldn't.

I generally lean toward trying to change things you might be able to, especially when the cost of trying is low, because not trying only guarantees failure, which otherwise might have been possible.

You're differentiating between prescriptive and descriptive activities. Those are not mutually exclusive: anyone can and should do both.

You also asked me which side of a divide about a prescriptive question I fall on ("supporting" is a prescriptive thing), so I gave my answer to that prescriptive question. A descriptive answer to such a question would have been nonsense. And it wasn't "a sermon" "directed" at you. I wasn't telling you in particular what to do. I was saying what I generally encourage anyone to do, because that's what the question was about.

There's some story in the comics where it turned out that Captain America was actually a Hydra operative all along, and therefore had been implicitly a Nazi back when Hydra were Nazis. That was apparently horrible unpopular with fans, and I'm not sure if it's been retconned or was always an alternate universe or what. There's a nod to it in Endgame that seemed to make a lot of people happy though, where [spoiler]Captain America pretends to be an undercover Hydra agent to get something from actual Hydra agents)[/spoiler].

I note that you also look at the scene through emotion-laden lenses instead of assessing it mechanically — frank

What makes you say this? I have emotions, sure, but I'm aiming to do practical things to bring about the ends I think should be brought about. My actual political philosophy is completely outside the Overton window of electoral politics, so I'm not unequivocally in favor of anybody in the field; the whole system is undesirable to me, and I'm looking to vote (and encourage others to vote) however is most likely to move it as much as possible (which is not very much) in the direction of where I want things to actually be.

That depends on exactly what they mean by that.

I live in an extremely "safe" state where my personal vote is unlikely to influence the actual electoral outcome. As such, I usually vote third party in protest, to encourage the Democrats to move more toward the party I vote for so as to try to recapture that vote. I will probably vote Democratic in the general presidential election if Bernie gets the nomination, to reward them for that. Otherwise, probably Green.

But if I lived in a swing state, where my individual vote stood a chance of actually mattering, I would definitely vote for whichever Democratic candidate got the nomination just to prevent the worst option from winning. And I advocate for everybody else to do the same: if you live in a safe state, vote your conscience, vote third party unless you really do like a mainstream candidate best, vote whichever one you like, whether your state is safe red or safe blue and whether you lean left or right, vote your conscience when your vote matters so little, because doing otherwise is throwing it away. But if you live in a swing state, vote Democratic, even if their candidate sucks, because the Republican is assuredly worse.

loving and being loved — simeonz

This is the solution. Well, half of it: the other half is learning and teaching. Let both goodness and truth flow into you and out of you, through you, and you will become meaningful to the world and it will become meaningful to you.

Does he appear strong to you? — frank

Very. The best kind of strength, the kind that's not afraid to stand up to bullies, but isn't going to become one either. That's exactly the kind of person I want holding the nuclear football: someone who's not going to use it, and is not going to stand for anyone else using theirs either, who's actually going to show concern for whatever is pushing anyone else to consider using theirs, bring them to the negotiating table, and talk out a win-win solution instead of just threatening lose-lose unless we get our way. A principled negotiator.

I'm from the far opposite side of the country and Bernie definitely seems like "one of us" to me.

That is true, but that's not saying we do philosophy by experiment. "your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object." It's saying that, for example, empiricism is a correct philosophical position, as opposed to speculating about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or whatnot, because empiricism is concerned with the practical observables of things: the upshot of a scientific theory (a conception of what is real) is the observations it predicts, and the truth of that theory is to be judged by whether those observations actually take place when predicted. Empiricism says that we should do experiments to figure out what it true about the world. But we don't do experiments to tell whether empiricism itself is the correct philosophical stance.

But this is really getting off topic for this thread. There are multiple other places in later chapters where I apply pragmatism, and we should save more of this discussion for there, rather than weighing in on whether the "pragmatic" in the title is accurate without having read the actual work yet.

I was originally going to refer to that exact quote, but when I pulled up the wiki to make sure I had it right, I saw that other even better quote and decided to use it instead.

Thanks. I'm starting a beta read of the whole thing in another thread if you'd like to participate.

