questions without answers

a woman gave me the “zorba the Greek” book
a wise friend said “she restored your faith in living”

Wow, this thread takes me back.

Back then I, among others, used to post a lot of “new topics” in the philosophy forum. And that is because back then there were considerably more folks who actually chose to exchange philosophy at ILP. However we might have construed what that entailed.

Now, of course, the place is veritably overrun with the Kids and the huffers and the puffers and the retorters. And the bullshitters.

But thanks for the memories. :wink:

iambiguous,

Is there a reason for that - an answer?

Perhaps the Second Law of Thermodynamics explains it. Entropy.

Sure, most of us will have an opinion about it. But to pin down the reason, the answer…

The difficulty for me has been that over and again many venues in which folks broached philosophy in a more or less substantive manner have gone defunct: some of the old yahoo groups, the Ponderer’s Guild, ephilosopher etc.

And then there are sites like Philosophy Forums – forums.philosophyforums.com/ – venues where the sort of Kidstuff antics that go on here is simply not tolerated; but they go too far in the other direction: banning [for life] posters like me.

Or maybe we just live in a wholly determined universe. Which gets us all off the hook.

Iambiguous,

Aside from what I previously said, let’s not go and throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Sure, there are a lot or mundane threads and posts in here; for instance, talk of breakfast, lunch and dinner. It seems that all over the internet, people are fascinated with food, what they eat and what others eat. Perhaps those tidbits are simply mini vacations from the mind.

Let’s not forget too that we are social creatures and ilp is in some respects a social forum. Can someone talk philosophy all of the time without at some point becoming a bit unbalanced and feeling like something is “missing”?
I myself am guilty of some 8-[ or more than just some of those mundane threads.

BUT then again, there ARE also some fine philosophical discussions going on in here - intelligent questioning threads…although many are replications of others but still they are resurrected/replicated.
Just how many original ideas/thoughts can come through the human mind.

Remember the past and the philosophers who were here then - some of whom may still be here though undercover - like Tab, Sawelios (sp) Three Times Great, Amor Fati, Faust, Oughtist, Wonderer, Fabiano, just to name a few.

ILP’s landscape has more than changed but it’s still there.
But I do think that there ought to be more quality than quantity.
Life goes on and it changes - it flows and it ebbs - just as the sea does.
But I still think that philosophy is alive and well - sometimes it just needs a kick in the pants.

Entrophy I think.

It’s difficult to find a balance - how much to allow, how much to lose.
There is just no black or white in these things.
I can’t recall the name of the philosophy forum - in that forum you were not even allowed to misspell a word. You couldn’t even give a hint of an insult, et cetera.

I didn’t think that way even when i believed in a personal god or any other god.
I would hate to think that arc who intuits herself to be a pretty autonomous being, or at least strives for the most part to BE one, despite her somewhat and sometimes set patterns and unconscious leanings and behaviors, which she strives to be aware of, is a puppet.

If what you say above is even true on some level, why would it get us off the hook?
Then we would simply have to strive to re-create our lives and universe in self-determined ways. …tumble that determined universe on its derriere. …which when you think about it, doesn’t history already show that we are doing just that?

Down with the Puppeteer God[s] - Carpe Diem! :laughing:
Seriously though.

All of this is, among other things, hopelessly subjective.

In other words, we take out of ILP that which we first put into it: “I”. But ILP as it existed when this thread was created is [in my opinion] a very different place. And not for the better.

On the other hand, I don’t pretend that is anything other than a subjunctive prejudice on my part. Rooted in dasein. Rooted in conflicting goods.

I became a member by and large in order to discuss the philosophical implications embedded existentially in the relationship between identity, value judgments and political economy: How ought one to live?

But I joined only because Postmodern Beatnik “banned me for life” from Philosophy Forums. And at one point [with folks like moreno, von rivers, faust etc.] there were plenty of rather sophisticated exchanges here. And I still engage in much the same sort of thing with folks like gib.

