Sobering Sabina

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

In this age of Dionysian ecstasy, wallowing in inebriated states of self-flattering, drunken stupor, the echo of “I luv ya man” is followed by a shit-faced regurgitation over a communal toilet.

We wake up the next morning with a terrible headache promising ourselves that we will never succumb to the temptation again, but by noontime, once life has slapped us across the face, our boss has given us a verbal wedgy and our neighbor has, almost, begged us to break one of the Ten Commandments, we find ourselves heading towards mother’s little cupboard, to pull out the tried and tested little plastic bottle of chemical happiness, just to make it through the evening.

Shall I offer you my cold-shower, before you go back to sleep, all wet, and cold, and alone, despite the body beside you?
Don’t pull back the sheets, my dears, you might find that it’s been brain-dead for a long, long time.
The cadaver moves, like you do, like a zombie, but it is cold and animated by an innate hunger; a longing for some flesh and bones, and hot, steamy blood.

Why does it not turn to you, all jagged teeth and empty eyes?
Because you are one of them.

Can you not see the reflection of yourself in its needy eyes?

=D>

2

Just because a position is similar to another, more famous one’s, does not mean that the same path has been taken to the same oasis in the desert.

True, most live their lives by going down worn-down roads, because it is easier than going off the beaten path, and it is because they’ve been taken by the hand and pulled along, waddling behind a long line of individuals such as they are, that they think, conveniently so, that all are like them.
Even those who disagree with them, and have reached another oasis, are taken to be followers, and sheeple …because it’s more flattering than the alternative.

Reality is shared, and though all is changing it is not changing at a rate where life is impossible and all perceptions are obsolete.
The more intricate, subtle, patterns a mind can find, incorporating them, by simplifying, into one grand pattern (world-view), all the more timeless the insights will be.

A simpleton is always trying to adjust his earlier delusions to whatever is most popular at the time.
He calls this his 'open-mind", and his willingness to consider, and to humbly learn.
But then, if every year you are changing your mind, and just so happen to not be female, then you should consider the other possibility that your own lack of consistency and steadiness, may be the product of an absence.

Genius, after all, is a temporal designation.
It can only be judged temporally.

Therefore, if two minds can reach the same conclusion, without being told beforehand what it is, then this does not necessarily mean that one was following the other.
One can only expect that when dealing with a shared world that the conclusion, no matter what way is taken to it, will be the same.

This is not to say that the other type of mind is not more ubiquitous, not only comforting us but also leading us to the error that ALL are just like this.
If we are to find a common trait amongst the western, modern, nihilistic, minds, claiming individuality as their one and only saving grace, it is this desire to reach a conclusion before any justification is given.

A kind of thinking ass-backwards:
First you know what the end is, because you are told so, and all share your convictions, and then you try to justify why you can never let go of it.
And no, it’s never because it makes you feel good, and its easy, and popular.

The average ones always begins with the final destination, no matter what it is, just as long as it flatters and feel good thinking about it.
Because reality does give a shit, doesn’t it?

This destination must always, always, be popular, or, at the very least, it must possibly become popular, and all-inclusive.
And because it is the most popular it is the most social, the most inclusive, the easiest to accept and to defend.

Stand in a crowd screaming inanities, and see how brave you become - how shameless.

3

No, despite popular belief, perspectivism is not the belief that no matter how absurd you are, or how detached from reality you may be, that your opinion matters or that it is just as possible as the other’s.

I know this is heart wrenching and a mental crutch not easily given up, but it just isn’t so.

Perspectivism simply indicates the logical assumption that no matter what reality is, that no one mind can ever know it completely - mostly because it is ever-changing - and all perspectives must be judged by how they compare to one another and then to reality,a s it is sensually perceived, directly.

Perspectivism is not a blank check to write whatever amount you need to get by.

All value judgments are comparisons, and the ultimate standard is reality itself.
True, reality is dynamic, but not to a degree which would make all patterns useless.
If it were so, life and consciousness and knowledge, would be impossible.

Consciousness is the continuous juxtaposition of your abstractions with the sensual data invading your brain, though your sense organs.
It is the comparison between your previous abstractions and the latest noes , where all consciousness is always behind in its conceptions.
To compensate for this lag, nature cleverly, and through trial and error, evolved the tactic of imagination.

Here we have the perception of patterns that hold true for long periods of time, used to foresee what will occur, in this way preparing and enabling the organism to focus and to direct its energies.
This advantage has proven dominating…and it is called INTELLIGENCE.
Creativity is the ultimate weapon of the intelligent mind.

