Basics of The Crafting of Philosophy

[The Voice of Time]

I think of philosophy as a craftspersonship, a know-how which you apply to produce results of sometimes an artistic nature and sometimes of a more practical nature, like the difference between the painting on a canvas by a painter and the forging of a steel sledgehammer by a blacksmith.

Consequently, I'd like to present an inferred formula for producing philosophy, "inferred" meaning it won't be like a procedure, but instead a bunch of descriptions and declarations that infer how to produce philosophy, by the way it will rather intuitively be possible to make methodological procedures from it that result thus...

1) Our minds consists of order and disorder, and both of these work together to form perspectives, where a perspective is any finite set of elements of knowledge. An element of knowledge is more descriptively "a piece of an entire process of knowing, where each piece is a process of integrating a reference to a fulfilled recognition of states of nature with other references, and the entire process is the sum of all on-going integrations" ("states of nature" is another way of saying "how things (in the natural world) are at a moment", and "fulfilled recognition" a way of saying "an experience that is complete/thorough enough to count").

2) Perspectives are the foundation for all decision-making, but not all our behaviour, as behaviour also consists reflexes and automated behaviour that we've not had the ability to take decisions on ourselves to develop (influences we are not aware of before they happen). Any mind consists of multiple perspectives which shifts as sources from which we take decisions, the decision-oriented parts of our mind is a kind of super-perspective which harbour other perspectives. The super-perspective's choice of shifting between its child perspectives produces a personal philosophy inside of us, this philosophy can be called a philosophy of life, but this is also misleading because of the way that term is already appropriated. It is perhaps better to call it a "philosophy of living", as a philosophy of the process of living instead of merely abstract meanings of life and what we are to do about it.

3) Our "philosophy of living" is constantly under development, as its constituent parts are constantly developing. All that it is, and all it moves towards, is mere informal and subconscious philosophy. What you can do is formalize it, put it into the "open discourse", by introspection and seeking inspiration from how other people see you, you can develop an understanding of the philosophy you base yourself on. This is also at the time you start being able to see yourself as a formal product of philosophical content.

4) From "getting to know your philosophical self" you are able to project yourself unto a linguistically exterior self which you can call the "object of the formal philosophy sum", this can be an -ism if you want to bath in the light of historical philosophies, like "<my name>-ism", for instance "Bobism", "Sphereism", "Blaggardism", "Kaylaism" and so forth, whatever works. Basically, it is a name you give to a systematic understanding of your own philosophical self.

5) Projections can be split into several such "philosophy sums", creating variations of the original name you gave for the philosophy or new more narrow philosophies altogether. A "separation of concerns" is encouraged, with the use of a stockpile container philosophy which you first project everything unto, this can be your "Bobism" or "Blaggardism", with dedicated philosophies like "exampleism" and "forinstanceism" being loosely related to the former. The purpose of the stockpile container is for you have easier access to formalized philosophy, and to automate your process of formalization more easily. Compare it to how there's one company for extracting the ore and another for processing it into metals, and a third one for making metal parts from it. In the production chain of philosophy you have the same situation. Your mind is the ore extraction centre, your stockpile container philosophy is the ore refining centre but also works as a place for preparing the metal for piecing together. Your derived philosophies are the ultimate appliers of these metal pieces into structure to form products.

6) Your mind is actually closer to a farm field than a mine, as my next point is that it's not just about extracting what you already have, but also advancing the output, and there's a quantitative as well as a qualitative way you can do this. Quantitatively you can just increase the process of formalizing your mind, however, this is gonna give a very narrow-minded product, the equivalent of a poor harvest where the diversity of food is small as well that the food is poorly nourished (something you should understand if you are familiar with the concept of organic farming and the consequences of non-organic farming). Up to a point, quanta is gonna be very useful, especially for somebody not used to it. But only to that point, as in the real world you should be able to find examples of what really happens when people only pursue quanta... that's usually those people who are excessively self-absorbed and usually only really cares about a very small amount of things, because those are the things they find interesting, for whatever reason.

But when we read these people, up to a point we might even agree with them, but beyond that point, we should start seeing that it all becomes rather nonsense and just so poor, it might not be wrong even, but it's just so poor, so much information and so little actual saying, or so much saying, but so little solving. Like what happens when somebody obsess about a problem and write lengthy hateful discourses on the issues they are having, you'll see a lot of obsession with little interest of solving, except perhaps in a preferred manner which is not itself part of the inquiry but predetermined and rationalized in the aftermath with that missing genuine link between solution and problem.

