You can hate the capitalism that forces you to have a phone in this day and age.

I mainly remember learning about it in the class and him putting on some kind of show lol.

>No, you are deliberately conflating two different definitions of the word capitalist to suit your argument. I hate to be the guy citing a dictionary, but since your definition of the term is not one shared by everyone else, let's consult Miriam-Webster:

Dictionaries are notoriously terrible when it comes to political theory, precisely because of widespread incorrect use of political definitions. I gave you a form of the Marxist definition, which explains what a capitalist is and why.

>>Capitalism: noun > >>1: a person who has capital especially invested in business > >>2: a person who favors capitalism > >You are saying that only definition 1 is valid and that definition 2 does not exist (even though it's the one that more relates to discussions of philosophy, and is obviously the meaning I intended in my comment).

The second one is clearly contradictory, people have just used it wrongly time and time, likely due to repeated wrongful use by capitalist media in an attempt to think your pension savings makes you a capitalist or a beneficiary of capitalism.

I also highly struggle with why you thought this semantic battle was necessary even after I addressed your point or why how a person self-identifies ideologically has any impact on the material truth of their class relations.

>You do not get to gatekeep how the word is used or decide which definition is or isn't useful. You also do not get to tell other people what their beliefs are. Sorry.

I gave the only meaningful definition of the word in a philosophical place. A capitalist makes their income from capital, juxtaposed to workers who are forced to sell their labor-power in order to procure a wage necessary to purchase the means of subsistence.

Way to go to purposely miss every point I made or outright ignore them by playing a game of semantics though.

And this is why knowledge and ideas are something that goes with the flow of time, what I just said earlier would've killed me 3 centuries ago, but there were men at the time who would consequentially build these ideas, people who left us something else than scholastic and nominalism, not entirely sure what you mean by critical in this context, as a mere foreigner, but if you're saying that it is not the preferred theory amongst the population is absolutely unquestionable, but the literature on the question is not that simple, since it was indeed an importance subject of phenomenology, which is certainly modern, but not contemporary.

I kindly disagree with the statement that the paradigm's order we go after because we were blessed with reason is something we don't follow for our own personal gain, therefore, if it could be said to be objective, we do not have a grasp on it. Aristotle's dialectic has a great example for it with the paint as a false representation of the truth (not going through the whole experimentation, because it's long), meaning that what we find and think of objective is a possible fallacy, and we have no possibility to acknowledge it besides theorizing it, there's a complete and vast differential between what we see, and what's to be seen, and that is not a recent thought, Spinoza talked a lot about it in his Ethics around his idea of god.

(And please, refrain from making assumptions of what I believe or state as evident, since neither I or you knows a pinch of what is obviously accurate in this world, in this particular matter)

>I don't believe these two "extremes" are the only possible alternatives, and the problem with both of these seem to be that the people who have the most knowledge don't get to choose the best course of action.

Private ownership and dictatorship of capital or common ownership and the dictatorship of the working class are actually the two only options, unless total apocalyptic collapse of all of society happens. There quite literally are no possible other options, given how class society functions and develops.

>People make choices against their own interests all the time and the actual day to day interests of a cleaning lady are most likely contrary with the best possible outcome for everyone.

Care to give any concrete examples? I don't see how letting people have democratic control over their lives could possibly be worse than letting the demonstrably genocidal and ecocidal profit motive. If people elected their bosses, they would likely choose the guy who organized the place so that you could go home earlier with more money in your pocket.

Today, workers are forced to take the jobs that exist at market rates, with anywhere from 5 to 50% unemployment with desperate workers ready to undercut your meager income just do they can eat or sleep safe another day. The goal of socialism is to guarantee everyone gainful employment, until the day that labor has been automated to such a degree that nobody needs to work anymore.

Given the inevitable thought of automation, I implore you to do a thought experiment what the Bezoses, Musks, Kochs and Rockefellers of the world would do to the working class should their labor no longer be necessary for all development.

>Innovation requires more than just education; it requires sacrifices of the immediate desires.

I'm saying the foundation is education, and there is no reason to believe people would work less hard or less innovatively if you give them more power over their working lives, as well as direct control over what to produce and when.