Very little. I'm not particularly familiar with Confuscianism and didn't find much inspiring in what I have read of it. Major influences (on that particular topic) are Pragmatism, Absurdism, Buddhism, Stoicism, the Greek cardinal virtues and four temperaments, theological noncognitivism, the Christian Serenity Prayer, and the Acceptance and Commitment school of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapy.

I spent most of last year trying to figure that out, and wrote my answers down here.

That doesn't sound much like pragmatism as I understand it; it doesn't really sound like philosophy per se at all, but rather some more special science. I mean pragmatism as in...

The study of philosophy consists, therefore, in reflexion, and pragmatism is that method of reflexion which is guided by constantly holding in view its purpose and the purpose of the ideas it analyzes, whether these ends be of the nature and uses of action or of thought. — CS Peirce as quoted in Wikipedia on The Pragmatic Maxim

This is getting way off topic, but I just want to address a couple of points you seem to misunderstand about me.

I don't hate markets. I love markets. I think rent (including interest) distorts markets away from what we would naturally expect of them, and creates the problems that people wrongly blame markets themselves for. The naive expectation of a market is that those with less wealth will trade their labor to those with more wealth, who in turn will trade that wealth away for the leisure of not having to labor, and so wealth flows from where it is concentrated to where it is not, until the poor no longer have to labor in excess of their ongoing consumption (because they have all the non-consumables goods they need), and the rich can no longer afford to rest on the labor of others (because they no longer have an excess of goods to sell off), and only those who continue to do more of value for others can continue to live a more luxurious lifestyle than others. Markets are supposed to be a great equalizer, as Adam Smith expected it. Instead, in reality, those who have sufficient wealth can rest in indefinite luxury on unearned income from that wealth, and those with insufficient wealth must labor indefinitely just for the continued privilege of using someone else's property to do the work they need to survive. Why does that happen instead of what Adam Smith expected? I say the answer is rent, including rent on money i.e. interest.

And you completely miss the point about housing rent in particular. My concern is precisely for people who have to rent out of necessity and can't afford to buy. Most people rent out of necessity because they can't afford to buy, especially if we include everyone who rents money, i.e. mortgages, with which to "buy" as collateral for that borrowing. And paying that rent prevents them from saving money or building equity to get to out of that loop; millions upon millions of people are stuck renting their entire lives unable to ever get to a point where they don't have to keep paying just to keep what they already have (a roof over their head). The world I want is one where once you've paid for housing long enough, you get to stop. Where everyone who "can't afford to buy" can afford to buy and doesn't have to rent, because buying has been made as cheap as renting. I think the very existence of rent distorts the market to make it so that owning is more expensive, because if you own an extra house you can get free money from people who need it to live in, which makes buying extra houses attractive to rich people, which inflates the price above what poor people can afford, forcing those people into renting from the rich people who bought all the housing out from under them.

I can address the whole slew of complicated objections I'm sure you have that I've heard a zillion times before, but this thread isn't the place for that.

Do you remember our discussion about the existence of non-moral oughts? You said that there wasn't because the non-moral oughts in the end just basically come down to moral oughts, if I remember. You were trying to find the truth behind the language, but I just don't think this is how a pragmatist would approach it. Pragmatists would probably be more partial to ordinary language philosophy where we just take the meanings as they are commonly used in the language. — BitconnectCarlos

This is probably better saved for the chapter on philosophy of language, but I don't see that view as being at odds with ordinary language philosophy at all, because I wasn't really talking there about what ordinary words mean, but more how the concepts they refer to relate to each other. And the way those concepts relate to each other, in that particular instance, seems very pragmatic to me, in that morality isn't something beside ordinary practical reason, but rather something completely continuous with it: "moral oughts" are just "non-moral oughts" that are sufficiently (to some arbitrary measure of sufficiency) detached from immediate personal decisions, and to draw a distinction between them would be like drawing a distinction between "real" as in rocks and trees and "real" as in quantum fields and superstrings: they're parts of the same picture, just "foreground" and "background" so to speak, little things up close vs distant big things lying behind all those little things.

Thank you, that’s very good to hear!

In what sense do you mean? I mean it in the sense of the philosophy called “pragmatism”, focusing on philosophical questions through the lens of what practical endeavor an answer is meant to facilitate. Do you mean some other sense?

