lol as if i’ve been wrong all this time, secretly believe you are right, and am afraid of accepting it. but alas, i fear this too is all in your head.
but how do you know i’m not doing great, and by what standard do you determine this? that i have no regrets, am in great health, satisfied with my work and my income (all things considered), and don’t believe i wasted my money yesterday going to watch the new ‘starwars’ movie because once they got to exegol and hit that fleet, the shit got real. isn’t this enough? btw that movie… in fact the whole series… could be made into an excellent metaphor of the war between socialism and capitalism. the sith (evil capitalist autocrats led by palpatine - adam smith) vs the jedi (noble revolutionary guerrillas led by yoda - karl marx). no but siriusly, who gets to decide if i’m doing great? i’d like to decide that myself, with your permission of course.
on the matter or ‘questioning oneself.’ that is a delicate thing to talk about in the wrong company and without discretion. not everyone’s ‘questioning’ is equal, less so are the stakes involved in making decisions similar to questions that have much more gravity than others. there are little arbitrary questions we are faced with… and then there are yuge questions we are faced with that can’t be asked or answered lightly. the question about the question should be; how much of a difference would it make in your life to answer x instead of y. fortunately for most, not much, so there isn’t much at stake. little questions with little answers.
so those who have only ever had to ask and answer little questions don’t get to scrutinize those who are faced with bigger ones. for some, ‘questioning thyself’ is a much greater task than it is for others and involves a different kind of matrix… and when someone doesn’t understand or hasn’t experienced the enormous complexity and pressure involved in answering such yuge questions, they tend to assume such answering would be as simple as their own.
your assignment for today is to go out and get yourself into a fix not of your own making, and then battle with yourself over what you should do. i don’t mean watching videos about the impending immigration of mongrels into europe, either, since you’re gonna do the same thing no matter what happens when its over (go to the kitchen to make a sandwich). no, i mean some real shit, where your ass is directly on the line.
then come back and we can talk about ‘questioning thyself’.
He abandons an exchange of philosophy [however differently that might be construed] and starts in on huffing and puffing, retorting, name-calling, making me the issue.
Huffing and puffing.
If you do not succumb to the either/or power of the nil, and you call it by tis name, then you must be prejudiced…an emotional thinker/emoter, like it is.
This has worked to drive away, screaming ni frustration, many a well-meaning fool who thought this thing could be reasoned with.
it is already gone…what it is waiting for if for the body to be taken away, when tis mind is already dead.
Either/Or.
In a no god world, the only absolute left to surrender to is the Nil.
If not ONE…then most certainly NIL.
Nihilism is always effective. It does not await a miracle. It negates immediately and effectively.
Someone trained it in the art of the nil.
have i ever said ‘do as i say but not as i do’? shirley not. in fact, do try to do as i do. give it a shot. i triple dog dare you, and i would like nothing more than to see you succeed!
Second line of defence.
“Now look what I reduced him to”
This, too, is part of its training.
To even pay attention to it, is a victory for it.
It’s learned a technique, like all nihilists, and they will never abandon it.
The positive nihilists requires some creativity to fabricate alternate realities and justify them with romantic poetics and mystical allegories…too much work for the pure nihilists. They can simply negate - knowing there is no absolute - and then ridicule - cynicism.
What is the power of the nil founded on?
The absence of absolutes.
No indivisible, immutable, whole - no omniscience, no omnipotence - ergo no absolute certainty.
This is the source of their remarkable powers of negation. Since nothing is perfect, all can be rejected.
Now it becomes a matter of subjective preference.
What feels good.
i guess my only problem with the cast was that ‘ren’ looked too much like roger waters, and for some reason i didn’t like that. i felt like he didn’t have the right look to be the villain. i understand that in the end he came back from the darkside so technically he wasn’t a bad guy. but still they picked the wrong dude for ‘ren’. i’m sure of it.
