Something Instead of Nothing

Gib’s comment was not a retort. It was an honest expression of the confusion and frustration that your posting produces in people. Karpal Tunnel and I have said essentially the same thing.

It goes like this :
You post as if “your hole” is a big problem for you. People respond and try to “help” you with it. After dozens (or hundreds) of posts, you finally reveal that you easily deal with your problem. People feel that you have misrepresented your problem and that they have been jerked around.

Apparently you don’t see that or you don’t care.

I expect that Gib is not going to be the last poster who goes through this same process with you.

I’m not sure if that is true. You seem oddly comfortable with what you are doing. You don’t take anybody’s advice or change your position based on their arguments.

One would think that an “uncomfortable” person would shift around to try to get into a more comfortable position. That seems like an obvious and natural way to act.

Maybe you have “comfort and consolation” and maybe you don’t. I don’t know you (aside from what you have posted and that’s contradictory).

Similarly, you don’t know whether I have “comfort and consolation”.

I always find it weird when life is viewed in terms of winning and losing.

I sometimes wonder of all of us overlook something. That the deeper question, for there may be one lurking on the very edge of conscious awareness, overlooks the position that the mediating , rational nexus between the microcosmic feeling(sophistry) harbored by Imbigious and that held by philosophical discourse.

If The matter is looked objectively, then it becomes evident, at least to me, that Iambig’s position is shared by the larger philosophical background in which we all participate.

I think of looked at this way, the conclusion may not be avoided that his position is one that many modern men participate in, who try to get put from under the almost impossible center that has modern man been inscribed between the traditional and the post modern world.

Between policy, politics of tradition and ones of experience. It may be futile not to avoid reducing politics to experience , because we members of an internet sight do not really known each other, then merely from reading each other. I don’t know but it seems like we are all missong something that could be important and useful in more in-depth analysis.

It’s not that Iambig’s position has no truth in it. It does.

But it’s impossible to discuss it with him.

I get that , but maybe its because he is spoken to referentially and he speaking preferentially, where he is trying to express his preference for a largely determined conditionality, (intentionality) , whereas he probably thinks that he is spoken to as of his freedom to choose overrides those conditions.

Does he ? Can he? Is he able to generate the will to do so? These questions as of yet remain undetermined, and until then, no clear picture arises to be able to sort it out.

I don’t think that anyone is telling him that “freedom to choose” overrides conditions. They’re telling him that “choice” is not about “overriding conditions”. Even in a “determined world”, a person is making a choice.

Yes but free choices are more undetermined, by far, to the degree of determination. That is a very wide grey area.

And in an undetermined future, this greay area may widen or narrow, in accordance to a specified necessity.

How accurate do specs need to accommodate the degree of necessity, maybe even one molecular lengthy or even sub-atomic.

Sure, in the here and now, I would be very hard pressed to sustain his conditional requirement ’ to bring it down to earth’, especially in light of an example of far flung future civilizations. However in principle, this could be a contention.

In addition , all communication failing, bridge building may be the last way to communicate.

Okay. But when the question being discussed is this big aren’t we all going to reach the point where the exchange topples over into the profoundly problematic turbulence embedded in the gap between what we think we know and all that there is to know about the ontological parameters of All There Is?

The vicious circles – I think this and you think that and around and around we go – are basically built right into such exchanges.

Or so it seems to me.

It’s just that, even if true, philosopher types like us are still drawn to them. Fascinated by them.

A few though are able to convince themselves that they actually have come closer to grasping “the answer” than all the others.

This can console them. However faintly.

Well, given that I certainly do respect your own intelligence, I look forward to it.

But that just takes me back to pondering the extent to which I can ever be absolutely certain that anything I recommend was not just that which I was never able not to recommend.

Also, at the very least it would all need to be brought down to earth. To the best of your ability, you would need to describe gurlabada; and then attempt to explain its existential relationship to a world of fish in an existential relationship with the human species.

And then grapple with the part where you take a stab at determining [and then demonstrating] if your effort here was ever within your capacity to articulate and resolve autonomously of your own volition.

But [in my view] an answer to a question like this will take us back to the answers to questions like these:

1] why something instead of nothing?
2] why this something and not another something instead?

The hypothetical assumption is that, however these two questions are able to be answered, the aliens reside in a part of the universe where they do have the capacity think freely; while we on earth do our own thinking and feeling and behaving strictly in accordance with the laws of matter. The assumption here being that the human brain/mind is no less matter. Just a very, very unique kind of matter.

And it would seem that in a wholly determined universe anything deemed to be chaotic was only really being misunderstood. The quantum world is no less embedded mechanically in the laws of matter. We just haven’t figured out how yet. On the other hand, in a wholly determined universe, wouldn’t our attempts to figure things like this out also be no less mechanical.

