In everyone's life, they're going to have 'good and bad' things happen to them. I might get mugged today, I might get given money, I might feel happy or I might feel sad- I have some control over these things. If I didn't want to get mugged I could chose to leave the house as little as possible, for example, but this doesn't mean that I would never get mugged. This is seemingly the way things 'have' to be, because we have to have to have an engagement with the world or the universe. It doesn't have a particular slant, it's just that pain and pleasure or success and failure, are parts of life. Some people choose to call it 'God' and other people choose to call it 'life, etc. Whether there's a big plan, a god, or nothing of the sort; I think we might be able to safely say that 'good and bad' things happen to people throughout life.

We live in a world where people are born and die, and we understand that for us that have yet to die, life carries on. I suppose naturally, we assume that things will continue as they are after our death. We can't prove that, but perhaps people feel like there's enough evidence to support the idea that the universe will carry on after I die. Scientifically, energy cannot be created and cannot be destroyed, only transferred. So I'll die and could become food for maggots or something. I think we safely assume that our own death is not the end of the universe, and so there is reason to believe in an afterlife, because we would readily assume that there is life after our life.

It's normal for us to grow up in our own specific context, and hence we do bring our ideas and learnings to the table that is our current life. You can't be wrong for how your particular life has taken you, but from what you're saying, I think that maybe you don't have enough to fill the void that has been left since your questioning of religion. I would imagine that having grown up around a lot of religion, the lack of it must certainly appear as a lack; whereas there are people who have almost no interest in anything 'spiritual/religious' and have no desire to.

Whatever feelings and beliefs you have are fine, you don't need to fit into a box. You could, for example, just believe in God when it suited you. Some people might have problems with that, but that is their problem. Do whatever you need to, and think whatever you want without worrying about if it's wrong.

For example, is the feeling of dishonesty when listening to a podcast helpful for you? I doubt it.

Apparently, people have a tendency towards belief.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/12/believe.aspx

Maybe you felt God at one time and now you can't shake it. If you want to believe something badly enough, you can through conditioning I suppose. I, personally, prefer to stay open minded and believe what makes the most sense to me, remaining an individual.

Btw, God does not make bad things happen. I've heard it explained like this: God is the boss. He is in charge. He is not in control. He chooses to relinquish his control at times. This is when the devil/sin steps in. If you don't believe in the existence of the devil, I challenge you to explain how good and bad exist.

I believe that humans have a natural tendency towards spirituality. We have evolved alongside religion and spirituality for a damn long time, and I bet that some of it has become embedded into our code.

There's nothing wrong with having this feeling. We humans have illogical feelings all the time. No human is 100% rational. Perhaps you can even use these feelings to make you a better person.

>>462

Yes, but everything that is rational is interpretable in theory by humans. Who's to say that everything is by nature comprehensible? The positivists gave up last century as far as I know, widen your scope.

If you had a proof for God, it would not be God. The divine is unapproachable through the mundanely human. Also, I'm not talking about the pop culture jesus-around-the-neck god that many reasonable people are rightly disgusted by.

>>455
This is the kind of pointless apologist rationalization that tells us absolutely nothing. None of us could even begin to explain how a theoretical divine being would think or operate. I'll participate though, the problem of evil is a non-issue because good and evil are arbitrary human constructs. Besides, we can't see the big picture; Allowing the death of millions could prevent the death of billions.

>>514 here

>>516
>Then he continues with the typical edgy atheist 100% literal interpretation

The problem is that it's Christians themselves that are insisting that their Bible must be taken literally. Of course, when a non-Christian brings up one of the batshit insane things that the Old Testament has to say, like slavery being okay or rape victims being required to marry their rapists, suddenly they're all like "Woah hey, you're taking that outta context! You can't do that, man! Not cool!"

>>518

This. Christianity is not some unified entity in regards to interpretation of the bible, many denominations don't look at the bible as anything more than a moral example in some situations and dispensing entirely with the old testament (most of the exceptionally crazy shit is old testament). In fact there are churches where most of the people didn't believe anything beyond the reality of a God incarnate as man, rejecting any specific claims as necessarily false because any story of one trait or act would not be able to communicate the sublime nature of God.

