What is Dasein?

Why presume that it would take trying them all.

Because as I have said elsewhere and perhaps not just me, there are two things going on, an emotional hole and the philosophical conundrum.

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Putting ‘feeling better’ in citation marks is bizzarre. People actually feel better.

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You have been presenting your hole as something so scary to objectivists they must oppose you and deny the validity of what you are saying and hide the truth from what you are saying. And yet now it is described as something you watch films and listen to music to distract yourself from. We thought you were really deeply upset 1) because you called it a hole 2) because of how powerful the effect you attribute to this hole having on objectivists when they get somewhere near it.

But here is turns out to be on a part with everyday stress such as that at the average job, given the list of self-medication techniques you use. And yes, I understand now why you feel little motivation to find a way out of your hole and I now see no reason to point out that there are methods to help you out of the hole. You can,however, back off from the - my ideas threaten you so much, I can face the discomfort of the truth and you cannot posturing. That’s just silly, now that you’ve revealed what can soothe your dark night of the soul, even if it is only temporary.

Or just finding a way not to change while accusing his opponents of being afraid. It is a pretty standard ad hom. You run from the truth of my arguments, you cannot face them - I mean the know thyself crowd uses this approach regularly. But when suggestions come at him to come out of his hole, then it is not so bad. Convenient answers at different points in time that do not reconcile. Who knows? I have noticed oddities and probed them and at times I am sure it is something like what you say, at times something else. I really don’t know. A form of trolling. An angry stance covered by a more ‘I just don’t know what to do’ stance. I don’t know how much self-knowledge there is, how much intent to piss off or hit back on people he thinks are making the world worse. Or…

In the end I just see the inconsistancies and get the sense something other that what he is presenting is going on.

Again, I take it all back. I thought your hole was a deep existential and painful crisis. I do hold you responsible to a great degree for that impression, even here above your use of language makes it sound extremely painful. But given how easy it is to distract yourself from it and your lack of interest and need for any way out of the emotional hole, I have a better sense of what you are facing on a day to day level. I took your rhetorical attack on objectivists too seriously. You do think they are deluded but you are not remotely as troubled yourself as it seemed. It was just a good way to attack those you see as deluded.

OK, now I know you do not identify as Buddhist. You kept mentioning Buddhist Noble Truths and presenting ideas that are experienced only by advanced meditators as if you knew them to be the case, again within the Buddhist tradition. You took umbrage, elsewhere, to criticisms of the Buddhist community and masters and the judgments and behaviors I find there. You were sure it would not hold for those masters in South Asian Buddhism, I believe it was. My experience is that those masters also are very critical of public judgments and speaking about meditative states one has not yet experienced and even then very carefully. But I see now you have just taken what you like and are not interested in why masters who actually have attained those states over decades - and in their belief system, lifetimes - universally warn people off some of the behaviors you exhibit, and because they consider it to slow down their development as meditators thus increasing their suffering. IOW evil, in their non-Western sense of the term. You know better than them despite your novice status what can be tossed to the side. Which if fine with me, I do not like that tradition anyway.

I was not referring to public statements on Islam. I was talking about daily practices that lead to deeper meditation and the specific states that Buddhist practices are aiming at. And then what obstacles one can create to accomplishing things there. But you are in the mall of Buddhism, shopping for what you like, like many a Westerner.

What the heck are you on about? My views on Islam are extremely negative.

What an ugly thing to say. Furher it is a stupid thing to say. My relatives are vastly more likely to die from corporate conscoius negligence, wars and their effects carried out for corporate profit,than through terorrism and so are yours, but we’ll never see you writing threads critical of the philosophies of life and value inherent in corporate culture will we?

And just to be trebly clear. Those methods engage the emotional suffering related to any hole. They do not solve the conundrum and they will not elimate all suffering, but they reduce it, often to a remarkable degree. And as said repeatedly and repeatedly ignored by you, you can then continue to seek an answer to the conundrum while suffering less. But now I understand that your suffering is not so great, given your self-help methods, and, for your information, that level of suffering is likely NOT something people are terrified of, or those books would not be so popular, nor would more serious players be looking for methods that help people deal with really heavy stuff and true existential crises.

