One day the infinite thought to itself ‘I’m going to try and find myself - it seems the done thing these days.’
Well, it looked and looked and looked - but all it could come up with was the finite.
“Oh I give up!” it exclaimed to itself. And that was that, apparently.
Found this on Facebook. A guy named Tony Tee.
Yes and so was I, why chop out the part that matters and that’s worth thinking about and that explains, why this dance that inthedark does is a perfect example of this “playing basketball in zero gravity” metaphor.
My god it can’t be anymore straight-forward:
There’s no foundation for understanding our inner impulses, without that thorough appreciation of our biological, evolutionary origins.
Just think of how our lives revolves around sexual impulses and issues, that’s chemistry in action - total chaos. But taking it from a bottom up evolutionary perspective, we become familiar with all the ways insight from other animals actually relate to our own actions and lives.
Instead of dying over how is any of this possible, it’s got to the impossible, my mind is ready to explode.
Transforming our experience into one of a pageant of discovery, learning and widening awareness, with every day. Understanding that Karma is real, but beyond our understand, so focus on doing the best one can, the rest will take care of itself. We land where is belong I’ve been told.
Oh course, it’s a problem.
There’s why a sober appreciation for the Physical Reality (biology/evolution) ~ Our Human Minds (with creates the stage where our respective mindscapes reside - with all our thoughts and struggles) such a critical first base achievement provides the foundation for making sense of rest of it using our logic with a clear personal appreciation for the limits of logic -
and the unavoidability of Mystery in our lives.
If you can’t describe the foundation then you are in the dilemma presented, or as you say, the mystery. Either it doesn’t matter that we don’t know what our thoughts were like two million years ago, or it does matter that our minds developed from rocks that don’t have thoughts at all.
Well apparently according to this user we cannot know or speak truth:
But the point is that there is no meaning hence the reference to managing the drives. Also I just gave a link that argues otherwise about what Lacan means,
Biology and evolution and being part of the biosphere is the foundation.
The mystery is that we can’t describe every bit of it, because it is too complex and people are too self-absorbed and self-serving to ask the proper questions.
Coming home from my first visit the monthly philosophy club this semester
Who : Dr. Michael Martin
What : “Saints and Prayer: Modern Sainthood and the Effectiveness of Prayer”
Which was basically a catechism class seemed to me. The notion of God out there seemed the default position, but I’m less surprised than I used to be. It’s tough to get religious overtones out of philosophy, just how we humans are.
Still at the end I had my chance to share my two cents worth:
** "There so much this evening that I can agree with, except this notion of God out there.
** How does a notion of God become a Fact of God?
** The reason that is important because to believe God is out there somewhere, is a total rejection of the reality of biology and Earth’s evolution.
** When will we take responsibility for God being a product of our own minds and experiences?
What are you talking about?
How do you figure our minds developed from rocks???
Then, you’ll tell me how you appreciate evolution plenty enough, nothing more to learn there - and I’m just wasting time and effort over nothing in pointing out that the only place God can come from, is within our own minds. Why the flak?
Or whatever it is, Why do you rather share riddles (like that obtuse response) and snippets that leave nothing but innuendo for me to tease out like a Rorschach text.
While inthedark rambles on as though his body’s biology has nothing to do with his drives, and managing them, and who he is, and why living one’s life matters in our living day to days, even as it doesn’t matter in the bigger picture of Earth’s reality.
Oh and consciousness originating from within our bodies, even if Chalmers’ expectation of ultimate knowledge can’t be satisfied.
Every valid physical fact medical science has acquired points at our body being the interpreter of all we know. There’s no other alternative, but we get hung up over word games.
The reason this jazz gets so enraging for me, is because this is the root of why we have been such f’n hopeless failure at learning to appreciate our planet - and the existential importance of keeping it’s biosphere healthy.
It’s all rolled into the same sh… poop show.
The tragedy is that it didn’t need to be like this, Earth’s nature is so resilient, and we can be so ingenious, that with a little less greed, a little more appreciation for the importance of our planet’s health - which I believe grows out of learning about Earth’s magnificent pageant of evolution - we could have stretched out the good years for many decades, while reducing the intensity and speed of the warming, perhaps putting us within reach of stretching out a few centuries of Climate Optimum humanity has been enjoying.
Oh so easy to play the “wtf” card.
