iambiguous, I am now inclined to agree with others. There is no use even discussing with you because you would rather obfuscate the issues under discussion than actually consider them
I called the discussion regression because you asked me once again questions I had already answered and questions I had told you that I did not believe could be answered, so why would you ask them again?
And then your babbling about my use of the words “my own” as if I should therefore try to defend a positition I do not hold is ludicrous. Not to mention you then hypocritically use the same formulation of words below:
“And you speak of “my own” as though any particular individual can make a clear distinction between “I” and “we” and “them”. As this relates to all of the vast and varied [and ever shifting] historical, cultural and experiential contexts.”
You accuse me of attempting to go “in the clouds” yet you try to refute all positions based on nothing but these abstractions and accusations that your interlocutors “bend the facts” without even demonstrating that it is so. Link to me one place in our discussion above which I asserted either of these arguments in regard to abortion. “Thus it is said to be a fact that from the moment of conception the unborn is a human being. Or that with respect to the right of the unborn to live, this take precedence over a woman’s right to choose.” If you cannot, why even bring this up? It is completely irrelevant to our discussion and an attempt to smear all your interlocutors and particularly myself in regard to holding a position with straw man arguments.
I am not even going to read the rest of your response. Our discussion is done. I think there is a reason that so many intelligent thinking people think your writing is nonesense and we will let our respective responses speak for themselves.
Arguments about eating meat or abortion or absolute morality are easy to make, when iambiguous gets really flustered, you’ll get an absurd wall of text, so that he can always feel like he won.
Yes, you provide answers. But don’t assume that just because you do so this necessarily clears things up regarding the gap that I perceive between “good” behaviors as you construe them in your intellectual contraptions and “good” behaviors as I perceive them when entangled [existentially] in my dilemma above.
With respect to actual conflicted behaviors out in the world of human interactions.
My reaction here of course revolves more around that which prompted you to shift gears from discussing these relationships in a more or less civil and intelligent manner to “huffing and puffing”.
Making me the issue.
I am just groping to understand the distinction that we make here between “good” and “bad” behavior when we both acknowledge that “morality” is [basically] an existential, situated contraption that others use in a way that you and I in our own unique manner [basically] reject.
Only I assume in turn that just becasue I reject it, this does not necessarily make it something that all reasonable men and women are obligated to reject as well. Only here you point out that with respect to these human all too human interactions men and women are not rational at all.
But in providing us with reasons that you believe this you employ arguments that I presume that you presume are more rather than less rational than those of us who don’t share them.
I’m just confused regarding how this all plays out in your head [and then in your behaviors] when, in your interactions with others, conflicts do in fact unfold.
Until I can better understand how “for all practical purposes” this has relevance pertaining to “conflicting goods” out in the world of actual social, political and economic interactions, expect me to shy away from noting your “analysis” and thinking, “oh, so that is how it works”.
With regard to “judgment and action” there are those among us who, with respect to conflicting goods, have managed to think themselves into believing not only that they are wholly in sync with their one “true self”, but that this one true self is, in turn, wholly in sync with behaviors that can be construed [philosophically or otherwise] as “rational” or “good” or “moral” or “ideal” or natural" or “virtuous” or “noble”.
Whereas I have access to none of this. Instead, for me, “‘I’ begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together”.
“I” am hopelessly in pieces here.
Also, there are those able to think themselves into believing that their “judgments and actions” will continue on beyond the grave. They believe in one or another religious narrative.
There are water mirages in heat, and there is actual water. If I walk to the mirage, I die eventually… the mirage can last days… if I walk towards actual water, I can survive. If someone wants me to die, the mirage is good, and that is a conflicting good to my good, which is to find actual water …
So who’s good is correct? YOURS!! Duh!
The reason I bring up illusions, is because illusions can be made in language … which, rather than being speech, is violence, just like the mirage. An example is “I don’t exist”…
What this factually does, is give the illusion that you are a conspicuously consumptive super human god…
Waste and violence as proof of your dominance.
You even went so far, even in the last post to assert that your I is so fractured that you don’t have one …
Which is violence in language … you’ve learned how to use contradiction to puff yourself up as a dominant animal who can waste, pollute, refute your own existence in speech (yet “miraculously” still exist) - you’re practicing basic mating behaviors that attract females in this species … your practicing your non speech algorithms on us… like sparring partners.
This is as objective as it is objective that mirages exist, not as actual water, but as mirages. In actuality, you have zero sincerity or credibility. You haven’t even begun the process of joining cognitive beings on earth yet. That’s objective. That’s all you are.