For the aliens though, the laws of nature would allow them to grasp certain inherent continuities that are true objectively for all of them. In the either/or world. But what of the is/ought world? Even assuming their capacity to choose freely those behaviors deemed to be either right or wrong, how would the components of my own moral philosophy be factored into that?

If, on earth, we are in fact free to choose, that doesn’t make the part about dasein, conflicting good and political economy go away. Or so it seems to me.

Bingo. The age old conundrums/quandaries revolving around dualism. How are thinking and feeling connected to the material world? Through God? Through some qualitative leap in the evolution of matter that we are not yet privy to?

You can start by assuming instead that your partner is not obligated to agree with what you say in order to be deemed as making an effort to understand what you say. And then grappling with the extent to which both factors might come into play.

So, in “addressing” them, you are not suggesting that I agree with them?

If so [all the while assuming of course we do have some measure of autonomy in the exchange] note what you construe to be the most important point of yours here that I have not addressed.

Then together we can bring this point down to earth and examine it as it relates to actual human interactions. In either a wholly determined universe, or in one in which we are [up to a point[ able to freely choose what we think, feel, say and do.

How would human interaction in these two contexts be the same or different?

For all practical purposes, all I can really do here is to come back to this:

In regard to particular human behaviors unfolding in a particular existential context that most of us will be familiar with, what constitutes an “honest expression” relating to either 1] moral and political narratives or 2] human autonomy and free will.

Apparently, I’m not doing these exchanges in the way that they are supposed to be done. In the way that you and KT have been “helping” me to understand.

On the other hand, what else is there? We need a context in which the definitions and the meanings we give to words in these exchanges are fleshed out…illustrated…insofar as they have an actual impact on what we think, feel, say and do.

Also, as though there are not dozens and dozens of exhanges here at ILP in which conflicted folks don’t hurl at each other the same sort of accusation that you are hurling at me.

From my frame of mind, this is often just one more example of objectivism. I produce “confusion and frustration” in folks because I don’t come around to their way of thinking. Whereas with respect to the “the big questions” and/or the “is/ought world” I don’t expect there ever not to be confusion and frustration.

Of course you have no way of really knowing the extent to which I construe this as a hopelessly mangled and distorted assessment of my own frame of mind. But then [in my view] this sort of thing is built right into discussions like these.

And even though I have accumulated “distractions” as my own “whatever works” method of achieving some measure of “comfort and consolation”, it doesn’t make the hole go away. It doesn’t make the parts embedded in an essentially meaningless world and oblivion go away.

All I can do is to go in search of others who have an interest in exploring these questions. See what they have to say about them. Knowing all the many, many times in my own past when I once believed this but than believed that.

Maybe. Maybe not. In any event, I am running out of time to find out.

And yet I am still convinced that any number of folks like you and KT and Gib are repelled not by my “methodology”, but by the arguments that I make. In particular, the part where I reconfigures into “i”.

The fractured and fragmented “I”, unable to pin down right and wrong behavior objectively. The mere mortal “I” that tumbles over into the abyss that is nothingness. The “I” that can’t even decide with a measure of self-assurance that “I” is all his own, autonomously.

Well [here and now] you know that better than I ever could.

Okay, over the past 10 years, what positions [regarding important matters] have others managed to change your own point of view about?

And you seem to insist that the problem here is always me not them. There have been arguments that would have worked but I refused to listen. Willfully refused apparently. If I had really been willing to listen to the advice of some I would finally understand once and for all how a rational human being is obligated to think about things like, say, Communism.

Truth be told, so do I. But there are clearly some instances where winning and lossing are more easily calculated than others. Sporting events, gambling, playing the stock market, board and video games.

Instead, it’s when the discussion shifts to the morality of these interactions that “winning” and “losing” becomes more problematic.

Likewise, the extent to which we can ascribe either winning or losing to our abilities or to a wholly determined universe in which either winning or losing was never going to be anything other than what it had to be.

Did you review his comments? Can they be better described as a retort or an honest expression of feelings?

Surely you can make such an evaluation.

At this point, it seems fairly obvious that the help we thought you were asking for is not the help that you actually want. (If what you want can even be called ‘help’. )

You seem to be asking for help with a big problem but then it turns out that your problem isn’t much of a problem for you after all. That’s the source of the “confusion and frustration”. “What the fuck is going on.”

It’s not because you “don’t come around to their way of thinking”.

Nothing to do with this expectation of yours.

That’s like saying that painkillers don’t make the cause of the pain go away. No shit. They make the pain go away.

