My wife insists that the lights and decorations do not get interrupted and that that part looks just like the rest. — Sir2u

Maybe she spins the tree around when you're not looking. :P

Active drug addicts might as well be classed as mentally ill, especially long time meth users. I can see how housing these folks would be an intractable nightmare.

Am dealing with a squatting (in tent) meth user. There is a bit of a social network of the underclass where I live which makes me nervous about using the police to evict them for fear of retaliatory property damage. Would have left them alone except for evidence of trespassing.

For the psychological desire for symmetry, an unfinished tree lingers in the imagination like a half mowed lawn.

Don't put any mistletoe above the bidet. I'm told this is one of the few things God can't stand, a tier of importance beneath the golden rule.

These demonic people want to control everyone. — Noah Te Stroete

Do you really believe in supernatural entities or is "demon" just a label for unjust and predatory exploitation by those with power over those without?

If a mustache connects to a beard, does it share its being with the beard?

You might have to block out mustaches depending on how you want to do the judging.

In fact, will have to block out the philosopher entirely and just see the beard, to be anally objective.

I'm guessing basic fear. — praxis

The fear is culturally supported though by the taboo. I'm not sure if it was Thailand or Malaysia but there was a Nat. Geo article about poor folks living inside a cemeteries exposed openly to the remains of the dead. Families will exhume their relatives and takes pictures with them, with young kids present. The smoked corpses of some Papua New Guinea tribes is something most Westerners would find truly disturbing (the definition of nightmare fuel). In parts of Africa they pose the deceased in a scene which illustrates what they did in life, even as they bloat and rot, while folks eat and party nearby.

Whereas our culture seems to strictly keep the dead out of sight and mind. We cold put it down to the fear of disease I guess, an emerging formality around the natural disgust toward things that are dead and our hygienic expectations.

I was taught to avoid it whenever possible. — praxis

I guess I was fishing for an anecdote or recollection. I can't imagine any mother or f
ather sitting their kid down and saying directly how their kids ought to avoid death. Anything that harms us without killing us can teach us to avoid death. I'm not sure telling anyone not to do something is always that effective. Was there any moment of stress about death in your childhood that you remember?

My mother had in-home hospice care at the end. It seemed ideal, given the circumstances. Far better than dying in a hospital bed attached to tubes and various machines. — praxis

When I look back at how my grandmother died, to a lesser extent my grandfather, I feel that they were somewhat neglected by family out of convenience. My gran became very difficult to deal with due to strokes and she was kind of left to a care facility which drugged her to keep her manageable. Yes, I don't think we treat the elderly all that well but part of the problem is that sometimes they don't resemble who they used to be.

There was a case of a doctor recently being held accountable for the murder of 25 near-death do-not-necessitate patients because he ordered lethal doses of painkillers for all of them. Seems like what he did wasn't all that terrible but I guess the law is the law.

I abuse the demonic people on TV and the demonic people on the other end of the tech company surveillance devices. These demonic people want to control everyone. — Noah Te Stroete

It could be just the impersonal effect of the way we collectively must organize ourselves in mass. Freedom must be constrained because there are so many of us vying for resources and all resources are owned property and subject to laws for the preservation of social order. The pressure to be efficiently productive (competitive) breaks a lot of people.

The real monster (divine or hellish) is the totality of being.

Sorry if you suffer hallucinations and paranoia.

The scariest agents for non-schizophrenics are other people.

Especially if we begin to regard others as moving purely out of a predetermined condition, lacking a sense of free will.

The psychology of resentment hits so much closer to home in Joker than in John Wick. I felt a lot for the character and the tone of the movie is quite serious. Any of the forces responsible for a violence born from this kind resentment are already primed by corresponding social conditions (or perceived injustices).

I could barely stand to sit through John Wick because it was so boring (action sequences were so repetitive). There is little emotional resonance with the protagonist.

Where are the private investigatory critics? Don't count your eggs before you have any.

The first couple lines of Randy333's Chaos Cosmology:

I pass bare, black trees in the shadowy wood, not much living in sight, crooked branches twisted betwixt each other in the silent gray gloom, a cold veil without light or life, comprised of nothing but opaque smog... No stars or moon illumine my path, nor lantern to guide me.

