What if "Death" is misunderstood?

Hear me out but have you ever heard the saying "Sleep is the cousin of death"? Well what if there's more truth in that statement then society gives it credit for?

Think of when you sleep, you have no concept of time in the slightest. So why would death be any different? Physics tells us that energy can never be destroyed, it only changes form. Once passed, you'd have no conscious self to keep track of "time" so even though it would take an unimaginable amount of time to happen, eventually in the cycle of the universe all the elements that make up us would surely come together again at some point and we'd experience what we know as conscious life again right?

I mean of corse we wouldn't be aware of our previous lives like so many claim to be able to remember but does this mean in a technical sense "Reincarnation" "could actually scientificly possible.

Aristotle claims that things that are true and just prevail over their opposites.

Do you agree with this? Do moral, factual arguments actually tend to prevail in mainstream society?

On aimlessness, self expression, and purpose.

The feeling of aimlessness can be likened to being surrounded by various pools of water, and occasionally dipping one’s toes into one; these pools represent the different passions one can devote their lives to. As you age the people around you submerge themselves: some without a second thought. You never decide on one on the grounds that you might swim greater in another; the fear being that once you submerge yourself fully, you cannot return to idly sitting at the water's edge. Through the fear of devotion you end up depriving yourself from self-expression; so great is your fear of closing off just the option of exploring other avenues of purpose, that you unwittingly close yourself off to any purpose.

The paradox of utopia I often find in literature and fiction that utopian societies are often based around one particular set of ideals or philosophies. Examples like bioshock, 1984, and we happy few are recent enough examples for context. And they either always fail, or looked on in a negative light. This is because the idea of a utopia for everyone is impossible. The idea of a utopia is in itself subjective. Everyone has different values and beliefs, wants and desires. Everyone has a different idea of a perfect world, of how things should be run, on what should and shouldn’t be done. And most ideas of a utopian society would be doomed from the start because within a society’s worth of people, there will always be those who have their own ideas. What is perfect to someone will not be the same as perfect to someone else.

In this episode (https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/abusing-dolores) Sam Harris argues (as he has many times before) to Paul Bloom that moral blame is irrational in that it is impossible to blame someone once the truth of determinism is understood and hence it is understood that they couldn't have done otherwise.

Can this argument be correct if we're interpreting blame to be an emotion?

Though we have some control over our emotions in the long term we really don't choose them in the short term and generally speaking even when we do choose them that choice is not typically done within a hyper-rational framework although perhaps in principle it could be. To the extent that emoting in a particular way is viewed as an agential behavior it should be possible to at least intentionally calibrate our emotional responses in a rational way.

However I don't think that Sam is arguing that the practice of blame in general is going to have greater costs than benefits. His argument hinges on the premise that moral blame is predicated on the idea that the transgressor possesses libertarian agency (not sure if this is a term but I mean the type of agency which an agent which had libertarian free will would have). Therefore he is saying moral blame is irrational in the sense that it is a consequence of an irrational belief (the belief in libertarian free will). This strikes me as very odd that something which human beings seem to do innately could be predicated on something which in his view (and mine as well) is not even a coherent concept. When I think about blame from a first person firsthand perspective it also doesn't seem to be predicated on libertarian agency.

I suppose it's possible that all he really means is that if one really understood and accepted that a particular transgressor couldn't have done otherwise in the most general sense then it would simply be impossible to blame them. If we view this as a phenomenological claim then it seems at least plausible to me except that I think perhaps there are two types of moral blame which can be differentiated by their function. The function of the first type is to facilitate some sort of behavior modification algorithm in order to correct the behavior of the blamed. The function of the second type is to simply identify the transgressor as an enemy of the social group to facilitate the removal of the transgressor. The second type of blame seems possible even without any conception of agency at all. In fact it is possible (although generally considered wrong in our society) to blame someone specifically because of their immutable characteristics.

Do you guys know a work that talks about Plato's dialogues as a colection of techniques of thought?

