I’m up for a friendly… any takers? 
What are ‘boonies’? 
Have I missed out here? Do they pertain to only on a need to be there basis?
I’m up for a friendly… any takers?
What are ‘boonies’? Have I missed out here? Do they pertain to only on a need to be there basis?
Heidegger capitalises the word because in German all nouns are capitalised in principle. As this is not the case in English, I suppose one should decapitalise German nouns when they’ve become part of the English vocabulary.
I agree with what you say about existential trajectories. However, is not this “acknowledging of the obvious” itself the outcome of only some existential trajectories? Aren’t you always arguing on these fora with people who do not acknowledge it? Maybe it isn’t obvious to them, or maybe they just can’t accept it, but whatever the reason, their failure to acknowledge it is itself the outcome of their existential trajectory thus far. And this, I think, is how philosophers are not children but stepchildren of their times. The philosopher is a type (sein) that, however much due to external circumstances (da), in the course of his existential trajectory arrives at said acknowledgement of the obvious.
Now as for your great conundrum: Yes, had your life been different, then you might have different beliefs. But this is because, had your life been different, you would be different; internal (sein) and external (da) circumstances interact, and a human being, a dasein, is this very interacting, the product of its past interactions. Well then, I think your entanglement, your being poisoned, betrays a lack of self-valuing. If you valued yourself above a certain threshold level, you would not be drowning in this existential mud; you would have more solid ground to stand on. (Also, to be sure, if your intelligence was below a certain threshold level: for then you would not even be able to grasp these vines.)
And now as for moral philosophy. Before you can take that down to earth, it must be firmly rooted in heaven, so to say, and every step of the stairway down must also be solidly built. I think value ontology apprehends, if not objective values, then at least rational values: the rationality of self-valuing, both in the sense of the valuing of valuing and of the valuing of a self, a self-identical “A”. But if all that exists are valuings, as value ontology posits, then all that exists is good, valuable–as Heraclitus affirms when he says that, to the god, all is beautiful and good and just. How could we ever bring this down to earth, where mere men all consider some things unjust and some just? One option is this:
Thus we could, for example, answer the question “kill the baby or force the mother?” in each particular case by considering which of the two options would probably further philosophy more (or hamper it less). What do you say?
I’m not here.
The truth is out there.
For reasons available on demand, I propose a central date of September 25 2016, and a minimal encampment on a location to be designated from september 15 to october 5. My preference for a location would be the vicinity of Zoot Allures wherever he may roam, as he is a reliable all terrain guy, I want that to be the basis for the Clan’s outward morality complementing the inward ethics of philosophy, the capacity to remain independent, free. Many of us have or have known trouble with this, myself included. I used to think this is our own fault, as what decadence to pursue philosophy and no a career, but I’ve grow, this is no secret, very proud of what I have accomplished, and what I’ve accomplished was due to the members of two websites; killdevilhill, where I inhabited the Nietzsche Campfire for 5 years, and when that was being ruined by censorship, I received a P from Faust, asking me ‘Jake, what the hell are you still doing here? ILP is where it’s at.’, if I remember correctly. This was in 2006, when I had overcome the greater part of my ignorance about the basic fact of philosophy after Nietzsche: drives. Pride, nobility, superman, these represent the philosophers drive, which could be called the refusal to keep on living hidden and (therefore) wretched lives, a condition philosophy had to endure after the intellectually driven Roman Empire has fallen to the monotheists, the monologoists, if I may introduce a new term. I think most philosophers are monologoists out of ignorance of the possibility to be otherwise. I try to be a prulalogoist, someone who can handle multiple logical paths at once. It is confusing but also far more powerful, as it allows to discern the drives behind the logics. All these drives are willing-to-power, to completion, to annihilation by justification, more or less; the idea is to overcome that wish to an ending that all drives possess, to uphold a wwell being that consists of a lot of drives being oriented on one another by the supreme drive of victorious philosophy. It sounds megalomanic but I reached that state – and what else are we into philosophy for except to make sense so as to feel right? Not so much feel good, but right, justified. That feels, on the whole, much better than the other, guilt or shame. It is obvious I feel right - I might easily feel like I should be ashamed to make such videos but I am not. It all comes from a good position in life, the conditions for which I have natively received, along with very difficult problems, but for which I have to thank mainly to some of the great ones who wrote down their thoughts, as well as the forum posters who never cease to question, and mainly my own insistence on restoring what I felt always in me to be the inevitable state of man - sensible, without remorse for the act of being.