The descriptive redundancy is maddening and there is this thing about seeing without light. You must be dreaming then... confabulating...

The paragraph doesn't end for the entire sample, which is 5 pages, enough to fatigue a reader. Breaks help us to read comfortably.

Do you even edit drafts bro?

The second argument, known as the Theory of Recollection, asserts that learning is essentially an act of recollecting things we knew before we were born but then forgot. True knowledge, argues Socrates, is knowledge of the eternal and unchanging Forms that underlie perceptible reality. — SparkNotes: Plato

Sounds like Socrates is baggering Meno with his annoying rhetorical method. If only Meno could give him a dose of his own medicine. How does Socrates defend his theory of recollection?

A fun literary riff about "God" can be found in J.L. Borges grim short story of the Library of Babel.

In the story God represents the desire (a hopeful hypothesis) for a directory/cipher of the library itself (the universe), that would help one to either decode its gibberish or navigate toward a center of meaning. The only ciphers of the library of gibberish are its denizens, bound by the limitations of their own language and the banal recurrence of the library's geography.

There is much desire for understanding what can't be really be understood, what really isn't a desire for understanding but for something else (bliss, peace, a cessation of anxiety?). The subject's creation (a meaning as footing or anchor) then fills the void, whether as a solitary or collaborative act.

The basic kernal on which religions are built will never change.

There is a good way to do things and a bad way to do things. There are vastly more bad ways of doing things than there are good ways of doing things.

The way of doing things is naturally conserved, especially in a resource scarce world. Lots of suffering helped to shape the way. It's also conserved by virtue of being raised on it, being conditionally accepted by conformity to it.

Furthermore institutions (monarchs, theocracies, et cetera) conserve their power through ideologically based laws. The state is like your family's father, with the power to deal out punishments and rewards.

We no longer have to believe by threat of violence or group acceptance... or do we? It's just tribal in-group out-group status seeking bullshit that life is about, whether religious or consumer.

Apple is a cult! Now that you are in you have to give up audio jacks and usb ports and updatable RAM. Fuck Apple.

Even if there comes a scientific measure of consciousness, it won't eliminate the concern about an artificial subjective experience (what is it like to be something). There will always be doubt even if by a future consensus that doubt is a voice of a minority. You will never be other than yourself (unless by some metaphysical fancy, you already are).

There is definitely consciousness beyond the individual mind. — Mapping the Medium

Does this belief stem directly from Pierce's metaphysics (Syncheism)? Why would biological mechanisms of behavioral inheritance, namely epigentics, provide any more support for this metaphysical theory? It seems like cultural evolution (memetics) is a far greater means of transmitting "what it is like to be" human between individuals.

You all just need to go read C.S. Pierce's “Immortality in the Light of Synechism” (1893) and understand it.

Then come back and explain it to me like I'm your child (that you love unconditionally because I'm somehow continuous with... yourself?).

Ugh. Whatever.

You're boring me. Bye. — Xtrix

And what does Heidegger say about boredom and its relation to Das Nichts?

I realize you gave me a free therapy session. Nice.

Perusing articles on Heidegger I can definitely say that his work is inaccessible to me.

I'll just concede at this point and say my concern is the inevitability of subjectivity after death (even after gazillions of actual years if it takes that long). My intuition is that there will always be subjective phenomenal qualities (that I eccentrically associate with being something).

Here I imagine these qualities of being like listening to music. There are notes interspersed with silence (nothing). Memory permits a play of harmony or dissonance with these silences. Death results in absolute silence (with no memory) but inevitably the music must play for a subject.

Fine. The only beings that experience are living things -- namely, animals. That's like saying that all things that don't "experience" in this sense, that aren't living, aren't "beings." — Xtrix

Yes, I don't like the use of "being" for things that we'd claim have no capacity for experience. But it doesn't really matter much either way. Chairs aren't beings. There, I said it. But insofar as they have the capacity for experience, maybe they are. This has nothing to do with the common variants of verb "to be" (ex. The chair is.)

This has little to do with my main worry which I did admit was irrational.