As for dealing with the cause, I haven’t seen you try anything that has been suggested to you. It’s been 8 years. One would think that at least one worthwhile idea would have popped up in all that time.

It’s always general, abstract, scholastic, in the clouds, existential contraption, etc.

Believe me, it’s the way you post. Your “arguments” about “i” or “I” are not particularly frightening/repelling.

Ooh scary. Just kidding.

But they’re not asking for help. You seem to be asking for help.

It comes down to “Do you want help? Do you want to change? Are you doing something in order to change?”

I really think that all you want is to talk.

Not to talk with any goal or intention - just talk.

That’s fine as long as you make it clear to your discussion partners. That way they won’t try to 'help" you.

Given that we do have freedom to choose, the distinction between the either/or world and the is/ought world becomes paramount to me.

In the either/or world, you can choose to believe things able to be demonstrated as not true. Just as you can choose not to believe things able to demonstrated as in fact true.

What becomes crucial here is the fact that, sans sim worlds, demonic dreams, solipsism etc., there is an objective truth to be found. Now, we may not be able to pin this down beyond all doubt but in the either/or world something either is or is not true.

On the other hand, in the is/ought world, we can all agree that certain things are in fact true, but we don’t all agree regarding our reaction to those truths. The state executes John Doe. That’s a fact. Jane supports this execution. That’s a fact. Jim does not support it. That’s a fact.

But if the discussion shifts to whether or not capital punishment is a good thing or a bad things [moral or immoral] that’s when I broach the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. Those are the “conditions” that are of most importance to me.

Now, if, instead, we presume that human interactions [and everything else] are embedded in a wholly determined universe, what does it mean to speak of one of us choosing one thing rather than another?

Yes, a choice is made. A woman chooses to have sex and becomes pregnant. This woman then chooses to have an abortion. A doctor chooses to perform it. A law official chooses to place them under arrest because abortion is illegal where they reside. A jury chooses to find them guilty. A judges chooses to sentence them to prison.

Now, in a wholly determined universe, is there anything that unfolds in this sequence of events that could ever have possibly been anything other than what it was?

That’s what I can’t wrap my head around here. And I will readily admit I might not be thinking this all through in the most reasonable manner.

But: if in fact we do choose something only because in fact we could not not have chosen it, how can we speak of a “compatibility” between a so-called “metaphysical determinism” and a so-called “psychological freedom”?

I must be missing something really important here.

If we live in a wholly determined universe then the manner in which I convey my own moral philosophy [nihilism] is just one more set of dominoes toppling over in sync with all the other ones. I choose to convey this here, but I was never able to not choose to.

Surprise, surprize…

Iambiguous trolls another thread without responding to mine.

If you simply conclude that conflicting good are inherently bad, you have a stable philosophy.

The reason I pick on iambiguous so much, is, that if you want to create a docile population that you can control with impunity, you will aregue that they don’t exist, and you will argue that consent violation is meaningless to ethics and morality.

I’ve stated before: I’m 100% certain iambiguous is a psychopath.

You respond yet again to a subtext that was never there…

You are effectively speaking to yourself…

Allow me to clarify one last time, and I do hope you make an effort to hear me this time…

I was saying that I can only aspire to make reasonable arguments, I cannot and do not dictate how persuasive that might be.
The faculty of reason is a shared one… it could be our common ground in such a conversation.
If ANYONE decides that they do not value that faculty nor find it’s conclusions persuasive, then we no longer have common ground.
And if they were honest about that, well we’d very likely agree about everything…
You could claim anything, literally anything and I’d agree that you could get there by ignoring reason…

The same holds true of people who straw-man the counter-arguments and thereby ignore them entirely… this is an act of deception
Whether it’s meant to fool me or themselves I cannot say… but regardless they are made deaf to reason all the same.

Now as you like to bring things back down to earth…
Whenever someone responds to an argument of mine by saying “I remain unconvinced”, I can only respond by saying “I don’t care”
If what I said was unreasonable or I was overlooking something important or failed to address something… THAT I would care about.
Whether or not someone was convinced is of no concern to me.

of course not… in fact I’d very much appreciate any reasonable criticism or counter arguments.
So long as our responses are reasoned into being and address the points… all they can ever do is improve our thinking

  1. Systems are not slaves to the rules that govern their fundamental building blocks… they subsume those rules and build their own rules from them.
  2. Define your terms “autonomy” and “choice” (What quality must you possess in order to qualify as being “autonomous” or what circumstance must you be in, so as to have “choice”?)
  3. Defining “self” dictates what is considered the thing that must be “isolated” so as to possess “autonomy”… Even a dualistic notion self still has input from the material world, you see, you hear, you smell, you feel etc. If the brain is considered the “self” it has the same influences. What you do in response to that input… well that’s a function of the “self” in both scenarios, except one is located in the material world, the other is not.
  4. If your character, if your will and wants are perfectly predictable, then so are your choices… that may well mean things are only as they ever could have been, but your will is part of the reason why.

