But look at the subject of my post. The subject of my post is how you interact with other people on this forum. Isn’t that me talking about “the reality of actual human interactions”? I am talking about how you [an actual person] interacts with other people (such as gib) [actual people] in real time and space. I don’t think you can get more real than that on an Internet forum. Any other kind of discussion would be hypothetical. Compare that to what you’re asking me to do. You’re asking me to talk about imaginary people (such as John and Mary) located at imaginary points in space and time having an imaginary disagreement over some moral issue (such as whether or not Mary should abort her baby.) That strikes me as being less “flesh and blood” than what I am doing. Yet, you keep saying I never get around to the reality of actual human interactions. That’s simply not true. Instead, what you’re objecting to is the fact that I am not discussing the subject that you want me to discuss. I am discussing your interactions on this forum while you want to me explain to you, via imaginary moral disagreements, how moral disagreements can be resolved.
Yeah, you are what one may call an “anti-philosopher”. An anti-philosopher is someone who argues against the usefulness of philosophy in one or all aspects of life. You specifically argue that philosophy is useless when it comes to discovering moral truths and resolving moral disagreements. You repeatedly make that claim on this forum but you never really go about demonstrating it i.e. you never explain why you hold it to be true. You just say that it’s rooted in your life experiences (which isn’t really an explanation as much as an instance of banal truth – a truism.) Instead, what you do is you demand from others to prove to you that you’re wrong i.e. you shift the burden of proof. If other people try but fail to convince you, you conclude that they are wrong and that you are right. To hide the fact that you’re promoting certain beliefs on this forum, without justifying them, you try to faint neutrality. You try to claim that you’re merely a solution seeker – someone looking for a solution from problem solvers i.e. actual philosophers. But the way you interact with other people on this forum points to something else being your primary motive.
That is a truism because it is something that everyone already agrees with. Can you cite a single person who disagrees with the above?
That’s something you say about pretty much everyone who refuses to accept your convictions, namely, that moral statements have no truth value and that moral disagreements cannot be resolved using the tools of philosophy. It does not matter what they do. Whatever they do, if they don’t immediately please you, you accuse them of that “my way or the highway” mindset. You never really justify your position, you just state it, and often enough, you state it in situations when it’s not applicable to do so. You also have a tendency to disregard all meta-discussions (such as this one) by pointlessly insisting on shifting the discussion towards something else, namely, imaginary moral disagreements. “My way or the highway” sort of thing.
The definition of the word “insanity” is “doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results”. The underlying idea is that you can’t get far if all you do is repeat previously unsuccessful attempts. And that’s what you’re doing here. Instead of spending enough time trying to understand what the other person is saying and trying to figure out the best way to respond to them, you just repeat yourself.
Previously, you tried denying that you’re quick to throw accusations. The above is an attempt, a rather poor one, to defend that claim. An accusation is merely a negative statement about someone. When you say that someone is an objectivist, you are saying that they are a closed-minded authoritarian. That’s a negative statement about who they are. For that reason, it is an accusation. Why you hold that statement to be true, with what certainty you hold it to be true and so on is irrelevant because whether or not any given statement is an accusation has nothing to do with it. The only condition for a statement to qualify as an accusation is for it to be a negative statement about someone.
You misunderstood. My point was merely that whether or not someone is arguing in favor of some position has nothing to do with how they adopted that position.
You said that you did not argue that there are no moral truths, only that it seems reasonable to you at the present time that there are no moral truths. My response was that the two statements are equivalent i.e. that they mean one and the same thing. When someone says “That belief is true”, they are basically saying “At the present time, it seems reasonable to me to think that that belief is true”.
These are non-existent distinctions that you can’t use to exuse your behavior. You can’t just say “Look, I didn’t kill that person, I just did something that caused them to die” and get away with it.
It makes no difference, from my frame of mind, because both efforts have the same kind of negative effect. They both put heavy pressure on people to adopt, against their will, the ideas that are being pushed. When you repeat a belief often enough, it eventually becomes “truth”, in the sense that it eventually becomes accepted as true by those who were exposed to it. It’s not necessary to demand from people to adopt it. It’s enough to repeat it over and over again until their minds become too weak to resist the pressure. And when you mix it up with various shame-inducing accusations, it works like a charm.
