So then the only certainty is contingency whose only limit is possibility.

https://youtu.be/nh6k9NL-82s

Well if so then thought must be contingent since the good Bishop is not still here, and there must be a here, where they are no longer at and therefore a reality that is independent of their dreams.

It isn't about inherently immoral. It is about ethical consistency. You'd have to explain why an animal is deserving of slaughter and a human is not. And if that trait is present in the human, is it now OK to slaughter the human?

I did say that we don't confer such rights to animals, and you have admitted that you value human rights over those of animals, therefore since eating meat does not contravene against any human rights, nor the rights we have allowed to animals, therefore we are acting within our rights, i.e., consistently by eating animals, and not humans.

Reason and logic are a part of it. The rest is empathy and compassion, which I stated in my original post here. You still have not made the case for why "taste" should be a valid justification to slaughter animals? And if a human used the same justification of "taste" to slaughter humans, would you accept that as valid? If not, you're inconsistent in your own subjective ethics.

You asked why I eat meat, and I answered because I like it, and then you asked how my liking it can provide reason or justification, and I replied that not all human actions need to be justified. Now adding that when it comes to questions of taste that have no impact on the rights of other humans there is no possibility of acting inconsistently.

It is part of basic universal rights. The right to live free from pain and suffering. We call this universal human rights, which are granted at birth. The same rights should be granted to animals, and you'd have to present an argument for why that shouldn't be the case. Because anything that can feel pain and suffering and has a will to live, should be granted basic rights. Such as, the right to not be killed.

Human's construct rights to enable a workable society, they are not by nature and as such animals don't have rights, except as what might be conferred on them by law, custom or tradition. To pretend that all of human societies are inherently immoral because the eat meat, is wrong and I think it is a form of intellectual elitism.

To state that your position is free from logic and reason, just puts you at odds with ethical consistency.

I didn't say that ethical concerns are free from logic or reason, only that these benchmarks can't describe the fullness of human experience. If you think reason & logic are the sole constituents of moral behavior then I think you have an impoverished view of morality which is evident in the elitist position you are trying to maintain.

I value human life over animal life

I too value human life over animal life, however unlike your position I don't believe animals have rights simpliciter, rather their rights are given to them by us.

And to discuss your justification of "I like it". Do you think this is a valid and sound justification for eating meat? And if we deployed the justification of "I like it" in another context, do you think it would be just as valid?

The aesthetic pleasure of eating a 2 inch well cooked and spiced steak, goes beyond logic and reason. Human activities of this sort and many other sorts can't be circumscribed by logic and reason.

I eat meat because I like it, and you skirted my question... is there a difference between the butchering of humans and the butchering of animals based on your "trifecta"?

Does anyone here eat animals, while also adhering to the moral trifecta (Empathy, compassion and ethical consistency)? If so, I'd like to know how?

The majority of humanity eat meat, it's been that way since advent of man. Now you suggest that the normative notions of "Empathy, compassion and ethical consistency" ought to differentiate what's moral or immoral...that by these practices ordinary men are immoral because they fail your "trifecta", I think that is intellectual BS.

Are you suggesting that Holocaust's butchering of Jews and others are on the same moral plane as the butchering of animals to feed the world's population?

Cardi B., ought to be a drink...Bacardi & soda with a twist

Idealists die don't they?

Wisdom is the knowledge & the practice of living well.

then our claims to knowledge are wrong, since we can't be certain we're not perfectly envatted. The idealist would respond by saying we know what appears to us, and the BIV scenario could only exist for the mad scientist. And the realist would be left with the difficult task of bridging the epistemological gap.

Old school. We can't know any empirical claim with 100% certainty, isn't that what Kant showed, that the Noumea is not something we can know.

What is the difference between the phenomenal that we sense, and what the BIV senses...? I don't see what's different so then what is the use of a distinction where there is no distinction.

p.s. take the blue pill.

