Zizek to talk with Peterson, billed as "debate"

Update:

More of Zizek’s hideous, though charismatic, clowneries, in the most substantive and repulsive form, discrediting him and showing him to be a weak mind, shows in his recent talk of “pseudo science”. The man has no judgment concerning European science, is a basket case, living in a hamper, a kind of rat biting a hole in the wicker of a Soviet materialist Marxist ideological black out, peeking an ugly lascivious snout out for a sniff of sham fresh air (while continuing to bandy about Soviet bosh which he never got loose of due to having a weak mind). And what he refers to as “pseudo-science”, whatever that may mean, is a comparison concerning the way hormones function in different strata of animal life. A perfectly sensible subject matter. Zizek, a clever mind who appeals to those without the ability to think: infinite bluff of an academic theorist.

Supplement:

Sam Harris, a bore shock jock who appeals to illiterate persons of no culture, but who has the equipage of the strong self-reserved confidence of a magician. Wholly ignorant of Western thought and its history in any serious sense. Absurdly whimpered that he knew Richard Rorty as though that excused his lack of a serious knowledge of Pragmatism (and, as though Rorty, one among the many, were the very epitomized core of this American thinking). Idiotic American bloc demagogic appeal to the state educated multitude in its most elementary nakedness. Not so fraudulent, nor as wholly unable to think, as booboise beloved scientism posterboy Dawkins.

I eagerly await the beginnings of an argument.

Oh, I agree that Dawkins indulges in Scientism: the tertiary horseman, below Hitchens and above Dennett.

You have learned the simpleton patois of scientism, the wretched vox populi. Now, you must learn one day, that this kind of childishness is only good for mechanical dealings. For humans can’t be treated as cannon balls. It harms reasoning to forbid its power scope. Then, the result is, that one becomes dependent on rules, fallacies and various prosthetic means of “thinking” and “judging”, which more order one than serve the mind. However, beside from the current age, and its problems, due to the race of lethal missiles ahead of the power to think, which you must study decades to grasp, what I would recommend is that you read a decent piece of literature. Plato, a magnificent stylist, will help whet your apatite for the joy derived from the wink of language. Poor denizen of Galilean decay!

Your fraudulent obnoxiousness has lied, since I gave a reason. Though, not Zizek, who merely says “pseudos”!

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hfYJsQAhl0[/youtube]

The judgment stands, despite inarticulate popular outcry. Very few people have strong minds, Zizek is surely not one of them.

What do you think logic is for?
Do you really think that certain people can only think from one logical proposition to the next? In reality pretty much everyone thinks without restraint, myself included, only if they wish to communicate their thoughts meaningfully they can either systematise what they’ve thought, after they’ve thought it, into a form that others can make sense of, or they can just throw out raw thoughts through whatever means. The latter can be artistic expression, it can rely on the interpretation of others, it can be nonsense. By all means indulge in the latter, but if you go by the former you can construct ideas that actually make reliable sense of our senses - even formulate cogent argument and predict things with more than random success. The Apollonian versus the Dionysian, if you like. Perhaps you are a die-hard devotee of the latter - there is nothing inherently wrong with embracing nonsense and irrationality. Art has value, no question, but it does not have the same value as rational analysis and accurate, reliable communication.

This is what logic is for, and if you wish to explore the details on a precise, communicable level to build something that lasts independently of the expression of the day and contemporary tastes, perhaps some Galilean decay would do you good! The reality is that you rely on whatever you might call the sensible, rational, logical form of thinking in your everyday social life - assuming you have one and aren’t completely dependent on others to interact for you. Maybe you’re still a child? Which everyone was once. In as far as anyone is embedded in the real world, and with the capacity to create beyond the transitory, they will learn to formulate their thought, however previously unshackled it was, into something that is not fallacious.

As such, on a forum of communication that values the wisdom not only in the arts but also the sciences, your excuse from logical consistency is denied.

Likely, it ('s reason debtre) is because the sophists wanted to play a game with the Megarians et others. And, then, later, the Christians. Ergo, they needed “rules”.

Exacto! Genauification. Now your simplicity is not in a herd of lies, but sensibly betraying itself to our naked consideration of you foul unworthiness!

