Yeah, as said. Not reading those.
Let me sum up.
There are value laden memes here on Iamb’s part.
An objectivist position about how one should think of oneself.
It’s the mirror image of other objectivists who tell you to feel like you are special or important.
Iamb assumes that anyone who is not in his hole has some kind of contraption. He does not want to consider that his hole is created, in part or in the main, by his contraptions: here, that it is better to walk around thinking I am nearly nothing.
If you engage with him, he will develop a theory about your contraption - in my case, that I believe in pragmatism, rather than simply being pragmatic, that is solving problems, trying to achieve things, trying to avoid other things. STuff he and everyone else does.
It has to be the case that one has a contraption or one should be suffering just like him.
I raised the nature of the otter, a social mammal capable even of play - to show that one need not have contraptions to NOT be depressed and disengaged from life and other people. Organisms without a disease will tend to have a complex relation to life, certainly suffering in certain circumstances but also engaged and enjoying life in other circumstances.
For Iamb the base, contraptionless experience of life is depressed, isolated and nihilistic. He sees this as what life MUST be like, regardless of circumstance, if one does not have contraptions to rely on.
This position is not based on science. It is his assumption. And he has resisted considering other sources for his suffering as the main ones.
Fine, his choice.
Here in this thread he presented the ‘right’ attitude. The attitude he thinks one should have towards our existence. We are nearly nothing on a planet circling a puny star.
There are several problems with this: off the bat, it implies that if, say, there was a life form in the huge black hole, it would have better grounds to think it was great. Which is just silly. Or if there was a lifeform that was enourmous itself, it would be justified in thinking it was great and special. Also silly. The amount of matter that makes one up or one’s sun up does not change the fundamental issues around existence. And it’s all speculative nonsense.
I raised the issue of the complexity of brains, just to highlight the oddness of using mass to determine importance or specialness or the not being nothingness. But, to be clear, I am not arguing that because our brains are more complex than anything else we know of, this means we are important.
So…He is telling us we should think of ourselves as small and nearly nothing.
I see no reason to take up this belief. I see no reason to take up the opposite belief.
He is selling part of his depression as if it is a fact.
Is he an objectivist? Well, in this thread he actually does refer to his position as a fact. But in general he avoids being an objectivist by making disclaimers. Fine.
But he is still selling a position, even if, unlike say a fundamentalist, he will at times say he is not sure. But since not being sure is the attitude he is selling, it is not clear to me this moves him away from being
another voice out there telling us how to live.
Which is also fine with me.
If he could own it. If he can’t own it, then it makes any interaction pointless because he will then make any interaction about me, even if he starts the thread and presents a position, suddenly the onus is on me to prove something or to prove that I am not something.
It is oddly like the types of discussions one can have with a narcissist, though he is obviously much nicer or ‘nicer’ than narcissists are. Since it is the internet it is hard to tell whether the citation marks belong or not.
I think, but am not sure, that the best he can feel is when he is in putting the objectivist or anyone he thinks is an objectivist or anyone feeling better than him in the position of having to justify him or herself.
So, if one is going to interact with Iamb, one should be ready to have one’s main points ignored, especially any regarding him and his positions, and to be treated as if one is the only one who has any onus to justify things.
That might be useful for some people. And then it might not be useful, certainly after a time.