Like a dog without a bone, into this world we’re thrown. All of us. Being happy isn’t easy even for those with perfect conditions. All perfections hide something terrible. That is not to say that there aren’t worse and better fates. The fact that I have been relatively fortunate in some respects that warrant sharing, kind of forces me to share it. I can not help anyone from being born where he is born, but I can do some things to help him make sense of it. That is, I think, all that is needed. It is also, in many circumstances. the impossible, or that which is as close to impossible as anything in the life. THis is why philosophy needs to be very harsh on the soul, it needs to pus the soul for its utmost effort to justify itself with the means it has. Humans are powerful creatures. But their powers are collapsed in a vortex called ‘doubt’. Doubt is never justified, only questioning is. But doubt rules maybe 80 percent of human affairs. Doubt is nothing of itself. Un-doubt, anti-doubt. Certainty in questioning. The razors edge where it belongs. Not to cut oneself from the inside indiscriminately. Man always hurts himself, because this is what being a mind demands, to cut into life to increase it’s knowledge. To master the mind in the sense of its cruelty, this is recommended, that one learns ow to strike. As outside, so inside. Not exactly, but close enough.
I think there is only one question that you have to answer: why, for all the precise reasons, is this (crucially?) important to you? Because you care, you value many things in this equation; your friends and your own opinion on abortion, to name some of them. I would say: why not drop your own opinion on this since you are as you say tied to none in particular, simply acknowledge that you care, Mary and John, and perhaps try to resolve things with or between these friends, knowing that there is no such thing as an absolute moral truth, none that don’t kill and pillage and ravage the soul.
An abortion is ugly, but life can be much uglier. Here’s my personal stance, the one I would follow if I was directly involved: I take the practical route, which includes science, which includes much speculation. I would estimate whether or not the seedling human might have attained self awareness or not. There are different stages, advancement down which increases the pain the ‘baby’ will feel. I place the fence at the point where the pineal gland is awakened. This gland is responsible for the direction of the production of several dozens of hormones and enzymes, basically it is the central command gland. Descartes place consciousness here, as rudimentarily as he conceived of it, he may be right. The gland also produces the compound DMT. I think personally that if a nervous system is so far evolved as that, it’s too conscious for me to be able to abort it without heavy remorse.
So that’s my take - every case of abortion stands by itself. Abortion too is rooted in dasein. It can clearly also be a centerpiece of a ‘da-seiendes’ a ‘there-being’.
This why I never truly believe. Until I am certain, I question, I Socratically “don’t know”. It’s medicine for my soul, or rather, just a light enough diet to be able to ‘dance’ in the mind, which is one of the things a ind is good for good for, to enjoy itself, to discover itself, to fin those big abysses in itself an try to make it across them. Philosophy is often compared to mountaineering; sure there is the heights, aloneness and the clean air, but there is also the danger of falling into the clefts of the Earth itself. Some philosophers are rather navigators of these depths than bridgers of the gaps. It is good to have probers and ropers in one team. In any case you ought to ask yourself perhaps what your life is worth to you and if this worth is not perhaps diminished by the moral problem of abortion. As I said these issues scorch an more even by his own self-inflicting than they o by causing him loss. Unless, hypothetically speaking, this was your baby and you would have liked to have it… I mean that is when I could imagine a life of agony over it, and the moral issue of abortion as such would be subservient to the emotional values.
