If you think that your philosophy is sufficient, then you will hang on to it no matter what I say.
From my experience, it does not adequately describe human interactions.
Take it or leave it. I don’t really need to do or demonstrate anything. I’m not preaching here.
I suspect you’re using “about” in two different senses which then get conflated. My thoughts here are about me (the motivation to have the thoughts is from me), but are not about me (the thoughts themselves have to do with something that is not me).
My impression of the world has to do with how I’m put together, but it also has to do with how the world is put together.
I just wanted to illustrate a bad happening X happened to me and then show you have no mechanism to be affected by it until you gain knowledge of it and at that point it’s the knowledge you wouldn’t like.
I thought the cat example was interesting because cats aren’t as smart as dogs and generally aren’t pack animals. From my philosophy, the helpful cat was assisting the other cat because that was the best scenario for it. It’s like if we were walking down the street and someone attacked me, you’d have to help me fight or else possibly lose a friend (assuming you couldn’t be friends with the attacker), so you’d have to protect your interests (ie me).
Yes I think you understand. We are a center of awareness within the universe that is receiving external inputs. I don’t want to lose my hand because that would hurt me; I don’t want to lose you because that would affect me; I don’t want to see animals suffer because that would affect me. It’s all the same: some information comes in and the center of awareness judges it good or bad. It’s the relation between the internal and external that results in a declaration of good or bad.
Eyes need light in order to see colors and I need something to think about in order to think, so it’s more than just me, but the relationship between me and the external.
I have no doubt that you’re feeling empathy, but I’m trying to say that empathy is no different than any other sense faculty. The attempt to separate empathy as something different than merely that is itself a pedestalization of empathy.
I don’t see how it’s off topic.
Ok fine. I give up.
Acceptance is a virtue now? So I should accept foul smells and all manner of offense with open arms lest I reject something and get labeled “judgmental”? No, I reject that.
I don’t see how we can discuss the topic without examples of the topic.
Well, I’ll take a cue from your playbook and simply say I disagree and cite my experience as evidence. Hey that was easy 
I’m invincible now because who can refute my experience. 
No, that’s you, not me. To wit:
That’s obviously false as evidenced by your continued replying on the matter. Had you really held that notion, you would have stated so days ago: “Here’s my 2 cents. Take it or leave it.” But you didn’t. You tried every argument you could conceive and finally, after being totally exhausted, you paint the picture as if you never really cared.
I have all of academia and some of the greatest minds on philosophy on the side of my argument and your retort is simply “well, it doesn’t match my experience” which = “nothing nor no one will ever convince me!” That’s dogmatism.
What a powerful thing you’ve stumbled onto. Heck, I don’t need a brain at all, but can simply say “that doesn’t match my experience, so I win!”
There is no god.
That doesn’t match my experience, so you’re wrong.
There is no free will.
That doesn’t match my experience, so you’re wrong.
There is no objectivity.
That doesn’t match my experience, so you’re wrong.
Claim: X
I’m going to disagree with whatever you say in order to have an adversary who I can then defeat by simply saying their claim doesn’t match my experience. All hail me! I am the smartest person here by simply having the hardest head! 
me 
Brains are antiquated. Who needs brains when it’s the amount of bone in the head that matters. That is precisely why it’s impossible to argue with conservatives.
Sure, there’s a mechanism. I see the person in pain, I feel for them.
Some people do not have that mechanism.
Reptiles tend not to.
Plants can feel other plants (the extent to which a plant can feel), but the reason it reacts is the same reason it reacts to its own threats. The plant has no way of differentiating self from other, it just does what the chemicals tells it to. The fact that we think we are different from plants is a pedestalization of ourselves. We’re smarter, sure, but not more divine. The plant is a sensing creature just like insects and animals and we’re all dimensionless points looking out at the world. Being a point looking outward means we can only care about the point and what causes pain to that point.
They now know that trees will share water with other trees that are not doing well in times of drought. Even across species. Trees inform other trees of parasites and other kinds of threats. Dying trees will send their nutrients to other trees, again also across species. I haven’t argued I am divine. I don’t put us on a pedastal. I am trying to describe what I think is. Maybe I am wrong. But every time you add in hallucinations - like ‘divine’ - or other words that imply I have emotional goals, you are ad homming implicitly.
