Vivarium: Philosophy Discussions On Any Subject

Speaking about philosophy, or about what someone else said about the world, or the human condition, is not philosophy.
An academic, teaching the history of philosophy, the different ideas, knowing the dates and the names, is not a philosopher.

Speaking about art does not make you an artist.
An academic, teaching art class is no artist. Knowing the names, the styles, the dates, does not make you an artist.

Knowing is not understanding.
Imitating, copying is an inferior talent, even dumb actors can pull off convincingly.

There's a particular kind of creature, out there.
A type of modern that is quickly multiplying, because of the sheltering milieu and his not so innovative kind of niche survival strategy.

It's the type that feeds upon the confusion between knowing and understanding, which is no more than about patterns.

Data, it is believed, will solve the problems plaguing humanity.
This myth, claims that placing different individuals, from different genetic backgrounds, training them in exactly the same way, will produced the desirable outcome of parity.
If you push this "logic" to its extreme, to emphasize what it is claiming, you can say that they believe that if you place a dog and a cat in a controlled environment, and then train them both, in exactly the same way, the genetic differences between canines and felines, will disappear, because the behavior will become similar.
Similarly, if you place a chimpanzee and a gorilla in a controlled environment and train them strictly enforcing behavioral rules, regimenting their daily routines, you will produce a uniform primate type. 

This same underlying myth, is what makes them believe that education can "heal" the world of discrimination, or inequality.

For them knowing names, dates, being able to recite poetry, of philosophical works verbatim, is the same kind of intelligence, the same level of genius, as required to understand philosophy, or the world and create your own philosophy based on this understanding.
A myth founded on the delusion that if you simply say it, it is an argument supporting it, as a line on canvas, the intent, is a genius piece of art.
 
Unable to validate a theory, outside subjective popularity contests, they assume that it's all about seducing as many needy fools as possible, to become a brilliant philosopher.
For them, how many dance to some cRapper's so called music, is evidence of its quality.
The only quality they can understand is popularity.
They have no other standard to evaluate a theory, or art.
Popularity and pleasure, both ingredients of happiness.
How happy it makes them feel, first by incorporating them into a herd, a collective, where they feel safe, and then by how much pleasure it offers, how well ti triggers their primal, automatic, reactions.
Moderns evaluate everything using this subjective standard.
Everything from art to philosophy.

Therefore, impressing others, flattering them, making themselves likable, is paramount in everything they choose to do.
In philosophy, how many famous, or obscure intellectuals one can name, implies that the speaker has understood what he knows the names of, or knows to recite by memory.
The famous icon becomes their proxy, implying power, intelligence, by proxy.
Nietzsche has been often abused in this way, by dullards, and needy boys, that covet not the philosophers pain, but his infamy, the respect and adulation  showers upon his name after his death.
Some, more conniving ones, purposely look for obscure intellectuals, where their understanding cannot be challenged by only the very few, and so their hypocrisy does not risk being exposed as the pretense that it is.

Confusing knowing for understanding is underneath this pathetic ploy, as well.
 It is so ingrained in the modern psyche, after generations of indoctrination, and because of the implications - the easiness, the promise of parity, the flattering of ego.
We can all appreciate the attraction o a myth that makes genetic inheritance irrelevant.


 

A MIND IS LIKE A PARACHUTE : IT DOES NOT WORK UNLESS IT IS OPEN

A mind open to all things, all the time, is a trash-can.
Discrimination is how the mind determines quality.
As I told someone elsewhere, at another time and place....when I hear someone telling me to 'drop my walls'  I build them even higher and thicker.
Without walls, there can be no windows or doors, and you have no choice as to what or who you invite in and throw out, in the trash-heap.
Skin is an organisms wall. others have an exoskeleton. Without a wall life would be impossible. 
The first necessary step for the emergence of life was the creation of the membrane - to separate self, from other.
Self as a the relative control over a portion of space/time.
Self, differentiated from ego, as the inherited past/nature, remaining unconscious, automatic....and ego meaning the part of self become aware of itself.
The Greek word for 'self; is intentionally used to distinguish consciousness, as manifestation of past made present, from self-consciousness...the Know Thyself command, as an ongoing process of self discovery. 

I like the cynical dismissive title on ILP:
ANOTHER BLODDY NIHILISM THREAD
It shows an attitude, an intent.
People fail to appreciate how despite their beliefs they show their nature in subtle ways. Like through their choice of words, their arrangement, and the accentuation, such as capitalization, bold colour etc. 
Already shows intent in the title.
It says...
Do not take this thread seriously....it's like all the others on this cesspool we call ILP...but the fact that it is posted allows the thread starter to continue believing he is open-minded.
He did try...no?
Its intended, and expected failure will only help him dismiss it.
He remains true to himself as open-minded, because he gave something he does not respect a viewing, but he frames it in such a way as to ridicule it, then using the immanent outcome, of the thread becoming like all the "bloody rest" nothing other than gossip and bragging, and small-talk, as evidence supporting his already made judgment.
Little details like that makes hypocrisy so delicious.
This one is using self-sarcasm to either excuse itself, or dismiss itself.
As if the topic has been covered by the **** on ILP, so why bother...it's another one of the same.
Let's get back to gossiping and sharing self-adulation via others - **** using a proxy.
I will rub my impoverished ego against yours, and you can share in the pleasure. 

