Well, the more we think we are embedded in others. Perhaps. Some feel the self is already an illusion, so there is that. In any event, we aren't actually "embedded" in anything. It's a figure of speech. We do not have any adequate language to describe what "happens" to us. Yet here we are. Discussing our well-being.

Which is why this reddit is mainly speculative philosophy, not philosophy per se. Actually, speculative is incorrect. Not much speculation in the philosophical sense. So even better might be "r/ philosophy and self-help."

Mods: think about it.

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I seldom see posts here doing critiques of these first-level reflective operations and their alleged conclusions.

We have no idea who or what we are. But we think we must, or should, or do. And as to other people, you will have to prove they are real, and in what manner, before I entertain *philosophically* the notion I am "embedded" in them.

It could be, "other people" is the greatest McGuffin ever invented. We simply can't know. We are in the system, not outside of it. That's a fact. Helps to start with it.

That's because the only explanation is, that this is all a joke.

>it's important to use critical thinking so that you are not led astray.

That is a closing move, though. Or can be. We need to better explore what openness does before we set up a watch over it.

A frictionless, permeable barrier would be madness. But movement with some level of surface coherence would, due to the openness introduced by the movement, naturally increase coherence or mitigate fragmentation. Again, paradoxically.

Imagine a surface with a number X of connections and/or connectors. These connections are with the surface itself (endogenic, reflection, or preoccupation I suppose too) and adventitious (exogenic, external). By movement [in the external] the potential connections multiply in proportion to how one (the surface) moves.

But, one can move the surface too fast to enable this virtuous tempo.

Additionally, there are many ways to move the surface. Many people find reading to be a mode by which connections are made bountiful. Others do not. Some find travel nourishing. But again, at a virtuous tempo.

EDIT: what the tempo is, is not universal, certainly. When and how to rest the surface -- to sleep -- varies in its meaning and operation in human societies, for example. I would expect a lot of variation, even at the individual level. Thank goodness for language. It gives us some semblance of a common timeline of "what's happening."

or openness paradoxically lessens fragmentation. Likely due to openness allowing for many more potential "cohesion moments" than would a closed system.

Travel can be a good time to gather your thoughts. Travel is sticky. People have written books about being on the road. Identity in movement, not so much state.

Hey why not!

Schopenhauer said the most terrible noise is that of the whip, the horse whip. It speaks of the utter carelessness of human beings, and of how bleak we never cease to be.

I could make the counterargument, human beings deeply need symbiotic contact of some sort with other species, but horse labor and horse transport was replaced by machines. Net result: potentially quite a serious loss all around, if my premise is correct.

Pessimism relies on you agreeing to limiting your outlook just so. But why would one do that? Is there any self-evidence for pessimism? I think it's histrionic. A previous post was about absurdist writers. Kinda same deal. History moves forward, and the passions some thoughts require of us, sometimes just don't work the same way. Thrill is gone, thrill is gone.

Anything that wants to keep a flame alive makes me also suspect, something needs burned down. Why pessimism? Don't tell me about stuff like horse whips. That's rhetoric, not theory.

I think we have a similar lack of enchantment on this train of thought lol. Yes, I agree.

Death why not birth? After all, I can potentially consent to death, but I cannot consent to birth. It seems to me "violation of consent" is what badgers 19th and 1st half 20th century philosophy, in essence.

Well birth is far more an outrage than death then.

As to the here and now, and how it tends to not have room for such thoughts, I guess we can modify the saying: there are no absurdists in foxholes.

edit: "Then why phase in and out of it?" -- excellent way of putting the issue.

I am going to go with you on this. On the Why? part, not the robot part.

Rhetoric can do all kinds of things, including paradoxes and ironies, and that era of thinker used both rhetoric and philosophy quite well.

But that does not mean something can't be dated, or passe as it were.

It is one of those classic tropes in Western literature that death is somehow an insult. Theological reasons? Poetic reasons? Logical reasons? I am not confident saying why this developed as a trope, but it did. Death is an insult is how Schiller more or less described it, and that same thought is kind of implied in Kant. So death is this "categorical objection" of some kind?

In any event, I think such a notion was a creature of its time, and as time goes by is starting to appear to more people as very presumptuous. Absurdity is what happened to the Romantic notion of tragedy. But what "death is" simply can no longer be assumed. There is no consensus any more. We can use these old tropes, but the point kind of is, we are apparently moving out of their range.

Do we need to turn back?