[size=200]Sometimes the odds matter more than the stakes.[/size]
What are the odds?
God exists: 50%
God does not exist: 50%
How is it a 50% chance?
What about all the other gods? Shouldn’t they have their percentages?
What is hell?
The point is, a belief is a belief; not an action.
One does not say “Hmmm… this belief is quite… safe and advantageous. I shall choose it.”
One just comes to a conclusion, whether they choose to or not; whichever conclusion they came to is the one they see as most probable, otherwise they would not have arrived at it. I ALREADY THINK that God doesn’t exist, so threatening me with a nonexistent Hell doesn’t scare me… get it?
If someone decided to join a religion for statistical fear of its hell, it would just be covering bases, not believing, and you gotta actually BELIEVE to go to Heaven, right?
“Billy’s not here right now.”
“Yes he is, and he will hit you with a big stick.”
“Seeing as how he’s NOT HERE to hold a stick, how will he hit me?”
“Wouldn’t it be safer, to just in case, assume he’s here?”
“Well, it would, but considering that he’s NOT HERE, it doesn’t really matter to me.”
“Well umm… it’s just as likely that he’s here that he isn’t.”
“Then isn’t it just as likely that Maxwell is here, and he’s going to bring down a silver hammer on your head?”
“No, because only Billy counts.”
“But I can see him. And the hammer. Doesn’t that make a difference.”
“No, because Billy is there, too.”
“Oh. Well why should I be afraid of the stick anyway? Nobody’s admitted to getting hit before.”
“Well it’s as likely to be large as it is small!”
“What about the sizes between? Would that make the chances of it being exactly “large” or exactly “small” infinitely tiny?”
“Well if you pretended Bill was here, you’d pretend his stick would be big too!”
“Why?”
" 'Cause Jan told us so."
“How do you know Jan isn’t lying.”
“She told us that, too.”
“Oh. Well, is there anyway for me to avoid getting hit by Bill?”
“All you have to do is know he’s there.”
“Well, can you have him wave to me, so I can see him.”
“No, that’s against the rules; Bill won’t do that.”
“Then could I find Bill if I searched the house you claim he is in with us?”
“No.”
“Well, assuming I find him, what do I have to do?”
“Well, you can’t make some sounds, and you have to make everyone else find Bill.”
“How do I do that if I can’t show them?”
“You can show them, just not with any senses. You just have to CONVINCE them…”
“I don’t see any reason for Bill to be here.”
“He wants to.”
“Then why do you think he’s here.”
" 'Cos it’s less risky for me."
How is it a 50% chance?
What about all the other gods? I don’t believe in other Gods.Shouldn’t they have their percentages?
What is hell? I don’t know.
The point is, a belief is a belief; not an action Belief is action.
One does not say “Hmmm… this belief is quite… safe and advantageous. I shall choose it.”
One just comes to a conclusion, whether they choose to or not; whichever conclusion they came to is the one they see as most probable, otherwise they would not have arrived at it. Huh. That is what I’m doing.I ALREADY THINK that God doesn’t exist, so threatening me with a nonexistent Hell doesn’t scare me… get it? Good.If someone decided to join a religion for statistical fear of its hell, it would just be covering bases, not believing, (why, what’s the difference?) and you gotta actually BELIEVE to go to Heaven, right? I don’t know how much you have to believe.
Hi James No 2 - New day, new way, forgive me if I pluck a few bits and bobs out of sequence…
Hmm… I think there is, I think we are all effectively unique. Allow me to illustrate the point with large day-glow crayons…
We exist within the universe. As far as we can allow ourselves to wholeheartedly believe, the universe had a beginning, extrapolated backward from current rate of observed expansion, this at least implies an eventual ending, either in big crunch or entropic stasis. ie: We believe the universe is finite.
Now, I accept that in a large enough array, anything not impossible becomes inevitable. But I’d wager myself that the odds of another being, exactly duplicating the current state of my molecular structure, right down to the last subtley spinning quark, are so long that even this universe is not a large enough array to compensate. I’d bet my actual stable-energy doppleganger does not exist.
Even if it did, would the quixotic standing wave identity running through its synapses resemble my own…?