In conclusion, though the real can be approached, never fully to be seen - because only a god, according to some traditions, exists outside time/space - no two perspectives are the same, nor equal.

And if one or two become to seductive to the average populace, that they evolve into a meme, then all the more glory to the ones who created them.

4

There is only one quick way to define the concepts POSITIVE and NEGATIVE, in my mind.

The expenditure of energy to bring a phenomenon about, is my defining standard.
We’ll keep in mind that the phenomenon, the apparent, is always an interpretation of the sensual input flooding the brain, through the senses and then through the nervous system.

That which requires constant energy to maintain itself, is called POSITIVE.
That which does not, but comes about effortlessly, is called NEGATIVE.

Let us find some sub-categories to these binary categories:

Positive:
Light, Heat, Life, Order, Consciousnesses etc.

Negative:
Dark, Cold, Lifelessness, Chaos, Unconsciousness etc.

When we speak of entropy, or increasing chaos - randomness - what we are speaking about is the normal flow of time, towards chaos.
Randomness does not require effort to come about, or to maintain it’s increase …it is the natural state of things.
Order, on the other hand does require constant and continuous effort to come about and to persist, in the entropy.

Therefore, when we look back, what are we looking towards - in science they call it the Big Bang …some near-absolute state of an almost complete singularity?
Yes, when we speak of the past we speak of a higher level of Order.
When we project into the future we are projecting towards disorder.
It dos not matter how we imagine its coming future state, because the mind is not bound by reality and can succumb to fear, hope, imagining whatever it pleases. Particularly in a culture that protects simplicity, and defends error, this is becoming more and more the norm, rather than something to be weeded out of the species using natural methods (culling, sexual exclusion etc.)

In fact it is the mind’s ability to detach itself from reality that is the source of its potential greatest strength and its potential greatest weakness.

To test this hypothesis conduct an experiment.
Lie down in your bed and do nothing.
Let us assume that you cannot arrest your breathing, so let that one go.
systolic and diastolic metabolic processes, and autoimmune systems aside , just be inert, still.
remain so as long as you can.
How long before you die, without any effort on your part …but a cessation or reduction of effort?

5

A definition of ARTIFICIAL versus NATURAL

All that exists is (inter)active, dynamic, and so it is natural.

The sub-category of ARTIFICIAL is meant to facilitate the appreciation of human intervention upon natural processes, and how these begin to affect him and his destiny.
Man is now becoming the writer of his own destiny …and this is not necessarily a good thing.

Natural:
The past.
The sum of all previous nurturing.
That which determines the apparent and manifests as appearance.
All that preceded human willful intervention.

to deny or reject or dismiss the past, is to show contempt towards nature and all that made you, and everything around you possible.
It is a form of self-hatred, often expressed as a coming, Utopian, positivity.

Artificial:
The ambiguous point in space/time when an organism’s - in this case homo sapient - (inter)actions, and interventions, upon natural processes begin to affect it more than the processes that pre-existed this intervention.
The collateral effects can be multiple and placed under the heading of good/constructive/beneficial and bad/destructive/detrimental.

Under the latter we can include pollution, both material and genetic.
Material being air/water/soil pollution, garbage, sound pollution, destruction of ecosystems etc.
Genetic being the allowance, under the heading of morality or justice, for the infiltration of unfit mutations into the genetic pool. From this we get disease, metal and physical dysfunctions, disabilities etc.

6

Gene & Meme, a comparative study.

Gene:
The sum of all past experiences, even those preceding one’s own birth, encoded and stored (memory), as DNA programming.
Combined and merged into new forms, affected by environmental conditions during the period of combination (mutations), and passed on to the next generation.

Genes produce Organisms.

Meme:
The sum of all past experiences, even those not experienced first-hand (knowledge), encoded ans stored (memory), as Language.
Combined and merged into new forms, affected by socioeconomic/cultural conditions during the period of combination (mutations) and passed on to the next generation.

Memes produce Cultures, or Superorganisms.

The meme is the outcrop of the gene - its continuation and application within a different context.
Particular populations, genetic bloodlines, affected by environment (geography, weather, history, temperature, random events, vegetation, etc.) produce particular memes, or attitudes towards nature, the world, and existence.
Like with genetic health, healthy memes may then impregnate, seed, other peoples, spreading themselves across physical and temporal limits.
Like with genetics, cancers emerge, infecting memes with cultural, mental, ideological, diseases.
In other words memes that contradict the original.

7

BEAUTY, not so much ‘in the eye of the beholder,’ but more a re-cognition and appreciation of order, symmetry, patterns.

Here we must make a distinction, along the Hellenic lines of AGAPE and EROS.
Two facets of the same LOVE, attraction.

