Powers to what end?
Why does a philosopher need to sharpen every tool within accessibility?
Are you at war?
Comfort - a state of physical ease and freedom from pain or constraint.
Sounds good to me, I aspire to that. Does that make me unphilosophical?
Oh, Russel was on to something when he said we should beware of beliefs that seem too good to be true, as philosophers. I don’t think he counted on cynicism becoming cool, or philosophy being something that only cool people have the time to do, though. Does anyone here think that being a status-quo challenging, impulsive person makes MechanicalMonster uncomfortable? I don’t, not for a minute.
Yes.
…always, merely varying in degree.
Hopefully you speak only for yourself, James.
War requires that a party actively choose to fuel conflict with another.
If I choose to not cause conflict with someone, regardless of how they treat me, I am not at war.
Actually, I was speaking for MM and a very large percentage of the population, especially on top.
I certainly have no objection to those who do not inspire war in others by presuming the need for it.
I personally, am never at war with people, only with their insanity.
Life is either warfare or death, likewise with consciousness.
Please explain to me how my life is warfare.
If you can not do so, it means you can not be speaking on my behalf, and therefore are not making an objective statement in regards to all lives, but rather those you have awareness of.
My personal belief is in unison with Bill Hicks as I’ve posted about recently, life is a ride, not a war.
You can adjust the ride as you will.
Even the ride is a fucking war zone. You don’t think that Hicks suffered enough war wounds? You don’t think he was a casualty of war? That is just his comedy and only the surface of it. Look a little deeper. The basis of comedy is admission of reality (uncomfortable truths, or suffering) through denial of reality (comedic tactics like exaggeration, fictionalization, role-reversal, personality characterizations). The comedian creates a temporary “safe space” in which he shows you horrors, and you smile and pay him for it, for the relief it provides you.
Life is war or death, likewise with consciousness, because this is the principle of “life” and consciousness is only a certain kind of manifestation of this principle. Things exist only in so far as their form succeeds in holding itself together amidst the decaying influences of other forms and of inertia. The only reason you exist is because every single ancestor of yours back to the fucking primordial soup was in a constant state of conflict and struggle, pain and suffering and death, only was able to reproduce first before the final end, and so succeeded temporarily the madness of existence.
Modern society is a hubris of comfort, convenience, non-war precisely because this state of “peace” is only a kind of sublimated warfare in which the victims don’t even know what is happening to them. But war is the requirement and what is built upon, the example of the organism itself is analogous to the social systems. Every part functions adequately and the sum of all this functioning and “freedom” is the production of larger forms and powers, which then condition individuals. You have emergent orders of complexity conditioning larger orders of organization, which behaviors and laws turn back and re-condition these initial orders in a feedback loop. “Life” is this feedback loop. And all consciousness rests upon sensation, which is to say on differentiation and suffering. Even pleasure is only a respite from pain and the edified process of keeping pains at bay.
As Nietzsche said, you don’t eat because you are hungry, you are hungry because you eat. You are an organism made and bred for war, and if you think otherwise in this world, that only means you are an unwitting victim of the warfare of others.
Consciousness is a war, every truth must be taken from reality by force. Thinking and understanding, and correct action, are not givens but quite the opposite.
Every form perishes, but some survive longer than others. Why is this?
If life was utter shit, and offered no possible respite of pain, and everyone lived in complete anguish, do you think anyone would seek to preserve their lives?
They would not.
Because of the way that life has evolved, and our own ignorance, we have been at war since our species began. War has been a fundamental part of our existence, and has shaped us into the beings we are today.
We commit to war, when we believe that the interest of two parties are mutually exclusive. That both can not succeed. There are many aspects of our lives, which we’ve had to make choices between alternatives which can’t coexist.
I say we commit war, in an attempt to preserve something beyond war. What we are trying to preserve, is the core essence of life, not the means we’ve implemented to attain this preservation.