I challenge – dare? – anyone to reconfigure intellectual gibberish of this sort into a context in which actual human behaviors can be discussed in terms of either realism or idealism.
This is typical of zombification.
There’s a video of a wild moose infected by some sort of brain parasite, but the most common is of those ants that are infected and begin to behave in strange ways - eventually dying.
you can find videos of the process on-line. It’s quite fascinating.
From genes to memes.
When I used the term meme-parasite I was speaking of the ideological version of this life form.
This specimen is evidence of what I was speaking about.
It was infected during its youth, by Abrahamism - probably the Christian variant - then it morphed into Marxism, which is typical because of the commonalities, and then it morphed into post-modernism, the latest variant.
Crypto-Marxism.
Whoever doesn’t know what post-modernism means there’s a wonderful lecture by Stephen Hicks on the subject.
Watch it on YouTube.
This specimen exhibits all the symptoms. It’s as if Hicks is describing it, specifically. Uncanny.
Zombification of the parasite-meme.
The meme is selfish. All it cares to do is propagate itself.
In this case its ruse is that it is “trapped in a cognitive hole”
A trap.
It doesn’t want to be pulled out, but to pull the world into its hole - entirely taken over by the parasite-meme.
It wants to spread doubt, negativity, nihilism. It wants to pull the world down with it.
Nothing you tell it will work…as most have already realized. It is dead from the neck up ….its brain turned to mush.
Like those proverbial movie zombies, it is motivated by pure hunger - metaphor for need…but the real motive is of the meme which wants to spread to other brains and turn them into mush, as part of its reproductive cycle.
Selfish-gene - Selfish-meme. Zombification = gradual detachment from reality - through linguistics - semiotics.
Like I said…this is entirely abstract because it is linguistic.
Hard to prove if not for these volunteering specimens.
The specimen itself is evidence of what I am describing. A zombified individual, detaching form reality, suing semiotics, and desperate to spread tis own confusion and nihilism, to other minds.
here’s the thing, dude. it is in the very nature of philosophy to work like this. you have to understand that to him, none of this is jibberish, because it is built off a system of propositions and premises which seem to him to be reasonable. the beauty of philosophy is that such propositions, premises and axioms of thought don’t have to be the slightest bit indicative of the truth or the facts in order to be coherent, comprehensive and supplemental of certainty.
you have to understand that most philosophy doesn’t come into contact with the real world… i mean doesn’t ‘read from it’ the statements it configures about it. instead it ‘imposes’ them onto the world, and their strength doesn’t depend on any empirical verification, but rather the veracity of their supporting arguments. so in his head, everything he says is true because it follows from others things he’s said which he believes are true. in this sense it isn’t ‘gibberish’ because it corresponds to prior propositions which make his conclusions logically valid and sound.
but being logically valid and sound does not necessarily mean a statement is actually representational of something in or about the world. this is why philosophers make great chefs. you can’t tell me some of the word salads you’ve eaten here weren’t absolutely delicious.
okay think of chess. a game which works according to a set of rules. in the game we say that it follows logically that this bishop can move to g3 and take the pawn… but in the real world, bishops don’t move to g3 and take pawns. in the same way, a philosophical language game operates according to its own internally generated rules, and need not be ‘about’ anything that can happen in the real world to make sense.
That he can say this — actually even believe it! — is nothing short of breathtaking.
Unless, of course, he is only being ironic.
How can someone with his tongue not buried down deep in his cheek…someone who stays up in the stratosphere of intellectual contraptions in post after post after post…argue that my point is “entirely abstract”? When, again, back to the irony, my whole effort here revolves around pushing him into bringing his own entirely abstract points [like the one above] down to earth.
Again, I challenge someone to note instances when he does in fact attach his words to the world – the reality – that we live in.
He’s got to be putting us on. No one could be that far removed from understanding how his own accusations are applicable more to himself than to folks like me. Either that or there is something seriously wrong with his thought processing.
