Only YOU Can Reduce The Idiocy In The World
If you spend your time on Internet forums, you probably spend most of your day surrounded by idiots. So, you should treat people as if they weren't idiots and watch them become smarter bit by bit instead of seething with hatred or whatever your main avocation in life happens to be. Only YOU can reduce the idiocy in the world.
>"stop seething with hatred"
>"I'm surrounded by idiots online"
.Blackadder:
Well, it is said, Percy, that civilised man seeks out good and intelligent company, so that through learned discourse he may rise above the savage and closer to God.
Percy:
Yes, I've heard that.
Blackadder:
Personally, however, I like to start the day with a total dickhead, to remind me I'm best.
Correction: You probably spend most of your day surrounded by idiots at work, school, home, etc. I didn't think most people spend most of their time online, but even if you do that's not really "surrounded" considering the Internet is open on all sides unlike real life.Originally Posted by Grendel
The inquisitive mind seeks to understand before it disdains.
The noninquisitive mind will inevitably lack knowledge, and likely viable framework, with which to understand reality.
If one's own precept of idiocy is also viable enough in reality, that it is the manifested strategy one sees functioning on a daily basis in so many others, it begs a reevaluation of what idiocy is, and where it is.
While prolific strategies that are rewarding to individuals in the short-term but damaging to society in the long-term are indeed possible, one is burdened to bring specifics to the table in highlighting them, lest the greater chance that it's simply an individual's own arrogance speaking be easily inferred.
Nah, I think there are idiots everywhere. The American education system is shit and the European one seems to be falling apart based on what I see in Eastern Europe, and people aren't seeking out that knowledge themselves either, so most people are idiots. I'm not saying most people are inherently idiots and nothing can be done about it, despite the maxim "you can't fix stupid." People are too fearful and too cynical to accomplish much. I don't see any heroes, geniuses, leaders, or anyone trying to be significant anymore, and the last article I got on Google Chrome on my phone before I switched back to Safari because I don't like random articles was about how people still just want to listen to David Bowie and Prince imitators all the time because it seems like rockstars aren't trying to be significant either. It shouldn't even be a big deal if someone tries to accomplish something, people should just be like: namaste.
I spoke about death on other threads because I think that's the cure for fear and cynicism, getting modern people to think about death more. Death wasn't a taboo throughout most of history and people's lives were better in most respects despite all the plagues and warfare and other evils because they had a framework with which to interpret evils. In the modern world, people can't even interpret a toothache. Imagine if we had pre-1850s levels of spirituality and human community combined with modern knowledge and technology. It wouldn't be a utopia but it'd be such an unprecedented level of human flourishing nearly everyone alive would be dazzled at first and brand it as one.
I'll sound like I'm lacking generosity because you tend to insert more loaded assumptions into your trains of thought than operable specifics, but I'm going to be blunt here:
It sounds like you equate too much of intelligence with the ability to fulfill certain complex mental and social constructs, including some that are all but known to be vestigial or dead-end.
Rather than, say, having the mental skills to transform one's environment into something that increases the living conditions for oneself and/or others, if not something else matching one's internal vision in another way. I'd call failure to razor away things that can't affect you until people think about them a profoundly inefficient way to operate in reality.
But it's also hard to come to a real agreement on intelligence, since the concept is tautological in some ways.
A material drain on resources and thought. The dead cannot make decisions. The dead can only "do" what they set in motion in life, or things that others took their name in vain on in death.I spoke about death on other threads because I think that's the cure for fear and cynicism, getting modern people to think about death more. Death wasn't a taboo throughout most of history and people's lives were better in most respects despite all the plagues and warfare and other evils because they had a framework with which to interpret evils. In the modern world, people can't even interpret a toothache. Imagine if we had pre-1850s levels of spirituality and human community combined with modern knowledge and technology. It wouldn't be a utopia but it'd be such an unprecedented level of human flourishing nearly everyone alive would be dazzled at first and brand it as one.
Considering death permanently annihilates agency and the ability to even think in the context of reality as far as we can tell, I see no excuse for there to be any public enemy greater than death.
Vestigial social constructs are the purpose of life. No new ones are coming into existence, and anyways, no thing is ever really vestigial, see: the appendix. People just seem to be turning into the Wall-E people instead and it's gross. As for death, people seem to intentionally just make themselves too stupid to think about death as a form of denialism, not actually do something about it. I guess that's the future of humanity, to be immortal jellyfish who live forever and are cumpfterble and don't think or feel anything. Death isn't public enemy No. 1, just somewhere in the top 5 or 10. Living involves something known in philosophy as intentionality, otherwise it's just a mass of tissue and flesh writhing around. That's the difference between "living" and "surviving," I've always thought.
