Ah, yes. The voice of reason. — T Clark

You old fool. You dare challenge me?

You old fool. You dare challenge me? — TimeLine

I've been old since before you could vote and a fool since before you were born.

I’m aware that anything I might say will be trite. So I’ll say this trite thing: It’s part and parcel of the empathetic life not to be dead inside, with both its ups and downs—ups and downs that most empathetic people share. To those who even remotely cherish empathy, more empathetic people are needed in the world. And it can be painful when these empathetic folk no longer are as numerous due to, well, joining the clan of the non-empathetic people that are out there. This isn’t not about cheering you up. It’s about wanting strength in you during the hard times that presently are. — javra

Empathy seems painful. And I suck at emotional stuff. Always have. They don't make much sense to me... but I try.

Sometimes I wish I were fully dead inside, I would sacrifice the pleasure in order to have no pain. — Lone Wolf

I had a hike planned today but I had to cancel because of the weather, but just like horse riding, being outdoors and active in nature is really useful and helpful in so many ways. Spending time at the park, in forests, on hikes or any outdoor natural environment can improve blood pressure, memory, release stress, eliminate fatigue, and even reduce inflammation providing a number of other physical benefits such as strengthening your immune system, helping you increase your concentration, and all that can boost your self-esteem and improve your mood which thus allows you the improved cognition to tackle rumination. Rumination is the worst symptom and a promotor of the negative affect of depression or anxiety. Camping or hiking can improve psychological and behavioural well-being and is really an effective treatment modality to help you understand how to connect to others and nature. It is really evolutionary.

Get back on your horse or camp out. Even hiking on your own can really change you for the better.

Not sure if this will help - I don't have a lot of friends, but I have found friends here. If you hang around a little while, you will too. Maybe that's not enough, but this could be a place where you feel at home. — T Clark

Hmm, yeah. I have found two out of my three friends here lol. And those two I don't know with certainty if they want to stay friends...

True. The weather here was crappy (think cyclones) probably part of the reason my mood is out of whack. Wildly up and down. The poor horse was spooked when I tried to get her in the barn today. :sad:

True. The weather here was crappy (think cyclones) probably part of the reason my mood is out of whack. Wildly up and down. The poor horse was spooked when I tried to get her in the barn today. :sad: — Lone Wolf

Holy shit, we're just cold and rainy here. Ok then, jump on youtube and do those 20min HIIT workouts :lol: and stay safe.

Lol, yeah I should. Or on the heavy bag... that always takes a good deal of frustration out.

Hmm, yeah. I have found two out of my three friends here lol. And those two I don't know with certainty if they want to stay friends. — Lone Wolf

:rage:

Ewww, why would she be friends with you?

Because I'm a gentleman.

Prove it by changing the red faced emoji and treat my girl with gentlemanly respect by replacing it with the love heart eyeball one.

Yeah, when someone holds the door open for you at the post office you expect them to blow you a kiss, is that it?

Get back on your horse or camp out. Even hiking on your own can really change you for the better. — TimeLine

I'm telling you @Lone Wolf, this is all utter bullshit. The path to happiness is not paved with hikes, camping, horses, or even the warm embrace of a lover. It is paved with this magical aural elixer from the frozen hills of Sweden:

Over the months we have known each other, we've clashed once or twice about this reason vs. intuition thing. Sometimes you've been mean to me and I went off with my tail between my legs like a frightened puppy. Poor T Clark. Now I'm ready to take you on like a man!!! :strong: Well... — T Clark

Who are you talking to? It kind of reminds me of those office gossips that start rambling broad concepts and themes in meetings as though they are indirectly trying to say something to others to justify the whispers they did near the xerox machine with Stacey.

Anyway. In a normal situation on the forum, with someone reasonable like, say, Sapientia — T Clark

Yes, yes, we get you want to act like some father of moderation. *Pats on the head

You're wrong, and you're blind. :grimace: — T Clark

The voice of reason.

To believe that reason is anything except a veneer we paste over what our hearts tell us is self-deception. I have always seen that reason is something we add later to justify what we already believe. Over the past year, I've also come to see that some people can use it as a tool to guide them to a place where they can be free of the shackles our feelings put on us. I have a lot of respect for that. — T Clark

Who said anything about a 'veneer'? Reason is there to interpret, to explain, to understand and if reason is disordered or in chaos - i.e. irrational - translating that intuitive experience is impossible. It is reliant on your reason and rationality and they are not mutually exclusive, separate where one precedes the other, but bound together.