But, come on, tell me that the threads overall here haven’t tipped [plunged] considerably in the other direction. However difficult that might be to actually pin down.

After all, talking about philosophy “all the time” is a far, far, far cry from the Kids pumping up the volume here and now.

Of course, my own frame of mind these days revolves as much around waiting for godot as anything else. You know, whatever that means.

I agree. But how else to explain the fact that so many folks with minds more in sync with what is generally construed to be “a serious exchange of philosophy”, have left?

Or, sure, maybe they left because the manner in which I critique “serious philosophy” myself was rubbing them the wrong way.

Entropy, however, connotes as mechanical for some. Like it’s all just built into the way things work so don’t fret it.

But these things are also rooted in “the times”. The extent to which at any particular historical, cultural and experiential juncture, things like philosophy either are or are not deemed to be valuable pursuits. And in the age of pop culture, mindless consumption and the worship of all things celebrity [culminating now in Trumpworld], does philosophy really stand a chance?

On the other hand: For better or for worse. There’s always that debate.

Here’s the thing though: However folks like you and I think about these things “here and now”, we have no real capacity to ascertain for certain what is actually true “objectively”. And we are almost certainly going to the grave utterly oblivious to the “ontological” and “teleological” nature of “existence” and “human reality”.

But things get even trickier because if someone is convinced [here and now] that the manner in which they think about these things is in fact the objective truth – think James and his RM/AO TOE – then for them it is true objectively. And they may well succeed in taking it with them all the way to the grave.

How can you hold anyone responsible for what they think and feel and say and do if what they think and feel and say and do is only ever as they could have thought and felt and said and done?

Without some level of autonomy, “I” becomes just one more mechanism – domino – embedded cosmologically in the immutable laws of matter. Or so it seems to me.

In other words, when some do suggest…

…I am unable to grasp what in the world this can possibly mean [for all practical purposes] out in a world that unfolds only as it ever could have unfolded.

I haven’t forgotten about this.

Ryan is gay as a kite.

Arc, you need to drive your gaydar into a repair shop in 0100 hours.

Also, this is the wrong thread. Mods, move my comment to the thread where Arc says Ryan Gosling is not gay.

Hopefully then we can draw others into the exchange.

It seems to me that everyone is gay to you, Trixie.

I don’t have to do what you suggest either. My focus doesn’t lie within that.

“iambiguous”

True. We all think with different minds, do we not, based on our own life experiences? How can we move away from that? Things are not so clear cut, are they? We aren’t speaking of bare facts here. We’re speaking of how we as individuals view things.
But why does that have to be so hopeless unless you cannot live with questions without answers.

We can probably take more out of it than we ourselves actually put into it at times.
As for your last statement, I can agree with you. I can see your point. I’ve been here since 2008 I think.
Things don’t ever stay the same, do they?
Hmmm…I’ve never quite understood that saying: “The more things change, the more they stay the same”. Is that true?

Anything other then? Are you minimizing your feelings? Don’t we have a right to be disappointed in the way things have worked out?

Do you see the question: “How ought one to live” as one of those questions without answers?

I don’t know what Postmodern Beatnik is. But why were you banned for life? Kind of drastic, I think.
At least you still have gib here.

Sure, when I compare them to the threads of the past. But then what do you want to do about it?
All you can do try to do is to tip the scales in the other direction. Keep writing what you write. You do realize don’t you that others are also somewhat ridiculed for their kind of thinking?

What do you mean by “pumping up the volume” - some of the absurd threads and posts?
Did the greatest philosophers talk philosophy all of the time?

Can’t say for sure. People’s lives change. I realize that some of these “folks” have moved on because they were interested in more heavy real philosophical talk. Some have moved on and created their own forums.
We don’t all feel the same when it comes to “How ought one live his/her life” and the answer to that question can change depending on what direction one’s life goes and how their perspectives change.
Right there, doesn’t that kind of show that there is no “ought”?

