a new understanding of today, time and space.

Peter_Kropotkin · April 24, 2017, 4:04pm

and we have reached exactly the same point Plato did when he posited that
idea of eternal forms…he thought that there was a temporary world, the world
we live in and an eternal world… that eternal world is where the eternal forms
like the circle existed and what we have is inexact and low grade copies of those
eternal forms…once again we reached this human need to create permanence in
the universe…Artificial permanence… nothing that can be shown to exist…
implied in Plato argument is this eternal world is god and god creates the
permanence in the universe with his eternal forms…once again philosophy looks
to god to hold the world fast and stable… Descartes does the same thing as
does Spinoza and Liebniz and Locke and Berkeley… each of them at some point
bring in god to make good the world’s promise…yet, yet we cannot do so…
because nothing as yet suggest that god actually does exist…
I would like to use a courtroom experience to show that god doesn’t
exist…

what evidence would you take to a courtroom to convince a judge and jury
that god does exists?

there is no evidence that would be admissible in a courtroom to show us
that god does exist…you can’t point to anything and say, that is god…
clear and certain as day… nothing like that exists… and so it goes for
Plato’s eternal forms… there is nothing there that would pass a courtroom
test…

so we have reached the point where Plato needed god
to make his theories work… we cannot resort to such arbitrary means to
get our theories to hold solid and in place… everything is temporary and
changeable and melts into nothing at some point…

our philosophy must reflect this… we have nothing in the universe that
exist permanently and eternally…

even space and time once began, the big bang and so that implies that
space and time are of duration and thus will at one point not exist…
if something can come into existence, it can go out of existence…

our philosophy must reflect this reality that we and everything is impermanent
and temporary… idea’s, matter, reality, space and time, the universe, all of it is temporary
and impermanent…the search for a permanent reality is nonsense, call yourself
Don Quixote if you insist on searching for a permanent reality… such is a fool’s quest…

our idea’s and philosophy must reflect this temporary, impermanent reality we exist in…

so what does this mean for us?

Kropotkin

Peter_Kropotkin · April 25, 2017, 4:43pm

We have a multitude of questions in philosophy…
one such question is : what is the meaning of life?
and at one time or another, everyone asks themselves that question…
the problem with this question, as often happens with philosophy questions,
is that if you look at the question, I mean really look at the question, the
question itself has issues…

The meaning of life: we have two key words, meaning and life…
but if we look at these two concepts, we see they are two different
concepts, life is facts and meaning is value…so in essence we are asking,
what is the value of a factual existence…

life has many different meanings, there is that word again,
one way to define life is:

life needs to maintain Homeostasis, it is composed of cells, it undergoes metabolism,
it can grow, it adapts to its environment, respond to stimuli and it reproduces…

to be called life, it must follow these 7 things… or at least that is the
current conception of life… it will change because that is what facts do,
they change…and there are more then one theory as to what is this thing
called life…in other words, we have problems with understanding what exactly
is life… one of our two words, we are not sure what it is… how can we
find an answer to, what is the meaning of life, when we aren’t really sure what life
is…life is a process, not a substance…

as to our second word, meaning, there are even more theories as to what is
“meaning”… Wiki lists at least 5 different theories about meaning…
meaning is about values. look up the work “meaning” and you get something along
the lines of this…

Meaning as nouns:

what is intended to be, or actually is
the end, purpose, or significance of something,
what is the meaning of life…
Linguistics, the nonlinguistic cultural, reference, or denotation of a
linguistic form… expression by linguistic content…
(I have no idea what this means)

meaning as an adjective:
4. intended (causally used in combination)
she is a well meaning person
5. Full of significance expressive…
a meaning look…

in other words, even what the word, meaning, means is under dispute
and in questioned…

so we have two words in a 4 word sentence that we don’t even really
understand… how can we find the meaning of life when we don’t even know
what those words mean?

we have interesting examples of the meaning of life even given we don’t
really understand those words…

for example, this is an example of one version of the meaning of life…
the declaration of independence tells us that…

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these,
are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…

with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, being the meaning of life…
goals to be achieved… and meaning is in part, is a question of goals to be
achieved… and where does all his leave us?

we have at this point a question that unanswerable because we cannot
agree on the term of “meaning” and the term, “life”…

so does answering these questions become a linguistic questions?
some think so and answer it in those terms but that path is sterile
and cannot meet our flesh and blood demands for knowledge and truth…
a word means this… does that really answer our question…
love is defined as… but that certainly doesn’t tell us what love is
as love is greater then any definition we impose on it…

so we are back in the beginning, wonder what is the meaning of life?

and until we understand what the word meaning and the word life, means,
we cannot begin to answer that question and then all we have are definitions
and definitions are not answers…

so what am I left with? an understanding that we cannot answer our
questions about philosophy unless we clarify the questions and then
that is only part way to finding answers…