Sooooooo.....if you can't live without a purpose bigger than continued existence itself, and other people do, do you not see how that might, eventually, open up situations where the added burden you have to bear for trying to survive and living by your ideals, lowers your survival odds compared to theirs, and the pure survivors end up replacing people like you?
If you die for your ideals and your death isn't actively helping preserve them, you're just destroying the actor that served those ideals in the first place. You're not really dying for what you believe in, you're letting your beliefs suffer too because those who don't share them have a pathway to dominating the world.
No one should die for what they believe in. They should believe and physical survival or non-survival should be incidental. I always think there's Spirit as some sort of fifth dimension, since the character of none of the first four allows them to be interchanged with another to begin with in the same way people think someone's green could be your red and vice versa even though basic color theory forbids that, and after that is the fifth as necessity, just as finiteness requires infinity, something requires nothing, light requires darkness, and sense and reason require intuition by necessity. Since the concept is coherent and there is no alternative, as a reductio ad absurdum, if it has disastrous consequences, I think life should be considered an unfortunate mistake and swiftly ended. It's like the ancient Greek saying that if there are gods and they are not just, we should not want to worship them. If all people are so horrifically flawed that they want to worship them out of fear and pain even though they shouldn't, that's a flaw on the part of people, not something to be celebrated. If reality outlives its purpose, it ought to be ignored or overthrown. Man is the measure of all things, not "reality" and not fear.
That might be impossible to follow but if it is I probably need to put out a book on epistemology or something even though I'm not an academic and no one will care other than caring about having to shut up when I speak since they can't say what I'm saying is stupid but can't agree with it either.
When a person claims a spiritual experience and no apparent material explanation can be found, perhaps that's telltale evidence of a spiritual world.
But others have occurred, for which material explanations are later found to be highly appropriate.
In material reality, a mathematical framework is frequently consistent with our limited lens of the physical world. Arithmetic is predicated on the assumption that mass is neither created nor destroyed, yet existed long before this rule was formalized. Though it was emergent from empirical interactions and not something we laid in stone before it all began, yet its consistency with the world compared to every other science we'd developed was so great, that we regarded it as magic at times. Nothing followed that could replace it.
The idea of the spirit and soul throughout time has varied quite widely. Some have interpreted it to think that a transported soul might be incarnated into another body with the memories of the last one; and some understandings use a continuity of past memories as the ultimate label for a person's subjective identity. But in some philosophies regarding reincarnation, the memories of the past life are not transferred between bodies, only the achievements and sins.
If I'm not mistaken, the Cartesian Ego is the smallest "unit" we have for a person's "soul" - the smallest atom of their subjective instantiation - that is not also coupled with other aspects of consciousness that we sometimes include or omit.
I dare to say that this unit of internal subjectivity is the only true lynch-pin of consciousness that science can't even allude to, let alone understand. But aside from that, different centers of the brain have been found through experimentation to link directly with different subjective functions we'd pool into "consciousness." Some parts control memories and associations; some handle raw sense data; some create emotional vectors that energize themselves into thoughts.
Now, given the almost stalwart accuracy of our probabilistic framework of the world, derivative of mathematical postulates we have realized over the ages, would it not make sense that, given limited information, the odds that these sectors of the brain with known attachments to functions of consciousness are in fact responsible for these aspects, are higher than the odds that a redundant "soul", occupying the material brain, in a non-material form, also possesses its own redundancies of these aspects of consciousness? That the brain, capable of facilitating these functions all its own, would even need an immaterial black-box to also occupy it, giving subjectivity to the otherwise complete physical machine?
The only thing not totally explained by this emergence explanation is the basic unit of a conscious mind's own subjectivity, what some called the "Cartesian Ego." But even then, this material framework does offer something in the way of explanation: the brain cannot understand itself outside its own lens of subjectivity. The subjective observer, looking upon an objective system, cannot then remove his own state of being a subjective observer, while observing.
Now, this emergence, and the notion of the "spirit" being some extraneous thing, are both different perspectives for looking at the world. From what has been said here, there is not necessarily any inconsistency to either; the "soul" may in fact still be a black box that resides in the brain, made of some otherworldly substance we can't otherwise quantify, while the brain still possesses its own functions of consciousness, and there's still nothing making this redundancy impossible. It seems unlikely and there's nothing to suggest this is the case, but we can't falsify it.
But on the other hand, both perspectives can be seen as little "spheres" formed between connected points of information. The shape of each sphere makes them unable to coexist as they contradict one another, but either can exist, and there are "points" that are included in both spheres, as well as some that are exclusive to one or the other.
