Philosophy Now Forum

to lay out one such philosophical problem,
is this question of human beings' thought being
eternal, universal, timeless....
or are we unable to work out a universal, eternal, timeless
theory of everything?

Personally, I am unable to see an idea or series of idea's being
universal/eternal..... take something like an idea like, love...
is that an eternal/universal idea? If we look into a history of love,
we can see that love means something different to each individual
and to each society/state..... we do not have a universal/eternal idea
of love....the concept of love is thought to us, it is inside of us at birth,
but until it is explained to us, we have no idea what love is..
in practice, we know/understand love, but in theory, we have no
idea...ok, describe love to a child.... in the end, one winds up saying,
what you feel for your dog, mommy, daddy, sisters/brothers is love,
you don't describe love, you just point out examples of love,
thus showing that love is basically unexplainable.... we simple don't
have the words or understanding, to know what love is until we ourselves
experience it... love is best understood and explained by experience....
not by theory.... thus, how do we express love as a universal/eternal
theory? We can't....thus, we do not have ideas that are eternal/universal...
all theories/ideas are limited, finite and ephemeral and bound by
their culture/societies to be of limited value and use....

or said another way, when we describe something, we can only
describe a part of something, not the whole or a complete aspect
of something....

we are unable to have a universal, eternal theory of everything...
no matter how thorough we try, we cannot completely explain or
describe all aspects of an idea, or have a universal idea because
we cannot completely explain all aspects of that idea...

part of the failure within philosophy is the vain attempt to
have a complete and overall theory of all aspects of existence...
at best, we can only describe parts of the universe...
there is no possibility of a total, universal, eternal theory of
anything or everything....

the last "metaphysician" that tried to create a theory of everything,
was Marx.... and we know how that turned out....

We must walk away from any attempt to create a ''TOE"...

But in doing so, we admit from the start, that we are unable to
fully and completely explain or understand everything...
we are, at best, describing bits and pieces of reality, the universe....
and we must leave as unexplainable, aspects of the universe,
of reality, of everything... the universe is only explainable in
bits and pieces, not as a whole.... and that makes all the difference
in the world....

Kropotkin

It is interesting that

you only nominated love.

I would add

fear and hate to the mix.

I actively dislike fear and hate... I believe it's from
fear and hate that we get many of the world's problems....
indeed, from fear and hate, we got the Holocaust, the bomb,
both World Wars, Vietnam... My Lai massacre, the current division
in America, segregation, prejudice and intolerance, just to name
a few problems that stem from fear and hate....

I hold that virtually nothing good comes from fear and hate..
but a whole lot of good can come and does come from love...

If there is an answer to the world's problems,
it lies in love...

Kropotkin

Peter Kropotkin wrote: ↑Mon Sep 19, 2022 6:19 pm I actively dislike fear and hate... I believe it's from
fear and hate that we get many of the world's problems....
indeed, from fear and hate, we got the Holocaust, the bomb,
both World Wars, Vietnam... My Lai massacre, the current division
in America, segregation, prejudice and intolerance, just to name
a few problems that stem from fear and hate....

I hold that virtually nothing good comes from fear and hate..
but a whole lot of good can come and does come from love...

If there is an answer to the world's problems,
it lies in love...

Kropotkin

Point taken. I don’t disagree whatsoever. I just think that, sadly, fear and hate will be with us forever. And the consequences of these are widespread. Call me a pessimist if you like, but I would counter that I am a realist, sad but wise.

NO.

"love" is just a human emotion that ocurrs when you connect to something in a intense way.

You cannot understand that if I dont define "intense".

Because, we must to separate what "connecting with another human" is from "connecting with a bullet in your head" is.

And we do that understanding what Good and Evil is, in general, in order to say that something is "more Good" than other.

In order to say that something is "more connected" than other.

And you understand that when you define the theory from the start, from the origin of the universe.

When you do all that, then you can explain what "love" is, because you can say something like "from this kind of connection we experience love in a human brain".

That can be tested in a laboratory, quantifying the emotion in order to know how "intense" is, too, but this is an extra, this is a demostration of that theory of everything that explain love.

You dont have this theory, so, you say that we cannot describe love. But is just that you dont have this theory.

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all had philosophical theories
about love... which can be either "Agape" or sexual love which is
"Eros"..

and it is too bad that we don't have a philosophical theory about love...

Kropotkin

¿? There are.

I can explain all about that, but in order to do that, we need to start for the begining.

When you define the origin of the universe, you create the axioms wich are defined to make later the theorems.

And things like "love" are explained easly.