Philosophy Now Forum

BigMike wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 11:47 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 11:18 pm

BigMike wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 10:30 pm
Oh, Immanuel, honey, are you saying that truth and facts don’t belong "on a philosophy site"?

I'm not trying to infantalize you, so you can calm down: I'm pointing out where your knowledge is significantly lacking. You can fix that, and you probably should.

Just read Nagel. He's easy, he's profound, and he's on point. And we can talk about his argument after.

Can’t you explain Nagel’s argument yourself?

I was thinking that you could read him. You don't want me to chew your food for you too, do you?

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 12:02 am

BigMike wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 11:47 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 11:18 pm I'm not trying to infantalize you, so you can calm down: I'm pointing out where your knowledge is significantly lacking. You can fix that, and you probably should.

Just read Nagel. He's easy, he's profound, and he's on point. And we can talk about his argument after.

Can’t you explain Nagel’s argument yourself?

I was thinking that you could read him. You don't want me to chew your food for you too, do you?

Oh, Immanuel, sweetie, I see you’re still dodging the question. It’s okay, not everyone can articulate complex ideas, especially if they don’t quite understand them. But if you can’t explain Nagel’s argument yourself, how do you expect anyone to take you seriously? Are you sure you’re not just throwing his name around because it makes you feel clever?

It’s adorable that you think offering a book recommendation is the same as making a point. Here’s a little tip for the grown-up world: if you can’t explain it, it’s probably because you don’t really get it. So how about this: when you’re ready to actually engage and tell us what Nagel argues—in your own words, not just hiding behind "read the book"—then we can talk. Until then, maybe ask someone to help you chew through those big ideas before you spit them out half-digested. We’ll wait!

BigMike wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 12:07 am

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 12:02 am

BigMike wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 11:47 pm
Can’t you explain Nagel’s argument yourself?

I was thinking that you could read him. You don't want me to chew your food for you too, do you?

Oh, Immanuel, sweetie, I see you’re still dodging the question.

Ummm...I'm not your "sweetie," and I'm not sure that outside of prison, that's okay. But no, I'm not going to read on your behalf, digest on your behalf, and spoon feed you back whatever is left. "Mind and Cosmos" is a very small, very affordable book. If you can't read it, maybe you can find something you can colour instead. But no, I'm not doing your thinking for you.

Technically, “sweetie” should be capitalized since as it is a stand-in for a person’s name. Same with “honey”.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 6:30 pm

Will Bouwman wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 5:41 pm All your evidence is hearsay.

You don't know what "hearsay" means?

It's not "hearsay" when a Leftist organization says what it believes, and is quoted as such. It would only be "hearsay" if I "heard" it, then tried to "say" it into evidence, and that in some kind of "court."

Well, your reading it rather then having heard it notwithstanding, and the fact that this forum can't really be described as a "court", all you have done is repeat someone else's opinion.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 6:30 pmThe point was simply this: do the Left recognize the undemocratic nature of the EU? And by their own testimony, they do. QED

This is wrong on several counts. The "Left" is not an homogeneous bloc. You are begging the question by saying "recognize". One person giving a testimony that something is true, doesn't make it true, nor does it mean that everybody on the "Left" believes it to be so.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 6:30 pmSo no, my evidence is what's called "evidence." Or, to put it another way, "first-hand testimony, confirmable by source."

All your evidence shows is what one writer thinks.
Anyway, back to the point:

Will Bouwman wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 5:41 pm

Will Bouwman wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 12:16 pmAs I have pointed out several times, the truth is that the EU Commission is nominated by the democratically elected heads of state that constitute the European Council. It is those democratically elected heads of state of the European Council who decide the political objectives of the EU. The job of the EU Commission is to formulate and implement policies that will realise the political objectives set out by the European Council. Before they get to do that, the nominated candidates for the EU Commission are vetted by the democratically elected Members of the European Parliament. Once the democratically elected Members of the European Parliament have ratified the nominations of the democratically elected heads of state of the European Council, the EU Commissioners remain accountable to the democratically elected EU Parliament.