And it's edited now. Thanks again.

The first ordinal bigger than any real ordinal is called omega, and there are infinitely many others.

Don't forget that just because a person flees the country, doesn't mean their wealth flees the country. A lot of wealth can't be moved like that (land and other natural resources), and other wealth can be stopped from leaving the country with them if we want.

I think you misunderstood what I meant by justificationism. It's not any of the particular things we've been talking about, but something quietly underlying some of them.

The justificationist thinks that you should reject all beliefs from the get go, and then only let in ones that can be proven worthy, i.e. justified. This is the common, naive view of "rationalism".

The opposite approach, critical rationalism, says you should admit any beliefs you want (and agree to disagree with others who want to admit other ones), until they can be proven unworthy, or falsified.

I was applauding you for pointing out that "hard solipsism ...must furnish further proof of how it came to be certain that other minds don't exist". The hard solipsist doesn't just get to say "you can't prove other minds exist, therefore they don't!" Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence: the person who says something doesn't exist isn't automatically right until proven wrong. It would be justificationist to think so, and I'm glad you're implicitly thinking otherwise.

So if you own a van Gogh painting worth 100 million USD, you'll have to pay annually half a million dollars to the US government just for fun of owning it — ssu

And this kind of thing is why I'm against a wealth tax in principle, but on my list of high-priority problems in the world, the struggles of people who can afford hundred-million dollar paintings are pretty low, so in practice I really don't care all that much compared to much bigger fish that can hopefully by fried by the same people proposing these policies.

Some people do live in rental homes, hence if you raise taxation on rents too high the rental market won't work and you will have an excessive demand on rental housing (as nobody thinks of becoming a landlord.) Taxation has many consequences, and sometimes quite unintended consequences. — ssu

Most people live in rental homes, or else in homes "bought" with rented money (which would be effected similarly). And what will happen to all that housing that used to be owned by landlords and rented out to people? The landlords can't profit off renting it out anymore, and aren't getting any use out of it themselves, so they'll want to sell it off, but nobody else is going to be buying housing to rent out to anyone else, the only people buying housing will be the people who need housing to live in, who would have otherwise have been renting. But they can only buy if that housing is sold on terms that they can afford, which is entirely up to the sellers. So everyone who owns rental housing will have two choices: either sit on their useless property and get no profit out of it, or continue collecting a monthly check for a long while at the cost of eventually not owning the property anymore. Which do you think they will choose? And who do you think benefits from this, people with enough money to buy extra houses to rent out for profit, or people who otherwise wouldn't be able to buy and would be stuck paying indefinitely for a place to live?

This is not an unintended consequence, this is the intended consequence. People paying money for something should end up owning it, and people who get paid for something should lose ownership of it. The principle injustice of capitalism is that the rich get paid just for owning the things the poor need to use, which keeps the rich owning more and more and keeps the poor from ever escaping that.

Thanks so much! I'll try to edit that soon.

Thanks! That's actually one of the things in particular I was wondering about, because I don't actually know Latin very well at all and cobbled this title together from online dictionaries and translators.

I think I am looking for the genitive, yes. "Book of/about Questions/Questioning" is the general notion I'm trying to capture.

(I am pretty attached to calling it "the Codex [something]" though, so despite the pretentiousness I think that's not going to change. At least it's not "Codex Sapientiae" anymore; even I thought "Book of Wisdom" was too pretentious).

Any part of it in particular?

I know we've had some arguments here before, but I just want to express my sympathy for you Wallows, and wish you the best of luck. I spent most of the last year trying to figure out how to go on living, myself. I wrote a whole lot of my thoughts on the topic in the last essay of the book I spent the past year writing, but to summarize some of it I guess:

- Develop a vision of a hopeful future, however improbable it may seem, and do what you can when you can to inch however slowly toward that.
- Try to accept the things that you can't do anything about, and not to want things it's impossible to get
- Realize that feelings of hope and despair, meaningfulness and meaninglessness, are often entirely illusory, and can change despite no change in circumstances or beliefs or knowledge. Consider purely physical causes of those changes, like sleep, exercise, diet, weather, etc, and consider medical solutions too (medications, etc).
- Cultivate feelings of meaningfulness and hopefulness by doing something productive for yourself, or helping someone else, or learning something, or teaching someone. In short, let good and truth flow through you. Even if it's just a little thing: clean up your desk, or patiently explain something to someone on this forum, etc.