Kropotkin

Peter_Kropotkin · April 25, 2017, 7:58pm

and what of beauty? do we understand beauty?
think of a beautiful woman or man, as you wish…

We automatically think of women as being more beautiful then men…

take two examples, say, Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep…
are they equally beautiful? Most would say no, but why?

society would say Nicole Kidman was more beautiful then Meryl Streep,
but there are those individuals that think Meryl Streep is more beautiful then
Nicole Kidman… So who is right? is there some sort of census building
in society that is deciding what is beauty and beautiful? I think the problem lies
in how we determine what beauty is… what is beauty? how would you define it?
of course the usual suspects are here, pleasing to the eye and another favorite,
symmetry and what other criteria has been used?

now one thing I have noticed about beauty is this, it is nonthreatening, we don’t feel
threatened by beauty, but we do feel threaten and repelled by ugliness…

(now my last statement about beauty being nonthreatening is not actually true,
I have seen women be threaten by another women’s beauty, but that is about
self esteem issues more then any thing else)

so what is the definition of beauty? and once again we run into trouble,
because there is no actual definition of beauty or the beautiful that would
allow us to clearly understand beauty… but once again, it is not all about
the definition of something that makes it clear but taking the next step
after definition that allows us to properly understand something…
a definition is just one step closer to understanding something, it is not
THE step to understanding…

I would suggest we have a mixed and muddled idea of beauty that prevents
us from understanding what beauty is… so twice we have had misunderstanding
because of our lack of understanding of what our terms are, the meaning of life is
another misunderstanding of what meaning and life is and the search for beauty is
a misunderstanding of what beauty is…
perhaps this is why philosophy has been stagnant all these years, confusion over
what we are actually questioning… we are asking the wrong questions or we
are failing to understand what our questions mean, truly mean…

Kropotkin

Dan1 · April 25, 2017, 8:07pm

It seems to me that beauty and attraction are brain structures.
A structure can be made any which way.
The result is as you can see.

Peter_Kropotkin · April 25, 2017, 8:29pm

the problem with this is we can “blame” the brain structure for almost
anything then… I didn’t commit this crime because my brain structure
caused me to commit this crime… now I recognize that this brain structure
isn’t really a brain structure but the way the mind categorizes things, but
I would suggest that we are heavily influenced in how the mind categorizes
things by society and the way we are raised… the influence of society in how
we think about things cannot be underestimated… I would argue that our idea of
beauty is really a cultural and society construct and far less a matter of our own
individual brain structure creating categories for us to place individual people
as beautiful… we learn what beauty is from society and not from any
individual brain structure that creates categories for us…

so any answer we might get from the question of the meaning of life might
actually come from a cultural and society construct that has been created for us…
we think that the meaning of life comes from our praise and giving glory to god,
but that doesn’t come from any individual categories we might have inside of us,
but is given to from society and cultural influences…

so what other idea’s you might have are influenced by culture and society influences?

Kropotkin

Peter_Kropotkin · April 26, 2017, 4:59pm

so in my study of philosophy and my offshoot study of science, I
have encountered an interesting thing…
so we have human beings and they want to know about the world around them…
so to understand the world, we humans look at the phenomenon around us…
for example, we see the sun rising every day… humans have seen this sun rising
every single day of our existence as humans…we have tried to explain this in
many different ways, the Greeks had the god Apollo ride his flaming chariot
across the sky every day for example and many other different examples exist
of the explanation of the sun rising every single day…

this one example of the sun rising every single day leads us to wonder,
about how or why does the sun rise every single day, in the east, no less…

so we have spent a whole lot of years thinking about this going back to the
beginning of time…

how we were able to find a solution to this problem? We connected the earth
to a bigger picture… we put the earth into context… we used the
information of the sun rising every single day, which by itself can tell us something
but not enough to create a picture of earth in context of the solar system…

but the interesting thing is we interpret this even in a context and within HUMAN
values and human understanding… in other words, we see the universe
in terms of our senses and our language and our math… we see the universe
in terms of our human nature… we interpret the universe with human eyes
and human hearing and human math and human language… the universe makes
sense because we have filter it through our human understanding…

today we have a mathematical theory of the universe… but that understanding
is done through and with human thought and understanding… it makes sense because
we have found the laws of nature through human thinking and human math…
in other words, our brain structure which is really a means we use to categorize
our world… is the universe as we think it is or, or does the universe look that way
because of the way we humans have categorized it…we have made the universe
understandable to us, but does that really represent the way the universe actually
works? or has creating the context of our understanding of the universe been
compromised because we have done that context in terms of human thinking
and human math and language…

have we created a clear understanding of the universe or have created
a understanding of the universe that makes sense to us because it was done
by us with language and math done by us…is the picture of the universe
a human construct? humans said, let there be light and there was light,
light being an idea of humans, by humans and for humans…

is the universe really something different then we think?
we have created this idea of the universe using human values and human math
and human language, does that mean we really understand the universe or do we
understand our picture of the universe because we drew that picture and the reality
of the universe is something completely different?