Do I need to explain evolution? Minds evolved out of biology, which came from some interaction of physical elements, minerals catalyzed organic life, those chemicals, that chemistry, never experienced thought but, here we are
That user sounds a lot like you. Congratulations, you found someone on the Internet that you agree with. Now, how do you know that what they are saying is accurate?
In a way yes - that would sure beat dismissing it !
You’ve totally missed the pageant of evolution and the reality of deep time and biological complexity, and the interconnectedness of life on this singular Earth.
Why that inability to process the reality of the biology within you? It’s a hell of a lot more than “a rock being transmuted into a mind.”
It’s as easy as laying down smoke screens.
I’ve been striving to discuss that foundation
So we make up magical thinking, from God, to the endless philosophizing abilities of our self-satisfied minds.
Today we can be literally destroying the foundation of our existence, and barely anyone actually notices, oh they are vaguely aware something is being debated, but we’re simply not invested in the future or this planet - it’s our petty desires and dreams and self indulgence that always seems to carry the day. But we darn not call ourselves instinct driven animals - we are the superior one’s with God on our side.
That’s a problem, regardless how distasteful you find me, it’s still our biggest impediment to seeing through our self-created smoke screens of smug self-absorption and self-serving, self-destructive behaviors.
But you don’t. I don’t say that as often anymore because there’s nothing more to say. You say there is a pageant and that it will change you if you see it, but that’s magical thinking, not a mechanism that leads to insight. Instead you contradict yourself:
[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:46, topic:11760”]
The mystery is that we can’t describe every bit of it, because it is too complex and people are too self-absorbed and self-serving to ask the proper questions.
[/quote]
I didn’t endorse Plantinga, I only described his argument. I have argued why it’s flawed, at length. But it’s not dis-provable in scientific terms (unless you include very low probability as disproven). The opposite answer to “why are we here” is that there isn’t an answer to that. It is also beyond scientific methods to prove. So, it’s not “endless philosophizing”, it’s a question that lies in the zone of a question of truth that science can’t determine. You have to understand science to know that, so in that sense, it IS science.
further on that tangent, a principle of science is that nothing is 100% certain. That’s where science and philosophy meet.
This is much closer to the conversation we should be having. You and I know we are animals. The people creating social media algorithms and other propaganda know it too. The difference with them is they just use that knowledge to get rich. I used to think I could figure them out, but now I’m just sure they don’t care about the future and I can’t change that. We already know that better education and better welfare can change the world. We have dismantled most of feudalism and systems that support slavery. but all that is a difficult system to maintain.
Yeap, here we are.
But none of the removes the point that until the philosophy of consciousness starts absorbing evolutionary biological findings, it’s only spinning its wheels with idealized notions that can never touch the reality. Rock to mind indeed.
It’s hard to say given that psychoanalysis says a lot and some of it seems true.
Like how it says that desire requires fantasy and that the feeling of connection is a lie: Reddit - The heart of the internet
It’s got me thinking about what does it mean to be into someone else, is it traits that they have or some idealized version of it. When I asked here the answers are similar to what I’ve told you already: that language is limited, that meaning can change, etc: Reddit - The heart of the internet
But back to the fantasy bit, I think that’s more about the world of meaning that we live in, at least that’s what it sounds like. It sounds a lot like what I’ve said before, how we live in a social reality but according the the second post that’s what limits us in terms of subjectivity because language itself is limited. Even going so far as to say that you cannot really know, it’s all just a web that feeds of itself. You could shower someone with gifts and things like that but you’d never know their heart and that’s…hard to hear.
Even more is how all that would impact our ideas of ourselves like here: Reddit - The heart of the internet
Every idea and norm we operate on: sex and what we think it means, the good and bad of the world, taste and what makes media “good”, all of it is from being caught in the web of meaning we are born into. But in the end it’s meaningless, a mirage according to what psychoanalysis says: Reddit - The heart of the internet
I guess it just feels like all of it calls into question the meaning and things I took for granted and just formalizes it in a scientific way. Like saying what I said but smarter and more hopeless, heavily leaning on the failure of language.
Makes me wonder if the feeling of connection is just a like like the comments say. But then I remember other philosophies argue otherwise and say that separation is an illusion and we just invent distinctions. So which feelings to trust. But speaking of feelings apparently those cannot be trusted because there is a whole part of you that is unknown (the unconscious) which renders self knowledge impossible.
It’s very challenging an I don’t have the words to respond to it.