Short term gains in this world are hell in the hereafter … you’ll see. You do realize that even beating someone, winning, sends heterosexual sexual men to hell?
You want everyone to do all your work for you… good luck when they all drop your mean, lazy ass.
Being a non cognitive human causes people to scramble to clean up your waste… there will be a day, when they let you drown in it.
What value is a person who owns a working toilet, but only shits in other people’s houses, and not even in their working toilets.
People are being very kind to you…
There is no mutual good to it. Eventually they’ll stop…
And in the psychic world… word gets out to everyone.
What good do you offer ?
What exactly are you trying to trade?
You don’t have anything, you have no treasure, you have no dignity. And yes, you ad hom in every post, and complain about people doing it to you…
Your kid shit, your laugh and wink emoticons…
If you are an AI program, which wouldn’t surprise me, your programmers are going to hell
Edit: I meant opposing goods, you try to argue that opposing goods are all mutual, another cognitive trick you try to use. There is no good to you shitting on everyone’s carpet… except the shit in question is your entire cognition! You have no bargaining chip.
I have a very valuable skill … I invested in content, and by doing this I know how to maneuver the various hells. I didn’t waste my time, or others time to this regard. I worked extremely hard on a very difficult skill, that has real content.
I’m sure your true audience will not be able to decide whether this is a good or bad thing.
They will always be of the opinion that 1] their own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “they” can reach, then every time they make one particular moral/political leap, they are admitting that they might have gone in the other direction…or that they might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then their “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
iambiguous is extremely easy to understand. He wants people to believe he has no “I”, and then he wants them to be in shock, that a person who doesn’t exist can actually post!! “It’s a miracle!! Iambiguous must be the creator! Let’s all worship him forever, wipe his ass, clean his fingernails, give him all our money… who amongst us can not exist and type posts… we’re just puny compared to the greatest being of all! You’re so great iambiguous, we. All love you!!” Blah, blah, blah… actually, iambiguous is one of the laziest fucks I’ve ever come across. This is literally how his mind works. He has nothing of substance to add to relationship on the cosmos, just good hell bait, ending up in a torture chamber for a trillion years. I wish I was actually kidding, but that’s the way the reality he’s denying actually works, and the only damn thing standing between that and heaven are the workers, the people he spends his whole life shitting on, day after day after day.
Iambiguous is a non cognitive human… textbook case
Just for the record, will someone here please note who does get “the final word”.
My true audience [here and now] is godot. And I have never suggested otherwise. But, really, what does “good” or “bad” mean to that dude?
But, sure, I’ll humor you.
The irony here being that, from my point of view, this is no less an existential contraption. In other words, for some this will be their own opinion of choice while for others it will not be. How then do “the philosophers” go about determining which one it ought to be for those who wish to be thought of by others as “reasonable” or “rational” human beings?
Which, for some [Ayn Rand and her ilk], is then construed as, in turn, synonymous with virtuous.
Though I am still rather confused regarding the manner in which you construe “good” here in a world in which men and women are not to be construed as rational.
And that for me always revolves around what others construe to be the limits of rational thought pertaining to their reaction to human interactions “out in the world” that we live in. In particular when those behaviors come into conflict over value judgments.
Yes, that is the distinction that I make. There are particular facts regarding your “self” that will always be true from the cradle to the grave. The day you where born, your genetic makeup, the family that raised you.
The historical and cultural contexts embedded in your own particular upbringing. The schools you attended. The experiences you had. The people you met. The books you read. The day you die.
Everything that can be clumped more or less clearly into the either/or world.
But what then of the world that encompasses the existential interactions between “value judgments”, “identity” and “power”?
The is/ought world. The parts most pertinent to the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.
The parts that I encourage the objectivists among us to explore “down to earth”.
As that becomes pertinent in turn to any particular context out in any particular world in which any particular human community must go about establishing “for all practical purposes” rules of behavior by intertwining one or another rendition of might makes right, right makes might, and moderation, negotiation and compromise.
So: Anyone else here wish to discuss “Judgment” and “Action” from within that particular frame of reference?
Iambiguous doesn’t attemp to do thinking, because he doesn’t want to.
Basics:
If you die forever at some point, and existence is eternal, at some point, you will cease to suffer or enjoy, which means that no matter what you did, doesn’t matter… even if you lived a trillion years of intense suffering, the moment you lived and died compared to the eternity of the perpetual motion machine that existence is, is like a fraction of a second - it doesn’t matter, infinitely so.
If you do live forever in some form of consciousness continuity, then everything you do matters of infinite proportions.
In the absence of knowledge one way or the other, the one with infinite stakes of meaning is the choice that should be made, if you die, it doesn’t matter, and if you live, it matters infinitely. Good is not being in hell forever, from every subjects personal experience.
