Making iambiguous's day

From my frame of mind, an intellectual contraption relating to the components of my own argument – identity, value judgments and political power – is one in which actual behaviors such as this do not even make an appearance.

Instead, they are encompassed in conflicting reactions to human behaviors such as this by way of scholastic assessments — “general descriptions” of human interactions in one or another academic, didactic lecture. Think Satyr at KT and James S. Saint here. **

My point is that individual reactions to this sort of behavior will be embedded largely in the actual existential trajectory of any particular life. That, give a unique and particular sequence of experiences, relationships, sources of information/knowledge etc., one is predisposed to react one way rather than another. That, in other words, there does not appear to be an argument [philosophical or otherwise] that can in fact establish how all rational men and women are obligated to react.

And, in part, because there are arguments that can be made to rationalize such behavior from both sides. From many conflicting sides. Embedded [politically] in conflicting goods.

And [again] that’s before we get to the arguments posed by the sociopaths.

** Consider this “observation”:

You tell me: What on earth are we to make of this pertaining to our individual reactions to the methods used by the secret police above?

They either tortured and killed the man or they did not.

Now, what are philosophers [ethicists] to make of it if they did? Is there a deontological assessment here that all reasonable/rational folks are obligated to embrace?

Or does it instead depend on the particular context seen from particular [and conflicting] points of view. Political points of view. Or religious points of view. Or ideological points of view. Or points of view said to be most in sync with “nature”?

Again, there are those things that we claim to know or to believe are true “in our head” that are able to be demonstrated as in fact true objectively “for all of us”. Sure, there may well be contingency, chance and change embedded in these phenomena “over time” but the reprecussions of this are no less true for all of us.

We remain inflexible and repetitive regarding these truths because it is reasonable to do so.

But with respect to our prong #2 interactions those aren’t the things [the relationships, the consequences] that I focus on pertaining to my dilemma above.

Are they?

Let’s go there then and explore the extent to which it is not applicable to you when your own behaviors come into conflict with others.

What are we able to establish as in fact true for all of us and what, instead, becomes entangled in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.

You choose the context.

You are inflexible and repetitive not because it’s reasonable to do so but quite simply because you have no respect for the consequences of your actions. You don’t want to admit to yourself that what you’re doing is unreasonable because then you would have to make a drastic change in your behavior something for which you simply have no patience at all. And this is evident in the manner you interact with people on this forum such as for example me.

You never respond on point. You evade and then make excuses for evasion.

Narcissists have no interest in measuring the performance of their actions. Instead, they simply act and then override the consequences of their actions by imagining they are doing well. You try to hide this and make yourself appear credible by adding an entirely valueless “I might be wrong”.

My point however is that different folks have different reactions to the consequences of any particular set of actions.

And then the objectivists come along and refuse to respect the reactions of anyone who does not share their own.

How is that not reasonable?

Again, let’s explore my own reaction to the question that revolves around the behavior we call abortion: “is aborting a human fetus rational…is it moral?”

My answer is embedded existentially in this:

1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.

Which then precipitates [philosophically and otherwise] this frame of mind:

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

In other words, I am inhibited from making any “drastic change” in my behavior because I have come to conclude that any change at all is merely embedded in an existential contraption rooted in dasein and conflicting goods.

And then I ask folks like you: How is this not applicable to your own behaviors?

Thus when you level this accusation at me:

That is precisely what I am inclined to think about you. And many other objectivists.

Narcissists [like many sociopaths] are interested only in behaving in a manner that it reinforces their own sense of self-gratification. Sometimes they will agree that there is a right and a wrong behavior, but they just don’t care. Other times they will insist that in the absence of God right and wrong can only be understood from the perspective of any particular mere mortal in any particular context viewing the world around them from the perspective of “what’s in it for me?”

Personally, I do try to live my own life embodying the perspective embedded in the Golden Rule: would I want others to do this to me?

I merely have no illusions but that this is just one more existential contraption rooted by and large in the particular sequence of experiences that have encompassed my life. So far.

Though even here I have no way of demonstrating to others that all reasonable men and women are obligated to think like this. So I am always acknowledging here that I may well be wrong.

Narcissism is about falsifying the evident in order to protect oneself from the unpleasant emotional reactions.

