recovering from 2013

I want to create.
I want to influence the next generation and guide.
I don't have hope. It doesn't matter. I don't need hope,
  I just need goals.
I need to forget outcomes at some level.
To just plod through, and be aware.
Life is a mystery and that is enough.

more complications

A follow-up to my previous post.

So "the world" plays to our selfish default settings. But religions also often promote values that keep us surrounding ourselves with others who are self-same. The shared alternate values provide a balance of powers that may be a step forward for the individual who is hoping to escape a desire fulfillment prison but to be truly other centered or just to be able to understand and relate to diverse people, you have to spend time with them, and focus your energies on it. And know thyself.

To an extent this is what Jesus did, headed out and spent time with tax collectors, sinners, Samaritan women, loved his enemies, etc. But then we get phrases like “do not be yoked with unbelievers” coupled with (species preserving?) protective thinking which makes Christianity resemble just another in-group. To my mind, a properly Christian view of the world does seek to understand and relate to others but it has its limits. For instance, it lacks the resources to advocate a thorough existential exploration of opposing viewpoints.

Along with spending time with communities with divergent values there’s practicing regress-- assuming the truth of a perspective or belief in order to understand it. For all of us I assume the exercise is a pretense but there’s nothing in the perspective I operate from that would keep me from participating in explorations as thoroughly as possible. The kooky consilience is that these attempts to love and understand one another can coincide with a pursuit of objectivity akin to Nz’s perspectivism.

This synthesis makes sense to me, well, coupled with a willingness to play outside the lines. And a willingness just to be. And Listen. And Epochè. And Silence.

complicated relationship with religion

These thoughts are pretty incomplete but if I wait until I find them satisfying I'll probably never post them. I'll start with a few snippets from that David Foster Wallace article I posted a bit ago:

The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship...

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.

By denying religion I don't thereby embrace the "values of this world". I often find the "values of this world" as annoying as religion's values and I generally think of religion's values as also the values of "the crowd". The values of the crowd need the values of other crowds. Balance of powers and all that.

It used to be that all education was dictated by or associated with the church. Some Oxford dons led me to believe the first separation of Church and state in regard to education came with Henry VIII (something about funding coming directly from the monarchy, they had a lot of positive things to say about ol' Henry). But we're still in danger of homogeny in regard to education. The state is also an agent of homogeny. Homogeny is at odds with freedom (and imagination -- viva Orwell/Huxley).

--
I'm a believer in external reinforcers and religions are what exists.

--
I'm more of a fan of the imitation of Christ (minus the bloody end) than following Christ. Why does the latter often preclude the former? The fear-driven life?

--
We were involved with religion because we are on a growth path and it was part of that path. The path went through religion but I don't deny that religion took us further along that path. If we remained in religion we would stagnate.

ingroup/outgroup

I suppose it's only natural for us to be more lenient towards our ingroup than outgroups but I still find this phenomena frustrating.

For philosophers or rationals (or whatever you want to call crazy people like me) we tend to expect others to be similarly rational. But since so many are ignorant or irrational, those within our ingroup often get a free pass.

So, to be consistent we could be equally hard on those within our ingroup but this move isn't very human because we are the anomaly here and it's a move toward isolation and consequent loneliness.

The alternate move is to lend your sympathies to irrationality in outgroups in the same way you lend them to your ingroup. This is the move I attempt to make as it seems most fit for this more heterogeneous world and it matches my Whitmanesque desires for world travelling.

Note that this meditation doesn't speak at all to lenience toward other rationals. I prefer a bit of contention in that ingroup.

agents of positive change

modified from 10/10/2009

When I was younger and more Christiany I thought evangelical Christianity was the end all be all, that once someone "gave their life to Christ" they'd be all set. With experience came the realization that most the people who "gave their life to Christ" would live an existence that only varied slightly from the American norm. Studying the history of Christianity too showed me that though some were able to do incredible things with Christianity (e.g. Methodists in England pushing to stop slavery, MLK, Jr.), that Christianity itself was often impotent in the face of power or worse, used by the powerful to sedate and confuse the masses. Where I did see substantive positive differences they came mainly, I thought, from temperament and education (especially philosophical education).

