Well, everything becomes about patterns in the end and you're not wrong that logic becomes about patterns quicker than most things as its academic in natute, but also, logic goes into arguments and testing and things so it's not this "Patterns exist so the ancient wise ones applying logic mapped out a rigid picture for us that's either 100% the truth or 100% false!" as you imply.

You say you are conscious but without patterns how do you figure a consciousness would have any... existence to it (for lack of better terms)?

I'm also curious what you meant by saying consciousness "shouldn't" exist since "should" is what doesn't exist, it's a myth.

Perhaps, but what does that have to do with the post?

How so?

I admit I haven’t read this part of the Nicomachean Ethics recently, but it at least fits with my recollection, and how Aristotle approaches ethical issues elsewhere in the work.

I would like if you would clarify and expand upon the relation between Aristotle’s thought and our current economic situation. Our economic system is in important respects very different from that of Aristotle’s time and place. Do Aristotle’s comment still apply? Do they need to be altered? In what ways? What would Aristotle say about modern developments in economic thought? There are many avenues you could take here.

That’s an app design

Pretty indefensible take. Life advice is consistent and essential for children. He offers no specific consequentialist net benefit to increased self actualization and ignores the harm caused by a generation of children who aren’t warned about the risks of pregnancy and drug addiction.

Also the quote disparaging providing evidence backed advice specifically felt strange: “Offering reasons, arguments or evidence as if one is in a privileged position with respect to what the other person’s experience would be like for them disrespects their moral right to revelatory autonomy.” Surely the evidence supporting your advice should make it more justified. It’s more reasonable and moral to advise someone to avoid Xanax addiction than it is to control their career path precisely because of the evidence. It’s just so interesting that he’s against advice, but seems especially against what doctors and psychologists would call “good advice.”

Lol true.

😂😂😂 fucking true. The guardian is like the left wing equivalent of fox lol

Yep. I think a lot of it comes down to descriptive vs prescriptive advice… advice is highly valuable, and we can’t just make decisions without the help of others. I think it’s partially about learning to give advice in the right way and also learning to take advice in the right way. If you just do anything anyone tells you, you’re a fool. And if you guide someone’s decisions in a highly aggressive way your just being over controlling. The whole thing takes a lot of deliberation and careful decision making from both parties.

This is definitely true, however it’s not a one size fits all type thing, it’s always going to be relative to the situation. Also how you give the advice… is it descriptive or prescriptive?

Recently my friend was dating a girl who was extremely manipulative toward him. She had a habit of intentionally breaking down his confidence (consciously or subconsciously I’m not sure… but it was definitely in someway intended to break down his self esteem). Things like telling him he’s dumb, weak, ‘not man enough’ etc. she had a clear habit of manipulating his behaviour so she could have more control over him - for instance coming up with ridiculous reasons to keep him from leaving the house when she was away. She’d frequently ask him to give her a lift and pick her up from things (using her car, which just made zero sense). Once she was away for a weekend seeing her family and she told him he had to stay home the whole weekend to look after their cat (even though they had two other housemates who were perfectly capable of feeding it)… she would chastise him for every tiny little thing (like arriving home to an un-vacuumed floor or an un wiped bench). She also frequently threatened to leave him over tiny arguments she started out of thin air over complete non issues and would disappear to random people’s houses for the weekend without telling him (many occasions it was another guys house), then she’d just roll back home and act like nothing ever happened… typical manipulative behaviour. I saw his confidence slowly deteriorating over time, I also saw him constantly stressed over the perpetual arguments she started and refused to resolve.

I was torn between letting it play out or intervening. I spent a long time deliberating on whether I should leave him to make his decisions or just tell him straight out to end it and move on (also by the time I knew what was happening, he’d already dug himself in quite deep and separating would’ve been very hard for him so I really just didn’t know was was the best way to provide support as a friend honestly, she also convinced him that it was bad faith to tell other people about relationship issues so he was often scared and reluctant to confide in anyone from fear that she would find out he was telling other people about their relationship issues). In the end I decided I wasn’t going to intervene until I saw really serious and obvious life changing problems occurring.

It even went so far that she convinced him to buy a home in her home town and have the sale managed by her father who was a real estate agent. It was a terrible investment, and due to her propensity for manipulative/controlling behaviour I was pretty certain she did it so he would be more attached to her, given her dad who was the real estate agent managing the sale and rental tenants too. The house wasn’t even in the same state as him. Neither of them had plans to live there, the plan was to rent it out and pay the mortgage from the rent income, but they were sinking money renting in the state they were actually living in, so I don’t see how any costs were being offset with this plan… anyway it was just dumb.

