a new understanding of today, time and space.

ancient philosophy got its start with Socrates and his motto,
know thyself… this self examination was the beginning of
philosophy as we know it…

Descartes began with his self examination and discovered humans to be
thinking beings…I think therefor I am…

and so began the modern world of philosophy… both the ancient
world and the modern world begin with the same action…
self examination…perhaps it is time for the next great
epoch of philosophy… not by self examination by going from
outside in and not like before which was inside out… from inside us
to the outside world like Descartes and Socrates… perhaps we
can begin with understanding our place in the world and work in to
an understanding of who we are…

Kropotkin

as stated before…

“intellectually, all the problems of Medieval and modern philosophy have
arisen from the conflict of new experiences and new knowledge with
traditional thoughts and attitudes” …

so we haven’t reconcile the new experiences and new knowledge
of the modern age with traditional thoughts and attitudes…

I am a child born in the fifties went to school in the 60’s and
I recall as a child in Illinois doing drills like if a nuclear weapon hits,
to go under the desk and cover your eyes. Being a child, it seem
reasonable that a desk would protect you from a nuclear weapon…
nowadays, I have my doubts a desk would survive a nuclear weapon…
but hay, I could be wrong…

those experiences (in part) made me who I am today as they made
all those children from that era partly who they are and those experiences
are different from any other children experiences in human history because
never before has humanity been so close to total extinction and we knew it…

how do we reconcile my experiences has a baby boomer with traditional thoughts
and attitudes? how do I reconcile modern physics with its random and chaotic
evidence of the world with traditional thoughts and attitudes?
how do I reconcile quantum physics with traditional thoughts and attitudes?
how do I reconcile the history of the 20th century with its wars and a depression
with traditional thought and attitudes?

how do we reconcile modern technology with traditional thoughts and attitudes?
the pace and speed of our world is unprecedented… we hear of news from, say china,
in a matter of minutes on CNN… in the past, it would have taken months for
news to travel from China to Europe…now, minutes…I can, potentially,
communicate with every single person on earth with computers and phones…
that has never happened before…

traditional thoughts and attitudes come from the world traveling at a
pace of no faster then a horse, nowadays you have to travel very far to even
see a horse… you have cars, planes, trains, rocket ships, all moving people
and goods around… you have communication around the world taking seconds…
you have the knowledge of the potential of death of the human race
coming from a number of different sources… the sky in the form of rocks from the
sky and death from nuclear weapons and death from diseases that we haven’t
heard of today and death from manmade weapons of diseases to various forms
of WMD’s… how do we reconcile all this with traditional thoughts and attitudes?

how to turn all this into a coherent philosophy that we can reconcile with
traditional thoughts and attitudes? if you look at the 20th century philosophy
with 20th century history, you see philosophy response to the history of the 20th
century with escape into logic and word philosophy and a side trip into despair
which is the existentialism philosophy…
philosophy response to the horror and despair of the 20th century by
hiding its head in the sand and spend its time on the meaning of being…
or what Augustine meant by time and other useless crap…
that is in part why philosophy has lost its place with the public because
philosophy refused to face up to the challenges of the 20th century
by engaging with the 20th century… philosophy ran away from the
challenges of the 20th century like the coward it is and hid in the
minutiae of the difference between Aristotle categories and Kant’s
categories! philosophy deserved to lose the respect of the public
given its shameful retreat from the tough questions of our time…
philosophy has become irrelevant because it hid from
tackling the serious and difficult questions of our times…
what does it mean to be human in the modern age?
how do we reconcile the horrors of the concentration camps
and the war to end all wars and the fight to save democracy from
Fascism and the cold war that lasted 40 years…
with traditional thoughts and attitudes?

philosophy may have hid because the task is daunting but
it is not impossible… we have so much to reconcile with
traditional thoughts and attitudes, how do we begin?

we can just jettison the entire idea of traditional thoughts
and attitudes and begin anew? begin with the modern world
and just pretend the world began in 2000 AD…

or we can accept the past and begin the serious task of
understanding the last 117 years of history and science into
some context that allows us to begin to formulate
a philosophy of what it means to be human in 2017…
because to be human in 2017 means something different then
it did in 1900 because of all the changes and history that has
passed in the last 117 years…what does it mean to be human
when artificial intelligence is possible or what does it mean to be
human when we have the human body being “fixed” with modern
technology and replacing body parts… I had spinal surgery many
years ago and they replaced two of my vertebra with cadaver vertebra…
and I am not alone in this… does this change my “humanness”?

so how do we reconcile our modern age with traditional thoughts and attitudes?