A point cannot connect to other points on a given sphere if it contradicts them, but the linkages are probabilistic and strengthen or weaken depending on how likely a connection between two points is to be true; the net strength of all connections on the sphere then add to some function of the sphere's "weight." Now, neither sphere is without apparent inconsistencies, only excluding those points that contradict its net structure, or that simply cannot be acknowledged or explained by it.
On the other hand, the sheer number of points connected to either sphere, even though there is considerable overlap, also contributes to some function of a given sphere's weight.
Now, a sphere's weight can be said to be a good estimate for whether or not it's consistent with your own experience - not "true" as that's difficult to prove, but consistent with it. Now, the same "sphere" that dictates the emergent consciousness of the brain is some function of its physical features - this sphere does omit a few less-quantifiable points about the "soul" and the subjective unit of consciousness, and there are indeed points exclusive to it that the other sphere includes; but because this sphere also has such tight and such consistent interconnection between the points dictating the physical laws of the world, for instance - things for which there is both a great breadth and great consistency of knowledge - that adds significantly to this sphere's weight in offsetting the lost points from not being able to totally explain subjective being. Because I have seen almost ubiquitous connectivity between the breadth of points in this "large" sphere regarding the natural laws of the world, and because the undeniability of this physical reality is something so consistent with my own experiences, my bets are on the "large" sphere being the "correct" one, or the one consistent with where I am.
I know this is a metaphor and metaphors are weak, but this is the simplest explanation for my thought process in choosing perspectives here. The lens that most things we understand are a result of physical phenomena is very consistent with the fact of physical existence being something that it's very hard to deny, and being an opt-in experience that still manifests on you even if you opt out of it. Given this lens, there is no explicit contradiction to the existence of transcendental "black boxes" like non-emergent notions of the soul, but because the only aspects of the soul we feel ourselves experiencing are also connected to the parts of the brain that are physical, and have some tenuous connection to the very consistent physical rules of reality - from a position of ignorance, until more verifiable information from the unknown "transcendental realm" manifests, we can assume most of what we experience also stems from what we see.
Now, granted, one of the biggest assumptions you'll notice underlying all of this fluff is Pragmatism, or something vaguely similar. This is because any piece of information can be referenced by its relationship to us, and the mind understands things based upon connections between other things. We are physically limited against understanding information that "just is" without any reference to its position, and so information that only exists self-referentially is not true information. If you're trying to understand things we're incapable of understanding by design, you don't keep chasing the futile goal, but you don't just go on assuming the unquantifiable is there either, not until it shows some operable evidence.
Even while you're trying to contemplate the things you can't relate to your own limited lens of being, things all around you that you can relate to it will continue to affect you in ways you can't ignore, and even as you're pondering the great unquantifiable mystery in your head, the slings and arrows of material reality are still going to hit you, and eventually you'll be forced back into working in their framework.
Often, it's the framework of empirical reality itself that lets us formalize our mental methods for pondering the unobservable in the first place, so I see no reason to believe they don't fundamentally stem from the observable, or something linked to the observable. If it's truly linked to the observable, we can derive what it is and how it interacts with us even if our senses can't directly perceive it, so the only information that doesn't really fit is that which is "just there," but that we absolutely cannot reference in position or contextualize.
I mean, from what I've seen of what you value, you are, or at least you value being one. Not complimenting, not insulting. There's a clear required reading list when working with your worldview. I gave up patience for academic authority long ago.That might be impossible to follow but if it is I probably need to put out a book on epistemology or something even though I'm not an academic and no one will care other than caring about having to shut up when I speak since they can't say what I'm saying is stupid but can't agree with it either.
Only based on your recurring sense of disgust with...I don't really know what, I'd argue there was a lot of time you didn't enjoy wasting, but I shouldn't judge. There's way too much judgment out there already.
Coerule m
Grendel
Hey are you two actually one person?
This thread feels like a fraud.
Socionics -
the16types.info
Bold words for someone too afraid to use the @mention feature.
@Grendel
There's a difference between required reading and referencing other people. Referencing other people so you don't have to read them is why philosophy books are so long, they have to list every other argument that's been made up to that point.
And also, your argument is exactly how I formulated my notion of spirit. I found the Cartesian ego to make a pragmatic version of epistemology completely impossible since it goes directly into making the entire material world an unknowable ding an sich and allowing people to think things like you're a brain in a vat or you're going to be poofed out of existence in the next moment or other paranoid thoughts which I was getting annoyed with having to listen to at college all the time ("I think we live in a simulation, viva Elon Musk!" etc.), so I decided there wasn't an emergent soul either and just went to a sort of monism between the agents/observers and objects/observed.
