Internet poker, mostly 2-7 triple draw and baduci. Primarily on pokerstars.

Triple draw is so frustrating, manic depression - the card game version. Half the time I want to smash a brick into my face and end it all. But the other half I'm on a heater taking pot after pot.

It mostly balances out.

Suffering motivates us to act, in order to stop feeling it, or prevent it being felt. This is perpetual. We will do this till the day we day, because we have bodily needs - food, water, shelter, etc. Hunger is suffering, thirst is suffering, cold is suffering. So we must act, expend effort and energy, struggle to avoid it. Because if we don't, the suffering will intensify greatly, until we die a horrible painful death, of starvation, thirst, exposure, etc. Life is a constant struggle to avoid suffering, and the consequence of avoiding all these various sufferings is that we continue to exist (and suffer). So I would not say that "we avoid suffering because we want to continue living". Rather, I'd say that we want to avoid suffering (because it feels bad, it's unwanted, it hurts), and the consequence of this is continued existence. Evolution has fine tuned this, whereby we feel hunger, so we struggle to find something to eat, and then we feel thirst, so we must expend effort to drink, and then we get cold, so we find some clothes or heat, etc. It's a constant series of sufferings in various forms, which motivate us to perform different actions - which produces the overall effect of continued existence (and continued suffering).

The horrible thing is that when we avoid all our bodily sufferings, we're not rewarded with anything (aside from not feeling suffering), there's no prize, no compensation for our struggle. All we achieve is a state which the dead get through no effort at all, and don't have to suffer and struggle for it. We just feel 'not-bad'. Our physical needs are met, now what? We are confronted with the emptiness of existence, it's inherent lack of value, it's ambivalence - you could take it or leave it. And we become bored, and restless. We are so used to perpetually being in action, struggling from suffering that when we rest, we simply don't know what to do with ourselves. We need tofind something to do. When our attention isn't being absorbed into something, when we lack a goal or purpose, we face life itself. And it's empty. So we must invent goals, we must invent something to absorb our attention into. We must put made up goals ahead of ourselves, so that we struggle towards those instead.

And we are so dumb, that psychologically we imagine it all paying off in the future. "I'll be happy when I achieve x, or when I reach y, or when I get z". But when we reach xyz, perhaps we feel some momentary excitement, or joy, but soon, due to our once again lacking purpose, goals or direction to distract us from the emptiness of existence, we are confronted with it again, and lapse into suffering. We become anxious and restless. And it just repeats. "I'll be happy when I reach a".

And due to psychological complexity, how complicated we are (as opposed to say a cow), we have more needs than just bodily. We experience a far greater range of suffering than other animals. We need social contact, we need to feel valued, we need to feel like what we do is meaningful, we need to feel part of a wider, greater whole (a society, a country, the human race, etc). It's just endless. Life is just a constant race, a struggle to avoid a vast range of sufferings. Because we experience such a wide range, we develop the complex and complicated societies we see today. There's no real end goal. We may tell ourselves we do it all for 'x', it all has 'y' meaning, and that's why we live and struggle. But this isn't the case. We struggle simply because suffering hurts. Pain hurts, cold hurts, hunger hurts, and so we do whatever we need to, to avoid these various sufferings. The resulting effect being continued biological existence. But we also feel the suffering of meaninglessness, and so we must invent justifications/reasons for our struggle ("we may tell ourselves we do it all for 'x'), to try and give us some psychological comfort, to avoid the ennui and anxiousness.

And there's all kinds of other sufferings as well. This is just the normal functioning humans life. Everything can go wrong, addiction, mental illness, physical illness, heartbreak, rejection, fingers down chalkboard, car crashes, being harmed by empathy (you feel bad when others do), I could go on for days.

But yet, there's no true pleasure in this world. There's no genuinely positively valued experiences. Suffering has negative value, and yet pleasure is not positive. At best it's neutral. What pleasure actually consists of, is an experience of 'losing oneself'. We say that we feel pleasure in moments when we become absorbed into something so much that we forget our existence, our struggle. We say eating good food is pleasurable. What actually happens is we become lost into the flavor sensation, we focus so much on it that we lose our sense of ourselves and forget we exist. This is what happens in sports, movies, music, sex, massages. Pleasure is nothing but a brief respite from suffering, through completely absorbing ones attention into something. An orgasm feels good, not because it's an actual genuinely good sensation in-itself. Rather, the feeling is so strong that our attention is overwhelmed into it, and we lose our sense of self, of being in the world, if only for a brief moment.

I'm writing this post right now, because I have secured my bodily needs, and the emptiness of the world is confronting me head on. I need to find something to do, to distract myself, to absorb my attention into. Just so happens that the complicated thought involved in doing philosophy, much like a puzzle to solve, takes a lot of concentration/attention, so that I don't have to face the emptiness of merely existence anymore. Soon this wont be enough, my attention will stop being absorbed by my thoughts, it doesn't last. And so I'm downloading an episode to watch soon. I've prepared to avoid the future suffering.

I don't think most people are really aware of how bad their lives are, and the world is. It's suffering all the way down. There are no motivations for action that are not a kind of suffering. We seek 'pleasurable' (which we falsely believe are genuine goods) experiences only because the lack of them is a kind of suffering. Anyone with any sense of empathy should conclude that creating another being that will have suffering inflicted upon them, day in and day out, until it finally overwhelms them and they die, is clearly not the right thing to do. It's cruel and unnecessary. But most people are deluded about the value of their lives. They are masters of pollyannaism, or just genuinely lack empathy. Some of the reasons people have children are downright shocking. "So someone will care for me in my old age", "to save my marriage", "to get money from the government". And then there's people who do it unthinkingly, because that's the thing that you do. You become an adult, you find a partner, you have children and settle down. And so they do that, because that's the thing that you do. thedoxa.