The qualitative development, is when you start planting new seeds, you start trying out new perspectives, you make new perspectives by adding and subtracting elements from knowings. Like the way we test in our minds what it would be like if something suddenly disappeared or appeared, and our necessary shift in understanding of this situation then, to include the new phenomenon, but also the way we can shift focus and look from angles we've never used before, or look at things we've never seen before. We are changing the rules that constitute our philosophy of living, and thereby changing the sources from which we formalize from. The application of quantitative and qualitative development of our minds, are the means we have to enrich the philosophical pool we end up with in the stockpile container philosophy.

7) The process of formalizing, is not just a manner of putting "words" to things. It is a manner of putting "order" unto things and re-ordering that which already has some kind of order, usually I would think because the previous order was built out of situational necessity and not out of thorough thinking. Order is created by applying "operations" on your sense of knowing, like when you have what we might call a notion of knowing something, like in intuition, but you don't really have a way to describe what you actually know, or know what you actually know. The "operations" are those tools you use to "make sense" out of chaos and bring notions into structures you can call "knowledge", operations are typically questions you ask about it, like "what is it about? What is the object we are talking about?", or "how is like, what are its components, and how are those components relating?". If such operations do not yield immediate results, you may be able to find results through dedication to the problem the question pose, and "keep it in mind" and ask it in repeatedly different situations until something clicks together and a bond between the question, the thing of that you know, and formality materializes into a vague sense of understanding which you can project into the stockpile container philosophy.

The degree of formalization in the stockpile container philosophy is low, and even with a bit of order a lot might be left desired, this is to expect. When you create derived philosophies, you might need to scratch the products that they are, repeatedly, like if you write it down, you might want to just delete your entire word-file multiple times over, or throw your notebook page into the paper basket. You might want to create new philosophies that derive from those in turn, recycling some or most parts of the original philosophy, in new or the same manner as it originally appeared. But when you are about, and this is an important point, when you are about to tell the world of your philosophy, if you want it to be shared and more than just your own esoteric knowledge, you will need to test it against what people consider to be the world and its philosophy, and you must relate it to this world and its content. Although by definition all things that derive from the output of the super-perspective of mind is philosophy (if you doubt this, try imagining how the results could not be so, as any such output is a rule that would belong to either of the disciplines of philosophy), it might not be clear what kind of philosophy it is, and it might be useful to sort a bit of your philosophy into parts of ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, logic and so forth.

9) The real challenge is systematizing your philosophical products into the real final deals, what even if they in turn might develop further, they have at least a solid basis that can stand the test of challenges the world will pose to them, and critics might fling at them, and doubts you might point at them. Systematizing is when you have multiple arguments that all form pillars for new arguments that increasingly explain a broader and broader amount of the world... think of it like erecting a building. If you build upwards, you might offer more and more capable knowledge, which has increasing utility, if you choose to build sideways, you might not be very capable, but for those who comes after you, they will find a larger solid foundation by which they will be able to rapidly create increasingly more capable products (of thought).

10) What is the ultimate purpose of philosophy? Now I don't really mean what people mean by it, or any general meaning, I mean "utility" purpose, and here the utility of crafting philosophy is to create structures of thought that might allow us to take advantage of more and more things. It is the foundation by which we at all are able to do anything. Now there's good philosophy and bad philosophy. The former makes us increasingly capable, the later impedes us, and it's up to each and every craftsperson to properly understand the implications of their philosophy, and alter it such that it generates more good than bad if necessary, or polish it for it to excel and not just be a good but also an excellent philosophy!

Now go and make some philosophy!

[Being]

Hello The Voice of Time.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on how the mind creates philosophy, and how you put it into a very interesting story.

I wish to simply express a few thoughts that came to mind while reading your post. I am not sure if it is of any value to you. You never know, you might put it in your stockpile container philosophy.

I had thoughts about an old book (published late 1940's I think), called the 'Intrapsychic self'. Oddly enough, the authors surname was Frankenstein. (Seriously, that is why I still remember it). The book pioneered the concept of the mind consisting of different identifiable parts of the psyche-self. Such as the child, adult, parent inside of us, or as emotional entities, like the angry-me, happy-me, and so forth. Very similar to the -isms you mentioned. By the way, some people refer 'ism' as 'I, Self, Me' and/or 'In-Side Me', both are (intra). This book came to mind because it had a very interesting story about how different parts collude to either support or undermined other parts. It was suggested that our thoughts and behaviors become depended upon the interplay of our intrapsychic selves. Self-sabotage could be a good example of undermining our self.

Another niggling thought, was about a dream I had of becoming a racing cyclist. I shared this with a close friend and cyclist. He said, 'first of all you need to decide whether you want to be a pretender or a contender'. His statement jolted me into a different frame of mind - a mind of a contender (contender-me). This shift of reference made me realize that I was previously unaware of being stuck in the 'pretender-me'. Another example of this is after I have been cycling for a few hours, I sometimes tend to slow down a bit and feel fatigued. But I normally have more stamina than this! So I test myself to see if I really am fatigued. I get out of the saddle and surge up to a more reasonable speed. If I am fatigued, I will soon drop speed again. But 95% of the time, I feel okay and continue on at speed. Here, the so called 'fatigued-me' might have come from the collusion of stressed-me, bored-me, impatient-me, etc to get me to stop and do something more relaxing (i am just supposing this). However, I cannot deny that there was an undermining self that got shifted to a supporting self.