There is only what it is like to be something. We do not experience what it is like to be nothing.

Therefore being (what it is like to be something) is all there is. The totality of existence is stands in relation to what it is like to be something.

It's as incoherent as the hard problem of consciousness. How could there possibly be satisfying explanation for qualia (being like something rather than nothing)?

Your experience is your experience. It's one aspect of being, nothing more. To generalize human experience to all of the world, nature, the universe -- to "being" generally -- is not only misleading, it's incoherent. — Xtrix

I'm not generalizing human experience only, I'm extending any experience in any capacity (what it is like to be something/anything).

You say it's likely it has no independent being, then state categorically that the rock is a dependent feature of our being? — Xtrix

Well, I guess I meant experience here. Few would likely concede a rock has subjective experience (unless a panpsychist). The existence of a rock depends upon (any) something for which it is like to be. Therefore I'm proposing a primacy to the experience of being (the experience of an entity) and making it universal. The state of any existence is relatively bound to experience of what it is like to be something.

My advice: stop using the word "being" -- you're clueless about its meaning. — Xtrix

You're probably right that I'm equivocating. Lends a bit of grandiose and useful obscurity to try to lure folks in.

There's no evidence whatsoever that we live again, that there's reincarnation or a heaven or anything else. If there is, we certainly have no memory of it. This could be your millionth life, in that case -- and you have no idea. So who cares. — Xtrix

I can't imagine that there is anything but an experience (what it is like to be something). Death is like dreamless sleep and as soon as time begins (for something it is like for there to be time) we are.

If you don't care you are free to go. No need to harass me.

"Experience" is something that happens to a living being: human beings and animals. The being of a rock has no experience. If you equate experience with being, fine -- but why bother? It's misleading. "Being" as a word is good enough. — Xtrix

It's not at all misleading, as it's more natural to use "being" as a condition of a subject experincing and reflecting upon the world. I find it odd you disagree with my usage.

I guess with the verb "to be" we can say that the rock "is". While it likely that a rock has no independent being, it is a dependent feature of our (and any) being.

If you're worried that your life will reoccur in an eternal recurrence or in reincarnation, fine -- just say that. (You must be saying this, otherwise what is there to "fear"?) — Xtrix

I did say as much. Yes, I'm worried, for the sake of chit chat, about whether being (an experience of what anything is like) is an eternal condition. If I am being now, won't I be again later (after death/birth)?

Sounds like all too much work for a life not worth living.

I believe you can't really escape being, since being like something is all there is between spans of non-existence. Though we can escape suffering by whatever means is deemed worth it.

I just don't want anyone to cut my eye lids off and slowly cook me alive over a fire. Be merciful.

I don't understand this sentence. "Nothing else that enters into it"? What's "it"? Being? What does the "else" refer to? — Xtrix

Granted it is a bad sentence which is best to discard. "It" refers to being. Non-being is not a state of being.

My point is surprisingly simple. Being is an experience. Non-being is not an experience. After my death the experience of being will reoccur because being is what constitutes experience. "Reoccur" is an inadequate or incorrect term because there is nothing that links specific beings and identities between lives. Nothing that I identify as myself will recur but being will always be. There will always be an experience because that is all there can be.

I don't understand this either. We exist, we are. The world is. That's being. Being is everything, every being, and the basis on which anything "shows up" for us at all. Awareness is being. Non-awareness is being. Your life will end, believe me, and so will your anxiety. So to be worried that anxiety will never end is indeed completely irrational, and also incoherent -- unless you're afraid you'll be reincarnated or something like that. — Xtrix

I agree for the most part. The anxiety is very similar to a fear of reincarnation (eternal recurrence), except there is no soul that reincarnates, since there is no linking the continuity of experience between two separate lives.

Being is surely more complex than I've made it out to be, as an on and off state of affairs rather than a continuum. Qualia might work as a better substitute for my use of being. There will only ever be what it is like to be, even if trillions of years pass between instances of what it is like to be something.

