jellyfish

Yeah I'd say so. Even if our ideas are well-adapted to the world (maximize survival and comfort), there world can and does change. Any successful syst...

I read that line as deadpan humor. Freud and Jung talked for 18 (?) hours when they first met. To me this suggests that Freud loved ideas, loved his s...

Great response. I really don't know. I take the freedom (such as it is) of the US system for granted. My suspicion is that we're all a little mad, and...

That does sound reasonable. My concern on this issue is that most of us identify with reason. Even if all the 'religious' or unreasonable people were ...

Thanks for the post. I'm thinking that we share a sense that the world is aesthetically justified, if it all. From my perspective, your philosophy (an...

IMV, we could use more admissions of guilt. Innocence is ignorance, purity fiction. To me knowledge almost requires guilt. That's the toll to be paid,...

Hmmm. What is existence for? What does all of our rationality aim at ? Do 'we rational ones' have a good plan, tend to agree? Who's in the club?

Now that's poetry! And such a fascinating tonality is only possible with one foot in the grave. Here's a nice passage that comes to mind. This too. Ye...

I like your breakdown. The sadism/cruelty is what Nietzsche understood so well. To me sophistication is related to turning this sadism inward, against...

I know what you mean. The pill metaphor breaks down. As I see it, it's just human to crave authority. And it seems to me that we all believe in someth...

Well I do have a grim sense of humor. It seems that existence is a strange dream, but it does have a continuity (it mostly coheres). It's a story. We ...

:up: Right. I'd just add that philosophers can be enjoyed also as characters. We get to know strange, fascinating personalities.

:100:

Thanks. I like your take on it too. Ah, I didn't know about that. But the Orwellian paint-job is familiar and believable. Domination usually has a flo...

All these voices are like an addictive drug. I get stressed in a pleasant way, so my problem is that I tend to find would I should be doing boring. My...

Yes indeed. To me that's how ideas are tested, and that's why book learning alone isn't worth much. Life evaluates the books as the books inspire life...

That's some of what I mean by the red pill --an exposure to voices, voices, voices. And what these voices talk about is the other voices. Interpretati...

I've looked into Shogi. Fascinating! I've actually invented quite a few games, some of them with psychedelic rules. One of these days (so I tell mysel...

I've been reading (and more importantly living) philosophy for about 25 years. My formal education is in something more objective and less fun.

I got into 1 minute games on various websites. It was a blast, but it made me a worse player. I just couldn't resist turning it into art, making mad s...

Thanks for the link. This part caught me. http://geekofalltrades.org/codex/fideism.php Fair enough. I guess I've just tried to emphasize that intellec...

Sounds good! I also answer your OP a little more. Philosophy has mostly been good for me, but it's led me down some dangerous paths. Nietzsche was a d...

I agree with all of this, but why wouldn't this include secular politics? Like some of the stuff that happened under Stalin? This isn't a defense of t...

Right. You might like wrestling with Nietzsche's work (who saw the self this way), not as a cure but as a profound exploration of the 'disease.' IMV t...

Thank for you sharing this. I'm not against it. It sounds great in the abstract. Perhaps it presupposes a certain level of affluence. An animal that h...

Tranquility through detachment perhaps? What I was aiming at was the ideal human for the stoic against a background of the ideal human of other life p...

Well said. I think of dark laughter, the infinity of consciousness, a gleam in the eye. It comes and goes. And it's darkly ironic, pessimistic. 'It' e...

Thanks for the kind reply. I love that skull next to the flower. To me that really gets it.

I think you mentioned Nietzsche in some post, so I'm not surprised. That's my jam too. When I'm (godlessly) up, I'm way up. 'I' am 'God' (along with e...

I just read Engels on early Christianity. Great stuff! It focuses on The Book of Revelation (for reasons explained in the text). https://www.marxists....

Yeah, I feel you. But a pack of wolves has a certain cohesion. So maybe we're more complex wolves. We love and hate. We assert status with words. We'r...

Your attitude is of course reasonable, but it's also familiar in terms of the emotional comfort it offers. I don't know exactly how far the idea goes ...

Nice link. Thanks!

Anti-natalism is indeed a weird thing. It wants to snuff us out. In dark moods I can understand. The source of our suffering is life itself. So if the...

Indeed. Your theory (to the degree that I know it) reminds of other philosophers'. I understand the desire to transcend that dichotomy. In some ways i...

Indeed. Religion (or something like it) hasn't gone anywhere. We're a haunted species. I agree. There's also the issue of tone. Often political argume...

Fair enough. But I think of stoicism, for instance, as a quasi-religion. This aims at a perfectly self-controlled consciousness. This ideal man is lik...

Indeed. I agree. The class issue hits us where we live. Even the talk of race and gender (which obviously has its value) gets tangled up in class-indi...

I thought you'd like it. I've been reading The Black Circle lately (Jeff Love). It's about Kojeve, which means it's about Dostoevsky too. The undergro...

Does your theory include an explicit fitness function? Or it more like Darwin generalized?

You seem to imply that certainty requires justification. I don't think so. To even begin to justify is to assume that there is a community out there, ...

But we make all kinds of exceptions to that norm. Parents control children 'for their own good.' The insane can be held against their will, etc. So yo...

I agree with all of this. I'd just add the theme of class. Americans are afraid of poor people. And we hate poor people, who are often just a little p...

Here's the source. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm I don't claim to follow all of Debord, but some quotes really speak t...

Nice. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/600/600-h/600-h.htm

I think you see the complexity of the situation. Is the goal at least color-blindness? Or rather color not being all that interesting? And yet we are ...

Are you talking about genetic algorithms? Those are awesome. But we provide the fitness function. I can imagine watching a population without knowing ...

But let's think about this. To me it says something like: if we lift the curtain of appearance, we'll find math. A smile is mathematics. Even the idea...

What I take from modern philosophy is that most knowledge and the most important kinds of knowledge are not only not formal but not explicit at all. F...

That sounds fishy to me. We're flesh and blood with history, not Turing machines. I know philosophers have fantasized about perfect languages which wo...