Bill Hicks suffered in life, no doubt. In our ignorance, we commit atrocities against one another. We only do this because we don’t see alternatives. Bill Hicks however, did see alternatives. He saw that we have a choice between fear and love.
Fear is war, love is bliss.
I assure you, his speech about life as a ride, gets to the essence of what he stood for. He wanted man to love each other, and flourish. He wasn’t just trying to give people temporary comfort before they were terrorized again by existence.
He spoke of the atrocities in our society, to show us how poorly fear is working for us, and how preferable it’s alternate, love, would be.
Please, watch the speech (below) with this in mind, and if you still believe life is war, please share.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1RQmnSJoRg[/youtube]
I’m not saying you are in complete anguish. I openly admitted the existence of comfort, convenience, and pleasure.
It isn’t ignorance that war is based on. Peace is based on supplication, passive acceptance and tolerance, and repressions of war. War itself is based on will to power, the need for life to consume, produce, and control its environment and itself. Without this continuous activity life dies. Take any example of death and you can see how it results from the stopping of this process of consumption, production and control.
I’m not saying that life SHOULD be war, or that we should end society as it is in order to have constant open warfare… what I am saying is that life literally is a kind of war, likewise with consciousness. No “ought to or ought not to” about it.
There is fear in war, yes. And there is bliss in love, yes. But that does not mean these things are equated, or even essentially related to each other.
It’s placating philosophy to make you feel good. Like religion or soft spiritualism or democracy.
Yes, fear has its drawbacks. The point is to use fear, to supplement it with power and truth, to form it into a larger affective-conscious system… the point is not to just ignore or wish it away.
Those animals that ignore their fear end up… being eaten.
And peace is based more on fear than is war.
The point is to develop and express the whole complex and varied dynamos of human sentiment. Positions of either pro-war or pro-peace dangerously miss the point.
Taking either war or peace as a virtue is a religious faith, nothing more.
My point was to show that life itself, even in peace, is still a kind of warfare based on the conditions of living and dying, and that your entire organism was created as part of this process. Consciousness is based on differentiation and synthesis, division and unity, creating concepts and tearing truths from experience. Logic and perception is power, without these you are nothing, you do not exist.
Modern society is the task to create a world where logic and perception are no longer required. So ask yourself what kind of “peace” or “love” you can have when your entire faculty of judgment and experience has been dismantled before you even get the chance to know you have it.
I’m not saying it’s comfort, convenience and pleasure that gives people to will to live. I’m saying there are people who live for love.
War is based on ignorance of alternatives. Peace is based on love, respect and co-operation. I deny your interpretation of will to power. I do not will to power as you describe it.
We do not need control every aspect of our environment in order to survive. All that’s required is we form a mutual agreement and symbiosis with all that could pose threat, and in this paradigm co-operation and mutual benefit could flourish.
This isn’t war or control.
Life can be war for some, but I deny that it is inescapable and necessary in life. Life doesn’t require war.
I’m not saying fear is bad. I’m saying living for fear, or living in fear, is bad. I equate living for &/or in fear with war. One can’t have true relationships with enemies.
It gives me perspective and inspiration in the face of hate, cruelty and suffering. This speech does not placate me, it gives me an enormous will to alleviate the suffering of those around me, see them as my equals and will to improve our existence.
Are you telling me you live to stay in power? That is your ultimate will?
The point is how your “will” if you like is being manipulated by outside forces. You are GIVEN a philosophy of certain concepts in which your motivations, fears and desires are organized to produce your behavior, your “beliefs”. You now “believe” in love, in peace, in however you conceptualize “the world” in its ideal form.
This is a problem because, well, this isn’t philosophy, it’s religion. Following an ideology is not thinking, it is faith. And faith is ALWAYS based on how it makes the faithful FEEL.
Try throwing out your feelings and preferences for a moment and see things objectively.
No, that is not my “ultimate will”.
Replace heart with emotion/feeling and mind with power for the below statement.
What’s your ultimate will, if not power? What would you prioritize over power?