Kropotkin

Peter_Kropotkin · April 26, 2017, 5:07pm

to follow through this thought, would the universe look the same
to Aliens from space? or do they interpret the universe through the lens
of their existence and come up with a totally different picture of the
universe because their senses and language and math is different then ours?

is the picture of the universe dependent upon the nature and quality
of the senses and language and math of the species looking at the universe?

or is the picture of the universe the one we actually have described through
our senses and math and language?

I can envision an alien species having a different math, a different reality
because they exist in a different environment and have different senses…

math is a human construct and aliens having a different reality would
have a different math…so how much does that influence their vision
of reality?

Kropotkin

Peter_Kropotkin · April 26, 2017, 5:39pm

what is space and time? however the human sense and human reason and
human math make of it… we create the idea of space/time for our benefit
and our use, by our senses and math…

it is not necessarily what space/time actually is…

Kropotkin

Peter_Kropotkin · April 27, 2017, 4:28pm

Einstein said that we feel time subjectively. sometimes we
feel time moving quickly and sometimes we feel time
move slowly… usually at work… so time is subject
to our own interpretations…as we call it space/time…
we also feel/understand space in a personal fashion…

in other words, space/time is a function of our perception of it…
we have created space/time with our senses and our reason
and our perceptions…

space/time is a human construct just like math and science
and history and biology and physics… different environment,
different senses, a different reality and we have different math,
science, history, biology and physics…

Kropotkin

Peter_Kropotkin · April 27, 2017, 5:33pm

so, what does this all mean?

we have to redefine what is the “meaning” of government and the “point”
of our economic systems…

in short, what is the point of life?

what we call science and government and biology
and history is really a function of how we have constructed it…
they are artificial ways of looking at the world… created
by the way we see and understand the world…

so we see the world as a conservative see’s it and the world
is a dangerous place, full of people, events, institutions all trying to
damage us, destroy us…orrrrrrr,

we can see the world as a liberal see’s it, where the world is a positive place,
where we create our own vision of “the pursuit of happiness” and
the world is a social world, not every man for himself/herself…

both are right… because the world is as we see it… dangerous if we see it
that way, and positive if we see it that way…

now one argument for a conservative vision is the idea that
humans are basically selfish and all about their own happiness…
as with all visions, that is only partly true…

at my work, we have a store manager that only concern is to make her
bonus…everything single thing she does is subject to that one goal…
she couldn’t care less if the store burned down as long as she got her bonus…
because of this single minded pursuit of her goal… from a workers viewpoint,
there is no benefit of any kind to do the things needed to help the store…
we don’t clean up the store because that has no benefit for us…
we don’t do customer service because if we do it right, no one notices
or CARES…it makes no difference in how the store is run because the manager
only cares about her bonus…and only cares about customer service if it
affects her bonus (and it doesn’t) she has trashed the store by cutting hours
and never, ever complimenting anybody for a job well done, or for that
matter she isn’t on the floor to even see what happens in the store…
she is in her office talking personal business on her cell phone all day…
that is pretty much all she does…

but what if, what if we got some feedback as workers even if it was negative,
it would be a improvement over what we have now…

where we have no incentive to do anything but show up and collect our paychecks…

a shitty place to work where it really doesn’t have to be that shitty…

so what does my little story have to do with anything…

more on that later…

K: so its later, much later then I thought before I got back here…

think of my little store in terms of government as a whole… what if
the government was run in a similar fashion as the management runs our store…

the burden falls on those who have the least ability to deal with it…
by that I mean… think of those on the bottom rung who have little say
or influence into the running of the business, just like employees in my store
have no say or influence in the running of the business… the citizens have
done the same thing we employee’s have done which is do your time, collect your
paycheck and get the hell out of there… management in both business and government
managed to turn off any interest in their “working” team, citizens and workers are treated
the same here… and they have lost interest and have stopped caring about what
happens in both the store and in government and this is on purpose…