It would be better perhaps not to focus on one particular person but generalize a discussion. toward shared problems that need not descend into am absolute abyss for I do not think that even exists.

The reduction toward such descent is the backbone of existential reduction and this befits all mankind.

The reduction traps any one into nihilism, since phenomena are out pointiillystically into.an expanding canvas, where the edges seem to blend into one another
But it’s an illusion and the illusion. Is which we are all trapped in. In particular illusions into more illusions with the optics becoming more fabulous.

So if Lambigious’ problem with reduction is worthy of closer examination into it , he is not doing his own reduction , unless he wants to become self destructive, and listening to him over the years. that is not my impression of him, but that he is not attuned to , literally the increasing impressionist interpretation. Who he is, probably not worth his while to transcend, because he may not view transcendental reality the way to so it.(phiilosophically) in fact I do not believe for a second that he is a tranacendentalist.

This is also my preference, to connect the points by a visual correspondence between equally spreading and seemingly disembodied visual clues which have taken up residence in usual roles without actually believing them.

Its like six characters searching for an author, while remaining in an accustomed characterization.

With dozens and dozens that have already come down the pike over the years, why would I suppose I’ll actually bump into the one most likely to work on me?

Besides, I can always slump down into one of my own distractions in order to feel “comfortably numb”.

Though, sure, if I come upon a regimen that actually appears to address the hole I have come to think myself into, my interest would be considerably more piqued.

My hole is a numbingly complex intertwining of circumstances, psychology and philosophy. But what are the odds that I could successfully convey that to others who have no substantive understanding whatsoever of how the existential variables in my own life came to predispose me to this “sense of reality”.

Better [for me] if they aim to persuade me to try something that has actually worked for them. But only in the sense that, when they are confronted with conflicting goods [re their interactions with other], they are not consumed themselves by the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein here.

I actually feel better immersed in one of my distractions as well. But, if others are down in the hole that I am in, that will only last until the next newscast. Or until the next spasm in their aging body reminds them that oblivion really may well be just right around the fucking corner.

What I do is to note that when I was an objectivist myself, I was able to embody the comfort and the consolation of imagining that the real me was in touch with a self-righteous truth on this side of the grave and with immortality and salvation on the other side of it.

That [here and now] is beyond my reach.

But would appear [here and now] to still be within their reach. Depending of course on the particular objectivist frame of mind that they subscribe to.

Indeed, here we are again: at the fucking epicenter of dasein.

How on earth would I go about making you understand my frame of mind? Hell, even if you knew me for years, there would still be any number of crucial gaps between my “I” and yours. The vast, vast number of possible permutations built into the evolution of our own particular sequence of existential variables is for all practical purposes incalcuable.

And then we would still have to confront what I construe to be the reality of conflicting goods out in a world where the bottom line always revolves around who has the political power to enforce one or another actual set of rules.

Why on earth would I back off? Only in reminding others how they may well be susceptible to my own frame of mind someday am I likely to provoke them into making an attempt to demonstrate why they are not now.

But only to the extent that they are willing to broach their own sense of self [in the is/ought world] by noting their own equivalent of this:

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

In other words, taking us through the existential intertwining of a sequence of actual experiences and a sequence of actual ideas they came across in the course of actually living their life.

There is only one self, one “true self”, one “real self” … it’s the self that exists now, in the present moment.

Again, there is that enormous existential gap between what I think I am trying to convey to you here about my frame of mind and what you think that I think I mean instead.

So, you hold me responsible for what…pointing this out?

I think the sort of hole that you are talking about here revolves far more around particular sets of circumstances. One is in constant excruciating pain. One is being battered from all directions. One’s life is in the toilet. One’s options are few.

And then if, on top of all that, you feel human existence is essentially meaningless and absurd, it can sure as shit become all that more unbearable.

I have absolutely no illusions that any day now one or another rendition of the “big one” will descend down upon me and I will be in that hole you are now imagining of me in your head.

But I don’t think that they are necessarily deluded. After all, how on earth would I go about demonstrating to others that they are? And over and over and over again I point out that my own narrative here is no less an existential contraption.