Kropotkin

Nietzsche very famously wrote that “god is dead and we have killed him”
the problem is most people take that statement as is and out of context…
the reality is you have to take his statement into context…
“god is dead and we have killed him” is an understanding that
in our modern age with its science and politics and economics
and technology, our new experiences and new thoughts are in
conflict with traditional thoughts and attitudes and so to reconcile
our new modern age with traditional thoughts and attitudes,
we conclude that “god is dead and we have killed him”
god is the old traditional thought and attitude and our modern age
is full of new experiences and knowledge that conflicted with the
old notion of god…one of them had to go, either we remain with our
old traditional thoughts and attitudes and keep god or we remain with
our new experiences and new knowledge and lose our religion, kill god…
as god can only exists by faith because god doesn’t exist in any other way…
god is a product of faith and remains because of faith and once faith is gone,
so is god…so to what do we remain faithful to… god or our new experiences
and our new knowledge? this is why conservatives reject science and our new
knowledge and experiences… to keep god because it is one or the other in
our modern world, god or the new knowledge…as a modern man, I accept
the new experiences and the new knowledge and so I must reject god…
and thus continue the death spiral of god…

Kropotkin

Science says that only a foot of concrete and a years supply of tacos will stop a nuclear blast from killing you.

Here’s the thing about concentration camps. Hitler killed 6 million jews but what about the humans like you who kill 6 billion animals and put them in concentration camps every day? Did you know Hitler was a vegetarian who tried to pass animal rights?

so anyway, back to actual philosophy…

in this conflict between traditional thoughts and attitudes
and new experiences and new knowledge, what else happened?

some of our responses to the new idea’s and experiences was
democracy and capitalism and communism, nationalism…
and ism’s and ideologies that didn’t survive the new experiences and new
knowledge were religion, monarchy, imperialism… all were destroyed by the new
experiences and idea’s…

this idea of equality is a modern one and comes from our new experiences
and idea’s/knowledge… the thing about the medieval world was its
devotion to inequality, both economic and political…
the modern world’s response has been the rising approval of equality
as an answer to the traditional thoughts and attitudes…equality
both in the political and the economic sense…events that
show us the modern response to the traditional thoughts and attitudes
are the French Revolution, the American revolution, the Russian revolution
the entirety of the 20 century with its wars and concentration camps and
cold war are all response of sorts of the conflict between new experiences
and new ideas and the old traditions and attitudes…the conflict
between the left and right lies in this conflict between the old traditions
and attitudes and the new experiences and new idea’s… the left wants to
follow the path of the new experiences, new idea’s and the right wants
a return to the old traditions and old attitudes…the right is wrong for the
very simple reason that you can’t engage in the modern world with its new
experiences and new idea’s and new technologies with old idea’s and old
ism’s and ideologies and old attitudes… the right is trying to preserve
a way of life that is already gone… lost in this new world of science and
technology… the battle in the schools to prevent trans kids from
using bathrooms is just a symptom of this battle to preserve the old
traditional thoughts and attitudes against the new idea’s and new
experiences…the right will fail because if they cannot overcome
the new experiences and the new knowledge with old and failed
traditional thoughts and attitudes…that don’t cover the new
experiences and new idea’s…we must have new thinking about
what it means to be human in light of the new experiences and the
new ideas/knowledge…the old ways of thinking about human beings
no longer applies anymore…for example, you cannot think about human
beings like the Medieval times thought about human beings… we are not
in the medieval times, we are in a new and modern world that requires
new idea’s in response to the new experiences…to those who defend
the old way, the conservatives for example… you are simply preventing
people from achieving a new equilibrium with the modern age by your
holding the past up as a model for the future… this new equilibrium
is the balance achieved once the new thoughts and new experiences are
processed and understood and placed into the already existing system…
and this is what is really desired, a balance between what is and what is
possible… the road into the future is not a path into the past like
conservatives want, the road into the future requires new experiences
and new knowledge being put into action politically, economically,
socially, scientifically and culturally… the basis of action in the
modern world must be modern thoughts and attitudes, not old
traditional thoughts and attitudes because they are from another age
that had different experiences and different knowledge… we cannot use
their experiences and knowledge to chart our course into the future
because their experiences and knowledge is geared toward their
conflict between new experiences and new knowledge and the old
traditional thoughts and attitudes that was prevalent in their time…
that is their response to the conflict, it cannot be our response because
we have new experiences and new knowledge that only makes sense
in our times and our age… we must respond with the appropriate
ideas that work in our age, not theirs…

