Philosophy Now Forum

Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 12:39 pm

henry quirk wrote: ↑Wed Aug 03, 2022 3:09 pm

Advocate wrote: ↑Wed Aug 03, 2022 2:54 pm Mind is a metaphor for the patterns in the brain. They're distinctive in use, not different in reality.

So, again: brain does mind, yeah?

You're admirably patient with someone who thinks and says you are necessarily evil. I'm not even a free willist - 'agnositc' - and I had less patience.

Dom is the one who thinks I'm evil. Advocate? I'd have to consult his To Grok Evil thread (if he has one) and see where I fall on his scale.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 1:10 pm

Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 12:39 pm

henry quirk wrote: ↑Wed Aug 03, 2022 3:09 pm

So, again: brain does mind, yeah?

You're admirably patient with someone who thinks and says you are necessarily evil. I'm not even a free willist - 'agnositc' - and I had less patience.

Dom is the one who thinks I'm evil. Advocate? I'd have to consult his To Grok Evil thread (if he has one) and see where I fall on his scale.

Oh, you're quite right. My apologies to you and Advocate. I was thinking, for some reason (brain fart) that it was Dom you were responding to.

There is no such thing as supernatural 'Free Will'.

As I say: you can call it what you want, but -- yeah -- there is sumthin' more to man than meat.

Henry lacks much of the academic big guns that would increase his freedom. I suspect Henry is influenced by a cultural prejudice against academia, and that prejudice is what holds him back from the degree of freedom he deserves.

Wolf: What is that on your neck?

House dog: Nothing at all.

Wolf: What! nothing!

House dog: Oh, just a trifle!

Wolf: But please tell me.

House dog: Perhaps you see the mark of the collar to which my chain is fastened.

Wolf: What! A chain! Don’t you go wherever you please?

House dog: Not always! But what’s the difference?

Wolf: All the difference in the world! I don’t care a rap for your feasts and I wouldn’t take all the tender young lambs in the world at that price.

And away ran the Wolf to the woods.
excerpted from a tale by Aesop

Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 1:19 pm

henry quirk wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 1:10 pm

Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 12:39 pm You're admirably patient with someone who thinks and says you are necessarily evil. I'm not even a free willist - 'agnositc' - and I had less patience.

Dom is the one who thinks I'm evil. Advocate? I'd have to consult his To Grok Evil thread (if he has one) and see where I fall on his scale.

Oh, you're quite right. My apologies to you and Advocate. I was thinking, for some reason (brain fart) that it was Dom you were responding to.

Now, you might ask why so patient with Dom? I think there's sumthin' to be uncovered by way of our conversation, though I'm not sure what that is yet, or how exactly to get at it.

I might be chasin' a wild goose.

Belinda wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 12:35 pm I don't know about Krishnamurti but I am partisan to uncertainy.

That’s what puzzles me about folks who go boutique shopping for a religion. They’re simply looking for what they imagine fits their tastes, based on what they’ve heard about this and that. However, this business of picking and choosing the best parts of a religion is a throw that’s aimed way off base, for a simple reason, to wit:

The need for a religion is what prompts the boutique shopping. However, to intellectually pick and choose is to compare the object of attention* to what one already knows. And more than that, the known becomes the tipping factor on the road map. In other words, one is a slave to the known.

There’s a tidy little collection of Krishnamurti’s meaning called, “Freedom From The Known.” You might even find it for free.

Once free from the known, the guiding light of pick-and-choose significantly dims. If you’re a Christian, you gotta follow the Christian rules, even those that don’t comport with what you know … ‘cause what you know is what created the need for a religion in the first place.

It's like folks who move from California to Arizona and start asserting the things they know that screwed up California.

If you’re a Christian, and a Catholic, and a Brandon who has the juice to say, “So let it be written, so let it be done …” you just can’t go around promoting abortion.

- Speaking of that, but a bit off topic ... if you're the US Speaker of the House, you just can't go around setting foreign policy with rogue trips to Taipei. The executive branch of the US federalies determines foreign policy, and not a political minion (Pelosi) of the deep state that has insulated itself from The People.

* a religion, or agnosticism, or atheism.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Tue Aug 02, 2022 9:09 pm

Unbelievable! I'm able to note all of the instances in which I came to believe I was wrong about the "big stuff" here in "real life"...

I'm not a lemming.

And this has anything at all to do with...what exactly?

without fearing you will show up on my stoop

henry quirk wrote: ↑Tue Aug 02, 2022 9:09 pmI wouldn't cuz I have a life.