Narcissists have no emotional resilience – their nervous system is inflexible – so instead of slowing down their densely packed emotional reactions they are protecting themselves from them by telling themselves all sorts of lies.

The event that triggers unpleasant emotions, in other words, is discredited.

Like a fox that can’t reach the grapes. The observation of failure – that the fox couldn’t reach the grapes – triggers certain very unpleasant emotional reactions. The brain automatically starts making certain attempts to remedy the situation but because everything happens all at once it becomes counter-productive. Instead of slowing its emotions down, by having patience, the fox falsifies its past, i.e. it adds a layer of imagination on the path to memory, by telling itself that it never wanted to reach these grapes (because they are supposedly sour.) This means the fox didn’t fail, because its goal wasn’t to reach the grapes, but perhaps merely to try to reach them, and so the brain of the fox no longer reacts and the fox is happy.

Narcissism is self-gratifying in this particular sense.

Narcissists are quite simply reality falsifiers. They bury unwanted aspects of their past deep beneath dense layers of imagination in order to protect themselves from their own emotional reactions.

I am not evading anything. Quite the opposite, in fact. I am asking you to tell me what you want me to do so that I can do it. But you never respond to my questions. Instead, you just bombard me with words and declare a victory when you see me walk away. Cool stuff, bro.

This sounds like something a computer programmed by an analytic philosopher would spit out.

I think it’s time to…reboot? :wink:

Okay, let’s bring this down to earth. A particular narcissist out in a particular world interacting in a particular context in which a behavior he chose [fucking] resulted in impregnating a woman. She wants to abort it. He sees that as murdering his child. His child. What then constitutes emotional resilience here? What frame of mind can be demonstrated to be the embodiment of a lie?

Okay, maybe. But what does that really have to do with this:

Narcissists [like many sociopaths] are interested only in behaving in a manner that it reinforces their own sense of self-gratification. Sometimes they will agree that there is a right and a wrong behavior, but they just don’t care. Other times they will insist that in the absence of God right and wrong can only be understood from the perspective of any particular mere mortal in any particular context viewing the world around them from the perspective of “what’s in it for me?”

You choose the context and the behaviors in conflict [the “reality”] and we can explore your theories more…substantively.

That’s exactly how you sound to me. Minus the “analytic philosopher” part. You don’t sound like a philosopher or a thinker at all. More like a broken record repeating fancy terms that you have picked from some external source but without understanding them. Terms such as, I don’t know, “dasein”?

Whatever you don’t understand you judge as “too abstract” or “up in the clouds”. Very convenient. I have nothing against it. Have your fun.

In other words, you’re too stupid to understand what I am saying – indeed, you have no idea what narcissism is – and beside being stupid you’re also unwilling to admit you are, or might be, stupid, so let’s put the burden on the other, on me, to justify myself instead of simply asking “can you please explain yourself to me, I don’t understand what you’re saying”.

Little. Your understanding of narcissism is superficial. It’s stupid. According to your definition, even animals such as lions are narcissists. When in fact they aren’t.

Maybe, if you were humble and trustworthy in general. Which you aren’t. So I can only mock you.

A narcissist is someone who doesn’t take responsibility for his actions.

What does this means?
It means he does not accept the consequences of his actions. In other words, he does not measure the performance of his actions by comparing what he wanted to happen (desired outcome) with what in fact happened (actual outcome.) The purpose of such a measurement is to facilitate learning. Learning is the process of adaptation, which is to say, the process of adjustment of strength of connections between some set of actions and some set of outcomes. When you make a mistake, which is a dissonance between what you wanted to happen and what happened, you adjust the corresponding connection between the action you performed and the outcome that was produced by weakening its strength, which is to say, by decreasing its probability of success. Otherwise, you strengthen the connection.

Narcissists don’t measure the performance of their actions thus they don’t learn. They change but they don’t learn. They stagnate.

They think that they are always right. That their actions are perfect and thus beyond any kind of measurement.

Think of Christians and their prayers. They believe prayers are perfect, requiring no measurement to adjust how well they perform, which is to say, their probability of success.

Think of democrats and their voting rituals. They believe voting is perfect, requiring no measurement to adjust how well it performs, which is to say, its probability of success.

These are examples of narcissistic behavior. Not what you’re giving us. But this.