After that, I went through a phase where it was hard for me to imagine someone who had studied epistemology and the history of philosophy yet remained content in his dogmatic slumbers reinforcing the status quo and still looking to repetition for answers. I didn't really expect all philosophers to be shining lights but at the least I expected them to understand how precarious and absurd our situation truly is. I was thoroughly disabused of that notion as I read and heard from philosopher after philosopher who clearly understood the material yet seemed to have plenty of psychological and rhetorical resources to keep them from any need to appropriate their knowledge.

At this point I assume as I pick other agents of positive change I'll just be corrected again and again; this must be my Sisyphus task. Imagining Sisyphus happy, I look for another. So what are the agents of positive change we can rely on?

I don't know. Different strokes for different folks? I do think some aspects of religion are the answer for some people at some times and the same for philosophy. They both teach types of discipline that can help us achieve goals and reorient ourselves in ways we require. The best answer, at this point, seems to be to put yourself in the place where there are the most external reinforces to move you in the direction you're trying to go.

And of course love, love is an agent of positive change. Gotta love love.

the legitimate purposes of philosophy

• the pursuit of truth - too boring/exhaustive for one person's lifetime, delegated to the sciences as a collective enterprise
• unearthing prejudices - especially by looking at the prevailing wisdom of our time and tracing its development but also by carefully attempting to understand other disciplines, people, cultures and ages (ways of being)
  
• delineating between phenomenal and epiphenomenal beliefs - to better target beliefs that need changing and also to better determine how to change oneself (specifically I think it's best to target/understand beliefs that impact your MO and even at times to work backwards from behavior to understand beliefs)
  
• untying a knotted understanding - personal therapy to avoid spending mental energy on things that don't really matter
• reframing - tweaking our perceptions and stories to achieve different ends, gaining new eyes
  
• "know thyself" "become who you are"
  
• means to explore an arbitrary literary/artistic drive
  

Anything I'm missing?

shared history

Talking with others who share our personal history provides respite. It allows for saying more with less.

Dumbo's surprising responsibility

7/2/2007

It's not a genuine choice unless it's presented by our context. If I believe in a flying Elephant that's in charge of the rotation of Pluto, it isn't a personal (genuine?) belief for me. I could hold that belief or try to hold that belief if that's what I mean by "choose" a belief but what would that mean, what would it look like in life? (e.g. is it just a thought or something that comes up in passing conversation or does the belief actually demand something substantial?)

5/31/2009

RE: 7/2/2007 (Which still seems unclear.)

marketing and the genuine choice

A lot of marketing attempts to create a need and then meet it. Christianity is often presented in this way.

questionable questions

Some philosophical problems are artificial. When I work on unearthing prejudices I ask myself, "am I working on an area that's adequately personal? Does this question really matter?"

philosophical turn

For most students of philosophy a moment comes when a perspective or prejudice they've held for quite a while gets overturned. Like Hume's problem of induction hits you just right and you think, "oh great, so logic can't even help with my belief in the uniformity of nature?"

In any case, which belief gets changed isn't the point. The point is, from there on you have to face the personal fact that along with the expression I know is the expression I thought I knew (Wittgenstein). What separates philosophers from others is that they live in the perpetual possibility of the turn.

--
Q: And what of so-called philosophers?

*shrugs*

I'm just relieved I didn't limit the set to only those who perpetually pursue the turn.

bits of rubbish

12/8/2008

I was voted "most conscientious" in high school.

11/10/2008

The more fully we understand our historical context, the more capable we are of unearthing our major prejudices. We don't thereby gain so much power over these prejudices; at best we gain the ability to comprehend our resonant frequencies in relation to them and tune ourselves accordingly.

To change our prejudices more substantially than that takes a more substantial force (trajectory, the moment of crossing the Rubicon, no turning back, external reinforcers generally) and has a more substantial cost: time and the exclusion of other choices because of the limitations of time and the fact that you can only be formed in some ways at certain times in life.