There’s not really much magic there, though the biology part might be overstated as some psychoanalysts like to tell me:
Are you saying that things that happen in movies cannot happen in real life? What part of Casablanca is unrealistic to you? And we don’t have to talk about Casablanca, there’s a million other movies that depict realistic moments of love. At the end of the day, a person expressed their idea of love through the making of a movie, your argument here is weak if you think we can’t turn to different mediums to see how love operates. “Giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t need it.” Let’s break it down so you can understand, because clearly you don’t. The thing you don’t have is way to make your lover complete, and the thing your lover doesn’t want is to be complete in the first place. Because to be complete means to not lack, and is there any a time that we don’t lack? The answer for Lacanians is no. It kinda seems like you have never fallen in love before, because the situation in Casablanca is honestly incredibly easy to understand if you aren’t an alien. Let’s simplify. Hypothetically, you and your lover are kidnapped and locked in a basement somewhere. The kidnapper gives you a choice. Does he kill you and let your lover free or vice versa? Are you gonna say “teehee since I’m truly in love I’m not going to elevate my lover above myself, please kill them and let me go”. We don’t even have to limit this to romantic love either. Wouldn’t most parents sacrifice themselves for their children if they have to? Isn’t a good parent one that elevates their kin above themselves? Also isn’t Everything Everywhere All At Once a movie and not real life? Why are you recommending movies to me? Cut it out. As far as Zizek goes, you clearly misunderstand most of what he’s saying, because it could not be farther from the depiction of love that Hollywood slop gives us. Instead of the “happily ever after” type love that Hollywood promotes, Zizek claims that love can hurt, it can be betray, it can be messy. You can doubt yourself, you can unconsciously ruin the relationship, you can try fixing something that can never be repaired. If you’ve ever been in love then Zizek’s ideas should resonate fairly easily. And it’s funny because in the Why Theory episode on Love, they clearly say that they are specifically talking about real love, and not infatuation or lust. So your critique there is unfounded unless you can find some examples where they are mistaking love for infatuation? Like really, you’re going to chalk up the relationship in Casablanca to infatuation? Have you seen the movie? Regarding the food stuff. Of course people regret their enjoyment. But it doesn’t explain why they do it. We can feel ourselves become full, so why do we keep eating when clearly our body is indicating that we are full and we are going to regret it later. Maybe your alien body doesn’t but ask literally anyone if they have stuffed themselves past capacity and regretted it later, they will all say yes. Enjoyment is all about regrets. You enjoy skipping the gym, because it delays your progress to getting what you desire, that beach bod. And then later that day you regret it and go “dang why didn’t I just go to the gym”. You enjoy skipping out on your studies, because what you desire is good grades and not studying will cause you to not get the grades you wanted. And then after you fail the test you inevitably regret not studying. This is the entire point of psychoanalysis, this is the “unexplainable” phenomenon that Freud was so interested in, the built in unconscious self sabotage that we all have. Maybe you don’t like food, or friends, or love, or anything else. But I bet there’s at least one thing in your life that operates this way. Maybe you desire to understand these concepts more, but you enjoy not understanding and so delay any meaningful progress to actually learning these concepts. Here’s another thought experiment. In psychoanalysis, there are different ways that the unconscious can relate to their symptom. The main categories are here are the Neurotic, Psychotic, and Pervert. Everyone according to psychoanalysis falls under one of these categories. Let’s say hypothetically you are a Neurotic, are you going to claim that Psychotics don’t exist? Because you have never experienced schizophrenia, it can’t possibly be true? No of course not. So stop relying solely on your anecdotal experiences, because there might just be a possibility to experience life in a way that you aren’t familiar with, and that doesn’t make the theory wrong.
Though to be honest a lot of it sounds like “just so” stories and not really how people react, like saying that folks find joy in not getting what they want, that’s not really true. The reason seems to be that evolutionarily we didn’t evolve for long term goals which are abstract and not immediate and get distracted by short term easier ones. That makes more sense at least.
“rock to mind” was a very shorthand way of describing Plantiga’s arguments. It was not meant to sum up the entirety of the history of the universe and how we all got here. As I’ve already said, I don’t endorse or defend Plantiga or the idea that how science describes the beginning of life in any way proves that there must be some other force that created consciousness, something other than physical processes. All I did was summarize the point made in the video so I could have this discussion with InTheDarkness.
