There's "know thyself" and then there's "know thyself better". — Janus

No, there's "know thyself" and then there's "know thyself according to someone else's idea of who you are".

Illusions can only be experienced by a subject, which points back to cogito ergo sum. — Wayfarer

How ironic.
In some schools of Hinduism, Maya is a servant of God and she's in charge of the illusion according to which humans think that they are separate from God, believing that "they are because they think".

We know God through His effects, the reality of physical existence, but we cannot see Him directly as the cause, His existence is inferred. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. Every self-respecting Christian has a personal relationship with God.

Since our premises are derived from the observational, empirical knowledge,

Again, no, not in the case of God and people who believe in God (and whose knowledge of themselves proceeds from their knowledge of God).
Because these people's knowledge is not derived from the observational, empirical knowledge, but is a (directly) received revelation from God.


It's immaterial whether you agree with this epistemic method. The point is that it avoids all the usual problems related to knowledge that is derived from observation, empiry.

Also, I'm not saying this to advertise theism. But if we are going to dismiss the one epistemic method that has been the primary epistemic method for what is probably the vast majority of the human population, then we're going to need some really good reasons for doing so.

- - -

I'm not saying you and some philosophers are wrong

(we ultimately do not know) — Tom Storm

How can you say that?? Based on what??

There is such a thing in some monotheisms, summarized in the tenet "You are an eternal servant of God." It's a tenet from which everything else can be derived.

From a social point of view I think it makes sense not to go to far with this point of view that perfection of our survival is the absolute good in itself. — kudos

Then what is an absolute good in itself, as far as human life goes?

not all is lost on the man of wealth and power and genius. — NOS4A2

What do you mean?

That wealthy, influential people could be shallow, but aren't so necessarily?

Here I'm sort of assuming that greedy individuals and corporate entities given sufficient amplification would under their pure logic willfully destroy their own environment by over-exploiting resources and taking minimal regard to it's human fuel; this is assuming there were no power in the form of social government to keep them in check. — kudos

It's not even necessary for a social government to keep them in check. It's in the nature of pursuing pleasure for the sake of pleasure that the person becomes dissatisfied with it. Whether this dissatisfaction sets in early enough to save the natural environment is another matter.

Hedonic adaptation/treadmill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

Pleasure Paradox
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_hedonism

You're very sure of your position, you don't cite any external sources so where does your knowledge on the matter come from? — Isaac

Isn't confidence grand! :fire:

Have you ever read any self-help books etc. by very rich and influential people?
Much of the advice is commonsensical, or New Age lite. But when you consider this advice against the backdrop of these people's success, wealth, power, it sounds absolutely outlandish, like a bad absurdist play.

However, I feel there needs to be a source of fear that makes us are aware that we are only actors and not in full command of modulating the concepts behind these actions. — kudos

Being aware of one's own station in society and of one's own level of knowledge of a topic is often enough for a person to self-moderate what they say on a topic.

As a simple example, a while back, the local road in my neighborhood was being redone, new asphalt, new sidewalks etc. On my way home, I once met an older lady who also lives in the neighborhood. We chatted a bit about the roadblock, the new road, etc. She said the road is now even narrower as it was before, and added "Oh my, I have a lot to say, and I don't even drive!" It was interesting to hear this bit of self-censorship.

Of course, not everyone is like that, and some people have very definitive opinions about the new road, even though at least some of them don't know what legal, practical, etc. restrictions the planners and the workers had to work with.

I want to say that it reaches beyond the question of whether an uneducated audience would understand or agree, but if the academic has the right to impose their ideology onto the non-academic. — kudos

And conversely, whether the non-academic have the duty to internalize said ideology.

It's an important question, esp. in the time of this pandemic and issues of vaccination.

One who seeks contentment must seek ways to dull the tribulations of life — NOS4A2

Now apply this to very rich people: They still seek contentment, and they find it, and it would be hard to call their lives uninteresting. It's just that the tribulations of life have been taken care of by their wealth and power.

I'm not asking how to get famous. I just want life to be interesting, not just adequate, and I wonder if that's wise. — Satyesu

Are you sure it's wise to ask about this at an online forum?

Similarly, we could compare human actions with the animal who does not choose it's own death, but acts it out; in the process allowing another species to survive by balancing the population numbers. — kudos

To engage in that kind of strategic mathematics _deliberately_ would require an accurate picture of the entire populations involved.

