/philosophy/ - Philosophy

So what's your question(s)?

I mean, I assume you have some either existential or psychological problem you're trying to solve.

>>4614

Yes I seem to be suffering from a mixture of an existential crisis and being indecisive. My main concern is being unable to identify any core values or beliefs which I think will make my life more meaningful. Have I been demoralized?

>>4617

>My main concern is being unable to identify any core values or beliefs which I think will make my life more meaningful.

what about "liberty" ?

>I've been told my whole life I'm important.

>Oh shit, I'm not important.

>Better pretend this is about high-falutin philosophy.

99% of teenage angst. There's a related one where you suddenly realize you're treated like dirt, and you've always been treated like dirt, even though everyone tells you you're special.

Most humans are limited to a mental potemkin village. Actually looking at the universe as it is doesn't make the feel awe, it makes them panic and shut down. They're limited to a caricature, typically provided by other humans, in a lovely game of Telephone. It means there's some 100th monkey to gets to decide what all the other monkeys see the world as, almost unconstrained by what the world actually is, but very highly constrained by the extraordinarily limited minds the caricature universe has to fit into.

Which would be fine if the potemkin minds would admit they're limited, instead of chimping out on anyone who sees farther than they do.

Finite.

Even if space is perfectly flat, which would imply infinity, the observable universe will always be finite. Light cones and all that. Even if time is potentially infinite, at any point a finite amount of time will have passed. Also, it looks like everything decays and so the universe will have a functional end.

>eternity is high status, and shards of high status are still highish status, I need to be high status to feel joy, and therefore I can feel joy.

Hello monkey. Monkey want to dance? Sorry, I don't understand 'ooga ooga.' Just dance if you want to. You can leave my friends behind.

Missed this meme tbh

>equating God and religion

>>4490

The ontological argument is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard.

>>4135

"We have killed him, and we'll never be able to wash off the blood."

Also, we're not really talking about 'God' we're talking about, specifically, Jesus. Does Allah exist? How about Yahweh? Zeus? Odin?

How about none of the above, but I'm still not an atheist?

Two separate things.

1.Monkey-human catastrophizing. When you want to show how much you care by being afraid of losing things in the future, then it spirals out of control, and you imagine losing everything so hard you pretend you actually believe it.

2. Things actually ending. If we consider the Roman dark ages and the Bronze Age collapse, there's definitely end times, if not quite so dramatic as the melodramas portray. (It's an affective representation, it's not supposed to be scientific.) There's also substantial evidence for The Flood, most recently due to cometary impacts on the ice age glaciers. That's a real end times. But it's metaphysical end times only in the fact that emotions are metaphysical and it certainly felt like all existence was coming to an end. In fact, all existence was not coming to an end, and if humans evolved once, it can probably happen again. Even if all life is wiped out of not just Earth, but the universe, the planet will keep on spinning.

posers, the lot of you.

>>4493

You call us posers, yet you haven't even read Spinoza.

I've read the Enchiridion, I prefer it much more than the Meditations, it's much more concise since Aurelius' is more of a journal.

Ha! Neither!

Tell me something in them I haven't thought of before. Hint: you can't. The stuff's out there already, the books are a crutch at this point.

>>3881

No worries. I didn't need to be so salty.

Welp, board is slow as shit, but at least we're polite.

On nuclear weapons, Günther Anders is a must-read. On the subject of A.I., Nick Bostrom wrote Superintelligence that discusses what would be the consequences of such an invention. I didn't read it yet, but it seems interesting enough.

>>2639

Jaron Lanier on current and future abuses of big data and computing to destroy the economy (amongst other things) in Who Owns the Future?

>>2647

Yeah even Star Trek TOS had those themes, as a kind of modern aesop's tales but by a modern thinker (liberal Atheist). A lot of my ethical thought is still grounded in scenarios of pulp paperbacks I read in adolescence. It's always the newest medium that the censors are less aware of, and the newest medium is freest to be subversive. Sci-fi is full of allegories, and was the choice genre for liberals trying to bypass censorship in the USSR or the during America's Red Scare.

I wish philosophers would try to make their work more interesting and narrative rather than writing it like proofs only for autistic nerds. Even Jesus knew to use parables for expediency if you want to reach a large audience.

>Or is everything gonna go to shite?

no

>>4492

Who is this semen demon?

"This video is private."

What does this have to do with philosophy?

>>4456

>a man's understanding of the world around him has nothing to do with philosophy

get a load of this post-enlightenment continental navelgazer

I Believe the set guidelines that make our universe was forged by God. The universe is kinda like his dream and follows his understanding of things. But looking at the universe in his eyes, Being truly sentient we can leave this perception and wake up outside it.

>>4458

Cool strawman, bro. But you didn't answer the question.

What does it has to do with philosophy?

There ain't anything else in this thread even resembling a question, and there ain't nothing like an argument either. OP has got nothing but some rather angsty and certainly unoriginal thoughts and an implicit "please rate my opinions". Didn't even bother justifying them, just asked some inane shit ("lol how do i long until suicide?"). Total jackass.

A good philosopher doesn't believe anything until he can prove it. Can you prove the universe has no purpose? If you could, you would understand what that actually means, instead of reacting with the cliche emotion.

