a thread for mundane ironists

[iambiguous]

[b]Bob Dylan

If you don’t underestimate me, I won’t underestimate you.[/b]

Or, as likely as not here, overestimate.

What did I owe the rest of the world? Nothing.

Not unlike what the rest of the world owes him.

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Though maybe to tell you when it will stop.

It’s not important what other people call you. If you yourself know you’re a fake, that’s tougher to live with.

Yep, that’s no less an existential contraption.

I was born a long way from where I belong and I am on my way home.

Beautiful…and meaningless.

You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right, now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself, you decide for yourself.

Let’s decide if that’s close enough.

[iambiguous]

[b]Leonard Cohen

Well, you know, there’s depression and depression. What I mean by depression in my own case is that depression isn’t just the blues. It’s not just like I have a hangover in the weekend … the girl didn’t show up or something like that. It isn’t that. It’s not really depression, it’s a kind of mental violence which stops you from functioning properly from one moment to the next. You lose something somewhere and suddenly you’re gripped by a kind of angst of the heart and of the spirit.[/b]

He means “darkness visible” of course.

It’s been a long time since I’ve stood on a stage in London. Was about 14 or 15 years ago, I was 60 years old, just a kid with a crazy dream. Since then I’ve taken a lot of Prozac, Paxil, Wellbutrin, Effexor, Ritalin, Focalin. I’ve also studied deeply in the philosophies and the religions, but cheerfulness kept breaking through.

On the other hand, he was Leonard Cohen, right?

I see people allowing their lives to diminish, to become shallow, so they can’t enjoy the deep wells of experience. Maybe it’s always been this way, when the heart tends to shut down. If only the heart shut down and there were no repercussions, it would be O.K., but when the heart shuts down, the whole system goes into a kind of despair that is intolerable.

Whatever that means. But, sure, who can doubt it.

You are locked into your suffering and your pleasures are the seal.

One of his best: youtu.be/H63dZKnlu_I
It’s filled with them.

It doesn’t matter what you do because it’s going to happen anyway.

Does it matter then what you don’t do?

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking.
Everybody knows the captain lied.
Everybody got this broken feeling, like their father or their dog just died.
Everybody talking to their pockets.
Everybody wants a box of chocolates and a long-stem rose.
Everybody knows.

Not counting you of course.
And occasionally me.

[iambiguous]

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.” Benjamin Franklin[/b]

Why? Just lucky I guess.

“There’s nothing more to hold on to, and of course political circumstances just push that boat further out.” David Bowie

Either that or anchor it to shit like Trumpworld.

“I feel that reality has become an abstract for so many people over the last 20 years. Things that they regarded as truths seem to have just melted away, and it’s almost as if we’re thinking post-philosophically now.” David Bowie

I know that I am.

“While we are reasoning concerning life, life is gone.” David Hume

Hmm, isn’t that what we do here?

“Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.” Democritus

On the other hand, how idiotic is that?

“Only describe, don’t explain.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Let’s explain this.

[iambiguous]

[b]Federico Fellini

Don’t tell me what I’m doing; I don’t want to know.[/b]

Every once in a while I think I understand this.

I spent my life trying to cure myself of my education.

I actually did.
Well, if I do say so myself.

You exist only in what you do.

Trust me: And in what you didn’t do.

No matter what happens, always keep your childhood innocence. It’s the most important thing.

Man, did I luck out there!

Like many people, I have no religion, and I am just sitting in a small boat drifting with the tide. I live in the doubts of my duty… I think there is dignity in this, just to go on working… Today we stand naked, defenseless, and more alone than at any time in history. We are waiting for something, perhaps another miracle, perhaps the Martians. Who knows?

Indeed. But tell that to the fucking Kids!

I claim the right to contradict myself. I don’t want to deprive myself of the right to talk nonsense, and I ask humbly to be allowed to be wrong sometimes.

In other words, being “human all too human”.

[iambiguous]

[b]Frans de Waal

Conventions are often surrounded with the solemn language of morality, but in fact they have little to do with it.[/b]

I know: not counting your conventions.

We have a tendency to describe the human condition in lofty terms, such as a quest for freedom or striving for a virtuous life, but the life sciences hold a more mundane view: It’s all about security, social companionships, and a full belly. There is obvious tension between both views, which recalls that famous dinner conversation between a Russian literary critic and the writer Ivan Turgenev: ‘We haven’t yet solved the problem of God,’ the critic yelled, and you want to eat!’

What would you tell him?