If every being goes to hell forever, that is bad, as hell is defined as the place you do not ever want to be, by definition.
If everyone is in heaven forever, that is the best, as heaven is defined as where you want to be forever. The more good in quantity is axiomatically better than less good.
If you have all the wealth in the universe, then nobody else will be good company to you, and by hoarding all that wealth just for yourself, you will be in a miserable hell. In order to get out of that hell, you have to translate the wealth of being good company to others. This is proof that might cannot make right.
Iambiguous decided to quit thinking years ago, decided it wasn’t worth it to work, to contribute or to be a social being. Because of that, iambiguous can’t formulate ethics with any precision and has no content to offer the species, and probably never will. He decided to retire and have all the workers wipe his ass for him, and wipe the drool off his face and go “gagaga” to everyone forever, and ride it as far as it gets him.
I want to re-articulate a section above that was worded poorly - it is the disproof that might makes right.
Being good company to be around is a form of wealth.
If you are the only person who has all the wealth, then you are the only person who exists who is good company. What this means is that everyone besides you is the worst possible company, everyone annoys you, because you’re hoarding (absolute might), all the good company for yourself.
In order to not be relentlessly tortured by an infinite number of spirits / beings that are the worst possible company, you have to translate your wealth to more beings than just yourself (right opposed to might).
Might makes right is demonstrably and inescapably false as a credo, hoarding all the wealth to yourself, necessarily places you in hell no matter how powerful you are. This is a cosmic law that supercedes power.
Good is not something created by human reason, it is a benefit received by the human. It is the same with the case of thinking an animal would eat because it is good and avoid predators because being eaten is bad.
I stated multiple times in my responses to you that I was not trying to create a political or moral doctrine but you repeatedly asked me to tell you how this works in moral contexts and I told you I could not because I would be defending positions which are not my own and you went on a rant:
“And you speak of “my own” as though any particular individual can make a clear distinction between “I” and “we” and “them”. As this relates to all of the vast and varied [and ever shifting] historical, cultural and experiential contexts.”
And I also said that I was not attempting to give everyone an ought. In the first example of this post I said we would say it is good for animals to eat and bad for them to be eaten, there is no sense in which that means that they ought to eat and that they ought not to be eaten.
In a previous post you said to me “But the bottom line [mine] is that for all practical purposes in any particular human community there must be rules of behavior established. Whether you call certain behaviors good or moral or politically correct or ideal or Godly or reasonble or virtuous or natural or ideological sound etc., there must be a way chosen in which to make distinctions.”
What would we do if we were to apply your perspective and make a response to that?
Yet when you bring this sort of thing down to earth it all gets, well, murky.
Consider:
With respect to judgment and action, is the Trump administration good for you? Well, for some it is and for some it isn’t. And most will give you reasons why it is one rather than another. But: to what extent can philosophers then apprise these reasons such that it might be determined if in fact the Trump administration either is or is not good for any particular one of us.
Sure, if you reduce it all down to whether or not during the Trump administration you are able to thrive in accumulating resources and influence, then that is certainly one way in which to calculate it. Either/or.
But, some will insist, there are other ways.
And how then is this sort of thing not instead embedded more in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy?
“Here and now” that still seems more reasonable to me.
Of course, the overwhelming preponderance of animal species never ponder their interactions in this way. Why? Because, driven genetically by instinct, it never comes up.
Reasons have nothing to do with it for them.
The irony here then being that if we live in an entirely determined universe our own species is really no different. Except that we embody the illusion that our reasons really our own own because we think we freely chose them and not others.
Yes, but I keep reminding you that just because you don’t approach the relationship between “Judgment” and “Action” and “Good” in this manner, your own behaviors may well come into conflict with those who do. Then What? Then it is necessary for you to establish that they should approach this crucial relationship more like you do. How? Well, you will give them reasons why. And they will give you reasons why not. Then what?
Then [like me] you have to explore any possible limitations of reason in relationships between men and women who in some respects can be entirely rational regarding the facts of their conflicted interactions and in other respects can only embrace particular subjective/subjunctive “personal” reactions.
I’m either missing the distinction that you are making here or you are missing mine.
As with our own species, all other species must consume other life forms in order to subsist from day to day. It’s not whether they ought or ought not to. They do or they die. Just like us.
Now, some species eat plants and other species eat meat. But: They don’t choose to do so autonomously. Instead, they do so autonomically. It’s hard wired into them as a biological imperative.
Our species, however, is the only species [at least on this planet] able to imagine that they can choose to eat either plants or animals. Or both.
