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Why does crap float to the top?

I'm sorry I left the conversation that I was enjoying so much, busy couple of days. I believe I'm actually somewhere in between the opinion of you two. While I do not think that we necessarily would have.... "don't you think we'd have found a solution by now"....Nor do I really believe that our activities such as reading, games, and ideas are necessarily an escape. Perhaps the world of action movies or sports can be labeled as an escape from the reality of the problem. However, when we move into speaking about actual thought, derived from books, educational television, ect...then is it really an escape?
When speaking of actually expanding our ideas and views of "problems" themselves I don't think it can be labeled escape as much as an attempt at recognition of the problems of the human condition. (feeble as the attempt may be)
In the end however, although I disagree with Bobby on these premises....his conclusion I have to agree with. The ability of the human mind to solve all problems is an arrogance created by the mind itself. Not only because of the guises that we have to sift our way through when trying to gather any information, but the sheer impracticality of broadening our intelligence. There seems to be an efficiency that brains can't go past without running into more problems than the solution is worth. We see this constantly with intelligent people coming up with ideas used for unimaginable ends. This is even thinking on a large scale effect of oversized intelligence. The direct effect seems to be a realization itself of all of the actual problems we face. For this reason it seems to often be the case that has been repeated time and again that you rarely see a happy intelligent person, yet you see bumbling idiots walking down the street never better while things are falling apart around them, but they simply are incapable of realizing it.

In essence I agree with Bobby or Bryan whoever you are :) ...your conclusion that we will never be able to come up with "the solution" from the human brain....I simply have differing reasons why. And since it seems that Optimist and Cynicist roles have already been claimed.....I'll take my place somewhere in the middle.
 
I can understand why you think I'm cynical about this, but I'm not. what I mean by "escape" is, say you don't like your circumstances in life because they're fraught with conflict and sorrow. someone dealt you a shitty hand. you want to move from that set of circumstances to another. you're ambitious, you believe you can find a state in which you're not lonely and miserable. sometimes this state is crystalized in an object which gives you a sensation that makes you feel pleasure, so your mind feeds on it for a while. but then you get bored and look for something else. the object of desire is pretty much irrelevent, it's desire itself that leads to conflict because desire breeds fear. the two go hand-in-hand. the desire for pleasure is the fear of pain. that's how the mind is conditioned. so seeking and accumulating knowledge is just an indirect way of saying "I fear the unknown".
 
I disagree.....I don't believe that desire and fear are necessarily inclusive reciprocals of one another at every given instance.
 
bobbyburns said:
I can understand why you think I'm cynical about this, but I'm not. what I mean by "escape" is, say you don't like your circumstances in life because they're fraught with conflict and sorrow. someone dealt you a shitty hand. you want to move from that set of circumstances to another. you're ambitious, you believe you can find a state in which you're not lonely and miserable. sometimes this state is crystalized in an object which gives you a sensation that makes you feel pleasure, so your mind feeds on it for a while. but then you get bored and look for something else. the object of desire is pretty much irrelevent, it's desire itself that leads to conflict because desire breeds fear. the two go hand-in-hand. the desire for pleasure is the fear of pain. that's how the mind is conditioned. so seeking and accumulating knowledge is just an indirect way of saying "I fear the unknown".
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By the way I think you and Thomas Hobbes would get along quite well Bobby. If you haven't read Leviathan I think you'd enjoy it, you guys have pretty much the same theory about humans, about our nature, and what motivates us.
 
lol, one of these days you're gonna understand me. something will click up there and this will all make sense. or maybe it won't, I don't know ... but as long as you're interested, I'll keep typing. just keep in mind, it's not philosophy because there's nothing you and I have to remember. we're just trying to observe ourselves. simple enough, right?

going back to desire and fear, it is my opinion, my idea, my experience, my knowledge, which creates desire and fear. I have a reaction to, say, loneliness; I say I am afraid of being nothing. am I afraid of the idea itself or do I have previous knowledge of the idea? if it is only the idea then I do not fear it, it is only my apprehension about an idea which causes my fear. fear is a product of the past, it can only exist through images, thoughts. it is the mind that creates fear and projects it into the future. it is always absent.

desire, on the other hand, is simply the resistance of fear. it is not something separate that imposes itself on you; it is you, your-self. there is no space between you and your desire. that's an image created by the mind. but I'm not going to go any further with that. desire is very complex because it can be extremely subtle. the whole structure of desire is a mechanical process of memory. obviously, some memories stand out in your mind, while others are buried deep inside you. it's seeing desire as it occurs that leads to self-awareness. but you also have to understand fear.
 
