Thread for mundane ironists

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242

Logic

“When we characterize talk as hot air, we mean that what comes out of the speaker’s mouth is only that. It is mere vapor. His speech is empty, without substance or content. His use of language, accordingly, does not contribute to the purpose it purports to serve. No more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely exhaled. There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted. In any event, it cannot serve the purposes of sustenance, any more than hot air can serve those of communication.” Harry G. Frankfurt

Much as he exemplifies that here?

“It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.” Carveth Read

On the other hand: about what?

“He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.” Julian Barnes

Take that, Mr. Objectivist!

“People will always prefer black-and-white over shades of grey, and so there will always be the temptation to hold overly-simplified beliefs and to hold them with excessive confidence” Thomas Gilovich

Take that, Mr. Objectivist!

“What we believe is heavily influenced by what we think others believe” Thomas Gilovich

Pick three:
1] historically
2] culturally
3] experientially

“Whenever there’s something wrong with your writing, suspect that there’s something wrong with your thinking.” Patricia T. O’Conner

Or, sure, there’s something wrong with what others think they are reading.

243

Sarah Perry from The Essex Serpent

Must we make battlegrounds out of our children?

Though some wouldn’t have it any other way.

…what use was it to observe the human species and try to understand it? Their rules were fathomless and no more fixed than the wind.

Right, like everything is only as it ever could have been. Unless, of course, that’s actually true.

The principle of caution, respecting the gravity of human suffering, weighs against procreating to the extent that it is unpredictable whether the person created will have a good life.

Though some will in fact embody spectacluar lives.

I said I’d go alone, but perhaps that’s the point; perhaps we are always alone, no matter the company we keep.

I know I have always been. Why? Just lucky I guess.

But she’d learned the humility of scholars: that the more she knew, the more she did not know.

Unlike, say, the scholars here who do know everything.

Living outside of any story―living without hope for the future, without the belief that one is part of a narrative―is confusing.

When it’s not actually fractured and fragmented.

244

William Golding from Lord of the Flies

We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything.

Well, not counting philosophy, perhaps.

The mask was a thing on it’s own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.

Or here, personas.

His voice rose under the black smoke before the burning wreckage of the island; and infected by that emotion, the other little boys began to shake and sob too. And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of mans heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.

Next up: Yellowjackets.

Which is better–to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?

Better for who?

I know there isn’t no beast—not with claws and all that, I mean—but I know there isn’t no fear, either.
Piggy paused.
Unless—
Ralph moved restlessly.
Unless what?
Unless we get frightened of people.

Let’s just say it’s the difference between The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock.

“The rules!" shouted Ralph, “you’re breaking the rules!”
"Who cares?”

Of course here that’s all changing, right?

245

Meaning

“There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one’s self, the very meaning of one’s soul.” Edith Wharton

Me? She’s long gone.

“Crap.
It’s all crap.
Living is crap.
Life has no meaning.
None. Nowhere to be found.
Crap.
Why doesn’t anybody realize this?” K-Ske Hasegawa

Me? I’m doing the best I can here to remind you.

“Obsessions are the only things that matter.” Patricia Highsmith

The right ones anyway.

If you could hear other people’s thoughts, you’d overhear things that are true as well as things that are completely random. And you wouldn’t know one from the other. It’d drive you insane. What’s true? What’s not? A million ideas, but what do they mean?” Jay Asher

What do you need them to mean?

“To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.” Bill Watterson

For example, if you’re a cartoon character.

“After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.” Richard Dawkins

He wondered why this frame of mind always exasperated him. Though he still doesn’t know.

246

There should be a movie about two people who are done w life, think it’s crap, pine for the one that got away, think the other will never measure up, and fall in mutual cynicism together… by total accident realizing they’re both full of shit & can choose to …. recognize they are very fond of each other despite all of life’s very real bullshit. And from that point on they refuse to be bullshit for each other.

247

Ludwig Wittgenstein

This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time’.

Or, here, flip 'em the bird?

Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound.

Meh.

Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.

Now, that’s where I come in. The philosophical equivalent of a bulldozer.

An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.

What’s that make IC and his ilk then?

Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult ‘What is that?’

That and the clouds, of course.

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

Let’s get back to that tomorrow.

248

lol you’re so full of shit!

249

Science

“We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.” Ray Bradbury

So, what’s that make God then?

“In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.” Carl Sagan

Fortunately, it happens all the time here. 8)

“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.” Christopher Hitchens

Let’s pick one and get started.

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” Abraham Maslow

Any nails here?

“Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion gives man wisdom, which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals.” Martin Luther King, Jr

My guess: they sure as hell can be.

“The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.” Albert Einstein

On the contrary, others say:

250

Roberto Bolaño

“Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.” Roberto Bolaño

Let’s explain that.

“Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me."

Anyone know which book he’s up to?

“I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don’t have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions."

Who can argue with that?

“People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth."

Uh, define never?

“While we are looking for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, that is, the ‘new’, which can only be found by plunging deep into the Unknown, we have to go on exploring sex, books, and travel, although we know that they lead us to the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where the antidote can be found.”