Life consists of nothing more than a struggle away from suffering, and brief respites from suffering by forgetting you exist, essentially. Losing oneself into a moment, or a sensation. That's it. We delude ourselves by perpetually imagining the future better than it will be in reality. We imagine happiness ahead, we don't really understand that we'll never reach the future, we'll always be here, presently suffering and struggling. And then one day our bodies will be lethally harmed, or give out, and we will die.

Humour and laughter is an important and effective counter to suffering. It's probably the best way to deal/respond to it. Find a way to keep laughing, try not to get too depressed.

Here's how to reconcile them: Biological sense organs are nothing but a particular type of sense-perception.

That was easy. — lambda

If you press on the side of your eye, your vision doubles. If you lose your eyes, you become blind, losing your tongue means you can't taste anything. If you lose all your sense organs/brain, then presumably you cease to have perceptions altogether and die. There's clearly something special about sense organs, that I don't think can simply be explained by saying that what clearly looks like a casual relationship between sense organs and perceptions is mere correlations of perceptions or coincidence. As in, it's just a correlation that one loses their taste perception after one loses their tongue, and there's no casual relationship between your tongue and your sense of taste. There's something deeper going on than that. I suppose I cannot prove this 100% though, but neither can we about a lot of things and yet we still believe it (eg, that I am talking to another conscious person through this forum).

What about just "I am suffering, therefore suicide."

Seems perfectly logical. Everyone still living is blue-pilled as fuck.

All I am arguing is that if for the sake of argument we grant that such a simulation, indistinguishable from real life were possible, then we would be able to choose whether to partake or not; and that the choices we make could arguably depend on our preferred model of ethics. — John

But if it was truly subjectively indistinguishable, it would just be a choice between continuing to experience the suffering of real life, or for your real life experience to become far more pleasurable. Almost everyone would pick the latter. To know that it's a simulated world you're entering is for it to not be subjectively distinguishable (because the two worlds are distinguished into simulated and real).

The thing is that if you believe pleasure machine experiences could be subjectively indistinguishable from real life experiences, then you at the very least are an epistemological solipsist.

What you are saying is that you could subtract minds from your experience of others and literally nothing would change experientially. And the only way this could be is if you exist in your own private 'experience world'. Which entails epistemological solipsism, because you can't know other minds exist.

And if the pleasure machine experience could be subjectively indistinguishable from real life experience, it therefore must go both ways - real life experience could be subjectively indistinguishable from simulated experience. And if that's the case, how do you even know you're in real life, and not the simulated experience world?

The problem here is thinking that your experience is caused by your brain.

Lets say physiological sense organs/nervous systems give rise/cause this experience that you are presently undergoing.

But the problem here is that our physiological sense organs are only known about through perception. So, your eyes and brain are causing your visual perception of seeing this screen. But what am I actually referring to here with "eyes" and "brain"? I say that what my physiological eye is, to me, is experiential. I can touch it, I feel myself moving it, I see it in the mirror, and I read and learn about it's function. Nothing about my understanding, and conception of my physiological eye is anything which transcends my experience. And yet this is precisely what the physiological eye must be in order it to be causing my visual perceptions. Otherwise you are in the situation where the cause is the effect. The eye causes it's own physiological existence.

So what I am saying is there nothing about a physiological organ which goes beyond experience. And so, if the physiological eye is causing your visual perceptions, then eg in the case of looking in the mirror at your eyes, your eyes are causing the very existence of themselves. Because you look in the mirror at a physiological eye. And how you look is through visual perception, which is itself caused by the physiological eye (among other things).So here, your perception has created your eyes own physiological existence to you.

Can things be the both a cause and an effect? Can they cause themselves? Seems incoherent.

So then I ask, what is it about our species that we keep putting more people into the world if we can reflect upon procreation itself, and even choose to stop the process. All the X reasons that are used when self-reflected upon (in other words not just "accidents" which themselves could have been avoided easily), are absurd when taken as reasons in and of themselves. I just chose "redemption" because that answer is a great example of what does not even need to occur in the first place if humans were not born. Redemption does not need to take place if there is no one to exist who needs redeeming. So what is it about the human project, that it has to be carried forth? What are we doing here that we need to be here? And again, if you answer that with any X reason, that reason can be taken to its logical end where it becomes an absurdity because it becomes circular logic. — schopenhauer1

No argument here. I'm never having children either, life is full of suffering and it would br immoral to inflict it upon someone who can't consent, and whose only escape if he doesn't appreciate the 'gift' is to violently, lethally harm his body until he's dead, causing suffering for everyone around who cares about him.

Personally, I used to care about antinatalism a lot. I believed there was a great moral imperative to prevent babies from being brought into the world. What could more important than to bring about the cessation of suffering entirely? What an opportunity this generation has, to completely end all human suffering, and the only thing we need do is choose not to do something. But I just don't care about it as much anymore. It's not my suffering that's being created, it really doesn't affect me at all. Other people will always choose to breed, there's really no stopping it (unless you invent some biological weapon which sterilizes the entire world), and it seems most people born basically delude themselves into thinking life's great and they weren't harmed by birth. Does it really matter that much if the are born? They themselves don't even think they were harmed, so why even care that they actually were?

Why actually care about the hypothetical suffering of non-existent babies? Would your life actually improve in any way if you convinced people not to breed?

Secondly, we learn from a very young age that instant gratification in all things tends to lead to very bad results. I could empty my bank account right now, max out my credit cards, and have a rip roaring time today. But I know that I will be regretting and paying for that decision for weeks to come. So I employ some modicum of self-control. — Marchesk

Does this actually make sense though, to defer current pleasure for future ones?

The only time pleasure can ever be experienced is now. When you defer the possibility of experiencing pleasure now, so that you may experience greater pleasure in the future, I'm not sure you are actually better off. I think this kind of deferring is motivated by seeing pleasure as a sort of quantitative thing. Whereby drinking alcohol on Monday morning you experience say 5 pleasure units, but on Friday night you will experience 12 pleasure units. And so there's more intrinsic goodness on Friday than Monday. But, this is not the case. Pleasure = intrinsically good, and good is good. There can be no greater intrinsic 'goodness' when it's the very same thing in both cases (pleasure). Sure, you may prefer Heroin over Meth, but that doesn't mean Heroin is more intrinsically good. Intrinsic goodness is an all or nothing thing, and not a scale.

Life exists only presently, so pleasures are only experienced now. So to hold off on reaching one's goal (intrinsic 'goodness'), so that you can reach the exact same goal 4 days from now is nonsensical. You could have just not waited and reached the very same goal.
Also, you will never actually get to the future anyway as you never leave the present. The future pleasure you are deferring your possible current pleasurable experience towards will never actually be experienced by you. The future, where you think the greater pleasure experience will be perpetually remains ahead of you. You'll always be deferring towards it. The only time you can possibly experience pleasure is right now. It's like sitting on a donkey with a carrot in your hand ready to eat it, and then putting the carrot on a stick and holding it in front of the donkey because you think you'll be better off when you catch up to it. Intrinsic goodness is intrinsic goodness - it's all or nothing, and not a scale. Something is not more i intrinsically good than another intrinsically good thing.

So, an example. You find alcohol pleasurable, but it's Monday morning. You have the choice to a) drink the alcohol right now and feel pleasure, or b) defer the present experience of pleasurable drunkenness until Friday night because you believe it will be more pleasurable then (because eg, you might be with friends, or you wont have to worry about working hungover the next day). What do you pick?
You could have experienced what's intrinsically good right now, but you chose not to for 4 days so that you can experience what's intrinsically good then. All deferring pleasure is, is you choosing not to do a pleasurable action. Nothing is achieved, you don't actually gain anything.

It's seems warranted on the face of it to balk at this idea of not really planning ahead, but when analysed logically, it makes sense. All deferring to a future, greater experience of pleasure achieves, is to miss an opportunity to experience what's good in life. You missed out on experiencing pleasure for 4 days so that you can finally presently experience pleasure. Well what was the point of that, when you can just presently experience intrinsic goodness right now? Which is the only time you could ever feel pleasure anyway. Pleasure is always experienced presently, so deferring an opportunity for a present experience of pleasure until a future time is pointless, all you've done is chosen not to feel the good in life for 4 days. All so that you can in 4 days do nothing greater than what you could have done now - experience the good in life. Why wait?

I don't know why this fallacy keeps repeating itself. There's a difference between "to be is to be perceived" and "to be is to be perceived by me". You can't go from the former to "others are exhausted by my perception of them". — Michael

Yeah but the default position is realism, and one generally comes to idealsim through epistemic concerns about realism. And so it only seems logical that the epistemic concern will follow a natural progression from external world -> ideal world -> my ideal world. Otherwise you don't have epistemic concerns in general, you just have epistemic concerns about the material world.

I mean sure, a subjective idealist can just dogmatically assert the existence of other minds, even though he does not perceive them himself. But it's kind of non-nonsensical to do this, along with bad philosophy.

In any case, the OP is an example of many of the kinds of objections that Berkeley's imagined opponents came up with in his dialogues. He didn't address the 'drugged water pitcher' scenario — Wayfarer

I believe OP is arguing against a subjective idealism where the only minds that exist are human minds (and possibly, some animals). Whereas the drugged water for Berkeley's idealism continues to be 'held' in existence by the mind of god. His whole argument makes no sense if he's arguing against Berkeley.

(This by the way is how to understand Kant's distinction between 'discursive' and 'intellectual' intuition: Kant's theory of the in-itself has nothing to do with the vulgar idea that there is a world that is 'beyond' perception in the sense that it has perceptual qualities that we cannot know. Rather, the in-itself is aperceptual, it has qualities which have nothing to do with perception, and that is why it will remain a 'thing-in-itself'. It is not that there are parts of the world that are 'beyond knowledge', as if a superior, non-human, or divine knowledge could grasp it, but that the very idea of knowledge is no longer applicable to certain aspects of the world, that is is a simple 'category error' to say we can know such and such beyond our experience of it. This is why Kant remained an empirical realist no less than he was a 'transcendental idealist'). — StreetlightX

Then doesn't this do away with the notion of anything causing our perceptions altogether?

What's causing our perceptions is a 'thing-in-itself' (if it's perceptual, then our sense organs are literally the cause of their own existence), but if knowledge doesn't apply to 'things-in-themselves', then it makes no sense to say they cause our perceptions. So the whole notion of perception having some cause dissolves.

Actually, my suffering analogy is wrong. Think of it as like 6 hands stuck in the fish tank holding heat lamps. So, the beetle doesn't strive away from the heat in any aimless direction, rather, his path ahead is shaped by avoiding the other areas of heat/suffering caused by the other heat lamps. The beetle tries to walk in whatever direction has the least amount of heat, which constantly changes because as it walks, the heat lamps move as well. Also note, the hands get in each others way, so the heat lamps can't just converge into a single circle of heat following the beetle. His path is always shaped by avoiding suffering.

The beetle is like a river, trying to take the path of least resistance. The rivers course is guided by whatever forces conform it's direction.

Yes I realize that at this point the analogy has become far too complicated to be worthwhile and I might as well have just talked about suffering directly. Lol.

I think what's missing from the Cyrenaic position is the importance of suffering - how huge a part of existence it is. The Cyrenaic sees pleasure as something one goes towards. But our lived experience is nothing like this. What motivates action is suffering, we don'tmove towards, rather we are driven away. Basically, we constantly suffer, and so are in a constant striving away from it. We aren't striving towards pleasure, we're striving from suffering. We are perpetually trying to avoid sufferings.

Take eating for example. The Cyrenaic might say that eating is pleasurable (for him), and so he eats. That the sensation of taste and eating is pleasurable. But I think in reality, what we are motivated by is hunger, and something like 'lack of nice mouth sensations'. We are driven to eat, the suffering entailed by hunger, lack of mouth flavour, etc, motivates our running from it. Intellectually we might say we ate because it tasted good, or something along those lines, but this was not the case in reality. What's good about this characterization is it avoids this 'future pleasures' issue. The suffering is presently felt, and we are presently striving from it, we are perpetually motivated away from it.

I think also there's a mischaraterisation about what pleasure actually is. Seems to me the Cyrenaic (note: I've never actually read any Cyrenaic work) sees pleasure as something far more valuable or positive, or 'pleasurable' than it actually is. A kind of pollyannaism about pleasure. Take the example above, where I've written "lack of nice mouth sensations". You might argue here that "ok, the lack of nice mouth sensations is a kind of suffering we are motivated by and strive away from. But those nice mouth sensations we experience (due to striving away from it's lack, and not as the Cyreanic says; because we positively strived towards it) are actually intrinsically good."

But I'm not so sure. If the taste sensation is actually positively pleasurable (over and above a cessation of suffering, or a kind of 'flow' distraction from suffering) and therefore good, shouldn't you want to constantly sense it? I like the taste of orange juice, but I wouldn't want to constantly experience the taste. Or take bodily sensations. I know for sure if given the choice I would want to never experience bodily suffering/pains again, but would I want to constantly experience bodily pleasures? Would I want to constantly orgasm? And if not, what does that say about how pleasurable the actual sensation is? People who orgasm like 100 times a day live in hell it seems. Note that pleasure is also extremely short lived. An orgasm is like 3 seconds, one only gets 'lost in the music' for a single song, at best. Food only tastes good until it's swallowed. A heroin rush fades pretty quickly into a sort of secure numbness, which eventually becomes sickness.

I think (what we call) pleasure really consists of, is a negation in some suffering in another, a relief essentially. An 'ahhh' I'm not being pained anymore. And if you're lucky, there's what I would characterize as a kind of self-less flow experience. Where one loses oneself into the sensation, and hence forgets ones suffering. I don't think pleasure ever actually gets into a genuinely positive thing, whereas suffering is genuinely negative, it has less than zero value, in that we aren't just indifferent to it, but are motivated to avoidance. Action is fundamentally avoidance, we are always striving from some suffering or another. And what we call "pleasure" is relief from suffering, and a loss of self into sensation. And not how I believe the Cyrenaic conceives of pleasure which is of an actual positively good thing, on the opposite side of the scale as pleasure, above neutral.

An analogy for how I conceive of suffering, is imagine say a fish tank, with only a beetle in it. Now someone is holding a heat lamp above the beetle (imagine the heat lamp being held at half the depth of the fish tank). The beetle feels the heat, and is pained, and so is motivated to strive away from the heat. Note he's not motivated towards something, rather he just goes in any aimless direction so long as he avoids the suffering. If he stops striving away from the heat, the heat lamp catches up and is held directly above it. He feels like he's burning and soon dries out to a painful death. If he strives too far away from the heat, so that he goes beyond the limit of the area it heats, he doesn't know what to do with himself. Where to go? What to do? He's in an empty fish tank, there's nowhere to go and nothing to do. He becomes bored and stops moving, and the heat lamp soon catches up, motivating him to strive from it again.

How I think of pleasure is that the beetle escapes the heat from the lamp, and then loses his sense of self by getting lost in a sensation. And not say, the beetle walks towards some corner of the fishtank where some positively valuable thing is. Think of it like the shower temperature thing. Every temperature is either too hot or too cold, except that perfect temperature. Does it make sense to think of this specific temperature as being an actually above neutral value positive sensation (whereas all the others aren't)? I believe this is how the Cyrenaic sees it, the sensation being a genuine good, something which one strives towards. I think rather we strive away from the too cold, and away from the too hot, until we find the perfect trade off between the two - and it is here where we find an opportunity to 'lose ourselves' into the sensation. The feeling of the water on your back. "Ahh, that feels good." - and then one loses their self into the sensation. But not for long, body parts out of the water soon become cold, and besides you're here to clean yourself.

So to summarize this rant, there are no genuine goods, and we strive away from, rather than towards something. Other than that I agreed with your essay and found it interesting.

Also, reading this thread it seems there's some confusion over thinking the Cyrenaic (would) still believe in this idea that one 'has' or possesses beliefs. As things which sort of persist through time. I think a belief is more a sort of lived expectation, rather than some thing which one holds or possesses. The belief is itself experiential. So eg, one doesn't posses a belief that the sun will rise tomorrow, which sort of follows him round ephemerally. Rather, only when one is thinking about the next day, or future next days, one presently expects they'll be bright. It's a sort of lived expectation of future daylight. When one doesn't have this expectation (eg, when thinking about anything else), then one doesn't actually have a belief that the sun will rise tomorrow. Intellectually that's how we speak, as if we have this large set of beliefs which constantly follow us around and are there regardless of our experience, but in reality it's not the case.

From a particular reference point — Terrapin Station

But we only have one reference point, which is us here right now. We can't even know there are others.

from your conception to your death. — Terrapin Station

This is the type of thinking I am referring to, as if what one exists as is an overall timeline, or one 'has' this timeline. A linear sort of 'thing', with right now just being a particular point of that timeline. I say this timeline doesn't exist (except as a presently experienced idea).

purposes — Terrapin Station

How though? How does this work? How can I desire the sandwich over there, and then go eat it, and think nothing about the overall purpose (eg, 'leaving the world a better place than I found it') and yet that's really why I'm eating. How does this hidden purpose work? And why posit it?

OP isn't arguing against Berkeley's idealism though, and neither am I. Granted, I shouldn't have wrote "esse est percipi", as it's confusing.

The best argument against subjective idealism is "account for intersubjectivity."

If esse est percipi, then others are exhausted by your perception of them.

Because others aren't exhausted by my perception of them (proof: it is undeniable you are reading this), subjective idealism is false.

So the desire for redeeming the world (charity, scientific advancement, enlightenment) is really instrumental in getting what seems to be the underlying case, the pure desire for more existence. — schopenhauer1

Doesn't it make more sense to see the 'underlying case' in evolutionary terms though?

Because biologically speaking, what makes us continue to exist is not a desire to live, our bodies just do it when provided with what it needs. And it doesn't get what it needs by us desiring to continue to live per se, rather we have separate individual ends/desires which overall produce the outcome of continued life, but each one is a specific end in itself. As in, we don't eat, drink water, find shelter because we want to continue to exist. Rather, we continue to exist because we want to eat, drink water, find shelter. That we continue to exist as a result of this is kind of accidental. A side effect.

At the gene level there's no desire for continue existence. It's just those genes that code for proteins which increase the chance (in some way) of that gene getting copied, are the gene copies we are more likely to see in the next generation. And those genes that don't reproduce themselves, don't. It appears as if the goal of a gene is to reproduce to itself, but in reality there is no teleos.

I sympathize with Schophenaur (although I'm not scholar), but I suspect that there's merely the illusion of will, rather than a genuine will. In the same way evolution appears to have a teleos, but it's just an appearance. Think of it like natural selection for 'willing'. Things which don't strive for more existence, don't continue into the future, whereas those that do, do.

Sobriety is intoxication, alcohol sobers one up.

These are awesome questions, but there's alot of presuppositions behind them need to be unpacked, and in some cases, perhaps reworked altogether. As a first clue to where things might be badly put, recall that our sensory world is always - if the science is right - 'cross-modal'. That is, we can't separate out sight, smell, touch, movement and hearing and treat them on their own terms without doing violence to the phenomenology of perception. Perception always occurs in an integrated 'perceptual field' in which all our senses are brought to bear on a particular 'scene'. One way to think about this is to turn around the usual intuition that our senses are individual and 'additive' (perception = sight + smell + movement, etc). Rather, one begins with an integrated perceptual field from which the individual senses can be progressively distinguished (to close one's eyes is to 'subtract' sight from a more originary sensory plenum). — StreetlightX

Reminds me of how when you watch the news on TV, the voice of the person talking appears to be coming from their mouth, yet intellectually we can step back and say that the voice is actually coming from the speakers and it's an illusion that the weatherman is speaking. We can separate the image on the screen from the sound intellectually, but our normal perception is of the weatherman speaking.

So it's not quite right to think about our 'biological sensory organs' in isolation from a integrated field of living as such; nerve optics and so on are the biological mechanisms by which perception takes place, but they do not, on their own, explain perception, an account of which would need to take into account the whole developmental history of a living being in an environment in which it lives. Perception works in the service of significance, not in the service of perceiving 'things'. — StreetlightX

This is a good point. You can imagine two identical twins, born with the same 'biological mechanisms' but one's abandoned and raised by wolves and the other raised by his parents in a society, with language, education, etc. Their perceptions would differ greatly. As an example, the normal kid would perceive a jacket as something to wear for warmth, protection, and modesty - or even to be fashionable, or to attract a girlfriend. Whereas wolfboy, well I don't even know how he'd perceive it - certainly not as something to impress the ladies, and almost certainly not even as something to be worn. I can imagine he might perceive it as something which might be edible, or something to rip up and destroy, as dogs are prone to do.

Another way to approach this is to think not in terms of 'lines' where (say) vision shoots out into the world or vice versa, but in terms of a perpetual circuit in which both body and world are implicated in with respect to a life as it is lived. Perception is not a matter of registering static images on a silver plate that is the brain, it is a matter of living, of a dynamism in which significance and movement are primary to it's understanding.We do not 'model' the world 'in the brain'; we respond to it by being in it, moving through it, reacting to the significances that it presents to us. — StreetlightX

I have difficulty understanding what this actually means though. So the brain doesn't produce a miniature model of how the world is, sure. But still, what seems to be entailed by this understanding is that the brain does produce, internally, an 'integrated perceptual field'. The point being that the our bodies and the world around us is produced by a brain. Do you agree?

So, the 'significance's presented to us' are contingent upon our individual history. If my history was different, then the world around me would be perceived differently. But the world does not actually itself change depending on my specific history. So how to account for this? You'd have to say there's a single world, containing brains, and each brain produces specific 'perceptual fields' depending on that persons (or animals) history. As an example, I'm seeing a pair of shoes, as a pair of shoes (something to wear on feet, etc). But, say I was born in some strange culture with no shoes, my perception would be a lot different. But, we wouldn't to say here that in my alternative timeline the thing in the world (which I in this timeline see as shoes) has actually changed. The shoes are not 'in-itself' things to be worn on feet. That's just my interpretation of them. As in, how the world exists 'in-itself' is not dependent on my specific history. So, isn't some sort of indirect realism entailed here? Otherwise you'd have two people directly seeing the shoes in two completely different ways. How would this work?

If so, you're still in this weird position of there being two worlds. Our individual perceptual worlds produced by brains, and the wider singular world which our brains exist within. And with this position comes all these epistemic problems, and concerns about solipsism.

Or you could say that everyone with the same 'biological mechanisms' perceives the very same object. As in, it's the actual object in the external world which we see in our visual field. But depending on our history, our brains add particular meanings to the objects. You also could say all the possible meanings and 'significance's' exist out in the external world and it just depends on someone's history which of those the person perceives.

The reason for this is that we are essentially meaning-seeking beings (or rather, 'significance seeking beings'). We perceive not in order to simply see, hear and touch objects, sounds and textures (this is a very abstract way to think about things, despite it being intuitive), but in order to negotiate an environment around which to move, to avoid threats and danger, cultivate safety and food, respond to sadness or joy. In others words we 'see' meanings no less than we see 'things' — StreetlightX

Do you think that there's a real issue for the science of perception? Because we come to know about our sensory organs, and our bodies through perception. But, if 'the senses work instead to give us clues regarding how to live' then necessarily what we are perceiving is not the sensory organs/bodies which are 'prior' to the perceptions they produce. So the sensory organs and body work together to produce a sensory field of meanings and signficance, but because the bodies and sensory organs which we know about are within this very sensory field, we can't be seeing the actual 'biological mechanisms' which produced this sensory field. Again you're in this position where these two bodies. The meaningful perceived body, and whatever it is that has produced this perception - which we can't access. Science can only study the 'meaningful body'.

We do not 'model' the world 'in the brain'; we respond to it by being in it, moving through it, reacting to the significances that it presents to us. —

What do you actually mean by this? Is the world our (perceived) bodies move through, produced by a brain/sensory organs?

Thing' is a word that barely belongs in the philosophical lexicon (with the exception perhaps of Heidegger's analysis of the term), so I don't know what you're driving at. And I am unapologetic about my scorn of the intellectual dishonesty and philosophical miseducation of which you sow in spades, no matter how politely or conciliatory. I couldn't care less if you believe in voodoo dolls or the ghost of Christmas past, but if you diminish and cheapen a field I hold dear at every point with your half-truths and philosophy-by-allusion-and-Google-search, you can expect to be called out on it. — StreetlightX

It sounds like you want to confine philosophy to the tertiary level discipline. You write as if someone needs to be an expert on a billion specific books, know all these esoteric definitions, as well as the history of philosophical works and authors since Plato in and out, before one even opens their mouth during a philosophical discussion. As if one needs some sort of educational qualification, or be some sort of scholar in order to even do philosophy.

This thread has made you mad.

Today I was fishing and as usual was catching nothing, so I started poking sticks in rock pools (this illusion fascinates me haha), and I noticed how you can see this illusion, as an illusion, really clearly.

Get your head on the rocks about 50 cm away from the edge of the rock pool, as close to horizontal with the surface of the rock pool. Basically lie down on the rocks next to the pool with your head sideways resting on the rocks. Get a stick, and poke it into the rock pool in and out of the rock pool while watching it refract.

Sounds fairly stupid, but from this angle it's really clear that the what you see as the lower half of the stick is actually an image on the surface of the rock pool. The water is not see through, and as the lower half of the stick goes into the water, it disappears below the surface. What happens is an image is displayed on the surface of the rock pool of the light travelling from the stick below the surface (light which is refracted) up to the surface. And this image is what you see.

It looks like the water magically melts and bends the stick. But in reality the stick stays straight and disappears below the surface and you see an amalgamation of the top half of the stick out of water, and an image of a (refracted) stick on a surface of water.

From the angle you're viewing the rock pool surface from (while having your head close to the rocks), the image loses a lot of it's depth, so that it becomes a lot clearer that what you are seeing is an image on the surface, and from this angle the degree of refraction is a lot greater than if your standing above the rock pool looking downwards and poking the stick in. The greater the amount of refraction, the more skeptical you become that what you are still seeing is the actual stick.

I think perhaps that what I'm outlining in this thread is just one of those things which you can't just debate someone into believing, they have to figure it out and learn for themselves. That clear things are see-through is such a fundamental belief we hold that it takes something pretty significant happening before you shed that belief.

Personally what happened is I became pretty obsessed with glass and mirrors for like two months, especially mirrors in the beginning. I just couldn't understand how the mirror could teleport my gaze behind myself, so that I could look forward at the mirror, and yet see something behind myself. Eventually I figured out a mirror just displays incoming light as an image on it's surface, but glass refraction still confused me. I remember, I would sit in my car and wind the window down halfway. And I'd look at the side mirror so half was seen through the air and half was seen through the glass. I'd move my head side to side and watch the glass bend the mirror, and wind the window up and down and notice the position of the side mirror shifts as you roll up the window. It kind of 'jumps' back and forward. Anyway, eventually I finally had the revelation while the window was halfway down that the side mirror seen through the air continues behind the window. I can't see it because the window displays an image on it's surface of the light coming from behind it, and I can't see past this image at the rest of the side mirror behind it. You have to roll the window down to actually see the rest of the side mirror. Absolutely blew my mind.

But now, I feel like I drive blind. I just sit in the drivers seat looking at an image on the windscreen, and I can't see past it. I wish it wasn't illegal to smash my windscreen out so I could actually see the road!

Sounds psychotic, I know :D But this is actually how glass works. Looks like it's just one of those things where you have to figure it out for yourself. Have your own 'eureka' moment.

(disguised bump)

Would each person be isolated or would they inhabit, via an avatar of some sort, every other person's virtual world? In other words, will they be networked? — oysteroid

Like two people on other sides of the world each with a chess board before them, versing each other.

In my view, such a life would be pure fluff, like living in a kitsch painting, empty of real and substantial life, completely hollow and superficial. It would be strictly masturbatory. Despite all appearances, a deep desolation would permeate everything. — oysteroid

But even if this was so, you wouldn't know it. Because this is the best possible world, you'd experience the world full of 'real and substantial life', moral significance, and meaning. You may in fact be alone, but you would have no knowledge of this and you'd act and live as if you were among others. Is this really much different to the way in which we exist now?

So what would be the point in leaving the real world? — oysteroid

Suffering. This world is full of it.

I can imagine a Buddhist might describe the body as a sort of vehicle of suffering, a Christian might say it's a lump of flesh that the soul inhabits, a biologist might describe a body as a collection of physiological systems, a physicist might describe a body in terms of mass and gravity. A dancer might describe the body as a tool for movement and expression.

How would a philosopher describe a body?

Or, is your body a package which is discardable without loss of “YOU” — Bitter Crank

I believe this is how souls are supposed to function. The body is a hunk of meat the soul inhabits and controls, then discards it when it dies. Descartes also thought something along these lines with his dualism.

Thing is though, intellectually, you can imagine yourself as existing in the same way as when you die in a shooter video game like counterstrike, and then you get to fly around the map without a body. But if someone bashes your skull in, then well there goes your intellect. Descartes, intellectually, imagined himself as a thinking thing which interacts with the body. But his thoughts were in the form of language, and language isn't something given - it must be learned. One starts off as a squirming screaming rugrat, who must watch, and hear, and learn a language from the people around him. Those people being human bodies. You only survive as a baby because your mother feeds you, either from her body or using her body. She teaches you how to speak using her mouth and voice - through showing you how to do it, using her body.

Take the problem of other minds. It's not called the problem of other bodies. In our everyday life we walk around, talk to people, drive, eat, drink water - we are always embodied, everything we do is done bodily. Yet when we do philosophy all this goes out the window, and we start talking about being an ego or a mind. And then we get stuck in these thought loops, struggling with doubts about our epistemic access to the world, and whether other minds exist transcendentally, or even not at all. But then we get hungry, walk to the kitchen, make some food using our hands, and eat it with our mouths and ingest it into our stomachs. And inevitably someone will want some and you'll end up sharing, and chatting. Minds don't urinate.

Hell right at this moment I'm doing philosophy, using my fingers.

Are you your body, or are you something apart from your body? — Bitter Crank

I think, before we answer this question, we need to be explicit about what we actually mean by body. Otherwise everyone will probably end up talking past each other.

What is a body? A body, at least an alive body, is unlike ordinary objects in the world. For example, you can't misplace your body, but you can your keys. And our bodies can perceive, and be perceived. When you touch your face, your face feels your fingers and your fingers feel your face. Ordinary objects can only be perceived.

This scientific description of the body - as a collection of physiological processes and systems, an amalgamation of cells - or even a collection of atoms, or sub-atomic forces - completely misses the point, which is that the body is something which we live in the world, as.

What actually is a body?

One could define "wrong" (in a very general way) as that which causes harm to someone, directly or indirectly. As well as the factor of timing mentioned above, there are other factors. What is the likelihood of someone being hurt? How many people could be hurt? How badly and in what way? If not people being hurt, how about the chance of an animal being hurt? Or property damaged? — 0 thru 9

Harm is definitely something which we consider when trying to figure out whether something is morally wrong or not. But I think people want "wrong" to go further than this. Imagine a case, of someone being the last person at an open casket funeral to 'pay their respects'. The dead person is wearing an expensive ring. Now, I really can't see how anyone would be harmed by stealing the ring. The dead guy isn't going to be harmed, nobody will ever even know the ring was stolen, so they wont be harmed, and you're not harmed either, in fact you benefit by getting an expensive ring.

We still want to say in this situation that what the guy did was morally wrong. And yet in this situation, it's a net benefit really. The thief benefits, and nobody else is harmed.

If this is beginning to sound like a courtroom argument that one might hear in a criminal trial, perhaps that is to be expected. There very well may be absolutes (right/wrong, good/evil) somewhere in the universe. And these absolutes or ideals may be perceived by some people to some degree. One could perhaps imagine a world where the "absolute/ideal" realm (cf. Buddhism's Two Truths or Plato's Ideals) are completely perceived, understood, and followed by everyone all the time. But for now, we live in a relative world, full of ever-changing circumstances. Where in the best case scenario, people are trying to discern the ideals present in a situation and act in harmony with them. — 0 thru 9

Intention is definitely important. The best form of moral behavior is when someone does something for no other reason than they think it's the right thing to do. Moral behavior is cheapened in our eyes, when it's done for an ulterior motive than it simply being someone doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do. Compare, handing in a lost wallet to a police station because you could get a reward, and handing it in because it's the morally right thing to do. In both cases it's the same behavior (on the surface) and yet one is more 'moral' than the other, due to the intention.

Maybe there just isn't a "why" as to why we ought be good. We are just given the freedom of choice to match our behavior to the moral facts, or not. As in, there's nothing in the universe which says we ought act morally right/wrong, the universe just contains the moral facts (eg, x action is morally right, y action is morally wrong). It's purely up to us whether we decide to conform our behavior to these facts. There's nothing in the universe which says it's better or preferable to act morally right or not. It just has the facts, it's up to us what we do with them.

Both judgments such as "murder is wrong" and "one ought not to murder" are how one feels about behavior. — Terrapin Station

Not sure about this. At least personally, when I say "stealing is wrong", I don't mean "I do not think that people should steal". What I generally mean (there are other ways of saying "stealing is wrong", such as catching someone stealing and saying "stealing is wrong!" - here it's a more a command for that person to stop what they're doing), by "stealing is wrong" is that there are objective moral facts about what is right and wrong behavior, and stealing is factually wrong behavior. As in, there's something outside human judgment to which our moral corresponds with and gain their truth value. There's moral facts existing out there somewhere, and it is to this that our moral statements correspond. There are objective facts about how it is that people should behave, and one of those facts is that people should not steal.

Notice here there is no contradiction with stealing something, befitting by the theft, and even enjoying the theft - even delighting in the harm you caused to others - and yet at the very same time believing that you've acted in a morally wrong way. Believing that objectively, it is wrong to steal.

This would make less sense if "stealing is wrong" is a judgment about behavior. Because here I would personally be judging that I should not steal, and then I would go and steal regardless, and enjoy it. If I stole, doesn't that kind of negate the judgement? As in, I musn't of really had that judgment. "It is my personal opinion that I should not steal things and also right now I am stealing something." My action of stealing seems to create doubt about whether I really had that opinion.

I don't think that it has ever been suggested that a 'gaze travels' or that anything 'travels out' from the ear to the source of sound. So why would the fact that this doesn't happen constitute a problem? — Wayfarer

We hear the sounds in the world around us. The lawnmower is making a loud noise. When I perceive a noise, I perceive it to be located at the source of the noise and not say located in my ear. We say "what is that noise?" and search in the world around us to find the noise. The sound of the telephone ring, is perceived to be located at the telephone. Even though physiologically all that's detect is a change in the pressure in the cochlea. How can I perceive the sound to be where the telephone is? By what physiological means does this happen, when all the auditory system does is send neuronal impulses into the brain in response to changes in pressure in the cochlea (caused by sound waves vibrating the ear drum).

As in, how is that we somehow access the sounds in the world around us, when it does not appear, at least from our current observations of the auditory system, that there is any means by which this could happen?

"Murder is not to be done."

Is this statement truth-apt? If so, what makes it truth-apt?

For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation

Right here Hume is stating that they aren't synonymous.

To say something is morally wrong is to say it ought not to be done. — Wayfarer

I have spotted another prescriptivist.

Do you want to claim there is a problem with saying that 'morally wrong' means 'not to be done'? — John

Yes. It is generally held by most people I would guess, that moral statements (eg "murder is wrong") have the form of: X act instantiates the property 'wrongness'.

Sounds like you're arguing for a form of moral noncognitivism called prescriptivism.

That's like arguing "x is a good movie" is synonymous with "one ought watch x movie."

One's an ascription of a property "good", the other is a prescription for a behavior.

"X is morally wrong" is not synonymous with "X ought not be done." One is an ought and the other is an is. There's this common idea that you cannot derive an "ought" from an "is", which would make no sense if the two statements above had the same meaning.

Morally wrong means something like, "not in accordance with what is morally right or good." When we say something is morally wrong, what we are saying is that thing has the property of being morally wrong. It is a separate thing to say that one ought not do that thing.

The statement that "one ought not do wrong things" is practically a tautology. You can query whether a particular action is wrong, but asking why wrong things out not be done is like inquiring into whether all bachelors are unmarried men. — Aaron R

Why?

What is the connection between, "x is morally wrong", and "one ought not do x"?

You act like the connection is obvious, so you should be able to explain it.

"X is red", has no connection to whether anyone has any reason at all to act or be a certain way. So why does "X is morally wrong" have this connection?

Both statements are of the same form: X has a particular property. So why does one entail a prescription of how one ought behave, whereas for the other there is no such prescription, at all.

I'm just speaking from my experience, that's how I imagine such a thing. I picture in my mind, a person with a saw, going and cutting a tree. Then I tell myself seventy times. And to imagine this, seventy times, I try to picture 70 in relation to other numbers like 60 and 50, but this seems somewhat vague. So I picture seven in relation to one by counting in my mind, and tell myself ten times that. Then I picture ten as two groups of five. Now I can imagine ten groups of seven, and this is the number of times that the person cuts trees. In this way I can avoid picturing the person cutting a tree seventy times. — Metaphysician Undercover

What in the fluck?! It must take you like 37 years to read a single book haha.

To answer the question: nothing. — Benkei

Clearly not. GID/gender dysphoria is a terrible disorder to have, with an awful prognosis. Apparently 41 percent attempt suicide at some point. Being transgender is just the medical treatment for the disease (gender dyshporia, or Gender Identity Disorder). It's a shame this medical illness has been tacked onto LGB issues and causes/politicized.

It is completely against our survival in evolutionary terms and looks like an aberrant disorder of the mind that serves no purpose and is completely backward to procreation as a species. For if everyone was a transgender and/or gay that would mean no one would have babies (assuming IVF does not exist). — intrapersona

This argument doesn't work because evolution has no teleology. It's not that organisms ought reproduce, it's just that those that do are more likely to have copies of their genes show up in subsequent generations. So it's not a competition between species, or even just a singular species trying to propagate itself into the future. Rather, evolution can be understood as a 'competition' between individual genes, although here is no teleology or 'want' to reproduce, it's just that those that do, are likely to have gene copies show up in the subsequent generations, and those that don't reproduce, aren't.

However, I think an argument can be made that there ought be a better treatment to Gender Identity Disorder than 'transgendering'. As in, changing genders as a medical treatment is a bad treatment. It strikes me as much like giving liposuction to an anorexic.

What I've noticed (I have no stats or proof for this it's just anecdotal) is that transgender people have these highly rigid notions of gender. As in, pink is for boys, blue is for girls. But not just for how one appears but also for how one ought act. A man ought be responsible and not effeminate, nor 'pretty', nor interested in make up, or other men sexually or romantically, dresses, and a man ought be dominant, confident, not sexually submissive, and a man ought be interested in mechanical things and science rather than art and poetry. And likewise for female to males. It's as if they can't see that you don't literally need to inject testosterone in order to wear suits, be sexually dominant towards other women (transgenders have a far higher rate or homosexuality (in terms of their birth sex) than cis), and not care about your appearance.

I suspect a lot of transgender people had parents with really rigid notions of gender. "No! You can't cut your hair, short hair is for boys, and you are A GIRL, and girls have long hair!" If you imagine a parent with this sort of attitude towards all notions of gender, this could confuse the hell out of a child or teen. A young or teen girl doesn't care about clothes, pink, being submissive, liking arty things, wanting children, boys sexually or romantically, or any other stereotypical notion of the female gender. And yet has it drilled into her, all through her childhood and teens that only boys DON'T want these things. You can see the logic from here: "I don't like X, I like Y. Only boys like Y. Therefore, I am a boy." That's my pet theory anyway..

I suspect that, rather than people with GID starting off with a primary desire being to alter their body to appear like the opposite sex biologically, (and therefore they're really a girl because they have this desire). It's more like, their primary desire is to act and appear like girls do (and therefore they're really a girl because they want to act/appear this way, (and girls don't have penises)).

1. Is it ever ok to remain skeptical of an "absurd" conclusion to a clever argument even when one can't pin-point the exact flaw in the reasoning? — Aaron R

Not if you're doing philosophy. If you can't pinpoint a flaw in the reasoning, then what ought follow is skepticism towards your already held conclusion. Otherwise you're just a cultist, essentially. You might as well just pick the religion that appeals to you the most and then dogmatically assert it's truth.