I'm just gonna come right out and say it. I am putting in a lot of effort to honestly engage with individuals on this site and contribute something, anything I can of value to the discussions. I do not get the same in return. I am ignored and excluded from conversations in which I have the same right as anyone to take part in. This is a public forum and last I checked there wasn't a sign on the door saying "People with degrees only."

I don't know if it is cowardice, jealousy or just plain ignorant arrogance but it's pretty pathetic and removes a lot of the general respect I have for everyone, from the individuals that do this. Show me something to respect and prove me wrong.

@Banno
@Srap Tasmaner

Is there a good reason why neither of you can bring yourself to engage with my writing and openly ignore every attempt I make to engage with you?

Is there a good reason why you are both more entitled to speak here than I am?

Do either of you see me as an equal?

Asking directly because you are both being extremely rude by trying to exclude and ignore me when I have not done the same to either of you. So I would like an explanation. What is your problem with me exactly? Neither of you even knows anything about me. So I don't know where this unjustifiable judgement is coming from but you both need to grow the fuck up and learn how to show others the respect they try to show to you, as equals.

I'm really all ears, if there is a good reason I'd be really happy to hear what you both have to say for yourself.

@dussiasI'm starting to think the problem isn't with me and is with how people react to me.

I'm spending a good few hours taking the time to respond to people with the most qualitative, thoughtful and engaging content I think I can write and yet I fall to the wayside, ignored and my points unused and uncritiqued. While others are pretending I wrote nothing while they carry on having a conversation with others as if I was not there. I don't see what I'm doing wrong but it's quite upsetting that so few if the people I am directing my comments toward straight up ignore me with no explanation as to why. If I was making mistakes in my reasoning then why aren't they picking them out? If I'm not making mistakes in my reasoning then why aren't people acknowledging that?

What do I have to do at this point to just not be excluded from the conversation?

suppose.. in that random crazy scenario there's some point. — Outlander

Indeed. I purposefully left the meaning I put into the story vague and unaddressed. Just in case anyone took away another meaning from it worth investigating. Without being led to, or way from, it by me or my biases

Can I steal your house or wife just because I can do something better with either than perhaps you can at present? Just curious.

I mean, who knows. Maybe he sacrificed time and energy that could have been used to build the strength and endurance needed to throw said item as far just so he could be able to purchase said item legitimately. What then? — Outlander

No, I'd say that stealing is wrong most of time, unless you're stealing back something which rightly belongs to you or if you will die if you don't, then stealing is mostly wrong. In the story however, nothing is stolen.

It's interesting that you said "Purchase said item legitimately" because legitimacy is something the story examines.

Described in the story are three methods of acquisition. Purchasing, borrowing (remember that ultimately, the Javelin wasn't stolen) making. Is purchasing more legitimate than making? Doesn't someone have to first make, in order for the made to be bought?

Let's say I am the familialy legitimate heir to a throne. Yet the people tell me I have no legitimacy and get rid of the throne, in favour of a democratically elected government. I may have been the legitimate heir to that throne, but the throne itself was not given the status of legitimate right to govern.

That last paragraph is just a tangent really but it popped into my head so I obviously thought it might help.

Here is a question for you. In the story, which was the more legitimate throw? Should either of the throws made by either people be seen as illegitimate? If so, who's throw was more legitimate?

Are you serious right now?

That seems like a strange way of putting it. I would agree that the definition of “common sense” is something like “something that has a broad consensus”, in the sense of being large uncontroversial. But the specific philosophical principles that I think rightly enjoy that broad uncontroversial consensus do not include anything like “whatever enjoys a consensus is probably right”, if that’s what you mean. That would actually violate the second example of a common-sense view that I gave, that somebody (in this case a majority) just saying so doesn’t make it true. — Pfhorrest

I see.

So you're suggesting then, that common sense is referring to the idea that if ordinary people thought about the problem, charitably, reasonably and rationally, their conclusion is a common sense one?

I'd agree to that.

Could we do that? I'm in. But I'd not expect a high score; my Lichess correspondence score never gets over 1600, and blitz, never over 1200.

You are right. The analytic/continental distinction was waning when I went to school fifty years ago. What I see in my small understanding of contemporary philosophy is the application of analytic techniques to issues that would have then been classified as continental. Always small steps that are not going to impress the folk in the stalls, but interesting enough for me. — Banno

@JerseyFlight The above quote is where you should look for the thing with the real negative social value. It isn't Analytic philosophy. Just ignore him. Not worth your time. He can barely reciprocate any of the time I spend on him. It's just getting transparent as to why now too. Don't throw gems into a feeding trough. You'll just lose the gems. Don't even waste your time trying to show him how to use the toy he chose to buy when it was literally able to be picked up outside.