However, what if others, too, had the same crude thoughts? Ergo, were “human” upon the same mistake. Why expand the hoop of the beings with direct “given” (es gibt) “thereness”? why not, instead, drill into truth!

I would name these concepts, not ideas. This is a cruel trick on a man such as Plato, who despised idiot concepts. Ideas, that is, direct knowledge of being as it is, the only authority, being for the anthropos, or hominem (human). If, many words, than, concepts. Abstraction. After two thousand years, “ideal types”.

However, at bottom, this means solopsism as “life” (ergo, anti-Descartesianismaficationelifaction, el sid), that is, total identification with everyone and everything, and form. Ergo, being and beings.

This is derivative, if I may say so without offending you to your being, of rationality as some value. I.e, I think ratio as the source of the answer to: How to live?, or, How to carry out predictive vert-frei science, or, &c., then, find some “romantic” departure from that project.

This misses the point outright, e.g., the destruction of science! Of the tradition, in the attempt to make politics formulaic, Hobbesian. this attempt failed. The result is still with us, your education, namely, all you know, as did the Maoist or Stalinist child, is a thing to be overcome. This is very hard to achieve.

Not at all about “art”. Art and techne are the same thing historically. Science was degraded, became, mere art. Mere technology.

“Art”, as art for art sake, or as economics + poltics = “art world” may be “neutral”, e.g., something one scarcely cares about. That is self-evident, many don’t give a damn about present day “art”. Art, in the traditional sense, you don’t understand this, means, something learned, ergo = LEARNABLE, rather than nature. REASON was understood as an art in the middle ages (cf. recta ratio, right reason [concerning the law of a country]).

Child {you must see = you honestly are very poorly informed, one studies these matters for decades]. “Logic” has many meanings. The most recent has to do with “symbolic logic”, e.g., mere “rules” = “math”. You are naked unaware of the history of thought = WHAT THOUGTHIS WHAT YOU ARE!. If you are not infinitely rude I can show you, but I am not your nurse to waste time constantly on unnecessary polemics.

This is a notion of math as a concept. As in Stephen Wolfram.

Now, I’ve studied all this much more thoroughly than you. This means: I am not your fucking nurse. If you don’t believe it I don’t care. Get lost then if you want to “debate”. I am of AT LEAST sound mental capacity, likely much higher, so that means, whatever you think is certainly wrong, because you have less data to work with. You are a baby in thought. The gods have forgoten to sing over your cradle, and so, your language is dumbness and American bloc music.

A sufficiently obscured argument, such that nobody can quite understand, can never be faulted, eh?
You can always pull the “you’re too dumb to understand” card this way.
Seems pretty cowardly, no wonder you have such a high opinion of yourself, all protected in your self-made bubble.
I bet you don’t even dare be understood else we all realise how full of shit you really are.

But this way, you can claim mental capacity to whatever degree you like without ever actually having to say anything at all or even know what you’re talking about!

Either you are choosing the most autistic standard of self-evaluation possible, or you are a sophist.

I’ll be generous and go with the latter for now, and you can continue to go ahead and tell yourself how brilliant you are, “if only others were smart enough to understand” what you’ve intentionally prevented them from understanding.

Or have I been too rude for you to be willing to stoop down and nurse anyone or anything now, “Soliphist”? I’d be so sad if I had :cry:

I can’t edit one of my previous posts anymore - the Rationality Rules guy is Stephen Woodford, not Simon.

I guess his channel title suggests he’s just another rule-follower with his dumb, childlike, perfectly comprehensible rationality. If only he would reel off impenetrable nonsense claiming to be profound - then he would be as advanced as “Guide”.