I think basically you confuse my provocative polemicist persona here with what you are actually able to imagine is instead the real [or realer] me.

Which just reflects how far removed we actually are from grasping the manner in which I have come to think about “I” in the world of value judgments. Or in discussions that revolve around “the meaning of life”.

But then I have come to expect that in exchanges like this.

It truly deflates me when you allow your contributions here to be reduced down to this sort of thing.

Yes, here and now, there is only one particular “I” embodied in each and every one of us in any one particular context confronted with any one particular set of options.

But why in the same context do so many different people go in so many different directions:

Morally.
Politically.
Aesthetically.

Is the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein above an important component to be considered here?

And, if not, how, in your own conflicted interactions with others, is it basically nowhere to be seen?

Iambiguous, we’re going to have a little talk here.

You see, there are people who want to be in charge and send people to hell forever. The only people they can round up are people like you, by consent, by spiritual mandate. Why would you do that to yourself?

I’m not trying to be mean here…

You skipped over this post though…

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You’ve lived long enough… what do you think really happens to someone who repeatedly denies their innate morality repeatedly in the universe…

It’s called consent iambiguous!

Since many of them have positive effects in most participants, the odds are very high their would be a reduction in suffering after trying just a few. But, again, I see why you have little motivation in part because the hole is not very deep.

Right and duly noted. But this places the way you contextualize you and the objectivists in a light that is not flattering. You have your distractions. You are fine being comfortably numb. The hole you are in does not have a particularly serious emotional depth. So to judge the objectivists as running away, unable to face the hole, is grounded on nothing.

Sigh. Read it again. Back off from the way you couch the issue, not the issue of conflicting goods. I have said this time and again.

You couch the issue as objectivists cannot face what you have managed to face. They cannot deal with the discomfort. Now you reveal

as justification for not bothering with any method that might alleviate your suffering

that TV and music work. You have your self-help method.

That these work reveals that the suffering is very mild. Those things do not work for depression, PTSD, existential crises, etc.

So your positioning yourself as having faced something so tough objectivists in general cannot face it

is something you should back off from because it is false.

When someone talks about you, you raise dasein issues

How could you possibly know me? and we get a short lecture in the effects of dasein.

But you know why objectivists do not join you in your hole and can know, somehow, all of their minds.

Of course I am reacting to the kind of person you present yourself as here.

Of course when you present yourself or a polemic self as bravely facing a hole
and present objectivists as running from it
and then say that you can distract yourself from this hole via media

I will respond to what I have to work with.

You are acting in the world, to whatever degree it is polemics.

In these acts you have judged others who do not agree with you.

I found these judgments wanting going by what you put forward about yourself and the objectivists.

Iambiguous:

If you are going to judge and insult people, you may find that someone will respond by pointing out the contradictions inherent in that.

It is clear now, why you do not need any new methods, since everyday methods that pretty much everyone uses to destress and distract themselves from daily life problems (and not crises) are working.

Your point about refusing help on the emotional side, now seems completely justified. It would be silly to suggest any other methods since your hole is not that deep emotionally.

Argument won on your side on that issue.

On the other hand, it puts into question the way you judge others, not just becuase of your own sense of how tough this is to do (re:dasien) but because your discomfort in the hole is not much.

When this is pointed out…

No, I am noting how you justify your judgements of other people and finding your justifications weak.

If you have lied in the name of polemics about your level of suffering or something else, that is your problem.

I can only work with the justifications you present me with and they are weak.

You seem to think this is only about information. But once you act in the world interpersonally, it doesn’t matter if what I am dealing with is polemics or something else. If it’s a fucked up polemical insult, then I may notice this and point it out.

If your conclusions seem binary, I may notice this and point it out.

I am now going to use an extreme example to show how silly your response was here. I do not think you are evil.

I am sure Hitler was using polemics a lot. If he implicitly compared himself to Jews, he has to accept that how he presents himself and the Jews will be looked at.

He can’t say, you are confusing my polemicized self with the real Adolf.

No Adolf, I am working with what you are trying to get away with.