(edit: shortened the video)
Part of the learning process in making these videos is watching them and seeing something I could have done differently and better. Being able to take a situation and develop it somehow is proving to be difficult… I lack experience, video making resources and have little patience with making them, but missing an opportunity to do something clever while recording really sucks because there are no do-overs. This video is a prime example.
I should have ran when he charged again… you’ll see what I’m talking about. If I’d had done that… and he pursued… I’da pwned it.
I hear Colombia is nice these days. Brazil, too. My original idea was to have it take place in the US. It would be more expensive and complicated, but therefore also ore philosophical, relevant. But I would prefer it to be mobile - a central place but several vans to venture out, within a certain vicinity, explore an area and create videos there. About half way the last video where the acres are showing above your head, and you talk about Heidegger - that lifted me up into philosophical spirits. The man filming himself talking in the field talking about the philosopher of the field and showing the fieldness above his daseiendes head. Building the corn. Ah, the psychedelics of philosophical liberty. This is also why I like the US. Virginia, Carolina, close to Maryland but in the boonies - this would seem ideal to me. But it could be that this is a pre-2K dream. As far as dreams go I’d like it to be a mobile camp equipped with a van or two, or three, but preferably bought second hand, then to store and to re-use a next time, the next month of the next year, according to the new calendar I astronomically devised. No astrology involved this time, only axes and progressions to attain a structure the logics of which can be discerned without pre existing protocol. Basically you can count on there being a philosophical clan gathering on the day Jupiter aligns directly with the sun. A central gathering is both a functional and a symbolic gesture, act, event, thing to cause the idea of the congregating philosopher in the hearts and minds of men. We will make films, probably could make money with them, because Magsj is right. It’s been a many years that the headbang impulse came over mew but your dog montage did the trick.
Primal - about the enduring question about the superior merit of this or that style; I am not generally in fist fights at all, the ones I’ve had I’ve won quickly or lost justly - I was being a drunken idiot and was more ashamed of that than of ‘losing the fight’ - being rammed to the ground from the back or in some unexpected or not resisted way. But the cases where I was the offensive, the moral cases, need to be decisive. And basically wingchun is a form of the way I used to approach a fight when I was young; ‘if the way is free we go forward’. Like a certain climatological phenomenon. I actually call what I practice Chironic Arts, Chiron being the trainer of the heroes, among whom Achilles, Perseus. The arts serve to do much more than develop fighting strategy - they enhance health and grace in life. The Greeks were very graceful, they weren’t brutes. Odin too is a graceful god. Like the lightning is graceful. You don’t see the lightning or the sun clinching in a puddle of sweat - cosmic art is to keep substance and constance and distance to the battle, it has to be beautiful, justified before the gods. Not graceless pounding with gloves on, which minimizes bone hardening and maximizes brain tissue-destruction. The gloves only serve to replace direct to indirect damage. It is courage, but not wisdom. You have much grace though which works like the spine of a cat to avoid hits to the head. Evolution rigs time with forms. Or rather, the forms that rig time ‘evolve’ - prosper. Philosophy should be the art of brining prosperity, of health, soul an society. Like these gorgeous georges. Nay? Not saying I fancy a pummeling like that, but this is how they conquered the world, by being well’ ard, by playing soccer with heads chopped off from subjects with attitudes, by drinking tea while cannons go off without spilling any in the saucer. By eating human flesh at royal dinners. By birthing a son to the throne on the summer solstice. Incorporating Vikings, Franks and Germans by becoming even wyrder. Creating the worlds ruling language. Drinking for breakfast. Taking New Amsterdam from the Dutch and calling it New York. Taking it with milk and sugar. Boxing bare-fisted. Hard bloody bastards, Britannia rule was meant as a tautology. Launching Tolkiens lore from the trenches of the first world war and Churchills madness into the skies of the second, beating Nietzsche’s shadow by taking bravery for granted in the mad, and by taking war to be madness. Reasonable lads. Good neighbors from my end. Good rulers from the worlds end.