I'm sure you know this, it just bothers me to see educated people disparage the largest religion on the planet based on eccentric beliefs of a subset of that group. So yeah, there are many Christians who look at the bible as not even mostly-true.

>>516
Well, ken ham did emphasize that little bible bit quite alot.

My interest is in doctrinal disputes. What would an orthodox or nestorian christian have to say? Why does the debate rest soley in the hands of the western pentarch and his bastard offspring?

>>534

I'm not making a dispute, I'm just saying it would be interesting to know. From what I know of history, the east was the intellectual center of christendom, for most of it's formative period. If this debate is to be settled in any way, I want to see the best christianity has to offer, for a fair assessment.

It's like if you were learning about egyptology, you'd go to egypt wouldn't you? Or just stay in your university department?

I mean take an outside perspective. As a scholar living in the 12th millenium, interested in the debate for the sake of truth or some other frill. I mean there's hundreds of years of case law on the subject, if you consider church scholarship. Theological academia has a massive tradition, theology being coterminous with philosophy for a great period. So treat the catecheticals like any other text.

I want to see some sources cited and no bullshitting just because it's religion.

I think what he is talking about doctrinal variations in Christianity on the creation of the universe.

The thing is that most eastern churches are different in identity and perspectives towards God, not in their account of creation. So, Saint Thomas Christians in India are creationists regardless of what the Pope thinks.

To find religious organizations that embrace an evolutionary timeline you would have to go to western churches with exposure to quality education. For instance, many Catholic, Episcopal, and Evangelical Lutheran churches in places like the United States and Europe are led and attended by evolutionists from the lay people to high level clergy.

Most churches try to not take a position on the issue at all in order to attract both groups of constituents.

Source: Been to a lot of churches and visited a few of the official websites of major denominations

>>1017
>do you have such problems?
No, because I know that things aren't as terribly bad as your paranoid and misinformed mind makes them out to be
>how do you cope with that?
I try to be as informed and educated as possible

You're transferring the concepts of tyranny and oppression from abstract to actual in your mind.

I don't want to comment on the actual veracity of your beliefs because I believe doing so would provoke a heated discussion about the state of the union and doing so would be counter-productive. Instead, I want to explain to you why your cognition is faulty.

First, you are effectively trying to predict the future. You cannot do this. Anything you think you know about the future is wrong. Things change in an instant, a single errant neutrino could kill the next Hitler without anyone even knowing. Granted the odds are astronomical, but you get the idea, now apply it to planes, trains and automobiles. Similarly, the same could happen to the next Ghandi or Mother Teresa. You just don't know.

You're assuming your opinions are facts, or worse you're assuming the opinions you read in the news are facts. The next time you read something about how Obama is the anti-christ and is literally waiting for you to leave the house so he can steal your guns, read an "everything is ok" newspaper for a different perspective on the same story. Unless you directly know of some secret society or group that is actively plotting to destroy western civilisation from within, don't believe it. Just because Alex Jones once met a guy at a bus stop who knows someone who said he saw Keith Alexander's super secret world domination plans doesn't mean it's true.

You are experiencing a phenomenon known as world narrowing. What that means is that you are slowly and subconsciously isolating your focus, resulting in you seeing mountains instead of molehills. For instance, talk to any neo-nazi skinhead and they will tell you that jews are the problem with the world, because they honestly believe that because all their friends do, which results in them seeing every news article in the light of "jews are bad." Similarly, talk to any anti-fa member and they will tell you that skinheads are the cause of all the world's problems for the same reason. Talk to a vegetarian, they blame meat eaters, talk to the greens, they blame big oil, talk to a democrat they blame gun nuts, talk to a republican and they blame statists. The solution to this is simple - find other hobbies. If you enjoy nothing but reading the news and posting on obscure imageboards, you will see the world through a depressed pair of eyes. If you enjoy several hobbies such as playing an instrument, socialising, attending sports games as a player or spectator, studying Shakespeare or jacking off, the news will seem much less important to you.