Aquinas and the medievals thought ratio, reason, was the essence of the human being, and that through it human beings could come to the mind of god. And therein might achieve rational life, a measured goodness, as an ordering of our will to action. But, what is the excuse for fetishizing rationality today when nobody believes that? Reason exists, it’s a tool for making instruments and for manipulating our fellows, this is the real accepted belief. The rest is a fetishism of impotent private “subjective” convictions. Who cares what conclusions reason comes to? It’s not a serious thing to make these kind of analyses, it’s a babyish game which may, here and there, be sincerely believed in as are shallow thoughtless political views, and it relies on all sorts of vacant and busted assumptions. It’s a thing for burial. This kind of modern and passing conceptions such as “objective existence” taken as the word of a revilation for all practical purposes. All the arguments of people like this are based essentially on “autistic” presuppositions of this sort. It’s a kind of demagoguery founded in what we’ve picked up in school, through the state compulsory education which is based on the best professors could do fifty years ago, or whenever the concepts came to power. It’s not a worthy pursuit for a serious person, self respecting, who would attempt to learn the scrutinizing of reality. It’s an aping of a received wisdom. It is a belief, demanded by the prevailing tradition. It is closer, therby, to what was fought against, by the thinkers who polemized against institutional religion (that is when it was still a real power, e.g., the Kulturkampf, one of its final victories before its down going in the essential respect, long after it had been for three centuries weeded out of the educated classes ever since Hobbes’ work in 1650), its dogmas, than to thought or philosophy in any serious sense.

We have here a comprehensive problem, a global difficulty. The circumstance isn’t that individual students are not intelligent, or even that “analytic philosophy” is mere “problem solving”, but, rather, the whole approach in the countries dominated by capitalism, in the Western bloc, which is increasingly planetary, is simply “autistic” (“continental philosophy” just as much) or unserious, the training is personal and petty, the proffesorite is generally incompetent to teach philosophy in any serious sense, they don’t know what it is. I remind you of the infinitely trenchant remark of Hannah Ardent (circa 1950, in paraphrase): the American hasn’t an inkling of what philosophy is (the German of what politics is). what is sought is the technological essence, in the service of economy through concerning its military needs, achievable through a certain form of education. There is a race to power which can not be stopped, since each country must be able to hold its own in the world or become a servant. The global university, its elite schools in America and the UK, is not concerned with philosophy/wisdom as philosophy, but with philosophy as a petty individual academic concern subordinate to what we have long called science, the Galilean science, now planetary. It presupposes the authority of this European science, the part of philosophy now in power. It presupposes the general existential nihilism of the each one has the right to interpret existence in their own way. It has no, can produce in its product, young consumers and programmers, no serious grasp of its place in the history of thought, and how it is floating about on uninterrupted presuppositions of a radical and comprehensive character which are the intransigent support of it spontaneous ends.

So reason is an outdated practice, founded in ideas that no longer hold.

It merely lets us build things and persuade those under its spell.

I remember rebelling against reason myself a few years ago for a long time, and people here would ridicule me, but irrationality is a perfectly choosable choice - and I still don’t deny that now. You claim superiority through looking past the methods you were taught at school, well you’re not the only one who did that.

Your reasoning here is that, given reasons such as you present, one would do better to abandon reason - and this is the exact reason why I found such reasoning to be invalid: it is in itself reasoning. How can you argue against reason while at the same time appealing to it? You can say anything you like, even in the most abstruse syntax and semantics, but as soon as it makes sense you validate reason. You appeal “to the rules”.
But hey, you’re arguing against reason, so even though you’re appealing to reason, you can deny that you are and not be in violation of being free from reason because there are no rules. You can say whatever you want, whatever comes to mind, whatever you think - fuck reason, you’re free from that. However, the effectiveness of this relies on others similarly rejecting reason such that they either agree with you because of whatever comes to their mind, or they don’t. It’s a gamble - there’s no reason to agree or disagree with you, it’s all cathartic expression. You win as much as you lose and nothing is built any more than it is destroyed - you’re just you and that’s that.

Like I said, it’s a perfectly choosable choice.

But what else does reason accomplish? Consider the illusions of simply taking things at face value - as you do when you pay no regard to “the rules” of reasoning. They will fail you. Reason will navigate you around them, predictive power goes through the roof and you will overpower all the free spirits who are so superior such as yourself. These mere instruments that you bring up are the same that you use to communicate with us here, they run the daily things that you take for granted, they found all the systems and work methods that found the running of the daily life of yourself and the entire society in which you live. They allowed electricity, mechanical utility, sewage systems, running water - how pathetic and outdated reason is!

These fucking reasonable retards!

A particular interpretation of what we have long been in the habit of calling reason no longer appeals to reason. It’s different. You’re failing to explain, in simple terms, what reason names. So that we know what we are doing and talking about. What we are thoughtlessly taking for granted, or seizing upon in order to interpret, or approaching in order to let it call to us so that we can become its respondents.

