The name of this forum

It’s fun every couple years to look at the name of this place and how it has brought a certain type of global community together.
I think one late night I typed in I love philosophy, in the same way I’ve googled how I’m feeling, like googling “fuck everything”
or “i am so bored.” I don’t think I was expecting to find ilovephilosophy.com. But when i got here, I realized I was in the right place.
I had visited other philosophy forums, but this one managed to attract a certain type. We were all very different, but bound by something intangible.

So today I ask you to share why you love philosophy. Version 2015. (But first of course I want you to read why I do and tell me if you can identify at all.)

Humbly, here is where I am these days. I’ll try to be short and sweet. It’s interesting how my answer changes over the years.

WHY I LOVE PHILOSOPHY

I’m 44 years old. That’s a shitload of thinking when you are the fighting kind with a lightning mind.

My mind, like yours, and everyone’s, is exposed to more info than we can ever make full sense of, and to deal with this, we judge and simplify things into nice and neat chunks of ideas. We all do this.

The almost unavoidable byproduct of doing this, this act of condensing – the exhaust fumes, the byproduct, of this chemical separation from raw data into chunks of thought, is always going to be some measure of bias, prejudice, stereotyping, simplification. This process is condensed even further as we force our thoughts into words, yielding more byproducts. Sometimes the effect is huge and noticeable, and it makes for low hanging fruit to attack. Sometimes the effect is subtle. Sometimes we convince ourselves it’s not there at all. But it almost always is.

The curse of gifted intelligence, like most of us here, is this: sometimes the more you are able to consciously understand the world without having to process it into chunks, the more you can directly grasp a complex system of relations, the more other people’s little chunks seem disdainful, unnecessary, pixelated. The more these people seem to be stupid.

Keep in mind our view is always pixelated, too, the difference is in degree.

To the young intellect it becomes frustrating and lonely to be able to process complex systems without having to parse them into understandable chunks that yield byproducts of bias and fallacy. In order to feel less lonely, we might take to regularly arguing, debating, unpacking people’s judgements. Try to force feed them a point of view that encompasses a higher-res view of a complex system of relations. It gets tiring. You start to believe people are willfully being idiots. Let’s call it a level of judgmentalism. Not a binary “is or isn’t judgmental,” but rather a degree. We all fall somewhere on a graph, for any given subject, when it comes to a very human kind of judgement taking place.

If you are in the middle of the bell curve, primitive-level judgementalism won’t bother you as much. You may not agree with people, but your beef will be on WHAT people think and WHY, you won’t be burdened or irritated with the whole meta critique of HOW people think – which many of us recognize here as the real issue.

I think we come to ILP in search of people and discourse that’s more consistent with our own brain types. But keep in mind we all are stepping into fallacy and judgement constantly. Most of us do it on a slightly higher channel than the national norm. And there’s great variance in our community. But by and large, it’s nice to be on the same channel once in a while.

Now how does this tie back to I LOVE PHILOSOPHY?

I think there’s a very high level, a person at peace with his lot in life, and a boon to all manner of people…when you are aware of the fact that our intellectual tapestry will always be pointulism, as if God works as Seurat, we are all judging to varying degrees. Often, human reality can only exist when we pervert actual reality into something namable. We all, by process of modeling reality, yield byproducts of fallacy and bias. Some have sharper points than others. But we are all brothers in this way.

I feel that wherever you stand on the sharpness scale, we all have a hidden channel on common.

A master can learn to find this channel every time. I don’t claim to be this master, but if I take nothing away from my years at ILP it is that I have found in this ideal a worthy goal. The goal to find some intellectual common ground with everyone I meet when talking about politics, God issues, good & evil, ethics, metaphysics, the problems of life itself. And in 2015, it is the reason why I find myself loving philosophy more than ever.

Are you interesetd in the “Version 2014”? I asked the following question and put it in the topic of one of my threads on 30. July 2014: „Do you really love philosophy? - Cp.: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=186170

I totally agree with Your assessment as to why we come to appreciate a community of thinkers. I think by degrees is right, rather then via a binary process of elominating anything but what may suffice in our estimation–as to what the requirements could be? However bit by bit, degree by degree, we come to realize that such chance of happening unto someone who may exactly fit the bill is shaded, or rather is filtered by the old Humean doubt. This doube consists of, basically the internet’s grab toward a wish , which we may hope might be fullfilled, that of wanting to believe, that the person on the other side is who he says he is, not a dreamer like some. Some admit to being dreamers as a defense, and there another masking arises, that of believing i the validity of dreams. Are they real or not?