We have subscription-based heating in cars now, and 5 or so mega-corpotations designing the same 10 phones with minor differences, developing the same technologies multiple times for absolutely no use or reason other than locking people in their brand ecosystems.

This is not to speak of the funding of fascism, endless wars of aggression and conquest, or coups against anyone who dares seek true sovereignty for their nation.

>My gripe with this democratic decision making with everything is that it is only desirable if all the actors would be experts on whatever they are deciding on.

Workers are literally experts at their jobs. If you've ever had a job I'm sure you're aware of shitty micro-managing bosses or company-wide rules that make absolutely no sense for your particular store, but still have to be mindlessly followed because corporate said so.

>I'm fairly confident that majority of people aren't able under any circumstances to make the best decisions for the good of the whole.

The alternative we're currently working with, we know none of the decisions are taken with anyone's except the owners best in mind. All that is taken into account is profit, whether millions of people die and large swaths of the planet become uninhabitable.

>I'll give a silly example off my head: Do you really believe that it would be desirable that the vote of the vain cleaning lady (who believes in energy healing) had the same weight as a doctor on what medical devices or new treatments the hospital should invest in?

What makes you think every person would be taking every decision? Wages are an obvious example where everyone should ideally get to vote, until money can be abolished. The cleaners should have more power over cleaning, the doctors and nurses etc over the actual medical care and so on. Today we treat those who can afford it and let those who can't suffer and die, because that's what the bottom-line calculator on some insurance schmuck's PC says.

>Many people are stupid and short-sighted on even their own simple life decisions, how could it possibly be desirable to let them have equal say in choices that have complex implications for everyone?

The profit incentive is simple. The economy has to grow or it implodes, and even when it does grow it implodes every 10 years, killing millions and throwing many many more into poverty. What we produce doesn't matter, no matter how bad for the people or the environment, so long as it produced a profit.

Planned obsolescence is also a real gift, where we could make virtually indestructible products but the markets have been cornered by a few monopolists and now they intentionally break their things early to sell more of them.

Then we have the fact that millions and millions of tonnes of food is simply thrown out and has bleach poured on it or it goes into containers with police protection, to stop people from eating and paying less for the maximally marked-up goods that remain for sale. These are the type of inherent contradictions of capitalism that waste billions of working hours, millions of tonnes of food and millions of lives every year.

>Isn't the whole thing a massive assumption? Shouldn't we ultimately favor the system that in reality produces most output and not because it is based on some holy tenets?

Which again and again has been proven in real life to be socialism. China was in a similar position to India in the 1900s and today their economy is 6 times larger in merely 80 years, having eradicated the worst poverty of which a couple hundred million Indians still suffer, not to mention the brutal oppression peasants suffer, as well as the highly patriarchal and socially debilitating caste system.

Even Cuba, suffering the worst economic sanctions in modern history, has higher life expectancy, literacy and access to healthcare compared to the US, let alone nations with similarly low levels of economic development.

I got as far as him saying antifa was destroying Portland to remember that just because you're a philosopher doesn't mean you know Jack shit about politics or in this case the facts of what actually happened.

He's the guy who taught how to overcome one's biases?

But it's shared by whose standard ? It's pure conjecture, we see others basically as mere different versions of ourselves, and it works for the most part, but what if it doesn't and you're actually wrong ? Suddenly you get into the reality, people are having lots of problems communicating precisely because their life experiences are divergent enough to make it difficult to comprehend, let alone getting a chance to build on it with another individual. Fortunately no one is that different, we have a lot in common thanks to our cultures, but what if we were living in caves, would it be so easy ? Thinking of allegory of the cave, if you were the one to leave, assuming they don't kill you when you come back, do you think they would understand what makes you happy ?

Therefore, we can guess, and it's fine, it's doing the job, but that's where it stops, we make lots of guesses based on our own experience, objectively we are reflecting our own self, I can never get into your head to actually get a sensible feeling of what you really think, I would just mimic it and pray for the best, it's not exactly the same thing.

My knowledge about others in general is not that impressive, but Sartre, Heidegger, or even Locke have lots of deep thought around this idea that we can't do more than reflecting ourselves into the other, it's our only way to communicate, mimicking each others.