So common sense to you is consensus?

I'm reminded of something I wrote in the intro to my own philosophy book:

"The general worldview I am going to lay out is one that seems to be a naively uncontroversial, common-sense kind of view, i.e. the kind of view that I expect people who have given no thought at all to philosophical questions to find trivial and obvious. Nevertheless I expect most readers, of most points of view, to largely disagree with the consequent details of it, until I explain why they are entailed by that common-sense view. Many various other philosophical schools of thought deviate from that common-sense view in different ways, and their adherents think that they have surpassed that naive common sense and attained a deeper understanding. In these essays I aim to shore up and refine that common-sense view into a more rigorous form that can better withstand the temptation of such deviation, and to show the common error underlying all of those different deviations from this common-sense view."

I guess as much as I dislike Wittgenstein's attitude, we have more in common than I often think. — Pfhorrest

What is common-sense and what is a common-sense view? Can you give an example and explain to me why it is a common sense view?

All at once. It's not like any of them negate or contradict each other by being true. Deterministic events can happen, randomly.

Why is this? Non-linear causality.

Yes, it does. So does systemic classism. Those two systemic failures fuel the other.

If I can use systemic classism to keep black people from gaining any real power, then I can make them flip out at the unjustice of it and justify whatever systemic racism that I want by pointing only at them flipping out, while hiding my provocation.

Oh good. Someone found the No-cat I was talking about a few days ago. Was wondering when that would happen.

I don't believe Analytical philosophy has a negative social value.

I do think some analytical philosophers do.

I can tell people what I think is the thing that has the negative social value, but people won't like to hear that ugly truth.

Can't believe how unjustifiably full of themselves some people on this forum are and how rude they can be when ignoring people who disagree with them. Trust me @Banno your time is not that important that it requires you to be so picky about where and who you spend it on. Methinks someone is just trying a little too hard to control their public image, not realising that they barely have one worth trying to control. I'd say get down from your ivory tower, but I can see you have just walked up a hill and are pretending to have built an ivory tower only you can see. Boring.

And in the end, criticism from the ignorant is not critique. — Banno

Maybe, Maybe not. I do however have very little faith in your ability to recognise who the ignorant are and are assuming it is not you.

Analytic philosophers focus too much on playing with concepts, and not enough on thinking about the parts of reality that matter." — Olivier5

I will be starting a thread later that is related to this one. I'll briefly explain myself here and make a fuller accounting in the other thread. The reason I won't post it here is because the thread will also address other ideas besides Analytical philosophy.

Now, Jersey already knows some of my thoughts on Analytical philosophy, an area where our views share some overlap, however I feel he has misinterpreted the meaning I was trying to convey. Which is my fault for not being substantive enough to do my own point justice.

What I have said, Privately; Analytic philosophers are very good at being half of a philosopher.

Now you'll probably be thinking "only a continental philosopher would say such a thing." But then you'd be making the same assumption I am about to demonstrate.

This statement may sound like an attack on analytic philosophy, but it's actually just an attack on some analytical philosophers. Which is a very important distinction to make.

Now Jerseys issues revolve around the behaviour of some analytic philosophers. He attributes the behaviour to analytical philosophy. This, is an assumption on his part that he has correctly identified the cause of the behaviours.

In order to demonstrate what I mean;
Lets say that X is a belief about philosophy.
Y is a belief about ethics.
Z is a questionable behaviour with a cause.

For the next part, I'm going to use some famous philosophers names as examples but will not be talking about their historically held beliefs, I'll just be saying their belief is X and/or Y for the purposes of the explanation.

Wittgenstein Believes X
Wittgenstein Believes Y
Wittgenstein Engages in Z

Socrates does not Believe X
Socrates Believes Y
Socrates engages in Z

Hume Believes in X
Hume does not Believe Y
Hume does not engage in Z

Dewey does not Believe in X
Dewey does not Believe in Y
Dewey does not engage in Z

Based on this, what causes Z?
X or Y?

Now so I'm not making a single cause Fallacy, let's assume that Socrates did not engage in Z. This would suggest that in order to engage in Z, one must believe in X and Y at the same time. Meaning the combination of X and Y creates another value, which we will call W, that we can say is the cause of Z.

Personally, I think that the problem isn't analytical philosophers in general. The problem is the beliefs some analytical philosophers have.

Like any tool, analytical philosophy has it's uses. It is down to the believer to make sure the belief is being applied correctly to the context. This will mean that sometimes it's useless, other times it will not be. We can never be certain if a tool is useless in a given situation when what may be stopping the tool from working is in fact another tool we are using along with it.