45 is a perfect example of a manager who only cares about his bonus and
he doesn’t care what happens to the worker/citizen below him…
higher management in this case, the federal government has made it clear,
it doesn’t care about the average worker/citizen and those workers/citizens
have lost interest in the goings on in the state/company…
management agenda has nothing to do with helping or improving the
average citizens/worker… and so we check out… millions of American’s
have lost interest in the goings on in government simply because they feel, correctly,
that the government couldn’t give a shit about them and so these millions of people,
don’t participate or involve themselves in the going’s on of government…
they don’t vote, they don’t protest, they don’t say a word and actively
avoid paying attention to the news or any information about the government…
and the government like big business loves this… less people involved the better
for those who can implement policy…connect the average worker and the average citizen
and you can see a remarkable similarity between both… and how management treats
them and the workers/citizens reaction to this mistreatment, very similar…

so how do we reengage the worker/citizen?

the answer is very similar… engage the worker/citizen in all the steps of
the business/government… bring the worker/citizen back into the decision
making process… give them some accountability and some voice in the
actions that affect their lives… reengage the worker/citizen in the business
of governing and business… make them part of the business/government, not
just a token level but a real level of engagement… make them part of the business,
not just expendable workers/citizens…

Kropotkin

Peter_Kropotkin · May 4, 2017, 4:40pm

I haven’t been around much because work has been trying to kill me with
long and ugly hours and because of that, I have been in a state of sheer exhaustion…
which tells a story in of itself… one way to keep the masses down is simply work them
to death… if one is exhausted from work, you don’t have the energy to protest or to
work to bring about necessary changes in the world… this is simply a technique to
maintain the system… now on a second note, not long ago, my nephew, who is an idiot,
got into a flame war with me on facebook… one of his comments was to “fight the man”
and I haven’t been able to get this idea out of my mind for a simple reason, there really
isn’t a man to fight, it is the system that we must fight…there are those who take advantage
of the system, those are the ones we call “the Man”…once again its about gaming the
system to get the results you want and the wealthy and powerful have the resources to
game the system…you have even heard 45 saying he has gamed the system and thus
he is an “expert” on cleaning up the system…another lie in a long midst of lies…
anyway, as a lower middle class person, I don’t have the resources to game the system…
so to connect these two idea’s… I am being worked to death because the system
is being gamed by the company who uses its resources to bribe officials to change
the rules to allow the company to work me to death… it isn’t a “MAN” to fight but
a system to fight and that is far harder to imagine and understand… and to fight…

ok, now we have a second point to cover…
life is a series of problems to solve… and much of what exist today, exists
to solve a problem… philosophy is a means to solve a problem and government
is meant to solve a problem and history is to solve a problem and science
is to solve a problem, in other words, we have created many diverse means
to solve problems, from institutions to government to academic solutions…
schools and universities are a solution to a problem and what they teach
are introductions to the problems that need to be solved and what problems
have been solved already and by what means…
so our system of government was a solution to a problem…but if a system no longer
solve our problems, it is to be changed… and the problem to our system is not
that the system doesn’t work, it does, but it has been hijacked by those who use/game
the system for their advantage… and that is the problem to be solved today…
we must return the system to working for the majority and not the small, moneyed
minority…not to fight the man, but to fight the system that has been bought
and corrupted…

my father believed in work and a fair day pay for a day worked…
I was delivering newspapers at age 9 and I also had a job mowing lawns
along with my paper route…the only stretch of my life where I didn’t have a
job was my first three years of high school…otherwise I have been working all my life…
I have contributed my entire life…to work in a system that takes advantage of
everyone is not in my best interests nor is it in yours…I have no problem with
a honest day pay for a honest day’s work and that is the point… it is no longer
a honest day’s pay for honest day work…what is the solution for getting a honest
day pay for a honest day work? we are no longer being paid an honest wage for our
work… and in fact, those who are gaming the system are trying to steal our pensions,
via dishonest plans like the ones that want to take away our social security and replace
it with market accounts in which wall street will steal most of our money… once
again gaming the system… so we need to understand life is a series of problems
and we need to begin to solving our current problems in order not to leave our
children an unholy mess…

Kropotkin

Peter_Kropotkin · May 13, 2017, 4:49pm

I have been on vacation this week… Went to LA and parts around LA…
Was in Santa Monica when Comey was fired…
I am feeling more refreshed and alive after this week…

as I have described before, Philosophy is about values and science
is about facts…What values are most important and why, is philosophy…

