Top Ten List

Yeah, their version and one going way back is…
as within so without, as above, so below…
revinventing the wheel.

Ah, I didn’t best them then. It was just intuition of the part I hadn’t heard.

Unexpected knowledge from such a… Classical lefty… Come now…

They don’t teach that in University, do they?

I’ll give it to them though, that’s pretty clever of them.

But wait actually. AS within SO without is not the same as what’s on the inside is what’s on the outside. I didn’t say the same as. I said is.

There seems to me to be an important distinction there.

Yes, alchemists tend to be arrogant.
But to call Faust an alchemist is a bit indecent, I think.

But we agree then that there is no one on one correspondence between appearances and scientific Vision.

Your rude stance was just that of any layman approaching a specialised field with enthusiasm.

As above… so not quite now above… because “below” (cough)

Hume, who the consensus thing is from was to science what the NYT is to Trumpian job growth.

Hume, man. Fuck him.
All he ever did was creating consensus that Newton’s laws could be broken at any given moment because… um. … “text”.

Most of your list looks boringly uncontraversial. Philosophy is only about language? Well, philosophy is about thought and we think in language, so…

This statement looks interesting though. Do you mean that academia killed philosophy, or philosophy killed jazz?

Academia has killed philosophy. In part by continuing to argue over boring and uncontroversial ideas.

"…You see, a philosopher is sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted. And sensible people say, existence, it’s nothing at all, just go on and do something. See, this is the current movement in philosophy, “logical analysis”, which says: you mustn’t think about existence, it’s a meaningless concept. Therefore, philosophy has become a discussion of trivia.

No good philosopher lies awake nights, worrying about the destiny of Man, and the nature of God, and that sort of thing because a philosopher today is a practical fellow who comes to the university with a briefcase at 9:00 and leaves at 5:00. He “does philosophy” during the day, which is discussing whether certain sentences have meaning and if so what, and – as William Earle said in a very funny essay – ‘he would come to work in a white coat if he thought he could get away with it’.

The problem is: he’s lost his sense of wonder. Wonder is in modern philosophy something one mustn’t have… it’s like enthusiasm in 18th century England: very bad form…" Alan Watts

:laughing: … always makes me laugh.
.

I wish, in a sense, I was a classic lefty. How simple and then I’d have a group. I do react to righties, sometimes, in ways that classic lefties do. On the other hand I react to lefties like a righty, often these days. (I mean, why trust corporations or governments, and conservatives and liberals both, whatever their supposed disagreements seem to trust these entities for the most part.) And liberals, I react to them from both sides (now). I think the wordings are the same, in this context. That what is without is within and vice versa. I don’t think it is indicating process, like a flow chart or something. And what, lefties don’t study the alchemists? Come now…Some large chunk must head through Jung to them. I got to them because they kept being denigrated by the scientism groupies. Gotta check out whatever is denigrated by a consensus.

Nowadays, the political weatherforms are regulated by the fear of displacement, fearing one’s own self interest above that of the common good, and usually with an eye to wether how much the winds of favorable high pressured winds on the horizon can be overcome by the low pressure weather coming in from over sees.

Sometimes boring things are the best things.
Excitation is imbalance, imbalance is decadent, and decadent things tend to eventually undo themselves,
by accepting failure.

Cause is an illusion based on a distorting mirror effect. Like those big circus fun house mirrors.
It can make a skinny man appear fat.
You cannot derive new from old.
You can change the shape of matter, but the components are the same, even if their formation is different.
Therefor, sameness is the essential level of things,
and difference is the human appearance of change.
Nano is assential, a steak or a pencil is a formation.
Formations are made of essence.
It appears different, although it is made of the same components / things.

I’ve tried to explain form and essence, earlier.
Objects and events both have an essence and a form.

“Complementary” was discussed with my friend Jared today.
He said how his wife is good at what he is bad at, and he is good at what she is bad at.
When they team up, they are complementary.
I told him my statement about how diversity is good and compatability is an illusion.
He understood me right off the bat.
There are many forms of power. I prefer long lasting or eternal power.
There is short lived power as well. It starts out great then later you’re left with nothing.
Morality is a form of strength, though.
People think of power like it is some kind of evil government.
Strength as a word has less stigma.
So, morality is all about strength. There are many kinds of strength, and it is up to us to realize which form of strength is the best.

Iam - you are a master at changing the focus or scope of an argument (or even a mere claim). It’s almost Bill O’Reilly-like. Albeit that O’Reilly uses it to win an argument, not to lose one.

Whatever you think of me, you will either focus in on a particular context in which to explore your top ten list or you won’t. Abortion works for me because 1] it is an issue that most will be familiar with and 2] it literally revolves around the question of life and death.

