Comments

  • Philosophy Joke of the Day
    torture-the-rack-granger.jpg

    There’s a story that Napoleon, a man who Nietzsche claimed was an Übermensch, was briefly captured during the French Revolutionary Wars. Before escaping, he was put on the rack and tortured by the enemy for military secrets. He was strong though, it's reported that all he would say is, “that which doesn’t kill me makes me longer.”
  • Philosophy Joke of the Day
    There once was a forum for the philosophical

    Where members would troll things fantastical

    It happened one day

    In a gruesome display

    That Sir2u was marked ungrammatical
  • Does Man Have an Essence?
    I'd say that man's essence is identical to his concept of humanity, and a concept that is formed via culture and experience. Guess I'll have to vote 'other' too.
  • Philosophy Joke of the Day


    It’s Latin for wisdom. That’s not funny?

  • Philosophy Joke of the Day

    ensho.jpg

    What do you call an ensho painted by a sentimental latin woman?

    Reveal
    A sappy ensha
  • Philosophy Joke of the Day
    If a nihilist thinks a thought, is it meaningful?
  • Philosophy Joke of the Day


    Oh God, I crack myself up.
  • Philosophy Joke of the Day
    If something doesn't make sense then how can we sense it?Nils Loc

    Knock knock!

    Who's there?

    Wesense

    Wesense who?

    Wesense nonsense
  • Is 'information' physical?
    Concept - Transmission - Transmission is physical, concept not. No?MikeL

    If a concept is a pattern that is transmitted how can the transmission be physical but not the pattern?
  • Colors for the Apollonian and Dionysian
    Then I suppose you might generally avoid colors that inspire passion, which could be any color. Maybe avoid color saturation.
  • Colors for the Apollonian and Dionysian


    Red is a romantic color, whereas Dionysian is creative, spontaneous, and emotionally driven so a warmer and more energetic color may represent it better, such as orange.

    Reason and discipline are emotionally neutral so gray might work well.

    Graphic design or art project?
  • Philosophy Joke of the Day


    One to hold the ladder. One to screw it in. One to... okay I got noth'n
  • Philosophy Joke of the Day
    How many Übermensch does it take to change a lightbulb?
  • Mass Murder Meme
    I don't find it inherently irrational. I mean I can imagine someone who feels they are approaching the end of their life and are motivated by a dangerous evil ideology to engage in such crimes.Agustino

    What do you believe the difference is between irrational and evil?
  • Mass Murder Meme


    3k were killed on 9-11, by people who believed the act would plant them in heaven.
  • Order from Chaos


    The curious thing is that the notion of an ever existing designer is counter to the notion that existence requires a designer.
  • Order from Chaos
    all compounded things begin and end, but the First Cause is not among them.Wayfarer

    The 'first cause' is just a concept indicating a starting point, or the limit of our current understanding.
  • Order from Chaos


    An intelligent designer that has always existed?
  • Order from Chaos
    I'm afraid 'who made God?' is not a valid question, because 'the first cause' is by definition something that is unmade.Wayfarer

    The 'first cause' is just a concept indicating a starting point.

    So if the question is, who made that which was never made, then there is no answer.Wayfarer

    That's not the question, but the answer to this question is that no one made that which was never made.

    It is like asking, who broke that unbroken vase?Wayfarer

    No, it's like simply asking who made the vase.
  • Order from Chaos
    or 'who made God?', as I said. As long as you think that's a question, there is no answer.Wayfarer

    It's a perfectly valid question. The fact that no one knows the answer doesn't make it a bad question.
  • Order from Chaos
    For instance, logically, and not playing with words: if something emerges from nothingness, then this can only translate into nothingness caused something to be.javra

    It can simply mean that the cause is unknown.
  • Order from Chaos
    why does 2 plus 2 equal 4?Wayfarer

    We can conclude that we don't currently know.

    We can conclude that a designer designed it this way. But if we conclude this we are left with the question of whether that designer was designed, and if that designer was designed, was that designer designed, and if that designer was designed, was that designer designed...
  • Order from Chaos
    If you have lower degrees of order leading to greater degrees of order by itself that is contradictory - it's the same as having something come from nothing.