BIV....if it is a perfect simulation then how would it make any difference, and if it does not make a difference then what good is the notion.

Malebranche is known for his occasionalism, that is, his doctrine that God is the only causal agent, and that creatures merely provide the “occasion” for divine action. On the old textbook account, occasionalism was an ad hoc response to the purported problem in Descartes of how substances as distinct in nature as mind and body are can causally interact. According to this account, Malebranche was driven by this problem with Cartesian dualism to propose that it is God who brings it about that our sensations and volitions are correlated with motions in our body.

SEP

:up:

:down:

This is what my last paragraph was about.

There are different theories about how this is done, Diderot thought that a painting ought to present its characterizations as a separate world quite aside from us, and this view monopolized the art world for over a century, until Manet's painting Olympia, where the subject of the paining overtly confronts the viewer.

How a painting can grab you:

Here is The Death of Socrates, which was done by Jacques Louis David (French, Paris 1748–1825). The painting is its own little world and the observer puts together a piece of history. So according to Diderot the aesthetic effect, the grab here is the story the painting is tells.



Manet's Painting of Olympia is vastly different. Olympia boldly confronts the viewer, an commands attention but the painting is not just about her brash pose. The black maid presenting the bouquet adds to the story, and the black cat structurally balances the painting plus adds an air of mystery . It grabbed its viewers back in 1863.



Both paintings grab the observer, each in its own manner. Phenomenal realty also grabs but quite unintentionally and most of the time without any cogent need to be read into, just simply experienced.

A sense of reality requires incompleteness. Think of a painting of a garden path. If you experience a suspension of disbelief and follow the path, a sense of reality is conveyed by the idea that something is beyond our sight. The more I focus on the fact that the scene is actually complete, that there is nothing beyond that bend in the path, the more that feeling of reality is dispelled.

Other obvious examples are dreams, novels, and plays. Breaking the fourth wall creates a reality-breakdown. To what extent is this same aesthetic in force in regard to what we think of as the real world?

Our phenomenal reality is never complete we are always adding what we know to what we see, but we rarely suspend our belief in what is manifest to us in the world.

The suspension of disbelief is a different. We know what we are looking at a mimesis but we want to experience it as if it were real, we want the work to be real and our imagination allows us to do this, to enter and experience the work.

There are different theories about how this is done, Diderot thought that a painting ought to present its characterizations as a separate world quite aside from us, and this view monopolized the art world for over a century, until Manet's painting Olympia, where the subject of the paining overtly confronts the viewer.

Would the idea of Karma equate better with a conception of "harmony, perfection, or "the good"", or with a notion of "randomness and irreversibility"?

It's almost like you are asking if Ethics ought to be first philosophy, or if the irrational is the only other option. I think Karma is closer to luck.

A man goes to the market to buy fruit, runs into some one who owes him a lot of money and he confronts the man and the debt gets paid off. The purpose of going to the market was to purchase fruit, but the good end was that the debt was paid off.

The man was lucky. The question Aristotle asked is...was this man born lucky, is this part of nature's own irrationality (or perhaps nature's determinism) that some men are, quite unknown to themself, lucky.

The performance is brilliant, and she is the shit...colors

? !

I have a question, is it right to pick beliefs regardless of accuracy if they make you a better, more functional person? For example believing in free will rather than determinism because the latter belief makes it difficult to act as a self motivated individual. Or, if you are religious, believing in god as opposed to nihilism, because creating ones own meaning is difficult considering the random nature of reality. Should one be a utilitarian with one's beliefs? I'm an atheist but some things I cannot allow myself to believe, determinism being one of those things. Even if it comes to be that all of accepted human knowledge concludes that is in fact correct. Am I wrong? Why?

Perhaps beliefs as a class have kinds, and some of these kinds are objective or empirical and others are subjective, and of the subjective some rational and some emotional. Then what is (assuming normative viewpoints) empirically believable, such as determinism, might not be subjectively believable. Something along the lines of what I believe about the empirical properties of H20 have little to do with the feeling of being wet.

