a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Donald Davidson

Nothing in the world, no object or event, would be true or false if there were not thinking creatures. [/b]

Try proving it though.

There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.

Of course without language none of this gets said.

There are three basic problems: how a mind can know the world of nature, how it is possible for one mind to know another, and how it is possible to know the contents of our own minds without resort to observation or evidence. It is a mistake, I shall urge, to suppose that these questions can be collapsed into two, or taken into isolation.

We’ll need a fucking context, he thought.

Mental events such as perceivings, rememberings, decisions, and actions resist capture in the net of physical theory.

Well, that’s what the ghost in the machine is for.

Even if someone knew the entire physical history of the world, and every mental event were identical with a physical, it would not follow that he could predict or explain a single mental event (so described, of course).

Of course no one does, though, do they?

Terminological infelicities have a way of breeding conceptual confusion.

And felicity has always been problematic here to say the least.

[b]Rudolf Carnap

Logic is the last scientific ingredient of Philosophy; its extraction leaves behind only a confusion of non-scientific, pseudo problems. [/b]

Otherwise known as, among other thngs, the human condition.

In logic, there are no morals.

Let’s poke around and find some.

In science there are no ‘depths’; there is surface everywhere.

For some here though it’s all depth. Well, in a world of words anyway.

Let us be cautious in making assertions and critical in examining them, but tolerant in permitting linguistic forms.

On the other hand, how helpful is that?

The self is the class (not the collection) of the experiences (or autopsychological states). The self does not belong to the expression of the basic experience, but is constructed only on a very high level.

On the other hand, how helpful is that?

If one is interested in the relations between fields which, according to customary academic divisions, belong to different departments, then he will not be welcomed as a builder of bridges, as he might have expected, but will rather be regarded by both sides as an outsider and troublesome intruder.

And how idiotic is that?

[b]Werner Twertzog

Entire universes are destroyed; intelligent beings obliterated by billions. It is Tuesday.[/b]

God keeps a journal.

The inevitability of death makes the misery of life more endurable, as we all know.

Really, that’s the only thing that works for me.

Everyone is a winner,
If,
By “winner,”
You mean Food for Worms.

Well, the worms certainly are.

You have one word for me: “Plastics.”
I have one word for you: “Apocalypse.”

Hey, times change.

Things get worse before they get even more worse.

If only when they actually do.

“Dastardly” is an under-utilized word.

Here? 80 times in 14 years. Now 81.

[b]Ted Chiang

Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.[/b]

No, as a matter fact, that is not always enough.

Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.

My guess: there are many more.

My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t. The reality isn’t important: what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.

My guess: And it always will.

[b]I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term “self-aware.”

Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I’d previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.

With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don’t pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.

I know how they make up my thoughts.

These thoughts.[/b]

Another gigantic general description of mindful matter.

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments.

Of course, what could this possibly have to do with dasein?

It is no coincidence that “aspiration” means both hope and the act of breathing.

And that’s important to know…why?

[b]Greg Iles

The female memory defies explanation.[/b]

Something a male would no doubt conclude.

Only in the shadow of death do we sense the true velocity of time—while adrenaline blasts through our systems, eternity becomes tangible and all else blurs into background.

That’s how it works, alright. But only for all of us.

But fear and danger aren’t always directly proportional. We’re all terrified by rattlesnakes, but the spider we brush off our sleeve with hardly a thought is far more likely to hurt us.

We’re all…we’re all…we’re all. What? Different things to different people.

A glacier consumes whole forests by inches.

Thank god for global warming.

Quentin finishes with the limb and sits up. Who wears the pants in your family, man?
That depends on the issue.

Indeed, as it should.

There is always something.

Or, as I prefer to put it, there is always never nothing. At least on this side of the grave.

[b]Werner Twertzog

To write dialogue, simply pretend to be stupid in different ways.[/b]

Hey, that’s what some of us do here! If only philosophically.

Man is born free.
But, everywhere,
He is checking
Work-related email.

Or coming here.

I am not a pessimist. I am an idealist. I sustain the hope that none of this matters.

And things couldn’t get more ideal than that, right?

Bears have few regrets, as we all know.

Well, not counting Timothy Treadwell, perhaps.

2024: Majority of U.S. oligarchs override obviously rigged elections to restore semblance of equity, education, healthcare, and civil order to prevent imminent revival of the guillotine.

I know: dream on…

Always remember, today is the first day in your inexorable march towards death.

My guess: some being closer to it than others.

[b]Taylor Jenkins Reid

That’s the glory of being a man. An ugly face isn’t the end of you.[/b]

Like it isn’t for some.

From experience, I can tell you that if you go around trying to figure out what’s fair in life or whether you deserve something or not, that’s a rabbit hole that is hard to climb out of.

Unless, of course, you’re an objectivist.

No one is just a victim or a victor. Everyone is somewhere in between. People who go around casting themselves as one or the other are not only kidding themselves, but they’re also painfully unoriginal.

Unless, of course, you’re an objectivist.