Because at any given point, any given individual does not have the whole picture of the situation. Indeed, sometimes sacrificing oneself can be beneficial for the species as a whole, or beneficial for the other species; but other times, it is not. But at the ground level, it is impossible to know which is which.

A military general can, for example, assess that by sacrificing 15,000 men in some particular battle situation, he can surely save the other 50,000. But that's because as a general, he has the necessary data, the big picture. The soldiers don't.

If, however, something cannot be achieved deliberately, then it is impossible to talk about it meaningfully, rendering the issue moot.

I looked up this old thread in order to better understand the recent one.

The absolute most weak person is a bit hard to imagine having much of a role of any kind in society.

I'm a bit lost as to what you are aiming for. — Bitter Crank

It seems he's making the point that the weak are needed for the strong to exercise their strength.
Ie. that the weak are an opportunity for the strong to show their strength.

As in, there can be no knight in shiny armor without there also being a damsel in distress. But does that mean one should choose to be a damsel in distress?

Read some self-help books etc. written by very rich and very influential people, such as those by Arianna Huffington. These people still talk about "going with nature", contentment, and such. (These people aren't crudely ambitious the way poor authors of self-help books and their get-rich theories are.)

The world doesn't always work on Buddhist principles. — Apollodorus

But sometimes it does? That's news to me.

I think China knows exactly what it is doing. — Apollodorus

Absolutely.

If the West controlled Hitler and Stalin, why not Xi?

Are you sure about the former, given the rise of rightwing politics?

As for Xi, the situation isn't the same, because the West apparently wants to benefit from China, wants to continue importing from it (there came a point from which on Westerners didn't want to do business with Hitler anymore).

The West trying to control China is like a drug addict trying to control his drug dealer, while continuing to obtain drugs from him. A desperate thing that a drug addict will attempt to do, but an endeavor that always ends with the drug addict losing out.

Gotcha, but wouldn't this be a distraction from the point that injustice can happen whether people view it as a blessing and like it or not? — schopenhauer1

My point is easier to argue for.

My stance is that people can't imagine smells/tastes/touch/sounds as they can visual images or if they can only to a lesser extent. — TheMadFool

You made your claim first. What do you have to back it up?

Like I said:

You could perhaps specify your point and instead of making a wholesale indictment against humanity for procreating at all, focus on pointing at the fault of producing children while failing to instill in them the belief that life is a blessing and worth living.

I think this is the point that people fail at the most: Showing and teaching others that life is a blessing and worth living. — baker

I've been trying to get to answer whether it is possible to deliberately learn to view life as a blessing and worth living.

There have been high politicians who simply walked out of prison, literally, no guard stopped them. They were sentenced to jail, and they walked out of prison, long before serving their sentence. Some of the media were outraged, warrants issued, but on the ground level, nothing happened.

I dread to name names, but I know that this can happen. Some people simply have such power.

Are you so sure they wouldn't let him in?

By that standard, eating is unjust. — Derrick Huestis

Indeed. He that doesn't work should not eat.

So he tells them to unlock the door and let him in.

Our minds can, via imaginative ability, create simulations - virtual realities if you like - BUT the simulations are always partial/incomplete. In the example above, I can see the golden sand, I can see the rock I told you about, I can also see myself touch it BUT I can't feel the rock.

What gives? — TheMadFool

What gives is that you're making an unjustified generalization. People differ in how well they can simulate things, via different senses.

Also, maybe you damaged your sense of smell with smoking.

Ah. Go back. What you're quoting is from my brief discussion with , whose reply I'm still waiting for.

I was actually furthering your point.

Look at the work of Matthew Ratcliffe, for example, here some of his titles:

Evaluating Existential Despair
The Phenomenology of Existential Feeling
The Phenomenology of Mood and the Meaning of Life
Existential feelings
The Feeling of Being

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Matthew-Ratcliffe

This is to say that emotions aren't merely feelings like sad or happy (those are simply the downstream by-products of awareness of our emotional processing), but rather that emotional processing in the mind is an actual system of information composition, deconstruction and restructuring that can cohere with and use imagination — intrapersona

Of course.
I don't think the line between "reason" and "emotion" is nowhere near as clear as many people like to claim it is. I think it's all emotion, just that when put into words, it looks like reason.