    Now when we reach the first cause, we have no reason that requires us to go back. There's nothing else that needs to be explained.
    Agustino

    What is the first cause if not something come from nothing.
  • Order from Chaos
    The designing intelligence is a required element to account for reality as we perceive it, but we have no grounds to that would require the designing intelligence to "come about".Agustino

    What's the difference? If the designing intelligence doesn't require a designer then why would anything else.
  • Order from Chaos
    Intelligent design doesn't give us an infinite regress, it says that there must be an intelligence at work which can account for increasing order.Agustino

    How did the designing intelligence arise? and was it intelligently designed?
  • Order from Chaos
    This loss is expressed by the belief that everything is crapshot - otherwise you could not sleep well at night with who you are.Agustino

    If Crapshootism were an effective sleeping aid there would be whole shelves dedicated to it in the self-help section.
  • Unconditional love does not exist; so why is it so popular?


    Is it obvious? You wrote that it’s about the other and not the self. It’s obvious that it’s about the other AND the self.
  • Unconditional love does not exist; so why is it so popular?
    agapē is about the other person, not the self.Bitter Crank

    There can’t be an other person without a self-concept.
  • Another word for "objective morality"?


    This would seem to imply that the act of killing isn’t a sin or objectively immoral. It depends on the killers point of view. In the case mentioned, we may give a superior or authoritative position to the Buddha’s point of view, but it is nevertheless just one point of view out of countless others.
  • Another word for "objective morality"?


    Skill-in-Means Sūtra (Skt. Upāyakauśalya-sūtra).

    Noting how I must defer to religious authority for the ‘objective’ truth.
  • Another word for "objective morality"?
    The only sin is to believe that there might be such a thing as 'sin'. The enlightened person knows that there are no sins, only points of view.Wayfarer

    There’s a story that in a past life the Buddha killed a man and acquired merit for doing so. Which is to say in that instance and from his point of view killing wasn’t a sin but a virtuous act.

    He could not have known the entire results of that action. He only had his point of view.
  • Unconditional love does not exist; so why is it so popular?


    Religious dogma defines conditions for those that need their conditions defined.
  • Unconditional love does not exist; so why is it so popular?
    I wouldn't expect unconditional love to occur in a 3 month (or 30 minute) romance begun in a bar unless, of course, I happened to pick up Jesus.Bitter Crank

    Why not? I would find unconditional love more credible if it were born in a brothel or other seemingly unlikely conditions for true love to bloom. Indeed Jesus didn’t mind hanging out with a whore.

    However, people who live in ordinary life may, on occasion, express and experience unconditional love.Bitter Crank

    So on occasion, when the conditions are just right, people in normal life express and experience unconditional love.

    How does one express unconditional love?
  • Unconditional love does not exist; so why is it so popular?


    Any object of love is a particular set of qualities or conditions. To love unconditionally would be to love all conditions or qualities. As I mentioned earlier, that might be possible in a spiritual transcendent experience. I don't imagine it's possible for people in ordinary life however.
  • Unconditional love does not exist; so why is it so popular?
    people aren't as literal as you're being when using the phraseBenkei

    So when people speak of unconditional love they're just expressing an intention to tollerate a wide range of conditions? That doesn't sound so romantic. No wonder they go all unconditional. O:)
  • Unconditional love does not exist; so why is it so popular?
    That makes no sense. The feeling is the enabling experience otherwise 'love' would not exist at allTimeLine

    The feeling is part of it but there’s more to it. Any emotion could be seen as comprising of our past experience, affect, our learned or created emotion concepts (such as unconditional love), and of course whatever external stimuli inspired the emotion. So indeed there could be a feeling without ‘love’ existing at all. For example, many social animals demonstrate behavior that we might call unconditional love, yet they have no such concept.
  • Emotional reaction is all that matters - who's idea was this?
    Maybe NLP (neuro linguistic programming)