I can make pancake batter with a whisk and a bowl, I cannot cook pancakes without a pan and a heat source.

Which is why I say that analytical philosophers are very good at being half a philosopher. All that means is that a tool user is good at using his tool or he isn't. He can't do his job without all the tools he needs.

I can give you a tool, I can teach you how to use it. What I can't do, is tell you that it's a universally applicable tool. There may be some kind of job I've never done with that tool in order to find out it is useless.

Which g/G is that? :roll:
— 180 Proof

Any one of them will do, they are all the same. — Sir2u

No they aren't. In fact very few conceptions of god are the same.

It would be entirely consistent With the US Constitution for it to contain a contradiction? Ok — Banno

Well... Duh? It wasn't written by infallible beings.

but the slavish stupid fucking asshole translators are incapable of bridging some differences in lingual constructs. — god must be atheist

Too true, Erfucht Vom der Leben gets translated as reverence for life, when in reality the phrase used here for reverence is also supposed to express rejoice.

Types of posters who are not welcome here:

Evangelists: Those who must convince everyone that their religion, ideology, political persuasion, or philosophical theory is the only one worth having.

Racists, homophobes, sexists, Nazi sympathisers, etc.: We don't consider your views worthy of debate, and you'll be banned for espousing them.

Advertisers, spammers: Instant deletion of post followed by ban.

Trolls: You know who you are. You won't last long

Sockpuppets

If they are evangelists and are genuinely trying to push their ideology as the only one worth, by the rules they should at least be getting warnings of their behavior.

@god must be atheist Have you asked what steps the moderators take and what their criteria is for dealing with these infractions? Have you flagged the alleged offending comments?

How hard have you tried to convince these alleged offenders of the errors in reasoning they are making?

Unfortunately due to the language used in the rules, if they are pushing their ideas while not saying anything about other peoples ideas then they aren't technically trying to convince that their ideology is the only one worth having, they are just very strongly pushing theirs. In order to make the full claim, that their ideology alone is best and that all others are useless. There would probably need to be evidence that says they have not only strongly pushed their claim, but baselessly attacked others claims and judged them for those claims. Without even being willing to listen to the substance of those claims if they aren't similar enough to their claims.

Hypothetical; I am a christian, you are a muslim.
I tell you about my beliefs, I tell you that you are wrong to have your beliefs and that you will burn in hell. I even make a false claim about a muslim practice that you know, no Muslim would ever do. I refuse to allow you to even object and reject that claim and I refuse to listen to anything you have to say about your own faith as I claim I already know what I need to know about it to even bother listening to yours.

As a Muslim, you make your claims strongly, you believe they are the only ones worth having. However, you also listen to other peoples claims and give them their time to speak. Allowing them the opportunity to convince you and giving some time to listening instead of talking.

Only one of these persons would be breaking the rules. Both might believe that their views are the only ones worth having. However only one is behaving like they truly believe that. This one is the real rule breaker.

Not saying I agree or disagree with you. I'm just asking if the people you are concerned are like the Christian or Muslim in our scenario?

The difficulty, as I see it, is in separating emotion from reason.
— @Pop

Good topic, but different from the one here. — JerseyFlight

I think our emotion and reason are attached for a reason.

Desire is in emotion
I desire to reason about things.
I desire to reason about them because of emotions.
If I don't reason about things, I will always react with emotion
If I do reason about things, I can balance between reason and emotion.
Acts ultimately require emotions, like feeling motivated.
I desire to reason about things because I care about contributing to mankinds efforts to be reasonable, with itself and others.

As you said, not the topic here. Just thought I'd chime in.

It's not a matter of feeling. I don't know if you answered my question. — god must be atheist

Everything we can perceive or comprehend is a matter of feeling. But I understand what you mean. I don't know if I answered your question either.

What are you trying to achieve by asking me to keep on explaining myself? — god must be atheist

My goals;
Not to be bored, have a good conversation.
Learn more about you, which will help me learn how to better communicate with you.
The reason I ask about your feelings as well as your thoughts, both are data types, relevant data types. I can only conceive of your external environment, I cannot do the same for your internal one. Not without a neurology lab. Ultimately I am enquiring into you as a phenomenon, not just as a person.

Agreed. We haven't even gotten to the point of taking about if the only personality playing is the part of me that knows how to play chess and that all the other composite parts of my psyche are just spectating one personality play chess, where the spectators have already voted on who will win while the chess player is confined to playing out the game in response to a vote to either win or lose, based on the colour he is moving, black or white.