11/2/2008

Q: What do I call a person who needs the carrot on the stick called heaven/hell or some sort of divine command in order to behave morally and know what morality is?

A: an immoral person acting like a moral one

Which is certainly preferable to an immoral person acting like an immoral one.

--
I use the term "moral" in this way because the answer to the question "whose morality?" is ours. Meaning the culture in which our moral identity has been cultivated. The shape of this formative culture is increasingly varied and variable because of our increased use of technology to communicate across societies and cultures. Isolating your moral identity to your religious belief system or something else ideologically singular leaves you limited, blinded and dishonest. Refusal to take religious identity into account would also be a mistake.

--
"Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious? Or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"

The Euthyphro ^{[text | wikipedia]}


10/25/2008

Culture and language define the character of our consciousness.

Our consciousness is the ground from which everything else grows. It defines the parameters of everything else. It's analogous to the box in the expression "thinking outside the box" but it's the box that's impossible to think outside of. Not that it can't be shifted and changed but it can't be changed via thought experiments or propositional assent. Or at least I can't easily see how that'd be possible.

the loss of culture and identity

if

Culture (language) is the primary identity forming force.

and

Cultures (languages) are being destroyed by the day.

then

What is being lost is depth of identity or the possibilities for genuine variation in depth of identity.

but

We keep thinking in terms of those tiny morsels called ideologies and thereby fool ourselves into believing we aren't really losing something so valuable.

i should also include this blast from the past

from 6/25/2007

It seems like a lot of people think the world is a place where you’ve got a ton of different packaged worldviews and your mission is to choose between them and pick one, put it on like a helmet with goggles and your world will forever be transformed by it. You “understand” the people with different worldviews because you understand their helmet.

Truly understanding people is quite different because each person’s view of the world is really their own. A person’s view of the world is mostly guided by things that are outside of his/her control (environment, culture, indoctrination, etc.). So understanding myself and my view of the world is a discovery process not a construction process. It’s similar when I change my view of the world. I read something or understand some new concept and can’t help but be changed by the concept.

I think some story like this is the human process and I think arguments about this camp vs that camp don’t really get anything done. So… I wouldn’t pair Spinoza and Einstein in that way and I view all people as having distinct worldviews. If I were to pair people by worldviews I’d probably be more likely to use culture as a metric. Culture seems to have a large impact on human behavior and therefore seems like something we could (should?) work on directly to make a better world. Looking around… “American” is what defines the people I see in regard to behavior much more than Christian or Athiest or Buddhist.

choosing camps… choosing faiths… maybe those aren’t really choices we have? OR how is it that we gain that level of control over “reality”?

--

This is part of the background from which that previous post may make more sense.

In a lot of ways all this is just an argument to get me out of what I consider to be nearly worthless arguments. You'd think that would mean I would think this kind of meta-argument was even more worthless but I'm a strange duck.

wonder bread

8/18/2008

To me, understanding philosophical paradigms is primarily about interpersonal relationships. Understanding a person is roughly equivalent to understanding a philosophical paradigm. More often than not, the former is more valuable than the latter but the realms aren't entirely distinct.

This understanding, combined with wonder, is the essence of philosophy.


Note: my new thing-- standing around pointing and naming the essence of things

on listening, audience and approach

5/21/2008

I'm not so interested in bliss or something else that aims to satisfy my soul. I'm already overly satisfied. I need something so entirely unsatisfying that it has the power to turn me into that person who is the change I want to see in the world.

How did Gandhi do it?


5/3/2008

I listen to the advice of long dead thinkers to learn from their mistakes. I inhabit their time so that I can better understand and engage my own.

But why should I engage with those living in the past? Because a few such men currently exist in the present? Computer emulated virtual worlds are much more real than the habitat the slaves of yesteryear occupy.


--
"to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin." (James 4:17 NASB)

The awake christian recognizes the predominant behaviors in western culture as sin.

The awake humanist recognizes human behavior as the tangled mess produced by the human animal.

Without adequate recognition and awareness there is no path towards correction.