I understand what you are saying....I'm simply disagree that desire is necessarily a product of fear from my experiences, knowledge, and so forth. It is not to me only a resistence of fear, but something of itself.

And you can't claim that it's not philosophy , if it abides by some type of logic than it can be applied as philosophy regardless of the memory it entails.

To me, what you're claiming is as implausible as the exact opposite....saying that fear and all things bad derive from desire, and are fear is a resistance to desire. It seems that this argument would have similar basis, and run a similar line of reasoning, just flipped.

I enjoy discussion, but please don't add patronizing first paragraphs as in your former post. It does nothing to improve the information of the post.
 
wait ... ok, I can see what you're saying. "something up there will click" and "simple enough, right?" can come across like a slap in the face. I'm sorry, I was being vivacious. I guess I went a little overboard.
 
Irene Wilde said:
It's always thought-provoking, and perhaps some of the other members will find our discourse entertaining. :)

Irene Wilde
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Yes, very much thought provoking. I enjoyed reading all the response.
 
Just interjecting a moment to say I was away on business for the day, but I'm keeping up. Once I recover from my little 14-hour day, I'll be chiming back in.

Irene Wilde
 
No worries Bobby, I know you always mean well. Just reminded me of like when a Christian says oh you don't know God now, but someday it'll click. Wasn't offended by it though, just saying.
I think I would definately enjoy sitting down and talking with you about a variety of topics. I appreciate someone who thinks out their beliefs completely before adopting them, it's refreshing. I hope everyone else has enjoyed the debate ;) , and I'm sorry that you had to work for the day Irene! :) I'll be around for the night, I have a new idea for a thread. G'day!
 
Interesting perspective Mr. Enema! :)

I've been away from this subject for a couple of days, and the horse seems to have been beaten to death, but I did want to go back and clarify my idea about "solutions." First, I think many people apply themselves to "the problem" (which is so large we [meaning all of us, human beings] have yet to define it, I think) in a linear and logical fashion, but there is no room there for inspiration, for intuitive thinking, for the "great leap fowards" (excellent song, by the way). And by tomorrow, I don't think we mean literally tomorrow, or in our lifetime or in this millenium, just eventually, one day. In the meantime, our little leaps, our increased knowledge of science and so forth, bring us a little closer to that one day. In universal terms, it was only "yesterday" we thought evil spirits caused diseased, and "today" we have medicine, but we still have a long way to go, because the medicine is still a business and it's limited not only by the bean-counters and the calculators, but by the thinking that science is limited to what mankind can synthesize in a laboratory, that chemicals are the cure. There's a passage in Henry Miller's "Tropic of Capricorn" that I think perhaps captures my thinking better than I can myself:

"If I got home of an evening, for instance, and there was no food in the house, not even for the kid, I would turn right around and go looking for the food. But what I noticed about myself, and that was what puzzled me, was that no sooner outside and hustling for the grub than I was back at the Weltanschauung again. I didn't think about food for us exclusively, I thought of food in general, food in all its stages, everywhere in the world at that hour, and how it was gotten, and how it was prepared and what people did if they didn't have it and how maybe there was a way to fix it so that everybody would have it when they wanted it and no more time wasted on such an idiotically simple problem...That's what I think about, more than about whose trap it's going down or how much it costs. Why should I give a **** about what anything costs? I'm here to live, not to calculate. And that's just what the bastards don't want you to do -- to live! They want you to spend your whole life adding up figures. That makes sense to them. That's reasonable. That's intelligent. If I were running the boat things wouldn't be so orderly perhaps, but it would be gayer by Jesus!....you wouldn't need a visa or a passport or a carte d'identite because you wouldn't be registered anywhere and you wouldn't bear a number and if you wanted to change your name every week you could do it because it wouldn't make any difference since you wouldn't own anything except what you could carry around with you and why would you want to own anything when everything would be free?"

Ok, I did some severe paraphrasing there, but I was copying from the book by hand. So I think my point is, going way back to the beginning of this thread, even though some books, some authors, some artists are not "popular" it is good that we have them, but I believe it's the people who seek them out, who want to be challenged, who want to keep challenging their own ideas, who will eventually carry us forward to the "one day." Not from fear, not from desire, not from a need to escape, from something else, from that tiny little spark inside the human creature that makes us the look up at the stars and wonder "why?"

There. This horse can official die now and we can all go back to our lives.