Finally I want to say that there's nothing wrong with the way you feel. You're experiencing basic physiological changes in your body in response to a perceived threat. What is happening to you is no different than what happens to people who suffer anxiety when they go outside, but your trigger is different. Stop reading the news and take up some hobbies. Expand your life, make it more interesting, then when you do happen to glance at a paper it won't seem like such a big deal. These changes take time, you won't notice them until one day you find yourself reading about China invading Japan and making a racist joke to your friend instead of worrying about the consequences.

Good luck.

The brain is the biggest danger to brains.

Except that's wrong. If something cannot be defined, it cannot exist.

That's not to say that being undefined = non-existence. That's absurd, there are plenty of things that exist that are unobserved so haven't been defined, but if it CAN be observed, it CAN be defined, so it DOES exist. If it cannot be observed, (by ANYTHING) then it cannot exist.

>>484

It follows from what you're saying that both the past and future are not real.

As far as OP's post goes, I fail to see how any temporal act of definition could have any effect on whether or not something actually exists.

>>487

No it doesn't. The past has been observed, and can be observed by someone with a large telescope light years away. For instance, if someone 300 million light years away with a powerful telescope was looking at earth, they would see dinosaurs.

The future can similarly be observed by us when we move in to it. It is also possible that it can be observed right now by beings other than ourselves.

Confusion is the fuel of a personality.

>>488

You may see the light that was reflected in your direction in the past, but regardless of what you're seeing, the telescope is still pointed at something very far away that is in the same time as us. "Looking into the past" with telescopes is no different than looking at at the Earth and claiming that you are looking back into the time of the creation of the solar system by looking at something that was created then. The only difference is the longer distances involved.

Seeing the future through the passage of time is completely different than seeing old light waves that reach you in the present.

>>1014
It's dumb for pretty obvious reasons. Yeah, people have warred for these reasons before, but it almost never ends with the aggressing party really becoming more prosperous as a result. 10 years of war have certainly taught us that it doesn't exactly bring ideal results.

But in a broader sense, it's still dumb because there's no such thing as just invading one country in Europe anymore. You'd also be going to war with all their allies, and your own allies aren't going to rush to your defense when they don't see their national interest in it, and might even join the other side. As high and mighty as we see ourselves here in the US, we would not win a full-scale war with the entire continent of Europe, and nuclear war in such a scenario would almost be inevitable, and if doesn't happen it means we would be invaded and defeated.

The most prudent move in this scenario is quite simple: get less dependent on oil. If one country buying oil in a different currency is such an incredible threat to our country, then we need to make it so that it's not a colossal threat, and in the process of becoming more energy independent, we can become a stronger nation, rather than one that has to invade and conquer in order to stay afloat due to internal weakness and an inability to address these problems.

>>1015

Are you serious? War pretty much always ends with the victor becoming much more prosperous. It's how virtually every empire in history has funded its existence. Find a nation smaller than you, go in and take their stuff. End. That's why empires inevitably fall, they need growth to live, and eventually become too big to administer successfully.

You seem to be referring to modern wars, which almost always involve "peacekeeping" in some form. That is not the kind of war the OP is advocating. Think of colonial Britain - were their declarations of war to seek out and eradicate terrorism? Or were they to conquer, rule and plunder the target nation? Can you see the difference between say the British invading India, taking their land and spices, selling them for profit and imposing hefty sea trade tariffs and America sending soldiers to the middle east to track and kill terrorists?

War makes the world poorer, but it makes the victors richer.

I don't think the OP advocates going to war with any EU nation. In fact he specifically states "non-EU." I could be wrong, but that's the way I'm reading it.

As for your point about the US not winning a war against all of Europe, without armchair generaling here, consider that the US is about the same size as Europe, and has a military budget of $680bn/yr, compared to the top 4 EU countries which total 200bn/yr together. Then remember that 4 different countries with 4 different styles of military drill with 4 different languages can never be as effective as a single culturally cohesive entity.

