ChatteringMonkey

I'm afraid to ask, but what do you mean with reality?

Existence is not a thing, literally and figuratively. We are biological beings with a body containing a brain. That brain is best suited to navigate o...

I think complaining can serve a host of different functions. Because we care about something, and we think complaining can have an effect on realising...

I don't see how this follows. It seems to me that an afterlife only devaluates life, because you are living it in function of that afterlife. For athe...

Given the more right wing governement in the East of the EU who refuse to coöperate, it's still unclear if this will work at the moment, certainly sho...

Allright, I'll say some more because I feel like it didn't really answer to the point. What I think the difference is with the left/right split or any...

Yes they are only 'advocating' something that seems to go beyond the current order, once in power they can't really deliver that and adapt because it ...

This is interesting, especially considering that it is apparently well-established in studies now that the level of 'self-control' seems to be by far ...

It's not my intention to take a political side here with the terms populism and extermist, I'm just using commonly used terminolgy to convey meaning, ...

Yes I basicly agree. Free will is nonsensical, if it were free it wouldn't be will. We don't choose our will, we are our will... biologically determin...

And Praxis you do not accept some philosophy merely on authority, right, but you also don't live in suspension of judgement the rest of your life... t...

How to deal with emotions? How does it tie into living a good life, or into virtue etc... ?

Yes i don't disagree, but I think good philosophy should also provide some answers. And it does that too... just not in this case it seems.

Well I have questions, I'm just not sure philosophy needs to deal with them. They do more of that in eastern philosophy, but then the lines between ph...

I'm not sure if objective knowledge from a third perspective of emotions will necessarily tell us much about how to deal with emotions. Maybe... Easte...

What are good and bad ways of dealing with them generally. But maybe that aren't exactly philosophical questions, hence the questions in the OP.

Often i'm wondering what the reasoning of these rich-elite might be for doing what they do. I mean these are presumably pretty smart guys, and it seem...

Yeah Hume did think that reason was a slave to the passions, and there was ofcourse also Nietzsche. On of my favourite passages from him that ties bac...

I don't know... smileys :-) 8-) ;-) Maybe poetry, though i'm not much of a poet i should say. I'm a sad chattering monkey, still chattering cheerfully...

I don't think there's any purely 'mental' solution to the problem. We are biological beings, thoughts are more a product of our biology than other way...

Well if we are alone that won't be a problem.

That would do it, a common external enemy.... if the aliens would be muslim communist even better! Somewhat semi-serious I was thinking that we need t...

I'm thinking along the same lines, that nothing has changed all that much. Lately I've been entertaining the idea that we need a new overt nobility or...

Jake it's because i'm aware that reduction can go to far that i said what i said about essence in the beginning of my post. Maybe there is no real ess...

Yes that is definately part of it. But I think that can also be viewed in an even larger context as I tried to describe in my last post.

Allright, I'll give a little bit more context to my reasoning... Geopolitically from the second world war onwards the North Western Atlantic Alliance,...

Populism and extrimist parties vs establishment parties generally. As examples, Trump vs Hillary and the rise of populist parties all over Europe.

I don't think the split is only or even mostly simply due to a division in ideas, it think it's more a question of economical and social position, and...

Jake, that is I think going to far in reducing everything to its essence ;-).

. Maybe it's to cynical, in that I don't think people allways vote with only their own interest or social status in mind. It think a lot of people wan...

Why do you think that's exactly what he saying? At the end of the first paragraph he saying for instance: "and to convince yourself (after examining t...

Russell was a good logician, but probably not the best psychologist... Reason can definately help to loosen the grip of some negative emotion/values h...

What apokrisis said... better than I could have said it. I'd like to add though that I think emotional connection is probably very important in any th...

People have allways been influenced by some group or another. Nefarious is kind of a loaded term... it used to be the catholic church and whomever pol...

Detachment, which would mean that there is a distance or lack of attachment (i.e. 'fleeting') also would not seem to imply to me that there is no thou...

Parmenides would agree.

So to finally answer your question :-), I guess purely logically or mathematically, the opposite of the opposite is sameness (or identity). X = - (-X)...

I mean not a whole lot of things are true opposites in the world, it's usually only language that wants to take us there... For instance, truth and fa...

Yes i would say opposites are usually metapysical. The world is better described in sliding scales then opposites i think.

But thoughts do no come from the I, or removing identification with thought would not remove thought alltogether, I don't understand that jump you (or...

This is interesting because i have almost the exact opposite view of the quote. He says the cessation of thought is not possible, but the cessation of...

You don't cure the depression itself maybe, but i think you can stop the feelings of guilt and shame assoiciated with labels that maybe prevent you fr...

Yeah I think the idea here is that you need to let go of the negative valuations attached to labels, the social stigma etc. That's the second layer i ...

Yes i think it is... a label is only a overarching designation given to a set of certain symptoms in this case. It is a further abstraction from the s...

Hi Posty, I"m going to come at it maybe from a slightly different direction, maybe it speaks to what you are pointing at, maybe not… So we have ideas ...

I think you may be right about CBT and antidepressants, that it's more of a 'jumpstart' to get you going then an actual cure. About the identification...

No it doesn't take us beyond the senses. Scientific instruments are extentions of the senses. And math, like logic, doesn't directly inform us about t...

CBT and the related mindfullness meditation approach seem to be putting up good results against depression. To me these approaches seem to indicate th...

Yeah the thing in itself… nevermind that there is no way of going beyond our senses, of going beyond appearences. Why do we need a concept for somethi...

But emergent properties, like us experiencing a solid table, are every bit as real as the underlying dynamics. What's the justification for saying tha...