Sometimes, I get a great idea and run with it for a long time, and unbeknownst to me, I was barking up the wrong tree. My ego takes a dive when that happens. Anyway, our thoughts are not necessarily so. We could be undermining our own philosophy, or supporting it. As I said, these are some of my meandering thoughts on you forum post.

[The Voice of Time]

I had thoughts about an old book (published late 1940's I think), called the 'Intrapsychic self'. Oddly enough, the authors surname was Frankenstein. (Seriously, that is why I still remember it). The book pioneered the concept of the mind consisting of different identifiable parts of the psyche-self. Such as the child, adult, parent inside of us, or as emotional entities, like the angry-me, happy-me, and so forth. Very similar to the -isms you mentioned. By the way, some people refer 'ism' as 'I, Self, Me' and/or 'In-Side Me', both are (intra). This book came to mind because it had a very interesting story about how different parts collude to either support or undermined other parts. It was suggested that our thoughts and behaviors become depended upon the interplay of our intrapsychic selves. Self-sabotage could be a good example of undermining our self.

These are stereotypes and I wouldn't give them the benefit of truth. What many old-time psychologists (think psychoanalysis for instance) have failed to understand is that human minds are all unique, and it's very difficult to keep their behaviours inside "types" unless the definitions depend not on metaphysical properties that we might conjure out of nowhere and is really very culturally dependent, but on natural physical properties that might be dynamically calculated and tracked. Only in that natural fashion can you have really dependable and insightful information about a person's psyche or their persona which may not only include their psyche depending on who you ask (I think a person's personality, or persona, isn't a psychological phenomena but a biological one that, and if we accept that, we get something much more useful, than if we stuck to the historical usage of the word which indicates only psychological underlying factors... like memory, consciousness, awareness, and so forth, instead of hormone balances, structural qualities of the brain, brain patterns and so forth)

Another niggling thought, was about a dream I had of becoming a racing cyclist. I shared this with a close friend and cyclist. He said, 'first of all you need to decide whether you want to be a pretender or a contender'. His statement jolted me into a different frame of mind - a mind of a contender (contender-me). This shift of reference made me realize that I was previously unaware of being stuck in the 'pretender-me'. Another example of this is after I have been cycling for a few hours, I sometimes tend to slow down a bit and feel fatigued. But I normally have more stamina than this! So I test myself to see if I really am fatigued. I get out of the saddle and surge up to a more reasonable speed. If I am fatigued, I will soon drop speed again. But 95% of the time, I feel okay and continue on at speed. Here, the so called 'fatigued-me' might have come from the collusion of stressed-me, bored-me, impatient-me, etc to get me to stop and do something more relaxing (i am just supposing this). However, I cannot deny that there was an undermining self that got shifted to a supporting self.

This is not really about what I'm talking about in point, though I do mention something in that direction. What I'm talking about is an effort and nothing to do with the "self" or any psychological phenomena in general. It is a way to get to know your own philosophy, and carve out a refined version of it, and be able to express it in language, and understand it in a social context. It is all those things, and not just any specific one of them, because all of these together result in a "philosophical product", which you could write down for instance if you wanted to, in a book, or you could compare it to what other people have, and as such be a part of the philosophical development that happens in your social environment. What you talk about seems to be more about the problem of incoherence of ones own decisions and desires and so forth, that could be explained to some degree by what I'm talking about, but it's not a point of mine. Though interesting of you to mention

[Being]

Thanks The Voice of Time.

These are stereotypes and I wouldn't give them the benefit of truth. What many old-time psychologists (think psychoanalysis for instance) have failed to understand is that human minds are all unique, and it's very difficult to keep their behaviours inside "types" unless the definitions depend not on metaphysical properties that we might conjure out of nowhere and is really very culturally dependent, but on natural physical properties that might be dynamically calculated and tracked. Only in that natural fashion can you have really dependable and insightful information about a person's psyche or their persona which may not only include their psyche depending on who you ask (I think a person's personality, or persona, isn't a psychological phenomena but a biological one that, and if we accept that, we get something much more useful, than if we stuck to the historical usage of the word which indicates only psychological underlying factors... like memory, consciousness, awareness, and so forth, instead of hormone balances, structural qualities of the brain, brain patterns and so forth)