- Go - find two footballs. Christen one of them “past/present universe” and one “could be future universe” Make two paper cones, and fit them on top. With some round-ended scissors cut out a human figure. Place the two cone-footballs so the points of the cones touch either side of the figure.
ie: O>
<O
Now the cone leading from the past/present to the figure contains all the myriad cause-event chains in the universe that have ever been. The cone leading away from the figure to the could-be-future contains all the possible reactions, and the knock-on effects which would change the could-be future. Not just my future, but the whole future of the universe.
The figure (all of us individually) at any given moment, is the focal point at which everything past and present, gives birth to the future. Take for example, a bird, crapping on my head. There are a multitude of past effectors that placed me on that exact spot, at that exact moment. The same goes for the bird, all the way back to the big bang. If energy clump B had swung fractionly, for want of a better word, up instead of down, perhaps I’d have been a second later, or I might have been a giraffe, or a patch of hydrogen mist on a comet. You know the determinism spiel. But let me carry on anyway.
Say I was 3, and the poop landed in my eye and gave me conjunctivitus. This left me with a morbid fear of birds. But also a strange fascination which eventually leads me to invent a working hyperdrive engine…
My point is that the chances of me being not unique, are greater than those of my being unique. If you haven’t fallen asleep by now… 
Yes, yes - I remember your thread with Dunamis about the lack of original invention and the lack of even an inventor. I agreed with your idea that there is no invention beyond a reshufflement and reconfiguration of existant forms and relationships (though you did lose me on the inventor side)… The way I think/process perception into concept and reaction is based around my ‘identity’ and the physical experiences/memetic absorptions that shaped it. I think you talked about the unthinking pinball nature of the formation of day to day identity, and again I agree, there is or can be very little choice in the way we turn out, only a series of unfortunate or serendipitous reactions.
But… I think, if we can eventually recognize this gigantic pinball machine for what it is and then maintain an awareness, a constant vigilance of how experience moulds/has moulded us, and why we have become the way we are through a good understanding of self, we can short-circuit the purely reactive reflex and give a little cohesive narrative to our existance/identity - at least put the merest fingertip on the tiller of life. (Go away hard determinists - leave my illusions alone… 
)
In that small way my thinking is my own.
So - laziness is the taking of the finger off the tiller, and denigration of self, an abandonment of the development of self, from something personal and in some way originally, chosen… To the shackling of yourself to a book filled with the limited dogmatic principles of others, and slapping the hands of the three monkies over your relavent orifices. Purely personally - a surrenderment, an admission that “I’m not clever enough to deal with all this shit by myself… Can someone please hand me the answer sheet…?” Lazy, and lacking a confidence in self.
Sorry - it’s bound to be wonky, all GUT theories about life the universe and everything are wonky by definition, since there are always things that we cannot be certain about - the existance/none existance of some omnipotent [insert proper-noun here] being one of the biggies. (The existance/none existance of next tuesday being one of the smallies.)
Philosophies are like pop-songs, they need updating for each new generation. Some themes don’t change, agreed, but the expressions of those themes warp and wind with the music of the day.
Best wishes, and a happy new year,
Tab. (No 1 [size=75]and only[/size])
Sounds like you are embracing God because you aren’t strong enough to handle a world that is random and chaotic, or to invent your own purpose in life. Even if you believe in God, you should still be able to exist happily if you found out it wasn’t true. That’s one of the biggest arguments against religious belief - that people just invent it because they can’t handle the real world.
You have to ask which god period.
Is the muslim god right? the mormon god? the norse god? the mayan god?
Let’s go get a virgin to sacrifice to make god happy.
Pascal’s wager also implies god is a dunder head. You’re only believing in him because the odds were against you not believing in him.
If there is a god, he’s laughing at us wondering if there is a god. and also laughing at the human invention of hell.
Tabula Rasa
Ahh… Predictable response. How to reply…? Didn’t read the whole first section; guessing it goes a little like this;
“We are all unique on a molecular level so therefore I am going to infer invalidly that we are all unique intellectually, too.”
Seeing though as you seem to have recognized even as you wrote that your argument was invalid (how admirably prescient, btw), I will pass on to the next bit of your response.
My point was merely to emphasise how one needs to reflect on the meaning of the emboldened words here. You will never experience anything which you are incapable of experiencing - nothing, in any case, which is ‘wholly foreign’. The ‘new’ is not simply structured by the ‘old’, but is a part of it. It is one single movement, and the only way that it gains direction (‘cohesive narrative’ etc) - the only way that you gain your bearings, as such - is by first understanding where you are to begin with. This always means confronting your inheritance.