Uh, define antidote?

“The secret story is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living it from day to day, thinking we’re alive, thinking we’ve got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn’t matter."

Going back to, well, you tell me.

251

Time

“By the time you’re thirty, your worst enemy is yourself.” Chuck Palahniuk

On average, let’s say.

“Now, five years is nothing in a man’s life except when he is very young and very old…" Pearl S. Buck

On average, let’s say.

“Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it’s time for you to become someone else’s past time, and then time folds again.” Margaret Atwood

Close enough?

“Today will die tomorrow.” Algernon Charles Swinburne

Three hours and counting.

“Time is the enemy of identity” Michael Moorcock

Death too.

“Every moment is the paradox of now or never.” Simon Van Booy,

Ever come upon one that wasn’t?

252

God

“To believe in God or in a guiding force because someone tells you to is the height of stupidity. We are given senses to receive our information within. With our own eyes we see, and with our own skin we feel. With our intelligence, it is intended that we understand. But each person must puzzle it out for himself or herself.” Sophy Burnham

Next up: you have a “condition”.

“All right, God, say that You are really there. You have put me in this fix. You want to test me. Suppose I test You? Suppose I say that You are not there? You’ve given me a supreme test with my parents and with these boils. I think that I have passed Your test. I am tougher than You. If You will come down here right now, I will spit into Your face, if You have a face. And do You shit? The priest never answered that question. He told us not to doubt. Doubt what? I think that You have been picking on me too much so I am asking You to come down here so I can put You to the test! I waited. Nothing. I waited for God. I waited and waited.” Charles Bukowski

Even I wouldn’t take it that far. You know, just in case He does exist.

“After all, when ‘the Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become’ He resolved to ‘wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created – and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground – for I regret that I have made them’ (Genesis 6:7). The Bible thinks it is perfectly all right to destroy all animals as punishment for the crimes of Homo sapiens, as if the existence of giraffes, pelicans and ladybirds has lost all purpose if humans misbehave. The Bible could not imagine a scenario in which God repents having created Homo sapiens, wipes this sinful ape off the face of the earth, and then spends eternity enjoying the antics of ostriches, kangaroos and panda bears.” Yuval Noah Harari

On the other hand, it wouldn’t make nature any less a slaughterhouse. Not to mention all the ghastly diseases that animals are afflicted with.

“If you were meant to cure cancer or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself…You hurt your children, you hurt me, you hurt the planet. You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite God Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter further along its path back to God.” Stephen Pressfield

Come on, it was God who created cancer, right? And I’m still waiting for anyone who can reconcile their own religious beliefs with this:

“Faith means I chose not to know, which is different than ignorance which refuses to know.” Craig D. Lounsbrough

New thread?

“There’s a lot of pride involved in my refusal to believe in god.” Orhan Pamuk

New Thread?

253

“She is long gone.”

You sure about that?

254

Death

“If there be light, then there is darkness; if cold, heat; if height, depth; if solid, fluid; if hard, soft; if rough, smooth; if calm, tempest; if prosperity, adversity; if life, death.” Pythagoras

Sounds about right.

“We fear death, we shudder at life’s instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.” Hermann Hesse

His books? On the other hand, he is still almost certainly dead.

“Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.” John Donne

Any day now.

“Stuffed deer heads on walls are bad enough, but it’s worse when you see them wearing dark glasses, having streamers around their necks and a hat on their antlers. Because then you know they were enjoying themselves at a party when they were shot.” Ellen DeGeneres

I’ll bet you hadn’t thought of that.

“Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist- that is, I don’t make the mistake of thinking that the cosmos gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.” H. P. Lovecraft

He wondered if he might be an indifferentist too. Or still just an ironist.

“Everyone sounded the same when they died.” Sarah J. Maas

As far as we know, of course.

255

Philosophy

“How small a thought it takes to fill a life.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

How small is yours?

“To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without managing to remain there: I am too weak for such happiness.” Émile Cioran

I hear that.

“Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It’s everyone’s, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.” Barbara Kingsolver

New thread!

“They can’t tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.” Ken Kesey

For example, while posting here.

“Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.” Murakami,Haruki

Or, sure, eat them: doughnut holes - Google Search

“A student, filled with emotion and crying, implored, “Why is there so much suffering?”
Suzuki Roshi replied, "No reason.” Shunryu Suzuki

Start here: https://youtu.be/lnIlHQLAiTA?si=WfedZVmEMiWNV3aE

256

Free Will

“Yes I have free will; I have no choice but to have it.” Christopher Hitchens

And I have no choice but to disagree.

“In fact, if you are faced with the prospect of running across an open field in which lightning bolts are going to be a problem, you are much better off if their timing and location are determined by something, since then they may be predictable by you, and hence avoidable. Determinism is the friend, not the foe, of those who dislike inevitability.” Daniel C. Dennett

Click.

“Your personal will is the web your disease sits and spins in. The will you call your own ceased to be yours as of who knows how many Substance-drenched years ago.” David Foster Wallace

Reason enough to snuff it?

