leo

Science has also been a strong force in destroying other cultures and traditions. Here is what Feyerabend had to say about it in Against Method, criti...

Since meaning depends on the individual, there is no absolute meaning, but there is personal meaning. Watch how the concept of meaning arise. Say you ...

I see it as a great mistake to think that science is or can be separate at all from philosophy. Those who claim science has grown separate from philos...

To me, "deserve" and "should" are not part of the equation, they do not enter my thinking on this subject. There is not some absolute standard that al...

If a thought of groping someone on the subway pops in your head, then it's safe to say it's your thought. One might even say it's a desire you have bu...

We disagree in appearance on the semantics but fundamentally I don't think we disagree. As I said if suffering stems from a conflict between what is d...

It is hard when you feel you have something important to communicate but no one seems to care. I think there are many important ideas that were though...

And intuitively, reason alone cannot tell us what to do, because we need to desire something for reason to help us reach it. The need to change the wo...

Interesting comments, thanks. I agree that defining suffering as "an experience we want to stop" is very general, but isn't it precisely what sufferin...

At the end of the day you do what you want. I just find it peculiar that you react this way with believing and not with any other concept. If you say ...

But we agreed that a guess and a belief are not the same thing, and you gave different definitions for them. So surely, when you do something that fit...

You do believing...and you don't call it believing. Earlier you gave a definition for "guess": "an assertion (of sorts) that lacks sufficient informat...

By your own definition of belief, you are believing. If I see you drink water and you say that you DO NOT DO DRINKING, I will let you say that if that...

But you said previously: "To me, a "belief" is a word used to denote an acceptance of something as true...without having the evidence to actually esta...

I actually was being sincere, and in return you were fully condescending towards me. English is not my first language by the way, hence the occasional...

Yes you are mistaking my compassion for condescension, and no saying that I have compassion for you is not objectively condescending, that's your own ...

It is not that symmetry in the world of elementary particles is exact, but rather that physicists have attempted to model the world of elementary part...

Me too, otherwise I wouldn't bother. If you consider that enthusiastic amateurs often fail because they often seek compensation for help that they giv...

You're mistaking compassion for condescension. I am not bothered, I am not in a competition to win and get pleasure out of it as if you were my enemy,...

If we agree to define suffering as "an experience that we want to stop", desire is part of the definition so it doesn't tell us why people suffer, if ...

So you agree that you do what people do when they say they "believe" something. And you agree that they do believing. So logically, you do believing, ...

I think that knowledge is not independent of belief. Knowledge about a particular object/subject will be formulated in a framework that depends on the...

You can call your guesses guesses, but you're mistaking yourself if you 'believe' that you have no beliefs. Again, look at the dictionary definition o...

Notice that you are the one getting upset. Precisely because there is a difference between a belief and a blind guess. Why else would a belief carry m...

You haven't addressed any of my points, you just keep repeating again and again that you "do not do believing". This type of behavior is precisely tha...

Actually for now I'm guessing that you have some issues related to the concept of believing, that's not meant to be an attack that's an hypothesis as ...

You seem to have some deep-seated issues with the concept of believing. You keep referring to it in the context of believing in a god or believing the...

But do you agree that there cannot be an experience of lack or loss without a desire for what is perceived to be lacked or lost? This makes desire a m...

But the experience of lack of suffering is also an experience of lack, yet it is not suffering. And the experience of the lack of something unwanted i...

There can be pain without suffering, and there can be suffering without pain, so the two are not the same thing, nor is suffering a subset of pain, no...

But in building a model of suffering we are not attempting to predict how people are going to move! We aren't even attempting to predict whether peopl...

The things that you 'know', you act on them. You 'know' that such or such thing is going to happen in such or such situation, even though you may turn...

Let's assume for a moment that suffering is a conflict between desire and perception/belief. Then I would ask you, what it is that you want? When the ...

Experiences of pain, loss and humiliation can involve suffering, so indeed they are useful to consider in building a model of suffering. But there are...

Laws of physics are models of things that many of us experience. There are things that many of us experience (desires, beliefs, suffering) that laws o...

But there can be pain, loss, humility and change without suffering, so surely they cannot be the root causes of suffering. Indeed we encounter these e...

I think you're playing on semantics here. When you apply a general model to a particular instance, you're dealing with a particular instance. If you a...

Thank you for the comments. There is a lot to consider and answer, and it will take some time to think about it all carefully, so I won't reply to eve...

And I agree with that. Conventional medicine (in the form of drugs) is little effective to treat many kinds of suffering, such as existential anxiety....

But that's precisely what psychotherapy, psychiatry, Buddhism and other practices attempt to do, with some limited success. We have plenty of evidence...

That suffering can be modeled? I don't see what you are hinting at. As soon as we attempt to relieve someone of their suffering we are applying an imp...

What I notice is that you have good insight and clarity of thought, and I surely don't see your reactions as abnormal considering what you have been t...

Interesting comment, thanks. I don't necessarily see the lack of pleasure as suffering or the lack of suffering as pleasure, there are varying degrees...

Actually I see these three bolded ones as a subset of another one I listed: "Wanting to reach some goal while believing that this goal can't be reache...

There exists models of suffering, but I see none of them as doing the job well enough, I think we can do much better. We need a model based on empiric...

Thank you for the replies. The point in building a model of suffering is precisely to come up with techniques to have a better control over suffering ...

You could say that there are many things always changing, but then what does it mean to call them things if they are always changing, if from one mome...

The idea that there is only change is also the idea that there is no thing, because anything that we call a thing is not itself anymore by the time we...

We only say an effect has a cause because we link the effect to something else, we link an observation to something else. Now if you see something mov...

As a start, here are some instances I see where people suffer: - Feeling hungry or thirsty but not knowing where to find food or water to stop that fe...