the struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart?

My interpretation: Life is the struggle, the boulder, we push because we have to push to survive just as Sisyphus has no choice but to push the boulder up the hill. All the pain, the suffering, the love, the joy, the happiness, and the sadness of life are experienced, valued by men who have the power, the joy of shouting de capo. Beyond Good and Evil 56:

Anyone who, like me, has, with some enigmatic desire or other, made an effort for a long time to think profoundly about pessimism and to rescue it from the half-Christian, half-German restrictions and simple-mindedness with which it has most recently appeared in this century, that is, in the form of Schopenhauer's philosophy; anyone who really has, with an Asian and super-Asiatic eye, looked into and down on the most world-denying of all possible ways of thinking - beyond good and evil and no longer as Buddha and Schopenhauer do, under the spell and delusion of morality - such a man has perhaps in the process, without really wanting to do so, opened his eyes for the reverse morality: for the ideal of the most high-spirited, most lively, and most world-affirming human being, who has not only learned to come to terms with and accept what was and is but wants to have what was and is come back for all eternity, calling out insatiably da capo [from the beginning] , not only to himself but to the entire play and spectacle, and not only to a spectacle but basically to the man who needs this particular spectacle and who makes the spectacle necessary, because over and over again he needs himself - and makes himself necessary. How's that? Wouldn't this be circulus vitiosus deus [god as a vicious circle]?

The future is always uncertain, so while I may know the way to San Jose, getting there may be another story, which is not over until I get there.

As the boulder rolls down the mountain we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Why?
— Agustino

I think Camus wanted to say that regardless of fate, man creates his own values. Sisyphus is happy because he is his own man regardless of his fate.

Thinking a little more about Edward Snowden. His crime against the state, his 'traitorous' act stopped the State system from the continuation of its unjust and indiscriminate intrusion into the lives of its citizens, but at the same time his actions represent a challenge to the stability of the laws that enable the functioning of the society that nurtured him.

If the word 'Patriot' is true to its roots, it has to do with the father(pater)land, it has a familial feel to it. Historically it has been closely aligned with religion, which is still is a potent combination as we are currently experiencing around the world.

Patriotism has to be more than just flag waving, that seems too facile, but then again this depends on the society where one resides. Recall Victor Havel's "The Power of the Powerless", in it he suggests that the system itself that determines right and wrong, not individuals. In some societies any transgression of what the system has determined leads to ostracization and even very minor infractions can entail harsh punishment.

Maybe Marx was right "The working men have no country", there are no patriots.

It seems there could not be a reason why there must be something rather than nothing, because if there is nothing there can be no reasons. In other words there must be something for there to be reasons in the first place. So being is necessarily prior to reason, it seems.

Are you trying to prove god?

Another way to put this question could be: why is there diversity amongst humanity in terms of ideas, and why do we adhere so much to one or two particular ideas?

I think we share a bias based on the cultural theme of unending, unlimited progress (kinda of a continual capitalistic dream}, a bias towards the future, and we automatically seek the best options for going forward, which are typically limited in number; we choose based on what we have experienced, know, trust or believe.

Ok, my question, do you think

Is Edward Snowden a Patriot?

The NSA program he disclosed was latter found to be unconstitutional and this was only possible by his sacrifice, he clearly understood the risks and went ahead and sacrificed a good life for a moral life.

You are conflating nationalism with patriotism:

The Difference Between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does , and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does ; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility while the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to a war .

Sidney J Harris

Diogenes Laertius when asked where he was from said he was a citizen of the world. The relevant contemporary issues have to with people like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Many view these people as traitors, especially here in USA, but many others think of them as patriots of the world.

I have two questions:
1. Is nothing part of everything?
2. Nothing is something?

Hi

Following Plato, I think everything can be otherwise than what it is, that 'nothing' means something other or different from what is referenced, and it thereby eludes Parmenides prohibition: "Never shall this be proved that things that are not are, but keep back thy thoughts from this way of inquiry"

Whereas we have not merely shown that things that are not, are, but we have brought to light the real character of 'not being'. We have shown that the nature of the different has existence and is parceled out over the whole field of existent things with reference to one another, and of every part of it that is set in contrast to that which is; we have dared to say that precisely that is really that 'which is not'

So how do we decide between the two? Is it a matter of aesthetics? I'm repelled by radical contingency while you're appalled at some mysterious, non-empirical laws making things happen?

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists

Tractatus 6.44

Of all beings, only the human being called upon by the voice of Being experiences the wonder of wonder, that beings are

Heidegger.

...the principle of non-contradiction itself is without reason, and consequently it can only be the norm for what is thinkable by us, rather that for what is possible in the absolute sense

Quotes from Meillassoux's After Finitude.