In the tradition, which is still with us as the contemporary, there is, here and there, a high point which spills down on all the other points. From there, reason is meant to stand above and outside experience, and when undeceived by eristics it comes to the absolute truth. Now listen: this absolute truth, the wild and fabulous phrase, is synonymous with the calm and average talk about “objective reality”. This requires one to think. There are a great many points like this one, unthought in the usual rigmarole of grad students, academics, and persons on intellectual shows appealing to the state trained popular multitude. They are all the time abstractedly wondering about in old language, and that means old thoughts, not genuinely understood by themselves.

It is not at all clear what reason names. Even in the simplest sense. We have a discussion, a discussion surely is not only reasonable. It is called in Plato “dialectic”, in Aristotle logic and dialectic are synonyms. With the Romans dialectic is named, but in the medievals there is talk of something like disputation, and there all manner of informal logic develops, in a special circumstance of communal research towards the truth amidst fellow Catholics, in our own time logic names mathematics, symbolic logic, it is just rules (free of “metaphysics”, thus infinitely valuable to the academic who can be sure it is right, it is right, for it is right bey definition, like rules of a foolish game to waste the time). There is syllogism, and rules of drawing inference, at times this is called reason. Man’s essence, what differentiates him from all things that exist, is said to be reason (ratio). Is the intellect identical to reason, reason in what sense? In a simple sense, for example, one can say that drawing inference is something that belongs to all human minds, so long as there is no deception in the data of experience. And yet, if that is all reason is, why would we have so much trouble with disputations, with contest in speech? why would not each person, sharing reason alike, be as a matching punch card, and say the same as each other?

These kinds of question man has often answered, though they are difficult to sort out, they all do find answers with certain authorities. These authorities are not mere authorities, but thoughts in the tradition. A history, empirical data of what humans have thought. Of what we still think in transformed form. We are the past of thought. If we are serious we can not go about assuming to know all these things in a popular appeal to a mere word already set down for us in a dictionary. Our knowing is a somnambulist inside us, acting us out. Assumed, superficially in the popular mind, to carry the valence of the unqualified good.

Reason is the name of the set of ways in which descriptions of reality concord with themselves and the apparent consistencies of reality.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the notions of soundness and validity, as distinct from one another. There are relative consistencies to reality that can be described in consistent terms with a certain degree of soundness. And given these semantic definitions of the terms, the syntactic use of them in relation to another can be done validly or invalidly.

You don’t have to “follow the rules” of using terms to be descriptive of reality to a sufficient extent, nor do you have to “follow the rules” of using terms to be internally consistent with one another to a necessary extent, but in doing so you are either not describing reality or not making sense in doing so. I leave it to you to follow or not follow these rules - freedom from them is your prerogative.

Now, whilst there is necessarily a gulf between words as signifiers and the signified things that they are intended to describe with more or less precision, validity can be far more clearly correct or incorrect in a binary manner. However, the reliance of validity on soundness lends a relativity to the transitive truth of statements about the world: only given the acceptance of the definitions being used can absolutely true statements be claimed. Intransitive truth is tautologous and may only be expanded, allowing meaning to be extracted from it, by changing it into fragments/discrete concepts: I am not one to claim objective reality as anything more than “itself as it is” - that which is being described, not any description of it. The words and thoughts used to describe reality are “of” reality in the genitive sense as sights, sounds, feelings etc. but they are necessarily different in type to that which they denote in order for any association (meaning) to emerge. Meaning is of reality, but consistency in the use of the signifier is not a guarantee of the consistency of the signified in truth. The attempt to reduce this gulf is the aim - and either intentional or unintentional attempts that widen it are relatively less credible.

The sophists and incompetents are the ones that relatively widen the gulf: irrational, and the philosophers and competents are the ones that relatively reduce it: rational.

Now are you clear on what the rational aka reason names?

The widening and reduction of the gulf is the origin of contestation in speech. The ability to form, hold and adapt the signifiers plays a part, just as much as the intention to reduce the gulf. The authority is only whether or not what you say is true to reality. One need not intend to reduce the gulf in the reliable assumption that others may lack both or either willingness or ability therewith: a persuasive attempt to widen the gulf may take on perceived authority merely by the fact that it is somewhat reliably true to reality, even if an attempt that is truer to reality has been less persuasive - given the lack of willingness/ability to understand its higher truth.