I know this may sound kind of obvious, but, for instance,

- Hippias Major is the attempt to define something from what we know, but then showing the limit, hence we have to abandon the knowledge and restart later with more knowledge.

- Phaedrus has some techniques, but as I recall one of the main ones is the idea of, from an single object (argument) realizing the group in which it is part (the technique of argumentation, sophistry) and then studying the nature of this group by subdividing it in categories. [this is, by the way, what I'm trying to do with the dialogues themselves]

and so on.

I'm still pretty new on this, so I just read some dialogues. I do read philosophy, but I hadn't have the chance to read studies about them.

So, would you guys recommend me something on that line of investigation?

Why do people entertain themselves with religious philosophy? The one I dislike the most is Buddhism because it has managed to cultivate this image of a peaceful philosophy that can lead an individual to happiness. But the issue is that like all religious philosophies they rely on non-rational means to knowledge, they rely on claims without evidence from scriptures and as a result they're no different than other religions in that they're all based on unsubstantiated and arbitrary propositions. Yet people treat them with intellectual kids gloves instead of telling them Santa and Buddha isn't real.

Absolute hours are hours above the 24 hour mark. Its absolute not because of quantity but due to the finite amount it can be divided into. We do not count passed 24 hours in a day; not because of earths rotation around the sun which gives us "day" and "night" but because that would require a single time keeper through the history of time, ultimately binding the world together by the same hour count from when the clock first begun. Do not confuse that for what we call "years", I'm talking about absolute hours.

Comparing Heidegger to Husserl

Heidegger’s program of the destruction, and deconstruction, of metaphysics was critical of all past viewpoints. He addressed Kant's and Descartes’ notions of the subject-object relation: perception as being, being is perception, presence, perception of the given, existence is dasein is perception. Heidegger contrasts this view with his interpretation of Parmenides for whom thinking is being. Heidegger is on the phenomenological side, away from the empiricism of Kant's notion of perception encountering the given because he is critical of Kan't transcendental ego (so was Sartre for different reasons) which presumes a contentless consciousness that is filled by the actual. Heidegger does define phenomena as both being and intuition. The meaning of being is partly the correlation of the given and present with logos, with correct statements. For Heidegger, how the given is given constitutes the meaning of Being. For Heraclitus, the past is contrasted to the present, and Heidegger acknowledges this as relevant : facticity is our history. Heidegger however describes the historical facticity as thrownness and appropriation by death and/or forgetfulness and concealing. The event is the thrownness, the appropriation, i.e. lethe, therefore, alethiea is the unconcealing.

Heidegger's notion of phenomenology is 'to the issue itself' which is consciousness. The question is how time, the 3 ekstases, provide horizons of meaning. Although time itself, the temporal structure, is being, how does time affect the event and alethia? The main issue in Heidegger is the relation between Dasein and Being where Dasein interprets its own being in terms of other objects. Heidegger claims that Dasein has a mistaken or inauthentic self-conception; Dasein understands its own being in terms of the world. Heidegger is concerned to differentiate Dasein from the world - the attributes of Dasein are called existentialia and the properties of objects are categories. Existentialia, the ontological structural concepts of existence in the world, refers to the modes of being-in-the-world where Dasein is related to other Daseins by care, and related to objects which are either ready-to-hand (the mode of use) or present-at-hand (the mode of contemplation). Being-in-the-world is always being with others - there is no isolated I. Being-with-others, or thrownness, may alienate Dasein from its true self. Care gives rise to the tendency to be like others and in subjection to others. The loss of autonomy is to the 'they' (das man) - defending one's independence is a heavy burden. Heidegger distinguishes the they-self from the authentic self; the latter 'falls' to the they-self and fails to stand by its own possibilities. The falling movement of becoming is the dominant state of being that belongs to man: falling into inauthenticity. Absorbed in a world is Dasein's not-Being. Fallenness has the appearance of a secure and genuine mode of existence. Anxiety, however, is the opposite of the tranquilization of the they; anxiety individualizes Dasein as the sense of not-being-at-home which Heidegger claims is Dasein's union with its own deepest selfhood.