At the time, science had declared humans unique, since we were so much better at identifying faces than any other primate. No one seemed bothered by the fact that other primates had been tested mostly on human faces rather than those of their own kind.

Right, like in so many other incredible ways humans aren’t unique.

I consider dogmatism a far greater threat than religion per se.

We’ll need the particulars of course.

Ironically, torture requires empathy, too, in the sense that one cannot deliberately inflict pain without realizing what is painful.

Just not the sort of empathy that counts however.

It seems safe to say that apes know about death, such as that is different from life and permanent. The same may apply to a few other animals, such as elephants, which pick up ivory or bones of a dead herd member, holding the pieces in their trunks and passing them around. Some pachyderms return for years to the spot where a relative died, only to touch and inspect the relics. Do they miss each other? Do they recall how he or she was during life?

The truth here may or may not be more problematic.

[iambiguous]

[b]Lisa Scottoline

I wonder if whoever invented World of Warcraft realizes it’s practice for sociopaths. [/b]

If not instrumental in creating them.

1. I am superior to others.
Circle one:
Doesn’t apply to me.
Partially applies to me.
Fully applies to me.
And:
I would not feel sorry if someone were blamed for something I did.
Circle one:
Doesn’t apply to me.
Partially applies to me.
Fully applies to me.

Which ones are we morally obligated to check?

Listen carefully, I’m going to say three words.
I love you?

I guess we’ll never know.

The look he was going for was Friendly Suburban Dad, because that’s what he was, but he suspected he’d achieved only Cialis Guy.

Would Viagra Guy be even worse?

Do you know what they call people who hoard books? Smart.

We’ll need to know which books of course.

One out of twenty-three is a sociopath and that’s 4 percent of the population, that’s a lot of sociopaths. Anorexics are 3 percent and everybody talks about them.

Let’s change that.

[iambiguous]

[b]Patricia Churchland

Theorizing is of course essential to make progress in understanding, but theorizing in the absence of knowing available relevant facts is not very productive. [/b]

Cue the endless “general descriptions” here.

The neuroscience of consciousness is not going to stop in its tracks because some philosophers guesses that project cannot be productive.

How can it not be productive?

I had no idea what philosophy was until I went to college at UBC. I first read Hume and Plato, so naturally I was under the misapprehension that philosophers are trying to figure out what is true, and that contemporary philosophers are mainly trying to figure out what is true about the mind. Of course Hume and Plato were trying to do that, hence my misapprehension.

Let’s explain this “for all practical purposes”.

Even philosophers who did not mind psychology, claimed the brain was irrelevant because it was the hardware, and we only need to know about the software.

Let’s let nature decide.

Remember, in the heyday of vitalism, people said that when all the data are in about cells and how they work, we will still know nothing about the life force - about the basic difference between being alive and not being alive.

Not counting the ones here who know everything.

Analyzing a concept can (perhaps) tell you what the concept means (at least means to some philosophers), but it does not tell you anything about whether the concept is true of anything in the world.

I think.

[iambiguous]

[b]Martin Gardner

The greatest scandal of the century in American psychiatry … is the growing mania among thousands of inept therapists, family counselors, and social workers for arousing false memories of childhoood sexual abuse.[/b]

Unless of course they are true?

The computers are not replacing mathematicians; they are breeding them.

Any offspring here?

There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.

Nope, don’t believe it.

As I have often said, electrons and gerbils don’t cheat. People do.

As he has often said?!

The violence and double-talk in the Alice books probably does no harm to children, but the novels should not be allowed to circulate indiscriminately among adults who are undergoing analysis.

Let’s prove this mathematically.

A surprising proportion of mathematicians are accomplished musicians. Is it because music and mathematics share patterns that are beautiful?

Including hip-hop?

[iambiguous]

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk.” Seneca the Younger[/b]

Cue the fucking chickenhawks everywhere. Starting with you, Don.

“Who lies for you will lie against you.” John Locke

And who doesn’t do that?

“Anything worth putting off is worth abandoning altogether.” Epictetus

That’s absurd of course. If only on this planet.

“To live a life of virtue, you have to become consistent, even when it isn’t convenient, comfortable, or easy.” Epictetus

When in fact it is exactly the opposite. If in fact that is true.

“No man should be angry with what is true.” Plato

Though he can be furious at those who insist it is not true.

“A good portion of speaking will consist in knowing how to lie.” Desiderius Erasmus

Though even more important, when to.

[iambiguous]

[b]Raymond Smullyan

Why should I be worried about dying? It’s not going to happen in my lifetime![/b]

Har-har-har?