I don’t think we have to start a new exchange in order to iron it out. We can do it right here and right now. If you think that we must, feel free to explain why.
In fact, it seems like you’re trying to start a completely different exchange, one that is unrelated to my claim. If you think that it is related, feel free to explain how.
That’s, unfortunately, of no help.
The way I understand it, you want me to show you how you can resolve real-life moral disagreements. You want a step-by-step guide on how to to interact with people who are disagreeing over some moral issue in order to help them realize who’s wrong and who’s right. Is that true?
Probably because questions like this have been pondered by philosophers and scientists and theologians now for thousands of years. Different circles is all there ever seems to be.
On the other hand, that doesn’t make the questions go away. I merely shift the discussion from the answers that we give to how, existentially, we come to acquire one set of answers rather than another.
Thus…
Much like all the rest of us. Only, like all the rest of us, your senses and your sources are embedded in a particular world historically and culturally. And, like us, you have accumulated a set of uniquely personal experiences and relationships that predisposed you to one set of moral, political and spiritual prejudices rather than another. You have just come to think about this other than as I do. But that as well [to me] is just another manifestation of dasein.
Then, from my perspective, this part:
Wasms. I like that.
Yes, you convey this to me in a way that, while in not being you, I am still unable to understand the way the world is grasped by you…but sometimes I am able to imagine getting closer to you, to your frame of mind.
I think the biggest obstacle is still the way in which you are able to experience the world spiritually. This spiritual Self is what allows you to accept that your thinking can change about things but you still feel connected to something that is larger than yourself.
That’s something I once felt myself…spiritually through God, then intellectually through ideology. But don’t experience anymore.
Thus…
True. But human psychology is nothing if not extraordinarily complex. And then the part that revolves around the conditions that can emanate from the brain itself. Like “face blindness” from our email exchange. The “self” and all those afflictions in the brain that can change our sense of reality dramatically. As for memory, think of the plot that unfolds in the movie Memento.
That’s a very good question. At times, it looks like the reason he’s doing that is because he’s misunderstanding what the other side is saying. But in Ecmandu’s case, he clearly understands Ecmandu’s point, yet, he’s asking Ec to put his “I can send people to hell” in the context of the trucker protest. I see no reason why Ecmandu should do such a thing.
+++Probably because questions like this have been pondered by philosophers and scientists and theologians now for thousands of years. Different circles is all there ever seems to be.
On the other hand, that doesn’t make the questions go away. I merely shift the discussion from the answers that we give to how, existentially, we come to acquire one set of answers rather than another.+++
The obvious conclusion to draw from the fact that these questions have been endlessly debated for millennia is that there are no actual answers.
+++Much like all the rest of us. Only, like all the rest of us, your senses and your sources are embedded in a particular world historically and culturally. And, like us, you have accumulated a set of uniquely personal experiences and relationships that predisposed you to one set of moral, political and spiritual prejudices rather than another. You have just come to think about this other than as I do. But that as well [to me] is just another manifestation of dasein.+++
Well, yes. All of that is clearly true.
+++Wasms. I like that.
Yes, you convey this to me in a way that, while in not being you, I am still unable to understand the way the world is grasped by you…but sometimes I am able to imagine getting closer to you, to your frame of mind.
I think the biggest obstacle is still the way in which you are able to experience the world spiritually. This spiritual Self is what allows you to accept that your thinking can change about things but you still feel connected to something that is larger than yourself.
That’s something I once felt myself…spiritually through God, then intellectually through ideology. But don’t experience anymore.+++
It’s a fact that I’m connected to something bigger, namely, nature. We all are. That’s the basis of my spirituality.
+++True. But human psychology is nothing if not extraordinarily complex. And then the part that revolves around the conditions that can emanate from the brain itself. Like “face blindness” from our email exchange. The “self” and all those afflictions in the brain that can change our sense of reality dramatically. As for memory, think of the plot that unfolds in the movie Memento.