Dictionaries and other authorities are reliable guides to maximal truth - given contemporary willingness and ability to maximise it. But beyond them is the ultimate test of prediction, but not only sufficient prediction in the short-term.

This is a very abstract definition. Does it mean a distinction between observation and analysing the data of observation is made? And the latter is the sphere of reason?

“Reality” would seem to refer back to “observation.” Then everything hangs about the particular form of rigor of different disciplines, labs, cohorts etc. Specialization and micro expertise. No proper philosophic content: rather: working hypothesis and methods.

This is all very fine if we are grad students. It can be interesting to watch people such as “Kane B” (on Youtube) make their development in this respect. But, at bottom, it is wholly uninteresting for serious people. It is academic (academics, may, here and there, provide some useful and worthy contributions to human life). The only thing worth considering in so-called “logic” (syllogistics) is how we come to a sound premise. No rules can guide us there. It belongs to the human being and our judgment. For instance: What is Justice? Does Justice exist? What is knowledge? Is there knowledge?

So far as we speak of rules of drawing inference it may be that all normal humans, I make a concession and don’t go into the premise “normal range” and so on, can do that reliably. If that is what reason means, then, no problem. However, then we have a second issue, intuition or immediate experience. E.g., the place from where the premises arise.

Reason names, for two thousand four hundred years, prior to the year 1900 or so, something quite different. Serious discussion, e.g., the dialogues (dialectic/logos) of Plato, or, the treating of disputional objections in the medieval theological texts. These still concern human beings. They aren’t simply props for the vert frei, value free, mathematical physics: which is devoid of reason: reason there becomes instrumental reason. A machine (as in one of the lone worthy products of the American so-called philosophy, Searle’s chinese Room metaphor. Understanding is excluded. Ergo, what we call science is not a science in any serious sense. Heidegger says here, quite rightly: “science doesn’t think”.

Of course, one is always proud to have acquired some knowledge. And yet, we should not be dismayed to learn how little it avails, and how much we should wreck ourselves, it is painful, and learn something more. One must learn, most of all, perseverance in the face of one’s failure to reach the heights.

Supposing I say, there is an argument going on. And there is an ambiguity about whether argument is being used to signal a gathering of reasons to support a claim in the attempt to influence the human mind, or, on the other hand, whether what is in question is a fight where one side attempts to defeat the other at any cost without respect to whether the other side benefits or not. So far as “argument” is simply linked to a definition nothing can happen. Either under the sentence we have a “Chinese” system pointing to the right “argument” definition, or we don’t. This is not the way to do philosophy. One must include the human being. That is the way to build a machine. Wittgenstein made this development away from Russell on these grounds, or similar as it were, and that is worth following or thinking through.

I would call that instrumental rationality. We can trace the steady decadence of the idea, for instance, back to Galileo and Descartes’ popular tract on reason (where reason becomes: METHOD), through into Hobbes. That is one tract that shows the End of Philosophy, as it becomes mere technology or cybernetics. This has other lineages we can follow to see the destruction of science, or, put another way, the winning out of the part of philosophy, which came to power as science. Science is wholly unable to offer human guidance: e.g., it can not even answer the question should we pursue scientific knowledge? That is not a scientifically answerable question. It requires reason in the sense that prevailed from Plato to Schopenhauer.

No rules can guide us on how to come to a sound premise?

Are you sure?

May I just as legitimately claim the soundness of the premise “Circles are rectangles” as “squares are rectangles”?

What is Justice? Does Justice exist? These, as another example, are attempts to more precisely word our model of reality to how we use the term “Justice” upon its application to reality.
Is there knowledge? This pre-supposes knowledge of knowledge and the ability to know whether one answer is more knowing than another. What is knowledge? Again, precisely wording our model with how we meaningfully use the term.

This is fine, science is a structure of thinking so that its products more closely model reality - not something that does thinking. Case is important here: “thinking” is Genitive, no one is saying it is Accusative to the Nominative “science”. To address an earlier point of yours, you’re right that I am basing my use of the term “reality” on an analysis of observation - in a kind of dialectic sense: we observe to find relative consistencies, yet not all of these observations are consistent with one another, and we adjust our notions of reality to accomodate this. Thus observations may be illusions and we eliminate inconsistencies as our model of reality develops in this way.