I think free will has value in society because it seems to explain how we experience and explain our behavior, and it seems to form the basis for our accepting responsibility for our actions. So I don't know if the universe is determined, but since all deductions based on empirical evidence are probabilistic, they not certain.

I suspect we come to our beliefs, not really as a matter of choice (generally) but by what we have learned, utilized our reasoning, and/o how we feel about what our belief concern, so then more of a historical or habitual process.

Didn't Rex get fired for calling Trump a moron? I think Rex was more-on than off about Trump.

If the truth hurts, it is time to change it.

No, if the foo shits wear it.

Measure twice, cut once.

Lefty loosey righty tighty.

HTB Willie Nelson is 85 today.

Members of a society can acquire ownership over the means of production by establishing small collectively owned yet independently operated cooperatives that, when working together as a network, can fulfil the same function of larger, corporate enterprises. This will allow members of society to reap the rewards of the goods they produce without undermining the effectiveness of the free market.

I like the videos, ideas are presented very clearly, but I am not so sure of all the conclusions, which are very attractive, I guess I just don't see their possibility.

Also, I worked with a company that was owned by its employees and based on around a 10 year history of operations, from when it became an employee owned company to when I looked at the books, the company operations had gyrated widely and that's why I was called in.

This company's problem was not its product (it put aerial lifts on utility trucks and sold completed units to utilities, cable and TV companies) , sales growth was steady, the problem was with the leadership of the company. A good leader has to be able to act decisively, but fractions had developed in the company leading to questions about management and that lead to missed quotes, and more expensive operations.

Of course that is just one case but I think it points to a problem. Today a leader of a decent size company must produce results, or they will not have a job. They cannot be hampered by employee/owners 2nd guessing and not following their directions.

I think it is more likely we will see much larger corporations forming over the coming years employing less and less people per unit sold using machines/computer/economies of scale to achieve these goals.
Governments and corporations will become more and more complicit in how the Government is operated. Corporations need people who can buy goods, they will realize that unless they can make provisions for an increasing labor population, the market for their goods will dry up...

Sure that's why I said it is "...equivocation because depending on who is using it, the same set of circumstances can be viewed as tolerant or intolerant." The mother trying to get her child to use a spoon or a fork might not be as tolerant as those laughing at the child.

Thoughts on Respect:
Respect must be the act of esteeming a view or person, in the sense that the one who respects holds the other in high regards and supports/agrees with it. In order to respect, one must restrain negativity by means of rules constructed in tradition, refusing to inflict harm on the respected.

On Tolerance:
Tolerance is not the same as respect, although respect can have aspects of tolerance. This must be the restraint of negativity in order to avoid conflict or harming another, not necessarily due to benevolence towards the other. For instance, one may tolerate another's annoying habits without respecting the person or the habit.

Tolerance in the past was used to distinguish the minority from the majority, it had a very religious/ethnic dimension. Jews, Quakers, Papists were tolerated or not within varying normative contexts. Tolerance from the majority standpoint set limits and conferred permission on what could or could not be tolerated. These permissions from the minorities viewpoint might be considered intolerant. Just recently we have had similar discussions regarding the rights of individuals of the same sex to get married. The majority tolerated the union of same sex couples, but without any right to be married, thus denying them of the legal rights of heterosexual couples. On June 26, 2015 in the US the Supreme Court ruled that states cannot ban same-sex marriage thereby securing the legal permission for same sex couples to be legally married. The finer details of this normative permission are still being worked out in places like Texas.

Tolerance seems to be an equivocation because depending on who is using it, the same set of circumstances can be viewed as tolerant or intolerant. When someone says they tolerate something it suggest that while they believe that something is wrong, that they can still accept and live with its existence, in spite of its being wrong.