I’m not familiar with the film, but it definitely sounds like a scary condition. But even so, it’s not the complete wiping of memory that would be required to change into a different person. That’s probably not possible.
+++Yes. I’m thinking of exploring more in depth all the many different ways in which Pagans think about the “afterlife”. Maybe a new thread.+++
Good luck with that. I’ll contribute where I can, of course.
Or, rather, he agrees with it, but his emotions – his emotional self – is connected to a sense of reality that allows him to agree with me that had his life unfolded differently he could be here voicing opposition to the trucker protest while still feeling support for them and wanting them to win.
How about you? In regard to your thoughts and feelings and wants pertaining to a moral conviction of your own, how do you intertwine them?
Thus…
Note to others:
How utterly preposterous is this?!
Asking him to bring both his own moral philosophy and his criticism of me to bear on an actual set of circumstances.
But my frame of mind here [including my thoughts, my emotions and my politically prejudiced wants] have devolved into a “fractured and fragmented” jumble in which I am pulled and tugged in different directions.
Then in regard to the trucker protest whatever this…
…is supposed to mean. From my frame of mind, you are approaching Magnus here in keeping it all up in the clouds.
And then if that isn’t abstract enough for you…
So, what did I do you might wonder?
No, I was suggesting that you take the rest of the paragraph to our discussion regarding what we think, feel and want when addressing the trucker protest. You note these abstract accusations against me but won’t take them to the protest. To the actual points I have made regarding my own reaction to it.
Then, from my own vantage point, even higher up into the clouds you go…
Back again to my conjecture that there are in fact any number of certainties that both sides can agree on regarding the actual protest itself. Even when the discussion revolves around conflicting goods, the empirical facts don’t change. There’s the pandemic. There’s the government policies in response to it. There’s tha truckers protest in response to that. All “on the news” day after day after day. And the fact that even in regard to the political prejudices that different individuals subscribe to, both you and I agree that is largely rooted subjectively in dasein and therefore can never be fully trusted. But what you do seem to trust far more than I, are your feelings about the protest. But that is still what is all muddled to me.
What does your assessment above really have to do with the OP:
There’s the trucker protest. There’s our own subjective, rooted existentially in dasein reaction to it. There’s how we differentiate our thoughts and feelings and wants in regard to it. There’s how we connect the dots between them. Then there’s how you calibrate all of this such that you do this instead of that.
Same thing. How you connect this to our exchange is beyond my capacity “here and now” to grasp. And “I” don’t think any of this can be resolved much beyond “you’re right from your side and I’m right from mine”. And that’s what infuriates the objectivists. With their thoughts and feelings and wants basically in alignment with the One True Path – theirs – how would they react to you here?
The unconscious mind? Yours, mine, theirs?
How would we even begin to factor that into it? Again, I prefer to recognize that there are any number of components embedded in “I” out in the is/ought world that are beyond – sometimes way beyond – our either fully grasping or controlling. All the more reason though to make the objectivists among us seem that much more preposterous with their “my way or the highway” mentality.
Only [apparently] for you, there’s the subconscious/unconscious mind and your thoughts and the subconscious/unconscious mind and your emotions.
Again, only if it revolves around the trucker protest.
Again [to me]: another general description intellectual contraption aimed at “exposing” me rather than aimed towards explaining to us how in regard to the trucker protest, you differentiate your thoughts about it from your feelings about it. And where your understanding of dasein fits into that distinction.
And yet over and over and over again here, when the left/right, liberal/conservative, religious/atheist members clash their emotional outrage at “one of them” is what almost always leads to “huffing and puffing”, name calling, ad homs and [at times] vicious attacks.
Again, relate this to your thoughts and feelings about the trucker protest. What are the grounds for whatever you construe to be certain about in regard to it. For me, both my thoughts and my feelings are “fractured and fragmented”. Whereas back in my own objectivist days they were considerably more in sync. Only when shifting from one objectivist font [God] to the next [Marxism] was there a period of greater ambiguity and ambivalence.
Okay, what in particular was that “something”.