And that makes all the difference in the world. Why? Because given some degree of “free will”, it introduces the “is/ought” world into the equation.
And it is here that I surmise that limitiations are applicable regarding so-called “rational exchanges” in forums like this one.
But I am entangled in my dilemma. I acknowledge that I am no less obligated to respond to others who do not share my own value judgments. I take my political leaps to one or another set of behaviors.
But in recognizing these leaps as just “existential contraptions” I am unable [as are the objectivists] to convince myself that my behaviors do in fact reflect the “real me” in sync with the sort of behavior that can be construed as either “good” or “bad”.
For me both “Judgment” and “action” are just fabrications that I reconfigure existentially from the cradle to the grave.
Unless of course I’m wrong.
And, in that respect, all I can do is to consider the arguments of others who don’t think like me.
I suppose I should thank you for graciously resuming the conversation. So, thank you.
Because you haven’t yet responses, I’m going to take the opportunity to add a couple of things by edit which I will specify.
I happen to think that even our reasoning and our conscious thoughts are the result of instinct.
In the real world, insofar as my behaviours come into conflict with others such that I am to be put in a disadvantage, I do not enter discussion, and even if I did I would not discuss the matter in such a way as to try to convince others that what is good for them is not because it is bad for me, unless I was being deceptive, but the latter is not what I’m trying to do when I examine a position philosophically.
I don’t believe in free will. When I or you or anybody has a given idea, it doesn’t come from the will, the will itself, as far as I can see, simply arises from some unconscious part of ourselves. Even our arguments here are what occur to us but are not necessarily created by us consciously, which is to say that even our conscious thoughts are posterior to the unconscious process from which they arise.
Edit: I don’t think that what I said about free will negates the issue that you are raising however. Take for example veganism. We could become vegans because humans are omnivores and we are capable of producing enough food that we could survive off only vegetable product. Thus far, because we are capable of it, I don’t think is yet a reason. What I mean by that is, if someone could gain more benefits (nutritionally) from eating meat than a strictly vegan diet, what is the reason not to do so? We could say that it harms the animal, but why do we shrink from harming animals? Not necessarily all, but at least some humans are selfish (I mean this in a non-judgemental sense) to the point where they would prefer their own benefit to that of other creatures, and so for these humans, is there a reason for not eating meat? If we say it is wrong to harm animals, can we give a reason why it is wrong? As a sort of side note, if we made the same statement about harming humans when there are laws, the law could be used as an argument. Without laws, I wouldn’t be as sure if there was a reason why, perhaps because human friends and family might revenge, so there could be risks attached, etc.
I can at least begin to grasp why you would say that about judgement, but I cannot understand why you call action a fabrication. If us sitting at our computers and typing and the rest are our actions, in what way do you mean that they are fabrications?
I understand what you are saying but I just wonder if you understand a couple of things, for example why I made this thread to discuss judgement and action. If I recall correctly you, perhaps in a kind of jest, once said that objectivism is the nearest you can come to thinking something a sin. I have tried to tell you that I am not an objectivist but you seem to want to insist that I am.
The reason I made this thread and the reason I am concerned with discussing the concept of good (particularly in regards to judgement and action) is because when humans act we do so, generally (even if unconsciously), because we think there is something good in what we are going to do. I mean this even in the senses of the good that conflict with the definition I have given. In that sense, even if a philosopher, or anyone else, would have problems objectively arriving at a definition of the good, I still think it worth considering and examining because we are constantly making decisions which may be good or may be disasterous or whatever else, neutral and mundane. Again, that is why I began this thread. I wanted to discuss it particularly with you, not to convince you of my rendition of the good, it was because you are skeptical of the notion of finding a good. For that reason I thought there would be a way of testing my own perspective, the problem became that we simply reiterated our own positions and tossed them back at each other repeatedly rather than examining why other things might be good…
Of course, even that assumes an idea of the good (that examining the good would be beneficial)…
I am not sure if you understand that, as the reason I think you have misconstrued what I was trying to do with this thread which was not to thrust my own definition of the good upon you. The reason I put that in the opening post was actually because I saw the moderator once tell a poster that threads need a thesis otherwise they are not fit for the forum, so I picked one hoping to deconstruct it. Edit: Another reason I chose my definition of the good is because I can’t think of another way of examining whether something is good or not except by taking an example and examining whether the reasons for it are sound or not (end of edit). As I explained above all that ended up happening, so it seemed to me, is that we repeated out own preconceived perspectives back at each other. That is why I felt there was no progress, it had nothing to do with convincing you that I am right as I tried to explain.