The aware humanist seeks to untangle the knotted mess through understanding again (and again (and again)) the human context. Recognizing himself as a raw metal, he throws himself on a deliberate, particular trajectory towards change -- a refining fire.

The aware christian decries "fear" and "safety" to seek correction through the dangerous imitation of Christ.

The categories "christian" and "humanist" are not mutually exclusive.

Everyone who is awake travels the narrow path.

--
the analytic mind

Among engineers and scientists, I often find a strongly analytic mind. The practice of understanding is a bit different for this type of person. For people who quickly identify the structures which shape the world and see conversation in terms of propositions and conclusions, understanding is a matter of building and envisioning a compelling structure for that other person in order to better understand them. This sounds like a complex process but for this type of person it's less difficult than the more obviously relational modes of understanding.


5/2/2008

Listening goes together with understanding. Listening is what you do when you hear someone else "in order to" understand and relate to that person. Purpose reveals itself and other, more cleverly disguised, sometimes less cleverly disguised "in order to"s must be uncovered and extinguished in oneself.

on understanding and analysis (scribblings)

5/2/2008

"pearls before swine! pearls before swine!"

"quack! quack!"

I waddle around flustered like the ugly duckling with ruffled feathers.

---
Contrary to how many think of it, stupidity is not related to intelligence. I rarely meet a stupid moron (in the technical sense of moron). We expect a moron to behave a certain way because of diminished capacities. We love him for his deficiencies because it's a trait of birth, not a trait of character. I only recognize stupidity as it shows itself in character. If you examine the ordinary use of expletives related to intelligence you'll probably find others who express similar sentiments.

I'd like to get this phrase into more common usage, "That's the stupidest genius I have ever met."

We're all subject to our environment and genetics so someone might say that sort of statement is unfair. For the sake of humanity, the stupid geniuses deserve blame.

---
Analysis is not the same as understanding. Understanding is when you try to reach through the text to get at the meaning in the person. Analysis is when you examine the text to determine its logical structure, strengths and flaws. Understanding is much more difficult and useful than analysis and it requires a much more subtle mind. Analysis is for the man who wants to become only a better thinker in a particular way, understanding is for the man who wants to become a better person.

Understanding and analysis are thoroughly at odds with one another. Only a rare individual in an exceptional situation will willingly undergo external analysis. Everyone loves to be understood. Analysis is like behavioristic educational methods: It's a useful tool but it is best used (i.e. used morally) when practiced on oneself.

We fool ourselves when we think we've found accuracy in either of these methods. The best thing we can get from understanding is better relationships, the best thing we get from analysis is personal clarity.

Analysis can clarify what you've got but understanding embraces imagination in such a way that it can move you forward.


4/30/2008

The true myth says, "you must change your life." (Rilke)

Equally, the myth which fails to continually communicate that message ceases to be true.


4/22/2008

the value of metaphysics

I use metaphysical systems to moderate my arguments. What I mean by this is that I think an argument holds more water if it can be described within a variety of metaphysical contexts. I slap on a few that I find in some part compelling and see if, when I reframe, a version of the argument can still stick. If so, there's usually something to it, if not, I try to at least rethink a bit before I go forward. This also shows me strengths and weaknesses in various systems. That being the case, I hope that most of my arguments could be accepted by a reasonable individual with whom I have metaphysical disagreements (I do think such a person exists, maybe even two!).


4/18/2008

When forced to choose between
    "fatalistic bullshit" and "sentimentalist blather",

I'll take the foolishness over the falsity.

--
All men (I mean me) at times fall into the trap of speaking without thinking.

street intelligence

4/5/2008

toward a new ecological awareness

At some point a certain sort of presence and attitude, knowledge of the relationship between plants and animals (we are also animals) to one another and their environment, was necessary to exist and be successful in the world. We need to adopt a similar sort of awareness within our contemporary context. That's not to say we need to live how we once lived but that we need to become aware again of what's going on around us with the old sentiment of necessity and urgency.

Perhaps what Thoreau was looking for when he decided to go into the woods was a method towards gaining this new ability through experiencing the more ancient one.

