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On the contrary, existence is a false idea.
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Dec 3, 2016 01:37
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 18:10 |
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PortalFreak posted:Not to say "lol ur rong xddd" but how so? What's your belief/reasoning behind that? Just curious. Well, I mean, the notion of "existence" implies permanence. There is something which exists. But permanence requires an uncaused phenomenon, which is not something that is observed or considered at all likely. So we must abandon the notion of permanence, and in turn the idea of "existence", because although things exist at any given moment they are also constantly changing and we don't experience ourselves as a collection of snapshots, but as a continuous stream of events without discrete boundaries. "Existence" is a tool we impose on our experiences for the purpose of introspection, but it's also a flawed one.
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Dec 3, 2016 02:01
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Helsing posted:While there is no outside judge or arbiter of your life's rightness or wrongness you are still just an organism which is programmed through some mixture of socialization and instinct to have certain values and you can't really escape or transcend those values until you die and cease to exist, at most you can change the way you think about them. I don't think this is incontrovertibly true.
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Dec 3, 2016 03:02
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Helsing posted:Few things are. But even if it's a false idea it still seems to be more accurate than the comparatively juvenile beliefs that you can either generate your own set of values independently or that you can receive your values from some kind of deity or higher power. I don't think confusing despairing inevitability with adulthood is good, nor telling people they are helpless and prostrate before artificial gods of socialization.
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Dec 3, 2016 18:35
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Helsing posted:I don't see why you have to despair over the fact that your values emerge from the interaction between your biological needs and the culture into which you are born. It's not as though this means your values are incapable of change, though it does mean that the extent of those changes is determined by factors beyond your control. No, I mean that your beliefs are essentially ones born out of despair. They are built around passivity and inevitability- that your mind is set in stone, and can only be worked on from the outside by gods we call "culture" and "biology".
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Dec 3, 2016 19:17
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Helsing posted:Acknowledging that we don't create our own values out of thin air isn't a passive or despairing stance, and I'm curious what perspective you'd propose adopting as an alternative. Your position is that values are immutable and cannot be consciously altered, and that is what I am calling a passive stance, since it argues that, if you are racist you will always be racist until your biology or culture makes you suddenly not-racist. That is the very definition of passive- you cannot attempt to counteract your racism, because your racism is immutable unless altered externally by what are more-or-less divine forces in your metaphysics.
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Dec 3, 2016 19:31
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Helsing posted:I said the limits of the changes you can make are beyond your control, which in no way rules out the possibility of consciously changing your beliefs. For instance, I hope that with conscious attention you will be capable of moving beyond this rather puerile tendency to debate by telling other people what their position on the matter is. I hope your god Biology cures you of this tendency towards condescension. With that out of the way, "While there is no outside judge or arbiter of your life's rightness or wrongness you are still just an organism which is programmed through some mixture of socialization and instinct to have certain values and you can't really escape or transcend those values until you die and cease to exist, at most you can change the way you think about them." Does not really seem compatible with what you are saying now. Perhaps you're using a particularly idiosyncratic definition? Anyways, if you're going to whine about people misrepresenting you and yet not offer any clarification, perhaps your values are simply incompatible with reasoned discussion?
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Dec 3, 2016 19:52
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 18:10 |
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Helsing posted:I don't think there's any contradiction there. You can change your mind as time goes by but your life as you live it now is necessarily going to be in a continuous inner dialogue with the values that you absorbed when you were young. You might abandon an old religion or convert to a new one, you might change your perspective on gender or race, you might become kinder or crueler, but you're not going to ever truly escape the system of values you were raised in, especially since so many of those values aren't really present in your mind as consciously articulated beliefs. Define "system of values" and "escape". Because if we're saying that racism and nonracism coexist within a single system of values, what is really being said, to my mind, is that systems of values are necessarily broad enough to be self-contradictory, and that they cannot be escaped because they are broad enough it's impossible to hold a set of beliefs external to them. In which case "system of values" is more or less meaningless on an instrumental level.
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Dec 3, 2016 20:02
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