Hard determinists having nothing to say here. This isn’t about escaping your situated-ness, but approaching it in the right way. There is no disembodied subject here; hence no will free from causation, hence no confrontation with anything called ‘determinism’.
You do though keep emphasing the centrality of the ‘self’, as opposed to the ‘thick-headedness’ (those idiots 
) of anyone who takes their ‘dogmatic principles from others’. We don’t create our own answers. We create answers (not out of thin air) which define the ‘our own’ to begin with, and this reciprocal process only ends at death. Our ability to ‘work it out for ourselves’ is wholly contingent, and the reason you seem not to mind this is probably because you are begging the question against the supposed ‘truth’ of these dogmas. Of course you are, I suppose.
Everyone expends themselves to the best of their abilities - where, and on what though, is not necessarily determined by this prescription, in the way you seem to think. Sure though, people who read the Bible are just lazy and lack confidence to work out the answers for themselves. Now pass the physics book, I want to find out if it’s theoretically possible for Tab’s head to be so far up his…
Ahem. (I kid I kid)
Refutation No. 2354: You are still using this word ‘original’, as in ‘originally chosen’, even though I have argued that to be original is to ‘attend to the origin’; a definition which does not necessarily conflict with adopting, as your own, answers which were devised by others. The key emphasis in this sentence is on what it means to ‘make it your own’.
In fact, you seem to think that the only way to avoid ‘denigration of self’ is to come up with something which no one else has ever thought of before. I doubt you would agree that this is your position. How do you qualify it, then?
In any case, My response is that, to choose originally means not to jump out of history into some fantasy land where everyone is the leader of his own single-member philosophical or religious sect; but merely to appropriate from the past ideas and answers in a knowing way, rather than having them appropriate you.
Peace and Joy, Merry Christmas, Shalom etc,
James (No 2 - [size=84]but who’s counting?[/size])
Oh James… So impolite not to read my scribblings, they may be naive philosophically, but I would hope, are always worth the effort of running your eyes over… There were diagrams and everything… 
Now - go back and speed read…
“We are all unique on a molecular level so therefore I am going to infer invalidly that we are all unique intellectually, too.”
Okay - The molecular arguement is the first that speeds to mind. Quite simply because it does imply some form of uniqueness, upon which I suppose you agree. As to the invalid inferral of intellectual uniqueness, the wibbling afterwards tried to establish a reasonable footing - that from the huge array of combined variables (predicting doom-laden voice: “There are no variables - shit goes down as it was always going to go down…”) that goes into making me into me, generates a huge unlikelyhood that those same events would occur in the same exact sequence to anything else to make being A into me too… An idea I still think holds a little metaphysical water. But perhaps you speak a different language to the rather nuts and bolts biological one I speak, that of weighted connectivity, neural nets and dynamic equilibria.
Anyway, different strokes for different folks.
Hmm… I suppose my hope you wouldn’t pick me up on this was always going to be in vain - I did indeed realize the futility of that line of thought, but got carried away with fingers and tillers… I like boats - shoot me…
Agreed, we sit on the shoulders of others and heap more thought upon their heads. I pretty much implied I was with you on that with the ‘lack of true invention’ bit. But - I don’t know, it seems quite obvious to me, that with the mind-boggling number of memes available up in the ether these days, to be sampled, combined and blended in the cauldrons of our craniums, that the odds are that no two people ever think exactly alike, have the same set of weightings in their neural nets to produce the same thoughts and answers from a given set of stimuli.
No, very nearly everyone sits on their ever spreading behinds and expends their income on cable TV. This is my problem with dogma, credo and other formats of advertizing. Read a theory, durge a littany, watch a MacDonalds “I’m lovin’ it…” advert enough times and does have an effect on your brain-chemistry, wether you like it or not, wether you scoff or not.
Hit the joy-buzzer on synaptic connections burger-happy-face-beautiful woman enough times and it lays down an almost involuntry reflex, it passes from the conscious, which at least ‘we’ have some form of control over, into the unconscious autopilot - think of it as how you learned to drive. Do you think - or simply do it…?
The same with dogma - the driving lessons for the soul. Fill your thinking with enough of it, and soon enough, it becomes your thinking. Think cults - think about how hard it is to deprogram someone.