This makes ethics the foundation of philosophy. I am persuaded by the argument that Ontology and Epistemology either precede or coincide with ethics, seeing as value must first exist, and knowingly so. Yet existence and knowledge, as you allude to throughout your post, are valuations. So with the human being as intrinsic to philosophy, so too are such things that are independent of the human being such as existence and knowledge. “One must include the human being” and also exclude him - I would add.

Reason, critically, is the human being diminishing the inclusion of the human being, in order to moreso become the human being.

Redacted, I was looking at page one. Not the most recent post.

You’re regressing or, as Socrates would say, forgetting. We aren’t speaking of circles. Rather, what is being done with the thing we call a circle. What is it for the one using it? Most people can’t define ordinary objects. Can’t say what they are to be used for. The dictionary offers a specialist’s peculiar view. How long will the gorup willing to use it that way, understand it that way, reproduce and continue its order? Our universities are quite young compared to the millions of years old fire pits of intelligent beings in China and India (I say this on the view, by the way, that Neanderthals, or the like, are basically “humans”, putting aside species precision and taxonomic identification. Human is in the look, and what one finds there in ordinary dealings, thus, in reason.

So, where from the premisson? The issue is this: we will get general agreement on many issues, perhaps instituted by compulsory education, agreement or seeming agreement. But, this agreement is empirically seen to vary over the centuries, and among peoples of different climates and regions. No one did topological operations on non-euclidean circles in former times, for instance. Or, used maths at all for Galilean and modern physics. We are forced to maintain that what we now, as a group, generally grant, is the pinnacle of human thought. This is the way to use a circle, e.g., to make liquid for nuclear ICBMs work properly. To make some chemical calculations or so forth. E.g., a constant perfection is being carried out, and the West is its flaming core.

Describing how things are now done doesn’t tell us that they should go on being done that way. As a secondary issue, precision is generally not helpful in human matters, since it tends to abstract from the human understanding which is not precise in most matters.

It’s not “fine”, which is what needs to be learned after four hundred years of propaganda to the contrary. That’s not science in any real sense. Science would improve human life. It’s a blind or abiotic outpouring of aimless techniques which are indifferent to human beings and may perhaps destroy the human being, and may have already ruined its life. Reason has already flown. One can say, surely it is not perfecting life, making it gradually better. More people, for example, are in prison per capita in the richest country in the world than in the worst periods of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. more terrible weapons, and monitoring systems of human things are made daily. Of course, I know, one could say it is a kind of anecdata (or, wha tI really mean, it is just arguing with some possible outliers against what may be a more generally accepted improvement, as it may be, that is not clear), but I just point to the gist of the objection concerning the lack of the existence of rationality: ergo, that there is no perfection of human circumstances, but blind or random “evolution” from this “science”.

Because the whole point of science/philosophy is to improve human life. Reduce the pain of the world. Human life means the same thing as ethics: e.g., mores or the character of human life.

Yea, well, no one ever saw a “without the human being” running about. What was thought while reason still existed was that we are relatively indifferent to certain things. For instance mathematics. Mostly, it was reasoned, by Hobbes for instance, man has no interest in proofs of math in the way he does with legal issues. Ergo, so oft as man’s interests are not touched, he will play by the rules, and do so as others do. But, when maths start being used in a project that doesn’t coincide with the interests of some, they deny 2 + 2 is 4. Just as it happens with the use of other things available to human decision and fate (to transforming common sense/cultural circumstances and ways of thinking).

While it can improve human life that is not its actual purpose
Which is the study of observable phenomena and nothing else

People in prison are there because they have broken the law which has got absolutely nothing to do with science

Whether you are aware of it or not you are living at the best possible time right now and part of the reason for that is science
Do you have any idea what the quality of your life would be like if all of the ways you benefit from it were instantly removed ?

No hospitals / electricity / computers / fridges / television / phones / planes / radio / cars

How would you like to live in a world without any of these ? This is not by any means an exhaustive list - I simply thought of the most obvious
things that you would notice if they werent there. Also all the scientific knowledge that has ever been acquired - we would be going back to
a time before science. We would be going back to the Dark Ages