Comments

  • What Constitutes A Philosopher?
    ↪Garrett Travers
    I would say it would be a necessary but not sufficient condition for being one, or at least a great one.
  • What Constitutes A Philosopher?
    Just my opinion but I think you usually have to be dead to be a great philosopher. Someone's thought cannot be given enough judgement within the short time of a human lifespan in order to determine its importance. If it can remain relevant for generations after it was originally thought and not fade away and be forgotten, then the thinker is a better candidate for having been a great philosopher.
  • Currently Reading
    Money and Power, Jacques Ellul
  • Currently Reading
    Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Christopher Browning
    Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter
  • What if everyone were middle class? Would that satisfy you?
    ↪schopenhauer1


    Natalism: it's okay to procreate if most people are happy with their lives.

    Capitalism: it's okay to exploit workers if most people are well-off and middle-class.

    Am I reading in to things here?
  • Not knowing everything about technology you use is bad
    the business overlords that horde and produce that technology — schopenhauer1

    Quite correct, though the barons understand the technology even less than the technicians that create it. Technology has taken on a reality of its own - we serve it, instead of it serving us, barons included. We accommodate ourselves to technology, learn to adapt to it, because it is a new environment as much as it is a fetishistic cult. This has not always been the case, but it has been developing for a couple centuries.
  • TPF Quote Cabinet
    In view of the very different forms of technique, there is no question of a technical religion. But there is associated with it the feeling of the sacred, which expresses itself in different ways. The way differs from man to man, but for all men the feeling of the sacred is expressed in this marvelous instrument of the power instinct which is always joined to mystery and magic. The worker brags about his job because it offers him a joyous confirmation of his superiority. The young snob speeds along at 100 m.p.h. in his Porsche. The technician contemplates with satisfaction the gradients of his charts, no matter what their references is. For these men, technique is in every way sacred: it is the common expression of human power without which they would find themselves poor, alone, naked, and stripped of all pretensions. They would no longer be the heroes, geniuses, or archangels which a motor permits them to be at little expense. — Ellul
  • Currently Reading
    Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, Wendy Lower
  • Currently Reading
    ↪Pantagruel
    Thanks!
  • Not knowing everything about technology you use is bad
    May I ask what your role is specifically? — schopenhauer1

    I am a programmer. I can send you my resume if you like, I'm looking for a new job :sweat:

    There is something deadeningly inhuman.. Yet it is what sustains. — schopenhauer1

    I mean, idk I think there is satisfaction that can be derived from understanding how something works, even if it is a broad, general understanding and not a detailed one. I think the question I'd raise to you is to explain why you think a technological device like a computer is inhuman, but the physical-chemical-biological systems of the natural world are not...unless you think they are inhuman as well?

    I'm not disagreeing with you, I just want to know what your thoughts on this are. The vast technological orchestra is frequently nauseating to me too, yet the vast natural orchestra is not (at least sometimes). Why is this?
  • Not knowing everything about technology you use is bad
    Here I am using a computer in which I only know a vague understanding of certain things but for which the technology is well known amongst electronic and computer engineers. — schopenhauer1

    As someone who works in the computer industry I feel confident saying that the technology is not well-known amongst the engineers that are thought to understand it.

    That is one of the things that is so fucking sinister about modern technology, nobody understands it in its entirety, nor can they manufacture it themselves. Every technician understands a part, and even then they don't need to understand it as much as they just need to know how to use it. And if a person were to come close to grasping all of what goes on inside a single computer model, it would only be by an immense sacrifice of everything else in their life.

    What is it about this behemoth complexity upon complexity that seems to subsume ones own efficacy? It is pathetic our reliance but inability to know all of it.. But it is more than that. — schopenhauer1

    Well I think it certainly has something to do with Marx's notion of alienation, being reduced to a cog, a button-presser, the maintainer, etc. Humans did not evolve to do this sort of crap, it goes against our natural state of being. There's this blind, amoral force of technique that drags us along in its current of relentless improvement of efficiency, whether we like it or not.
  • Currently Reading
    Anarchism and Other Essays, Emma Goldman
  • Not knowing everything about technology you use is bad
    Can anyone help me explore this idea and possibly give more "meat" to why this seems a very major problem? — schopenhauer1