This reminds me of the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist, where the first deals with the brain and prescribes chemicals to alter its functioning, and the second deals with the mind and prescribes thoughts to alter its functioning. The old ongoing debate between matter over mind vs mind over matter. In any case, I can see which side of the fence you prefer to come from. Though I do not expect you to come over to my side of the fence, but we can still discuss over it.
In so doing, though we are all unique, we also have similar 'types' of emotions, such as happy, sad, etc. Though each of us have a unique way of expressing those 'types' we all can recognize them as being a particular 'type', and they can be given the benefit of truth. However, sometimes these 'types', do collude with each other and then they present themselves in a different 'type' which can be regarded as 'wouldn't give them the benefit of truth'. But after many years of counselling I have come to recognize these admixtures and can give them the benefit of truth. A common example is when a person has difficulty naming their present state of mind, or feelings. However, if I suggest to break it up by saying 'I feel a bit like this and a bit like that' they can then always describe their state of mind. Such as, 'I feel a bit angry and a bit sad too'. Most people become confused about how they feel when so called 'types' collude, because the most common stereotype way of self analysis is to look for only one 'type' of feeling, and not for any collusion.
Also, I believe that a persons 'personality' is derived from their whole belief system. Each of us have a unique recipe of beliefs. Our beliefs collude with each other, to present a persona of sorts. My view is that the collusion of memory, emotions, etc. can re-arrange brain functioning. For instance, I might read a post that is against my long-term principles, and as result of me having an mental philosophical debate about it, I might start to feel tense, angry, impatient, and threatened. Are not these states of mental 'types' being colluded by our ego (thought censor) to try and reinstate its previous level of self-esteem?

This is not really about what I'm talking about in point, though I do mention something in that direction. What I'm talking about is an effort and nothing to do with the "self" or any psychological phenomena in general. It is a way to get to know your own philosophy, and carve out a refined version of it, and be able to express it in language, and understand it in a social context. It is all those things, and not just any specific one of them, because all of these together result in a "philosophical product", which you could write down for instance if you wanted to, in a book, or you could compare it to what other people have, and as such be a part of the philosophical development that happens in your social environment. What you talk about seems to be more about the problem of incoherence of ones own decisions and desires and so forth, that could be explained to some degree by what I'm talking about, but it's not a point of mine. Though interesting of you to mention

Again, from my side. It is interesting to see that you separate 'your self' from 'your philosophy'. My understanding is that 'our psychology' is a part of 'our philosophy'. After all, is not psychology under the umbrella of philosophy? Without considering 'our psychology', would not 'our philosophy' be flawed? I do see your view about exercising our own philosophy to refine our own philosophy. My threads in this post are about keeping an open mind about (our-self) when we refine our philosophy. In other words, try and be aware from where we are 'coming from' more than where we are 'going to' with our philosophical refinements. My thread is just an added dimension to your post that might become helpful to others as well. A good motto for this kind of philosophy-making is 'it is not necessarily so', including my thread and this post. Life is quasi. It is alive and in constant movement - so is philosophy. I am just pointing out some hidden difficulties we may come across. We are like a Trojan horse filled with an army thoughts that are hungry to conquer the world. We (our philosophical virtues) need to stay in control of the reins. The Voice of Time, it is nice chatting with you - over the fence.

[The Voice of Time]

This reminds me of the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist, where the first deals with the brain and prescribes chemicals to alter its functioning, and the second deals with the mind and prescribes thoughts to alter its functioning. The old ongoing debate between matter over mind vs mind over matter. In any case, I can see which side of the fence you prefer to come from. Though I do not expect you to come over to my side of the fence, but we can still discuss over it.

And I hope it to be a long and fruitful discussion

In so doing, though we are all unique, we also have similar 'types' of emotions, such as happy, sad, etc. Though each of us have a unique way of expressing those 'types' we all can recognize them as being a particular 'type', and they can be given the benefit of truth. However, sometimes these 'types', do collude with each other and then they present themselves in a different 'type' which can be regarded as 'wouldn't give them the benefit of truth'. But after many years of counselling I have come to recognize these admixtures and can give them the benefit of truth. A common example is when a person has difficulty naming their present state of mind, or feelings. However, if I suggest to break it up by saying 'I feel a bit like this and a bit like that' they can then always describe their state of mind. Such as, 'I feel a bit angry and a bit sad too'. Most people become confused about how they feel when so called 'types' collude, because the most common stereotype way of self analysis is to look for only one 'type' of feeling, and not for any collusion.

The problem is that the types aren't real! I mean, we can never know if a person truly is happy, it's always a guesswork, and we don't know what happy always "implies", that's ambiguous, and "happy" is not a quality which is the same in each person, so it doesn't give us predictability. In other words, it's a completely useless concept, except for communication and social interactions, where we learn to see each other as "happy" or "not happy" and act in the belief that our actions produce some result in a situation where a person is happy, but as everyone who has ever talked to a multitude of happy people should know, this is highly unreliable, very statistical, and depends really on how monotone the personality of the person. How much the person sticks to its character, but that does not give us any information about what goes on in the person, we base all this on what a person says or we make suppositions based on our own beliefs of what a person subconsciously communicates. And in both cases, people can lie, people do not really know themselves, people may be faking, people may be out of their minds, people may be only simulating happiness for whatever reason, and so forth.