I have free will, but not of my own choice. I have never freely chosen to have free will. I have to have free will, whether I like it or not!

He can only hope that he was compelled to note this.

There is nothing like a naturalistic orientation to dispel all these morbid thoughts of “sin” and “free will” and “moral responsibility”.

Of course: Whatever that means.

I believe that either Jupiter has life or it doesn’t. But I neither believe that it does, nor do I believe that it doesn’t.

Not many bases that doesn’t cover.

Metaphysical problems about “mind” versus “matter” arise only from epistemological confusions.

And how much more confusing can that be?

It has always puzzled me that so many people have taken it for granted that God favors those who believe in him. Isn’t it possible that the actual God is a scientific God who has little patience with beliefs founded on faith rather than evidence?

Sure, if you are willing to assume that anything is possible.

[iambiguous]

[b]tiny nietzsche

I can’t stop waking up[/b].

Not to worry. Just give it time.

any sufficiently advanced postmodernism is indistinguishable from tragic

That or farce.

where there’s smoke, there are mirrors

And not just in Trumpworld.

I’m dead to me

And [no doubt] to you.

the killer awoke before dawn. he said fuck it and went back to bed

Sounds like something that I would do.

a needle filled with haystacks

My guess: He’s making that up.

[iambiguous]

[b]Antony Flew

I now believe there is a God…I now think it [the evidence] does point to a creative Intelligence almost entirely because of the DNA investigations. What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together.[/b]

Sure, he thought, why not?

Science spotlights three dimensions of nature that point to God. The first is the fact that nature obeys laws. The second is the dimension of life, of intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings, which arose from matter. The third is the very existence of nature. But it is not science alone that has guided me. I have also been helped by a renewed study of the classical philosophical arguments.

Sure, he thought, probably not.

I’m thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins.

Of course that won’t sit well with some believers.

The Koran calls for belief and consequent obedience. It is, surely, calculated to inspire fear, indeed abject terror, rather than love.

Not unlike your own Bible I suspect.

Now, if anything at all can be known to be wrong, it seems to me to be unshakably certain that it would be wrong to make any sentient being suffer eternally for any offence whatever.

But especially if you want to be thought of as loving, just and merciful.

Pascal makes no attempt in this most famous argument to show that his Roman Catholicism is true or probably true. The reasons which he suggests for making the recommended bet on his particular faith are reasons in the sense of motives rather than reasons in the sense of grounds. Conceding, if only for the sake of the present argument, that we can have no knowledge here, Pascal tries to justify as prudent a policy of systematic self-persuasion, rather than to provide grounds for thinking that the beliefs recommended are actually true.

Let’s take a leap of faith to this being true.

[iambiguous]

[b]Gilbert Ryle

In searching for the self, one cannot simultaneously be the hunter and the hunted. [/b]

Also, never to be found.

Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine.

Most figure out a way to be anyway.

Dreamers of dreams may be pathfinders; but they may be mere vagrants. Of those who depart from the pavements, only a few are explorers: the rest are mere jaywalkers.

Of course: Who gets to decide?

…my today’s self perpetually slips out of any hold of it that I may try to take.

Yeah, it’ll do that.

Contemporary philosophers have exercised themselves with the problem of our knowledge of other minds. Enmeshed in the dogma of the ghost in the machine, they have found it impossible to discover any logically satisfactory evidence warranting one person in believing that there exist minds other than his own. I can witness what your body does, but I cannot witness what your mind does, and my pretensions to infer from what your body does to what your mind does all collapse, since the premises for such inferences are either inadequate or unknowable.

What problem? After all, here there are any number of solutions.

So too Plato was, in my view, a very unreliable Platonist. He was too much of a philosopher to think that anything he had said was the last word.

I guess we’ll never really know.

[iambiguous]

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

Society: Just be yourself.
me being myself
Society: See you in court.[/b]

And not just for dope.

The side effect of being intelligent is thinking that you are much more stupid than any person you ever meet.

If you know what she means of course.

The more words you know, the less you want to talk.

If you know what she means of course.

My Italian language app suggests phrases like “I tuoi insetti sono nel mio piatto” (your insects are on my plate), and I feel like I’m already reading Dante’s Inferno in the original.

May I go to the grave appless.

An optimist: The glass is half full!
A pessimist: Of emptiness.

And then the abyss.

It takes a lot of imagination to pretend to be yourself.

And it’s at least double for me.