That doesn't change which comes first. We do what we do because of who, what, we are. It comes from inside. The, I don't know, is it irony, is that you and I come down in just about the same place in terms of what is the right way to live our lives. Compassion, honesty, honor, strength, generosity, grace. I must admit, you have come closer to that ideal than I have, but that's not a matter of reason, it's a matter of character. — T Clark

Because of how I interpret those experiences, my desire to be confronted - however harsh - with my own capacity for inauthentic interpretations, for self-deceit, my desire to further ameliorate my knowledge and understanding so that when I reflect on experiences, when I try to network through the complexity and the puzzle of my emotions and feelings, I can piece it all together. My intuition is a voice that has no words, but reason provides those words and enables me to articulate what it means. Any 'veneer' is really just an inauthentic interpretation of that intuitive experience, a way to silence or settle the emotions by suggesting false ideas or methods to calm it, such as what New Ageism can provide. This is evidence of why - as Epictetus said - since it is reason which shapes and regulates all other things, it ought not itself to be left in disorder.

What you have identified is not a distinction between intuition and carefully thought out decisions, but you have only identified how it is that bad information results in bad decisions. That will be the case whether the decision is knee jerk or whether you write out the pros and cons in your unicorn adorned journal and deliberate upon the reasons for days. If I believe that people are prone to cheat because I am a cheating dog, then I will necessary allow that bias to impact my conclusion that you too are a cheating dog despite the scant other evidence supporting it. My conclusion is rational in its own right, considering my data points are derived from my own experience, which is that I have cheated much in the past.. — Hanover

First of all, using a Winnie the Pooh pen with fluffy yellow feathers at a national conference with senior executives does not make me unprofessional.

Secondly, you have not actually answered the problem here, which is that reason disordered leaves any authentic understanding of our subjective emotional experiences false. The moral dimensions of criminals and their denial of any wrongdoing or remorse is an example of our capacity to violate reason and it is not that these criminals themselves are lacking in anaclitic dependence or empathy, but that they genuinely believe that they have done no wrong.

That guy who broke my heart several years ago is in a Jezebel/Ahab relationship, and while he has such a profound intelligence and capacity to be so much more - all that I thought I saw in him - he has instead deteriorated into this cruel man because he quite literally follows and copies her, someone so empty who is nothing but a public performer. Kardashians, for instance, offer nothing to this world other than teaching people to get plastic surgery and be sexual objects and overdose on makeup, use the concept of 'normal' as a tool to justify what is actually fucked up behaviour. It is not normal. But, when everyone thinks that she is normal, he thinks she is normal too, but deep within we know the truth, we know that behaving that way is fucked up and if he is someone who doubts himself enough to follow others, he simply does not have the rational capacity to articulate that inner feeling telling him that she is fucked up.

So he goes on thinking something is wrong with him or doubts himself since everyone else is saying she is normal, so much so that he is building a life with her while taking drugs, drinking steroids and just looks like a male version of a Kardashian, no ambitions in life other than pretending - like she does - that he has a career, all about the physical, about the show and nothing about the inner, no substance. So, it is not like his behaviour toward me is sociopathic, but rather he has such low self-esteem that the games that he played with me, he is really playing with himself. It takes a level of courage to not only see that self-deceit, but to say 'no' to the people and follow this intuitive feeling, to become the King of Nineveh so to speak who listens to the voice of reason despite what everyone else does.

So you don't actually get - as clearly showcased above - the dynamics of this intuitive/rational relationship.