Respect I think is a form of toleration, only instead of a hierarchical permission granted, it proceeds along at the same narrative level. Religious tolerance is now a question of respect. We respect each others religious beliefs even though we don't accept them for our self.

Depending on the issue involved, permission and/or respect may be useful way to analyze the relative merits of various positions.

"Life will not answer to reason. And meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it." I am simply trying understand what "life" in this sentence means.

Life will not answer to reason (logic) because reason and hence science can't encompass the fullness our experience of life and I don't think this has sunk into our psyche's, we simply have not understood the implication. I don't think life can explain itself because life is based on luck, on an accident, which as such does not submit to an answer.

I like your differentiation between the Will and Intellect.

As an aside:

Socrates and Plato had produced arguments claiming that virtue was knowledge. But this was proven to be a deficient position, because one can know what is right yet still proceed to do what is wrong

Socrates argues against this in the Protagoras.

“No one,” he declared, “who either knows or believes that there is another possible course of action, better than the one he is following, will ever continue on his present course” (Protagoras 358b-c) The problem of akrasia is still being discussed, but most recent thought seems to side with a version Socrates thought.

Ha, ha

No. The proof is in the lack of any definition. Where there is no definition, there is no understanding. No understanding, no cure. In that sense he's correct: for so long as he can avoid understanding, he can avoid being cured. Which leaves the obvious questions, what does he think his cure will be, and does he want to be cured? Or another way, he'll be correct until he decides otherwise.

As to behavioural therapies like desensitization, and others, they can be useful sometimes, for a while, for some people: they're not a cure.

I disagree and I agree.

No amount of understanding will enable patient X to escape his compunction, it is not so much that he is avoiding a cure but rather that in order for someone like this to be cured, it has to be of his/her own doing. The knot that they have wrought, only they can undo, but rarely can this be done alone, which is why there is group therapy where the power dynamic of the group may help a patient see their problem for what it is, to help them unravel it.

And, I agree that removal of the symptom is not a cure, which is why I find CBT problematical.

Yes, I think patient X is right. Even if he could understand why he is acting the way he is acting, if for wild example it evolved from his bed wetting as a child and the subsequent and sever parental admonitions that he received, that would not stop him from acting the way he is acting. There is no direct method I am aware of for solving the problem of this sort, it takes time and a lot of talking with a trained analyst, one who can help guide patient X into unraveling the knot he has gotten himself into.

"Truman Capote called Mr. Kerouac’s method of composition typing, not writing. But Allen Ginsberg, who regarded his friend as the greatest American poet of his time, declared that Mr. Kerouac had created “a spontaneous bop prosody.”.

According to legend, he put a roll of paper on the typewriter and just typed out the entire novel, never rewriting. I imagine the idea that he never rewrote his work irked Capote's fastidious nature.

"Old Man and the Sea"

But man is not made for defeat," he said. "A man can be destroyed but not defeated." I am sorry that I killed the fish though, he thought. Now the bad time is coming and I do not even have the harpoon.

Survival, "destroyed but not defeated"... liberation in the sense of Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton's ability to survive. There are several good books about him.

Are you out of your mind?

Sometimes

'On the Road' is a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac,
'The Road' is novel by Cormac McCarthy.


Very different kinds of quest, but there are similarities and yes The Road depresses, it almost set in grays. 'On the Road' is about exuberance of youth as a kind of paradise :smile:

Couple of more possibilities to entertain your imagination:

'Game of Throne' books are great, very detailed and captivating.
'On the Road', see it as a spiritual quest.

"Democritus laughs, Heraclitus cries"

“Heraclitus would shed tears whenever he went out in public – Democritus laughed. One saw the whole as a parade of miseries, the other of follies. And so, we should take a lighter view of things and bear them with an easy spirit, for it is more human to laugh at life than to lament it.”

– Seneca, On Tranquility of Mind, 15.2

Travel adventure story, fiction or nonfiction. Like Lord of the Rings or say something by Bruce Chatwin.