... by the dog the god of Egypt, I declare, O Callicles, that Callicles will never be at one with himself, but that his whole life will be a discord. And yet, my friend, I would rather that my lyre should be inharmonious, and that there should be no music in the chorus which I provided; aye, or that the whole world should be at odds with me, and oppose me, rather than that I myself should be at odds with myself, and contradict myself.

Plato's Georgias

I think of Qi as the sound of that lyre. The rhythm of life, its vibrations, with all its harmonies and disharmonious parts. What we share in our interactions with others either rings true or sounds out of tune, the disturbing rhythm of being "at odds with myself, and contradict myself".

Morality naturally arises because we are interdependent social creatures

We are social creatures only negatively. Human's by nature are desirous, greedy, needful, spiteful, weak creatures. We are social creatures because we have no other choice but to negate our natural inclinations, to alienate our self from our nature.

One's 'sense' of fairness, justice, and history are cultivated via common language. The same holds good for one's moral 'sense'. We come to understand such notions with a richness that only complex language can provide. That is not to say that everything we talk about is existentially contingent upon our awareness of it... contents of the focus within moral discourse notwithstanding.

Morality is an action, it may be described by language and language may give rise certain biases, to certain points of view, but the being of morality arises only in our actions with others.

Those are not mutually exclusive

Reason is a tool, it is neither good nor bad. Our passions: love, hate, jealousy, kindness ...these are good or bad.

You say morality comes from us, so then it is not individual. It arises in our relationship with others, a "code of conduct" a sense of fairness , justice., history.

If so then moralities's ontology is that of a objective political act, one in which the "code" subjectively transcends and guides our acts. Moral acts exist within our normative construction of a world, a world which contingently depends on the history of our shared relationships.

Then there is no moral nature, morality alienates us from nature. Our interest in justice is a shared motivation to do good, something we can all understand. A motivation to do good, each guided by their own conscience.

A passionate motivation to do good.

Rousseau "The mistake of most moralists has always been to consider man as an essentially reasonable being. Man is a sensitive being, who consults solely his passions in order to act, for and for whom reason serves only to palliate the follies his passions lead him to commit"

The miracle is that we are.

Consciousness of pleasure and pain arise in our experiences of our own body. The reflective ability of our consciousness enables us to reasonably sort and to value such experiences by their intensity, to assign meanings to our experiences from the start. Meanings that we abstract from experiences, to encapsulate what we experience so we can retain the information. Pleasure as a positive value is sought, and pain as a negative value is avoided.

It is in the distinction between the direct experience of pleasure or pain, and our conception of these experiences that desire arises. The desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain becomes conceptualized. Without physical pain, I think, our conception of transcendence would be impossible, because it is only in pain that our desire to escape our immanent situation arises. Our desire to dissociate ourselves from pain, to transcend it, enables us to desire transcendence in itself without associating it with pain as kind of a negative pleasure.

So here is the serious question: How could Astrology work?

Maybe Jung's notion of Synchronicity, "falling together in time.” of the external and the internal as in meaningful coincidences. Astrology as a science of coincidences.

I cannot accept justice by allegation regardless of the situation or the "scum" involved. "... all allegations must be examined and pursued..." Corbyn is right.

Your rhetoric has the tone of a wooden coin. It is not the claims of women I object to, it is the claims of a virtual swarm being taken as facts leading to the ruination of the innocent as well as the guilty, men & woman.

Corbyn gets it right

Of course I am concerned about the plight of women and others in our society, but it is society built on laws, not innuendo.

I am struck by your being "troubled" by the "power" of the abused! Almost as if your whole world is threatened by the empowerment of women.

I am troubled by the power of a viral mob, how it envelops people's lives and pushes its participants in a blind manner. This is not justice, it is guilt by allegation and that is not just. As I stated, anyone who has sexually harassed another needs to be punished or at very least apologize, but that is based on proof of claim.

How does one decide who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed if all that one has to go on are allegations? How can that be justice....did Carl Sargent get his just desserts?

I'm not a big fan of C.K. He's not my cup of tea, most of the time.

I agree.