Note to others:

Please explain to me [as best you can] why henry has no reason to be embarrassed posting, well, whatever this is.

You tell me what this tells us about him!!

henry quirk wrote: ↑Tue Aug 02, 2022 9:09 pmThat I wouldn't waste the contents of my bladder to put you out if you were on fire?

Tell me what this tells us about him!!

Better than that, I started a new thread

henry quirk wrote: ↑Tue Aug 02, 2022 9:09 pmI saw that.

So did Flash. Though he actually contributes. You tell us you're not posting there. Though you are the reason that it exists.

On the other hand, you get enough abuse from me here, right? Not that I am actually able to not abuse you in a wholly determined universe. So, we're both off the hook.

Not clear at all given that you, like all the rest of us, have no way in which to untangle all of the variables here...

All of this going back to how the matter we call the human brain was "somehow" able to acquire autonomy when non-living matter "somehow" became living matter "somehow" became conscious matter "somehow" became self-conscious matter.

Then those here who actually believe that what they believe about all of this reflects, what, the ontological truth about the human condition itself?

Then those who are compelled in turn to insist on a teleological component as well. Usually in the form of one or another God.

Meanwhile, philosophers and scientists and theologians have been grappling with this profound mystery now for thousands of years.

Either in the only possible reality in the only possible world or of their own volition.

...in order to demonstrate that what you construe to be clarity here is not anything more than than your brain, wholly in sync with the laws of matter, thinking and posting what it could never have not thought and posted. We're all entangled in the profound mystery that is mindful matter. You "solve" it [given human autonomy] by positing a God that gave you a Soul. A God you "thought up" and in no way, shape or form can actually demonstrate the existence of. Or, rather, to the best of my current knowledge.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Tue Aug 02, 2022 9:09 pmSure it is.

I'm a free will with natural rights. If I'm wrong, then I'm a determined meat machine with no right to anything. The calculation, then is pretty clear.

Seems clear to me.

Well, what seems clear to me [and perhaps others] is that you assert things like this with no real capacity to demonstrate that you are doing so of your own free will. In other words, unlike with the hard guys and gals in the scientific community who grapple with this profound mystery experientially and experimentally, you fall back only on a world of words...words defining and defending other words in your "intellectual contraptions".

Just like me.

Who else here doesn't understand the point I am making regarding just how surreal this quandary is for us? Brains trying to pin down brains themselves. Going all the way back to fitting them into the existence of existence itself.

This part:

the laws of nature compel your brain to delude you into thinking that your brain is not deluding you into thinking that you post what you do of your own volition.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Tue Aug 02, 2022 9:09 pm I understand your point. It's crap.

Of course: another "if I believe it that makes it true" assertion.

Please. From the day we are born until well into our teens we are indoctrinated by others to see our life as they do. And then as adults in a free will world how we come to think of our life is profoundly embedded in a particular historical and cultural and experiential context. We come to have particular sets of experiences and relationships and access to information and knowledge that commonsense tells us will predispose us to embrace one set of political prejudices rather than another.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Mon Aug 01, 2022 1:59 am I'm sorry your ma & pa abused you (not really).

Once again, allowing yourself to be reduced down to what passes as a..."clever" retort? Prime New ILP material.

What you won't do, in my view, is to examine my point here in depth in regard to your own existential self, your own hopelessly subjective value judgments.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Tue Aug 02, 2022 9:09 pm Your point is a deep as a sheet of loose leaf is thick. It's been examined and dismissed.

Of course: another "if I believe it that makes it true" assertion.

And given that you examine my points in the philosophical equivalent of a wading pool, what weight can one give to your "dismissals"?

henry quirk wrote: ↑Mon Aug 01, 2022 1:59 am can a nihilist be moral?

Sure. It depends on the extent to which in a No God world [an assumption] a nihilist is able to think him or herself into accepting one or another Humanist moral and political agenda as more or less rational. Not all nihilists are as fractured and fragmented as "I" am.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Mon Aug 01, 2022 1:59 am In other words: no.

Note to others:

How pathetic is this? He asked the question. I gave him an answer. Which he then completely ignores in order to basically insist that the only correct answer [his] is "No.".

henry quirk wrote: ↑Mon Aug 01, 2022 1:59 am Which I cleaned up, shortened, and laid out.

Tell me what this...

I wouldn't waste the contents of my bladder to put you out if you were on fire

...tells us about him!!

Let's see, could it be that I value piss more than I value you?

Yeah, I think that's it.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 7:10 pm

Tell me what this...

I wouldn't waste the contents of my bladder to put you out if you were on fire

...tells us about him!!