And then back to my point that had you not been stood up, who knows, that woman might have engaged in a conversation with you such that something she said had a profound impact on you…changed your mind about some things important to you. Just as my conversations with Danny and Mac and John and Steve at the MACV in Song Be had an enormous impact on my life.
But over and again I come back to the fact that I am still utterly at a loss in regard to understanding how you do differentiate your thinking from your feeling re the trucker protest. Or regarding abortion or guns or any other “conflicting good”.
Thus…
Note to others:
You tell me…
Is he or is he not avoiding the task of, in regard to the trucker protest, differentiating how uncertain his thoughts are from how much more certain his feeling are?
I’m still lost. You told me that from your perspective you are an anomally in regard to connecting the dots between your thinking on the one hand and your emotions and your wants on the other…in regard to the trucker protest. And of course from my perspective there will always be a gap. Why? Because I’m not you. I did not have your experiences, your relationships, your access to information and knowledge and ideas.
That’s what we are doing here…struggling to close the communication gap between us. Given the role that dasein does play in creating a sense of identity out in the is/ought world. Mentally, emotionally and psychologically.
Okay, “I” don’t believe in objective morality. “I” am a moral nihilist “here and now”. Now my moral and political prejudices rooted existentially in dasein might incline me to behave in a particular way in a particular context. On the other hand, I might want to do “this” but don’t because I’m convinced that if I do, the consequences will be dire. Suppose, for example, I come upon someone who is being viciously beaten by a couple of thugs. Now, the moral objectivist might conclude that it is his moral obligation to come to the man’s rescue. Whereas I am bound only by what I perceive the consequences might be for me if I do. So, sure, if I have a cellphone, I can call the police. If not, I can run to get help. But nothing “binds” me to risking my own neck. And then the sociopaths among us who not only refuse all help but just sit there and watch. It’s all just entertainment to them. Some may even join in on the beating.
The crucial point [mine] being that how any particular one of us chooses to react here is embedded in dasein.
Sure, but how is that schism itself not but just one more manifestation of dasein? You could pose that to each and every member of ILP and who knows how many different responses you might get. Though, yes, with some their thinking might be more ambivalent than their feelings…or the other way around.
Rock solid? In regard to our thinking or our emotions or our wants in regard to “I” out in the is/ought world? To the extent you ever do come to think about “schisms” as I do you will come to expect them to be the rule rather than the exception.
And the complexity in my view revolves precisely around the fact that there are so many, many jumbled existential variables involved in how any particular one of us reacts to something like the trucker protest that none of us can ever really make the jumble itself go away. Well, aside from the objectivists of course. There are simply too many factors involved that are both beyond our fully understanding or controlling.
The woman does show up for your date and her own thinking is instrumental in changing yours.
No, I’m far more interested in such things as they relate to an issue like the trucker protest or abortion or gun control.
That’s why I keep after you to note an issue of importance to you. An exchange in which we compare and contrast our own moral philosophies just as gib and I are doing here. Successfully in some respects, unsuccessfully in other respects.
That way, as I post things in sync with your accusations against me relating to this issue, you can point them out in a considerably less abstract manner.
As I have noted a number of times, John and Mary are anything but imaginary. They were actual friends of mine at Essex Community College here in Baltimore. I merely changed their names. But the wrenching quagmire between them and me was of fundamental importance in opening my mind to a whole new way of looking at human interactions in the is/ought world. Their ordeal along with William Barrett’s book Irrational Man…together they started me down the road to abandoning objectivism myself.
Okay, note some examples of you broaching your own moral philosophy pertaining to a moral/political conflagration that is likely to be well known by most of us here.
And if you insist on making me the issue, then I’m not interested. I would prefer something along the lines of the discussion gib and I are having.
Over and again, shifting the discussion to me…to the iambiguous that you have concocted “in your head”…someone that in many respects, I don’t recognize at all. I’m not an “anti-philosopher”, I’m for exploring what philosophy itself can or cannot conclude objectively regarding “I” in the is/ought world. When Wittgenstein suggested, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, was he being “anti-philosopher”?
And I have never claimed that philosophy is “useless” in regard to conflicting goods, only that “I” no longer subscribe to objective morality myself.
You do? Others do? Okay, lets grab an issue and a context and examine that.