Kropotkin

ok, in terms of the new experiences and new knowledge, we
have gone from taking different “moral” positions…
We have gone from gays being criminals to the legal approval
of gay marriage… we have gone from a society that doesn’t
tolerate gays, drugs, whites and blacks marriage to one that does
approve all of these things and this is the result of conclusion
of the conflict between the old traditional thoughts and attitudes to
the new experiences and new knowledge… we have overcome those
ways with a thesis, antithesis and synthesis… the thesis was we
don’t tolerate gays, drugs, interracial marriage, the anti-thesis was
the new ideas and new knowledge that these things aren’t bad
and the synthesis was an acceptance of these new idea’s…
these shifts in morality and culture and idea’s have come from this
conflict between the old and the new… but the difference today is the
speed of the shifts… as our society moves faster due to technology,
our shifts in the acceptance of new idea’s and new experiences also
move faster… what used to take decades, can now take years, even
months… those who try to hang on to the eternal fail because there is
no eternal to hang on to… there is no absolute eternal vision or action one
can hang on to… one must shift with the winds in the new world and that
is how it should be as science has shown us that the universe is chaotic,
random, unpredictable and we must have a philosophy that responds to the
new knowledge and new experiences… and the new idea’s tell us we have
no permanent, fixed place upon which to base our idea’s upon because any
place we may find is chaos, random, unpredictable… we must build our new
foundations upon the new finding of science which shows us the “real”
world, universe we live in…
how do you find philosophy in a random, chaotic, unpredictable world?

Kropotkin

We should only tolerate some gays and some drugs, like some, gay crackheads are fuggin’ annoying.

Delusional man thinks his shitlib philosophy is superior to the philosophy of the Holy Trixie.

This is why I hate humanists.

Show me one humanist who cares about animals.

Not one.

One can be humanist and vegetarian as they are not incompatible

Humans dont care about animals, thus why should I care about evildoers and enemies.

if we take the long view of ism’s and ideologies,
then we understand that the ism’s and ideologies of
say, Napoleon, weren’t all that different from the ism’s
and ideologies of Julius Caesar… in fact, the world of
Napoleon wasn’t all that different from the world of
Julius Caesar… it would have been recognizable to
Caesar… so from 44 B.C, Caesar to 1800 A.D. the world
in western Europe was still basically understandable by both…
for example, in travel, you got around by horse or carriage, in
both… in France in 1794, they removed the monarchy,
that is something very understandable to Caesar… you
had large cities with a large lower class, Paris in one, Rome in
another… no real difference there…technology wasn’t all that
different from one to another… it would still been understandable to
Caesar…the underlying principles of the world of 1800 was Roman…
the law and philosophy and engineering were all principles that the
Romans would have understood easily… it wasn’t that much of a different
world from 44 B.C to 1800 A.D. but the world in the last 217 years has changed
far more then the previous 2000 years put together…new experiences and
new knowledge has changed the world in such a dramatic way, that the world
is a much different place compared to 1800…whereas it would have been
relatively easy for Caesar to understand the Napoleonic world, it would
have been dam near impossible for Caesar or even Napoleon to understand the
modern world with all the changes in the last 217 years…one of the
events that truly changed the world was the Industrial revolution…
That has transformed the world (and not necessarily a good way) to the
world that we see the world today…in fact, you cannot explain the
world today without explaining the Industrial Revolution…and that
is something that would have been foreign to both Caesar and Napoleon…
(England was far ahead of France in the industrial revolution in 1800)
the ism’s and ideologies that would have supported both Caesar and
Napoleon were substantially the same because of the long line of
traditional thoughts and attitudes were, roughly, the same in both…
but the new thoughts and new experiences of the last 217 years
have so changed the landscape in every way, shape and form,
that unlike Caesar and Napoleon who had things in common, we
don’t have any real commonality with either…our world would
not be understandable by either one…this is an example of
how traditional thoughts and attitudes have been changed by
new experiences and new knowledge…this conflict between
the old and new was played out in the 20th century in
the many wars and conflicts that existed in that century…
you could say, that the 20th was the conflict between the old traditional
thoughts and attitudes and the new experiences and new knowledge…
and for better or worse, the two didn’t really settle anything for we still
have that conflict raging today…and I suspect that the reason for
this conflict is that we still haven’t created a philosophy, ism or ideology,
that allows us to place into context the new experiences and new knowledge…
the failure of philosophy to adapt and change to the new experiences and
new knowledge has contributed to the conflict we see today between the old
and the new…until a philosophy can be found/discovered/created that
can account for the new reality we find ourselves in, a reality that is
chaotic and random and unpredictable and we must create a philosophy
that can account for the chaos and randomness and unpredictability, we
know exist from science and from life…a philosophy that accounts for
the new experiences and new knowledge we had have since 1800 or the
last 217 years…