    Being self-sufficient seems like it is an important quality of a mature human being. It seems to me that there is something fundamentally repulsive (pathetic) about not being able to take care of yourself when you ought to be able to. Not understanding the technology we use and being unable to live without it makes realizing this quality of self-sufficiency impossible.
  • Currently Reading
    The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire — StreetlightX

    Against Elections, David Van Reybrouck — 180 Proof

    Put both on my to-reads, they look interesting.
  • Michael Graziano’s eliminativism
    These beliefs, claims, and intentions have no bearing on what is actually going on inside the skull or beyond it, since their meanings are epiphenomenal to computations in the brain and the motion of matter through spacetime.” — Ignoredreddituser

    Well, except for this claim of his, I guess :yawn:
  • Currently Reading
    My 2021 readings in no particular order, though there are some omissions that I don't remember at the moment. Favorites are in bold:

    Fiction:

    • Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
    • The Road, Cormac McCarthy
    • All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
    • Lord of the Flies, William Golding
    • Animal Farm, George Orwell
    • Brave New World, Alduous Huxley
    • We, Yevgeny Zamyatin
    • The Iron Heel, Jack London
    • The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
    • It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclaire Lewis
    • The Plot Against America, Philip Roth
    • Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
    • The Drowned World, J. G. Ballard
    • A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
    • Neuromancer, William Gibson
    • Starship Troopers, Robert Hein
    • Across Realtime, Vernor Vinge
    • Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline
    • Death on the Installment Plan, Louis-Ferdinand Céline
    • Castle to Castle, Louis-Ferdinand Céline
    • Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
    • Treblinka, Jean-Francois Steiner

    Nonfiction:

    • Against the Grain, James C. Scott
    • The True Believer, Eric Hoffer
    • Technological Slavery, Ted Kaczynski
    • Anti-Tech Revolution, Ted Kaczynski
    • A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright
    • Lifespan, David Sinclair
    • SCUM Manifesto, Valerie Solanas
    • The Murder of Professor Schlick; The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle, David Edmonds
    • Inside the Third Reich, Albert Speer
    • “The Good Old Days”; The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders, Ernst Klee et al
    • On Disobedience, Erich Fromm
    • Obedience to Authority, Stanley Milgram
    • Into That Darkness, Gitta Sereny

    In-progress:

    • Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, Henry Allison
    • The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant
    • The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul
    • The Civilization of the Middle Ages, Norman Cantor
    • Hitler’s Furies; German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, Wendy Lower
    • White Fragility; Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, Robin Diangelo
    • Overthrown; America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, Stephen Kinzer
    • Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka; The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Yitzhak Arad
    • Count Zero, William Gibson

    The major themes were:

    • Dystopian, post-apocalyptic fiction
    • Philosophy of technology
    • Kant
    • Holocaust studies
    • Céline

    I will likely continue with these themes next year.
  • A CEO deserves his rewards if workers can survive off his salary
    If you ask me the only thing CEO's and business owners really risk are becoming workers again. — Albero

    :100:
  • To The Mods
    ↪TheMadFool


    Did a bit of digging, found this:

    Can I read your API documentation?

    We have a very basic API, which currently has the sole purpose of sending invitation codes and activating or deactivating user accounts. Discussion lists (for All Discussions, Blog, Events, Most Viewed and each Category) are available via RSS.

    https://plushforums.com/pre-sales

    Dunno if there's a straightforward way of getting all of your data, aside from
    ↪jamalrob
    's suggestion.
  • Currently Reading
    Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Yitzhak Arad
  • Drugs
    ↪Xtrix


    Strong black coffee in the morning, usually half a pot. An IPA or two in the evening. Both paired with a book. Larger amounts of alcohol make me sleepy and irritable.

    9/10 times marijuana will give me a panic attack. I experienced a terrifying sort of ego death one time with a concentrate, but it might have been spiked with something else; it was kind of a stupid decision on my part to take it. I'm curious about acid and mushrooms, but I don't know how I would handle it based on my previous experiences.
  • Most Important Problem Facing Humanity, Revisited
    But my point is that we can't get very far if we don't identify the root of the problem, if for no other reason than to prioritize attacking it. — Xtrix

    But it's already been identified, more times than can be counted. At this point it's just shuffling papers around, a temporary catharsis.