All of her behaviour from the outside looking in it was quite obvious she was putting him in scenarios which made it very hard for him to leave her if things turned sour… she had a bad fear of abandonment, every one of her friends believed she had bpd (apparently she was diagnosed as a kid and it seemed she refused to acknowledge it, to me it looked like text book bpd… fear of abandonment, manipulating loved ones into situations where they can’t leave etc… so I was pretty certain this was the case).

The first time he confided in me about their arguments I could see exactly where their relationship was likely headed. My instinct was to tell him he should get the hell out of it before things turned worse, however I chose not to because I felt it was a situation which he needed to learn from himself, and it’s just not my place to tell him how he should be managing his personal relationships and investments. I decided to let it play out so he could see for himself where it would lead because he needed that learning experience for himself. If I just took the liberty of making decisions for him, I’d be robbing him of the chance to learn from experience which would not result in any personal growth for him… and also there’s an infantilising element too, because I’m not his dad, he’s not a child either, there’s just so many reasons why I shouldn’t have got involved in his decision making. I’ve come to realise there’s a good reason why society believes it’s rude to ask questions about another’s financial and relationship situations.

Anyway, the relationship inevitably blew up and as it crumbled I only gave him my opinions only in a descriptive way to help him make sense of it and come to his own conclusions so he could make his own decision instead of giving him advice in a prescriptive way. I felt it was better to just be there for support and perspective because it’s his life and he needs to learn these lessons on his own.

There was also the worry that he could think I was trying to sabotage his relationship if he didn’t believe my opinion. It was obvious he couldn’t see what was going on, so there was a high chance he wouldn’t believe me. There was also the chance that my judgement was incorrect too, because I don’t know the entire story first hand… so who am I to just jump in and tell him what’s what?

Giving friends advice is very tricky and we can’t take the same approach in every situation. If a friend has a habit of highly reckless driving for instance, it would be much better to tell them straight away to stop because their lesson could result in death or serious injury, it could also result in injuries for other people. There’s no one size fits all rulebook for giving advice to friends, and I think it takes a lot of deliberation when it comes to our decisions in these scenarios.

I think in a most situations (especially financial or relationship related), it’s best to stay out of it unless the friend specifically comes to you asking for direct advice. It’s also important to be wary of giving descriptive vs prescriptive advice too when they seek advice. I think overall, unless the decision can result in serious life/death ramifications I think it’s best to leave it up to the other person. People can only grow if they go out and learn directly from experience… when we intervene we rob them of that opportunity to learn and gain wisdom.

Edit: grammar

Let's think of the universe not in terms of the observable universe, rather the potential universe, no just what Is, bit what ever could be in all dimensions, since it is logically the same thing if you take your subjective experience out of it, in what way ever does it resemble where we live that universe? Infact in what way is it differentiated from absolute nothing, if there is no observer which "rules the earth" in announcing to himself what is meaningful pulling a concrete ground in utter chaos. If it doesn't center around you then what does it center around, nothing? That doesn't mean it's all encompassing that just means it has no center even if it wanted, infinite potential is basically the same as nothing, but our existence as experiencing beings makes it so the infinite potential universe is disproven individual tho as it may by if anything can call itself individual the maybe that's great enough for the chaos to bow down and revolve around what it never had.

I think you are just building on a basis that's heavily supported by the top. In the trying to understand something out of nothing you have to somehow prove from no basis, now, you use the word "know" as if we have established that it even exists, but does it? How can we know that we know? Were in all of this is the concrete ground? Because you can't just assume the "knowing" and the build up to the self which is what "knows"

A much more accurate word is "relations" If I understand correctly. But I think you are addressing only the outside of yourself being relevant, but I don't think it tackles what yourself is at all, for example you say the mind could be experiencing an illusion but that wouldn't change what the mind is or is doing. However I don't think you are addressing of the mind itself isn't a part of the illusion.

That's I subject I am very interested in and have been for a long time, and so far I've come to the conclusion that consciousness is a logical fallacy, it simply shouldn't exist, yet if I can know anything for sure it's that I am conscious (no way to truly know if anyone else is in this example though) and the that automatically leads me to believe that consciousness is fundamental over logic, and patterns presupposes logic, is that not what patterns are?

"Value" is a myth, it never exists outside the imagination. Nothing is "perfect" or "imperfect", that is also myth.

And you can make a star last longer with sufficient technology but no amount of technology can make something more "perfect" or more "imperfect". We can't even make a "perfect" sphere, the closest we can get is make it the most spherical sphere ever.