I'm not saying the OP is right at all, in fact I agree with you that the US and the world in general should become less dependent on fossil fuels, but I do stand by my point that the OP shouldn't be dismissed just because you don't like the style of what he has to say.

>>1020

I feel like raising hell on the issue is only going to reduce our political capital. We can get away with this because only crazy people like Iran are asking for it. But a reactionary backlash in the States could have unintended results. This petition is stupid.

Heh, even better would be a return to bretton woods. Fixed pegs just semt inflation to other countries.

It's annoying that my logical argument against Kant, that there can be no such thing as a categorical imperative when all morals are intention based. For example, Kant describes the act of lying as something that must always be avoided, but is it good to tell a child that his drawing is poor? Conversely, is it always good to save a dying man's life if he wishes to die?

I can't work out what statement and challenge it wants me to link up, and it won't let me have any of those.

I feel the same way. What have we gotten ourselves in to? Technology has reached the point where you either have to completely extract yourself from society or become an outcast to get away from it, there is no socially acceptable middle path.

To be honest I doubt there is any way to rationally discuss the effects of it here, or really anywhere, other than speculation. The only solution is to kick the ball down the road or reject it completely, and we humans seem to be very ok with making our luxuries someone else's problem down the road.

Honestly, I'm just thankful that I'm alive now to experience these wonders. I'd estimate that we have another 200-250 years of modern culture before there is a resource collapse, followed by a few millennia of ignorance, hopefully followed by something even greater and unimaginable in the even more distant future.

By restricting the scope of philosophy to what can be expressed mathematically, you handicap it greatly. And no, any idea in English cannot be expressed mathematically. Good luck expressing "quixotic unrestrained passion" in ZFC. Saying that all philosophy should be based in math is like saying that the only numbers we should think about are the ones we can measure with a yardstick.

In fact, as soon as you can represent something symbolically it ceases to be pure philosophy and becomes an axiomatized sub-branch of mathematics.

>>437
"All the real new work is symbolic-logic based"

Please. Not only is that an idiotic and arbitrary statement, it is just straight up wrong.

>>445
>Good luck expressing "quixotic unrestrained passion" in ZFC.
That's certainly not impossible since passion is generally experienced by physical objects. The non BS parts of passion are certainly expressible. Moreover, In the metalanguage of mathematics, people employ nearly unrestricted comprehension, so any sentence in english is fair game as long as it's contradiction free. In some contexts even contradictions are allowed.

>>447

The person experiencing passion is irrelevant, what is important is communicating the idea of it. The "BS" parts of passion are inherent parts of the idea that you can't just chop off so the remains can be expressed in terms of sets.

Once you turn a concept into a statement in mathematics, information is lost in the transformation. For example, you could approach a word problem and produce an equation that describes it, but if all you have is that equation and want to know what it describes you're out of luck. The equation could describe anything that happens to have those properties, including but not limited to the original problem.

Philosophy and mathematics cannot be one and the same without sacrificing the specific ideas that make philosophy relevant to our lives.

>>436
No, absolutely not. This is cargo cult science.
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm

Math is a powerful and useful tool, and it should be applied where it makes sense and contributes to understanding. Making everything mathematical just because it worked well in other disciplines and it looks impressive is idiocy. I wasted years of my life studying economics, so I know the damage this mindset can do.

>>476
>I wasted years of my life studying economics
It's just sad people are coming to terms with this only now

Playing Devil's Advocate, I think most libertarians and the like are upset that they banned smoking in restaurants and other private establishments. It's one thing to ban smoking in public establishments and places where people don't have to be, but as a restaurant I should be able to decide if I want smokers in there, and if other customers/staff don't like being around them they don't have to go there. The problem is, of course, that when it was legal pretty much all restaurants had to allow smoking to stay competitive, and even with smoking and non-smoking areas it wasn't uncommon for people to still have to deal with it when going to more or less any restaurant. Beyond that, they started banning it in outdoor areas, smokers had to move from outside the doorway to farther out and many colleges and workplaces require people to go pretty far lengths- many times no matter what the elements are- to get away from places where people MIGHT be, even if they're not there right now.