So what are you saying here? That you are solely responsible for this exodus? lol
Even if that were the case, what would that say about those who left? Not that I believe that that is the case.
There are personal reasons why people leave. Some are psychological, some are about ego, some are about politics and the way in which a place is run…ad continuum.

Isn’t that true though in a sense? That doesn’t mean that we can’t find ways to fight that entropy.
For instance, if we have no energy? What to do? Defy that and get out and run - struggle and transcend. Energy begets energy.
So I do think that it is true in a sense, being mechanical, but we are also self-determined creatures.
We don’t need to make excuses for ourselves.

That’s right. It’s about facing certain realities, right, and realizing that not all people feel the same about things. We are not the Borg.
I’m not a philosopher per se but I love philosophy.
I think that philosophy continues to stand a chance as long as there are people who love it and who remain focused on questions such as “How ought one to live” and all of the other difficult questions. Let’s not forget about all of the books which are being written on philosophy.

.

Speaking in the realm in which there are no real proven facts, this is true.
But I remember that Carl Jung has said that truth is founded (?) within the concert of many voices. But I suppose that that can also be turned on its head and used as a means of destruction.
What I mean is that we can probably say that this is true and that is true (but cannot prove) based on many voices, many individuals, seeing and experiencing the same kind of subjective truth which others have. A common existential experience. If that made sense. I may not have expressed it well.

It may seem like a stupid question but does there only have to be a one-size-fits-all insofar as each individual’s life and purpose goes?
Aren’t we biting off more than we can chew when we put this into such a panoramic landscape as opposed to an individual’s little existential journey and the personal and meaningful questions which crop up through that person’s human experience?
Can we find some answers within the inter-connectedness of others with similar psychic experiences and those which are dissimilar?

Anyway, I often question and reflect on my own existence and reason for being and how determined and not I am…how much of a purpose I have and if I truly have one outside of the one which I’ve created for myself, et cetera.

Can we really determine whether or not there are “real” concrete answers for this? If there are, does this also make me more pre-determined or less pre-determined, if that even enters into the equation.

We may not find all the answers but I kind of think that diving into this human experience is all that we can do.
I don’t know how much of any of that made sense to you. lol

According to law, isn’t this premise something which would first have to proven?

But what if we decided to change your perspective and to see something else as being possible? Not so much of a pre-determined world but one in which the folds of that universe become more open and all-embracing of something New?
Could that alone be the beginning of a world changing? Could that “seeing” differently cause the world to unfold in an entirely different way, a far less determined one - giving us the power to transform it?
Seeing can work in both directions you know. How little we know.

Clearly, there are any number of things that, over the centuries, we have managed successfully to communicate to each other.
I mean, just look around. Are there not countless interactions [relationships] that we have demonstrated to be true for all of us? Obviously. After all, how on earth would we have managed to create the many, many extraordinary facets of our collective civilizations if there was not a common overlapping empirical reality “out in the world” able to be grasped objectively “in our heads”

By, among others, mathematicians and scientists.

The world of either/or.

But what of the world of is/ought? How many questions here are there without answers? Objective answers applicable to all.

And what of the questions that probe the very Reality of Existence itself. The very Existence of Reality itself. Questions like these: youtu.be/lnIlHQLAiTA

Bare facts are, of course, everywhere. But what are the bare facts when our behaviors come to clash over conflicted value judgments? How are answers derived here without taking into account the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy?

That’s the question I always probe here: How ought one to live?

Yes, another question that precipitates conflicting answers. But, from my perspective, “I” is everywhere here. There are fundamental components of human interaction [rooted in nature] that more or less stay the same. But: What exactly are they?

Well, aside from the obvious: the need to subsist, to sustain one’s existence itself. The part that swirls around our biological imperatives: food, water, clothing, shelter, reproduction, defense.

I’m situating my emotional reactions here in “I”, in dasein. We come into the world biologically hard wired able to be disappointed in the way particular things have worked out. But what of those who are not disappointed at all? What of those who embrace the changes here? What of those who helped to bring them about?