That is discussed here:
In short, I prioritize consciousness and experience-as-such. I see power as only a quantum of consciousness, not the other way around. Here I part ways with Nietzsche.
Consciousness is not only an expression of will to power, rather will to power is an expression of consciousness. “Consciousness” means sensation, the adoption of a perspective from which encounters are able to be experienced and interpreted, made causal to something. This “something” is the body of material relations, what we consider to be non-living (but also includes the contents of consciousness, which are also “non-living”), the “to” is the act of being-conscious, what we also call “being alive”.
“Will” is always a product of the “what is” of that from which will manifests, that which wills. The ontoepistemic constitution is primary, and the situational laws that condition (have conditioned) THIS primacy are what we consider “natural law” or perhaps the (impersonal) “reality itself”.
Here’s what I wrote in that topic,
“For me, consciousness, its quality and quantity, which is to say the profound experience of understanding and knowledge, is more valuable than power; while goals are means to power, as FC says, power is means to consciousness— to life.”
You say consciousness is more valuable to you than power, and I also value consciousness higher than power. However, as I was trying to get at earlier, was that consciousness by itself isn’t what’s valuable to us, or at least me. It’s the content of what is conscious of, that is most relevant.
People kill themselves if they think death is a better state than their current conscious experience. These people are saying, the contents of their consciousness are worth less to them than had the contents been empty (death).
I believe suicide is an honest act and illustration of the true priority of man. To seek consciousness for the sake of consciousness, seems irrational if all one has experienced and expects to experience is negative. If one had respect and good intent for oneself, why would one will to prolong such a state?
The thing that would motivate someone to continue in pain, is if there was something they valued higher that was still attainable.
That’s why I say our, my, priority is not consciousness itself, but something more specific.
As for a prior point you made, an ideology needn’t be an act of faith.
Faith - strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof.
I take it this is the context you use the word faith in, if I am wrong, correct me.
I do not follow and believe in my own ideologies based on spirituality. I base my beliefs on my own life experiences and interpretation of my environment. These experiences and interpretations are the evidence for my own conviction. I was not forced into an ideology, and I found something that completely aligned with all my strongest held understandings.
That is not faith. I am always willing to analyze new information and reassess the integrity of my beliefs.
RM:AO “There is Potential-to-Affect formed of the Situation (“what is”) that brings the affect (“Will” - the action from the situation)”
I was quite tired when I was replying to you earlier, and I don’t think I addressed your points as directly as I could. (Was the early hours of morning for me)
As I said in my previous post, I chose my ideology, it was not forced upon me. If you say that it was forced because every event prior to my embrace of the ideology forced me into a position that I had no alternative than to adapt to that ideology, then I would say your point is completely moot for there is no other state that isn’t also completely forced and inescapable.
It is no critique of my personal ideology as it is every aspect of reality equally.
To see things through the eyes of personal feeling and preference is an objective for some, just as the will to see the things through the eyes of complete neutrality. Both are equally objective, and your description of feelings and preferences not being objective is insightful into your own perception of feelings and personal preferences.
Life - is a characteristic that distinguishes objects that have signaling and self-sustaining processes from those that do not
When both of you and I speak of life, I expect we’re both referring to the process of being & staying alive. Living, and all that encompasses.
War - a state of hostility, conflict, or antagonism
Warfare being the process of engaging in this state.
In peacetime, I do not believe this type of warfare needs to, and for some does not, exist. I do not believe these state is necessary for survival, nor for any any goal I deem rational.
I equate consciousness with awareness, even though it isn’t accurate. When I’m saying consciousness, what I really mean is awareness.
Awareness - feeling, experiencing, or noticing something (such as a sound, sensation, or emotion)
Believing in the power of love gives me the confidence to love others, even in the face of adversity. It promotes the will within me to go out of my way to be truly understanding of others, and to empathize, with the knowledge that we are all the same, and if one loves the self, they ought love all that possess the same qualities.
I do not not believe any of the prior three points has bearing on the integrity of love.