Now given the universe has features… gravity and motion and weight for example,
we have those facts gained from Science, we then conclude what value are important
in a universe of gravity and motion and weight, what values are important…
given that the universe is clearly chaotic and random and unpredictable,
we must have values/philosophies that are reflected in this chaotic universe…
for example, the old idea of the clockmaker universe no longer exists because
the universe is chaotic and random, totally different from a clockmaker universe…
so we discard that clockmakers universe along with the Ptolemaic universe as
systems that we once had that described the universe… so for those keeping track…
we have had multiple descriptions/idea’s of the universe…Ptolemaic and the clockmaker…
we have had multiple descriptions/idea’s of different political systems and we have had multiple
descriptions of economic systems…for example, in the political systems, we have monarchy,
dictatorship, oligarchy, representative democracy among others and for economic systems,
we have hunter/gatherer, capitalism, communism, mercantilism among other economic
systems…

so along with philosophy working out the values necessary for a given physical universe,
so working out values for our current scientific understanding of the universe…
we also work out the values for our economic system and our political system…
in other words, the values that are important in an capitalistic system are different
then the values in a communistic system…
the different realities creates different values… it doesn’t change the facts…
the sun will still be 93 million miles from earth and so it doesn’t undercut science…
but the values of a society changes if it is a capitalistic system or a communistic society…
and that is philosophy job… thus we have a connection with Nietzsche… who commented
that the legislator creates values… he was referring to Jesus for example…
but those values only work within a specific system and if you change systems
or if the system changes within itself, the values must change to reflect those changes…
America refers to its values as… Truth, justice and the American way of life…

so we have the current administration trampling on, Truth, justice and the American way of life…
so we must have values that reflect the current situation, so we have lies and obstruction,
denying justice… but those values cannot exist for long as they bring about disorder and chaos…
recall we strive for either order or disorder in our systems and the values we create
reflect this drive for order or disorder… to create order, we must, must put in
energy… to maintain order in any system, we must put in energy… a car for example,
we must put in time, money, effort and energy to keep the car, otherwise known as a system,
running… just like a car system, our political SYSTEM, and our economic SYSTEM, we must put
in time, money, effort and energy to maintain our system… and we must have values
that reflect our system…a system like a political system or an economic system
needs values to reflect what the system stands for, what the systems means…
so we connect our idea of values with our idea of systems and we have created a home
for science… it tells us the facts of our universe and we then use philosophy to create
values that make sense of the facts of the universe…notice I have kept away from
any specific values, for example, honesty or dishonesty… as honesty brings about
order in our system and dishonesty brings about disorder, we have a sense of what
values we must be striving for… values that bring about order in our current system…
when the current system changes, we must change our values to reflect those changes
in our current system, be it political or economic or social…
it all ties together…

Kropotkin

Peter_Kropotkin · May 14, 2017, 2:03pm

We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that ALL men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their creator with CERTAIN RIGHTS,
that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness- that to secure these rights, government is
instituted among men, deriving their just power from
the consent of the governed…

Yesterday, my wife’s cousin, her son graduated from
Hastings Law school in San Francisco… so we went to the city
to see the graduation…as we waited for the ceremony, I was thinking…
being a law graduation, I was thinking about the law…
as I was thinking, I wonder about the law and its effects on
people… I got to thinking about the above passage, where
our founding fathers also thought about the goal of people and
they thought that the goal of people was “life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness”… we often think about what is the meaning of life and here is
one possible definition of the meaning of life, “life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness”…and then I got to thinking about 45 and his attempts to limit
or end this meaning of life for people… and the criteria they used was
citizenship…in other words, if you are not an American citizen, you aren’t
provided or afforded the same rights as an American citizen…The criteria used
is being an American citizen…you only have rights if you are an citizen…
but, but that is not the criteria used by the founding fathers… ALL MEN ARE
CREATED EQUAL… it doesn’t say, ALL AMERICANS CITIZENS ARE CREATED EQUAL…

and another very interesting point made is this, it says, to secure these rights,
government is instituted among men… in other words, these rights are prior, before
the act of creating government…and to secure these rights, government is created to
protect these rights… so we have these rights and then the government is
created to protect these rights…in other words, the right to “life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness” existed before government…and before this idea of
citizenship…the founding fathers thought that these rights were present before
the founding of government…thus is it no longer a question of citizenship…
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL…thus to say, that you can only have these
rights if and only if, you are a citizen is denied in the very words of our founding
fathers… you cannot deny basic rights to anyone because they are not
a citizen because they already have these rights prior to, before the founding
of government…before citizenship comes the “right to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness”…and it says so in the declaration of independence…

now we either accept these words or we deny them and if we deny them,
we deny the basic concepts of what the founding fathers themselves believed
to be true… we cannot cherry pick what beliefs they had and then apply it
to ourselves… either we believe all of it or we don’t believe in any of it…
so to deny basic human rights to people based on whether they are citizens
or not is wrong and fundamentally opposed to what the declaration of independence
very specifically says… ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL… and endowed by their
creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness…and we must grant every single person these rights regardless
if they are a citizen or not… they pass the basic test of our founding fathers
and that is being a human being and by being a human being, they are granted
the inalienable right to, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”…