You miss the entirety of my deep distrust of books of the none-fiction variety… 
- Anyone, who looks only into the words of another for answers pertinant to the uniqueness of themselves, is throwing away their one chance to become something new. Rather than some memetic puppet-clone of another.
Your first words - “Predictable response.” - believe it or not - the molecular arguement that struck me, is not something from a book I read - but something, as is my usual (and admittedly usually unsuccessful) way of posting here, I came up with on the spur… My point - was my answer one you were expecting, or like the chessmaster you are, one that you’d seen as a classic riposte to an equally classic assertion…? Do you think of anything for yourself…? Or recycle joylessly old arguements from dry and dusty tomes…?
Very well - I was predictable, but for me, it was still something new, an avenue previously unexplored. Do you see the difference…? Do you see the joy in discovering, rather than being told…?
At least my head’s firmly up my own ass, and not anyone else’s…
Is this my position…? Yes and no - The only way to avoid denigration of self is to come up with something old, that has been thought of before - but by yourself… If you get my drift. I’m patient - something new would be nice, but I’ll settle in the meantime, for something old newly constructed in my uniquely haphazard fashion - only then can I call it mine.
This is exactly the fantasy land I inhabit… It may not be right, it may not reflect objective reality, but who cares…? The view is nice, all the rainbows are my own work, and reality will take care of itself. Who knows…? I may even stumble backwards over the reality of things myself one day.
Now - put the book down, and step away…
Tabâ„¢ - limited edition…
Figured I’d add my 2 cents:
Pascal’s Wager is a very weak argument for believing in god. He makes his argument on complete assumptions, such as if god does exist then automatically heaven and hell exist. He gives no reason as to why these two “places” exist automatically, he just makes the assumption that if God does, they do.
Furthermore, Pascal also assumes that believing in god alone is enough to get into heaven. This is another assumption. For all we know god might only allow christians in heaven, muslims, etc. (though I doubt this is the case, if a god does indeed exist)
I never saw why people even consider Pascal’s wager as noteworthy…
Tabula Rasa
Don’t worry I read your initial post. Eventually.
…
Some thoughts, from me, to you.
What does it mean for something to be ‘worth running my eyes over’? I often think. Is it that I anticipate something which I haven’t thought of? Or maybe it’s because I expect something interesting or humorous? It seems like a normative or methodological point; some people just don’t count as ‘worth reading’. And we arrive at these conclusions, vis-a-vis particular people, for all sorts of reasons. We cannot read everything that is written on this forum, let alone everything that is written, period. Are we then impolite? Not necessarily.
There is a certain personal side to this, which is inescapable. It is usually the person that says it that determines what is said. The appearance of simularity in word-use belies that each time the word is used, it is forced into a new context which includes an author/authored assumption of interpretative charity - we read the other as if he were coherent, and as if everything he said were correct. We start with the whole picture as well as the parts, and aim to keep them integrated. What counts as an ‘inconsistency’ or ‘error’ only emerges within this context.
Taking the person into account allows you to understand their ‘shorthand’, the line between what they articulate and what remains unspoken.
I have always, to an extent, prejudged the content of what I read beforehand, if by no other measure than by the fact that it has a certain person’s name attached to it. For instance, I do not pay much attention to, say (glances through the thread), KidA41. It is, to literalize someone else’s parodic characterisization, not that what they say isn’t right, but that what they do not say is wrong. Or something like that.
Beneath a single sentence post is a whole conceptual morass, and the only way to avoid explicitly stating all of it over and over again, for each seperate conversation, is to simply assume it and use it to build on your understanding of the way the other poster is using language.
I couldn’t say that your post, just now, was particularly enlightening. There is though a certain obligation which is not the same as that which says; ‘you better pay attention - you might learn something’. You put the effort in, and so I read. And it was enjoyable in its own way. It is quite besides the point that it says nothing new to me. This is not to say that it is always this way. It is not to say anything at all about this question.
It becomes clear very quickly, when approaching a given post, on what level I will be able to engage with it. It is often the case that an impasse is reached in the first exchange - an ‘impasse’ meaning nothing more than ‘it would take too long to establish a common ground from which then to argue the deficieny of your viewpoint’.