Self-gratification, in the context of narcissism, refers to the refusal to restrain actions that are clearly not giving desirable results. It does not simply mean pursuing self-interest.

Again: Let’s bring this down to earth. Let’s bring our respective “terms” out into the world. Let’s focus the discussion on a particular [and well known] prong #2 conflagration.

You can attempt to encompass your own rendition of Gib’s prong #1 assessment, and then integrate it into the existential reality of this particular set of conflicted human behaviors.

No, what I do is to ask those who think they understand something…something relating to human interactions revolving around the relationship between identity, moral/political narratives and power…and take what they think they understand out into a particular context that we might all be familiar with.

They either will or they won’t.

Huffing and puffing? Making me the argument?

Well, believe it or not, I’ve been there and done that with any number of objectivists over the years.

Now, from my point of view, I invariably end up making fools of them.

But not you, right?

[b]Note to others:

Given his understanding of narcissism and my own who might be more effective when confronting the narcissist “in reality”?[/b]

Hi Biggy,

I’ve been away from this thread for a while. Been busy. I now have some time.

You shouldn’t be asking that question. You know it leads to a dead end.

That’s why I’m saying to take a different route. Get back into objectivism… then trying moving back out of it through an entirely different route.

What it means is irrelevant. In regards to living in a deterministic universe, what we are able to come to grips with on the “is” side of the “is/ought” divide and what we are able to come to grips with on the “ought” side of the “is/ought” divide should make absolutely no difference to you. If on the “ought” side, you can only conclude that, in our moral convictions, we come up with existential fabrications due to the fact that, living in a deterministic universe, it could not have been any other way, then that exact reasoning can be carried over to the “is” side, and you should be concluding exactly the same thing. I’m say that, I’m afraid, your dilemma applies even to “is” questions.

Then we come back to the meaning of “choice”. As I said above, the ability to violate the laws of nature is not the only way to define “choice” or “freedom”. Most people, when they talk about acting “freely” are not supposing they can defy the laws of nature–they simply mean that when they have the experience of making a “choice” they’re actions unfold exactly in accordance with what they feel they are “choosing” to do. The difference between being free or being forced has nothing to do with whether or not things could have turned out differently, but where the forces that determine the outcome of our actions originate from–do they originate from within or without? Are we the force that determines our actions, or is it a force that comes from outside ourselves? For example, a purse snatcher sneaks up on a woman and tries to yank her purse from her hand. She resists. The purse snatcher is a force that works against the woman, who is herself a force acting in resistance. The former defies the woman’s will to keep her purse. If he succeeds, we say she was robbed against her will. But suppose the same woman earlier that day handed her purse over to her husband for safe keeping. It could be construed as more or less the same action: she relinquishes her purse from her possession to another man. But in one case, she does so against her will, in the other case, she does so according to her will.

Any way you cut it, however, they are all forces working in the fray of a deterministic universe, and one could still say things could not have been any other way.

Bringing this back to your dilemma, the only way you can get away with saying that you are “stuck” in your dilemma, always doubting the truth of objectivist-sounding arguments, is if you were actually trying to be persuaded by them, eager to be open to them, but some outside force (as if someone else had control over your mind) was preventing you.

You have a very primitive understanding of psychology, naturally, since you’re a very primitive person. Maybe you should stop doing it because, you know, in my very own personal opinion which may turn out to be OH MY GOD wrong one day in the future, you are terrible at it.

What I’m seeing is this: you come here, make some noise that noone can make any sense of, then you watch people’s reactions and then try to spot a pattern you want to spot e.g. that they are losing it. Very funny.

You know it all. But because you show how humble you are by adding IMO after every claim you make, well, it can be excused.

Applause.

Two points:

1] I don’t know that it leads to a dead end. I only know that “here and now” I am not myself privy to the argument that does in fact resolve it.
2] my argument is aimed more at those who insist that not only has it already been fully resolved, it has been fully resolved by them

The objectivists in other words.

How then would one actually go about doing this in regard to particularly contentious conflicts like clitorectomies, abortion, homosexuality, animal rights, gender roles etc…

How would you do it? In other words, for all practical purposes pertaining to a particular context in which your values come into conflict with anothers.