Kropotkin

Peter_Kropotkin · May 14, 2017, 3:48pm

so bought I this book in Ojai, “The rise of scientific philosophy”
I was reading the first couple of chapters and notice something interesting…
the author, Hans Reichenbach, claimed that philosophy had already
created language that made philosophy, scientific… he then brought
up Kant… using Kant’s Analytic-synthetic as the basis of this, making philosophy
as scientific…in Wiki, this is what I found…

"the analytic-synthetic distinction… is an semantic distinction, used primarily in
philosophy to distinguish propositions (in particular, statements, that are affirmative
subject-predicate judgements)into two types: analytic propositions and synthetic
propositions. Analytic propositions are true by virtue of their meaning, while synthetic
propositions are true by how their meaning relates to the world…However philosophers
have used the terms in very different ways. Furthermore, philosophers have debated
whether there is a legitimate distinction…

UMMMMMM, a semantic distinction…in other words, not based in reality but in thought…
just like Descartes… how do we define this sentence or these words…not how do
understand our place in the universe or how do we face death or what is the meaning or
purpose of life…it is just another attempt to find certainty in the universe using words
and not actions or the reality of the universe…Kant is another philosopher who is great
because he, like Descartes, wasn’t facing our reality of life and death and meaning, but
in semantics, words and ideas that exist only in our head, in our thoughts…
just like Plato and other “Great” philosophers… he achieved greatness, not in
helping us to become better people or curing our souls or finding new ways to cope
with the realities of life…no, he achieved greatness with words, discussing how
certain concepts are mental concepts and have nothing to do with our reality…
birth and death and all that which exists in between… just mere words talking about
mere words and describing more words, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing…

no wonder philosophy has lost touch with the questions of the average person…
it is about words and concepts that have nothing to do with our lives…

return philosophy to the people and what their concerns are and you will return
philosophy to something that matters…

Kropotkin

Peter_Kropotkin · May 14, 2017, 5:40pm

in thinking about values… as philosophy is about values and science is about
facts…so what are the values of America? America at one time stood for something…
Raygun’s America as a “shining city on the hill”…we, at one time felt, true or not, that
we were morally superior to everyone else… and that is no longer the case… we don’t stand
for anything any more…Trumps America is saying we can no longer afford to feed the poor
and homeless and old…so what is the point then? if we make the value of America being
about having the money to feed people and not in the morality of feeding the poor, then we
stand for nothing…if our value is about feeding the poor, then it doesn’t matter how much
money we have, we feed the poor…our values are defined by our actions…
if we are moved to protect our wealth by lowering taxes, we are making a moral judgement…
if you say, we cannot afford to feed the poor and shelter them, you are making a moral
judgement…what are your values when you make such a statement? We cannot afford to
feed the poor…that is a moral statement…

so what do we as American’s stand for? what values exemplify what America stands for?
what values did you vote for? did you vote to “Make America great again”!!!
then how does allowing the poor and old to starve to death, how does
that “make America great again”? what values are exhibited in “Making America
great again”? what values are you protecting or promoting when you make your priority
limiting how much taxes you pay instead of thinking about how we feed the poor? or
shelter the homeless or educate our children? what are our moral values there?
every action has a moral value, a moral judgment…
what you promote as an action is a moral judgment…
so what moral judgments are you in favor of?

Kropotkin

Peter_Kropotkin · May 14, 2017, 6:36pm

if I am sick, I go to the doctor… he/she will run through the list to see
what is the problem… are you feverish? do you have the runs? do you have
chills or feel hot? do you have any pains or aches? by working through the list,
which is a method, you can begin to understand what is the illness …
and by finding out what is the illness, you can begin to understand the cure…
I have a fever and pain and aches and am very tired… I have a cold or a fever or
perhaps a virus… the doctor can then look to possible cures based on the symptoms…
you don’t cure a cold by beginning radiation treatments… that cure works on cancer
and other similar illnesses…not on the common cold and understanding the general
illnesses and their possible cures are part and parcel of how doctors cure us…

so I have an illness and I go to the doctor…
but what about all of us having a illness?
we have a national illness and how do we find a cure?
What? a national illness? like bird swine flu or typhoid epidemic?
Yes, but not an illness like a physical illness, an illness where we are sick
but not physically sick… we are sick because we have somehow lost our core values…
there is a malaise out there, a fog like malaise that has infected America and we
have lost our values that made us Americans… We believe that giving millionaire’s
and billionaire’s huge tax cuts is somehow more important then feeding the poor and
giving shelter to those without shelters…it is a mental illness because it is
so delusional as to being beyond the pale… it is mental illness that believing that
starving people and making people homeless will “make America great again”…