It's become a movement that was once focused on just making sure non-smokers didn't have to deal with carcinogens no matter where they went, but now the anti-smoking laws and movement seem to have the goal of trying to over-tax and inconvenience people into quitting. Taking the libertarian hat off, they would probably have more success in funding more broad-based quitting programs, the various treatments can often be quite expensive and Quit-Smoking lines and other programs only really give significant assistance to the poor.

Any person who thinks they can stand alone will be beaten by the group of people who stand together. Civilization is evolution.

>>427
Mutual aid justifies racism. It makes more sense to be empathetic to those more related to you than to some strangers you barely know.

All y'all been indoctrinated by Western ideas of individualism yo. Humans came out the "fittest" because we managed to work together so as to increase to overall fitness of the species. Empathy exists because we as individuals could never survive on our own. We need other people no matter how much they suck.

Drunk posting on 99chan after a long break. Aw yeah.

We can't make things best or permanent, but we can make them better or last longer. The proof that we can do this is in that we have been doing this all along. And this is not limited to skin-deep creature comforts. Technology and science are helping us to gradually improve important things like life and love. It's philosophy, not science, that could never do this. Certainly not to the extent that is being made possible by science.

I am so stoned, I just chiseled all over me. lol <3

"Is it necessary to repeat here the irrefutable arguments of Socialism which nobourgeois economist has yet succeeded in disproving? What is property, whatis capital in their present form? For the capitalist and the property ownerthey mean the power and the right, guaranteed by the State, to live withoutworking. And since neither property nor capital produces anything when notfertilized by labor - that means the power and the right to live by exploitingthe work of someone else, the right to exploit the work of those who possessneither property nor capital and who thus are forced to sell their productivepower to the lucky owners of both. Note that I have left out of accountaltogether the following question: In what way did property and capital everfall into the hands of their present owners? This is a question which, whenenvisaged from the points of view of history, logic, and justice, cannot beanswered in any other way but one which would serve as an indictment againstthe present owners. I shall therefore confine myself here to the statementthat property owners and capitalists, inasmuch as they live not by their ownproductive labor but by getting land rent, house rent, interest upon theircapital, or by speculation on land, buildings, and capital, or by thecommercial and industrial exploitation of the manual labor of the proletariat,all live at the expense of the proletariat. (Speculation and exploitation nodoubt also constitute a sort of labor, but altogether non-productive labor.)"

As an anarchist, I can attest to the fact that an anarchist society is an organised one.

Cool. Anyway I'm gonna go make some coffee. I like coffee.

I'm simply going to refute the first argument only, as I hope it is representative of the core of your sentiment. If this is not the case, please present the core of your sentiment. You went on too many tangents to make it worth addressing any of them.

Assuming you define an imagination as a mental image that is perceived not to be real, then you can safely say that sane people do not live in their imagination.

Even if it is not required to be perceived as not real, the external world still differs greatly from the internal world. Reading about lucid dreaming, asking oneironauts or even trying it yourself will show one very big difference between the internal and external world: consistency. The internal world is inconsistent. If you forget about something in a mental image, said thing will not appear there even if you do not recall it. This will not happen in real life. If you thought you brought your keys with you in a dream when you arrive at your locked door, you will have done so, even if you never touched your keys in the dream. This will not happen in the external world.

Unless you wish to entertain the idea that the measurable external world is still not real ["It is tempting to think of such a thing as a red ball existing"}, the external world is still by definition independent of you and me. The ball still reflects the same wavelengths of light regardless of whether or not you exist. This might be horrifying to some, insulting to others, but that is where all the evidence is pointing.

>>467

Not sure you read beyond the first sentence. The gist of my sentiment is that the perceived 'present' is a construction based on limited information available in the near past- although I deconstruct this interpretation- so that in a literal sense, the consciousness exists in an imagined world. I might point out that any two tests of reality are comparisons between two separate recollections of the past, and therefore are tests of the self-consistency of your memory and the world as you imagine it to be; so yes, again, entirely in your imagination.