Well, I get drunk on power trips. The British Empire was quite an impressive trip. Is. Even their movie magazine, Empire, is impressive. Too much so - it makes the nation abstract. France has always remained simple, non metaphysical, reverent of institutions and not morals. Life is calm there, if a headquarters had to be built, it would be well placed in France. Maybe around the region where the towns names end in ac, and it rains in such ways that the way it hits the stone of the house justifies all universes at once in one breath. Or Paris, or why not the cote d’Azur. But that is for later. All things start as force and become form when force has so many implications that it must continue by other means. My ideals are meaningless, they are figments of a dream of a bird whose language I half speak, but there is a permanent, grounded, solid certainty that there is arisen a philosophic force that wants to become form because it has too many implications to remain ‘silent’. The slow rumble in the ground when they find the god particle… the thing you think is a dream, but from which you never wake up. “This is philosophy” wrote the ‘internet login’ ‘Fixed Cross’ on october 21st 2015.
For something like that you’d have to either get a spot at a camp ground (you might get a discount rate for twenty days) or you’d have to trek off somewhere and find a remote spot where you could have a fire at night without being seen. That could be a problem here because there is military aircraft flying at low altitudes everywhere, constantly, and if a pilot sees a fire light where there ain’t supposed to be one why, he might call it in, Jim.
That lake area in my videos is right off a main intersection and not at all secluded. Couldn’t set up there. So when and if you/we do something like that we’d have to look at a google satellite map of the area for a spot.
You’ll also want to consider that philosopher camping is not what it used to be. For a small group of three, by about the third or fourth day it starts to get old because all the mysteries that kept the old camping philosophers occupied and transfixed in discussion don’t exist today; Plato didn’t have an Ayer or Popper like we do…we know everything today… there is nothing to sit around and talk about after the second night. So you either have to keep moving to stay occupied or start building… and if you start building you need more people. We’d have to remain hunter-thinkerers and keep moving or become agrarian and get everyone a permanent visa and a garden rake.
At worst you could rent a hotel room at a discount rate for twenty days.
That dog was on me for what seemed like ten minutes; it’s persistence and determination was truly remarkable. I am quite impressed by the breed, being nearly maimed by this marauding Maltese.
It is true that those things that are obvious to me may not to be obvious to others at all. In fact, we see the consequences of that all the time here. We become exasperated when others simply do not grasp [let alone acknowledge] that the manner in which we construe things of this sort is the only rational [or the most rational] manner in which to construe them.
But, in my view, that pertains only to those things in which, using the tools of philosophy, a truth [or the truth] can in fact be established.
Again and again: What on earth does this mean? Given the conflicting goods embedded in abortion [and the manner in which our own prejudices regarding them are embodied in dasein], what does it mean for someone to “betray a lack of self-valuing”. What does it mean to transcend the components of your own argument when valuing “I” in one particular manner rather than another?
What is your own value judgment here? How does it succeed in transcending my dilemma above?
Okay, how is value ontology applicable to, say, the moral quandary entangled in the capital punishment debate. Whose “self” are we to value more – that of prisoner about to be executed or that of the family of the victim who construe the execution as the embodiment of justice. How does value ontology make the conflicting goods here go away? And how are our individual moral narratives here not still largely embedded in dasein? How is rationality to be adjudicated here? So as to secure, say, justice?
How, when push come to shove, is “rationality” here not really just a personal opinion, a political prejudice?
What I say is that there will be answers – hopelessly conflicting and contradictory answers – all along the moral, political and philosophical spectrum regarding which “solution” here furthers philosophy more or less.
In other words, just as it always has been. Just as, in a world sans God, mere mortals are always the fonts – the existential fonts – for “deciding” these things.