[iambiguous]

[b]Donald Davidson

Nothing in the world, no object or event, would be true or false if there were not thinking creatures. [/b]

Try proving it though.

There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.

Of course without language none of this gets said.

There are three basic problems: how a mind can know the world of nature, how it is possible for one mind to know another, and how it is possible to know the contents of our own minds without resort to observation or evidence. It is a mistake, I shall urge, to suppose that these questions can be collapsed into two, or taken into isolation.

We’ll need a fucking context, he thought.

Mental events such as perceivings, rememberings, decisions, and actions resist capture in the net of physical theory.

Well, that’s what the ghost in the machine is for.

Even if someone knew the entire physical history of the world, and every mental event were identical with a physical, it would not follow that he could predict or explain a single mental event (so described, of course).

Of course no one does, though, do they?

Terminological infelicities have a way of breeding conceptual confusion.

And felicity has always been problematic here to say the least.

[iambiguous]

[b]Rudolf Carnap

Logic is the last scientific ingredient of Philosophy; its extraction leaves behind only a confusion of non-scientific, pseudo problems. [/b]

Otherwise known as, among other thngs, the human condition.

In logic, there are no morals.

Let’s poke around and find some.

In science there are no ‘depths’; there is surface everywhere.

For some here though it’s all depth. Well, in a world of words anyway.

Let us be cautious in making assertions and critical in examining them, but tolerant in permitting linguistic forms.

On the other hand, how helpful is that?

The self is the class (not the collection) of the experiences (or autopsychological states). The self does not belong to the expression of the basic experience, but is constructed only on a very high level.

On the other hand, how helpful is that?

If one is interested in the relations between fields which, according to customary academic divisions, belong to different departments, then he will not be welcomed as a builder of bridges, as he might have expected, but will rather be regarded by both sides as an outsider and troublesome intruder.

And how idiotic is that?

[iambiguous]

[b]Werner Twertzog

Entire universes are destroyed; intelligent beings obliterated by billions. It is Tuesday.[/b]

God keeps a journal.

The inevitability of death makes the misery of life more endurable, as we all know.

Really, that’s the only thing that works for me.

Everyone is a winner,
If,
By “winner,”
You mean Food for Worms.

Well, the worms certainly are.

You have one word for me: “Plastics.”
I have one word for you: “Apocalypse.”

Hey, times change.

Things get worse before they get even more worse.

If only when they actually do.

“Dastardly” is an under-utilized word.

Here? 80 times in 14 years. Now 81.

[iambiguous]

[b]Ted Chiang

Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.[/b]

No, as a matter fact, that is not always enough.

Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.

My guess: there are many more.

My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t. The reality isn’t important: what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.

My guess: And it always will.

[b]I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term “self-aware.”

Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I’d previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.

With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don’t pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.

I know how they make up my thoughts.

These thoughts.[/b]

Another gigantic general description of mindful matter.

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments.

Of course, what could this possibly have to do with dasein?

It is no coincidence that “aspiration” means both hope and the act of breathing.

And that’s important to know…why?

[iambiguous]

[b]Greg Iles

The female memory defies explanation.[/b]

Something a male would no doubt conclude.

Only in the shadow of death do we sense the true velocity of time—while adrenaline blasts through our systems, eternity becomes tangible and all else blurs into background.

That’s how it works, alright. But only for all of us.

But fear and danger aren’t always directly proportional. We’re all terrified by rattlesnakes, but the spider we brush off our sleeve with hardly a thought is far more likely to hurt us.

We’re all…we’re all…we’re all. What? Different things to different people.

A glacier consumes whole forests by inches.

Thank god for global warming.

Quentin finishes with the limb and sits up. Who wears the pants in your family, man?
That depends on the issue.

Indeed, as it should.

There is always something.

Or, as I prefer to put it, there is always never nothing. At least on this side of the grave.

[iambiguous]

[b]Werner Twertzog

To write dialogue, simply pretend to be stupid in different ways.[/b]

Hey, that’s what some of us do here! If only philosophically.

Man is born free.
But, everywhere,
He is checking
Work-related email.

Or coming here.

I am not a pessimist. I am an idealist. I sustain the hope that none of this matters.

And things couldn’t get more ideal than that, right?

Bears have few regrets, as we all know.

Well, not counting Timothy Treadwell, perhaps.

2024: Majority of U.S. oligarchs override obviously rigged elections to restore semblance of equity, education, healthcare, and civil order to prevent imminent revival of the guillotine.

I know: dream on…

Always remember, today is the first day in your inexorable march towards death.

My guess: some being closer to it than others.