Irene Wilde
 
Irene Wilde said:
:

That's what I think about, more than about whose trap it's going down or how much it costs. Why should I give a **** about what anything costs? I'm here to live, not to calculate. And that's just what the bastards don't want you to do -- to live! They want you to spend your whole life adding up figures. That makes sense to them. That's reasonable. That's intelligent. If I were running the boat things wouldn't be so orderly perhaps, but it would be gayer by Jesus!....you wouldn't need a visa or a passport or a carte d'identite because you wouldn't be registered anywhere and you wouldn't bear a number and if you wanted to change your name every week you could do it because it wouldn't make any difference since you wouldn't own anything except what you could carry around with you and why would you want to own anything when everything would be free?"
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I like this, which reminds me of something from the Descipline and Punishement by Faucault.--no time for me to explain right now. will get back to it.

Irene Wilde said:
:----but I believe it's the people who seek them out, who want to be challenged, who want to keep challenging their own ideas, who will eventually carry us forward to the "one day." Not from fear, not from desire, not from a need to escape, from something else, from that tiny little spark inside the human creature that makes us the look up at the stars and wonder "why?"

Irene Wilde
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Inspiring lines, Irene. I think it make sense for me if I just focus on challenging myself, i e. to be myself.

Best regards, :)
 
Irene Wilde said:
"everywhere in the world at that hour, and how it was gotten, and how it was prepared and what people did if they didn't have it and how maybe there was a way to fix it so that everybody would have it when they wanted it and no more time wasted on such an idiotically simple problem...That's what I think about, more than about whose trap it's going down or how much it costs. Why should I give a **** about what anything costs? I'm here to live, not to calculate. why would you want to own anything when everything would be free?"
Click to expand...

Once again I appear to be clearly set between you and Bobby somewhere. That is a very good passage by the way, although the utopia mentioned in it where everyone gets their plentiful supply of food for free without economy will never happen in my opinion. I think it is all great and well that the human mind can come up with these wonderful things, but as I said earlier the repercussions of those always add up to a greater sum on the other side. Every time someone comes up with new technology to make more food, the evil caused by it will probably end up harming just as many people. Don't get me wrong I dont' believe it's inherent in the knowledge itself, I love the advances we are making ( especially in space right now :) ) ....but the human disposition seems that it is, and will always keep us from acheiving that ultimate solution. This is to say it's not that we scientifically can't find the answer, but for every one of those dreamers asking "why" there's hundreds of those supressing them saying "how can I take advantage of this situation to greater benefit myself."

But I do still love being one of those asking why, and hoping for the day when we find more cures, or explore new things...I do not think all humans are massochists or evil...just that the amount that are will always hold to much influence over the weak minded. People's hearts are generally good, but their minds naive...and by the time they reach puberty they have been told a million things by the world and most accept what they are told and are so twisted around it's not funny. Cure naivete? Possibly. Then we have a whole bunch of intelligent well informed people running around, and the end result of that I'm not sure would be all that well off either. It seems that nature has a way of balancing the types of people, so that there will always be the dreamers, there will always be the cynics, there will always be the naive, there will always be the greedy....but in the end I'm not sure that one of them can really win out.

I'm glad you were able to rejoin the conversation though Irene, and never worry about beating such a supple horse to death. :)

G'day!
 
watercrystal said:
I like this, which reminds me of something from the Descipline and Punishement by Faucault
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Think we should start building a Penopticon Crystal? :) I call dibs on the tower!
Great book by Foucault by the way if anyone likes Political Philosophy/Social Philosophy.
 
watercrystal said:
I like this, which reminds me of something from the Descipline and Punishement by Faucault.--no time for me to explain right now. will get back to it.

:)
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Yes, it reminds me of our status of existence, that we are pined/pigeonholed by spatialization and timetable which are essential elements in building that panopticon, as True said.
 
Thought I'd float this old thread to the top in light of the repeated raising of the word elitist in some discussions recently. I'm surprised, on reading this thread for the first time now, how much there is of what would now be considered 'insulting' or 'elitist' comments. Are we much more sensitive on the board now, or is the member base just wider and less likely to take such comments lying down?
 
Shade said:
Are we much more sensitive on the board now, or is the member base just wider and less likely to take such comments lying down?
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I think it's the rise in the influence of PC that has instigated the change in sensitivity. You can't speak out against anything anymore without being labelled racist, sexist, anti-American or elitist. The biggest social crime nowdays is to have an opinion that contradicts that of others. It's just pathetic :rolleyes:
 
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