If you decided there was a certain thing in the human brain, a certain pattern of different behaviours of biological structures and so forth, you could calculate with exact measures, when a person is within the boundaries of a definition, and when it's outside, and what this implies! You have in other words, determinacy. With "types", you don't have this, it's all very unreliable, very uncertain knowledge, and does not really give us a lot of insight, as a viewer we are stuck to choosing beliefs based on hardly working statistical information. As a person looking into themselves, it is way too easy to fool oneself, and way too difficult to really know what this thing called "happiness" implies, with certain exceptions perhaps, as habitual people may for instance always choose to take forth their favourite bottle of wine whenever they are in a jolly mood, but 1) those are rarely very interesting things to know, and 2) it's very narrow and has little room for explorations that lead to more and better qualitative knowledge, and more interesting knowledge.

Also, I believe that a persons 'personality' is derived from their whole belief system.

You should present a case for any such substantial belief, there must be a link that says this is so, or else you might as well be just talking at random what befits you.

Each of us have a unique recipe of beliefs. Our beliefs collude with each other, to present a persona of sorts. My view is that the collusion of memory, emotions, etc. can re-arrange brain functioning. For instance, I might read a post that is against my long-term principles, and as result of me having an mental philosophical debate about it, I might start to feel tense, angry, impatient, and threatened. Are not these states of mental 'types' being colluded by our ego (thought censor) to try and reinstate its previous level of self-esteem?

In a loose fashion perhaps, but if you base your thoughts about it on such a simplistic idea, you won't be able to see how you can bend and alter this, and you won't be able to predict for instance the words you'll reply with, though I presume you will think there is a connection between the words you use and these emotions you are experiencing, there doesn't seem to be a link which can explain it (and with a vocabulary of tens of thousands of words, it seems highly unlikely simplistic ideas, which are also isolated to its own "realm of existence" that "magically" interacts with the real world, could ever explain it... it's centuries old problem resembling Descartes' Dualism). This missing link is solved by not bothering with metaphysical properties, but focusing on natural ones, which calculates this on demand.

Again, from my side. It is interesting to see that you separate 'your self' from 'your philosophy'.

Your desire to have a hamburger is not related to either ethics, ontology, epistemology or logic, or any other discipline of philosophy. Now if you choose to have a hamburger, you can view this as an act of philosophy, because it involves choice. But desiring a hamburger, and any automated behaviour of acquiring a hamburger, is not an act of philosophy. Instead it's part of your human general functionality, if you want to give a name to it.

My understanding is that 'our psychology' is a part of 'our philosophy'. After all, is not psychology under the umbrella of philosophy?

Wherever you got that idea, it is dead wrong. Psychology is part of the social sciences. You might be thinking about "The Philosophy of Mind" though, which came before, in a manner similar to how "Natural Philosophy" came before natural sciences. Psychologists and philosophers occasionally takes interest in each other's fields though, as the manner in which they think to produce results is not too far apart, which probably is because unlike natural philosophy which became science a long time ago, there's only a couple or three centuries since psychology started to take shape.

Without considering 'our psychology', would not 'our philosophy' be flawed?

While the one might affect the other, the relationship is no more and no less important than any other relationships in the world, that might affect your philosophy. If you're genuinely interested in the origins of your own thoughts, you might take on a psychologizing of yourself, to try and bring into consciousness the different things that make you think like you do, but this is not really a philosophical activity, as philosophy stands on its own feet, but you might want to steer your philosophy in a direction that seems reflected in your self, or in other words, our desire to be something causes us to want to see ourselves reflected in our own philosophy, like a partial mirror into our own sense of self, this can especially be interesting when we might discover that parts of our personal philosophy is created by others and may not benefit us... like if you have authoritarian parents or teacher or whatever who have caused you to have opinions that are not very compatible with you down the line, but have maintained a surface presence.

I do see your view about exercising our own philosophy to refine our own philosophy. My threads in this post are about keeping an open mind about (our-self) when we refine our philosophy. In other words, try and be aware from where we are 'coming from' more than where we are 'going to' with our philosophical refinements.