And thus, from my perspective, the best of all possible worlds is still democracy and the rule of law – moderation, negotiation and compromise. But always within the context of political economy. That never goes away.
In other words, in the end, what counts is not what one believes [or claims to “know”] the correxct answers should be but those who have the actual power to enforce one answer over all the rest.
Me, if I have to choose between, say, Marx and Kant regarding a description of the “human condition”, Kant is considerably more irrelevant.
Unless, of course, I’m wrong.
Using those tools, are there things in which a truth cannot be established? And things in which the truth can be established? I think even this “obvious” notion concerning existential trajectories is not necessarily the truth, but rather the highest probability or most rational view.
All I was trying to say in this paragraph was that your tendency to relativise yourself suggests to me a lack of self-valuing. By this I mean that you apparently value your actual self just about as much or as little as the selves you would have been if your past had been different. This remains true even if you consider that, however much you may value yourself, you might have valued yourself equally if not more if you had been a different person. Any alternate pasts are just hypothetical.
Also, you have a tendency to want to bring things “down to earth” too hastily in my view. As I said in the next paragraph, moral philosophy must be firmly rooted in metaphysics, and then every step of the way from that metaphysics to a practical ethics rigorously follow from that, before one can practice a philosophical ethics. Anyway, I already provided a solution to your dilemma at the end of my post, to your response to which I will respond below.
By “rationality” I meant to refer to logic with its axioms, a.k.a. the laws of thought. Are they the laws of all thought? Or merely of human thought? Or even merely of the thought of certain human beings? And even then are they really laws? Regardless, it seems, to me, that I wouldn’t be able to communicate sensibly without adhering to those “laws”.
Anyway, I already implied an answer to your quandary at the end of my post:
But at least we’ll already have come a step further. In fact, I strongly suspect that most people will not accept my suggestion, however reasonable it may be. But apparently, you’d be willing to accept it, at least for the sake of argument. Thus you continue:
The god I mentioned is not necessarily an immortal, nor necessarily omniscient, omnipotent, etc. (a God with a capital G). In fact, I think some human beings are actually capable of attaining such a godlike view. Anyway, let us continue:
Well, from my perspective, at bottom the most certain thing is that you want that to be the case from your perspective; and the same goes for me, as well. You go on to say:
Yes: the strongest will to power. I again translate from the piece I quoted from before:
(The word “scientific” is a reference to a previously quoted passage:
“Sometimes I ask students if any real restraints, limits set by something like nature or gods, exist to curb scientific experimentation. Can science, for example, make men immortal or transform them into eagles? Most students deny that anything is intrinsically impossible. They acknowledge that some things probably will not happen tomorrow or even in a century, but, in principle, nothing prevents anything imaginable from happening at any time. Like good liberal democrats, these same students usually cling to a groundless faith that science’s uncurbed experimentation ought to be used for liberal democratic goals–to promote freedom rather than slavery, peace rather than war. As if that made any difference in the nihilist world revealed by science! The faith that science’s omnipotence can be restrained in the name of some non-arbitrary moral obligation is unscientific. It is relapse into the philosophic illusion from which science liberates itself [i.e., the illusion of “a universe in which the philosopher [or any other being] and what is good for him exist as something more than nihilist experience”]. Interpreted scientifically, any such relapse, any moral-political commitment, springs from the tyrannic decision to have it so: all moral-political demands are efforts to tyrannize over reality, to replace nature or truth with the propaganda dearest to one’s heart.” (Harry Neumann, Liberalism, page 2.))