If you’d like we can create a new thread for it.

If nothing else, I’m curious to see how you connect the dots between abortion and, “There are almost certainly events that cause other events, but there seem to be uncaused causes. Sometimes, things are the way they seem.”

The evolution of life on earth [eventually] begets human beings. Human beings have sex and this can beget pregnancies. Unwanted pregnancies can beget abortions. Abortions can beget conflicting goods. Conflicting goods can beget political narratives.

Where do “uncaused causes” fit in here? And, with respect to the moral and political parameters of abortion, when are things “the way they seem”?

Or was your intent here all basically just tongue in cheek? :wink:

I was joking. Not about the list, but that they were all about abortion. Morality belongs to political science. It always has. Since at least The Republic.

Okay, let’s take your list to the Society, Government, and Economics board then. And, sure, fuck abortion this time. You choose the conflicting moral narratives, you choose the context.

I see no reason to remove to any other board. Epistemology has always been used to justify morality, which has always been a component of politics. The Ten Commandments was a political statement. There was no distinction between morality and law - the TC was part of the law. Plato tried to establish that virtuous philosophers were the model for morality and went as far as to used the city of Athens as the model for virtue. The city that was run by virtuous people, if not always by philosophers.

It’s all the same thing.

In modern america, there is disagreement about the morality of abortion, but the virtuous Supreme Court allows it, under certain circumstances, which is not a novel idea.

The question has rarely been “Is abortion wrong?” but “what kind of abortions are wrong and how wrong are they?”

God saw all of this, while he existed.

Okay, but with respect to what moral issue in what political context? Trump’s wall? Obamacare? The Second amendment? Conscription? The death penalty? Homosexuality? Animal rights? Gender roles?

Particular people claim to know particular things about particular moral and political issues. About what is or is not said to be virtuous. Where does philosophy fit in here? What are the practical limitations embedded in the tools epistemologists use to assess what either can or cannot be known about them?

And soon [perhaps] a new virtuous Supreme Court will not allow it here in America. Okay, Mr. Ethicist, some then interject, which virtue ought it to be?

Here of course I interject and note the components of my own frame of mind: dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. In a No God world awash in contingency, chance and change. A world in which new experiences, relationships and access to ideas, can reconfigure “I” here into an “existential contraption”.

Depends on who you discuss this with. For some all abortions are wrong. For others it’s abortion on demand. The objectivists on both ends of the political spectrum. Some re God, some re Reason [political ideology or deontological assessments], some re Nature.

And the more ambiguous it gets – which abortions are wrong and when? – the more the best of all possible worlds would seem to revolve around moderation, negotiation and compromise.

Only here I have thought my way down into a hole. This one:

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

My only recourse then being discussions like this one in which I encounter the narratives [behaviors] of those not down in that hole.

Philosophy fits in exactly where i just said it does. The practical limitations on epistemologists are that what they are doing is impractical.

Of course there are those who can draw a thick, impenetrable line between right and wrong, but they still lie along a spectrum. And they may still assess differing penalties for not following the rule, which modifies what would otherwise be an absolute position.

No one can “reach” objective values. That is a hoax. And you might have gone in another direction even if there were. You continually manufacture, out of whole cloth, a problem that does’t exist. You simply are afraid of the freedom to choose that you have. Not that there aren’t consequences for our actions. But these are societal. Don’t ever confess to a murder. Unless they have you anyway.

no it’s not that. biggy got over that kierkegaardian anxiety and dizziness of freedom decades ago, so that’s not the problem. i’ll tell you what the problem is; biggy is suffering from PTFD (post traumatic forum disorder). i don’t know if any of you folks know about his history, but biggy served two tours of duty at a yahoo group called ‘the philosophy cafe’ which was run by a mexican kantian objectivist defense attorney named friedrich. and this guy led a platoon of objectivists of all stripes… half of em had fucking philosophy degrees. you can’t imagine the hell biggy was in, and why he had to become an animal to survive. i was there and saw the whole thing go down, man. it was vietnam all over again for this dude, and folks need to understand what that can do to a man. it’s in his blood, he’s a trained objectivist killer, and anyone who so much as whispers anything about an ‘objective value’ is in grave danger around this guy. this isn’t something he can just choose to let go of. therapy? we tried that. guess what happened. he ruined the therapist. the guy quit his practice, sold the business, and moved to some convent in south america.

the only thing you can do is avoid engaging him and hope he doesn’t hunt you down. since the objectivist slaughter of 2002 at the philosophy cafe, he’s gone rogue like the others in his squad, and despite my attempts to bring him home, he refuses to cooperate. i tried my best to reassemble the team, to no avail. this was my last transmission with him.