Being doesn't end -- beings end. Waking up from sleep is talking about states of conscious awareness. "I am unfortunately always awake"? What does that mean, you've never fallen asleep? Seems you've just contradicted yourself. — Xtrix

You just stated what I'm saying very succinctly: Being doesn't end but beings do end. Beings end relative to other beings. Another metaphor might be the Hindu deity which creates a universe every time he/she/it blinks. As with the visible and invisible room with regard to a light being on or off, it is the seeing that is something.

In any case I'm not saying much of anything. I'm merely pointing to being and the fear about it that will pass but likely return. I might even concede that I'm irrationally paranoid about the eternity of having to experience what any something is like.

Then consciousness is being? Like I said, you're then interpreting being in relation to the human being, particularly the human lifespan or human consciousness. That's not an unreasonable position, in fact its the view of most people, scientists included. I just happen to think it's not the complete picture. — Xtrix

Well, I suppose any kind of consciousness is a state of being, not just human consciousness. I think consciousness and therefore being is inevitable because there is nothing else that enters into it.

It seems that Heidegger posed Das Nicht (The Nothing) as a source of anxiety. Please expand about it if you can. My concern is about being as the only possible state of awareness which will never end as the source of anxiety, however irrational this is. Being ends but it likely starts again, like waking up from sleep. I never experience sleep though I sleep, I am unfortunately always awake. It can't be otherwise.

What is a dreamless sleep like? Is that non-being? — Xtrix

Yes, I'd classify unconsciousness as well as death as non-being, granting the
major difference between those two states.

What if, instead, being is considered something concealed, absent? A kind of "nothing" in a sense? We do seem to live most of our lives in a kind of "unconscious" (or in Heideggerian terms, "ready-to-hand") relation to the world--like when we're involved and engaged in the world, in a skill or with other people, or when totally absorbed in an activity. — Xtrix

I have no clue as to why being would be used in that sense but I suppose I'd have to expose myself to Heidegger for that.

Didn't seem it. You referred to "non-being" as death or sleep. One wouldn't say that's non-being. Maybe a kind of nullity. The world goes on when you're dead or asleep, however. — Xtrix

While what exists may not depend on any single being it does depend on the possibility of being at all (any being and generational memory). If there are no beings everything is dead. If there are no perceivers there is no world. Existence stands in relation to any and all kinds of being.

Maybe I have no clue as to how philosophers have used "being". What would non-being be according to you?

What is non-being if it is not being dead? You can't be dead really because you aren't anything when dead . There is nothing that it is like to be dead. There is only what it is like to be alive. Where there is life, presumably there is being. Wherever there is a world that goes unperceived there is the potentiality for perception and beings will appear in no time because beings are what experience time. Thus being is eternal light switch flipping.

You are.
You are not.
You are.
You are not.

Et cetera

It's not necessarily true that being ends in death. Human beings end in death. — Xtrix

Yes, that is what I am saying.

A lot of people are afraid of hell. That's where the fear stems from. — Xtrix

There is only whatever this is, whether you call it heaven, hell or reality. The worry is that there will always be a sort of drum warp of being and non-being that never absolutely ends (but non being is an end, like death or sleep). This is akin to the Eastern belief of being trapped in Samsara, the eternal wheel of birth and death.

To say being is finite (or infinite) is a mistake. — Xtrix

Being is finite in the sense that being ends in death. Being may be infinite in the sense that being is the only aware state (the ON state). We only ever experience being, so it might as well be eternal.

You can see the room when the light is on.

You can see nothing in the room when the light is off.

Assume for sake of this analogy that seeing is synonymous with being.

There is plenty of youtube vids about Heidegger. Gets a bit much...

I'm worried about being again after death. It's irrational and absurd though because there is nothing that links being before (life) as with being after (life), so we can just as well say being is finite and will never recur. Furthermore because being changes the fear will go.

But I question the idea that information is constitutive or foundational of matter. — Wayfarer

I guess this makes more sense, respecting a general definition. Information must inform, but the whole world is there waiting to inform us about itself. The sense data which becomes an impression and is used by an agent toward some end (ie. attention, recall, association...) is information (?).

Information:

1) facts provided or learned about something or someone

2) what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things

Science doesn't ultimately explain what all this is. It just leverages knowledge about things to do other things people need or want at some cost.