Well, Nietzsche is not Kant. (It’s funny that you’d mention Marx, as I learned only yesterday–though it does not surprise me–that Marx, contrary to Nietzsche, was a very disagreeable fellow in real life.) Consider my “Logic as self-value” thread, especially the quote in the OP. Nietzsche basically started a second Copernican revolution where Kant’s had ended. But regardless, I still think Kant is more relevant if you want a philosophical ethics rather than a merely ideological one. Marx, after all, said the philosophers had only interpreted the world in various ways, while what mattered was to change it. Heidegger then pointed out that the notion that “what matters is to change it” already presupposes a specific world-interpretation. However, he too embraced an ideology (National Socialism), because he held the view that the philosophical practical ethics I’ve spoken of was at the very least still a long way off. I however think I’ve found the foundations thereof, rational values, and a rationale for implementing them. The rational values I’ve named are, respectively, 1) something that cannot logically be disvalued, and 2) something without which there can be no logic. Ultimately it’s all about the valuation of the self, which is a valuing self. The Nietzschean Superman is really simply the ideal of the most valuing self, or at least the most valuing man.
Yes, but my point is there are things that we can help others to make sense of because there is in fact but one way in which to make sense of it: the way it is objectively.
Thus, if Joe says that Jane had an abortion and Jim does not know what an abortion is, Joe can tell him what it is. And what it is is what it is for all of us. It is an objective fact that transcends dasein.
But if Jim asks Joe if having an abortion is moral or immoral, rational or irrational, that is when my own “dasein dilemma” above kicks in. That is when I ask those who argue that abortion is either moral or immoral, rational or irrational behavior, to demonstrate how one can know this using the tools of philosophy given the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein and conflicting goods in positing the limitations of philosophy here.
In other words, pertaining to the relationship between identity and value judgments “out in the world”, ambiguity, uncertainty, confusion – doubt – seem inherent components of human interactions that come into conflict over morality and/or idealities.
Yes, within any particular human community [if it is small enough] rules of behavior can be embraced that revolve around a consensus. But that doesn’t make the behaviors moral or rational. Not necessarily. It just means that here and now everyone in this particular community share the same agenda. Everyone agree that “if this, than that”. But in the modern industrial world, rules of behavior revolve instead around laws. And laws revolve around political prejudices. In the case of abortion, it might be legal or it might be illegal. But, again, that doesn’t make the conflicting goods go away.
And, then, even if one acknowledges there is no “absolute moral truth” to be found here, are they willing to acknowledge in turn the extent to which their own moral narrative is embodied in dasein? That, in fact, had their own life been very different they might be embracing the opposite point of view instead?
Yes, but one might just as easily argue that, before one can reach these stages in the womb, one must first be conceived. Human life always starts there some argue. Is there really a way for science or philosophy to resolve this? The fact is that none of us would be around today if, at any point in our mother’s pregnancy, we had been aborted. There does not appear to be a way to offer a definitive resolution here.
Me, I support a woman’s right to choose; but I also believe that abortion is the taking of a human life. How do I reconcile this? I don’t. Why? Because I don’t believe that it can be reconciled. It is just the reality of living in a world of conflicting goods sans God.
This incidentally answers my last post’s first two questions to you. However, I think even this distinction–we might call it the facts/values distinction–is rooted in a particular weltanschauung. Thus Strauss writes:
“Husserl […] had realized more profoundly than anybody else that the scientific understanding of the world, far from being the perfection of our natural understanding, is derivative from the latter in such a way as to make us oblivious of the very foundations of the scientific understanding: all philosophic understanding must start from our common understanding of the world, from our understanding of the world as sensibly perceived prior to all theorizing. Heidegger went much further than Husserl in the same direction: the primary theme is not the object of perception but the full thing as experienced as part of the individual human context, the individual world to which it belongs. The full thing is what it is not only in virtue of the primary and secondary qualities as well as the value qualities in the ordinary meaning of the term but also of qualities like sacred or profane: the full phenomenon of a cow for a Hindu is constituted much more by the sacredness of the cow than by any other quality or aspect. This implies that one can no longer speak of our ‘natural’ understanding of the world; every understanding of the world is ‘historical.’”