Husserl’s conception of consciousness is: "Consciousness, considered in its ’purity,’ must be reckoned as a self-contained system of Being, into which nothing can penetrate, and from which nothing can escape; which has no spatio-temporal exterior, and can be inside no spatio-temporal system; which cannot experience causality from anything nor exert causality upon anything ..." (Ideas, Collier Books, p. 139).

"Because consciousness is self-contained, the method for studying it must exclude all reference to the outside world. The method will reveal the essential, universal structures of consciousness which determine the universal meanings or appearances things have. In other words, this method will illuminate the universal life-world, the essential structures of absolute historicity, namely, those of a transcendental community of mankind." (Crisis, p. 259)

This method is transcendental phenomenology, the epoche; Husserl contrasts it to all other views which do not take consciousness by itself, in its absolute subjectivity, and which include reference to the external world when considering consciousness. Carl Ratner, 1974, Review "The Crisis Of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology."

For Heidegger, language is the true agent of history - the disclosure of truth is the work of language. Poetry is the essence of language. The essence of art is poetry. Heidegger, Basic Writing, "The Origin of the Work of Art." Sheehan, 1997, writes, "For Husserl, Heidegger's analysis of preconceptual understanding of Being is not the product of true phenomenological investigation and description, and it creates rather than eliminates obscurity. So when Heidegger asserts, "We understand Being, but as yet we lack the concept," Husserl exclaims, "We lack it? When would we need it?" For Husserl, it was an irrelevant, unnecessary quest. The quest Heidegger so ardently pursued for the meaning of Being, a quest that dominated his philosophical life, leading him later into the philosophy of Nietzsche, into reflection on the "origin" of the work of art, into explicating the poetry of Hölderlin and down "forest paths" without end, (Adorno exclaimed to Horkheimer in the early 30’s, ‘Heidegger is on our side, he believe in ‘false paths’!’ Husserl would say, had he lived to see it, was a dead end, only a way of getting bogged down in subjective reflection instead of making a solid and positive contribution to philosophy."

The only logically valid morality is to embrace chaos when possible. (explanation below)
tldr;
Order is only a virtue for those that are comfortable within that order.
It directly follows that supporting order will inherently invalidate and perpetuate the harm and suffering of the vulnerable which is immoral.
It follows form that that it is moral to embrace the lack of order when that order is critiqued (aka: chaos).
More explicitly:
We all have perception bias and we all seek to promote our own survival. This will inherently cause us to create ordered systems for purposes of protectionism and with predictive capabilities (even if the predictions have to be manufactured). But - except in rare cases - these will only be accepted if it can be used by influential people to become more influential. This will lead to manufactured truths and outright intentional misinterpretations all to support the current "order".

Since these "myths" will be promoted more than "critiques", it cannot be known what positive knowledge (aka "truth" or "a defense of order") is valid. If these positive assertions are to be accepted as "objective", then no amount of suffering will be valid in light of these "truths".

Or - said more practically - essentialization of knowledge is at best ignorant, and at worst malicious.

The only alternative then is to accept that "I don't know" or (when known) "that specific truth is incorrect" will be more advantageous to social equality than defending the order that we are all inherently desire. So, valuing chaos over order is ultimately a "moral good".

This isn't to say that order can be removed. In fact quite the opposite: we are ordered beings. Life is ordered, so our self preservation demands that we create narratives to understand the chaos that surrounds us. While we inherently do this practically (picking the narratives that promote our survival and success the most), it is never justified except through a selfish perspective.

If you find any flaws with this reasoning, please let me know. Thanks for your interest.