Yet how in a wholly determine universe would I really have any autonomous choice in regard to deciding whether it makes a difference to me. If I think that it does then I was never going to think that it doesn’t. The “is/ought” world – the conflicts in it – are just an illusion. Every human interaction is necessarily subsumed in the immutable laws of matter.

We “come up with” only that which we could never not come up with. We conclude only that which we were never permitted not to conclude if we are to be in sync with the laws of matter.

Or: Then we are back to determining the extent to which the meaning that we attach to “choice” “here and now” is or is not the only meaning that we were ever permitted to impart given that we are permitted to impart only the meaning that is rooted in whatever [or whoever] set into motion the laws of matter.

And then the extent to which they either are or are not truly immutable.

Exactly: “Choosing”.

Here however we are clearly stuck. Why? Because in order to actually answer these questions we would have to be cognizant of that which wholly encompasses Reality and Existence itself. And surely one of the biggest mysteries here by far is where the brain ends and the mind begins, where all that is “out in the world” ends and where all that is “in my head” begins.

In other words, the truly enigmatic, perplexing connundrum embedded and then embodied in the self-conscious “I”.

Okay, assemble a bunch of us in a room. We are watching two film clips. In the first a woman is robbed of her purse against her will. In the second she hands over her purse willingly to her husband.

We are asked to react and we do.

Now in a deterministic universe every single thing that happens above was never ever not going to happen.

From my frame of mind once that is understood then it is understood in turn that our exchange here on this thread is in exactly the same boat. The only boat there is.

And then I am back to concluding that you are explaining something here of fundamental importance about “compatibilism” that I am simply [still] unable to fathom.

If “I” exist in a wholly detrmined universe then thinking and feeling that I am “stuck” here is just part and parcel of Reality. It is just another domino toppling over onto yours toppling over onto mine.

And at the very core of this problematic enigma is the understanding of what it means to “try” to accomplish something that is only ever going to be what it was never not going to be.

Possibly. But what on earth does any of this have to do with the points that Gib and I are discussing here?

After all, making me the argument doesn’t make the points that I raise go away.

Though it seems the points that I do raise here have often driven the objectivists over the edge. In order to stave off even the possibility that my own frame of mind may well be applicable to them, they feel this need to make me – to make me – the “problem”.

On the other hand, whatever works, right?

Like Biggy I like to keep things short and sweet, like getting hot with Some guy. How about it iambiguous? :wink:

The problem is you’re making no points whatsoever. Noone knows what you’re talking about. You’re living entirely inside your tiny brain while thinking it’s others who do so.

You merely spam, accuse, provoke, doubt . . . that’s all I see.

I asked you once, twice, several times, many times, billions of times . . . what do you want me to do? You never bothered to explain.

Note to others:

It’s rather sad [if rather typical] that I am able to reduce folks who are actually able to make intelligent arguments about any number of things down to declamatory glop like this.

You know, if he’s one of them. :wink:

There you go again. I ask you a question and you don’t care to answer it. And to remind you, I don’t have to interact with you at all. It is you who need me to. I am, in fact, doing you a favor. But what do you do? Nothing. You just spam. You don’t genuinely care about how others react to what you’re saying. You have no interest in interacting with people. You live entirely inside your tiny little head. All the while, of course, accusing others that they do so. That’s what narcissists do. They project what they fear they are guilty of onto others.

Again, I have no clue what you want me to do. All I see is an old man spamming other people’s topics with his own concerns.

You are a SPAMMER. That’s my impression of you.

Words and intentions do not matter. Actions and consequences do.

Over and over and over again you declare how interested in reality you are. But are you really? Everything that is outside of your declarations says otherwise. Maybe you need to increase the volume of your declarations so that everything else is squeezed out of our sight.

Over and over and over again you prove you have no interest in interacting with other people. Don’t tell us that you do. Show us that you do. You simply don’t. You merely think you do. You have “reasons” with which you try to defend yourself. To make yourself appear, to yourself first of all and then to others, that you’re someone who is honestly interested in reality.

What I see is an insecure old man who copes with his insecurities by telling himself all sorts of lies.

You’re too confident in your bullshit for someone declaring to be very humble.

And your pathetic understanding of human psyche . . . god! How horrible you are at psychoanalyzing other people. I would shoot myself to death if I were as retarded as you are.