Reality is an idealistic concept. It all depends from which level one assesses it. Thus the confusing attempts by humankind at synchronization, more specifically, synthesis. Synthesis - as an evolutionary component - is imperious to attributions and ascriptions, other than its own. It allows the witness (humankind) to label, define, embellish, criticize, and express whatever psycho-linguistic flatulence the witness deems amenable. The allowance is a courtesy, it is even shown to subordinate deities and wannabe archons. It plays no favorites. It notes the discerning, and recycles the rest.
Thank you, my gods are kind to me, but they can be strict instructors when they feel like it. I remember a long time ago I was recuperating from an illness. I stood steadfast and prevailed, I became healthier. Then one evening I heard a whimper from somewhere, then crying, then a sobbing, then screams of agony. It was as if I was high above in the stratosphere and I could hear all the wailings of whichever degree around the world. This was going on every day, had been for millennia. In my mind I said to myself that this was appalling, insane. Then a voice from somewhere, not mine, said: “Now you know what we’re dealing with.” The voice wasn’t dramatic about it, it was matter-of-fact, like someone at a job letting you know the routine and the hazards. The noise disappeared. I just sat there quietly for awhile thereafter. If ever there was a job of cleaning stables . . . I am thankful for the experience of witnessing such. And though I have not forgotten, I am also thankful for the merciful quietude of the present.
Man can only interpret reality, which is independent from his interpretation.
Like an artist can paint a tree, as accurately as he can.
The interpretation is the noumenon, that abstraction in his mind.
Idealists confuse their own interpretations, for the real. They take them literally.
Like an artist who convinces himself that his painting of a tree is the tree.
His noumena usurp the phenomenon which is then decaled to be illusory, and his interpretation as the only real tree - therefore all is interpretation, and there is no real tree.
The realist believes there is a tree, independent from his awareness and interpretation of it, and is motivated to understand it as best he can - to be an objective as possible.
The idealist is concept with his own interpretation, and may claim it is better than any other, but that all is, in the end, interpretation because there is no real world, and therefore no real tree.
For the realist meaning is how the real phenomena inter-relate and inter-acts, and that this is independent from his own awareness of this.
The idealist may believe that he is the creator of meaning, because he can choose what and how and to what degree inter-relates and inter-acts. His noumena, usurp and produce the phenomena.
depending on how idealistic, ro nihilistic, he is.
He, as I, are not Christians, but consider the holidays an opportunity to change our routines and to reaffirm family and friends.
I give him gifts when I find something I think he may want or like, not because I must. This year he got something practical. I usually give him money, because he never wants gifts.
He’s amassed quite an amount over the years.
Yes. There two levels of interpretation in the process.
first, when the stimuli reaches the sense organ and is interpreted into a form the body can process - a neural pulse. then, in the brain, when neural pulses are gathered and integrated into abstractions, sensations, emotions…
The return back to action follows a similar path.
Emotion, sensation, abstractions is converted to neural pulse and sent to the limbs, muscles, where they are converted to actions.
If you know my metaphysical positions - which you probably do - then you already know that my understanding of reality is as energy [εν-εργο] inter-activity - some patterned (ordered) some random (chaotic).
Man interprets this, to construct, ni his mind, his representation of reality.
An idealist believes that reality does not exist other than his own interpretations - subjectivity. No objective reality.
He, therefore, competes over which one offers the most benefits, not which one is closes to the objective. He makes philosophy into politics and marketing, selling their own version as more promising, positive - using the same techniques used in politics and marketing.
Just as a degenerate seeks the source of his pain and suffering, of his errors, in other, so too does he seek the source of a paradox, of a dissonance, of a irony, in the other.
That it may be a product of his own understanding, alludes him.
He always projects the possibility upon other, when the consequence is negative; and only begins with self when it is positive.
So, when the other says something that contradicts his own understanding of him, he does not question his understanding, but finds the other guilty of a contradiction.