But see, that there is a trap… Those of us not suffering from some insanity all agree that THIS is what is…
What is debated is which of these models best fits the reality we are experiencing… if there were big differences in outcome, the impostor would be easy to spot.

We could look at the findings of neuroscience and observe where certain notions of dualism become cumbersome… now needing to invent unobserved phenomena to explain the unobserved phenomena they invented to explain the observed ones.
Determinism otoh is a strange beast… technically it has nothing to do with materialism… you could have a deterministic reality, that had multiple dimensions at play, yet all equally determined.
The only alternative to determinism is any measure of randomness…

As I understand the words, autonomy is not contrary to determinism…
Even if something remained completely unaffected by everything else, that would not mean that this thing would not be orderly and perfectly predictable on it’s own.
And so long as it is orderly and not at all random, it seems perfectly congruous with determinism…
The most fundamental forces of reality, whatever they may be, qualify as autonomous by definition (unless you are using another definition)… determinism, as I know it, does not deny their existence, only claims them to be orderly.

You have two cases here : looking forward at an event and looking back at it.

Looking back, the event has already happened. It’s done, finished. You can’t undo the event. It can’t be anything other than what it was because of the one way direction of time. That’s true both for a deterministic world and a non-deterministic world.

Looking forward at an event in the future, you don’t know what is “determined” to happen. You don’t know how the infinite number of factors, swirling around you, affect your decisions.

Is it “determined” that you sit on your couch eating cheese doodles or that you get up and do something else? You don’t know until after you do what you decided to do. It’s when you do it that it becomes the thing that “had to happen”. Before that, you could have chosen something else, you could have done something else.

You seem to mix up past, present and future. As a result, you treat future events as if they are somehow in the past - as if the future has already happened. So you say " unfolds{present and future} in this sequence of events that could ever have possibly been{past} anything other than what it was{past}".

Which doesn’t make sense.

Well, after a series of rather substantive exchanges between us, that post had shrunk down to what I construed to be retorts. Zingers aimed at making me the point.

And that’s an honest expression of my evaluation. Or, rather, as honest as someone who thinks like “I” do can be.

The help I am asking for revolves basically around three things:

1] figuring out if, on this side of the grave, there’s a way up out of the nihilistic hole that “I” am in when confronting conflicting goods

2] figuring out if, on the other side of the grave, there’s a way up out of the abyss

And on this thread in particular

3] figuring out if my thoughts and feelings regarding the first two are in sync with at least some measure of autonomy pertaining to “I”

And here what else is there but to exachange points of view? I merely prefer them to be anchored [as much as possible] out in the world of actual human interactions.

First of all, you keep noting this as though it is something that you can in fact actually know. Again, just because I am able to distract myself from those things I am trying to figure out, doesn’t make them go away. And I recognize how ultimately futile it is likely to be for you to grasp this from my point of view. And vice versa. But I never lose sight of the possibility of bumping into someone who thinks about these things in a way that manages to reconfigure how I think about them. Dasein [for me] is everywhere here.

Then it comes down to to either grappling with or impugning each others motives. The trickiest part to say the least. Hell, I suspect I am not even close to fully grasping my own. If grasping anything at all is even within my capacity as someone in possession of a “free will”.

It’s true: I have no way of demonstrating that this is in fact applicable to you and to others here. All I can do is to extrapolate from past experiences with exchanges of this sort.

Meaning what? If expectations here are construed by me to be profoundly problematic, it then comes down to finding someone able to convince me that they don’t have to be. But here I always come back to the gap between what any of us think we know about these things and all that there actually is to know.

You tell me: How can the expectations that any of us have be fitted snugly into that?

Huh? You’re comparing taking aspirin for a headache to embodying distractions able to numb the brute facticity of an essentially meaningless world that tumbles over into oblivion?

What can I say. All those ideas later and it still seems more reasonable to me to distract myself from the hole that I am in on this side of the grave and the nothingness that awaits me on the other side.

I’ll leave it to you to explain to others why that is all my fault.

Okay, fine. Let’s leave it at that. Again, all I have to fall back on here are my own personal experiences with objectivists over the years. The part about “I” always seemed to be particularly aggravating to them.

This part:

If you say so.

What’s that really got to do with answering my qestion? What positions [of late] regarding important issues have the arguments of others managed to precipitate change [helped you] in your own life?