What I find troubling is how the powerful the viral #MeToo has become.... reminds me of the pitch fork scene in Frankenstein. Social media inveighing social justice by a viral mob, with very little recourse left to those accused. While I think those guilty of assault or harassment ought to be punished, the power of the mob over the course of justice suggests, to me, all kinds of risks.

Consider the utilitarian approach. Does your work do more good than harm for all those involved from your standpoint? There is always someone else who can and will do your job if you decide against continuing. The right to privacy is an inferred, not a stated right in the US Bill of Rights.

CK letter today.

I want to address the stories told to the New York Times by five women named Abby, Rebecca, Dana, Julia who felt able to name themselves and one who did not.
These stories are true. At the time, I said to myself that what I did was okay because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first, which is also true. But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your dick isn't a question. It's a predicament for them. The power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly.
I have been remorseful of my actions. And I've tried to learn from them. And run from them. Now I'm aware of the extent of the impact of my actions. I learned yesterday the extent to which I left these women who admired me feeling badly about themselves and cautious around other men who would never have put them in that position

I also took advantage of the fact that I was widely admired in my and their community, which disabled them from sharing their story and brought hardship to them when they tried because people who look up to me didn't want to hear it. I didn't think that I was doing any of that because my position allowed me not to think about it.
There is nothing about this that I forgive myself for. And I have to reconcile it with who I am. Which is nothing compared to the task I left them with.
I wish I had reacted to their admiration of me by being a good example to them as a man and given them some guidance as a comedian, including because I admired their work.
The hardest regret to live with is what you've done to hurt someone else. And I can hardly wrap my head around the scope of hurt I brought on them. I'd be remiss to exclude the hurt that I've brought on people who I work with and have worked with who's professional and personal lives have been impacted by all of this, including projects currently in production: the cast and crew of 'Better Things,' 'Baskets,' 'The Cops,' 'One Mississippi,' and 'I Love You Daddy.' I deeply regret that this has brought negative attention to my manager Dave Becky who only tried to mediate a situation that I caused. I've brought anguish and hardship to the people at FX who have given me so much The Orchard who took a chance on my movie and every other entity that has bet on me through the years.
I've brought pain to my family, my friends, my children and their mother. I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want. I will now step back and take a long time to listen.

Then when we experience a tree, it presents itself to us, when we think about the tree , we represent it to ourselves with our memory, imagination and reason. What we experience is different in kind from what we represent to our self. Say perception is a habitual two stage process of presentations becoming representations, where representations are foregrounded in consciousness.

There are no lines drawn in experience. All our senses, all our affects provide the basis for what we perceive. How our senses, how our affects have developed (physically and historically) determines what we filter out as well as what we retain in our representation of our perceptions. Perhaps some presentations are unrepresentable, yet still meaningful because of the pleasurable or pain experienced, what Kant and Burke described as the sublime.

There are two obvious approaches. In the first truth is taken to be approachable only asymptotically, and so certainty is seen as achievable.

Why do you say that?

Does it mean that we can only approach the truth, what is.

We must always have a good reason for anything but there's no good reason to be good.

Reason provides guidance. It enables us to sort things out, but I don't think reason is good or bad, moral or immoral. It is the way of thinking that can be valid, sound, or mistaken. We have to desire something in order to employ reason, to obtain what we desire. How we fulfill our desires as well as what we desire can be good, bad or indifferent. I think we all have a conscience, a way to judge our own actions and accept responsibility for them.

Consider The Apology. Socrates goes to his death, untroubled. And why? Because he himself is certain that he has lived in such a way as to not have to fear death

Nietzsche points out in 340 of his Gay Science, there are some questions as to whether or not Socrates died untroubled, given his last words. Similarly, Christ asks "My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?' when he faced death.

Our phenomenal experience of the aesthetic depends as much on what we are perceiving as what we are up to when we perceive. We give privilege to what concerns us, the pragmatic point.

Is experience something that 'exists' regardless of whether or not the agent is aware of it, or must the agent be conscious? If it must be conscious, need it be conscious of the fact that it's doing something? Need it be self-conscious?

Don't we negotiate this pragmatically...habitual vs consciously intentional, conscious vs unconscious.

For me, perception isn't equivalent to experience. It is a necessary elemental constituent thereof.

If so then what other mental agencies are constitutive of experience and how do they affect experience, isn't that the point.