>>4442

>>4443

>Reaction images, not argument.

I can prove free will is existentially impossible.

On the other hand, there's something else which does everything you wanted free will to do. This is also provable.

>>4469

I get it. You could too if you weren't being deliberately abtuse.

>>4461

He's a Marxist who went to school and first published behind the iron curtain. That's like a Fundie who never left Jesusland.

>hate capitalism

>become an icon of popculture and use advertisement and adjust to demands of potential buyers to sell your books

>>4464

The point is that you're forced to obey the rules of capitalism if you want to survive. What the hell do you expect him to do?

>>4465

>What the hell do you expect him to do?

not behave like a hypocrite, which is especially hilarious on the grounds that he pretends to be a philosopher.

>>4461

He's basically a professional troll. I'm not sure whether to envy his cushy job or pity his lack of integrity.

>>1585

Diogenes a best.

"Choices are

what forge

potential to real.

nothing is now

actual, so do to be.

losses are better

altruistically to the

monotheism fall midservant(?)"

- Anon

>>4449

Stop posting these dumbshit threads you look like a 15 year old who thinks he knows some epic secret knowledge

Try again when you're capable of posting something with substance and legibility

“Men find worthier of praise whichever song comes most recently to their ears"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism

u moron

>>4416

Moronic answer. The problem of free will is not that will does not determine, but that will is not the final determiner of itself.

>>4418

Compatibilism is the only coherent answer, yet only the conception of self-determination as really possible and existent makes it so. Standard accounts of compatibilism are just determinisms that try to side-step the problem of ultimate determination of the agent's reasoning. That the will wills what it wills and sees itself free in its will is not what is questioned, but how the will can really be the source of its own determination.

>>4416

I guess I see your point if you're considering the consciousness as a process rather than a single thing able to create will, which seems more accurate. I should have specified "free" as "free from the determined course of the physics of the universe" and not "free from your own thoughts".

>>4414

As for self-determination, I didn't research it a ton but it sounds like it asserts that there are aspects of the human mind outside of the physical world, kind of like Cartesian dualism. This is cool and I'd like to add it as a third item on the list, but I still have a problem with it. If the soul does exist in some different layer of reality, wouldn't it still be under the deterministic effects of that world, or else based on some random number generator in that metaphysical dimension? Like even if it's not a part of our reality, I don't see how it can really evade being one of the two. Again, I didn't research it super well, so anyone can feel free to correct me on the specifics of self-determination.

>>4418

So if I read that correctly, compatibilism is saying that you do not have free will to decide what you want to do, however you do have free will to decide how you want to do it. This still believes in some free will, just like, low fat free will. The mechanisms by which free will come about are not actually discussed by the concept though, so it seems like a dead end to me.

>>4430

Self-determination concerns one realm of determination. What components allow for self-determination only serve as necessary conditions of its existence, but not of its inner function. Just as your computer can be composed of a myriad different components of different brands which may determine how fast and how much it can do, the realm of actual computation is in the software and it works as it does within its own systematic form. Windows is still going to work as windows whether you run on 10 year old AMD or top of the line modern Intel.

>>4419

>Moronic answer. The problem of free will is not that will does not determine, but that will is not the final determiner of itself.

Recursive, therefore paradox. The will determines the will which determines the will which determines the....

Yeah, nope.

>>4419

>Compatibilism is the only coherent answer

Nope.

Compatibilism has been shredded by multiple commentators.

>>4412

>There just has to be some more options here.

Determinism is true, but there's a thing which gives you all the things you wanted free will for. I like to call it agency. Call it an object lesson on defining your terms properly.

>>4423

You might want to look into Puerto Rico, where the American planning policy sought to limit Puerto Rico's birth rate.

>By 1949 a survey of Puerto Rican women found that 21% of women interviewed had been sterilized, with sterilizations being performed in 18% of all hospital births statewide as a routine post-partum procedure.

Why should identical genetic, cultural, or psychological conditions lead to precisely the same rate of some procedure?

Maybe 2.5 times is well within the noise bounds. It's easy for rare diseases, for example, to triple the risk with some small lifestyle change...because 2x the existing risk is still really small.

Back again, Swissanon?

>>4402

I'm a citizen of the world; just call me anon, anon.

I was psychotic last time, said a lot of weird stuff about nihilism. Sometimes philosophy does that to you.

What do you think of my "question" btw?

Even if you answer it, you're left with a question.

>>4406

>I was psychotic last time

>last time

>last

>time

*snrk*

>>4247

Accepting your own perception of reality is a leap of faith, estupido.

>>4256

>accepting what you already accept is a leap of faith

>>4263

>Accepting acceptance accepts a leap of faith

Absurdism is not a leap of faith. A leap of faith is absurd.

>>4397

Existentialism is too broad for anything you say about existentialists per se to apply to any particular existentialist. E.g. I don't believe in free will, although admittedly that's a fairly recent change.

>>4247

Evidence suggests you weren't absurdist.

"I wore ties for two years, then I stopped." Makes sense.

"I had a fundamental cosmology for two years, then I had a different one." Yeah, kek, no you didn't. You can't change your fundamental beliefs wholesale with any kind of speed. Ergo it wasn't fundamental. Ergo it wasn't a cosmology. Hence, it was a fashion statement.