How many emotions I must be stirring with my “huffing and puffing” and how many notes to imaginary others I must be inspiring.

You’re a living perfection. Forever innocent. Because you say so.

Biggy,

I think I’m going to make this my last response to you in this thread.

To sum up the point I’m trying to make to you (one of the points), it’s this: that you seem most certain in the moments when you ask your questions–when you grill people for answers to your dilemma, the one you feel they too must be ensnared by–you remain “stuck” here because this continues to seem to be the most reasonable position from which to argue and think. True, you aren’t making any claims–you’re just asking questions–but any proposal other than the dilemma you see yourself caught in is held suspect in your mind until it can be demonstrated to you that there is a way out of your dilemma (and presumably into the alternate proposal you hold suspect).

This is your default position. ^ Dasein. Your caught in a dilemma. How can you resolve the conundrum of being in a universe in which things could not have turned out differently?

It’s good to have a healthy dose of skepticism over one’s own views, but this is not unique to you. It’s not a license to say you don’t have a default position–as though your nihilism permits you to say you don’t believe in anything.

Just like the objectivist, we are all prone to this–to having a default position that seems the “most reasonable” to us. My point is that we will only ever see the “reasoning” in our position simply in virtue of having those positions, that they are the ones we fall back on to deliver answers to questions, justifications to charges. It’s the “going into” that makes the reasoning seem evident, the being in the midst of the experience (even if the experience is an abstract thought).

If you really wanted out of your dilemma, if you really wanted to see whether an alternate position holds any merit or not, you wouldn’t be challenging such alternate positions nearly as much as you do. When an alternate view is proposed to you, if you really want to grip the merits of that view, you would dive into it, believe in it (if only temporarily), for that is the only way to see the logic of such views.

My point has always ever been that you have to allow your mind to “go there”–to temporarily suspend its usual tricks, its usual defenses–to be open to that which, at present, may not all together be a reality to you, just an existential contraption. But this is what existential contraptions do: they give us realities to believe in. Your nihilism, your “dasein”, is no exception.

If you did this, if you “went there”, you would find (eventually) that you have become just as convinced of your new outlook as you currently feel you are of your nihilistic/dasein-based outlook. It would gradually seem obvious to you. You would look back at yourself now and say: what was I thinking?

But I don’t think you want that. I think you find some kind of comfort in being stuck in your dilemma. It’s working for you on some level, for some purpose. And it’s true that you may not be entirely happy, unfulfilled, you may still feel some angst over being caught in a world in which prong #2 situations abound everywhere, but this is the dead end in the maze I spoke of earlier (the analogy to human thought). You feel the passage way you have followed has gotten you closer to your goal, but you didn’t expect a wall to stand between you and it. Now you’re repeatedly butting your head against that wall, still trying to get to the exit from the maze. It may be right behind that wall–so close yet so far–but sooner or later, you have to come to grips with the fact that the right way to get to the exit, the only way, is to backtrack. That’s why I’m trying to tell you: go back! Yes, backtracking does hurt, it means repeating mistakes you thought you’d never have to commit again, it means delving back into things you don’t feel comfortable with, that you thought you could leave behind, things you don’t really believe in anymore. But like I said: if you really want it, you could easily believe in it again. Objectivism is the default mode of viewing the world, the way the brain naturally works. It takes effort to see the world in any other way, to stretch the brain far from its natural mode of thinking. Relinquish that effort, and your brain will fall back on whatever “truth” seems most objective to you. I doubt you’ll ever forget that, at the end of the day, it’s still an existential contraption, but you’ll find that it’s so much easier to just slip into that objectivist mode of thinking than to be fixated on the fact that it could be construed as an existential contraption. The latter will become just a fleeting thought that passes through your mind and won’t seriously disrupt the stability of your brain’s default “objectivist” outlook.

But I don’t think you’ll do that. I get the impression so far that the effort you put in to resisting your brain’s natural objectivist mode of thinking is worth it somehow, worth some goal you feel is still within reach, or perhaps worth it because it brings you some kind of comfort that you feel would be lost if you slipped back into an objectivist frame of mind. I think you feel comfortable in your dead end. Not fully satisfied, of course–it’s not the exit you long for–but to backtrack… that entails surrendering what little comfort you have left.