the path to “making America great again” is the path to putting people first and
not tax cuts and not concern with how much money I make this year and how much can
I save in taxes from the government… that is not the path to greatness…and only a
small mind could even attempt to justify “making America great again” by depriving
millions of people of basic necessities…“making America great again” is about every single
American having values that necessitates us to make feeding the poor as having a higher
national priority instead of tax cuts for the wealthy…one of the higher values is
having empathy for those who are less fortunate then us…look at those we have
put on the highest pedestal and they are the saints and religious types… we have
understood them as being the highest type or value of a person and without exception
they, the saints and religious types, have made empathy for our fellow human being
as a priority… From Jesus to St. Francis to MLK and Gandhi…

take Saint Frances for example… once a disciple came upon Saint Francis
without clothes in cold, snowy weather… the disciple couldn’t believe that
Saint Francis would shed his clothes in such terrible weather… asking the saint
as to why, why would he go naked in such weather… the Saint replied…
millions of my fellow humans go without proper clothes in such terrible weather and there
is nothing I can do to clothe them, so I go without, in sympathy with those
who have no clothes…we are so impressed with those who have created such values,
that we make a pilgrimages to where they lived and we see their homes and visit their
churches and see how they lived and how they died… but we don’t attempt to be like them…
we don’t attempt to make ourselves great by emulating those who are great and they are
great because they have put the human race, their fellow man, before their own needs…
they have shown empathy for their fellow man and attempt to better the lot of those who
need it most…before “we make America great again” perhaps we should try to make ourselves
great by holding to values that put our fellow human beings first, not by “making America great”
but by making human beings great…one might argue that we can’t all do that…
but why not? why can’t we all begin the task of making ourselves great by following the
path of those who we have deemed to be great in making our fellow human being our priority
and not our selfish needs and desires…as a doctor, my cure for my fellow man is this…
cure your own self by becoming aware and attuned to the needs and wants of your fellow man…
the path to curing America is to cure each and every single one of us, of greed and desire and
“I want this” and “I must have this” the path to American greatness lies in finding our own
greatness and that is in helping our fellow human beings as our primary objective…
you want to “Make America great again”… begin by making yourself great…

Kropotkin

Peter_Kropotkin · May 15, 2017, 4:50pm

if philosophy is about values, then what values are worth pursuing?

we have “American” values such as has been proclaimed in this saying:
Truth, Justice and the American way"…not too long ago, I don’t remember
which of 45’s henchman said this, but one of them said that, “in order to be safe,
we have to forgo our values”. My question is this, if we forgo our “American” values,
then what exactly are we protecting? If I forgo my freedom in order to be safe,
then what exactly is the point of being safe? This returns us to the age old battle
between those who demand safety over freedom and those who want freedom over
safety…my thinking is simple, if I am not free, what is the point of being safe?

So what values are worth living for and what values are worth dying for?

Is life a “value”, a value above all other values? For me, life itself is not
the supreme value… that there are cases when life is not worth living.
one of the things that happens when you get old is you think about these things…
Again for me, what if I lose the rest of my hearing and that is a distinct possibility…
I had small amount of hearing in my left ear and one day, it just disappeared, again
granted it was not a large amount of hearing, but it was just gone and who is to say that
won’t happen in my other ear… So is being deaf, totally deaf, enough of a deal breaker
to suggest that life is not worth living…no, not in my mind… but is going blind along
with being deaf enough to warrant a decision to end my life…it becomes a much
closer decision now… more like a 50-50 decision… is paralysis enough to create
a decision? Yes, to my mind…loss of physical control such as paralysis is enough to
force a decision one way or another, yes…is loss of mental facilities enough?
yes, very much so…becoming senile is reason enough to want to make the decision
that life is not worth living…for me, it is not enough to physically enjoy life,
one must also mentally enjoy it and without my mental facilities, I wish to end this
existence…

so let us continue on… would loss of physical freedom such as jail be enough to
encourage a decision to end my existence? No, because there is always a chance
to be freed…

so we have talked about personal decisions that might be decided upon
our mental and physical states… but what values are worth living for?

I believe freedom is the highest value we have and losing our freedom
for security is a major loss… but, we can regain our freedom…
so again the possibility exists that we might become free again…
so here HOPE is a value that allows one to continue existence because
HOPE gives one a belief that tomorrow will be a better day…

What if we remove HOPE from people’s lives?
will life be worth living for? No… hope is a value that
gives life some meaning… without hope, what is the point of going on?

so what about truth? is the truth worth living for, worth dying for?
Depends on what truth we are speaking about…
As Pontius Pilate correctly noted, What is the truth?
My truth or truths, are not your truth or truths…
you may believe that security is more important then freedom
and only security is worth living for, not freedom…

My values and your values are not the same and we may disagree about
what is the worth of any given value such as, the value of hope…
How do we reconcile two people having different values?
How do we reach consensus between two people having different values?

