Yes, I more or less assumed that. But then, is this a Japenese man living in a tucked in the wall ‘residence’ in Japan, who does only what his parents suggest he do with his life, working 90 hour workweeks, and going to after office parties where women are paid to talk to and flirt with the people from work but not have sex with them and he stays with this company for decades, having little time for anything but work. Or is this an organic farmer communist in Vermont who is polyamorous and also stoic. Is this…well, you get the idea. Non-religious people can have an incredible number of lives, many of them seeming incredibly odd to most of the others and precisely not normal. Each will have its own ontology or ontologies. Each will have its ‘this is how you make things better’ and ‘these are the right values’ lists. Each will have a very different sense of self. Each will have it’s own morals and heuristics for problem solving. Most of these are not tested. They each involve attitudes and practices that are generally not tested.
I didn’t mean you should be religious or were saying you came from a pure place. I think the latter is implicit in Iamb’s position. Not morally pure, but as in, not having an ideology and set of practices and heuristics. Hence others who come with potential solutions to his problems need to have strong evidence. Which implies he is approaching life in a way based on evidence, since he would only follow an approach that is based on strong evidence, as he tends to couch it as something which every rational person would conclude one should follow. But he is already approaching life in a certain way. And I have never seen him show any evidence that science backs up his choice.
That question was not aimed at you as far as your choices. It was me raising the question in relation to iambiguous given how he relates to other people’s ideas and his own proclamations of his problem.
I don’t feel any urge to questoin your choices. The context is very different with you.
Sure. I get that. And the way you framed the issue, I don’t disagree at all with you. From what you knew you raised points that I agree with.
I might acknowledge that my own approach did not meet my own criteria. The difference here, and this is true for all of us, is he is his own doctor. What he is doing now has no evidence backing it up and it is not working. That creates a different relation than what I see to other people coming. Of course I would be interested in evidence. But I would also have the urge to try out other things, even based on intuition. In fact both I and a close family member have been in this situation a few times. The family member with a mortal illness. She rejected regular medicine, bravely, because they were saying it was a temporary (and obviously unpleasant) solution only. She found via intuition and tough interviewing first one expert, then another, in what is called alternative medicine. The first stopped the problem from advancing. The second eliminated the problem. There was evidence for the first treatment, but very little for the second. But the alternative was slowly tortured death. So, what the heck. And her choices also fit with her sense of bodies and healing and the people involved. It seems to me being in a hole, fractured and fragmented with little hope and no evidence that his own practices are helping in the least - for him or via reasearch on people in general - trying something else, like Buddhism, is not irrational, since it has some very solid evidence regarding many of its claims. And this is given his criteria, which are purely scientific. Science backs up Buddhist meditation. It does not back up trying to solve the issue of conflicting goods and determinism through online discussions. His reaction to others is to tell them their solutions are all in their own heads. Apart from being rude and unnecessarily binary, it seems implicit his approach is not ‘in his head’. But it is. In fact it has nothing to back it up. And his own experience is not that is has brought him an inch closer to being out of the hole. IN fact he has added holes, like determinism, in the last year or two, via philosophical discussion on line. If he said ‘Buddhism and/or meditation do not appeal to me’ that would strike me as both honest and maintaining integrity. But it is as if he makes choices based on rationalisty which means evidence which for him is not experiential but via science. But he does not have an approach based on scientific research.
Me personally, I can follow approaches from intuition. Fine, he doesn’t want to do that, but given the criteria he uses, his rejection of Buddhism does not make sense. Or, he is much more content than he presents himself Or he is doing something here other than what he says.
There’s nothing wrong with asking for evidence. But there is something wrong with telling people why they believe in their choices, especially if they have more evidence for their choice than he does for the choice he is making. It ends up being rude. He complains about his state, asks people to present solutions, when they do he ends up telling them it is all in their head and they are using contraptions to avoid facing the abyss he is facing.
Phyllo gave it 8 years. Now, look, we have all likely made poor arguments and failed to concede things in our dialogues with him. No one has carried out philosophically perfect or completely honest and fair dialogue. But my assessment is that should you engage for a long time with him, you will find a circular, repetative non-discussion forms. I don’t know exactly what is going on, but I see contraditions and evasiveness and a lack of concession. He concedes ‘in the clouds’ with disclaimers that he might be wrong. But in the specific, he never does anything wrong, he never evades, he never contradicts himself, he never said this or that, even when it is quoted back suddenly it means something completely different. We all have some evasiveness when there is cognitive dissonence. But I actually think it is damaging to engage with this person if you actually take him seriously. And, sure, I could be wrong. One can always test is out. But if you are not fragmented and fractured and in a hole dreading death, sooner or later he will start implying that you have some kind of cognitive denial going on. And, in his mind, nothing could be more important than answering the questions he poses.
I don’t think you did something wrong. I wnated to fill you in on the context as I see it. After enormous effort I found the discussion to not be what it purports to be. Consider me a sign on the beach saying ‘strong rip tide, don’t swim here’. But one could probably wade without much of a problem. And not because I can’t face the horrors in his hole. Jeez those came up when I was a teenager, and it is horrible. And there are others that are even worse. I think Ship of Thebes is actually worse. He interprets all avoidance of the guy as not being able to face the abyss. Well, that’s a rather self-serving psychic claim.
) relating to subjects where there is not even a general consensus - whether that was your intention or not. In other words, this is textbook hubris. 2) Your reasoning is