And why am I capable of pedastalizing X, if I am not capable of empathy?
IOW why bother labeling something negatively, this would also just be chemicals telling me what to do.
Now you may say, oh, sure pedastalizing is just you doing what chemicals tell you to do. But then there is no need to give it some term with an implicit lowering.
There is only energy and matter. (As far as we know.)
And those two ‘things’ form the infinite variety of the universe.
Within it we find patterns of caring, love, empathy, indifference, selfless action, selfish action, …
It’s possible to conceptualize existence at many levels of abstraction. But if you conceptualize at a lower level of abstraction, you lose useful information.
For example, if you conceptualize the universe as energy, then you can’t find a cat in a room. The cat blends into the background because it is merely energy ‘within’ energy.
I didn’t say you did, but now you’re reading things into things where there ain’t things. I didn’t mention the word “you” in my post at all and specifically chose to word “we” to avoid such development, which is becoming more and more predictable, as biggie pointed out here viewtopic.php?f=7&t=194298&start=50#p2710598
Just quit it and let’s forget it and move on. You’re not in everyone’s crosshairs. “You” is a general word meaning “people in general” and not necessarily you specifically.
Divine merely means “supernatural”, “above nature” or “superior to nature”. “I’m better than nature because I have divine attributes like love.” Clinging to concepts like love is patting ourselves on the back for being better than the simian and is a manifestation of arrogance.
I didn’t say you did, but now that you mention it, if you’re human, yes you do because all humans do it. We’re always trying to find a way to be one-up.
And she found a way to be superior to him by pointing our he’s trying to be superior to the atheists and christians. We’re always trying to be one-up and if you say you’re not, then that’s a manifestation of trying to be one-up (putting yourself on a pedestal). You’re putting yourself on a pedestal by proclaiming that you do not put mankind on a pedestal.
Alan said “Gurus are always putting each other down, so I can say I don’t put other gurus down. You see? That trumps all of them!”
All roads lead to arrogance. Regardless of the topic, we will always end the discussion with the realization of arrogance (or so it seems).
And you’re jumping to conclusions without clarifying what I meant by divine. You’re pedestalizing yourself by proclaiming my insight is a hallucination and my discussion about mankind is an ad hom because you think “we” = “you”, which is itself a hallucination and ad hom straight from Goebbels’ “accuse the other side of what you’re doing” playbook.
You (humans in general) do not need empathy to be arrogant. Psychopaths completely devoid of empathy are some of the most arrogant pricks around.
I guess because the chemicals tell me to. If you want to delude yourself into believing you have attributes that you do not have, then that’s awesome, but if you post it on here, I’m liable to attack it for the same reason I spit out food that doesn’t taste good. This is a philosophy board where we’re supposed to be discerning some truths instead of agreeing to disagree.
Fine. I concede. Living in fantasy land has no negative association. People are free to believe they are gods all they want. They can even try to fly and I encourage all who hold such beliefs to stand on the highest ledge they can find and give it one hell of a shot! Think positively!
There is no objective good and bad, but there are subjective goods and bads relative to individual goals/aspirations/desires. I think it’s a subjectively good idea for society to guarantee as a right the freedom to pursue one’s desires/goals unless those desires conflict with someone else’s desires. To that end, if people didn’t run about thinking they are gods, we may be a collectively happier species.
Consider this AW bit concerning rascality:
[i]As there is honor among thieves – we’re all thieves, let’s face it – there is a doctrine in the Jewish religion that when God created Adam he put into him a spirit which is called the yetzer hara and that means ‘the wayward spirit’ or what I call ‘the element of irreducible rascality’ – and that is in us all, a little bit. It’s not the whole of us; it’s like just a pinch of salt in the stew – and you don’t want the whole stew to be salt but you have to have just a touch of rascality to be human.