One is rational appreciation of similarity.
A love of self, through other.

The other is an instinctive, intuited, emotional, automated, genetic response to sensual stimuli.
This one is more of an exaggerated, idealized, after the fact, form of LUST.
Love of what is different, because one feels incomplete, and unhappy, with self.

Men prefer toe former, women the latter.

Beauty, and its two, binary/dualistic, forms.

Erotic Beauty:
Here, beauty signifies fertility, genetic health (past symmetry manifesting in the present), the ability to carry out a sexual role, as this has been determined by nature and its production of the female/male specialized sexual types.
An unconscious, instinctive, automatic, reaction to specific genetic markers.
Emotion is the most automatic response to stimuli, and so LUST and LOVE are confused and integrated into one sensation.

Agape Beauty:
In this case we have a conscious, rational appreciation of virility, health, symmetry.
The aesthetic sense.
We appreciate nature, the other, by how (s)he reminds us of what we are, or think we are, or wish we could be.
This form requires more time to come about, as it engages the higher brain, and is not an instinctive, genetic (re)action.
Because it is more rational, conscious, it is longer lasting, deeper, stronger.

Here the appreciation of order, symmetry can be produced by something which is not necessarily positive towards us and our well-being. We can appreciate its beauty though it terrifies us, or threatens us, from a detached, objective, standpoint.

Because chaos is increasing, order is becoming increasingly rare.
This makes the discovery and the appreciation of beauty in the subtle all the more powerful and valuable.

Random sound, is chaotic …we call it noise; sound with patterned order, is melodic …we call it music.
We are compelled to appreciate and to seek out melodies.

8

Are you satyr?

9

No, I have studied him. Why?
Do you have anything to say on my content?

10

Sabina o am from the sixties I know, janis joplin used to sing u have got to find somebody to love,
She od’d near a motel I live, I remember the day,
That night, a long long
Long time ago, hi an acid, that at some god forsaken party someone dropped into my whiskey sour,
I heard that on the radio,
And you have no idea where and when I found eternal love there
But I’d did,and now I have to be aware of the commitment,
Sabina: I can’t say I love you even if I sympathize because I have a lover my wife who will never have intimacy again, because well. I can’t say why,
But if I never am intimate with anyone else again, I would not bother, because I know, o have to love
My need to love is so great as to stop me from disappointment, to disappoint anyone, anyone, because I know I can never ever love anybody else, because as good is my witness I have to be true otherwise I could never, ever live with myself again.

I am sober, even if I am not, my sobriety is ingrained. You must find someone to love!

11

Sir, you are trying much too hard to be interesting.

You Win.

NEXT!!!

12

You’re ranting. Simmer down.

13

A common delusion, amongst those who share the same motives, and the same stringently educated uniformity:
To have an opinion is to benefit from it, easily, and immediately.

No effort required.
The awareness comes with a compensating gift, requiring no further adaptations.

A common mistake because it is part of the common behavior.

As a result, whenever a hypothesis is proposed as being more probable, the common mind seeks out the motive, the advantage, the easy gift, for the one proposing it.
Taking himself as an example, because he lacks the imagination to project his mind into what is more alien to him, he settles for the easiest explanation.

He, this other, must believe what he is saying because he, this other, benefits from it.
No, he is not challenged by reality, he does not honestly think it is so, despite it being detrimental to his well-being, but the belief is automatically an advantage.

Debate becomes this competition over who will present a theory which flatters the most, or offers the biggest immediate gratification, with the least amount of effort.
Who can imagine the most detached variation of Utopia?
Who will inspire, give hope, comfort, as many as possible, by first comforting himself?

Yes, THIS is what is called “philosophy”.

Not love of wisdom for wisdom’s sake …but love of whatever feels good, is the most altruistic, kind, polite …good

The insight must, MUST, be applicable. It must come with a solution, and a benefit.

You do not adapt to reality, but reality must be made to adapt to you, and your fears, and hopes, and desires.
Simply change your perspective …and you are home free.

14

Yes, two sentences constitutes a Rant.
Allow me to be monosyllabic…laconic:

NEXT!!!

Oh, wait …it was the exclamation points !!!
Let us quiet the mind.

15

That’s what happens with the democracy of knowledge.
The biggest question is how you are going to deal with it?
It’s not impossible to deal with it either, because many people have done so.

16
17

There is no democracy.

Knowledge does not come with an interpretation manual. Data is data …nothing more, nothing less.
The mind interprets data, makes sense of it, finds patterns in it.

He who controls the data, and the interpretations, controls the minds of those learning the data, with little effort of their own.