>>468
>The gist of my sentiment is that the perceived 'present' is a [mental] construction based on limited information available in the near past
There is certainly a processing delay for us, the most simple example of it being referred to as reaction time. There are more advanced theories and studies on the subject that might be of your interest. The delay, however, does not mean that we do not perceive a present. We can obviously not look into the future, and we do not exclusively recall memories. We live, and act, in a perceived present. This perceived present may certainly lag behind our sensors (which in turn may be subject to lag), that is not the issue. The issue is that you claim that this makes it imaginary without motivating why this makes it imaginary. Please provide your definition of "imaginary".

>>470

It is imaginary because it is a consciousness of a space that is generated within the mind, though also from external stimulus, like all other things which are imaginary. Consider the story of a novel, which necessarily makes reference to external impulses with which we are famailiar in order to render meaning. The story makes reference to an imaginary awareness of space.

>>415

The arrangement of nucleotides in one divine meatsack as opposed to another one is of no significant difference. Not that I read OP's picture. All the dots from the proofreading mode or whatever makes it impossible.

If someone is you they are you. There is no such thing as a soul because I fucking said so; but I have no proof. You're an impossible occurrence of energy manifesting itself into physical consciousness in a universe of non-living stuff, and that is a bad thing. Circumstantial evidence of a fictional character claims that your life is determined by what you do; be ashamed of that as opposed to making the best of life due to that information. Everyone is unique just like everyone else. Imsosmartpayattentiontome.jpg

Life is absurd. However, that doesn't mean it's meaningless; it means that meaning is created by human folly. You don't have ultimate control over your own life, but you have some. Yes, you are a deterministic pile of matter; this is nothing to be sad about.

'Soul' is not a well-defined term. It's not a helpful term to use. Regarding the nature of the soul, the best position is philosophical non-cognitivist; that is to say, to realise that there is no singular concept of the soul, therefore no-one can have anything useful to say about it.

Two people being born and living under the exact same circumstances is practically impossible. There are too many variables. Everyone has a unique set of information in their memories. Everyone has a body that grew slightly differently. Yes, some people can and do become objectively better than others at doing specific things. Yes, this makes them objectively more successful than others at achieving goals that they themselves have set. There is no such thing as a 'default human'. Clearly 'special' people do exist, think people with disabilities - clearly they have less chances of success at certain things. Think savants - people who have far more chance of success at one or more things. Everyone is indeed unique. Not that this should make you feel better about yourself.

>>448
Agreed.

Not that humans aren't still all on a level plain. Judgments are just an illusion created by the insecure mind. We are all the same, but we are all unique. Na'mean?

I believe this post belongs on the Literature board.

>>421
Don't know if this will help, but it might:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3567/3567-h/3567-h.htm

Can a mind exist without ever having senses?

It would exist through the recognition of concepts and self awareness, but would not have the same internal monologue we who do have senses are capable of. That being said, everything should be questioned, and I could easily be wrong.

What if the sense of self is nothing but an illusion, and is representative of an artificial division between what's inside and the rest of the world apart from it? I would say that existence is ubiquitous and the illusion of the self is just generated from a tiny portion of existence that is capable of sapience.

>>435

And there you go, you stumbled upon ego death.

The self is an illusion and not an illusion.

I'm looking that up, I'll get back to you.

SAGE has been used.

Everyone has emotions.

Some people, though, only have logical emotion, the kind that concerns decision making processes. An example would be someone with schizoid personality disorder. They aren't at all interested in other people, and will usually claim not to have any type of strong emotion.

Bale confirmed for psychopath, which I imagine was probably useful for his depiction of a psychopath in American Psycho.

Exoplanets.

We can infer that they are there because we can observe their effects on otherwise regular phenomena.

Emotions are like this. Even if someone can't process a giant ball of emotions, that doesn't meant that it's not effecting their behavior.