All I'm doing is working with you and your intuition on the subject at hand. It is quite clear that if I utter an obvious contradiction such as "I am here and I am not here" alarm bells go off inside my head but when the contradiction is buried under a mass of ideas as is usually the case, it slips through our inconsistency/contradiction, or if you prefer, bullshit, detector and gets incorporated into what then becomes a self-refuting worldview or belief system. — TheMadFool

That's okay, I am being sincere when I say that the problem has me pretty stumped and I'm definitely working on intuition, among other things, in order to try and tackle it.

If I am understanding your criticism correctly, you are also suggesting that my answer to the problem makes it harder for me to consider and trust any other answer charitably. Would this be a fair assessment? Or does this not really reflect what you were saying?

I definitely feel embarrassed by all my attempts to answer the question. As you'd think the writer of the question would have some say.

If we apply the rules of creating riddles, is my interpretation of the answer, the answer? Or am I only saying that to win a game against myself?

Wait. So just saying racist shit to get votes doesn't count as racism?

Isn't that a bit like saying it's OK if I'd call some black person a "stupid monkey" if I did it only to get some laughs from actual racists? — Benkei

Me neither. If you enable the bad behaviour you are contributing to it. I'm maybe okay with certain things being done ironically for the sake of satire or historical accuracy, in a way that clearly demonstrates what the bad behaviour is through its narrative structure. Like white actors who play slave owners and slave minders who are scripted to say the N word before a whipping, in order to clearly show the harsh reality of slavery in an educational way. Even bystander apathy is a chosen act of non action. If Trump were saying nothing racist at all but still ignoring the racist problem while coning down on anti-racist sentiment in all it's forms, he would still be acting in a way that benefits racists.

I play chess too. I am reasonably certain that I know what I am talking about and don't need you to explain chess to me, and also that you've missed the point of the exercise completely.

It doesn't really matter what stalemate is because the wording of the problem makes very clear that checkmate happened, not resignation or stalemate.

At face value, is there something philosophical to be written about it?
I've thought of a lot of reasonable answers to it, but none of them seem to come close to the real issue, by engaging with the problem, you enter into a language game where the same rules apply. You are effectively deciding for yourself if you have answered correctly or not. And the entire game of who wins and loses is a foregone conclusion. Ultimately, your answer says more about you than it does about what the objectively true answer might be. If the answer is that; the person playing themselves decides what the answer is, but I watch you engaging with the same problem then what can I say about your answer? Did you win and lose at the same time? Did you already decide the outcome before the match started?
What if we had changed a rule? If the rule had been that black moves first and the same moves had been made out of a 53 move total, would black have won? If I say that a part of me wanted to win, and a part of me wanted to lose then aren't I saying I held two contradictory beliefs at once? Is it even possible to consider it a game if the winner is also the loser? What if the game takes 53 days and you make a move as black on even numbers and as white on odd numbers?

If we say the game was a stalemate, then we are changing the rules of chess. A checkmate is only possible if someone wins and loses, so how could the game be a stalemate?
Is the game actually between the writer of the problem and the problem solver? Or am I just as unable to provide an answer we can be reasonably certain is true, as you are?
My own answer is just to say "I am reasonably sure that I think there is a paradox here.". Its the closest I can get to an objectively true answer. But I too am under the spell of being in a language game with myself by answering it. I can choose to believe I solved something, even though for the purpose of the game I had to have also pretend I didn't know what the answer was in order to play the game. A part of me had a conclusion that had to be correct and another part that had concluded incorrectly in order to play the game instead of rejecting it as a useless and meaningless exercise.

Rejecting it as a useless and meaningless exercise, is also still an attempt to answer it. So is still a part of the game of playing against ourselves.

Here is the thing that boggles my mind the most about this problem. Engaging with the problem, puts you into the problem.

You've hit upon a very intriguing fact. We're all accustomed to, in philosophy especially, consistency as a necessary feature of the rational mind. If I were to say god exists and then deny it, whether explicitly or in some implicatory sense, people would immediately call me out on it. I daresay most of us subscribe to a worldview with contradictions, obvious and not so obvious. One way of making sense of this would be to say that two different personalities are involved - one of them believes in, say, X and the other doesn't. — TheMadFool

This is an extremely intriguing answer! Give me a second, going to send some thoughts on this to someone else from a different forum.

I wrote you a really long response which I've ended up putting into my book. Would you like to read an excerpt and also let me know how you would prefer to be addressed in the Acknowledgements section? My current plan for that is to thank firstly the forum by name and then individual users by name. Would this be acceptable to you as well as footnotes on the pages you are cited, pointing to your UN here?

