Why are you here?
What draws one to philosophy? What is you motive to seek out and participate in this forum? What is your fundamental drive to elaborate others answers to your questions? And what do such answers offer you?
What is the purpose of your questioning here? Why have you come?
What is the purpose of your questioning here? Why have you come?
Comments (51)
:sweat: :up:
Quoting bert1
I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and i'm all out of kick ass.
My avatar is of a pig called Charlotte.
A closeup would be appreciated. She looks like a goer.
Me, I'm the next thing to a shut-in since Covid, which has been stomping around our streets for a long time now, keeping me from the casual social encounters that normally brighten my hum-drum life.
I generally frequent philosophy forums, not because I'm a huge fan of Philosophy, but because they usually offer discussions on human affairs, thought, belief and behaviour, all of which interest me. Plus, the participants are mostly pretty bright. I like that.
Its healthy to hold ones philosophy to the grindstone of contrary ideas.
She's a pig that @T Clark shared. She had a hard life. I hope he can update with a new picture of Charlotte soon.
Quoting 180 Proof
That's fine, but do you have expertise to make this enterprise useful? There's already a quagmire of self-appointed experts and monomaniacs out there inflicting their pet theories and mediocre half-arsed metaphysics on the world, making it harder than ever to find useful information amidst the avalanches of dross, sophistry and madness. :wink:
:up:
Like being Doctor Who's sidekick for the running?
Probably because like most men, including me, you do both!
:halo: Yeah, getting a bit like that for me to, in the past few years. Still, probably just as well, considering the old measuring stick, of when you are getting to where it takes you all night, to do what you used to do all night.
Haha. With your little thumbnail of a starling (I think), it makes it all the more entertaining a comment.
I'm imagining a small birds quest for world domination.
I'm also interested in these topics. And have opened many a thread based on them. Why see philosophy as a separate domain to those enquiries? Consciousness and so ritual have their place in thr realm of philosophical enquiry just as much as materialism, objectivity and the concrete.
Haha from now I will observe them with a new found suspicion of their true intentions :P
Is it true that you've banned all the reporters from CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post?
Your philosophy is contraryism? :lol:
That's it! It's more inclusive than any other heading. More kinds of interesting question can be asked.
Because Enlightenment philosophy through to current philosophy begins with an assumption about the nature of consciousness and an assumption about whether "spirituality" has any coherent meaning as a concept. They begin with answers arrived at through the wrong questions, and reform the answer as a question that leads to their answer. Trying to argue from a spiritual perspective against these assumptions has felt futile to me over the years because my interlocutors and I are essentially speaking different languages, or even using different forms of communication; it's hand signals versus morse code.
Anyway, the flame's been removed from underneath my bum regardless.
A friend said to me today in our walk through the Yorkshire snow, 'Why do birds migrate?' I think what I like about a philosophy forum is that many people there will think the usual scientific answering 'explanations' partial at best, risible at worst: conservation of energy, seeking resources, and so on.
The less wrong answers are more sophisticated than that, and the subset of those that fall short of poetry but seem pertinent - that's when I like philosophical chat. Lately I've mostly eavesdropped but I keep thinking I'll get chatting again.
If I'm honest Noble Dust I have had the same sort of experience as you have described. It can be very demoralising. Like we are both speaking some form of alien gibberish at one another which is wholly unreconcible.
But I discovered that this is the fundamental nature of "belief". If you believe something, you can see it, entertain it, understand it, rationalise it, and try to explain it.
If someone holds the opposite belief, it will most definitely fall on deaf ears. Because the premise (the accepted belief) dictates/restricts the means in which to define it, or in other words the scope of possibilities available to explain it to another.
Without restriction there would be no contradiction between opposing beliefs. The opposition defines strictly the domain of each side.
It's like another example where I (someone who has fallen in love in the past) attempted to explain the existence or sensation of romantic "love" to a dear friend who had never experienced it yet.
They were sure it didn't exist. Whilst I was positive that it did. But you can't explain something to someone if they have no experience of it.
It's like describing the color red to a colourblind person. They will simply "not get it".
The reconciliation at the end is the fact that, new experiences open the mind to new beliefs. And whilst one may not be able to describe their belief to another, perhaps they will come to understand it on their own accord, with time.
To expose my beliefs and thoughts to scrutiny. It makes me sharper. I hope to do the same for others.
To engage in the process of learning, I guess.
:up:
I love to read books by philosophers aimed at the intelligent layman. I sometime read philo papers as a Sudoku, but sudokus are way more fun.
For guys like me, theres nowhere to go.
But threads like yours here, is what makes me come here. And I love reading the answers.
Well I'm glad I could offer something of interest to you and same, I really enjoy the answers, they place me in reference/context to others. As I compare what I think to what they think and wonder as to the cause of the differences. Where they come from, what they might mean, what insights can they offer?
That way I learn both about myself and about them.
Sometimes on the forum I find myself in a process of unlearning. Old habits die hard but they can die all the same.
I think attaining accurate knowledge is about simulataneously learning (accepting knew concepts) and unlearning (rejecting previously held beliefs that from this new reference point seem naive or absentmindedly conditioned).
Absolutely.
"Wonder" did it for the ancients, "faith" did it for medievals, but for us moderns I think despair intractable, infinite, perplexity is the draw. (NB: Zapffe-Camus name it the absurd.)
I suppose this sums up why I'm (still) here:
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting Benj96
Again, from old posts ...
Quoting 180 Proof
... thus, the mise-en-scene of TPF"s Commedia
Quoting 180 Proof
:smirk:
Quoting Agent Smith
Succinct. :up:
My path: stupidity?! > absurdism > freethought > pragmatism-naturalism > TPF ...
Wow, that's a great term. What do you have in mind here? The embodied cognition crowd?
That's been entertaining.
I have learned a lot from people who have read the same works I did. I have been encouraged to read new works as a result.
Sometimes the arguments involve matters I am concerned about. Continuing in a dialogue is better than seeking a judgement that would end it for all time. Unless the question was stupid.
The shape of every TPF discussion, ever.
Edit to add: I don't mean to say something stupid happens all the time. Only that dismissal of arguments is not an argument very often.
Wow I really like that. It does seem that the world is in an explosion of information at the moment. With the advent of highly sophisticated communications - near speed of light exchange of information all over the world via fiber optic Internet cables and satellite, new forms of socialising and science propagated not only by basic hypothesis but algorithms that are story ahead - indexing things like protein structures and findings that woukd have taken a person millenia to decode.
As well as the highest levels of average education that humanity has ever seen to date.
However, every milestone comes with its drawbacks. We also have more misinformation than ever before, as well as the ability to becine polarised by selective education.
Knowledge is abounding and being diluted simultaneously.
Great post!