We are still left with why any of this is occurring (or not). This is not a question that can be satisfactorily answered. The impulse to ask this kind of why is no different than the impulse to pull God out of a hat to justify or explain. We've inherited ways to do things, just like we've inherited being, just as some folks have inherited God as a reason for x, y or z.

Science does enlarge the universe though which helps us to change what we can to benefit human beings (relatively speaking).

God seems to be a sort of an inherited case of ideas (a bit conservative) about embodiment of law/order that governs human or cosmic action.

So what if unchecked information processing actually causes our extinction? This would be a case of fulfilling purpose in the short term while forgoing even more in the future (relative to some species point of view).

Is there any inherent difference in human (anthropocentric) processing of information (as if we had free will to do anything else) and the kind that occurs in the natural world for slime mold, trees and colliding galaxies?

Not God was a grilled cheese sandwhich eaten in a New York diner on August 24, 1982. But what was the name of the diner? Who served it? Will it appear again?

Does anyone have more information about what caused the grilled cheese, so that I might predict the next one?

This is a grotesque procategorization comparable in value to a prosent life.

Since there is no meaning except where it is forced by the inviolence of being here rather than there, by a perception of chimpery in piggery, per the dictates of viewing by ex homo cerebrum, it comes to the denial of pork as homo that will save us from having to abstain from seeing bacon as ourselves, a kind of soylent green porcine-homo. Homo labors to consume pork alone, for it is in the tasting of ourselves as its own denial in total ignorance, that sustains homo's creative, innovative depravity. The naivety of being a cannibal is what enables being as being itself a being in beingness. We must deny our own forlorn incarceration as bacon to wake up to taste the bacon in bliss.

At once we cannot deny the pig in man, but by knowing the fateful historicity of chimp on pig, all will be lost in a utter foundness. It is as momentous as the death of God, and will recause the attitudes of dispair so typical of all centuries. The influx of nausea in the perception of homo as pig will be existentially intolerable. It is the invariable cause of the opiate and Netflix epidemic. To see our inner pig as oursleves is to wish to unbee in anesthete and teevee.

Cheers though, how's your sex life going? Mine is well you know by now ... — Wallows

None existent, unless simulacra counts.

Everybody is wallowing in something. The trick is to be in some kind of flow where you're relieved of being aware of it. A different kind of sleep.

You maybe lonely, Wallows.

Do you have enough strength to climb a wall? Imagine yourself in one of those silly climbing gyms, with faux rock wall, little ledges to hold on to, a professional safety rig. We'll race to the top but I'll hold back. I don't race but I can pretend to.

Then we'll go out and get you one of those real classy sex massage therapists, to wallow with you in a nice clean bed, to strum on the knot of being who you are. Unless that is grotesque. Then no.

Every act might be empty of a fullness of normality, but oh well. Staring at the curtains is as fulfilling as reading threads at this point.

More pig chimp content please.

Father
Bearing on his crown a spinning wheel of glowing gold,
Boring into his mind's eye
Bleeding from his temples

The gift of the waters in four directions.

Whilst Mother
Bearing in her womb
Father's own replacement
Heaved in pains of labor,
Bleeding forth the oceans,

The gift of the waters in four directions.

Brother,
Pained to see the wheel spinning on his aging Father's head,
Was struck by the wounded world and its costly gifts,
Crying loudly against it all:

This wheel is not for me.
This wheel is not for me.
This wheel is not for me.
This wheel is not for me.

And a voice spoke out
From nowhere and everywhere at once.

Who is the wheel for if not for thee?

Ask your therapist who ought to wear the clown nose (you will inevitably bring with you) in your next session.

Meanwhile, work on your balloon animal, juggling and tight-rope walking skills, with or without simultaneously smoking clove cigarettes.

Eggs. They are fundamental feature of keeping this absurd show going.

Symbolizing the enigma of the cycle of life since the the dawning of sense. Eggs, bunnies and flowers in spring, a depraved consequence of gratuitous and unchecked sexual solicitation and communion.

Don't count your chickens before they hatch. Eat them before then!

The mythic pheonix is really just a chicken whose eggs are taken for raising before it gets roasted.