Philosophy Now Forum

popeye1945 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 05, 2025 7:03 am

Phil8659 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 05, 2025 6:57 am

popeye1945 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 05, 2025 6:46 am

PLEASE GET OUT MORE!

How old are you? Are you so old that you are in a state of childhood regression, or simply a spoilt snot who does not care to learn from a master grammarian like say, Plato?

I am not a conciler, but stop playing with your own feces. Go for a walk, try to make new friends. You will feel much better, trust me!

How quickly you break down to babbling. What are you, a pre-teen?
You obviously use your own advice, as it appears you have spent a lot of time out, and not enough learning how to read.

Free Will

“Remember your connection with the cosmos. Remember your connection with the infinity and that remembrance will give you the freedom.” Amit Ray

I know, I know: forget about it.

“So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...” Stanisław Lem

And, of course, the equivalent of that here. And alas not only up in the clouds.

“But free will is what it means to be human, and no one can determine the path you take through this universe. Choice is our greatest right, our greatest gift-and our greatest responsibility.” Amie Kaufman

You know, as illusions go.

“The sin, both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave us free will.” C.S. Lewis

Though, perhaps, only after we gave Him free will?

“I have come to understand that life is composed of a series of coincidences. How we react to these - how we exercise what some refer to as free will - is everything; the choices we make within the boundaries of the twists of fate determine who we are.” John Perkins

We'll need contexts, of course.
Remember those?

“The choices we’re working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can’t know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it’s all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway.” Audrey Niffenegger

Next up: Let's think of something else.

iambiguous wrote: ↑Thu Nov 06, 2025 3:12 am Free Will

“Remember your connection with the cosmos. Remember your connection with the infinity and that remembrance will give you the freedom.” Amit Ray

I know, I know: forget about it.

“So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...” Stanisław Lem

And, of course, the equivalent of that here. And alas not only up in the clouds.

“But free will is what it means to be human, and no one can determine the path you take through this universe. Choice is our greatest right, our greatest gift-and our greatest responsibility.” Amie Kaufman

You know, as illusions go.

“The sin, both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave us free will.” C.S. Lewis

Though, perhaps, only after we gave Him free will?

“I have come to understand that life is composed of a series of coincidences. How we react to these - how we exercise what some refer to as free will - is everything; the choices we make within the boundaries of the twists of fate determine who we are.” John Perkins

We'll need contexts, of course.
Remember those?

“The choices we’re working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can’t know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it’s all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway.” Audrey Niffenegger

Next up: Let's think of something else.

You like quoting complete rubbish and nonsense. Ever notice that the insane think nothing about speaking for God, as if God were some kind of deaf mute.

I am the all powerful God, cept I need a crazed lunatic to speak for me, I am busy eating my Tocco's.

Hypocrisy

“Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing them upon his neighbors under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power.”  C.G. Jung

On the other hand, how unconscious? If you get my drift.

“People who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all.” Milan Kundera

Next up: people who shout joy [and most everything else] from up in the clouds.

“A man far oftener appears to have a decided character from persistently following his temperament than from persistently following his principles.” Friedrich Nietzsche

On the other hand, for all  practical purposes...?

“Godliness is more easily feigned in words than in actions.” Jonathan Edwards

Not unlike philosophy then, right?

“Armed neutrality makes it much easier to detect hypocrisy.” Criss Jami

You tell me.

“Mordred and Agravaine thought Arthur hypocritical—as all decent men must be, if you assume that decency can’t exist.” T.H. White

Of course, some things never change.

Theodicy

“One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the goyim were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate.

I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.” Christopher Hitchens

Sounds about right.

“It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.” Martin Amis

Let alone Christianity?

“You might think that, by now, people would have become accustomed to the idea of natural catastrophes. We live on a planet that is still cooling and which has fissures and faults in its crust; this much is accepted even by those who think that the globe is only six thousand years old, as well as by those who believe that the earth was "designed" to be this way. Even in such a case, it is to be expected that earthquakes will occur and that, if they occur under the seabed, tidal waves will occur also. Yet two sorts of error are still absolutely commonplace. The first of these is the idiotic belief that seismic events are somehow "timed" to express the will of God. Thus, reasoning back from the effect, people will seriously attempt to guess what sin or which profanity led to the verdict of the tectonic plates. The second error, common even among humanists, is to borrow the same fallacy for satirical purposes and to employ it to disprove a benign deity.” Christopher Hitchens

See, I told you.

“Even if there were pains in Heaven, all who understand would desire them.” C.S. Lewis

Just out of curiosity, which particular pains would you desire? How about your kids?

“In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust.” Christopher Hitchens

And it certainly includes MAGA!

“If God made everything, did He make the Devil?' This is the kind of embarrassing question which any child can ask before breakfast, and for which no neat and handy formula is provided in the Parents' Manual…Later in life, however, the problem of time and the problem of evil become desperately urgent, and it is useless to tell us to run away and play and that we shall understand when we are older. The world has grown hoary, and the questions are still unanswered.” Dorothy L. Sayers

Amen?

Solipsism

“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.” Ursula K. Le Guin

If only all the way to the grave, of course.

“Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Right, like it can never, ever be both.

“I am my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Want to borrow it?

“But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so beautifully -- got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation." David Foster Wallace

On the other hand, far better that than Your Generation.

The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.” David Foster Wallace

Alas, however, he's still dead.

“When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.” David Foster Wallace

Yep, even that.

Suicide

“When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity.” Charles Bukowski

My guess: unless of course he's wrong...drunk or sober.

“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.” Marilynne Robinson

Of course, we know better.

“Suicide is not a blot on anyone’s name; it is a tragedy ” Kay Redfield Jamison

Right, like this is entirely reasonable to assume.