Perhaps, but our reflection on what we experience has agency.

Yes it is another experience, which always adds and leaves things out.

Neither you simply experience what you experience. Trying to understand what happens in experience is not the same as the experience.

I'm perceiving kicking the rock?

No you are experiencing it, how you deconstruct your experience assumes a different pov.

Our culture thrives on addictive personalities. It continually pushes us to consume, but the pleasure in consumption is not enough. We want more & more intense pleasures because we have conflated pleasure with happiness. Many become depressed because they are not happy in spite of their best consumer efforts. People work hard to achieve what they have but for many the objectification of life does not satisfy. We are consumers addicted to consumption because we think pleasure will make us happy.

Mother's little helper has been around for a long time. This from 1965.

Kids are different today, I hear every mother say
Mother needs something today to calm her down
And though she's not really ill, there's a little yellow pill
She goes running for the shelter of a mother's little helper
And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day

Actually I think that Big Pharma holds a lot of responsibility for the opioid epidemic.

Fentanyl is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, but some fentanyl analogues, which are designed to mimic the pharmacological effects of the original drug, may be as much as 10,000 times more potent than morphine.

To date, more than 12 different analogues of fentanyl have been produced clandestinely and identified in the U.S. drug traffic. The biological effects of the fentanyl analogues are similar to those of heroin, with the exception that many use
rs report a noticeably less euphoric high associated with the drug and stronger sedative and analgesic effects.[citation needed]

Mother's little helper

And if you take more of those
you will get an overdose
No more running for the shelter of a mother's little helper
They just helped you on your way
through your busy dying day.

So, what's the deal with drugs?

I liked Russel Brand's answer:

Intuition and concepts … constitute the elements of all our cognition, so that neither concepts without intuition corresponding to them in some way nor intuition without concepts can yield a cognition. Thoughts without [intensional] content (Inhalt) are empty (leer), intuitions without concepts are blind (blind). It is, therefore, just as necessary to make the mind’s concepts sensible—that is, to add an object to them in intuition—as to make our intuitions understandable—that is, to bring them under concepts. These two powers, or capacities, cannot exchange their functions. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only from their unification can cognition arise. (A50–51/B74–76)

Kant's Togetherness Principle

This applies to judgments, Kant agrees that we sense without concepts but that it is only through concepts that judgments can be made.

Wittgenstein also discusses the duck-rabbit as two different points of view or aspects Duckrabbit in his Philosophical Investigations II.

So yes you run into something but it is not yet a tree.

To put this another way. Suppose you did not have the concept of a rabbit.



What would you see?

Here's the question you avoided:
If concepts were given to humans then that means they must have existed prior to humans..

Our ability to convert our perceptions into complex concepts differentiates us from other animals in whom this ability is rudimentary.

So, without the concept of what a post is, then there is no post. In other words, when a two year-old, or someone that hasn't learned what an internet post is, looks at this screen and doesn't have the slightest idea of what they are looking at, then your post doesn't exist. Without the idea of what a post is, then there is/may be no post.

Thanks, that's right, the post does not exist as a 'post' to them, and they tend ignore it, they don't see the meaning in it because they have not learn't the concepts that would enable them to understand it.

We perceive sensuously, biologically, and classify these perceptions according to concepts that we have learned or that we have construed from our own experiences. If what we perceive does not fit into our thought structure then it can't be thought, it is not in our imagination.

I don't know what you are reply to.

I think we ignore things not because they don't fit into our concepts, but because they don't fit into the current goal we have. It seems to me that things we don't understand,

Again, what governs how we form concepts?

How did you bring goals into this....how are they related to our sensuous perceptions, you seem to be agreeing with me here.

I answered your question. We learn how to swim, not the dog.

You might try answering my doggy swim question.

We don't invent concepts, they are given to us, and we assume them. No one grows up in isolation from others.

Did you have to learn how to swim? Did your dog have to learn how to swim. No I think the correlation breaks down.

Animals organize their experiences differently from us, we seem to agree on that. I also think they are conscious and have some limited capacity to learn, to be able construct learned reactions based on certain stimuli.

I think that if what we sensuously perceive does not fit into our concepts, we tend to ignore it because there is no place for it in our imagination.