A man and a woman have a child, but that does not make them parents. It is what they do, how they demonstrate their care for the child, that makes them be parents.

Having is necessary but it is not sufficient, doing is both necessary and sufficient for something to be.

So how do we decide between the two? Is it a matter of aesthetics? I'm repelled by radical contingency while you're appalled at some mysterious, non-empirical laws making things happen?

It is the problem of induction, an ontological problem which creates epistemological issues. We propose self evident 'truths', universals/absolutes upon which we base our systems of belief, our knowledge, on what we have proposed, which seems to be working for the most part, we tweak it, change it, reinterpret it as necessary. While we have no guarantees, we do have probabilities and possibilities.

What is needed is a different conception of reality, an expanded view of reality, deflationary or thick, one in which possibilities become categorized to encompass what is; such as deductive possibilities, historic possibilities, nomological possibilities, logical possibilities and so on.

Realism fails because what is given is only given to us though thought and idealism fails because we all die, and therefore thought itself must admit its own horizon, which means that idealism can't encompass factual reality either.

I agree with most of what you outlined and additionally I think that while reason and logic are important to our experience of life, so are friendship, morality, aesthetics, religion, baseball and many aspects of life which have far more brute force than any rational argument. As long as nature is as it is, then regardless of how it got that way, it is coherent, lawful, predictable to a certain extent. The scientific image serves the manifest image.

The issue is where do we go from here? Wherever we go, we ought to be sure of the basics, since even small inaccuracies/bias/prejudice in foundations, such as those built on historical prejudices (like God), or 'brute facts', may cause larger problems, until they are sorted out into their own domain. Given the amount of knowledge available to a huge population in the world, I suspect/hope we will be seeing some amazing new advances in all parts of the human endeavor.

Reminds me of Buckminster Fuller's 'less is more' which he called Ephemeralization:

the ability of technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing," that is, an accelerating increase in the efficiency of achieving the same or more output (products, services, information, etc.) while requiring less input (effort, time, resources, etc.).

Wiki

Almost like a pragmatic reinterpretation of Occam's Razor.

No quite, I can't think of any reason why anything must/should or ought to exist, versus nothing. Any such reason fails, it suggests faith not reason. The world is the way it is, but we don't have, and I think in principle we cannot have an ontological stance in regard to why it is the way it is. This is the problem of a viewpoint from nowhere, we are infinitesimally minute part of the set of existent objects and we cannot get outside of this domain to define it.

What makes Swineburn's conversation about God a rational conversation? Does he rationally prove the existence of God or?

Maybe, but I like Hamlet and his father, the Ghost who I think represents Hamlet's intentionality, as an external need (as if an ideology) to compel him to perform acts in a certain manner, in this case revenge. Hamlet spends a lot of time reflecting before he acts. The Ghost tells Hamlet in the first act:

But, howsoever thou pursuest this act,
Taint not thy mind,

Of course, how to revenge the act of murder without "Taint" or guilt/sin became his problem. I think he became able to act because he was able sway his mother to be complicit in his enterprise, she agrees to Hamlet's demands becoming complicit with him, thereby freeing him to act without Taint, she becomes separate from his revenge and complicit in his intent (the Ghost's intent) which frees him to act out his revenge.

I was listening to Colin McGinn discuss the question of why anything exists at all. His analysis is that there has to be some things for which there is no explanation that explain the things that do have explanations. Something must be brute.

The only brute that I can think of is the contingency of everything, the fact that what is, could possibly be otherwise. if you bring God into the discussion as a brute fact then, I think we are no longer having a rational conversation, and while God may work for many as the brute fact of existence, I am not one of them.

The only "brute facts" beyond contingency itself are those we propose as self-evident, which may be epistemological necessary, but they are not ontologically guaranteed, they are only probable. McGinn suggests that some things must exist necessary in order to explain why other things exist, which I think maybe a reformulation of the necessity of first causes or the cosmological argument all over again.

Do you talk to yourself? If yes then you are reflexive, if not then how do you do that?

“I need loyalty, I expect loyalty"

Trump as Michael Corleone wannabe
http://billmoyers.com/story/comey-got-face-trumps-godfather-fantasy/

Very much in the style of Trump, what you believe is true is true, that's not realism, that is idealism.

You see a naked woman as a man, and you start lusting for her. That's the natural response. Morality - not lusting - is learned.

And you use a study based on the cultural experiences of United States women in committed relationships to try to somehow demonstrate that lust is not a learned response, well no way (N) . Your response makes no sense.

That article is isn't germane or explicative of lust :s , it is in fact mind numbing.

You see a naked woman as a man, and you start lusting for her. That's the natural response. Morality - not lusting - is learned.