Believe me though, I do sense something of what I would have to say to at least give you a proper idea of my position - even if all that this would accomplish would be to furnish you with a better idea of what it is you are disagreeing with. 
…
In any case, the so-called ‘molecular argument’ is misconceived. Everything is made out of the same core constituents. It is the same. Everything is configured in ever-renewing ways. Nothing is the same. Both viewpoints are in a sense ‘correct’. It is simply a case of shifting the scale of your description. Neither though says anything really about ‘uniqueness’. I can wear a 1950’s sweater now and be unique, even though it’s the same sweater that my grandfather conformed to convention with, back in his day. My (hypothetical) twin brother can do the same thing in Cardiganistan, and be decidedly lacking in uniqueness.
Scales of analysis. Don’t want to confuse them.
Or here’s another answer;
There is no unique particular. The particular is an instance of the general. The configuration can be unique, but we have already assumed a conceptual apparatus based in categorical distinctions and relations of simularity, essence, etc.
Oh come on… this is a big no no. Using a kind of crude conceptual atomism to ground the idea that we are unique. There’s no metaphysical water being held here.
There is no raw stimuli. Either you are way off here, or I am. This paragraph strikes me as an absolute mess. What you see as ‘your own’, originally articulated and formed position, strikes me a series of positions which are not compatible with one another, put together and asserted as if they are, and done so unreflectively.
My expectation is directed towards you. You are a conglomerate of different discourses. You take noises from different descriptions and reuse them, intend certain of their meanings, dis-intend others, and are not aware of yet others. What you said does not come directly from a book in any straight forward manner. But it is not without origin. Something cannot be made out of nothing. There is no hole in the fabric of the cosmos where God whispers into your ear fresh and original ideas. That you cannot account for the spontaneity of your thought does not mean that it is sponteneous, disembodied, or elsewise detached from causative influences. You are a medium for the memes - if you want to use that particular language - they speak through you, you do not speak ‘with’ them. You are never entirely aware of what you are saying, though you may become more or less aware given the circumstance. I did not expect your answer because I have read our entire conversation in a text book. I expected it because it conforms to the picture which I have of you, and because in forming my original arguments, I necessarily pre-conceived the possible responses; not as some incidental after-thought, but as an essential aspect of what I was saying to begin with . There is no argument outside of its contextualisation between author and audience.
It matters not that you ‘feel’ it to be original. If you only want this originality than you needn’t rely on biology to bolster your arguments. It is simply the originality of ignorance. So yes, I agree, one must set out to ‘discover’ things for themselves. Yet this involves confronting material (including textbooks), confronting tradition etc. There is no space outside of this for your subjective sense of originality - just because it is a ‘first’ for you, does not make it a ‘first’, unless you wish to deflate the notion of ‘uniqueness’ right down to the naked assertion of the irreducibility of the particular against the general. Which is false anyway, unless perhaps you keep it enclosed in a purely molecular discourse, or else argue that it is the configurations, and not the base components, which are ‘ever original’. My point here would be that the configurations only appear once you have accepted the logic and content of the particular and the general, and that this logic does not fall from the heavens, but comes itself from tradition.
Those that do not learn the mistakes of the past, are destined to repeat them.
Regards,
Jamesâ„¢ - [size=84]More of the Same, only Different.[/size]
Well - in your case, I like reading you around the forums for the first reason, and hope, in my case - you read my stuff for the second… 
I wasn’t saying that anything I write will of necessity be “of a particularly enlightening” content, especially enlightening-straight-philosophic-content - I was more miffed that I put the effort into wrapping the same old crap up in colourful paper, for you to unwrap, even if the items inside go straight in the bin.
Only if you tell them directly… 
Aye - but the trouble is people, through lack of adequate knowledge of their ‘opponent’ - and for the sake of politness perhaps, err - and aim just a little over where they expect their heads to be…
Longhand for - “hey stupid, I can’t be bothered to walk back down to your level, and it would take you too long to climb up to mine…” 
You talk over my head, and I talk under yours. We are both very good at it…
I argue the value of (my) ignorance at a certain level… Because, well, I have too, I’ve worked hard to be this stupid … Just as you, defend the value of education, because its something you’ve put your energy into…
Look - James, banter aside, don’t get me wrong - I like you - you’re a more easy-on-the-eyes version of Dunamis. I look out for your posts on the forums, and follow them, if I connect with the thread-topic under discussion. (Which admittedly, is not often.)