“Dear anyone who finds this, do not blame the drugs.” Lynda Barry

Start here: https://www.google.com/search?gs_ssp=eJ ... e&ie=UTF-8

“Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete ” Kay Redfield Jamison

You know, subjectively speaking.

“Often it feels like I am breathing today only because a few years back I had no idea which nerve to cut...” Sanhita Baruah

Or, for some of us, a few decades back.

I used to be depressed, until I managed to get that car off my back. I will use a jack next time.

"... and as a serf you have an obligation to a Lord... some big-shot in the area" - R. Wolff

promethean75 wrote: ↑Thu Nov 13, 2025 1:35 pm "... and as a serf you have an obligation to a Lord... some big-shot in the area" - R. Wolff

Wow, Will is now the older person alive, and there are still people who, once in a while, chant his name, "Free Will."
What the fuck for?
He is probably way too old to do anything meaningful.

For example, a person who is always quoting, is a person firmly under the yoke of some mental master.

I am too busy, usually quoting myself, however, when I do quote the reason is putting down a time stamp as to how long ago, such and such was recognized. Most people quote like they are a groupie, we dress like them, we repeat them, cause we are too fucking stupid to realize we are a pack rat. Oh, golly, they don't dress like a this or that, fuck you.

Stupidity

“Have you ever considered you might better make your point by being nice?'
'Nice comes from the Latin word for "stupid",' said Griffin. 'We don't wanna be nice.” R.F. Kuang

Good to know?

“Biggest leap of human evolution...from Artificial Intelligence to Natural Stupidity.” Vikrmn

You know, if there actually is a difference.

“Like a fashionable dress, it can be fetching in youth, but looks particularly bad on the aged. And unique though its properties may be, stupidity is frighteningly common. The sum total of stupid people is somewhere around the population of the planet. Plus one.” Brandon Sanderson

And that's just on this planet.

“Stupid questions make more sense than stupid answers.” Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

Plenty of both here, of course.

"'Stupid’ is not being smart enough to recognize that it’s not smart enough.” Craig D.
Lounsbrough

Post it anyway, right?

“Sometimes, there were no good explanations for the stupid things you did on a whim. Sometimes, the explanations were too embarrassing, even frightening.” Zelda French

Post it anyway, right?

Now that is a stupid way to comprehend power of stupidity.

I call myself stupid, constantly. Saying anything more than that is narcissistic self-flattery. And besides, when someone else calls me stupid, we have at least one topic we can agree on.

Now, if they call me stupid, I expect them to follow through and teach me. When they refuse, I really get mad. for example, I get so mad at this mythical god of mankind, I know the first thing I would do if I ever met such a thing, is kick it in the knee cap, this supposed god refused to teach me.

Those then who claim that flattering one's self is positive reinforcement, I say, they positively have their dumb head shoved up their own ass.

Artificial Intelligence

“The most profound change is not just that AI replaces the mind. It is that it introduces a new form of labor into the world with a completely different physical basis. This is the Metabolic Rift.” Emad Mostaque

You tell me.

“Asking ChatGPT for life advice is like asking Google Maps for emotional directions—accurate, fast, but still might reroute you through childhood trauma.”  Saurabh Dudeja

Someone run this by ChatGPT...and then get back to us.

“The more knowledge I gain, the more I realize Google knows me better than I know myself.” Saurabh Dudeja

Can you say that?

“After thousands of years of coevolution, humans are now inextricable from technology.” Roger Spitz

Click, of course.

“A machine will never have the creativity, the feelings, or the soul of a human being.” Hazem Abdelmowla

Click, of course.

“Big Brother may not need a totalitarian regime to empower him if we simply open the door and invite him in. Indeed, it might already be too late for he is already here.” John C. Lennox

And, alas, it seems, virtually as well. 

Free Will

“Are we just radio sets? Tuned to a particular frequency? Are our brains simply tapping their potential from an invisible but universal thought cloud? Seriously, what is the source of our thoughts? How do artists create art? How do writers write? What is it that is doing the creating?” Abhaidev

Uh, your guess is as good as mine?

“It made you wonder: How much of our lives was just luck or good timing, and how much was actually choice? How could it be that tiny serendipitous events could change everything? And if lucky events could change everything, could minor mishaps have the same power?” Aditi Khorana

Let's run this by Benjamin Button.

“You cannot decide all the sensory stimuli in your environment, your hormone levels this morning, whether something traumatic happened to you in the past, the socioeconomic status of your parents, your fetal environment, your genes, whether your ancestors were farmers or herders. Let me state this most broadly, probably at this point too broadly for most readers: we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.” Robert M. Sapolsky

See, didn't I tell you?

“So it follows that those who have reason have freedom to will or not to will, although this freedom is not equal in all of them. Human souls are more free when they persevere in the contemplation of the mind of God, less free when they descend to the corporeal, and even less free when they are entirely imprisoned in earthly flesh and blood.” Boethius

Of course: "the consolation of philosophy"

“Libet’s EEG experiments suggest that we might not have free will. If the results of the experiment are to be believed, then what is the point? What is the fun if everything is determined?” Abhaidev

Philosophy and fun?

“He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.” Cormac McCarthy

Flip a coin?

In another thread, accelafine accused Americans of being the only people who think our country is "the greatest". That reminded me about an anecdote about Dean Atcheson, former secretary of State. It was 1963. In his letter of acceptance, Churchill complained that Acheson had claimed the post-war Britain had a tame and minor role in geopolitics. "It hasn't taken Winston long to adapt to American ways," said Acheson. "He hadn't been and American citizen for three minutes before he began attacking the Secretary of State."