I want to try and prove inductively that if we were hypothetically trained to use emotions as a way of making sense of the world, new kinds of epistemological truths could be uncovered and perhaps even a new systems of logic or in the very least, new postulates or non-logical axioms

I think this is what people do anyway, they just don't talk about it that way, given that "emotionality" has such a bad reputation in our culture.

I never got round to reading Dorian Gray — TheMadFool

Just read it.

I see your point. However, China has been an evil dictatorship from the day the Maoists seized power in 1949.

So, I would say that China (i.e. the political system, not the Chinese people) is evil quite independently of the West. — Apollodorus

Oh, and the West is heaven on earth, right.

If you look at the history of corporal punishment in Asian countries (not just China), for the past several hundred years, Westerners are fairly tame in comparison. Whatever ills Marxism etc. might have brought upon China, there was a fertile ground for them already there. If anything, it seems the Marxism etc. actually toned down the Asian propensity for, let's call that nicely, "ultimate competitivenes". No, I don't blame Marxism or Communism, the Asians can do all kinds of horrible things all on their own, without needing any tips from the outside, and they have done so for millennia.

And precisely because the West bears a large share of culpability, it also has the responsibility to do something about it. Economic sanctions, for example, would definitely be a step in the right direction.

So why not just, you know, stop importing low quality products from China?
I am quite sure the Chinese are perfectly able to live on their own, independent of exporting goods into the West. The Westerners can't say that about themselves.

If the Westerners are unable to control their own greed, their own lowly impulses, how on earth are they going to control the greed of others??

To avoid being fired for failure to get vaccinated, people claim religious exemptions. Lawyers will have to go through the exemptions and rule on them. — frank

What are you saying? That, for example, people with transplanted organs (and who are on lifelong immunosuppresant therapy) should rightfully be categorized as having "failed to get vaccinated"?

An atheist can also be more effective at helping humanity by adopting secular ethics and values rather than bronze age myths. — Wheatley

Really? How?

"The human body is the best picture of the human soul." ~Witty — 180 Proof

He looked round and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward. He had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it. It was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter’s work, and all that that meant. It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free. It would kill this monstrous soul-life, and without its hideous warnings, he would be at peace. He seized the thing, and stabbed the picture with it.

There was a cry heard, and a crash. The cry was so horrible in its agony that the frightened servants woke and crept out of their rooms. Two gentlemen, who were passing in the square below, stopped and looked up at the great house. They walked on till they met a policeman and brought him back. The man rang the bell several times, but there was no answer. Except for a light in one of the top windows, the house was all dark. After a time, he went away and stood in an adjoining portico and watched.

“Whose house is that, Constable?” asked the elder of the two gentlemen.

“Mr. Dorian Gray’s, sir,” answered the policeman.

They looked at each other, as they walked away, and sneered. One of them was Sir Henry Ashton’s uncle.

Inside, in the servants’ part of the house, the half-clad domestics were talking in low whispers to each other. Old Mrs. Leaf was crying and wringing her hands. Francis was as pale as death.

After about a quarter of an hour, he got the coachman and one of the footmen and crept upstairs. They knocked, but there was no reply. They called out. Everything was still. Finally, after vainly trying to force the door, they got on the roof and dropped down on to the balcony. The windows yielded easily—their bolts were old.

When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.

Oscar Wilde

↪baker Interesting fact, it isn't the soul that is resurrected (should there be such a thing) but the physical body. As it says in the Creed: "I believe in the resurrection of the body". — Bitter Crank

The soul is what gets incarnated, not resurrected.

(And the resurrection of the body is a bit of a tricky topic -- namely, a person's body at which stage will be resurrected? The one they had when they were a baby? Or the one they died in? Or the one they had in their prime? And what if they didn't live to see their prime? -- Oh, but who cares about details!)

↪baker I think your observation is correct, more or less. The term "spirit" and "spiritual" are sufficiently vague that they could just as well be replaced by identity, individuality, or personhood. Still, a residual belief in an afterlife is pretty common, and "something" is thought by many to continue on indefinitely. At least that's how I read the 21st century.

Sure. Also, even people who don't believe in a "soul", but who are big advocates of identity, individuality, place considerable value on what is, in effect, the "afterlife". Many self-help theories try to orient its audiences with questions like "How do you want to be remembered after you die?", "What do you want to be written on your tombstone?"