“Christianity would be helpless without the idea of free will and the idea of free will would be helpless without incongruity.” Kedar Joshi

Uh, let’s not go there?

“Free will? Either you follow the word of God, or you’ll be punished with eternal hellfire. That’s the same kind of “choice” an abuse boyfriend gives you: 'Either you do exactly what I say, or I’ll beat the shit out of you.” Oliver Gaspirtz

Yeah, what about that?

“No one denies that we are influenced by genes and environment. What is denied is that we are determined by our genes and/or environment, that we are literally puppets that cannot act differently, that we have no moral agency, no personal accountability, that we are mere machines." Mike Hockney

Unless, of course, God or No God, we were never able not to deny it.

257

Stanisław Lem from Solaris.

And he has created eternity, which was to have measured his power, and which measures his unending defeat.

Unless, perhaps, He is a sadistic monster?

“And perhaps Solaris is the cradle of your divine child," Snow went on, with a widening grin that increased the number of lines round his eyes. Solaris could be the first phase of the despairing God. Perhaps its intelligence will grow enormously. All the contents of our Solarist libraries could be just a record of his teething troubles…” Stanisław Lem

Dare to go there?

“It might hear us. But what’s its name? We have named all the stars and all the planets, even though they might already have had names of their own. What a nerve!

Repeat as necessary. And, eventually, it always is.

I was still a prisoner in my nightmares, and every morning the play began again.

This just popped into my head: https://youtu.be/p3czJ5zA_nI?si=zTKYUnqxMvRJhXx8

We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them.

See how fucking tricky this can all get?

Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him.

See how fucking tricky this can all get?

258

Logic

“To think or not to think? That is the new question.” Nadina Boun

Next up: the new answer.

“To want to tackle everything rationally is irrational.” Ilyas Kassam

In other words, rooted existentially in dasein.

“Some philosophers can’t bear to say simple things, like “Suppose a dog bites a man.” They feel obliged instead to say, “Suppose a dog d bites a man m at time t,” thereby demonstrating their unshakable commitment to logical rigor, even though they don’t go on to manipulate any formulae involving d, m, and t.” Daniel C. Dennett

Then the part where the dog rips the man’s balls off.

“Doctrines which can stand the trial of logic and reason can do without persecuting skeptics.” Ludwig von Mises

Not counting the other guy’s doctrines of course.

“We are raised in a society where we are taught to believe a more logical reason for an illogical happening rather than the illogical reason for something which may be of the unknown, hence, why the logical answer is illogical to the logical person.” Nicholas A. McGirr

On the other hand, why rock the boat? Especially on the way to the bank.

“Reason itself is fallible, and this fallibility must find a place in our logic.” Nicola Abbagnano

Uh, not always easy though, is it?

259

Suzette Haden Elgin from Native Tongue

First principle: there’s no such thing as reality. We make it up by perceiving stimuli from the environment - external or internal - and making statements about it. Everybody perceives stuff, everybody makes up statements about it, everybody - so far as we can tell - agrees enough to get by, so that when I say ‘Hand me the coffee’ you know what to hand me. And that’s reality. Second principle; people get used to a certain kind of reality and come to expect it, and if what they perceive doesn’t fit the set of statements everybody’s agreed to, either the culture has to go through a kind of fit until it adjusts…or they just blank it out.

Ah, the objectivists among us.

We are men, and human words are all we have: even the Word of God is composed actually of the words of men.

Or, here…words and clouds.

But she would learn. Every woman was a prisoner for life; it was not some burden that she bore uniquely. She would have all the company she could ever need.

Not so much here though, right?

He stayed carefully away from the profs, he ran the data they gave him without allowing any of it to register in his memory—that’s what you have computers for, so you don’t have to put stuff in your own memory—and that was all he did.

Click.

No longer were there “doctors” of anthropology and physics and literature to offend the real doctors and confuse the public; they had put a stop to that, as they had put a stop to so many things that were unseemly and inappropriate.

Next up: the unseemly and inappropriate behaviors that were put a stop to here.

Any beginning is also an ending, you know. You can’t have just the one.

Unless, perhaps, you don’t know that at all.

260

Meaning

“Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.” Ernest Becker

That’s me!
Right?

“Don’t for heaven’s sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

And if there isn’t a Heaven?

“I think of you as a friend. I used to think “friend” was just another word… Nothing more, nothing less. But when I met you, I realized what was important was the word’s meaning.” Masashi Kishimoto

Next up: the great friendships here.

“Exactly!" said Deep Thought. "So once you do know what the question actually is, you’ll know what the answer means.” Douglas Adams

Your own answer in particular.

“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we’re living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves… And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.” Olga Tokarczuk

Let’s just hope that never happens here.

“And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words… As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.” Alan Watts

I challenge anyione here to sum it up better.

261

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

In other words, alas, others, in the end, have to agree with you.

If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.

Next up: the lion whisperer.

The face is the soul of the body.

In other words, whatever that means.

The world is everything that is the case.

Just in case you thought it was only what uou believed it was.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all.

Start here: a man amidst mankind: back again to dasein

If there were a verb meaning “to believe falsely,” it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

Right, like that will stop them from posting here…