Is there a way then to calculate how much one ought to be disappointed by any particular change? Is there a way to calculate whether one ought to be disappointed by a particular change?

“I” don’t think so. But suppose there is? All I can do then is to come into venues like this and probe the arguments of those who have in fact come to a different conclusion.

Yep. And it’s right up there near the top. But there is a clear distinction to be made here between ought as it relates to behaviors that one needs to choose in order to accomplish some task, and ought as it relates to an examination of the task itself as either “good” or “bad”, “rational” or “irrational”, “moral” or “immoral”.

This guy:
forums.philosophyforums.com/memb … 12267.html

I was called a “troll” by him there for posting the same sort of stuff that I do here.

I suspect however that any number of folks there were becoming increasingly more perturbed by the same sort of thing that any number of “serious philosophers” here are perturbed by: my insistence that, with respect to the question “how ought one to live”, philosophy be brought “down to earth”.

You come into ILP and note that 90% of the new posts are from the same poster. And almost all of them are basically retorts, bullshitting, personal attacks and/or spam.

Unless of course I’m wrong. This is, after all, a subjective reaction.

No, but when they did choose to engage in a task or in an activity that revolved around the subject of philosophy, I would imagine that is mostly what they did.

And choosing to come into a venue called “I Love Philosophy” strikes me as qualifying in that same sense.

I can only note my own experiences in places like this over the years. Some folks think about philosophy in a way that brings them closer to the manner in which Will Durant described “the epistemologists”.

And the more effective I am in my attempts to bring discussions relating to identity, value judgments and political economy down out of the scholastic clouds, the more some will head in the other direction.

In fact I can recall my own reaction to the folks that accomplished the same thing with me. You never look at philosophy in quite the same way again.

The point though [mine] is that we will go to the grave never really knowing one way or the other. Or we can go to the grave thinking that what we do know “in our head” here and now is in fact what is true.

I suppose that questions of this sort are going to revolve by and large around just how close we are “here and now” to the abyss. We can probe the answer more “philosophically” when death still appears to be “down the road”. The closer we are to oblivion, however, the more preoccupied we become with the fact of it.

And, in particular, when we are atheists.

I certainly do agree that…

But: first and foremost that has to actually be an option. And each of us as individuals are going to be embedded in a particular context [set of circumstances] in which existentially we will be more or less optimistic about it from day to day to day.

But isn’t that the paradox and/or the conundrum? If everything that we think and feel and do is only as it every could have been, wouldn’t any attempt to prove that this is true merely be subsumed as well in the immutable laws of matter unfolding only as matter can unfold.

I will be the first to admit however that I am not thinking this all through correctly. But those who claim that they are will have to convince me of this. And how exactly would they go about doing that if this too is subsumed in whatever reality/existence can only have ever been?

Again, I am not really able to connect the dots here between these particular worlds and the world that I live in. Or, rather, the world that I think I live in.

How – empirically, phenomenally – could this be demonstrated?

I’m working on it. :mrgreen:

Sounds good. I’ll be looking for it.

Indeed, after going down into the gutter with Satyr over at KT, it’s always a pleasant experience to come back here and engage in actual civilized and substantive exchanges. :smiley:

iambiguous,

Yes, language is wonderful, is it not?

Yes, this is what I meant by similar experiences which are a part of all humans - that inter-disconnectedness of thought and feeling.

We grasp these realities objectively, unless we question everything we see, because we all observe them continuously with our senses with our consciousness and have named them. We sometimes observe a rainbow. A shared experience. The scientist among others of course can explain it.

There is the collective unconscious which I greatly intuit.