By the way your comment...

The universe is all that has ever existed past present and future

...tells me you do not fully understand what I am saying...unless the thread has nothing to do with my views and is just another bloody thread on nihilism.
You see, the way you frame the sentence implies that there this box, containing things, that exist, and past, present, future are different parts of the box, full of things existing.
Altogether it is a good way to conceptualize it in a way even a retard can visualize, it does so by disregarding some very important components.

Uni-verse -

late Middle English: from Old French univers or Latin universum, neuter of universus ‘combined into one, whole,’ from uni- ‘one’ + versus ‘turned’ (past participle of vertere ).

vertere = change

verse
vərs/Submit
noun
1.
writing arranged with a metrical rhythm, typically having a rhyme.
"a lament in verse"
synonyms:   poetry, versification, poetic form; More
verbarchaic
1.
speak in or compose verse; versify.

Actually there is no existing of something in past, as it no longer exists, having manifested into present, presence.
Past is what is manifesting as presence. Past is not separate from the present, nor is the future separate from the past, with the present being part of this past.
There is no thing existing separately, as if it is in some other part of the box, the whole, you contextualize as a uni, a one.

The Big Bang is not an event that has happened, it IS happening. It is an ongoing process.
The division of past/present/future is based on the organisms sense of willful control.
Past is what is determined and the organism has no way to intervene....immutable.
Present is the immediate past, and where the Will can impose some intervention.
Future is the yet to be, where the organism can intervene in the present to change it, without know how - uncertainty.

For Moderns this immutable past, or the sum of all previous nurturing = nature, is God, or totalitarianism, fascism.
They focus on the future - progressives - because the determining past/nature is an imposition they cannot endure. So they reject it, dismiss it, and try to forget it...ergo we have the current identity crisis with delusional nit-wits declaring themselves as women trapped in a male body, or race being a social construct, like gender.
This is also how they reject race and sex as the past made present.
Body = past made present.
The future will be present interactions manifesting in presence in the future. 
The root of Modern bushyte, that they can escape the past, or the sum of all previous nurturing we call nature, fails.
The past, what we conceptualize as an immutable thing, a God, determining all, cannot be escaped...it is inescapable in that it is present.
We can forget it, bury it, be blind to it, ignore it, but it is always present.

Past is not something that happened to us, it IS us.
What permits for divergence, freedom, is chaos, redefined as randomness and not a more complex order, a hidden order, or another name for God.
Random, as in no order, the absence of any pattern...not a more complex pattern.
Random permits the divergence from past....it is for God the Devil in the details.
Only through this 'demonic' chaos can the determining past, 'God', be opposed.

Applying this slight modification to our conceptualizing of universe, we use the Hellenic Cosmos, from κόσμημα = jewel, not a one anything.
A bedazzling jewel. That is the metaphor the Greeks chose.
Now all that exists is what is (inter)acting presently, as a manifestation of previous (inter)actions of patterns.
What appears to mind is what is made present to it as dynamic (inter)action.

Framing the concept as "all", that has existed, without actually defining what it means to exist, and all that will ever exist, produces the image, the abstraction, of a container, within which things exist, independently from the vague container we name universe.
It is WE who frame the box. 
A container has boundaries, an edge.
Conceptualizing it places you outside its premises, seeing it as a totality, a whole, a thing.
The imaginary border, the containers edges, produces the concept of in and out.
Something magically emerges IN the container, and then disappears...and if we try hard enough we can make something else emerge in the container sometime in the future. 
But it's not like that.
All is a continuum....there is no whole, because the concept is a way the mind conceptualizes. It is the mind that produces the concept of whole when it picks out ONE stone from a pile of stones, or from a mountainside.
It is in the mind where the patterns participating in the interactivity of stone is made into a single thing.
The stone, itself, is not a unity. It is an ephemeral state of inter-acting patterns...we divide these patterns into what we call elements, or particles, or whatever.
Consciousness unifies it.
A unity is what has continuity binding what preceded to what will follow - memory. 
A stone has no memory...it is simply different patterns interacting in the only way these patterns can.
A pattern is not a thing that just so happens to possess a particular trait....it IS the trait.
I am not a spirit that just happens to like sugar...I AM this need, this liking of sugar, this organism that NEEDS the element sugar.
Need is 'I', not something the 'I' is forced to endure.
I am not something that just happens to look this particular way....the way I look IS what I am, on display.
My behavior IS what I am.
I may be trained to suppress, redirect, hide what I am, by learning a new behavior, but this requires constant strain, discipline, to be maintained.
The training may become second nature, so that I no longer feel like I am exerting energy to maintain it.
We often refer to this as cultivation, or civility.
Cultivation takes a preexisting behavior which IS what the organism is and shapes it, gives it structure, directs it towards particular expressions....such as defecating.
Defecating is not something an organism does, it IS the organism ridding itself of toxins.
The process of consuming and ridding the organism of energies, IS the organism.
Civility directs this behavior by imposing rules.
You cannot take a **** anywhere....there are rules to how to express this behavior. Rules as to how to eat, how to ****, where to eat and ****, and ****.
But eating, ****, shitting, IS the organism, not what is imposed upon the organism as necessary.
Need to eat, due to lack, leads to excess of energies, libido, producing the need to rid itself fo excess, and to rid itself of the byproduct of excess, which is feces.