Yep. Sure is. Everyone goes through this during their brain development. Sometime in the teens. You figure out that the world you were told about, before you could grasp complex concepts, is not the world you need to know about it, the one in which you will need to find a way, so you can feed and clothe yourself. That is, you grow up. I’ve been listening to interviews with Jonathan Haidt because he is releasing new conclusions on his data about how social media has arrested the development of young minds. And by young, I mean up to people in their early 30’s. You might be in that group, even if you are a little older.
You are stuck. You have not moved very far from when you first arrived on this forum. You don’t have the words. You are challenged. You have tried therapy and medicine and researching philosophy on your own. You don’t know if connection is impossible or separation is an illusion, and it doesn’t help you to hear that neither does anyone else, really.
There are some things that can’t be made into a flowchart. They can’t even be put into language, other than the language of story. They aren’t taught, they have to be “got”.
To receive something: “I got a call from my friend.”
To acquire or obtain something: “She got a new job.”
To arrive at a place: “We got to the airport early.”
To connect to a network: "I can’t get a phone call.
But not like a call, a job, a place, or a connection, but gotten in a way that your neurons loosen old connections and form new ones. Like the way Yoda said, “you must unlearn what you have learned”
That doesn’t change its utter disconnectedness, when it comes to appreciating the biological creatures that we are.
If all you are interesting in is the florid Ego driven ideas people can come up with - fine have your endless discussion that doesn’t help clarify anything,
I’ll keep up my argument with the shallowness of people’s self-absorbed thinking processes - Remember I’m the Earth Centrist defending something other than our smug self-serving nature, and our current race to the bottom.
We are biological creatures and cannot be clearly understood through another avenues and the great philosopher’s and the lesser talkers I’ve tried listening to, or even conversing with, treat it like the plague and run for hills, every time I try to weave it into our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.
So they can get back to sharing platitudes.
Go find someone else to fight with. You are trying to put me in some kind of box where your narrative, that is unrelated to this thread, fits
I don’t know if it’s something like that so much that psychoanalysis calls into question the stuff that I took to be normal for being human with thinkers like this: Alenka Zupančič – EGS – Division of Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought
Writing things like: Lying on the couch: psychoanalysis and the question of the lie
Zupančič, Alenka. “Lying on the couch: psychoanalysis and the question of the lie.” In edited by Jochen Mecke. Galda & Wilch, 2007. ISBN: 1931255210
Like if you read the links I posted what it talks about is questioning what we take to be natural, whether desire is natural or just us projecting fantasies onto the world, to suggesting that sex is masturbation with another body and not a connection. Even calling into question the possibility of human connection because language is indirect and not direct so can it be said you know another (that’s not even getting into the subconscious).
I don’t think this is what growing up means per se so much as it contradicts what I hear being talked about what is healthy and normal. I thought desires were just no big thing but hearing that it’s just you projecting onto things kinda has me doubting what I want in life, if I want anything. The stuff about fantasy I don’t really get and it’s hard to get a straight answer because everyone has something different.
I cannot make sense of it and when I cannot make sense of it I assume the worst. I mean looking at everything psychoanalysis says:
“I was literally just reading on here about a patient who became so unnerved and unseated by lacanian analysis that they decided to give up their home/job altogether and live on the streets.
I don’t really think lacanian intervention dictates anyone go that far, but, to each their own. The idea is to unseat what makes you suffer, or atleast enjoy your suffering and symptoms. No one has to go live in the wilderness or denounce civilization to separate themselves psychologically, from civilization.
Does the phrase symbolic distance/detachment mean anything to you?”
That’s from one of the posts, but the point of it seems like there is no “way” to be found in the world because all of it is just fantasies we made up, it’s not real.
Like saying you’re into someone or have a “Type” (in terms of sexual attraction) is being written off as just some fantasy you project on them, you aren’t into that part of them but your idea in your head. This goes on to what I read about there being no sexual relationship according to Lacan, saying there is no perfect and unmediated method between the sexes (just look at this comment thread for an example): Reddit - The heart of the internet
I think it’s far different from what you’re saying, that’s more like saying you have to make your own meaning, this is saying there never was anything to be made.
I’ve read your links and commented on them. When people are saying you are just projecting, they might be the ones doing the projecting. You have to take things and map them on your experience and with our sources, not just pick the ones that fit your preconceived notions.
Yes. I know. I have told you that you do that from the beginning. That is your greatest error. That is the thing you should unlearn. Stop assuming the worst.