[b]According to Carl Jung, each person not only has their own unique unconscious mind, but also shares some elements of unconsciousness with all other people. He called this shared unconscious, the collective unconscious. Jung suggested that there are archetypes (images and memories of important human experiences) that are passed down from generation to generation. These archetypes can be common designs, shapes, colors, and figures seen over and over again throughout time.

alleydog.com/glossary/defini … nconscious
[/b]

You mean the scientific world? That’s not even a world of either/or is it?
How can it be since so much is still unexplainable.
Either/or to me is like black and white. It kind of ends further exploration and discovery, no?

Probably billions, maybe even more than the stars. They just keep cropping up. I don’t mean to cause you any angst. :wink:
:wink: Philosophy, science, religion, whatever will never be a done deal. We may never reach conclusions to things. Once we’ve reached them, it seems to open up more questions.

But then again, many question do have answers but they are based on our own subjectivity. I think that all we can do is first try to experience them within us, study them, reflect on them, to see how “real” and valid these answers seem to be. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, is there?
The world is complicated and much of it is still so unseen/undiscovered. Humanity is complicated. We don’t even begin to know ourselves at times so how can questions be so clear-cut? But don’t you think that we can explain them in some satisfactory way?

Are there actually “bare facts” in this regard? Maybe human “factors” which we have to examine in order to come to terms with conflicted value judgments.
Wouldn’t it all come down to what we eventually have to see as the greater good?
We have to pick and choose.
But maybe you’re speaking of CVJs with more than one person - between people or a group of people.
I really don’t see any easy answer - whether one is speaking of the abortion issue or whether to terminate, to pull the plug, on someone in a hospital in a coma for years, et cetera.
Hopefully, it would all come down to that which did the least amount of harm - but how to determine that since we cannot foresee the future of our actions - though there are some which we can foresee if we think hard enough.

Ought is a strange word, don’t you think. It kind of imposes a certain kind of mandate on behavior but I might be wrong here.
Ought here might simply mean a higher way to live which does little harm but perhaps it doesn’t even mean that.
“Ought” might mean as an example the decision to not have bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima because of the innocent lives, non-military lives there because having done that, many many many military lives would have been spared sometime in the future.

Aside from that, I can imagine that you must have asked yourself the above question countless times in your lifetime "How ought I to live?
The answer changes too doesn’t it depending on where we are “at” in our lives in the present moments, the situation and circumstances? Life is flux and we are not hopefully let’s say 10 years later who we were ten years previously.
I know this is not too philosophical a discussion, is it? lol

How do You answer the question: “How ought I to live” with regard to the above?

I’m not quite sure how to express this but is the “I” the main thing about dasein?
We experience ourselves according to our life experiences beginning with the journey from childhood in relation to those we meet and with the world around us.
Wouldn’t we all experience our dasein differently?

Doesn’t this have more to do with how we have been affected and effected through everything which has touched our lives.
I’m having difficulty with this because I do not have it down pat just exactly what is meant by dasein. Can you kind of put it in a nutshell for me. …dasein according to iambiguous?

I’m not sure if there is since ought is kind of a subjective term, no?
I suppose we can though by using reason and logic, which doesn’t have much to do with emotions. If we’re honest with ourselves and want to maintain balance within our minds, we use our intelligence and consciousness to find an honest and more valid way of thinking.

But we all have different ways of either responding to something or reacting to it. Some of us have been born with a more optimistic attitude and others with a more pessimistic one. Some can detach easier and some not - some are like a dog with a bone.

But isn’t that what it’s all about? Discussing differences and trying to come closer to some kind of mutual agreement and shared perspective?

What do YOU mean here by “brought down to earth”?

I can’t say for sure if it’s 90% and I don’t really think that it is “almost all of them” but there is a lot of that. It sometimes bothers me.

Well, I did say “greatest” philosophers. There is a lot of nonsense which goes on here, which I also add to at times :blush:.
I think that part of the problem is not so much intelligence. Many here have such vast knowledge (the more I read, the more I realize how little I have) but I think that the issue is the mind set, the degree of self control, impulse control and balance and personalities of the people. This is also a social watering hole. I can’t say much since I rarely start a thread but some of the threads are absolutely absurd and pure nonsense. That’s my opinion. Perhaps also many of these people are not so much philosophers within their hearts and minds but just have so much knowledge, if that made any sense.