I do not kid myself that I am in your, or Dunamis’s league, regarding philosophy and critical thinking, or even in terms of your use of language. You seem to swim with ease through a deeper metaphysical current, where I flouder around to pull out any kind of understanding. Or sometimes in the more abstract discussions - even an understanding of why I should bother trying to understand.
But, you never really learn from other people’s mistakes, without making them yourself first… And - Hell - we’re not talking the transparant “Doh - I shouldn’t have sent my cavalry against that bunch of archers on the hilltop there in broard daylight” kind of mistakes here are we…? - no-one’s going to die if Tabula doesn’t understand exactly what
this means for example…
And that is quite good enough for me. What do you expect…? For me to mope…? “Oh dear I’m nothing but a pile of hand-me-downs…” No-no, for me, the Emperor’s clothes are just fine… Especially in the climate I live in.
See you in Mundane, Brainiac… [size=75](Stubs out fag on James’ Blazer, cracks knuckles - vaults into beaten-up clunker, wheel-spins into the night…)[/size]
Tabâ„¢ - [size=75][minty-fresh, in the box, brain only slightly used][/size]
Ps: I forgot to ask, what would you accept as an arguement for “Uniqueness”…?
Tab,
“…a more easy-on-the-eyes version of Dunamis”
Damn, that’s cold.
Dunamis
Sorry James,
I re-read your post, and my post strikes me now as a little ungrateful, thankyou for taking the time to restate your positon at greater length, and with words of less syllables…
That was what I was thinking actually. I realize that there are limitations placed on the ‘unique’ by the rules and regs of the frame of reference it occupies, the set of objects it is contextualized by, and the nature of the being that deems it ‘unique’… And that the ‘appearance’ of something absolutely unique and hitherto unknown and unknowable - would probably send the perciever stark-raving “Mummy I made wee-wee” mad…
But I’m still thick-headed enough (and optimistic) to believe in the possibility (which yes, I realize is a little ironic to admit in a thread about the doofusness of Pascal’s Wager)
I think my trouble started when I was dabbling in painting, I hated the technical side, and the art history side of it, and still believe that to crowd your creativity (originality ) with too much of the old masters work, also clouds your pallette. Perhaps philosophy is not an art but a science…?
Anyroad, my Australian friend, perhaps one day you and I will find something to argue about on equal footing, until then…
- Hey - Summer’s over, now begins the long cold winter of discontent…
Reminds me of that time at Christmas when I…
…
…
…
…and so anyway, that’s how I saved Christmas. Cool story huh?
Ah well you see this is one way of reading it. However I did not say “from which to establish the deficiency of your viewpoint” but rather “from which to argue the deficiency of your viewpoint”. The move towards greater communicative ability is often, if not usually, the move towards greater disagreement, rather then greater agreement. And in both cases, it is the move towards ‘greater legitimacy’ in (dis)agreement, rather than shadow boxing. I get the same problem with Dunamis, too.
Nonsense. You’ve simply failed to adequately triangulate the objectivity of my immanentist, descriptivistic objections. It’s high time I force-fed you another Spinoza sandwich; when I’m done with you, you’ll be screaming the ontological argument, in Latin, whilst breaking large stones betwixt your butt-cheeks. Upside down.
Sure you do. You are just using the word ‘learn’ in more hollowed-out sense than me.
As for the rest of your response(s), it had me chuckling. You’re probably cleverer than that, though.
You see, in my eyes you are actually thinking the notion of ‘uniqueness’ in a rather particular manner. All this stuff you say about how you’re being ‘optimistic’, and how ‘ignorance is bliss’ - this is only possible because you have accepted as a reference point for your ‘follies’ the ‘inescapable self evidence’ of a particular description, a particular explanation which you have pilfered from this and that ‘scientific’ domain. Your ignorance is actually a kind of faith in certain things which, by your own admittance, you are not particularly well acquainted with. This for me does not equate to ‘original’ or ‘free’ thinking, but a kind of conformist modesty (but also a kind of pretension) whose ‘authority’ over your world-view defines the way in which you construct your identity; a series of splintered resistances to things you don’t like, but which you nonetheless accept as being both valid in their domain, and validly applied to yourself and your situation. And I would really only agree with you on the first.