As to know if a good philosophy is something that convey into the masses, well I don't have the capacity to judge it, but it sounds foolish to me, philosophy is not a competition, it's about substance, not acceptance, the quality of your ideas are not measurable by the amount of people who read you, otherwise, people like...I can't come with an American name, so let's throw a A.Soral –a french one notoriously known for being dog shit– who sells lots of book would be a better philosopher than say Schopenhauer who couldn't sell any of his work during his lifetime, it'd be foolish nonetheless. Although, I might've misunderstood your sentence, so I'll also build a bit around both ideas; To me, I've said this in another comment here, philosophy is mostly accurate because of mimetism, someone really smart (start with Aristotle) begin to think about the world, and gather people with the same purpose around him, and then suddenly, he (Platon) starts to write and describe his own view of the world, the next person smart enough to get into the work build his own ideas using the previous work as a fundamental, to better contradict it, and then it goes on ad vitam eternam, so concomitantly, most ideas are build bricks by bricks to suit our reality, philosophy is not something such as "this one is bad, but this author is fantastic", every piece of work is interconnected, there's no philosophy unworthy or absolutely false (as long as you deem it worth reading), any and every ideas will be used to enhance further our comprehension of our surrounding, hence when we use "philosophy", we don't think of an individual theory, we use them all, whereas if we dig into it further down, every individual has its own philosophy into a gigantic dialogism that we confront with each others every day of our lives to prevent ourselves from alienation.

In writing on my phone, it's hard not to lose focus writing posts like this, so excuse me of my possibly inaccurate topic.

>Every single socialist country has faced historically unprecedented levels of starvation. The RSFSR blew well past the Russian Empire's worst famines within 4 years of its foundation, and more than doubled that as the USSR a single decade later. Your argument not only doesn't have any factual foundation, but is based on outright lies. The rest follows.

The countries that made up the USSR had famines often several times a decade for centuries and hunger, illiteracy and homelessness were all but eradicated in a few decades of socialist rule. Since the collapse, hunger, homelessness and poverty has come back in droves, which I'm sure you have an explanation for?

I also don't know what type of history you've been reading if there is no famine today under capitalism (10 million yearly starvation deaths when there's a vast surplus, as opposed to in those newly formed nations straight out of civil, anti-imperial and world war) or that the feudal peasants actually starved less. This is demonstrably false, and efforts to argue otherwise are not rarely based in Nazi propaganda.

Star wars is for kids.

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Philosophy: How to communicate and express yourself in such a way that people leave you alone peacefully.

I’m sorry, it was many years ago that I took it and I don’t have the material anymore. Now that I am thinking about it again though I am kind of interested in pursuing that information again. One thing I do remember is that it was taught by someone who was a minor celebrity (might be the wrong term for semi famous in the field) named Peter Boghossian. Looking up about him now I see that he kinda got forced out of the university a couple years ago by being too controversial. I am currently reading through his interview about it: https://dartreview.com/an-interview-with-peter-boghossian/

I don't have to hate anything. It's a choice.

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Your questions are legitimate but get into the realm of speculation. It really depends on the form the socialist society takes. The USSR had a negative feedback loop of constantly lowering quotas as factories performed worse and worse. I think a magazine article I read talked about how restaurants in the USSR were bad on purpose so they received less business. It makes sense in a way, if the factory just fails to meet a quota, you don't want to push even more work on them. They'll just be in a constant state of never reaching the quota.

In a way, the questions you're raising are akin to a serf working the land of their lord and wondering how a system like capitalism would ever work. The reality is that we don't know. We can only examine the material conditions as they exist currently and advocate for better ones.

One solution is to break society down into smaller, self-sufficient communities as we can reasonably achieve. Shoe factory workers would be less inclined to shoddy workmanship if everyone they knew wore the terrible shoes they made and they received constant complaints.

I certainly do have some recommendations for reading! Understanding Marxism is incredibly difficult and can only be achieved by actively working towards it - like a college class. I've read numerous works for the better part of two years now and I just now feel like I'm getting my bearings.