Perhaps what we can ever have is “what is true for us, ourselves, individually”.
If we live our lives trying to be guided by that signpost, that beacon “How ought I to live” in a conscientious, compassionate, empathetic and rational way, balancing all of those things, and remain firm and true to it, what kind of regrets could we possibly have on our deathbeds?

If that were the case and the way that I thought, then I’m not sure how worthwhile I would think of my life. Who would want to be a puppet?
I would still have to act as if that were not the case.

Perhaps we sometimes feel that “it is only as it ever could have been” because when it comes to the really important decisions of our lives, the ethical and moral ones, the ones which can really effect our lives and those of others, any decision for that matter, we don’t really take the time to think things out, to see all possible ways to go, to evaluate all options, to question “what will this bring me eventually” - somewhere down the line, we believe that it was really out of our hands. Why? because we allowed it to go out of our hands because instead of grappling with the questions and our behavior, we took an easier and quicker way out.
Perhaps we cannot be completely self-determined but we can still determine the outcome of our lives and come away with knowing that we do have some control, that we are not puppets of some puppeteer, and that it is not all written in the stars. We have reason, we have consciousness. We are not bowls of jello jiggling in the universe. lol

Are you a nihilist or are you an existentialist? :laughing:
How do we change another’s mind? I suppose that one would have to start from the point of there being other possibilities to consider - no matter how things looked. That’s a feeble answer I know.
I know, it does seem to be a conundrum.

Of course this is the part that lends itself to the sort of complexity that the conscious mind may never fully grasp. This is the part where the id and ego and the superego become entangled in the very stuff that is embedded in the evolution of life itself.

In other words, how on earth is any particular one of us able to untangle it sufficiently enough to speculate on the very nature of Reality and Existence itself?

Let alone provide answers to questions that revolve around the existential relationship between identity, value judgments and political economy.

True. But for all practical purposes as it relates to our day to day interactions with others, mathematics, the physical laws of nature and the logical rules of language, suffice [for me] to allow us to make a reasonably clear distinction between the either/or world and the world of is/ought.

Not to worry. For two reasons in particular:

1] I recognize that my own narrative here is just another subjective/subjunctive contraption that may well be wrong
2] once you come to believe that questions of this sort don’t have answers that are applicable to all, this increases your own options considerably. Why? Because your behaviors are not tied [re your “conscience”] to “doing the right thing”.

On the other hand…

Here I just tumble over and over and over again into my dilemma. What might seem “satisfactory” to me here and now is no less a particular frame of mind entangled existentially in dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. Most folks however manage to convince themselves that when they feel that their own behaviors are “satisfactory” they are “for all practical purposes” close enough to having done the “right thing”.

That simply does not work for me. However hard it is to actually explain to others.

There is an “ought” attached to means and an “ought” attached to ends. Once you have managed to convince yourself of a particular end [it’s the right thing to do] then you just calulate what you ought to do in order to achieve it. That then precipitates titantic arguments about which particular ends justify which particular means. But at least most are certain of the ends involved.

That’s just not an option for me. Well, “here and now”.

On the contrary, this has more or less become the center of the universe for me now philosophically. And, over and again, in my discussions with one or another objectivist, this is where I bring the discussion. From my frame of mind, what does it mean to take philosophy “seriously” if, eventually, the “analysis” is not integrated into our actual interactions with others?

To me, analytic philosophy is basically just words talking about words. Words defining and defending other words. And, sure, it’s important to define and defend one or another epistemological framework. I certainly agree with that. After all, what can we know for certain? But to never take these ponderous scholastic contraptions down out of the ivory tower? Nope, not in exchanges with me.

“Whatever works”. And with all of the ambiguity and uncertainty that this entails.