For you to show these factual claims are "rubbish", you need to provide some actual evidence. Take your pick. Which of the above is not true?

Given your evasion, it's a bit rich for you to say this:

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 4:54 pmJust answer the question.

I found myself this morning praying to the acausal connecting principal. Nothing unusual in that. (Before coffee even!) But just then a pot of sugar I had set on the shelf — apparently too close to the edge — slipped off at the precise moment that the thought entered my mind to ask BigMike about his childhood experiences.

That is, was his mother also a psycho-physical reductionist?

Well, you might say “So what? Things just happen. No connection” (this came through a voice I figured must be Atla’s). But when I tasted the sugar and the full impact of its qualia-implications hit me, then with a conceptual hop skip and a jump I found myself hovering not simply over my house and the Earth, but in some extremely hard to express sense abstracted from the entire Cosmic Manifestation, outside and beyond the space-time problem, relieved of electromagnetical burdens and a confining sense of entrapment in sweat-soaked flesh….

….and then the left rear tire on my car spontaneously burst!

Right then, in the manner of a metaphorical explosion, an entire slew of meanings coalesced in me (Mike I was thinking about your lonely water molecule careening in that river’s channel just when this happened!)

And right then these damned mysteriously laden lines popped, unbidden, into my “brain-state”:

“Let him who is without light
Among you cast the first
Shadow, and let the worst
Among us here at our late

Hour now speak for the best:
There is nothing higher above
Our heads, and we whimper of
What once had been our boast. ”

WTF?!?! It kind of makes sense and kind of doesn’t. Frustrating!

Really, really freaky, Mike.

OK, I tried to get a grip on my behavior and hold the reins of my explainable, material evolutionary state — you know, what makes me me, my very self— but the shit did not stop! I heard the following as if it condensed out of the qualia of sweetness still bounding in the confines of my mind:

“Uncertainty, take me into the forest
leaf by leaf—“

Huh?!?

So I grabbed my Mind and Cosmos and in a state of mild hysterical wonder turned pages SURE I’d get an ANSWER. AND ¡Lo! it came as a cascade of intuition:

I will FedEx you some tablets of the rarest amino-acid concentrations suspended in an emerald elixir! You will ingest them. (DM me) I will then direct concentrated thought-beams into your brain-mass, Uri Geller style, and directly into that unbelievably complex array of bubbling neurons that is YOU, a code-pattern GUARANTEED to open your consciousness up to new ways of seeing, feeling, being and interpreting!

Easy-peasy! From that point on I am sure to win all arguments with you!

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 1:15 pm

Oh, Alexis, what a dazzling carnival ride of words you've given us! Truly, it's a performance—a kaleidoscope of sugar pots, bursting tires, and mystical qualia. Yet, amid this symphony of cosmic whimsy and faux-poetic musings, I’m left wondering: are you genuinely engaging, or merely practicing your abstract tap dance to avoid the hard questions?

You see, Alexis, while you hover "outside and beyond the space-time problem" (how convenient), the rest of us are grounded here, in reality, asking for coherence and substance. The acausal connecting principle? Delightful. But does it explain anything beyond your sugar-induced hallucinations? And as for your cryptic verse and "sweetness bounding" in your mind—well, that’s charming, but let’s be honest, it’s not even trying to address the topic.

And now you offer me tablets of emerald elixir and concentrated thought-beams. How generous! But, Alexis, I’d prefer the elixir of clear thought and rational argumentation instead. Send that my way, if you can manage it. Until then, keep spinning your psychedelic narratives—I’ll be here, grounded in causality, waiting for you to come down to Earth and join the discussion like an adult.

BigMike wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 1:54 pm Oh, Alexis, what a dazzling carnival ride of words you've given us! Truly, it's a performance—a kaleidoscope of sugar pots, bursting tires, and mystical qualia. Yet, amid this symphony of cosmic whimsy and faux-poetic musings, I’m left wondering: are you genuinely engaging, or merely practicing your abstract tap dance to avoid the hard questions?