Let's see, could it be that I value piss more than I value you?

Yeah, I think that's it.

Just as on the gun thread, I have managed to reduce you down to...this?!!

Note to others:

Go ahead, take him seriously if you must.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 2:01 pm Now, you might ask why so patient with Dom? I think there's sumthin' to be uncovered by way of our conversation, though I'm not sure what that is yet, or how exactly to get at it.

I might be chasin' a wild goose.

Not a bad description of a philosophical discussion.
As a side note: I can't see why expressive sentence like 'It's crap.' is taken as an argument.

I also can't see how implying something true - without any supporting argument - is better than stating that something is true.

I also noted that someone thinks that not only are you determined, but by them.

'I have managed to reduce you down to....'

Which is actually a whole bunch of claims, simply stated, these being true because he said so.

I mean, if we are going to interpret statements and value judgements as arguments, there's a very weird argument about his ability to control you.

I have managed...

...to do nuthin' at all.

-----

Dom,

Don't give up on me yet: I'm comin' back to our conversation.

Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 7:56 pm

henry quirk wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 2:01 pm Now, you might ask why so patient with Dom? I think there's sumthin' to be uncovered by way of our conversation, though I'm not sure what that is yet, or how exactly to get at it.

I might be chasin' a wild goose.

Not a bad description of a philosophical discussion.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 8:01 pm

I added a bit to my previous post while you posted.

I can't see why expressive sentence like 'It's crap.' is taken as an argument.

It ought not be except where it actually is crap, is so obviously crap no one ought to bother with it.

if biggy insists the sky is green: well, that's crap. I'm not gonna waste any time on that or him (an obvious lie on my part cuz look at all the time I've wasted on that and him so far).

*

I also can't see how implying something true - without any supporting argument - is better than stating that something is true.

That there is a rhetorician's trick, one we probably all use from time to time.

*

I also noted that someone thinks that not only are you determined, but by them.

Add megalomania to obesity and agoraphobia.

*

'I have managed to reduce you down to....'

Which is actually a whole bunch of claims, simply stated, these being true because he said so.

And there ain't gonna be no dissuadin' him.

*

I mean, if we are going to interpret statements and value judgements as arguments, there's a very weird argument about his ability to control you.

Well, he had my attention for awhile, so I suppose, in a roundabout way, he exercised some control. But the bloom is off that rose.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 8:19 pm It ought not be except where it actually is crap, is so obviously crap no one ought to bother with it.

To say something, another person's argument, is crap, is not an argument and I can't see someone thinking it was. It isn't...

"if I believe it that makes it true" assertion.

You're expressing incredulity. We will all make this kind of judgment with some arguments and conclusions. One can certainly demand justification. But if I have that kind of reaction, I do not think I am being convincing, I think I am expressing a value judgment.

if biggy insists the sky is green: well, that's crap. I'm not gonna waste any time on that or him (an obvious lie on my part cuz look at all the time I've wasted on that and him so far).

And it can be expressive in this way also.

*

I also can't see how implying something true - without any supporting argument - is better than stating that something is true.

That there is a rhetorician's trick, one we probably all use from time to time.

Yes, though I think it's embarrassing after judging your 'It's crap' as a fallacious argument. IOW right after judging an open value judgments as a poor argument, he present an implicit version of his own. I guess it's better to imply stuff. Or is it passive aggressive.

I also noted that someone thinks that not only are you determined, but by them.

Add megalomania to obesity and agoraphobia.

Obesity? I did get the impression he didn't go outside, though I didn't know it was a phobia. Obesity I never heard about. But anyway, while it is a bit megalomaniacal, I am more struck by psychic aspects of it and the self-congratulatory nature of it. A bit like Advocate having answered all the questions in philosophy and blames other people for not being interested in his threads AND there is no possibility there might be something wrong with his communication.

It seems to be a trend. I did this. Um, ok.

*

'I have managed to reduce you down to....'

Which is actually a whole bunch of claims, simply stated, these being true because he said so.

And there ain't gonna be no dissuadin' him.

Oh, don't be so deterministic.

Well, he had my attention for awhile, so I suppose, in a roundabout way, he exercised some control. But the bloom is off that rose.

Well, yes, posting does increase the chances one is read here.

But are you conceding something here? Are we partially determined? Are there percentages? Or is it rather that we choose to allow something to move us in a certain direction?

Me and biggy been goin' at each for a while, across multiple threads. If, today, I'm unphilosophical here or there with him it's cuz civility was exhausted a while back elsewhere.

'nuff said.