Then all the rest of your accusations that you refuse to demonstrate in an unfolding exchange with me. After all, that’s what gib is doing in regard to the trucker protest. We still fail to understand each other fully, but the issue and the context are still there to bring our thoughts and feelings back around to.
Come on, Magnus, do or do not the objectivists among us [and especially the pinheads] just shrug that part off and insist that how they lived their own unique life and not how others lived their own unique lives has culminated in them and them alone finding the One True Path. Deontologically on this side of the grave, and [for some] as an immortal on the other side.
Only all those others on their own unique paths, while agreeing that the One True Path is out there, insist that, on the contrary, it’s theirs.
I stopped having convictions years ago. Now I have moral and political prejudices rooted existentially in dasein. And ever subject to change given new experiences, new relationships and access to new information and knowledge.
The rest is just your own existential rendition of “iambiguous”
To witless:
Note to others:
Come on, convince him to start a new thread along the lines of this one with gib. He chooses the issue and the context. He is then able to note [as the exchange unfolds] actual examples of the things he accuses me of doing in his endless “general description intellectual contraptions”.
In others words, in these exchanges I have had over the years with objectivists…objectivists as “I” understand them above…I’m not spending enough time finally agreeing with them. That’s what made them unsuccessful.
Gib has attempted over and again to explain how he differentiates his thinking about the trucker protest [much like mine] from his feelings about it [not like mine] and all I keep doing [instead of agreeing with him] is repeating that I don’t understand this distinction.
There you go again claiming to understand me better than I think I understand myself. And I’m the first to admit that my own motivations and intentions are often ambiguous even to myself.
Again, the closest I’ve ever come to it is encompassed in this quote from The Magus:
“He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest.” John Fowles
There have been objectivists over the years I have had a great deal of respect for…their intelligence, their argument. And then, yeah, the fulminating fanatic pinheads who do project their own arrogant, authoritarian dogmas. I do what I can to deconstruct them. At first. Then when that collapses, sure, I’ll become the cat to their mouse.
But that’s something I rarely do anymore. Now that I’ve shifted more to the PN forum, I don’t even read the pinhead posts here.
I suggest that we agree to disagree about this. That is until in an exchange between us similar to the one I am having with gib here, you are able to note post by post by post the evidence you are accumulating to back up these “general description” accusations.
On and on and on he goes, hinting at an exchange between us similar to the one between gib and I with an issue and a context of his choosing…only it never actually quite seems to happen, does it?
I have to explain “why” first.
Okay, how about this: if only to commence an exchange whereby he gets to point out specific instances of all the things he accuses me of.
Then whatever this…
…means.
Anyone here care to hazard a guess?
Thus…
Then this preposterous rebuke:
I don’t want him to show me anything, let alone a step-by-step guide.
Instead, given a particular moral conflagration that is never far removed from the big bold headlines, I want to compare and to contrast our respective moral philosophies.
Only Magnus must be taking lessons from Mr. Chickenshit on how to completely avoid that. As with Mr. Chickenshit, he’s only really comfortable up in the didactic clouds. Why? Because up there the battles revolve almost entirely around definitions and deductions. A world of words in which these definitions and deductions almost never actually come down out of the “general description intellectual contraptions” clouds.
Or, as I suggest, that the answers are never ending. Only, for me, the answers themselves are derived existentially from all the vast and varied historical and cultural contexts there have been, are now and will be.
Then that crucial distinction between those who insist that your answers must be the same as their answers and those like me, being “fractured and fragmented”…absent any moral, political or spiritual foundation from which to derive answers that transcend dasein. At least in regard to value judgments.
Yet here I am grappling to reconcile my own understanding of these things…an understanding that [philosophically and otherwise] seems entirely reasonable to me…with the plain fact that almost no one else thinks like I do at all.
Talk about drawn and quartered.
Nature, from my frame of mind, is much that is bountiful and beautiful and much that is gruesome and ghastly. We don’t call earthquakes and tsunamis and tornados and volcanos and hurricanes and raging wildfires and prolonged droughts and the occasional extinction event “natural disasters” for nothing. And all those medical afflictions that pummel us. In fact, nature itself [including much of human history] is basically just a prolonged slaughterhouse.