No wonder then that someone like Dunamis comes along and thinks “Pfff… You call that ‘free-thinking’?”
It is not so much that I expect you to be unhappy if you are not Einstein, more perhaps that, if you have the curiosity or the desire, you should not give up on yourself so easily. I guess it’s a big ‘if’.
Anyway, being unique is one of those things you do when your intent on writing a story called ‘My Identity’, and you’re pulling at your hair worrying that the script is gonna be more like Batman and Robin than Batman Begins. I stopped worrying about ‘being unique’ a long time ago. It’s like that scene from the Simpsons;
Bart: “You’re not cool, Homer.”
Marge: “What about me, kids?”
Lisa/Bart: “Nope.”
Marge: “Well good. I don’t mind being uncool. And that’s what makes me cool, right?”
Lisa/Bart: “Nope.”
Generally, I guess, the ‘unique’ arises on the back of a sort of amnesia; but it is also caught up in a certain schematization of objective/subjective, where it pulls at both domains and exists in a kind of limbo, which is probably definitive of its mysterious allure. As soon as we put it in these terms, the unique becomes a matter of power.
What I was talking about above though was originality, not uniqueness.
Anyway, the sun’s rising outside my window, I’ve finished my daily German lesson, and Gadamer beckons. “Gad…? Who?..” Exactly.
Regards,
Jamesâ„¢ - [size=84][pre-order now and we’ll throw in this free set of stainless steel kitchen knives!][/size]
p.s. btw, you spelt ‘argument’ wrong. Shame.
Not quite - More like “Gad…? Who cares…?”
Well, anyway, I’ll keep my mysterious allure a while longer,
Nice talking to ya, remind me to come back when I need my Weltanschauung ham-stringing again…
Tabâ„¢ [size=75][Probably cleverer than that…][/size]
Cheers.
James
James,
You gotta update your profile. The term is “biatch”.
Dunamis
Kant was not black (literally or by cultural affiliation), nor did he partake in any recognisably “gang-sta” activities, i.e. such as hip hop music, or pimping. On the contrary, he was a proper German fellow who avoided such immoral things as racial stereotyping or sex. Actually, as a matter of fact, he was rather good at avoiding the second in particular. Not like that Wittgenstein chap. Oh no sir! You won’t catch our Immanuel marauding the streets around Cambridge, hungry for arse (or is that ‘ass’?). In fact, you won’t even catch Immanuel leaving Konigsberg at all. Guess that was a little too ‘progressive’ for his tastes.
On the contrary, the ‘Crusher from Prussia’ (as he is known amongst the particularly nerdy), was rather more adept at retaining the contents of his anus, than obtaining the contents of others. In fact, he probably thought ‘intercourse’ was the meal between entree and main (sauerkraut, no doubt).
So in conclusion, Kant was certainly not any kind of ‘bad mother fucker’. In fact there is probably a sense in which he lacked all three requirements for this, rather than just the two obvious ones. We must remember Camus’ characterisation of Sartre; “he writes as if he has no mother”. Kant was the very best of philosophical animals. Anaemic, asexual, and (of course), German. If he were a porn star, Ayn Rand wouldn’t even be worthy of maintaining his manliness in-between shoots.*
If they ever made a movie about Kant, it should star Arnold Schwarzenegger.
[size=75](*And a big thanks goes out to Shyster for relating her personal anecdotes on this particular need… I feel now that I can die without regrets.)[/size]
Regards,
James
p.s. Do you think I could meet Arnold if I rocked up at the Governor’s HQ? I have met my (now former) Premier. I’ve been wondering whether Arnold would have to make himself ‘more accessible’ because he’s governor…
p.p.s If you are a connoisseur of fine Schwarzenegger humor, I recommend this;
James,
Kant was not black
Oh…you were quoting Kant. I didn’t realize. I would say though, if you are translating Kant, the homologous relationship between Hipster and Kantese is probably closer than one might think.
Ayn Rand wouldn’t even be worthy of maintaining his manliness in-between shoots
I believe the technical term for this is “fluffer”. But if Ayn Rand wouldn’t even be Kant’s fluffer, why is she your bitch, but cannot be your biatch. I’m not sure I follow your gag-logic here.
We must remember Camus’ characterisation of Sartre; “he writes as if he has no mother”.
Remarkably, he also writes as if detrop had no mother as well.
Dunamis