Best of luck.

I keep seeing this thread and misreading it as "A Philosophy of Orgasm", and wondering for a moment what that would even be. (Are orgasms actually the same as religious experiences? Is it really a "little death", some interruption of consciousness that gives one a glimpse of what's beyond this mortal veil?)

Hard or strong solipsism, if it claims the non-existence of other minds, must furnish further proof of how it came to be certain that other minds don't exist. What is this proof? — TheMadFool

The kind of people employing radical doubt like Descartes does tend to be justificationists, without even knowing what that word means: they think that you ought to reject all beliefs that you do not have good reason to accept. So being able to doubt something is, to them, reason enough to reject belief in it, to say it doesn't exist.

I applaud you for implicitly rejecting such justificationism, as your comment suggests that you think in terms of critical rationalism, the view that one ought to accept whatever beliefs one wants unless it can be shown that one must reject them. Which is the right way to think about things, because justificationism inevitably ends in nihilism, and nihilism is just giving up.

As I understand it, the ultra-wealthy (top 0.1% and beyond) don't necessarily have or generate income, earned or not, that can be taxed at high levels to reflect their exorbitant wealth, and that a wealth tax is a more useful tool to in taxing the ultra-wealthy. — Maw

I guess I'm not seeing the need for that then. If they're not using their wealth to extract wealth from others (which would thus count as income), then I don't see the harm that needs to be discouraged or remedied with the tax. I also don't see why they would care to amass huge quantities of stuff that's not of any use to them (if it's not generating them any income, and it's clearly far more than they could be personally using themselves). It seems like if it weren't generating income, they would sell it off to fund something they can actually use.

It's not about "just having wealth", a wealth tax can be implemented for different groups. Sanders' wealth tax begins at $32M and Warren's at $50M with just a 1% and 2% tax to start. — Maw

That's why I don't really object to those proposals in practice, even if I may disagree with the principle of a wealth tax. Those policies only put a very small burden on a very small number of people who can easily bear it, so it's not anything worth getting upset about. I still don't agree with the principle behind it though. I 100% agree with taxing property income (rent and interest), as highly as we can, but just taxing property itself seems wrong.

Are not "your thoughts" definitionally "the thoughts you experience"? So if others were all able to experience each others' thoughts, they would all experience them as their own thoughts, and so experience themselves (and each other) as a single collective mind.

Dissecting a joke kills it. Like with frogs.

“I’m living in the future” as in technology has advanced to a point that in my formative years would have been called “futuristic”. We are now in the general era of time that I spent most of my life thinking of as “the future”. Nothing to do with the instantaneous perception of time this thread is about. Just a joke about the title: “living in the past” meaning living one’s life as though it’s a bygone era, “living in the future” meaning as described above.

It was a joke.

I dunno about y’all but I’m livin’ in the future. I can pull a computer out of my pocket and wireless watch a live feed of Earth from space from pretty much anywhere.

So tax people highly on their unearned income (rent, interest, etc) and you should be covered on accounting for people gaining wealth by having wealth, without any of the problems of taxing people just for having wealth. (We don’t want to tax people on proceeds from selling off wealth, because that’s what what we want to encourage them to do: sell capital for cash and spend the cash buying labor so the laborers can spend that cash buying capital and so the distribution of capital equalizes over time. It’s the rent and interest cycle that throws that process off, so we want to tax the hell out of that — up to 100% eventually, in my opinion).

make the majority of their money through owned assets [i.e. wealth], not through income — Maw

How is it that “making money” doesn’t count as “income”? Proceeds from rent, lending, etc, are income (unearned income, but still). Proceed from sales are income. What “money made” is not “income”?

As a libertarian socialist I agree that wealth taxes are a horrible idea. Any taxes should be at time of sale, so the market can reveal the actual value; therefore, income taxes. And ideally, they should only be levied, if at all, on unearned income, i.e. from rent.

Yes.