I think both are important. I'm mostly for the second, so I disagree that the former is more important, but I recognize the importance of the former, in for instance situations where somebody hijacks your personal philosophy and causes you to behave in ways counter to your hardware, and that can cause you to develop philosophy that you don't even agree with when all comes down to it! I also think that people who might work with what I offer above are gonna experience in the initial period that there will be a need for a lot of cleaning of garbage that might come from other people, or from stuff you've done yourself which you might not like entirely, maybe you have some thoughts you even feel embarrassed or guilty for having, and those thoughts might result in either that you suppress them in order to unify your mind, perhaps you had an extreme opinion that you suddenly find out is totally bogus, or maybe you realize that you are in fact a hero of sorts and that it's everybody else who are the assholes that need to get their stuff straight, and those things become the new foundation for your personal philosophy.

My thread is just an added dimension to your post that might become helpful to others as well. A good motto for this kind of philosophy-making is 'it is not necessarily so', including my thread and this post. Life is quasi. It is alive and in constant movement - so is philosophy. I am just pointing out some hidden difficulties we may come across. We are like a Trojan horse filled with an army thoughts that are hungry to conquer the world. We (our philosophical virtues) need to stay in control of the reins. The Voice of Time, it is nice chatting with you - over the fence.

Drop the fence metaphor, I can invite you to my house even if I disagree with you xD No need for a Berlin Wall, so to speak.

[Being]

Hello The Voice of Time.

Great to read your views. It has got me thinking about a few things - especially about viewing philosophy from a different approach to what I have been doing. I am still a fan of psychology because that is what I have studied. However, since visiting the philosophy camp, I have been learning how others think and debate about things here. Also, I know I use different words that seem inadequate, or nonsense, to others. To me it's not. Time will tell how I will adapt to arguing over philosophical matters in a philosophical manner/frame of mind.

To add further to my rethinking, I had one of my threads, in a highly debatable post, taken out - for being inadequately suited to the debate I guess. I asked for further explanation. So I will soon find out where I went astray.

[Ansiktsburk]

Well, I started to care seriously about philosophy 6 years ago, when life cooled down a little, being middle-aged, and I am still commuting and working hard weekdays. Maybe that influences how I do philosophy. When I look at your ten commandments - well, yes to a point that's what I do. I suppose.
I read a lot of philosophy(skipping a lot of the practical and social events the missus suggests) and hang around these sites. As you might expect, no one else in my now-middle-class surroundings care too much about philosophy more than "I wonder what the purpose of everything is", being busy going about in "das mann" of Heidegger.

You get a lot of input, try to sort it out, writing summaries, and I have just started writing a blog(in Swedish, unreadable to most here) where I try to integrate what I read with what I know from before, trying to elaborate.

Not as fancy as I get the picture of from the OP, and I suppose guys with academic parents who selects philosophy as a fun way of life and go into the deeps of academic departments have somewhat more sophistcated ways of reaching philosophical brilliance.

Yoy have to go about with what you have.

[The Voice of Time]

Not as fancy as I get the picture of from the OP, and I suppose guys with academic parents who selects philosophy as a fun way of life and go into the deeps of academic departments have somewhat more sophistcated ways of reaching philosophical brilliance.

Yoy have to go about with what you have.

I can assure you my parents were not very academic xD My father's a "handyman" who likes to use his hands and my mother's educated to teach children sports (primarily horse-riding) and the pedagogics of child protection services (in Norway, which is an own field of study).

[Ansiktsburk]

Hey, Voice, I was not thinking of you! It was not meant to be criticism, I obviously have no clue on what possibilities you have to go about in the world of philosophy. I was just measuring myself up to your 10. I really liked them, but have a some basics to cover first...

[Advocate]

>I think of philosophy as a craftspersonship, a know-how which you apply to produce results of sometimes an artistic nature and sometimes of a more practical nature, like the difference between the painting on a canvas by a painter and the forging of a steel sledgehammer by a blacksmith.

I'm very down, and i use that term in my magnum opus tiny.cc/TheWholeStory to refer to decisions made on the spiritual (v. material) side of our understanding which rely on the three contingencies; salience, perspective, and priority. Truth Wisdom (epistemology and metaphysics) isn't actionable in and of itself so there's no crafting to it except in the sense of aesthetics and pragmatism - how to tell the story. Both a craft, but not the same kind of exercise so they must remain distinguished to avoid problems. If you're crafting the truth, you're lying. If you're crafting the story you're doing philosophy.

>Consequently, I'd like to present an inferred formula for producing philosophy, "inferred" meaning it won't be like a procedure, but instead a bunch of descriptions and declarations that [i]infer[/i] how to produce philosophy, by the way it will rather intuitively be possible to make methodological procedures from it that result thus...

I've tried to have the preliminary conversation about what the best world view would look like (
viewtopic.php?f=16&t=29981&p=468482&hil ... st#p468482) as a prerequisite for vetting good philosophy but i can't seem to get the conversation started. :/

>1) Our minds consists of order and disorder, and both of these work together to form perspectives, where a perspective is any finite set of elements of knowledge. An element of knowledge is more descriptively "a piece of an entire process of knowing, where each piece is a process of integrating a reference to a fulfilled recognition of states of nature with other references, and the entire process is the sum of all on-going integrations" ("states of nature" is another way of saying "how things (in the natural world) are at a moment", and "fulfilled recognition" a way of saying "an experience that is complete/thorough enough to count").