Again, there are those things that all of us are hard-wired to think and to feel and to do as a result of the evolution of life on earth itself. There is the empirical world around us. Here “I” is more or less interchangable historically and culturally. My “I” – “I” rooted in dasein – revolves instead around the world of is/ought. Around customs and mores and rituals and laws. Around those behaviors that tend to either be prescribed or proscribed in any particular community.

For example, there is what we can know to be a fact about the Trump administration here in America; and then there is the manner in which we react to those facts.

I make the attempt to do that here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529

But it really comes down to the distinction that I always make between that which we believe to be true [or claim to know as true] “in our heads” and that which we are able in turn to demonstrate that all rational men and women are obligated to believe.

In other words…

Yes, but those who wish to reconfigure ILP back to the time when what they construe to be more “serious philosophy” was the rule have their “reason and logic” and those who actually like it more the way it is now have their own. And both sides can insist that they are being honest in their assessment.

The “problem” from my own frame of mind is that Only Humean can moderate the philosophy forum such that the trolling and the retorting and the huffing and puffing and the bullshitting is kept to a minimum. At least in the philosophy forum.

But if that sort of thing more or less proliferates everywhere else at ILP, the folks who do take philosophy more seriously will eventually move on. And they have, right? The von rivers, fausts, Morenos, zinnats, etc.

On the other hand, who is to say what the proper “balance” here must be?

That, with respect to the relationship between personal identity, value judgments and political power, any analysis accummulated by those who probe ethics philosophically must be integrated existentially into the world that we live in – a world in which conflicts over the relationship between “I” and “evil” and “politics” are everywhere.

Yes, that sums it all up rather well. Yet even in feeling that your life would not be worthwhile is something that you could not not have felt.

Clearly, those who fancy themselves as “masters of the universe” don’t want to belive their great accomplishments are “beyond my control”. On the other hand, it would be rather comforting for those who consider their lives to more or less be in the toilet to think, “yes, it is all beyond my control”.

My only point is that one way or the other it all appears to really be “beyond good and evil”.

Or perhaps we will never know. What I always come back to though is this: how on earth would I be able to determine beyond all doubt that I am typing these words of my own free will?

But that just brings me back to this:

Zorba: Why do the young die, why does anyone die, tell me.
Basil: I don’t know.
Zorba: What’s the use of all your damn books? If they don’t tell you that, what the hell do they tell you?
Basil: They tell me about the agony of men who can’t answer questions like yours.

Yes. :wink:

Given a particular context, we either can demonstrate that what we believe about it is more reasonable than what another believes about it or we can’t.

What else is there?

Again, I am working on it. :mrgreen:

Got your PM.

I’m looking forward to continuing our exchange. Among other things, it allows me to probe my own assumptions given the differing assumptions of others.

I don’t doubt that my own conclusions here are entangled in the assumptions that I make regarding the conclusions of others. And I don’t exclude my own point of view from my own point of view. It is clearly an existential contraption in the manner in which I have come to understand that in the world of is/ought.

I probably shouldn’t be posting in this forum. Just this morning I made a personal vow to post only in Gib’s OP “Why God is inherently right” … and here I am breaking my vow within minutes of making it.

Enough small talk …

I’m assuming the people who read and post here have not read something I posted in Gib’s OP the other day.

The silence is deafening in terms of response from that OP … maybe casting my net on the other side of the boat will be better. :slight_smile:

Noosphere is a relatively new word … yet … by no means a new concept. The concept is as old as the hills … I can’t begin to guess when it may have first entered human consciousness.

Augustine stumbled on it 1,600 years ago yet seems he chose not to pursue it … seems humanity wasn’t ready for it during his time on earth.

[/b]

Vernadsky, LeRoy, and Teilhard … in proposing the notion of Noosphere, put a tiny bit of meat on the ancient skeletal bones.

A tiny group of intellectuals/scholars have recently been attempting to put more ‘flesh’ on these ancient skeletal bones. duaneelgin.com/wp-content/upload … usness.pdf