Yet there are clearly millions upon millions of human beings who have been able and still are able to feel connected spiritually to it.
It’s just not something I am myself able to do.
Well, with severe cases of amnesia you may not change into a different person but you can lose all contact with the person that you were. So, it’s like having to start over again in some respects. The mystery of mind on steroids, maybe? The part where the brain ends and the autonomous “I” begins. We don’t even know for certain about the free will part.
I’ve gone to a few websites looking for one that really jumps out.
+++Or, as I suggest, that the answers are never ending. Only, for me, the answers themselves are derived existentially from all the vast and varied historical and cultural contexts there have been, are now and will be.
Then that crucial distinction between those who insist that your answers must be the same as their answers and those like me, being “fractured and fragmented”…absent any moral, political or spiritual foundation from which to derive answers that transcend dasein. At least in regard to value judgments.+++
While I do have a spiritual foundation, I nevertheless don’t insist that my answers are the right ones.
+++Yet here I am grappling to reconcile my own understanding of these things…an understanding that [philosophically and otherwise] seems entirely reasonable to me…with the plain fact that almost no one else thinks like I do at all.
Talk about drawn and quartered.+++
I would say that quite a lot of people think like you do. In my opinion, this is because modern society is disconnected from nature.
+++Nature, from my frame of mind, is much that is bountiful and beautiful and much that is gruesome and ghastly. We don’t call earthquakes and tsunamis and tornados and volcanos and hurricanes and raging wildfires and prolonged droughts and the occasional extinction event “natural disasters” for nothing. And all those medical afflictions that pummel us. In fact, nature itself [including much of human history] is basically just a prolonged slaughterhouse.
Yet there are clearly millions upon millions of human beings who have been able and still are able to feel connected spiritually to it.
It’s just not something I am myself able to do.+++
No one is suggesting, least of all myself, that nature is all sweetness and light. The ancients recognised this, and many of their gods were destructive or, at best, ambivalent. From a Pagan frame of mind this is no problem at all. It’s only the monotheistic religions that have painted themselves into a corner by insisting that their god is both good and omnipotent.
+++Well, with severe cases of amnesia you may not change into a different person but you can lose all contact with the person that you were. So, it’s like having to start over again in some respects. The mystery of mind on steroids, maybe? The part where the brain ends and the autonomous “I” begins. We don’t even know for certain about the free will part.+++
Are there any genuine cases of complete amnesia? How about the subconscious, or the ability to speak and understand language, for example?
+++I’ve gone to a few websites looking for one that really jumps out.+++
My experience is that the afterlife is not a subject that occupies the minds of most Pagans on a daily basis. If they mention it at all, most assume that some sort of reincarnation is most likely, but few have any certainty about this. My own opinion is pretty much the same.
Are you asking me to meet them and resolve their real moral disagreements? Or are you asking me to resolve, on paper, a moral disagreement they may or may not have?
Seriously though, you come into this thread and do indeed engage in a substantive discussion with me about morality. I can’t get you to commence an exchange with me similar to the one unfolding with gib regarding the trucker protest, but it is still a substantial exchange. Take the last three exchanges…
To wit:
Then you post this:
And that struck “me” as in or around pinhead territory.
Anyway, if and ever you are inclined to note a particular moral issue that is important to you then, given a particular set of circumstances of your choice, we can explore our respective moral philosophies.
And it won’t be me who resorts to huffing and puffing.
Otherwise stick with those like Mr. Chickenshit if discussing conflicting value judgments up in the “general description intellectual contraption” clouds is more your thing. He won’t let you down. Well, unless of course you don’t share his own value judgments regarding blacks and women and gays and Jews and “libtards”.
Oh, and on the contrary, I have engaged dozens and dozens of folks here going back to only_humean and faust and von rivers and mr. reasonable and moreno and phyllo and d63 and bob and felix and jacob and even James who I certainly did not construe to be pinheads.
I don’t construe you to be one. Only that in regard to your posts of late here, it’s basically what I have come to expect from the pinheads.