Perspective is any information available to one mind but not another. Knowledge is justified belief. An element of knowledge is a fact. These much simpler and common definitions are necessary and sufficient for all philosophical problems that include the word, except purely semantic ones of course.

>2) Perspectives are the foundation for all decision-making, but not all our behaviour, as behaviour also consists reflexes and automated behaviour that we've not had the ability to take decisions on ourselves to develop (influences we are not aware of before they happen). Any mind consists of multiple perspectives which shifts as sources from which we take decisions, the decision-oriented parts of our mind is a kind of super-perspective which harbour other perspectives. The super-perspective's choice of shifting between its child perspectives produces a personal philosophy inside of us, this philosophy [i]can[/i] be called a philosophy of life, but this is also misleading because of the way that term is already appropriated. It is perhaps better to call it a "philosophy of living", as a philosophy of the process of living instead of merely abstract meanings of life and what we are to do about it.

Perspective is one of three, the other two being salience (subconscious), and priority (bespoke). .

>5) Projections can be split into several such "philosophy sums", creating variations of the original name you gave for the philosophy or new more narrow philosophies altogether. A "separation of concerns" is encouraged, with the use of a stockpile container philosophy which you first project everything unto, this can be your "Bobism" or "Blaggardism", with dedicated philosophies like "exampleism" and "forinstanceism" being loosely related to the former. The purpose of the stockpile container is for you have easier access to formalized philosophy, and to automate your process of formalization more easily. Compare it to how there's one company for extracting the ore and another for processing it into metals, and a third one for making metal parts from it. In the production chain of philosophy you have the same situation. Your mind is the ore extraction centre, your stockpile container philosophy is the ore refining centre but also works as a place for preparing the metal for piecing together. Your derived philosophies are the ultimate appliers of these metal pieces into structure to form products.

That sounds like part of what i would call Universal Taxonomy - organising all non-empirical ideas in relation to one another, including going procedures.. The flowchart metaphor works better for me. Putting the relationships of universal taxonomy into graphical form, charts and so forth, i call "spiritual math/geometry" (not to be mistaken for the bullshit "sacred geometry"), the point being that you can perform exact calculations according to those relationships... sometimes.

>6) Your mind is actually closer to a farm field than a mine, as my next point is that it's not just about extracting what you already have, but also advancing the output, and there's a quantitative as well as a qualitative way you can do this. Quantitatively you can just increase the process of formalizing your mind, however, this is gonna give a very narrow-minded product, the equivalent of a poor harvest where the diversity of food is small as well that the food is poorly nourished (something you should understand if you are familiar with the concept of organic farming and the consequences of non-organic farming). Up to a point, quanta is gonna be very useful, especially for somebody not used to it. But only to that point, as in the real world you should be able to find examples of what really happens when people only pursue quanta... that's usually those people who are excessively self-absorbed and usually only really cares about a very small amount of things, because those are the things they find interesting, for whatever reason.

I think you're on a very good path there, but i would caution you to ensure your ideas remain accessible to remain relevant. All the philosophy theory in the world is still subject to Occam's Razor because even great minds are limited pragmatically. In other words, simpler is better so long as it's true. Perfection is when there's nothing left to get rid of. Simplicity is elegance, etc.

>But when we read these people, up to a point we might even agree with them, but beyond that point, we should start seeing that it all becomes rather nonsense and just so [i]poor[/i], it might not be wrong even, but it's just so poor, so much information and so little actual saying, or so much saying, but so little solving. Like what happens when somebody obsess about a problem and write lengthy hateful discourses on the issues they are having, you'll see a lot of obsession with little interest of [i]solving[/i], except perhaps in a preferred manner which is not itself part of the inquiry but predetermined and rationalized in the aftermath with that missing genuine link between solution and problem.

If i'm scanning you correctly, that's a great explanation of why you should formalise your thought. How else will you know where your gaps and weak points are? Most people never even start this process though.. you might beat that in mind for practical reasons.