Totally engaged, Mike, and in ways and on levels that are hovering over your ability to understand. Think of yourself as a snarling, over-stuffed intellectual opossum suspended from a branch of limiting outlook in moonlight, while I am an eagle circling the diamond eye of the sun!

What you see, and see-away, as “performance” went exactly to the heart of the issues being contemplated.

But here’s the deal: You have established what is an invention that serves the function of an Impenetrable Idea-Fortress designed to self-affirm a priori conclusions near and dear to you. You fail to see your own will in operation.

Yet I have painstakingly tried to explain to you that you transformed some facts, compelling though they are, into an Ideological Construct.

Send that my way

I overnighted the aforementioned capsules. The enzymes will enter your body-mind problem and immediately direct themselves to the congestion point. The healing thought-waves I spoke of will realign the neuronal complexity into more idea-favorable patterns.

This is all causal stuff, Mike, right up your alley!

Then I suggest reading Nagel. Not before! Go slowly for Heaven’s sake!

BigMike wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 1:54 pm the rest of us are grounded here, in reality

Hmmmmm

How then do you explain Age?!?

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 1:15 pm Well, you might say “So what? Things just happen. No connection” (this came through a voice I figured must be Atla’s).

Indeed. Did you know that people who keep noticing strange coincidences between their thoughts and external events, are often in the initial stages leading up to psychosis?

Could be. But I am led to then wonder what of those who have, somehow, locked their minds to even the possibility of the entrance of “meaning” from other levels than pure, laboratory reasoning?

The issue — thinking of Nagel — is simply put that the questions have not been absolutely settled.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 3:30 pm Could be. But I am led to then wonder what of those who have, somehow, locked their minds to even the possibility of the entrance of “meaning” from other levels than pure, laboratory reasoning?

The issue — thinking of Nagel — is simply put that the questions have not been absolutely settled.

You don't say. Nothing is ever absolutely settled, but how is it that humanity still hasn't figured out whatsoever what this "meaning" coming from higher levels is supposed to be?

Will Bouwman wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 12:40 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 6:30 pm

Will Bouwman wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 5:41 pm All your evidence is hearsay.

You don't know what "hearsay" means?

It's not "hearsay" when a Leftist organization says what it believes, and is quoted as such. It would only be "hearsay" if I "heard" it, then tried to "say" it into evidence, and that in some kind of "court."

Well, your reading it rather then having heard it notwithstanding, and the fact that this forum can't really be described as a "court", all you have done is repeat someone else's opinion.

No. My claim was that the Left is concerned about the undemocratic nature of the EU. Then I showed that they are, by reference to one of their own publications. There's no more to be said than that, because it's perfect evidence that my claim is true. You can whine about that, but it does no good.

But we're far afield, and so far as any reasonable person is concerned, your objection has been answered. The OP is about Corporation Socialism, about which the EU is only one example; so even if you don't like it, well, that's just really tough. Lots of people don't like facts.

Meanwhile, the WEF is an even better example. And it's happening in the US, as well, of course, though more under-the-radar, through the current administration and their collusion with the military-industrial complex and taxation. Hence, Biden's cronies are scrambling to get as much money and power out of Washington as they can before they lose their leverage...but plugging for greater Socialism for the masses, and thus for bigger government, is what's got them as far as they have gotten.

And my question, originally, was, "Do Socialists know that they are becoming the tool of the globalist and corporatist elite?" Do they know that they are now a tool of "capitalism," as they call it, to manage the masses? Or are they determined to remain oblivious to the fact that they are now being (to borrow a favourite term of theirs) co-opted in this way?

Atla wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 4:12 pm You don't say. Nothing is ever absolutely settled, but how is it that humanity still hasn't figured out whatsoever what this "meaning" coming from higher levels is supposed to be?

But it is, for Mike, absolutely settled. And he has constructed an ideological platform, a sort of existentialism, and a politics with it. He comes here, full of bluster (and a few badly-composed insults) to preach the doctrines of acute materialism.

Every liter of milk I’ve bought since he came on here has curdled within 24 hours! Now, please, explain that!