They are both good responses though. Not dull to me. There is a third option however, that the person playing with themselves are not just them self but also someone else too. The more you think about identity the more you start to wonder who really won the game. Which part of you won, which part of you lost? If the answer is, a part of you wanted to win and a part of you wanted to lose, you end up with a paradox of belief where we are forced to accept that a person can believe and desire two things at once, even though those two things are in complete opposition to each other.

Lets expand on the problem a bit and not focus on the creative side of it too much, as I did put some detail into the problem that is more so just to be entertaining and it draws your attention away from the content of the problem.

Thank you for engaging with this by the way. I'm trying to test this paradox to see if it is worth putting into the start of my book.

Now, the game ended on the 27th move and white won. Which means between both players, there was a total of 53 moves made.

Let's say the match started on a Monday, and only one of the 53 moves was made each day. Which means the match took 54 days to complete. The game didn't end until black looked at the board to find out they had lost on the 54th day. This means that every second day you tried to win as black and every odd numbered day you played to win as white.

Who won now?

Thinking multiple steps ahead of your opponent is the essence of chess. To not do that would be to court defeat. — TheMadFool

When your opponent is you, thinking ahead courts defeat because you've likely already decided which colour is going to win and which will lose. Meaning if you have decided that black is going to lose, you are going to lose as black. You will also win as white. You will have effectively won and lost the same game of chess. Is this even still winning?

So is it possible to play yourself at chess and still have it be called a game? Or can a game only happen between two players each with one colour, not one player with two?

Someone else was telling me recently to check out psycholinguistics.

I was also having a discussion with @schopenhauer1about animal linguistics. It absolutely fascinates me. Is there such a thing as Comparative Psycholinguistics yet?

don't believe that [white has an advantage] at all. I said White statistically wins more often.
— MSC

Isn't that a contradiction? — TheMadFool

No, this is just the advantage of first move start. It's essentially saying the likelihood of white winning is at it's highest before the first move is ever made. After that, player skill, luck, consistency and things like that take over and the odds change with every move. If you have two computers play at the same skill level over and over again a pattern does emerge the more games you play. If you were able to play the game with yourself honestly, 1000s of times without pulling any punches and really thinking of your other self as your opponent, White would win between 52 to 56% of the time. The problem isn't to do with the rules of chess. That isn't where the variance is. The problem lies in the rules of people and the little language games they play.

There are the rules of chess, then their are the rules of psychology. It's why playing chess face to face with someone feels like a different game than playing a faceless person on the internet through a screen.

Ultimately the only way to make a game with yourself a real challenge is to play reactively, to not think multiple steps ahead but just focus on the next move.

This post isn't about race either.

Well, you framed the question in a way that suggested you were under the impression that the player playing white had an unfair advantage. No, s/he doesn't. — TheMadFool

I don't believe that at all. I said White statistically wins more often. The meaning of the OP is more nuanced than that. If you you go back and reread it I'm not talking about the rules of chess between two different competitors. I'm talking about the rules of playing chess with yourself and the entire thing is supposed to tell a story.

For some reason, you've always felt it was unfair that white always gets to move first. How can that be a rule? Why is it a rule? Nevermind — MSC

I am not suggesting anything about the players here at all. I'm suggesting something about preference.

To be clear, not suggesting what you think I am.

Can you answer the question or not? I framed it creatively in order to be engaging. Your interpretation of the language used was the problem.

In chess, it is statistically verified that the first move advantage in chess contributes to an increased likelihood of winning the game by about 2-6%. It's slight but the edge is with white.

Yes, it levels the playing field between the players. But not the colours. Overall, white is the statistical favourite to take the tournament with a better win to loss ratio than everyone else in the tournament.

But, that's not what I asked you. I asked you who won? We aren't talking about which colour won.

From there, you can maybe go on to imagine if it was relative to an individual, Humanity, life or some other concept. Context is my go to. Contextual Relativism; where Correct or functional moral action is relative to context.

You can maybe say that; Morals are relative to something, is 1 moral absolute.

Just because some of the theories have the word relative in them, doesn't mean they don't make claims to moral absolutes.

Okay. Applied. Admittedly I may have paraphrased something from Mr Robot, however that is something I like and the topic is philosophy of mind so there is still a question of thought provoking ideas about the self and what Elliot Alderson as a character does to influence my self. That and I give credit where it is due so still playing by rules of philosophical inquiry.

It's weird, just mentioning a Hammer to me right now is one of those things that makes you feel like if fate exists, it has a sense of humour and irony. Will check it out :) Thank you