I am not going to sit around sweating my ass off just so men can feel more comfortable. It’s not my responsibility to not turn them on. It’s their responsibility to not be an asshole.

Memes, 1, genes, 0. If that’s true of course.

In general, I find that when you are doing something you are not supposed to be doing, the best course of action is to act as if you are absolutely supposed to be doing it.

Cynicism. Of course.

It’s funny, isn’t it? So often men see betrayal in what you’ve done instead of how you feel.

And, let’s say, the other way around.

In general, I find that when you are doing something you are not supposed to be doing, the best course of action is to act as if you are absolutely supposed to be doing it.

Hahahahahahahaha, it actually works like a charm every time. The trouble is people that were like are you supposed to be doing that and then get the impression that yes, sort of follow you because they want to be doing what you are supposed to be doing.

It leads to THE most awkward situations.

Why is that cynical though?

[b]Janis Joplin

I read a story about some old opera singer once, and when a guy asked her to marry him, she took him backstage after she had sung a real triumph, with all the people calling for her, asked, ‘Do you think you could give me that?’ That story hit me right, man. I know no guy ever made me feel as good as an audience. I’m really far into this now, really committed. Like, I don’t think I’d go off the road for long now, for life with a guy no matter how good. Yeah, it’s the truth. Scary thing to say though, isn’t it?[/b]

Much like the audience here for some.

I’m tired of all these hippie jack-offs.

So, what’s the backstory?

When I sing, I feel like when you’re first in love. It’s more than sex. It’s that point two people can get to they call love, when you really touch someone for the first time, but it’s gigantic, multiplied by the whole audience. I feel chills.

Which explains why some [like me] have always cursed their own pathetic pipes.

Why should I hold back now and sound mediocre, just so I can sound mediocre twenty years from now?

Had she lived that long.

I don’t know what happened. I just exploded. I’d never sung like that before. I used to stand still and sing simple, but you can’t sing like that in front of a rock band. You have to sing loud and move wild with all that in back of you. Now, I don’t know how to perform any other way.

Yeah, I know, she keeps rubbing it in.

People, whether they know it or not, like their blues singers miserable. They like their blues singers to die afterwards.

Let’s pin down how they like their philosophers.

[b]God

You people love being poorly led, don’t you.[/b]

Or: You people love being poorly created, don’t you.

If I had to pinpoint an exact moment when it all went wrong, I’d say Creation.

Or, for all too many of us, I’d say conception.

Congratulations India on completing the largest election in human history.
Obviously you’re not My territory, but I hear good things from Brahma.

So, that makes at least two of them.

Life begins the moment you leave Alabama.

Yo, Mr. Reasonable!

It’s easy to blame others for your mistakes, so do that.

Or, sure, shoot the Moon and blame God.

The people who think life begins at conception also think it began 6,000 years ago.

So, life doesn’t begin at the point of conception?!

[b]Woody Allen

I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.[/b]

Big deal. I got a 110.

Why ruin a good story with the truth?

Especially in the Oval Office.

Most of the time I don’t have much fun. The rest of the time I don’t have any fun at all.

He’d sure fit in well here.

Who’s the bigger idiot, the idiot or the idiot who gets fooled by the idiot?

Here it’s you or the Kids.

Taste my tuna casserole - tell me if I put in too much hot fudge.

Is that even possible?

I think universal harmony is a pipedream and it may be more productive to focus on more modest goals, like a ban on yodeling.

No yodeling here, right?

[b]Daniel Kahneman

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.[/b]

Of course it helps to have a really stupid citizenry.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.

Does this even make sense?

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

Here? Objectivists and Kids. Though not necessarily in that order.

The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.

Here we go again: Genes more or less than memes?

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.

He’s talking to you, Mr. Pedant.

Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.

The second part being considerably more rational than the first part.

[b]Rene Magritte

We are surrounded by curtains. We only perceive the world behind a curtain of semblance. At the same time, an object needs to be covered in order to be recognized at all.[/b]

Clearly some “general descriptions” are more relevant than others.

A thing which is present can be invisible, hidden by what it shows.

Just enigmatic enough to pique my interest.

Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.

Let’s steer clear of what it obliged me to do, he thought.

I want nevertheless to add that for me the world is a defiance of common sense.

That and the military industrial complex.

Do not accept any explanation of the world either through chance or determinism. You are not responsible for your belief. It is not even you who decides that you are not responsible - and so on to infinity. You are not obliged to believe. There is no point of departure.

And here we are obliged – obligated? – to react to it.

I need to see the original paintings just as little as I have to read the original manuscripts of books.

That’s true…but buying or selling the original is a whole other frame of mind.

[b]Claude Monet

To see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at. [/b]

Or [perhaps] here: To think we must forget the name of the thing we are thinking of.

When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, house, a field…Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you.

Things only artists say [and actually believe?]

All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it.

Things only artists say [and actually believe?]

Light is the most important person in the picture.

I’m a shadow man myself. The darker the better.

I want the unobtainable. Other artists paint a bridge, a house, a boat, and that’s the end. They are finished. I want to paint the air which surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat, the beauty of the air in which these objects are located, and that is nothing short of impossible.