and in that, we reach the modern American problem…
how do we reach consensus between competing, different values?
there are those who believe that there can be no finding middle ground…
in other words, there are absolute truths that cannot find compromise
because they are absolute and thus unchanging, past, present and future…
they are values that cannot be about finding middle ground because
those values are absolute and unchanging…
God is a value that is absolute and unchanging and there can be no compromise
or finding a middle ground…it is the believer who has certainty that
cannot brook compromise or the pursuit of a middle ground…to find middle
ground is to break with god’s laws…which are absolute and unchanging…

so what begins as an abstract discussion about values becomes what it is, which
is a discussion about who we are as Americans and what values should we hold dear…

Truth… Justice… and the American way of life…
Truth which has been a victim of the 45 administration because of its
constant lies… Justice which is another victim of the 45 administration
because Justice is bought and sold by the wealthy… pay to play and that
includes Justice…and the American way of life is under attack because
the American institutions are under attack as the former head of the
NSA, James Clapper said yesterday on TV… and when the institutions of
any society are under attack, the society itself is under attack… for the
institutions of a society represent the values of that society…if we put time,
money, effort and energy into an institution, which is a system, that means
we value that institution…if we reduce the time, money, effort and energy into
a institution, we devalue that institution…

it is my belief that one of the key values of any society, any civilization is
its pursuit of justice for ALL of its citizens…the smaller number of citizens
that are allowed justice, the more decayed the society is… Rome fell in part,
because the number of citizens given justice became smaller and smaller,
thus Roman citizens lost faith in getting justice in the Roman society and
when people lose faith in getting justice in a society, they disengage
in that society… as we see today in our modern society… people are disengaging
because they feel they cannot get justice in our modern society…For example,
who can get justice when lawyers cost so much money… and lawyers are indispensable
in any effort to get justice… the average cost of paying for a partner in a law
firm is 600 dollars an hour… who can afford that? Not the average person…
getting justice is a matter of being able to afford it and the average person cannot
afford the cost of getting justice and so they lose faith in the judicial system and
disengage…

why put money, time, effort and energy into a system that one has lost faith in?
so this question of values has lead us here…

so what values drive you? and more importantly, why?

Kropotkin

Peter_Kropotkin · May 15, 2017, 5:29pm

As I am reading of and about such thinkers such as Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza,
Locke and Hume among others, I am forced to confront my thoughts about this
question which haunted those thinkers, Knowledge…what it is and how do we
have certainty about our knowledge…how do we know the real world?
and how certain are we about it? there is certainly a school of thought
that suggest we cannot have any knowledge about the real world… we
cannot be certain about our knowledge of the world…

yet, we do know the world… I can see tree’s and plants and grass
and dogs and cats and sky and sun and stars and light and table and
my computer…the question really becomes this, what does it mean?

for example, my daughter has two cats… I have the scars on my arm
to prove it…the question becomes what does it mean, I see the cats…
I must do something with that knowledge… I must interpret it…
and it is in that interpretation I put a human spin on the information of the
universe…I see the cats and I interpret it in terms of my humanness… I
understand it with knowledge of being human… I give all information,
all knowledge, a human understanding, I interpret it in human terms because
that is how I think… in terms of being human and what it means to be human…
there is no knowledge that isn’t thought of in terms of human understanding…
even such “objective” thinking about the universe as Mathematical thinking…
I see one cat plus one cat equal two cats…that is true because we think that way…
our knowledge of the universe is bias because we see all knowledge in terms of being
human and having human categories… such as Aristotle’s and Kant’s categories…
they are a human inventions… time, space, weight, height, are human categories…
given a human slant…from a human perspective…our knowledge of the universe
is gleaned from a human standpoint, a human understanding, from human categories…
aliens from outer space will understand such things as math, science, history, philosophy
from their standpoint, their perspective, from their categories…we create
our own reality…now it this innate??? no, I don’t believe so… I believe
as we go about our lives, we gain an understanding of the universe from our experience…
thus, as we humans travel through time, from Egypt to Greece to Rome to the medieval
experience and on toward today, we gain experience which we pass down as idea’s and
experience and culture and schooling and within institutions… this experience gathering
lead each generation to a closer and closer understanding of the values we need to
gather to lead our lives…progress as we understand it, gaining knowledge is right,
but within limits, the actual progress is in gaining an understanding of the values
we have and need to go about our lives… it is not in the understanding that
sun is 93 million miles from earth, an understanding the Greeks, for example, didn’t have,
but what we do with that understanding, which is what values are about…what does
it mean to know that the sun is 93 million miles from earth…what value do we gain from
that knowledge? that is the point of “progress”… in gaining understanding about the values
we live with…not in the facts we gain…because we have to interpret those facts to
mean anything and we interpret those facts in terms of values, human values…

Kropotkin