I don’t need any help, I am fine.
The hole I am in is so fucking dark and uncomfortable no objectivist can face it, though I can with a little tv and music to distract me.
LOL

I did also in the post I linked to explain very quickly how I did in a concrete situation deal with conflicting goods. I think in that situation I made a small change for what I prefer and what someone else preferred. I have no miracle cure for the end of conflicting goods. I know objectivists who do not think there will ever be a cure. I see no reason to remove myself from acting in the world, nor will I, like you recently claimed about yourself, decide to remove myself from acting in the world or making political statements etc, until such time as someone demonstrates objective morality. That would imply, to me, that it would be bad to do things, in case it turns out they are objectively wrong. My inaction could turn out to be objectively wrong. I might as well, and in fact I want to make things move in the direction I prefer which includes may care for many types of lifeform.

I believe you see three possible categories to change things in the world

Might makes right
Right makes might (not quite sure what this one means)
Compromise, etc.

My reaction to this is that 1) they are not mutually exclusive 2) they likely are value laden choices. If one thinks compromise is the way to go this is likely based on values. I think you have presented it as the approach if one realizes that we do not have access to objective values. But once we do not know what objective values are, we still have all options for attaining on the table. If using these, given the epistemological conundrum seems wrong, well then you have access to objective morals. If it seems impractical, I think this is either 1) a cover for a moral judgment or 2) not paying attention to history or oneself. If someone comes into my house and tries to rape one of us, I will not compromise. Yes, an extreme example. Figuring out when using power over might be practical is not going to be simple. It would be currently beyond any scientific proof, as a rule that is.

I do the best I can weighing the various options and consider any option on the table, in general.

The example above includes a situation where it is very hard to not compromise neutrally. IOW violence or threat of violence is likely necessary. In a lot of more mundane situations I may not compromise, even though the stakes are smaller. Often in these situations, I can refuse to participate. Or refuse to approve. IOW not compromising need not be violent. As, say, Martin Luther King often demonstrated. Though he would also compromise and certainly believed in objective morals. My point being that in practical terms one can use non-compromise based methods without being violent or oppressive. Though I am not ruling out those options, they are generally not necessary, at this point in my history, given where I am.

Like other social mammals I live and struggle without objective morals, trying to make things work for me and others I care about, including abstract care, which would be less common in, say, wolves or even elephants. Though the latter have been known to rescue members of other species, even.

I think I get the main idea of the post the above is from and you may be right. I think I have reached an endpoint, at least for now, related to the line I was following which did focus on Iamb. For me it is often important to ground things in the interpersonal and the personal. If someone is putting forward a set of beliefs AND interacting with other people - which is always the case here - then I get curious how those two things fit with each other. If part of those beliefs are about that person and other people then I may want to connect the paradigm to what the person says about themselves and other people. If contradictions seem to be present yet are completely denied, I will want to probe until I get a sense of what is going on. Lived philosophy, not just ideas on paper. Just as Iamb wants concrete solutions to conflicing goods, I’ve wanted to understand how having his beliefs fits with his concrete behavior and judgments. It does become very to the man, ad hom, and I do realize this may also be problematic. But on one issue at least I found a fairly final point of understanding. His hole is not that distressful. That makes a lot much more clear to me. I see other things that seem like contradictions. I see often things being couched as if it is clear that there are two or three options, when I see more. But truly it is rare to get any clarity when it comes to being-in-the-world type issues.

And truly all that is directly tied to the topic of the thread, which is Dasein.

And people are often confused about what they believe, not just how they arrived at their beliefs. Further, they are often confused about what it would mean, in terms of attitudes and behavior, if they actually believed what they think they do or should believe.

That’s an area that interest me.

But as said, I am going to move away from Iamb for a while, because finally something became clear and that small clarity must be celebrated and given some air.

Another reason is that , if an analogy can be seen between a personal ‘hole’ and something broader, is, that a Dasein effected solution has a tendency to self question -doubt similar to a person who questions whether the lightbulb in the refrigerator works.

To check , the door has to be opened, bit when it’s. closed it can’t be certAin if the light didn’t go out, so one can’t really be 100 % certain. It’s an attempt to match bio feedback with probability.