Just today, coming across a ghastly hypothesis, that good old Adolf H. was half brother of King Geroge the Sixth, not a Rothchild offspring. Ok. Right? But may this kind of assertion be as far fetched as first presents itself as some sort of naive indulgence into the suoerlative,or even the whiff of poetically inclined comic relief? Bunderies are especially difficult to ascertain, where most information is repressed into the common subconscious as arcbhytipical efforts to pre arrange some kind of intended confusion, so as to be label anything embarassing as just another conspiracy theory.

Well, well. I must say, there really are no lies, at least not outward ones, only prefabs, so as to set a stage to build more atrocious ones, which may or may give sufficient foundation to just anotherconflict or wasr here, or another embarassing and misguided political move there. Affrontary helps to even things up, where people will jump to understandable reasons why such horrendous lies go down, perfectly effecting any and all onjections which mayn occasionallt pop up. Such objectors usually and up in loonie bins, or found dead on some lonely country highway, to be forgotten and done with.

Philosophy is likely is also such a charmer, a seemingly pretty explanation to the wayladen skeptic or doubor, that hey yes, there are those special ones, the creme de la creme of intelligentsia, who have the final say, be itm myth, fiction or based on revision. Volumes written on such problems as duality, or the tenacity and veracity of Platonic forms, or of the various inversions which priorly have been considered matters of concern fo the heath and the common.

So what of it, what of any of it? The fact is, sadly, that philosophy has always been an effort to present
venarable ideas with the most stylish and embellished nomenclature as possible, and the idea behind this, is to loose readers into the various and often hidden truths which get lost in the highways and byways, the twist and turns of philosophically
cleverly hidden nomenclature.

That is not to say we don’t love to get involved i suc mystifyingand clever ways, however we dooften get frustrated in getting lost in this journey, with philosophers being killed for their beliefs, going mad by them, or made excruciatingly sad figures of contempt and ridicule.

But its all for fun, or rather, the fun of appeasing those, for whom such fancies can not attain to the
larks’ stupifying reach for the heights and lows of intelligent and emotional understanding.

What’s not to love?

I love philosophy because the more you understand about it, the more you realize that understanding philosophy leads to a greater understanding of everything else. I come to this site because in spite of my frequent disagreement with almost everyone, there’s rarely a member that I can honestly say is just plain dumb. Even the people that I hate the most, are of some reasonable level of intelligence, and so when I go to argue with them, I at least know that they’re going to stay within the confines of what intelligent people might argue. I also like the idea that this is a place where people can come who have an interest, and a layman’s vocabulary, and over time they can develop a real understanding of a great number of things in an organic, plain language kind of way. I think if every kid in every undergrad philosophy program spent a few years here first, that they’d all make much better grades and come out with their degrees actually able to build arguments and spot fallacies and the like. I could go on and on, but I’d probably just be repeating a lot of what you’ve said, Gamer. Nice OP.

Did we all get here by searching the name verbatim? Well that’s how I got here, and the why… well, I was bored, it was the summer before college, I had a lot of down time, the house to myself, and the Internet outside of AOL was still a new thing to me. I was curious about life and the point of it all, and none of my peers or the adults I knew seemed like good candidates for extended discussions. So I heard the word philosophy somewhere, I think from one of my “cool nerd” friends who read a book, and it seemed to apply to all the things I was thinking about, and then bam… ILP popped up.

From some of the writing on ILP in 2006, I could tell there were some wise people posting who had a lot more experience than I did. I finally found a place where people were talking about all these things that I wanted to talk about, and some of the more mature posters must know something about life, right? There were some younger members too and it was just cool how everybody talked to everybody about ideas and the world and about life. It was a common channel. A little intimidating at first, afraid I might actually sound like the dumb teenager I was, but there was enough good humor and civility that I opted in and began to post a bit. Then my parents found out I was spending time chatting with people on an Internet discussion board and well they didn’t see anything good in that. They couldn’t really stop me continuing to post/follow ILP, but it did dampen the experience that the most fascinating thing I just found – a place to pursue all my questions and curiosities with other people doing the same – was supposed to be off-limits to me.

Well that’s history now, and ILP has changed for me over the years, but I still come back to sink my teeth into a good thread or to talk to other human beings when it’s not working out with people I know in real life. To me it isn’t that people on ILP are any more intelligent or discriminating than other people I know, but it’s that people here want to talk about things and they are usually more blatant and spirited about ideas and what they think. It’s funny how you can get to know a bunch of people through a discussion board. It’s a great thing, too.