I don’t generally have any problem understanding popobawa*; you yourself are usually more difficult for me to parse. Your motivations and philosophy are completely opaque to me. For example, 100% of all people will die, and I am happy with that, although it’s sad that the experience is likely to be nasty for most of them. My father told me last night that he is very much hoping to die very soon; he’s suffering immeasurably as his mind and body continue to degenerate. Death is the Gift of Man at best, and utterly meaningless at worst. I don’t understand why death matters so much to you… you offer no explanation at all, and I just can’t fathom it.
* Admittedly I understand the Dr. Bronner’s bottle too, so apparently I’m in a minority.
Because billions of people are not simply going to lay down in the night and quietly fall asleep and then die, only to have their bodies and memory of them disappear the next morning. Nothing happens in a vacumn.
There will be complex and ongoing repercussions to death on an ongoing and global scale, probably occurring over decades and persisting forever. Hell, we have more human refugees migrating across the world right now than since the end of WWII and that is already disrupting nations.
Go watch the TV show, “The Leftovers,” for a hypothetical scenario where 10% of the population does simply just disappear and how that affects society. Now make the death more likely starvation, plague, and economic disruption and make that go on over decades. This is leaving aside the suffering before death for all those poor bastards that do die (and then those who don’t).
It’s about time you came right out and admitted that. We’ve been waiting. Welcome to the club. Here is your jacket, @anon15383236 will show you the special handshake.
Well, I’ll try, keeping in mind that the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon, and I don’t claim to be infallible.
The universe is a single contiguous and timeless whole, through which our individual ego/intellect concentrations are threaded like the fibers in your sinews. It extends past both the submicroscopic and the conceptual and contains all things that are, as well as all that isn’t. Your own consciousness, which is limited to experiencing this vast totality in a very small and mostly sequential way, has a wonderful ability to shift focus; you can see a forest, or trees, or a continent as you choose. You can both hold fantastic concepts in your mind, and observe real phenomena with the same organ. But the fact that you choose to discriminate between components of the totality and assign them labels or compare them to prototypes does not change reality - a forest is a forest even when you are only looking at a tree. Once this is realized, it becomes apparent that many of our labels, prototypes and categorizations exist only as a manifestation of our choice of how to see things - we exercise volition to change the nature of our experience of the universe. I have chosen to not to identify as a member of a “race” and therefore I am not, except in the minds of others. The minds of others hold many delusions, and it’s clear that other people have their own subjective experiences that do not invalidate mine, so it’s not a big deal if they misapprehend my real nature… but as a part of the totality, I’d rather be a happy, co-operative microbe than a cancer cell, so it’s worthwhile to offer enlightenment to those who might benefit from it.
How’d I do, @popobawa4u? Did I hit the spot? If I’ve misrepresented your views to the point of offense, please just let me know and I’ll delete this.
I agree with this. What you describe is more how I understand human perceptions generally, rather than my specific views, but this does inform many of them.
A crucial thing to add is that this is of immediate and practical consequence! Many respond with a casual dismissal that “Sure, maybe, but it’s abstract philosophy” which I think is merely a path-of-least-resistance evasion. To say that artefacts of human perceptions are irrelevant to human activities and relationships would suggest some kind solipsism.
In a systems/information sense, I also approach things from an ethnomethodological perspective. Simply being that one cannot possibly fully understand the goals, values, and methods of a system from inside of it. The more complex the interconnections of a system are, the more true this seems to be. So sure, I knowingly take the position of an outsider, alien, AI, etc with regards to most everything, and have made a practice of it from a very young age. It helps to see where the hidden biases in any issue are. But it requires tremendous detachment, which denies me most social relationships.
People often rage that this is equivalent to me arguing against all common sense, but really I am only calling presumptions of such into question. I do often end up refuting some points which are assumed to generally be common sense, and they often appear to be quite fundamental ones. But I am not, as is sometimes suggested, engaging in nihilism or nonsense for its own sake. Except when I am poking fun at myself once in a while.
I’m not sure how any of this intellectualization turns into a day to day way of living when going about your day, eating your breakfast, working your job, paying your bills, etc. It comes across sometimes as wankery for its own sake and not practical in the slightest.
Knowing that things are labels? Yes and? I know things are labels too. How does that effect my coffee?
It is to me and it misses the point of my question.
Great, grandiose philosophizing…how does that impact the ACTUAL lived experience of a person as they go about day to day life in America today? Woo! You’ve realized all the cultural biases in play. You’re still going to be buying your milk at the market…