Anyways, why I hate academia with a fiery passion is it's just a bunch of geeks in the worst sense of the word nowadays no matter which field it is (yes, STEM too, probably especially STEM since it's considered to have more prestige and more pay.) I mean geek as admirer, collector, "geeking out" etc. as opposed to nerds who focus on hobbies and skills. People seem to want to get paid to obsess over something instead of getting paid to be competent at something and that's stupid as hell. Obsessing over things and people is just human nature like if you like a song by Lady Gaga you might get obsessed with Lady Gaga and go see the Lady Gaga movie even if some people think it's not very good (I haven't seen it) and that's great, but that doesn't make you competent to tour with Lady Gaga or try to be the next Lady Gaga or get paid to listen to Lady Gaga all day if you're willing to occasionally talk about her (really?!?) in front of a like-minded audience and lament that no one new can be like Lady Gaga anymore and you shouldn't get paid to pretend that it does. If there's demand for that, fine, it should be paid, but it shouldn't be crowding out the space that's traditionally for demand for competence.
So you deemed it impossible because it made you uncomfortable?
Simulation hypothesis isjust a null point to begin with. If the simulation is tight enough that there's absolutely no way to verify it's simulated, for functional purposes, it is real until proven otherwise. You can just razor it away because it's both impossible to quantify, and has no bearing on reality anyway.
It's a possibility that can't be relevant no matter what, and that the conditions are right for it to be possible doesn't mean it's automatically the one we're in.
This was a point I was getting at, really: if you're so certain the identity is real, there's absolutely no way to know you're not living in solipsism because all your evidence of other selves comes through sensory channels. The sensory world and the self's own world are both contradictory starting points, both self-evidenced only, and are irreconcilable with one another. They're both circular reasoning. One loop just happens to be bigger than the other though, and takes more into account.
I just say the outer world is more real than the inner because there's more information in it, and more to work with. And you still haven't gotten around to the fact that we've traced so many aspects we attribute to consciousness to fleshy functions of the brain, which is a pretty killing blow.
I deemed it unlikely because it's fucking insane and then worked from there. If you're an ordinary citizen and you say you're being spied on by alien satellites, that's considered insane, but if you're an intellectual and you say you're a brain in a vat, somehow that's acceptable? Also, people in philosophy have been trying to reconcile the "inner world" and "outer world" for ages and I came up with a solution that I don't understand why is bewildering at all. People who like to name-drop call the problem reconciling Goethe and Kant. I think it's bewildering that non-Kantian and non-dualist worldviews aren't even fashionable in higher education at all since they're well-established and have been well-established for ages and Kant and Descartes are nearly medieval anyways so it's not like people are going with the latest theories.
(OK, I half-understand why my solution is bewildering since people aren't used to thinking like that and opening up new categories of knowledge that weren't accessible before is a huge leap, but I don't know why it's bewildering that anyone would have an original thought in principle and not even listen to it.)
Also, the dependence of aspects of consciousness on the brain is not a killing blow whatsoever. It's just a form of intentionality. Hypothetically you could put your consciousness in another brain and have a different experience, but it'd still be your consciousness, and if you lose a limb or even do something mundane like sit somewhere else the contents of your consciousness change too, but it's still your consciousness. Consciousness depending on having a material form isn't the same as consciousness arising from that particular material form. Consciousness also doesn't experience time strictly linearly which can't be explained by the substrate of consciousness at all but that's a whole other issue.
Last edited by Metamorph; 02-28-2019 at 06:52 PM.
You actually are being spied on by alien satellites. Alien in the sense of not being US satellites, which also spy on you.
Technically, but I mean like reptilians or greys sending out satellites to track and follow a person individually like a typical paranoid schizophrenic delusion, not governments using satellites to make maps or read emails and just spying on you incidentally (unless you're somehow more important than the average person, but then you're still not having a satellite tracking your every move like a space helicopter devoted specifically to you and sending beams down to make you fart while you're giving a speech.)
Remember, if you absolutely don't matter to any other human being, the Aliens are still watching you all the time. So you do matter, after all.
Beams from satellites that make people fart on cue would be awesome.
LOL, and I actually got that from not a schizophrenic but just a generic conspiracy. Some people believe satellite weapons are being developed (which is a benign enough believe) and other people tried to blame them for making them burp, itch, shake, or fart uncontrollably at inconvenient times in order to humiliate or distract them. Things that people think somehow are truth are stranger than deliberately-contrived fiction.
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