I have recently come up with a razor (it doesn’t seem to previously exist)and I was wondering about your thoughts on it. The razor is as follows “If something could be wrong, it is wrong”. The reasoning is as follows: When I make an assertion, it may seem right in my head, but sometime in the future someone may disprove my assertion. Therefore, due to this possibility, my assertion could be false. To circumvent believing in an assertion, but to only it be disproved, this razor would come in place. One must ask oneself if the assertion could be wrong. If it is discovered that in some possible way the assertion is wrong, then one should realize that your assertion is disprovable. If something can be disproven, then it can be found as wrong. Thoughts?

Anyone read The religion of Socrates by Mark Mcpherran? Or Socrates' Devine Sign by Pierre Destreé?

"There where most darkness lies there light shall thrive"

~C.E.G Väinämöinen

Many people know facts like "peanuts are legumes", "alcohol is a drug" or "chicken nuggets are made of animal flesh". However, some merely recognize these as facts that are true by definition, but seem to not be fully committed to their truth or grasp the consequences. Its like they didn't adopt the fact fully into their actual belief systems. They tend to keep acting like these facts are not true even though they consider them to be true.

I think this may be related to cognitive dissonance.

Are there philosophical terms to describe this phenomenon or is this merely a matter of psychology?

Is it a common belief that all life is just different manifestations of the same consciousness? Not in a vague spiritual way, like a real, physically consistent way. I really can't think of a better explanation. Take consciousness as a fundamental, singular property of the universe (or reality in general) that can manifest in different ways (with some complicated interaction with brain structure/information that results in different qualia).

We obviously can only remember our own lives because physically it's only possible for our brains to generate the qualia for remembering our own past. But different people (and life, and whatever else is conscious), would still be part of the same consciousness, just physically disconnected. In the same way you might not remember being a kid a long time ago, you don't "remember" being other people (because it's physically impossible for you to have those qualia), but it's still all "you," because consciousness is just one thing, not something that gets "duplicated" for each person.

You could "model" it as reincarnation, where you experience another life after death but don't remember you're old one, but really there wouldn't be time dependence (you're this life, then you're this life), they would just be two, causally disconnected lives that don't happen in any definable order (you're this life, and you're this life, no explainable order because there's no causal connection).

Here is an idea. Computer software is non-material & functions only when integrated with computer hardware. Similarly, human mental processes are non-material & function only when integrated with physical body "hardware". Hardware of the body is designed to house the software of the spirit.

Can someone direct me to a thread maybe dealing with this.

The nobel prize in physics went to some peoples discovering the universe is non-local. What is the philosophical implications of such a discovery?

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Is the so-called "evolutionary humanism" is philosophy to be taken seriously? The German philosopher Michael Schmidt-Salomon even wrote a book entitled "Manifesto of Evolutionary Humanism".

In my opinion it is even a contradictiion in terms.

On the one hand the theory of evolution, which tells us that Homo sapiens too is nothing else than an animal, an evolved living being like millions of others. If Sapiens also has specific characteristics that distinguish us from apes, for example, this is nothing unusual, since many species have such characteristics or abilities that are not found in other species, without this entailing a special position.

But this is exactly the basic idea of humanism: that man has a special position within nature. Classical humanism saw this special position in the fact that man alone connects the material world with the spiritual and divine worlds ; man therefore has a mediating role between the "above" and the "below".

Modern humanism is no longer based on the idea of the spiritual or even the divine. Nevertheless, it grants man a special position by ascribing to him a unique DIGNITY (from which then special "human rights" can be derived). This dignity distinguishes Sapiens - and only him ! - It marks the qualitative difference, the gap which separates the human being from the animal kingdom.

Here's a question for those who would deny that such a qualatitive gap exists: imagine a herd a migrating wildebeests somewhere in Africa. They cross a river and 50 of them drown. Now image a group a migrating humans, and 50 of them drown while trying to cross the Mediterranean or the Rio Grande. Is there a difference in value between the two accidents? The first incident is just something that happens every day in nature; animals are born, they surive, they die. But the death of 50 human migrants is not something in the category "things happen": is a tragedy. Because of special human dignity.