Take sex...sex is not something an individual performs, its not an identity he wears over some vague core, some mystical spirit/soul.
It's not a fashion trend, nor is it a hedonistic vehicle implying that nature produces superfluity for no reason other than pleasure. Nature is frugal.
Just as the metaphor implies: nature despises a vacuum that can also be expressed as 'nature despises excess'.
Vacuum = lack
Excess = superfluity

For this reason, an organism storing energies on stand-by requires effort, experienced as stress.
Excess libidinal energies pressure the organism to be released....we know this as lust, or the frenzy of ****, he pleasing release of love-making.
Madness of sex. 
Sex IS the organism exposing/expressing its reproductive potentials as part of its accumulated excess.
Same goes for the concept of race.
Race IS the past manifesting as presence, and then interpreted as appearance by another organism that has senses.
Race, like any biological category, indicates probability, potential. Another way of saying a type of order, a degree, a quality of order.
Organ arrangements/synthesis, proportionality, symmetry, exposing probability. 

Past is not what happened to the individual...it IS the individual, and this past is not gone, even if it is forgotten, or denied, it is present, it is presence.
An organism is the processes participating in its congruity - organs interacting.
What direction this interaction will take is determined by environment, which is itself a product of continuous interactivity, the organism is also a part of.
At its primal level an organism is organs interacting.
The brain, another organ, gives direction to this organic interactivity. 
In larger brained organism, such as humans, it may even control this organ interactivity - suppressing enhancing..we call this Will.
There is no Will outside organic life, unless you use it as a metaphor, and you never forget you are doing so, just as we use God as a metaphor and then forget and believe in the concept literally.
Returning to our stone example...a stone is an ephemeral congruence of patterns, the mind converts to a thing - it abstracts it, eliminating dimensions of possibility/probability...it makes it into a one, a singularity...A stone.
Our language reflects this mental method of converting the fluid to a static.
This singularity is a conscious construct.  It is consciousness that makes it a one. The patterns participating in this ephemeral congruence care not...they simply interact in the only way they can with other patterns at any given time and place.
A stone has no memory to bind it into what we call a 'self'.
Again, we can use 'self' as a metaphor, but we cannot then forget that we did so, and think it is, in actuality, a self., purposefully, intentionally blurring the lines differentiating living from non-living phenomena. 
For example, if we single out a cloud it is not the cloud intentionally being a single whole.
It is we who differentiate it using our own criteria....shadows, shapes that look like an animal, light playing on its surface, our own memories projected in cloud formations, how it mingles in cloud formations etc.
The only congruity that has intent is a living organism.
Intent is a product of memory focused by will.  Where there is no life there is no intent.
Life's primary intent is to continue, and this requires some rudimentary form of memory. We call this DNA.
What differentiates living from non-living patterns and congruity of patterns, is Memory.
Only memory can produce intent.
Memory is the usage of experiences to guide present circumstances, or determine/affect interactions occurring presently.

There are automatic reactions produced by applying memory, as in plants, or inferior organisms, lacking a sophisticated nervous system, which behave in an automatic way we call instinctive, intuitive.
And there are more sophisticated organisms, such as man, with a developed nervous system permitting him to not surrender to automatic reactions, but to suppress them, control them, and direct them, with some effort - Will again.
This self-control we admire and call culture or civility, going as high as nobility - the noble spirit is the one that has full control over its automatic visceral, primal reactions, and can also appreciate and admire this same control in others.
What the Greeks called αριστεία, hence, aristocratic demeanor = to be dominated by the superior, in self and in others. 
I'm afraid this post has gone off on too many tangents and has become too long....nobody will read it, as ADD is a byproduct of modern lifestyles.

I don't really care.
 