I wouldn't say that I have an academic experience with these topics necessarily, I've just been interested in history, philosophy for a long time. Honestly what you have said of yourself is great and I think trying to provide these "simple life philosophies" with an intellectual veneer is unnecessary and detracts from the potency of such an outlook.

As for myself, one thing that I feel that I had happened upon during my readings and interactions with others is the notion that, bluntly put, sadness confers intelligence. It feels that many people heard the phrase "ignorance is bliss" and took the contrapositive to heart: "to be sad is to be smart". You can see this notion in alot of media (something like Wednesday the show comes to mind). Again this is my interpretation of the matter, but there seems to be this implicit notion floating around our societal ether that you are intelligent if you find reality to not be sufficient - if you are irritable, if you are morose, if you find life unsatisfying, if you yearn for true meaning yet cannot find it. This interpretation is always taken as meaning that life is inherently boring, full of suffering, meaningless, etc, and instead of these qualms with reality prompting a deeper introspection into one's outlook, investigating why they find aspects of life to be melancholic and valueless, they assign the insufficiency to the external world rather than asking themselves if the insufficiency is internal, in how we view ourselves, life, reality.

This is the conceit of the philosopher, that only simple people can be happy with their station in life while they (Schopenhauer for example) have apprehended the true nature of reality and that reality is one of sorrow and suffering. But these are all metaphysical interpretations of reality, not reality itself. The language games that I refer to in my OP is that as soon as one puts words to reality, it becomes an interpretation and not an accurate description (metaphysics is unavoidable) and in these interpretations is the value judgement that these people would rather cultivate a sense of intelligence than cultivate joy (again, this is operating under the assumption that ignorance is bliss, sorrow smartness). You can be both intelligent and joyous!

There probably is something to the notion that intelligent people are more likely to suffer from some kind of mental illness, and that the more intelligent you are the increased likelihood of it occurring and the more profound its impact upon the person. But these might be just-so post hoc rationalizations, and even if they were immutably true we can still choose our outlook. We are bound by our biology in many ways, but we still have choices in the matter of outlook.

This is a long-winded way of saying that we can/probably have memed ourselves into melancholic dispositions. I did so myself at one point, as all young men are prone to do (Napoleon writes about this in his journals during his time at artillery school). I slowly realized that I didn't have to entertain such a disposition to be actually intelligent, well-read, educated. The Stoics are excellent on this, but their wisdom is lost on young men with few life experiences, as it was lost on me when I read it young and unappreciative.

"You dwell on the vastness of the Cosmos and think yourself small. I realize I am a part of the universe and think myself big. I am up in this bitch."

Agreed on all points!

I don't think mind-body duality makes life meaningless by itself, I just think it helps create the conditions for nihilism. It causes human beings to think of their subjective experiences as something separate and removed from the rest of reality even though those experiences are as inherent to reality as anything else. It's easy to drop into nihilism when the fundamental framework you use to think about your place in the world is built on the assumption that you're somehow removed from it. Descarte's mind-body duality is just another aspect of modernity that further removed the Western World from the innate, transcendent experience of being. Seeking objectivity in all things inhibits our ability to simply experience reality.

Jose Ortega says it best: "I am I and my circumstance."

Well, that's, something... what about the proposition: "1 = 1"? Or "If Aristotle can dance, Aristotle can dance"? Are you really trying to suggest that tautologies don't exist?

A person saying that "anything" is just "something" does not qualify its value. All is perfect. If an asshole thinks it can make the star last longer, the asshole is crazy.

The Sun is neither "perfect" or "imperfect" nor can it ever be either. You can do whatever you want with it, make it last longer or not last as long, but it won't change that all the stars are just stars.

The same goes for organisms and the entire universe.

>Yes, yes, those are things. But why do they matter to you at all?

That's now how 'why' works. 'Why' is asking for a fellow organism's motive. You don't ask a rock why it is affected by gravity or the Sun why it emits deadly radiation in your direction or a thermonuclear explosion why it can come from something as small as atoms splitting or the Earth why it formed in orbit around the Sun. Those are questions of How (physics) and How It Came To Happen (history).

>And see, you're making meaning- humans are stupid. There's your meaning for you. Do you think a cat would agree, or a rock?

I have no idea what you're talking about. There's my meaning for me? Are you thinking in terms of like "What's YOUR truth, dear friend? Here, have some ganja while you ponder."

> They belong under the umbrella of existentialism

Do they though? They are not positions philosophers take seriously.

They belong under the umbrella of existentialism, friend.

Suffering VS pleasure

Is is, is is perfect. Otherwise, fix it, how not connected?, same. Congrats. Universe, non-locality everything, perfect.