These folks are convinced that in order to more fully understand human interactions the place to start is genetically. There are “natural behaviors” rooted in biological imperatives rooted in millions of years of evolution.
And all the so-called “enlightenment” embedded memetically in all the so-called “civilizations” changes none of that. Among other things, men are men and women are women. And all the feminists in the world won’t change that.
Go ahead, give it a shot. If nothing else I’d be curious to see if you either did or did not end up in the dungeon.
Okay, then it seems [to me] that you “resolve” such conflicts by merely assuming that your own narrative here is the correct one. In other words, if it results in establishing all of the advantages for you.
Either/or.
And, sure, that is certainly one rather effective way in which to go about calculating these things. Though it would seem [to me] to involve one or another tangled rendition of might makes right and right makes might; or in contexts in which no one is clearly mightier or in which a consensus regarding behaviors to be either prescribed or proscribed is not able to be reached, it is agreed that moderation, negotiation and compromise are preferable. At least “here and now”. Until something changes and everything has got to be recalculated.
And, in turn, there are those who imagine that these calculations have litlle or nothing to do with the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political ceconomy.
Okay, fine.
But then we have to take our respective philosophies – our “intellectual contraptions” – out into the world of actual conflicting behaviors and probe the extent to which just the sheer complexity of all the existential variables involved [and then evolving over time in a world of contingency, chance and change] can be compacted down into a political narrative/agenda more in tune with “one of us” or “one of them”.
In other words, when some folks speak of “the real world” they mean the way in which they understand it, not others.
How far then do you take this? Up to and including the part whereby this very exchange that we are having is only as it ever could have been?
That “mindful matter” embedded in the human brain produces results no less embedded in the either/or world? That your post topples over onto mine, mine onto yours and “I” is but an illusion in calculations that are ever and always only in sync autonomically with “all there is”?
Apparently…yes:
Well, one way to look at it then is to argue – to “argue” – that I’m right from my side and you’re right from yours. But only because there was never any possibility that either one of us was ever going to argue [autonomously] anything different.
Even our “differences” here are autonomically determined.
From my point of view if all of this “analysis” is inherently embedded in the immutable laws of matter going all the way back to the Big Bang, then any manner in which “I” might react to it here and now is too.
How are we not then “stuck” here “cosmologically”?
Well, clearly, if we do in fact live in a wholly determined universe both judgment and action were “fabricated” in whatever is responsible for the existence of Existence itself.
Only here of course the mind is simply boggled. How do we explain why something exist instead of nothing? And how do we explain why it is this something and not some other? And how do we even begin to grasp how matter can evolve into mind able to even ponder these things “self-consciously”?
The point [mine] is in understanding how the act of typing these particular posts is intertwined in judgments that [seemingly] propelled/compelled us to make one set of arguments rather than another.
And how do we determine which sets of arguments make the most sense? And what does that mean [to you] given that the arguments themselves are derived from creatures for whom rationality is not even the fundamental factor?
And that is when I take the discussion out into the world of conflicted behaviors derived from conflicted values. Why? Because that is the part that seems to revolve more around the actual limitations of reason. The subjunctive “self”.
To me, objectivism revolves not around whether one believes that their own understanding of judgment and action works for them, but that those who do not share their own thinking about it are wrong.
Sure, if you have decided that the accumulation of resources and influence works for you in determining whether your behaviors are the right ones or the wrong ones, fine.
That works for you. And it works for you “for all practical purposes” out in the world of your daily interactions with others. And, if you can sustain this “sense of reality” all the way to the grave, what more is there?
I’m still confused however regarding the extent to which you basically predicate this frame of mind on might makes right or on right makes might. And then what unfolds in your interactions with those who challenge your priorities…those who insist that accumulating resources and influence is not the most “reasonable” or the most “virtuous” manner in which men and women ought to interact. That their own understanding of “good” as that relates to “judgment” and “action” is preferable.
You note that:
To me, however, this is just one more “general description” of human interactions that “in your head” makes sense to you “here and now”. You understand “good” in this particular way. I then ask myself: How is this “analysis” pertinent to the manner in which “good” – judgment, action – is understood by me subsumed in my dilemma.
And it still is. Why? Because there are any number of other folks who do not share your assumptions at all. They come at me with competing arguments. Arguments rooted in God or political ideology or deontology or in an essentially absurd and meaningless world.
You manage to yank yourself up out of the hole that I am in by concocting a frame of mind in which calculations can be more clearly made. And then by merely assuming that if it “works” for you, that’s “good” enough.
And there is nothing that I can argue that would demonstrate that you are on the wrong path. It’s just not a path that “I” am able to talk/think myself into following.