When I walked out of the theater after watching Into the Wild, I overheard a number of people saying "what a waste of a life". They may be masking quality of life with quantity of life. Chris McCandless died young but not before learning to live at least once. His life serves as a warning, he wasn't adequately prepared. More importantly though, his life and his responses can show us things about ourselves and our societies that need to be reformed. We all take risks every day. The waste is when we lose our lives in car accidents and early heart attacks -- deaths that are merely a product of the ordinary overindulgences. He chose a different form of expression, the wisdom of youth.

Many find neither the wisdom of youth nor the wisdom of age.

---

on the uses and abuses of the word "philosopher"

The contemporary usage of the word "philosopher" has pulled it into disrepute.

On the one side we have philosophy as a profession which is really only practiced in universities so implies the forms of scholar, teacher and perhaps schoolmaster. The analytic tradition especially focuses on clarity (which usually also implies complexity) of thought. Philosophy as a discipline may or may not be making progress but it is as valuable a profession as any other. Some of these philosophers focus on contemporary translations, elucidating complex thought and bringing past thoughts to bear on the present. Others are focused on the limitations of language and science. Philosophers like Will Durant attempt to survey the sciences and bring the most important results to the attention of the public in as clear a form as possible. In the best cases, the philosopher-scholar gives us a full serving of intellectual honesty and the associated honesty to oneself -- this is no small task.

On the other side we have everyday people who, when confronted with the phrase "I'm a philosopher" express bafflement or worse, conjure an image of a high brow sedentary lifestyle. The main thing to note here is not what people see in the term but what they don't see. Namely, the life form of the sage. No one goes to the "philosopher" for wisdom.

Why is this the case?

I doubt Martin Luther King, Jr. or Gandhi could be considered good philosophers in the narrow academic sense. They were still the ones best willing and able to do what was necessary for their time.

At first I considered resuscitation of the term but how could that make me a better person? It's like Sarah says, "people go back to other people for advice when the advice works."

more on the philosopher as traveler

1/26/2008

Communication and honesty go hand in hand. You participate in them with others to the extent they have earned your trust.

Some also call what they do when they use people as simply a means "communication".
--
Meditations are for honesty, not for truth. In contrast to how philosophy has seen itself.
--
Philosophers often speak about "man" or "all men" when they're usually talking about one man, themselves.

This is hardly an original thought, as if thoughts should only be adopted and promoted when they're original. Copyright- what a stupid, horrendous, inhuman lesson. A widely adopted and enforced, self refuting concept. Nothing is ever entirely your own, at best it's your own "and".
--
In contrast to Descartes you don't pursue that which you cannot doubt but rather pay attention, where you are. I actually think this is what he did though it's not how we've traditionally understood it. This whipping boy (Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum) should be lauded for waking again a false consciousness.
--

Each other philosophy is a journey. Similar to a journey in the world. You see the landscape, the way of being and you learn. These journeys provide methods with which to engage the world, to understand.

A philosopher is then a master of approach, of method. He may be a fountain of knowledge and wisdom but that's not where his true value lies.

2/10/2008

Examining other philosophers with an eye toward objective truth is like attempting to learn from an athlete by examining their currently held records.

What is learned is in the person, in her way of being in and perceiving the world. What we gain is a new attitude and approach, not new metaphysical clutter. So what we're looking for is relevancy and humanity.

Scribblings

2/15/2008
A philosopher settling upon a previously defined view of the world is like a life-long climber setting up his residence on a mountaintop and throwing away all his gear. Perhaps he's done with struggle and thus awaits death?

2/23/2008
The philosopher as traveler adopts beliefs for their therapeutic value instead of for their truth value. That doesn't mean the beliefs are not true.

They are not after beliefs, ideas, and truth so much as a better life, better ability to enjoy and respect life.

They've seen those who create the world in their own image and seek instead to explore the world. They discover instead of create not because they don't create but because they embody the attitude of wonder.

When you read the travelers you don't take away their truths, you take away lessons for living. "lessons for living" sounds trite, it's not. Rather, it's overfamiliar through misuse.