Take your favorite kick-toy on this forum: Nietzsche.
Learn a few catch-phrases, go to Wikipedia for a synopsis, buy a book titled Thus Spake Zarathustra for Dummies, and everyone has a take on his positions.
Ironically, not that different from the next guys.
And how flippantly they discard him, these children of modernity.

But did Nietzsche just conjure up is views out of nothingness?
Was he a warlock, of some sort?
Where did he draw his inspiration from, and with whom did he agree, simply because great, honest, minds, cannot help but come to the same conclusions?

Dismiss Nietzsche, kill him, slander him …so what?
Forget Darwin …and so?
Is your memory a universal force?
Who is the victim when one denies a reality?
Is it reality?

Have you escaped the world he described so vividly, and with so much brutal honesty?
Socrates was put to death by his lessers, did they escape his insights?
Did they change the world?

But all is perspective, right?
So, your assessment is as good as anybody’s.
Why not?
Democracy in reality.

And the world keeps on going round, and round.

What passes for “honesty” these days, is this repetition of the common good.
If it hurts someone, anywhere, at any time, let no man utter a word.
Silence!!!
Be polite, kind, tolerant. Offer the benefit of the doubt.
Who shall cast the first stone?
Not I, right?

Let us water it down, so the children are not offended by this nasty pill.
Maybe mix it in with a chocolate bar.

The solution?

But this is a war of attrition.
A never-ending one.
One tries to preserve what is being lost, what is being chipped away at.
No solution, no victory, no end …endless agon.

Define yourself by what side you choose, what ideals you value, what principles you live by.

Awareness need not be solved, or considered a problem.
Everyone wants an application to insight.
Well, then let it be this:
Adapt or Die.
Make yourself durable.

18

I think virtually nothing in any reality is equal.
Each ‘thing’ has its own measurement and value.
I still can call myself a perspectivist because perspective is the form of mind we use so often.

You’re talking about a cheap mass mentality, but you don’t want to call it democratic?
Don’t you see how democratic it is though?
An appeal to the majority is usually an appeal to the lowest quality human bulk which exists.
An appeal to the best man or woman requires all kinds of things, including what constitutes the “best”. But, philosophers aren’t ready for that. In general. Society is by default a mass mentality of low quality. It can be honest in tribes and successful, but there it is also of low quality.

Also controlling someone isn’t so easy if you try to make a person do what they are by their nature against, it will be very difficult.
The mind control that really works well is when you propose something that the person already wants to believe.
That is why democratic media is so sensationalist and dishonest.

19

Have you mistaken me for a Democrat?
I gave up fairy-tales in kindergarten.

All inclusion, equal vote, mass participation …all shall be heard, all have the RIGHT to be respected.
The recipe of the lowest-common-denominator bake-off.

Make it sweet, or else the many will not like it, and if they don;'t like it, they will not buy, nor swallow.

Philosophy is lowered down to a vote:
Perspectivism.
How many yays does this perspective have?
Done!!!
It is truth!!!

The standard of quantities, rather than qualities.
Tomorrow, or the day after, a definition of quantity and quality.

Children of the book, by the book, for the book.
Numbers and words.
The noumenon over the phenomenon.
‘First came the word’ - my ass.

No, Goethe said:
“First came the action”.

Time to regain this lost ground.
Fight fire with fire, match word for word.

We’ve been made chattering housewives.

20

So, to sum up, this kind of ad hom - where you focus on what you imagine the person gains from their belief, rather than the belief itself and the argument supporting it - is a common one. I don’t see people getting away with that so much here, but I do see presumptions of gain motivating the way people react. It underlies, but generally I do see people called on to argue on substance.

Even beliefs that are to the detriment of one’s well being can have secondary gains. Then there are all sorts of dynamic motivations, where a person takes on the role of realist who faces the hard truth and lets other people be the irrational coward, which offers all sorts of evasive and self-soothing foci. People can position themselves and get off on the role they Think they have in a dynamic or simply on their own, even if the role is defined by beliefs that are not pleasant to face.

That it is often assumed that being the one who faces unpleasant truths means one does not have non-logical even irrational motivations for having a belief is missing an important insight into human nature.

All this setting aside Another issue: sometimes believing something detrimental to well being can be an act of cowardice or a way of maintaining Control. Other beliefs may entail more groping in the dark, or seem to.

But bringing these things up in the context of some belief would be an ad hom. That the patterns I Point out above are strong possiblities and that this is missed by some who Think they must be immune because their beliefs are unpleasant in some way are only valid in a discussion such as this one. In a discussion of most other issues it is simply ad hom and not going to the matter at hand.