Kropotkin

ok, historically philosophy as been a coherent, logically and internally
consistent…but, but what if that is wrong…what if the traditional idea
of philosophy being a system of logically and internally consistent is wrong
because the world as we known from science is not logical or internally
consistent… what if we need to make our philosophy like the world…
not only not logically inconsistent or internally consistent but without
a system, perhaps this is why Nietzsche didn’t write a consistent, orderly
system of philosophy…if the universe is random, chaotic, unpredictable,
what kind of philosophy must we have to match this idea of the universe…
Well certainly not the type of system we have been trained to do…our explanation
of the universe must match the universe, in both style and substance…
to those who commonly complain, your philosophy is full of contradictions…
I say, the world/universe is full of contradictions… why should my philosophy
be any different then the world? our explanations of the world must match
the world…and being logically consistent and/or internally consistent
and by doing so creating a system is not within this world, this universe…
physical matter such as stars and planets and galaxies and meteors and
the tree’s and grass and us all are part of this universe in which
is filled with chaos and randomness and disorder and we must match
the universe, so we all are random and chaotic and disorder and
unpredictable and our philosophy needs to match us, so our philosophy needs
to match us, which means our philosophy must be random, chaotic,
disordered and unpredictable…to have an orderly, logical, consistent
philosophy is nice but it doesn’t match the universe as we know it…

how can we create ordered philosophy when the universe is not ordered?
how can we create logical philosophy when the universe is not logical?
how can we create predictable philosophy when the universe is not predictable?

this follows the human need to create order out of disorder which is great
but the universe is disorder and what philosophy can we create to match this
disorder?

Kropotkin

we might argue that the world is consistent, see the speed of light, that
is consistent, but, recall that in a black hole, gravity is so strong that
light cannot escape it, which means even this physical event is
full of randomness and chaos and unpredictable… even this one certainty,
isn’t certain…all physical matter is subject to random, chaotic forces
and we must create philosophy to match these random and chaotic forces…
philosophy is not of the eternal because the eternal is subject to random, chaotic
conditions… philosophy is of the moment and when the moment is gone,
so is the conditions of the philosophy, so a new philosophy must be created to
adapt to those new conditions and with every change in conditions, we must
change and adapt our philosophy… this is, in part, why philosophy has failed
because it is created with the eternal in mind instead of the moment… that moment
in which philosophy is true and then when the moment changes, so must the philosophy…

Kropotkin

It’s like life can’t endure chaos therefor they are naturally drawn to order and stability.
This is why logic and reason are sought after, because they are solid and logical.
That means they can be predicted, therefor in them we avoid death and danger.

K: perhaps, perhaps…

Kropotkin

I think it is Apollonian to focus on the best, beautiful and most inspiring images, in the light, and because of the light.
It’s a world view that makes reality look structured, and appealing to the senses of reason and order.
This is a type of pragmatism, sanity before truth. “Sanity” here means that which is good for the mind.

Realism is different, because it sees many things at once, with and then without the light.
Reality doesn’t really care about us personally. It’s actually ugly at times.

I struggle between the Apollonian and the Realistic.
It’s quite the struggle.

I have heard it often said, a man must know his limits…
and how we are a weak species…we are a finite and a limited
species… and yet, I for one have never believed we are weak or limited
or finite… when people look at human beings, they see weakness, whereas
I see possibilities…perhaps because of my hearing loss, whereas I had to overcome
my “weakness” on a daily basis, I never thought of it as a weakness that was so
deep I wasn’t able to overcome it… Man has a moral weakness, I have heard
it said and yet, I have never believed it… …

we are suppose to need god to find salvation and yet, I have never believed that…
we don’t need to saved… we need to understand and we need to learn how
to be a better human, but we don’t need to be saved because we are weak and
helpless and unable to save ourselves… I have never believed that…

we can be as strong as we need to be… all we have to do is understand that…
religions focus on how weak we are and I focus on how to become a better human
being…

I believe limits are to be broken, not to be use to hold us back…
it is said we have a limits and I believe we should find those limits and
then surpass those limits in everything we do… it was said that man can’t fly
and we found those limits and then surpass it… we was said we will never get into
space and that was a limit and we found the limit and we surpassed it…

is man a weak species?.. no, just a species that hasn’t found its limits yet…
and until we stop looking back and move forward, we shall be bound by limits
and I say, limits be dammed, let us push the limits as far as they will be pushed
and then push it some more… break the wall of limits

enough of using our supposed limits to keep us from finding out what
is possible… push the limits of being human and find out what possible…

Kropotkin

K: I have at times thought of it in those terms of Apollonian and realistic…
other times, I haven’t…and I would put truth ahead of sanity… sanity be dammed…
find the truth not matter what’s the cost even at the cost of life itself…
the struggle is to be human and finding out what it means to be human…

Kropotkin