I called it ANOTHER BLOODY NIHILISM THREAD simply because this is what it is. So merely a reference to the quantity
of threads on nihilism and nothing else. I actually have no idea how many. But the perception is that it is indeed many

I know your reasons.
I also know how you undermine it, exposing your own feelings.

That every other thread on nihilism was based on a false understanding of the concept, is for you a reason to discredit this new understanding...because you agree with them, and so you identity with nihilist, in relation to them.

A MIND IS LIKE A PARACHUTE : IT DOES NOT WORK UNLESS IT IS OPEN

The older I get [ I am 52 ] the more open minded I have become. Slow and glacial like and so only aware of it after a certain amount of time has passed. But so
natural now that I no longer have to try. It is as effortless and subconscious as breathing. Listening to anyone and everyone however does not imply acceptance
or validation. Merely allowing you to have your say. No more no less. And so if for example you tell me 2 + 2 = 5 or the Earth is flat or Jesus rose from the dead

I'm 51...and the older I get the more intolerant of imbeciles I become, knowing that they affect me, even if I ignore them or pretend they are harmless retards.
you have no conception of what is at risk, and what is being lost, or what has already been lost, when we tolerate imbeciles and treat them as equals.
Your stoicism is a product of your sheltering...no matter what you are guaranteed rights, a roof, a respectable existence.
a pet, cares not what howls in the night.
It simply and calmly listens, safe and sound in its master's house, thinking it is so because it is brave.

I will not regard them as truth statements because they are all false and demonstrably so too. I only accept as objectively true what actually is. Sometimes truth
statements cannot be determined either way. So an open mind is the default state. The degree to which one is or isnt open should be proportional to the validity
of the statement in question. Case in point : intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Zero evidence of any though entirely possible there is so am straight down
the middle on it. Entirely neutral.

How indifferent you remain to the innocuous. admirable trait.
I, personally, do not care if there's a monster in my closet.
I am so aloof...courageous I would say.

Now as both an atheist and nihilist I see no evidence for God or gods. And less I ever do my position is that the only place they
do exist is in the minds of those who believe in them. I have no need of belief. A superfluous thing far as I am concerned. Although I do not deny it to others.

Very democratic...so independent you are from world.
You live and let live, a true noble man.

My
tools however are more robust : proof / evidence / logic / reason. They re what I use to determine the value of truth statements. So yes. I am very open minded

And of what use do your tools have in a world where another can take a dump in a box and call it art, while you chisel away at the stone, trying to make a perfect copy of a horse?

But only in giving you an opportunity to have your say. Not in agreeing with everything you say or indeed with anything you say. Subtle but important distinction

your stringency is admirable.
as you are one of them, i expected no agreement at all, only a hearing and a casual dismissal, in the form of a title, meant to ridicule because you cannot challenge.
proof / evidence / logic / reason has given way to insinuation, emotional appeal, indirect ridicule, intentional dismissal.

I am sure in your 52 year-old mind you remain open....to everything but what hurts your investments, like in your self-identifying pride in being open-minded. Willing to listen to what you've already rejected, with no reason, evidence, or argument, only a statement, for appearances sake, and to then pretend you are being objective, as you write out your title Another Damn Nihilist Thread.
You my friend, belong there.

The excuse concerning the aesthetics of KT, was so infantile it almost threw me for a minute.
I thought you were joking...but no you were actually trying to justify why you choose ILP over KT, and now vivarium.
Unable to face the real reason, as the evidence shows.
Your reasoning, nowhere in evidence, would be torn to shred on KT....and the colour scheme, the logistics, was how you reasoned your fear into an augment against it.

Good, thing, because I don't think your quality of mind would be respected for long by my friends on KT, nor would your girly tactics, despite being 52 fuckin' years OLD!!
See how I implied something with the insertion of "fuckin"?
But 'damn', and 'bloody', would have worked just as well.

What matters is that you told me you disagreed, and that is evidence, reason, logic, enough for you, and you can return to your next bloody thread on something facilitating and revealing, about you.
I've found none, but I know that it is immanent, as you are 52 years-old, so you must have something more interesting to say that what you have already presented.
Maybe Turd can teach you the fine art of insinuating, name-dropping, data vomiting, and power through association, I call google genius.
A bit  more impressive.
You stay open-minded and keep your evidence, and emotional reasoning, a secret. But do share your infinite excuses.

By the way, do you even know why 2+2 = 4 is a a conclusion that has already taken something for granted?
I know you don't get what I say about words and language, or symbols, but can you understand how 1+1 =2 must remain true to its own presumptions, and so be logical, as in not contradicting itself?
I doubt it.

Might start another thread titled...
ANOTHER STUPID RIDICULOUS THREAD ON SEMIOLOGY...you know just to remain true to your own presumptuous logic that you are open-minded.