Why Socialism? | Albert Einstein (I recommend this as the starting point for anyone interested in learning about socialism more broadly)

The Principles of Communism | Frederick Engles

Value, Price and Profit | Karl Marx

Wage-labour and Capital | Karl Marx

If you want something more advanced, you can also read the first chapter of Capital (Marx) volume 1. I'm in the middle of reading Capital myself at the moment and I have to admit it is extremely dry.

Every single socialist country has faced historically unprecedented levels of starvation. The RSFSR blew well past the Russian Empire's worst famines within 4 years of its foundation, and more than doubled that as the USSR a single decade later. Your argument not only doesn't have any factual foundation, but is based on outright lies. The rest follows.

It's important to make a distinction between subjective experience and objective reality when discussing science, pseudoscience, and mental bias because they are often confused with one another. The scientific method often involves using subjective experience as a starting point, such as a field of personal interest, a pursuit of an idea, or following the inspiration from a dream someone once had, etc. In fact, many scientific discoveries of great importance today were reported to have "come" to the scientist through what might be considered pseudoscientific means. There are too many to list, but if anyone is interested, I would be glad to share some stories. Is this related to a certain bias the scientist had? Most definitely so, but that doesn't mean the bias was not useful and fruitful in its essence, nor did the scientist necessarily have to be aware of their own biases to have made strides in their pursuit. While subjective experience can serve as a starting point for discovery, the test against objective reality is what takes the pseudoscientific into the scientific. The statement "meditation enhances your DNA" may sound pseudoscientific. However, if 60 days of consistent meditation clearly show the elongation of telomeres in test subjects under controlled conditions, and if the data can be replicated using other measuring instruments through other groups of scientists in the common framework of objective reality, then it can be said that the phenomenon is real relative to objective reality, hence scientific. The key is the convergence of minds upon singular nodes, their interactions, and the process of verification. Unfortunately, what is labeled as pseudoscientific is quickly dismissed by the materialist scientist, despite its historically documented usefulness in producing innovation across mutiple scientific fields time and time again. I would caution against vague dichotomies and attempts to diminish the significance of consciousness relative to the material world, and recommend being open and accepting of the fact that we just do not know yet how the material world works in relation to cognition. Today, the "observer" extends their hand towards Quantum mechanics, and who knows what dances we have yet to witness between the science and truth.

“By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you will be happy. If you get a bad one, you will be a philosopher.” Plato said it best… Philosophy is often studied by people who are unhappy with life. Typically people who are unhappy detach themselves from society.

Well, I do think there are general basis for happyness, and other phenomena that can be shared intersubjectively.

Isnt maslows basic needs or jungs personalitytraits, if not science at least good philosophy based on a set of generalities shared by most people?

Is ought moment

Arguments like Sam Harris’ have been refuted for decades in many ways. One is the is-ought gap - principally, you cannot logically derive what you ought to do (moral actions) from what is (biology, pleasure, happiness, etc).

Other notable refutations of objectivist morality like these are the Open Question Argument, and the Naturalistic Fallacy. So to answer your question, as with every debate in philosophy neither side has ‘solved it’, but the subjectivist side has never really had a problem entirely refuting arguments from the objectivist side

This almost seems like it should be required learning. Baked into the curriculum from an early age. I’m also interested in recommended readings from the class.

>You can say its the objective foundation of our existence, which means we have an objective reference to build our morality.

But why should that be the reference in the first place? We could make any number of things the reference, all of which might be objective to a greater or lesser degree. But why should that be the standard and not something else? We might prefer one option over another, but that doesn't mean that it is necessarily right.

To say that something is morally right or wrong carries the implication of an obligation that commands our obedience in some sense. If we do not adhere to that obligation, then we have errored in some way.

Yet, how can someone be said to have errored if they simply take on a different axiom than you do? Your axiom here seems to be something like 'we ought to fulfill our basic biological needs,' but someone else could as easily say that 'we ought to serve god,' and their axiom has as much proof that it is the correct one as your axiom does.

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I can't separate. It's not that I don't appreciate the idea of separation but my gut instinct won't let me. And since my gut and art are both tied to emotions I can't untie them.