In this view, there is no factual understanding of the phenomenon of a cow or of abortion; from certain points of view, the immorality of abortion is as fundamental to the full phenomenon of it as is the sacredness of the cow for a Hindu; likewise from certain points of view the immorality of compelling a woman to bear a child.
Another way to look at what you think is a dilemma here, Biguous. The problem of the moral/immoral nature of abortion is only conceivable to those who have a shared, public understanding of the language used to describe and define it as a problem. Imagine a future human species that is taught a kind of 1984ean new speak in which new generations are not taught to know or understand abortion as either moral or immoral. For them, your dilemma wouldn’t exist. Could this therefore be a nonproblem…
… as it were?
Is there a philosophical way to resolve the abortion debate? Shirley not.
Btw, I find this detail of the argument somewhat humorous: pro-lifers are wondering when is the moment the thing they aren’t sure exists in the first place (soul, person, whatever), begins to exist. 
Zoot, I petty sure experience exists. Self awareness, too.
Pro-life? C’mon buddy. Can you not use that word? It’s the most ridiculous bastardization.
I don’t mean to be a criminal a camping ground or a block hut would be fine. I’ll see if I can raise money. It depends if we’ll make a film project out of it, which I intend to, at least include it, get some footage of gathering and weird, pointless conversations about the nature of whether-or-notness and whatnot.
Iambig- I agree with the others, the fact that you take it as a problem is largely due to what you are, just as it is due to what you are how you approach the problem.
Moral problems can for homes for people. Any idea can be a home, I suppose, as long as it holds a tension, that can be emotionalized. Religions are really the result and cause of this attraction to moral dilemma’s. But the dilemma is rarely more than the ‘error’ of universalizing judgment of a phenomenon that calls for particular attention in each case. As Sauwelios said, it is arbitrary to say wrong or right if there is not an end toward which the decision is the wrong or the right means.
Moral conflicts give us grounds to think and to fight. What more do we want? Nothing pisses people off more than a moral solution.
Philosophy has barely survived its infancy. N was its first standing toddler. The Übermensch is a teenager with a gun and a car.
I am of the contention that ‘experience’ is not a state that at one moment is off and the next, on, at whatever point in the development of a fetus. I’d first be parsimonious and define experience as interaction… then add to it properties like awareness and sense data processing later on when the brain and nervous system was developed enough for it (what point that is I’ve no clue). And certainly we can’t be talking about self awareness in a comprehensive sense because that can’t happen without language use. So once we strip down this ‘experience’ to its essential characteristics it ends up being interaction in general and then environmentally oriented intentional activity in particular. There are gradations of this. In other words, basic experience becomes more complicated as the number of interacting systems increases. Ours is pretty phucked up… we’ve got the five senses but we can also make sophisticated sound combinations with our eating holes, and we can look in a mirror and say “hello me”. Those last two put some serious spin on our experience.
We need people and camera equipment, then. There are at least ten people from the forums that we’ll need… whom we won’t mention so not to offend those we don’t need.
You also mentioned a caravan earlier I think. That’s what I’m talking about: drive the entire coastline of south america, beginning out of Colombia. Buenos Aires is supposed to be an artsy town full of expat college dropouts and amateur painters. Sounds like a good place for philosophers too then so we should check it out. I need to pick up a package in Colombia anyway (that’s something I don’t want to talk about) and I don’t want to go alone. I’d need you to come with me into the hotel and wait in the lobby with your cell phone on, then… look, I’ll just tell you when you get here.
But isn’t this in itself the danger - if the individual’s identity is aligned with a group, hasn’t he not only lost the ability to think for himself but he’s also lost his sense of self - kind of like belonging to the Borg?
A group is more like a micro society but without individuals in that society/group holding their own unique sense of self, without sublimating it for the so-called “good” of that society, and without having the capacity to think differently, to question and argue differently, are they not just like sheep, or nazi pigs?
But maybe I’m not understanding you.