I'm not exactly sure, but from a value perspective it's like this frustrating feeling of like on the whole we are being given the option of this beautifully crafted piece of solid oak furniture that will last for generations versus a crappy piece of particleboard furniture and taking the particleboard... a despair at feeling a lost innocence.

Maybe this is why most states condone those who beat down religion and it's values. — kudos

They do??? This has not been my experience.


You'll need to express yourself in more direct terms, as it's still not clear what you're getting at.

‘There would no fool's gold if there were no gold’ ~ Rumi — Wayfarer

Yet there are holy grails.

Yeah, not interested. You can find plenty on the internet. — Benkei

*sigh*
You complain about the distribution of information being targeted nowadays. I point out that this is actually business as usual.

So what gives? In response to what will you tell me "I told you so"?

We've got /.../ people believing the worst things without any ability to even listen to opposing views.
— Benkei
Do you know of any time in human history when this was not the case?

I don't. Sure, the superficial methods change over time, as technology changes, but the underlying principles are the same. Pick any actual time in human history, any actual year and place, and research whether people in that year and place had free access to all information.

Was there ever a time when the distribution of information was not in one way or another targeted? — baker

Still don't understand how he can be allowed to participate when he won't observe the house rules. — Wayfarer

He just is allowed such.

Could Trump walk up to the outer gate of the White House, and walk through, without anyone stopping him? He probably could.
Could he walk through the door of the White House without anyone stopping him? He probably could.
Could he walk into the Oval Office and sit down into the president's chair, without anyone stopping him? He probably could.

Sure, some people would probably be outraged. But would anyone actually, physically stop him from doing any of those things?

This is actually what is happening and has happened in many countries. The pandemic has put the ruling administrations in a tough spot and if the emergency laws aren't up to it (as usual), it causes this kind of friction where governments have to back down because of legal reasons. — ssu

It's not only that. Some administrations really, genuinely don't care about the people, and they make that clear. Some administrations expect that the citizens need to earn the favor the government.

People would probably be willing to put up with quite a bit of legally grey things that the government does or wants to do, as long as people would have a sense that the government can be trusted and that it cares about people.
But once the government behaves like a business owner, treating citizens as its employees, that trust is gone, and trust substitutes must be put in place (such as a law for everything the government does) .

Apparently there's something worth talking about and promoting, that is your version of the truth. What makes your version greater than that of another? Something of value to you, that doesn't warrant life, whereas something of value to another does warrant life. You see the dilemma an observer faces when trying to process your argument. — Outlander

You sound downtrodden. What makes you so certain life isn't like a sandbox or a community pool, just because you showed up when it happens to be full of piss, doesn't mean it wasn't once before and never can be again, despite those who preach the same.

I asked before, but nobody wants to reply:

Anyways, no this isn't about me not cleaning the dishes or wanting to do "my fair share.." The whole point is that it is unjust to be put in a situation where you cannot opt out unless you die of /degradation/ or suicide..
— schopenhauer1
As noted above, some people do believe, by default, that life is a blessing and worth living. Such people cannot relate to your concern.

You could perhaps specify your point and instead of making a wholesale indictment against humanity for procreating at all, focus on pointing at the fault of producing children while failing to instill in them the belief that life is a blessing and worth living.

I think this is the point that people fail at the most: Showing and teaching others that life is a blessing and worth living.

While many people will eagerly criticize anyone who is in any way pessimistic about life as such, they are quite unable (or just unwilling?) to persuade them otherwise. They'll even go so far as to claim that something is genetically or otherwise physiologically wrong with the pessmist and dismiss them. — baker

Are you slothful by nature, but have managed to overcome your sloth philosophically? — baker

Is happiness a matter of chance, or can it be learned?

In a universe where everything is ineffectual does this make moments precious and worthy of reverence — Benj96

No.

or do we require a more apathetic approach?

No, but at least a more precise one.

Jung held that there was both a philosophical and scientific basis for synchronicity. He identified the complementary nature of causality and acausality with Eastern sciences and protoscientific disciplines, stating "the East bases much of its science on this irregularity and considers coincidences as the reliable basis of the world rather than causality. Synchronism is the prejudice of the East; causality is the modern prejudice of the West". — Wikipedia

And we all know that "Easterners" are a completely homogenous group.