And I find it difficult to get along with people who don’t know that they have it, people who come on that they’re all sincere, all good, all pure, bore me to death and scare me, as they’re unconscious of themselves and therefore they suddenly do terrible things without warning, either to themselves or to others. They make promises that they’re never going to fulfill because they want to talk right and so if I do business with someone who is not really aware that he’s a rascal – I know he is impossible to do business with – he’ll suddenly cheat me completely. But if I’m aware that he’s a bit of a shyster I feel comfortable and I let him know that I am too.
Then we’re human, then we are letting our hair down, then we can say, “Look, let’s work this out, and this is what I want and I know what you want.” And if we can get that clear we can work out a reasonable agreement, we can compromise, we have a little play of give-and-take. But if you don’t have that, you’re absolutely snarled.[/i]
So when we admit we’re selfish pricks, then we can truly get down to business with each other’s interests in mind in a true spirit of honesty and fair play rather than starting with the presumption that we’re righteous.
This hearkens back to Jesus’ remarks concerning the taking of the high-room:
8 When thou art bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room; lest a more honourable man than thou be bidden of him;
9 And he that bade thee and him come and say to thee, Give this man place; and thou begin with shame to take the lowest room.
10 But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room; that when he that bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher: then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee.
11 For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.
So we admit we’re rascals and windup being exalted, but if we start out as righteous, we’re revealed as rascals.
Admitting you cannot love is more productive in a relationship than deluding yourself into thinking you can love because you’ll have more insight and a better understanding as to why you must be attentive to someone else’s needs for the benefit of your own. That’s the philosophy I’m putting forth and holding.
I’m not sure about that because red light is 480Thz and yellow light is 540Thz and we can surely tell the difference between the two frequencies of energy. It is true that we must have a contrast, but energy evidently can be contrasted to itself via frequency.
Frequencies higher than 10^19 are gamma rays, which go up to 10^24 I think, but if we put E=hf=mc^2 and rearrange for f, then f = mc^2/h. If we substitute the mass of quarks, neutrinos, whatnot, then we get frequencies higher than gamma rays indicating that particles could be gamma rays with even more energy added. The cat is just a collection of localized densities of energy of varying frequencies against a backdrop of other frequencies (or lack thereof).
It’s still just energy until you call it a cat.
It’s still just energy even if I call it a cat.
It’s still a cat even if you call it energy. And calling it a cat let’s us know a lot more about what it does and is capable of.
It’s not jumping, it’s energy.
Energy doesn’t care about its young.
Become problematic when we focus on the catness of that batch of energy.
You could respond to me and Phyllo by simply typing
ENERGY
But you don’t, you get specific and seem to think those specifics matter.
I think you missed the part about varying frequencies of energy. Yes, everything is energy, but the frequencies are different. On one of those science youtube videos that I like to watch, they unwound movie film from one end of the country to the other (they pretended) in order to represent the electromagnetic spectrum, then they cut 1 inch from the middle which represented the amount of the spectrum that we can see. So, 1 inch divided by the distance across the US is the % of the spectrum that we can see (visible light). It’s an understatement to say there are a LOT of frequencies of energy. From 1 hz all the way to 10^24 hz and then all the particles which have even more energy. Who knows how far it goes.
An atom is 100,000 times bigger than the nucleus, so it’s practically all empty space. And they’ve demonstrated the double slit experiment with buckyballs (60 carbon atoms I think), so even molecules aren’t tangible things, but waves. It’s all energy. There is nothing but energy.
]Sure, but none of that goes against what I said or is news to me. I am certainly not arguing that cats are not energy.
Yes, I said that it is energy.
But it’s hardly ever effective to think of it as energy.
Did you remember to get the energy for the energy, honey?
Honey, you crashed the car with the baby in it, and you were drunk.
It’s just energy, sweetie.
And where would you like us to deliver the package?
Send it to energy.
I don’t think a grizzly bear is the right pet for the kids, I thought you were getting a puppy.
They’re both energy.
Smurf, you smurfed the smurf with the smurf in it. 
I did not. I wore a condom.
I trust it had enough energy to resist the energy of the energy from all that energy 
Hey this David Butler guy is awesome. Check out the well-deserved praise he gets in the comments if you don’t believe me.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG_YtASz7gY[/youtube]