I don't know if I would agree that we are driven by our emotions, but I do think that the Limbic system, which is the emotional seat in our brains, is essentially who we are. It's the source of our desires and rewards, and it's also the filter for our experiences.

Additionally, it's one of the earliest-evolved brain structures.

My emotional mood swings are fucking ridiculous. Keep in mind I am a male that is 100% straight and has not been diagnosed with any sort of fault or disease or lack of whatever...and yet, my mood swings change dozens of times a day, not just that many but that rapidly as well.

For an hour, I feel happy. Then I feel sad for 5 minutes before I get angry for no reason for like a half hour straight then Im back to being happy again!

Fuck, Idk what's wrong with me but Im sure as hell positive of the fact that we ALL have emotions, and whether we like to believe it or not, they come out in droves each and every single day, even when we dont notice it.

Everyone has emotions. Otherwise you would die because of inactivity, i.e. starvation, suffocation. You cant logically prove that you should be doing this things unless you assume that survival is something you should be aiming for, and if you completely ignore logic as well you would just act in a random fashion or not at all.

They've designed an experiment to test whether the universe is a simulation. So I think this may help to illuminate the answer to this question.

>>366

I've heard about that. It'll amount to nothing. Sounds like bullshit doesn't it?

>>366
No, they designed an experiment to see if the universe was discrete. Just because computers use discrete math doesn't mean that anything discrete is a simulation, or even that all simulations are discrete.

>>8

"Reason is always a region cut out of the irrational — not sheltered from the irrational at all, but a region traversed by the irrational and defined only by a certain type of relation between irrational factors."


>>66
Regression always comes down to one thing, induction. We are here. Something happened and we are here.
We have no reason to believe that whatever happened will or will not happen again because it exists beyond an infinite source. We will never know an ultimate how or why because INFINITE REGRESSION is INFINITE. Example, if the Big Bang created the universe, what created the Big Bang? Everything comes from nothing? If this is the science you have to offer, I gotta say it is not particularly tight.

We know we are, and that's what we get. Operate within your parameters. Play your position.


>>160

I would argue with just as much logic that "two" is not a real thing. Everything existing is distinct so there can never be two of anything as they could not occupy the same place in space time. So now that we've decided that all numbers are abstract concepts, infinity, the abstract concept/number rides again! Hooray!

Message too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>289
i meant in terms of infinite regress

if there is in an unlimited number of universes, you can't measure "one" universe. at least i don't see how you could. to be able to measure one part of something would require that the whole of that something be finite, no? that was probably better to use as an example than the earth, which can obviously be measured relative to the universe it is in

I don't think the purpose of philosophical thought is to "put out the fire", it's more to determine the structure and properties of the fire, to use your analogy. That starving family in Africa may not get any use of formal philosophy, but I guarantee you that they use the concepts in philosophy to some extent without even realizing it.

As far as your comment about most philosophers being self-centered dicks, I'm tempted to agree, as are many others. Of course there are exceptions to that generalization, but on the whole all people are unpleasant. Try reading some different philosophers, sounds like you've been reading some Wittgenstein or something expecting some kind of profound solution to the world's problems.

Personally I'm partial to my trill nigga Kierkegaard, he went through some shit in his personal life. It takes some suffering and realizations of the stark painful reality of our situation to kick off existentialism. Check it out if you haven't already.

Out of curiosity, are there any specific people/writings that made you feel this way?

>>388
I know philosophy isn't supposed to have a lot of actual practical uses, and I used to be OK with that.

Now I just feel it's a waste of time to ponder about things, I'd rather do things. A philosophy professor I once had said to us the first day "Welcome to my class! You'll learn nothing from it!"

And damn, he was right.

It bugs me, the fact that there are more important matters in my life than to waste time reading and thinking. I feel, pardon my expression, as if it's just a load of bullshit.

I guess it bugs me because I really, really enjoyed reading and having some nice insights about things, but now I just can't do it. It feels fake.

I'll check out Soren to see what's up.


Hey, thanks for replying dude.

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>>389
Entirely out of curiosity, why do you use double spacing for every sentence? For this sole purpose I am not reading your post.