What I mean here is that if you have a past that is filled with all sorts of unhealthy events, those events will drive many of your decisions, and you will think them rational whether the decision is well thought out or not. — Hanover

Exactly, but when you are a child, you don't have the cognitive capacity to understand many of the experiences that you have and so as a child, how you interpret those experiences remains or is stored away as you continue grow and evolve, a kind of habitus that becomes embedded into your psyche that despite the fact rationality is actually an evolving and continuous thing, your responses and attitude to your experiences remain 'stuck' and why you think, clearly and honestly, that your responses are actually ok or normal. That feeling it gives to you makes sense, even if everyone around you is like what the fuck. If my dad is violent, someone I love and admire as a child, then what is wrong with violence? Beating nine colours of shit out of someone suddenly doesn't feel immoral. Whether we would like to admit this or not, we are conditioned by our experiences as children and our environment, but the point about cognition and about rationality is that we have the capacity to stand outside of those conditioned responses and start to analyse them... rationally.

It is true that you will never entirely be free of such conditioning as it stands to be a part of our being, our learning and language and therefore our identification with the external world, but we can access them piece by piece, we can become receptive to our reactions and understanding of ourselves and others.

And as an aside, I really do believe in the ineffability of thought and ideas. In fact, so much so, that I find those philosophies that deny it completely incomprehensible. — Hanover

I hope you mean some thoughts and ideas.

I'm telling you Lone Wolf, this is all utter bullshit. The path to happiness is not paved with hikes, camping, horses, or even the warm embrace of a lover. It is paved with this magical aural elixer from the frozen hills of Sweden: — Hanover

Haha.

I've wanted to reengage with you on this subject since our most recent previous discussion. I think it was in "Being or Having." It was the first time I really understood how committed Kant and you are to the primacy of reason. I never felt like I laid out my position effectively.

The voice of reason. — TimeLine

What is unreasonable, irrational, about my statement? I'm not being sarcastic. I think this issue highlights a weakness in your philosophy, one you don't see. I don't think I'll convince you of that, but I'd like to give you what I got from that previous discussion - an accurate understanding of where I stand. Of an alternate way of seeing things.

Who said anything about a 'veneer'? Reason is there to interpret, to explain, to understand and if reason is disordered or in chaos - i.e. irrational - translating that intuitive experience is impossible. It is reliant on your reason and rationality and they are not mutually exclusive, separate where one precedes the other, but bound together. — TimeLine

I'm the one who used the word "veneer." Thinking about it, maybe "armor" or "shield" is better. The "intuitive experience" does not need to be "interpreted." It is perfectly capable of speaking for itself, without words of course. The idea that intention and action must be mediated by conscious thought is an illusion. In my experience, most of the things I do go from wherever they come from straight to action without passing through words. And I'm not just talking about reflexive actions like breathing or repetitive, physical actions like riding a bike. I include complex social activities like interacting with people or groups of people.

For me, reason and reflection come in to stop me from doing something, change the direction of my response, or deal with an unexpected or unfamiliar situation. If you saw me in everyday life, you would see that, sometimes, it would be better if they came in sooner and more often.

Based on what you've written here and elsewhere, I understand this is not your experience. It's always seemed to me that the philosophy we end up with has as much to do with temperament as anything else. You are a willful person. I'm sure you were born that way. I'm not. Will does not work for me. That doesn't mean I'm not responsible for my actions or lack of action. Will and reason are not prerequisites for responsibility and morality.

capacity for inauthentic interpretations, for self-deceit, my desire to further ameliorate my knowledge and understanding so that when I reflect on experiences, when I try to network through the complexity and the puzzle of my emotions and feelings, I can piece it all together. — TimeLine

And here we get to why a shield, armor might be needed - because of a fear of self-deceit, of impulse leading to weak or self-destructive behavior. Which brings me to my problems with the rationalist approach. The armor can be rigid and constricting. Misleading. Words can take on a life of their own. It can be tempting for a rationalist to think that manipulating words is the same as understanding. That shows up a lot here on the forum.

One of the things that struck me in some previous discussions is that Kant and you seem to think that the only path to moral action is through reason. What that means practically is that people get judged, not on their behavior, but on their internal life, on the process they go through, who they are.

...reason disordered leaves any authentic understanding of our subjective emotional experiences false. — TimeLine

My experience is exactly the opposite. For me, the internal voice examining and reexamining everything used to cut off any connection to, awareness of, internal life. The process of healing has involved learning self-awareness without the intercession of words.

Anyway. In a normal situation on the forum, with someone reasonable like, say, Sapientia :joke: , I'd discuss the differences in our opinions and try to come to some sort of reconciliation. — T Clark

:brow: