butchersapron
Bring back hanging
I don't support eco, it's just a joke he was having.
Philosophy for beginners?
- Thread starter mozzy
- Start date
so Kant is like the burly moustachoied plumber who comes to fix the washing machine and gets it on with the housewife?
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Kant is tantric sex. People go on and on about how amazing it is, but you just can't see how you are going to be able to carry on reading him make the same point for 500 pages.
He's also substantially wrong.
(although he has a lot of insight too)
He's also substantially wrong.
(although he has a lot of insight too)
What d'ya mean by this??? I would really like to know. I am very much into existentialism. What's wrong with it???
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
**zanY** warning
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
It's not wrong as such, but its problems regarding the dilemma of freedom are simply not problems for me any more.
Where it verges on being wrong is that it starts from a position of free will. In my opinion, the strictly correct position to start from regarding free will is to say that it feels like we have it and we act on a working assumption that we have at least a degree of freedom, but that there is no direct evidence at all that we do. Existentialists generally demand a leap into total belief in free will. I think this is both unjustified and unnecessary.
Yeah, dude, second time today. Explain???
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
I think fucking not
Haha, why the fuck not???
revol68
what, fucking what?
well bully for you then, for the rest of us mortals it will be pretty relevant.
you could also explain which problems and how you've squared them, no?
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I did in my edit.
revol68
what, fucking what?
So the problem with existentialists is that they start from a working assumption you agree with?
How far do you wish to take this skepticism, should any book on solar flares come prefaced with an explanation that the whole universe could be an illusion.
Furthermore you suggest free will as a suitable working assumption which of course existentialists do, which subsequently leaves me baffled as to how the issues they deal with are now irrelevant to you?
edited to add:
I bet you also insist the correct position regarding the existence of God is agnosticism?
Hmmmm.... so in which way do we not have free will. Do you count the restrictions put upon us by society as a form of lack of free will????
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I'm going to bed in a minute, but I'll say this.
If you ask me straight out do I believe that my free will is an illusion, I will say that if it is, it certainly makes certain aspects of cosmology much easier to understand. I think the main philosophical problem we face is our concept of time. Time and change are intimately linked in a way that I don't think anyone properly comprehends – they are in fact two aspects of the same phenomenon.
This line of thinking necessarily leads me to deny my own freedom. Yet I feel free, and if I act as if I were free, and it works most of the time.
The one thing I can't do is in any way predict the actions of those who I treat as if they were free. Basically, they are far too complicated for that.
Another problem that existentialists generally don't even address is the problem of the after-the-fact nature of consciousness. We are aware of our actions and decisions after we have made them. Our acting, free self, if indeed it is free, is most emphatically not our conscious selves, and a lot of the worry of existentialists is over nothing. Our freedom, if we have it, comes before consciousness, not after it.
If you ask me straight out do I believe that my free will is an illusion, I will say that if it is, it certainly makes certain aspects of cosmology much easier to understand. I think the main philosophical problem we face is our concept of time. Time and change are intimately linked in a way that I don't think anyone properly comprehends – they are in fact two aspects of the same phenomenon.
This line of thinking necessarily leads me to deny my own freedom. Yet I feel free, and if I act as if I were free, and it works most of the time.
The one thing I can't do is in any way predict the actions of those who I treat as if they were free. Basically, they are far too complicated for that.
Another problem that existentialists generally don't even address is the problem of the after-the-fact nature of consciousness. We are aware of our actions and decisions after we have made them. Our acting, free self, if indeed it is free, is most emphatically not our conscious selves, and a lot of the worry of existentialists is over nothing. Our freedom, if we have it, comes before consciousness, not after it.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
They're gonna fuck you up kid
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
There is no evidence for it in the natural world whatsoever. If it is there, what is the mechanism that transfers the desires of our free selves into movement of our physical selves? In all of the sciences, there is not one single piece of evidence that supports the idea that we have free will. This is not to say that we don't – I think, fwiw, that, as with time, we have a poor understanding of what we mean when we talk of freedom. While we are constrained by the parameters of the universe, time marches on at a seemingly relentless pace. When we are dissociated from that reality, we can experience a hugely dilated time. The point being that, in effect, each of us lives with our own time. Objectively, it may not exist outside us in quite the way we assume it does.
I pose as many questions as answers there for the simple reason that I do not have all the answers. I do now believe, however, that the place to search for the answers is not where existentialism would have it.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
A non problem
Like the transfromation problem
Like the transfromation problem
pk
drink flounce rinse repeat
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Not quite. The correct position is one that says that we can know nothing of any god, and that the chances of any particular conception of a supernatural entity being true are vanishingly small – effectively zero – because there are infinite other equally likely but different conceptions.
To even talk of something called god is to misunderstand the limits of knowledge. I am effectively a firm atheist, because I hold that the very concept of god is mistaken.
revol68
what, fucking what?
You still haven't addressed the issue, existentialism is precisely based on a working assumption of our experience of living, of our experience of free will.
All these things you talk about have no real bearing on life as we experience it and the anxiety that accompanies it. You are attacking existentialism on grounds it never seeks to contests, on a battlefield it long ago surrenderd as futile. In this I think existentialism shars much with marxism in that it seeks to bring philosophy away from irrelevant abstract shit and begin applying to lived experience.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
another non-problem
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
What were the limitz of knowledge btw?
Explain.
Kant is tantric sex. People go on and on about how amazing it is, but you just can't see how you are going to be able to carry on reading him make the same point for 500 pages.
He's also substantially wrong.
(although he has a lot of insight too)
He's very important for almost every area of philosophy, and though "wrong" on some things, people would never have been "right" without him.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Original sinner
This is a good post, obviously verging on the determinist who says it will drive us mad to understand ourselves as determinist, but we are.
I can't agree with all that, just because of mine, and what people tell me, is their experience of being human. But I enjoyed the well thought out post.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
No, not
revol68
what, fucking what?
Well I'd suggest that the whole point of science and knowledge in general is that we haven't removed them all, though that might be to bluff to secure funding.
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