What can I say? Yes, I really would like to come upon arguments that might “for all practical purposes” help me to “figure out” the three things I noted above. And I am more than willing to at least make the attempt to understand the experiences of others that helped them.

But: there are only so many [realistic] options open to me “here and now”.

You insert your problems, your “hole” and your reactions into the discussion and then when someone addresses you directly you react with “Why are you making me the issue?”.

Well, for obvious reasons … you made yourself one of the issues.

I still do’t know what “figuring out” means or how one would go about “figuring out” anything with you. I don’t see any sort of progress at all… and therefore no “figuring out” going on.

I’m just going by what you posted.

I do grasp it.

Meaning that the “confusion and frustration” isn’t about “the big questions”, it’s about the little question of your “hole” and how you interact with people.

You’re always going to find that gap and so it’s unlikely that you can “figure out” anything.

My advice is not to focus on the gap.

Yes I am. Your distractions are aspirin or morphine for your mind.

That’s one way to deal with it. You can keep taking painkillers/distractions for the rest of your life.

It’s your life. You’re looking for a cure. It’s up to you to decide what to do with the offered advise.

I still find it odd that you have not found anything worth trying.

I’m never going to tell you anything about my personal life again.

Whatever they say, you’re going to find “the gap” or “the existential contraption”.

This frame of mind speaks volumes regarding what may well be at stake here.

If we live in a world where [in some measure] human autonomy is embodied in this exchange then your clarification and my making an effort to hear it can [presumably] be judged freely by others here. Your clarification reflects what in your autonomous view is rational and I am able to finally grasp that or I have freely chosen a less rational perspective.

On the other hand, in a wholly determined universe there was [again presumably] never any possibility that this exchange could ever be anything other than what it is. And then the choices that we do in fact make come to constitute this “psychological freedom” embedded in the “metaphysical determinism” of the human brain as matter interacting with other matter only as matter can.

That we choose becomes more important than the fact that we were never able to choose anything other than what we did. Psychologically we think we are free [even though we’re not] and that’s not nothing.

And some argue that what you aspire to say in making reasonable arguments you were never able not to aspire to.

The “faculty of reason” is no less mechanical in the matter that constitutes human interactions than is the matter that constituted the recent earthquake in Anchorage.

Only our matter is able to convince itself that it is choosing of its own volition how human interactions unfold.

There is no equivalent of a brain in the earth quaking.

Brain matter appears to be everything here. How could mindless matter have possibly evolved into it. In part that’s why the Gods are always around. God is, after all, one possible explanation.

Okay, but common ground here is not necessarily the equivalent of the objective truth. Philosophical discussions and debates about “free will” and “dualism” have been churning now for centuries. What then is the “common ground” that allows us to finally know once and for all how rational men and women are obligated to think about it.

Bring this general description down to earth. Note a context in which flesh and blood human beings make choices. Choices that either do or do not come into conflict. What can be demonstrated to be reasonable here? And how is it demonstrated that what we all agree is reasonable based on “common ground” assumptions, came about because we either chose freely to accomplish this or because it was never really able to unfold other than as it did?

Instead, I get this…

“Not caring about” what others think here depends entirely on whether or not that is actually an option. And on whether the option is only the illusion of choosing it freely.

And, here again, everything depends on the extent to which [in an actual context] we are able to point to important things overlooked or things that were failed to be adressed. Such that an objective truth can be determined.

But how on earth is this really applicable in regard to either value judgments in a world of conflicting goods or to questions as big as the “free will” debate?

Some insist that things are important here that others insist are not important at all. Some insist that things were overlooked that others insist ought to have been overlooked.

But the only way we can explore these things more fullly is by taking them “out into the world” that we live in.

Instead, I get this…

General descriptions X 4.

Let’s do this.

You pick the context. You note the behaviors. You note the choices that people make. Then one by one we can explore the points you raise above.

Both in terms of whether [philosophically] it can be determined [in the is/ought world] how rational people ought to behave, and then the extent to which it can be demonstrated that they either were or were not able to choose what they did freely, autonomously, of their own volition.

In other words…

Note to others:

Insanity? Spotting imposters?

Is there something here in this particular “general description” that is pertinent to the suggestion I made about bringing it out into the world of human interactions?

I bring to down here to the world of human interactions.

Consent violation is bad.

That’s as down to earth as it gets.

I also find it interesting, like other psychopaths and narcissists that you’re always the only one doing what you accuse others of.

I provided you with the necessary conditions for a rational conversation between you and I… and you question their value?
We have no basis then, on which to conduct this conversation…

deleted, wrong thread