Funny, I'm almost entirely opposite of you here. Some indigenous native cultures don't seem to have any sort of Western styled cultural modesty about their bodies; and the clothes that they do wear appear to be more pragmatically inspired by their location. Certain Christian Missionaries had quite a time in Polynesia if I remember correctly.

Parents teach us how to behave, they and society tells us what we should lust for, and we put our own spin on this...I'm not saying we don't have a natural sex drive, only that simple seeing a naked person is not, in itself sufficient to explain lust.

I also don't think the 'moral state' is man's natural state. Man is an animal, one who is subject to the same basis drives as all other animals. Morality is learnt, the same way modesty is learnt.

[as a side comment I don't think Trump lies about important matters, I think he believes what he says, even if everyone else in the world (well maybe not Pence) thinks it's batshit).

Bitcoin went from $580.00 US to $3000 US last year, so no stable track record, but it does have great potential...it could be a world-wide currency in the future, taking place of the dollar...but it needs a much longer track record. I'm not sure about all of Kurzweil's ideas (2045?!), but I think his position on this is sound.

http://www.coindesk.com/googles-director-engineering-wont-invest-bitcoin/

So what do you think? Is a word a skill you learn? Or is it just another piece of propositional knowledge? Is it maybe even more natural to take words as tools, and the skills we learn are specifically tool-using skills? How do you think the dual (knowledge-that and knowledge-how) aspects of language fit together?

I don't think a word is a skill I learn, I do think the use of a word, how it fits into my use of it to communicate is a skill. A word is a sound design (I think words retained their affective quality in our inner monologues, which comprises like 99% of language use), which may be sufficient in itself or may require additional sound designs for its use to achieve desired results.

How those sound designs are composed, the skill in word use depends on an individual's proficiency and understanding (imaginative,creative, normative) of combining a word's syntactic categorization with its meaning in communication and thought. The ability to learn language is universal in humans and there are apparently areas of the brain which handle/specialize in syntactics. It may be that the basic syntactic structure of the brain has multi-uses, for language, computation, music and (my guess) perception.

"And there'd be nothing wrong with it if I did say that, according to everybody that I read today, but I did not say that."

I don't think he is so much post truth as he is apparently not interested in it. He is driven by his ego, whatever he says is the truth, his truth, he's proven it time and time again and his loyal followers go along him with it regardless of the craziness of what he says. He's a bullshitter through and through.

So the Tories have made an extreme right turn, in exchange for power?

"Why is the sky blue?" an explanation for why it is blue and not red can be given, but you cannot explain why that explanation and not some other explanation is possible... the explanation of why physical properties are the way they are that is to my mind the difficulty. Perhaps it's the laws of the universe that make it so, but why these laws and not some others? Perhaps because inductively that is the way the universe is. Causality, I think, is a lot like the blue sky, yes it is blue, but why is it blue.

Ignosticism is the view that any religious term or theological concept presented must be accompanied by a coherent definition. Without a clear definition such terms cannot be meaningfully discussed. Such terms or concepts must also be falsifiable. Lacking this, an ignostic takes the theological noncognitivist position that the existence or nature of the terms presented (and all matters of debate) is meaningless. For example, if the term "God" does not refer to anything reasonably defined then there is no conceivable method to test against the existence of god. Therefore, the term "God" has no literal significance and need not be debated or discussed.]

Meno asked Socrates if virtue can be taught and Socrates asked Meno 'what is virtue' then Meno asked Socrates, if you don't know what something is how do you expect to know it, even if you do stumble across it? Socrates did not like this argument, it stunned him as much as he had stunned Meno. Socrates then pulled a transcendental magic trick, the first instantization of an innate idea in history.

But TS I don't think any explanation of a brain impulses, nerve impulses, or electro-chemical signals can even potentially encompass the significance of what we perceive, think or communicate...our consciousness. The reflexive character of our thought, I think, will always be beyond our ability to explain because we have to be conscious to explain it, to use it to explain it, and we cannot escape this circularity.

As I intimated I don't think any full explanation is possible, therefore any such criteria would in principle be otiose.

Well I really can't see how you can say it's not impoverished. If the concept were 'rich', insightful or even pragmatic then it could fully explain how we can communicate at the level we are communicating :) without going beyond itself, you could point to the specifics exactly how it works, but to the best of my knowledge that is not possible, and I think, perhaps in principle it cannot explain thought.

Then as I said it is an impoverished concept.

Then we should be on the same page. I was not sure since some people want to entirely reduce mind to brain processes, and I don't agree with that.

So you think thought determines existence?

As I stated in my reply to you

So no, I don't think there is an ontological locational component in the subject/object relationship. We are entities in a world, and we make this shit up.

Do you believe minds exist?

No, as I said, it can't be distinguishable from my body, which is in Florida

And I answered it to the best of my ability, my concept of mind is inclusive, with my body