>The qualitative development, is when you start planting new seeds, you start trying out new perspectives, you make new perspectives by adding and subtracting elements from knowings. Like the way we test in our minds what it would be like if something suddenly disappeared or appeared, and our necessary shift in understanding of this situation then, to include the new phenomenon, but also the way we can shift focus and look from angles we've never used before, or look at things we've never seen before. We are changing the rules that constitute our philosophy of living, and thereby changing the sources from which we formalize from. The application of quantitative and qualitative development of our minds, are the means we have to enrich the philosophical pool we end up with in the stockpile container philosophy.

wisdom comes from perspective and perspective comes from experience ( e >- p >- w )

>7) The process of formalizing, is not just a manner of putting "words" to things. It is a manner of putting "order" unto things and re-ordering that which already has some kind of order, usually I would think because the previous order was built out of situational necessity and not out of thorough thinking. Order is created by applying "operations" on your sense of knowing, like when you have what we might call a notion of knowing something, like in intuition, but you don't really have a way to describe what you actually know, or know what you actually know. The "operations" are those tools you use to "make sense" out of chaos and bring notions into structures you can call "knowledge", operations are typically questions you ask about it, like "what is it about? What is the object we are talking about?", or "how is like, what are its components, and how are those components relating?". If such operations do not yield immediate results, you may be able to find results through dedication to the problem the question pose, and "keep it in mind" and ask it in repeatedly different situations until something clicks together and a bond between the question, the thing of that you know, and formality materializes into a vague sense of understanding which you can project into the stockpile container philosophy.

Yeah, you definitely need a summary version of all that!

>8) The degree of formalization in the stockpile container philosophy is low, and even with a bit of order a lot might be left desired, this is to expect. When you create derived philosophies, you might need to scratch the products that they are, repeatedly, like if you write it down, you might want to just delete your entire word-file multiple times over, or throw your notebook page into the paper basket. You might want to create new philosophies that derive from those in turn, recycling some or most parts of the original philosophy, in new or the same manner as it originally appeared. But when you are about, and this is an important point, when you are about to tell the world of your philosophy, if you want it to be shared and more than just your own esoteric knowledge, you will need to test it against what people consider to be the world and its philosophy, and you must relate it to this world and its content. Although by definition all things that derive from the output of the super-perspective of mind is philosophy (if you doubt this, try imagining how the results could not be so, as any such output is a rule that would belong to either of the disciplines of philosophy), it might not be clear [i]what kind[/i] of philosophy it is, and it might be useful to sort a bit of your philosophy into parts of ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, logic and so forth.

My own process was nothing like that. I started discovering necessarily true maxims (including the maxim that philosophy must be built on logical necessity) and then as i applied them in various circumstances, more pieces clicked into place until it was a full set.

Then i had to wrestle with how to shuffle them around to make them manageable. I settled on The Prime Metaphor () as the division between Truth Wisdom (epistemology and metaphysics) and practical wisdom (the rest of it/"spiritual"/contingent. Roughly speaking the typical divisions of philosophy are meaningful but aren't primary.

The process of intellectual maturity is the process of closing your mind. You discover necessarily true maxims and then rely upon them to build toward more nuanced understandings.

>9) The real challenge is systematizing your philosophical products into the real final deals, what even if they in turn might develop further, they have at least a solid basis that can stand the test of challenges the world will pose to them, and critics might fling at them, and doubts you might point at them. Systematizing is when you have multiple arguments that all form pillars for new arguments that increasingly explain a broader and broader amount of the world... think of it like erecting a building. If you build upwards, you might offer more and more capable knowledge, which has increasing utility, if you choose to build sideways, you might not be very capable, but for those who comes after you, they will find a larger solid foundation by which they will be able to rapidly create increasingly more capable products (of thought).

The Truth is relatively simple. It can be expanded infinitely, of course, but The While Story is sufficient to answer All Philosophy questions (by logical extension) and it will only be a couple dozen pages when it's "complete". Your version of the truth can be as long as you like but i think it's obvious that won't work for most people. In the end there is only one Truth and all legitimate truth-seekers will inevitably find it, and find it to be simple.

>10) What is the ultimate purpose of philosophy? Now I don't really mean what people mean by it, or any general meaning, I mean "utility" purpose, and here the utility of crafting philosophy is to create structures of thought that might allow us to take advantage of more and more things. It is the foundation by which we at all are able to do anything. Now there's good philosophy and bad philosophy. The former makes us increasingly capable, the later impedes us, and it's up to each and every craftsperson to properly understand the implications of their philosophy, and alter it such that it generates more good than bad if necessary, or polish it for it to excel and not just be a good but also an excellent philosophy!

The ultimate purpose of My philosophy is truth as a prerequisite for justice. However, since justice also requires resources and i haven't got any, i'm going to stay mostly on the Truth side. Contingencies are an absolute mess.

Anyone who starts down the pragmatic path without first understanding truth (and externalities, logical fallacies, cognitive biases, their own priorities, etc.) is going to mess up as much as they ever solve.

>[b]Now go and make some philosophy![/b]

Already did. Link above somewhere.

If you're still around in these forums and up for responding i'll give a better go of it next time, depending how well you think we're on the same track.

[Advocate]

>The old ongoing debate between matter over mind vs mind over matter.

Let me clear that up for you right quick: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... y_X2Kbneo/