Well short of it, I’d say.

I would advise young artists to paint as they can, as long as they can, without being afraid of painting badly.

Not counting the Kids of course.

[b]Harlan Coben

You can only be strong for so long.[/b]

In part because you can only live for so long.

…whenever I see a table of college “friends” sitting together they are inevitably texting with unseen others, searching, always searching, I guess, for something that might be better, a perpetual life hunt for digital greener grass, an attempt to smell roses that are elsewhere at the expense of the ones in front of you…

You can’t possibly text less than I do.

With everyone else, you put up this facade so you can hide the crud and make them like you. But with real friends, you show them the crud—and that makes them care. When we get rid of the facade, we connect more.

Trust me: some crud is the exception.

Fame is more addictive than crack.

A post-modern thing let’s say.

Watch out for people who belong in your past. Don’t let ’em back in your life.

After all, would they let you back in?

…the cardinal rule: You never have to take back words you don’t say.

Why do you suppose that is?

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Social media is something I’ll
2010: never do
2015: never leave
2019: quit twice a day[/b]

So, does posting at ILP count?

[b]A Brief History of Philosophy

1. Yes
2. No
3. Yes and no
4. Yes or no
5. Yes if no
6. Yes although no
7. No[/b]

And this only takes us to Plato.

Russian novel: the plot kills the character
English novel: the character kills the plot
French novel: the plot kills the author
American novel: the author kills the genre

With absolutely no exceptions of course.

Parmenides: All is one.
Heraclitus: All is many.
Spinoza: The Presocratics had too many opinions.
Leibniz: How many opinions is too many?
Camus: One.

None of course.

Plato: The light of the truth
Descartes: The light from the truth
Kant: The light to the truth
Camus: Got a light?

You know, Camus actually did more than just smoke cigarettes.

Can it get any worse?
Leibniz: What do you mean by “can”?
Heidegger: What do you mean by “it”?
Hegel: What do you mean by “get”?
Frege: What do you mean by “any”?
Camus: It’s worse.

Of course all this is before Don Trump.

[b]Bob Dylan

The corporations have taken over. Even in the recording studio. Actually, the corporate companies have taken over American life most everywhere. Go coast to coast and you will see people wearing the same clothes, thinking the same thoughts, eating the same food. Everything is processed. [/b]

You think?

Jesus, that ear. He should donate it to The Smithsonian. Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn’t make his records if you had a hundred tracks today.

Someone explain this please.

You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.

Anyone here ever wanted to?

I kinda live where I find myself.

If you know what he means.

I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.

Especially if he understands it the way we do.

God, I’m glad I’m not me.

Let’s imagine God’s reaction.

[b]Existential Comics

Avengers Endgame spoilers: it cannot ultimately distract you from the despair that haunts the core of your being.[/b]

Unless of course you’re a Kid.

Philosophers: “we don’t know shit.”
Scientists: “empirically speaking, we don’t know shit.”
Some dude on YouTube who skimmed three Wikipedia articles: “yeah I’m pretty sure I’ve got everything figured out.”

Probably you, right Kid?

Philosophers don’t want to admit it, but the meaning of life is quite obviously to maximize capital gains for the shareholders.

Besides, it’s in the Bible.

It’s important to read French novels to know that despite the inherent absurdity of it all, we can still live a life worth living.
It’s important to read German novels to know that, actually, no you can’t.

Depending on the translation of course.

How do I use philosophy in my day to day life?
Well, for example, say someone cuts me of in traffic, I think to myself: “philosophically speaking, fuck that guy.”

Or, philosophically speaking, don’t fuck him.

The arrogance of people who say “philosophy is useless” is astounding. As though we have finished thinking, and all of our ideas are now correct.

Okay, true, but how does that make philosophy useful?

[b]Leonard Cohen

You have to keep cracking yourself open or you become a parody of yourself. [/b]

Of course he doesn’t explain how one might actually do that. Himself, for example.

The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.

I tried that once. But now I’m sticking with the brandy.

It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was a real mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was but one mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed and changed into itself over and over.

Cue, among others, Zorba: youtu.be/4UV6HVMRmdk

I guess you go for nothing, if you really want to go that far.

Either way, it’s coming for you.

Here’s to the few who forgive what you do, and the fewer who don’t even care.

Here’s to them indeed.

My reputation as a ladies’ man was a joke that caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone.

How can this possibly be true, he thought.

[b]Federico Fellini

The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.[/b]

In other words, just like the rest of us.

Marriage is a tyranny, a mortification of man’s natural instincts. Man needs a multiplicity of relationships.

While [for some] forbidding women the same.

There is abundant testimony that if we choose love rather than self, we gain immeasurably.

Trust me: Not mine.

I never make moral judgments; I’m not qualified to do so.

Not to worry though, others will make them for you.

When I do things without any explanation, but just with spontaneity…I can be sure that I am right.

People really do believe things like this.

Fate is written in the face.

People really do believe things like this.