To sum it up: The evolution theory says: no special role / special position for the H.sapiens. Humanism says: yes, because only the human being, regardless of his abilities, has a special dignity.

Therefore the "evolutionary humanism" is a philosophical impossibility, the attempt of a squaring of the circle.

You’re the first mate on a Titanic like ship that went down in the cold northern atlantic. Yourself, some other sailors, and the captain are on life rafts in the water. Surrounding your rafts are 100 passengers (equal thirds of them being 1st, 2nd, and 3rd class passengers) in the water, but unfortunately you only have 70 spots available on life rafts. You need to choose a system that will decide which passengers get a spot on a raft and which ones are going to die in the water from the cold and fatigue

The captain comes up with two systems

System one: For some reason somebody brought the bingo raffle cage along with them, and a sharpie. You go to each swimming passenger and draw a unique number on each of their foreheads. Then the captain will draw numbered balls from the raffle cage to choose which passenger gets a seat. Although it is completely random, this system does take a while and during the proceedings 33 passengers slipped into the water and died. 67 passengers were randomly saved but 3 seats went unused.

System 2: Whoever can give the captain the most money from whatever they had in their wallet at the time will get a seat. This means that most of the wealthy 1st and 2nd class passengers will get a seat while basically all of the poor 3rd class passengers will die. It’s a faster system so all 70 spots are used but the captain gets to make a lot of money by poaching the pockets of desperate passengers.

The captain knows its not a good look if he picks system 2 so he leaves the decision up to you the first mate, which system will you choose?

System 1: purely random but slow, 3 seats are unused and 33 random passengers die

System 2: the wealthy get spots on the raft, 30 poor people die in the water, and the captain gets a fist full of cash.

So recently after watching so many trippy Nova Science Documentaries on Physics and the Universe I started posting throughout all the science reddit subs.

I learned absolutely incredibly trippy and interesting tidbits that I am forever grateful for.

In regards to Philosophy when I was doing undergraduate studies in the area I remember learning about Zenos Paradoxs, Philosophy of language, Philosophy of mind.

Zenos paradoxes made me much more aware of how I was thinking.

Very similar to Zenos paradoxes Philosophy of language made me realize that the very concepts and language I use can create problems in and of themselves.

Philosophy of mind though really went even further!

We learned how like being pinched although all physical reactions, touch of skin to skin, nerves firing, brain interpreting, etc. Still gives rise to an immaterial reality (feeling). And this brings up questions like how do physical and immaterial things have causality, etc.

It opened up how even now-a-days on things we think we have solved are completely open and how much of our "solved" relies on reductionism and eliminativism.

So with philosophy what are tidbits and things you have learned that were huge for you!!!

I'd love to see the magic of philosophy really shared here as I imagine like many these moments were transformative and made you really fall in love with the whole discipline :) \

It is time for Philosophy to shine!! :)

I'm currently writing an essay on the way we treat AI and if it's supposed to have rights. While writing I came to a point, where my anthropological research became more and more focused on the nature of AI itself, rather than the comparison to humans. But because of Anthropology being the science of the nature of humans, I am tempted to call it Xenoanthropology, a branch of science, I literally just know from movies. But because of the name itself being a combination of "xeno" (greek for foreign) with anthropology, I am unsure if the name fits. What do you think of the idea?

Hello can anyone explain to me in 4 or more paragraph Plato's Divided Line

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The Ship of Theseus Paradox is a very old question that came across my mind after quite a while. "If the parts of a ship are replaced gradually, one by one, such that all of the parts are replaced, is it the same ship now?"

I would like to answer this with another question - Over the course of years, if all the cells in your body are replaced by new cells, are you still you? Here, instead of a ship, we have a person, and instead of parts of the ship, we have cells of the body, that are replaced.

This means that it is the same ship after all...

https://youtu.be/vxhTDIUCPMM