    I'm not sure what you mean by "technique" here. Technology? — Xtrix

    Technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency [...] in every field of human activity. — Ellul

    By technique, [Ellul] means far more than machine technology. Technique refers to any complex of standardized means for attaining a predetermined result. — Merton

    But I see technology as dependent on how it's used, and that depends on human beings in power, who make decisions based on beliefs and values.

    I think another way to look at it is simply this: greed.     — Xtrix

    I am skeptical that sociological problems can be fully explained by the behavioral habits of the elite. I would argue that even the elite feel the coercive pull of technique. It is technique that is the puppet master.
  • Most Important Problem Facing Humanity, Revisited
    Capitalism has already been mentioned, and this should be obvious (identifying the problem is a lot easier than solving it). In addition to this, or maybe beyond this, there is the expansion of technique into every domain of human life. Technique is, after all, what engendered capitalism in the first place (though it is an imperfect technique for the demands of efficiency, since the pursuit of profit is not always compatible with the pursuit of efficiency). When humans become totally dependent on (helpless without) technology and techniques, there will be no real freedom, and therefore no real happiness, and ultimately no need for humans at all.
  • Currently Reading
    Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience, Gitta Sereny
  • Is Philosophy a Game of "Let's Pretend"?
    ↪Ciceronianus
    I think you're probably right that a lot of philosophy is the LARPing of ideas. Often it seems like philosophy is studied in a way that detaches itself from the banal reality it came from. For instance, there is evidence that philosophers like Karl Popper argued for his falsificationism not purely out of genuine conviction but because he wanted to be a maverick and it got him a lot of attention; he hated it when he started developing acolytes, because it meant that was no longer unique and special, people started to get bored with him.
  • Currently Reading
    Treblinka was unbelievably good. Holy fuck
  • Why are idealists, optimists and people with "hope" so depressing?
    ↪Cobra


    It may be depressing to you because you sense that hope and optimism, while advantageous in the short term, ultimately prolongs unpleasant things unnecessarily, and that possessing them is ignorant or foolish.

    At least that's the way it is with me, I think.
  • Should we try to establish a colony on Mars?
    ↪Manuel


    Right, yeah if humans can't even get their shit together on Earth then it's hard to see how it would be any better on Mars.

    But it seems to me that on practical affairs, we'd want to make the space travel we currently do, more comfortable and suitable for us.

    Hell, going to Mars would take like 7 months in very close quarters with people you'd eventually want to kill or something.     — Manuel

    The conditions of people on the frontier of the American wild west were often miserable and extremely dangerous. Space ("the final frontier") would be even more so.

    If Mars or anywhere else is to be colonized, it will probably be the poor, disenfranchised and/or insane that will be the first group to go. The rich will stay at home until it's demonstrated to be safer and more comfortable than on Earth (or in their private orbital station above Earth).
  • Should we try to establish a colony on Mars?
    ↪Don Wade


    Colonizing Mars would probably open up a can of worms as it would expose another vector for domination of humans by both other humans and technology.

    If the center of human civilization is on Earth and you're 200 million miles away on Mars, and some big criminal operation starts happening there, Earth won't be able to do anything about it. It would be extremely easy for a small group of people to hijack the colony and put it under a military junta. Imagine: just a few perverts with guns get to Mars, and they decide to kill all of the men and create a harem with the women as sex slaves. Or, say a rich guy sets up a little station on Mars where he traffics children to the super rich a la Epstein. Perhaps Mars could be used as a political concentration camp, or a black ops base where illegal and unethical experiments are done, etc etc etc.

    What is Earth going to do about that? Call the space cops? In order to prevent these things from happening, you would need to have lots of people and infrastructure in place, which takes time, and presupposes that these things don't happen in the mean time.

    History has taught us that when an empire does not have the technological means to maintain control over the colonies, these colonies start to assert their independence. It happened with the Roman Empire, it happened with the Merovingians, it happened with the British Empire...and it will happen again with Mars, unless there comes some technological advancement that gives people the means of rapid communication and transportation across space.

    And if a colony were developed, it would only be possible by a tremendous technological effort, requiring strict human obedience. Human would exist in order to keep the colony alive, not the other way around.
  • Currently Reading
    Treblinka, Jean-François Steiner
  • Currently Reading
    The Civilization of the Middle Ages, Norman F. Cantor. An exceedingly pleasurable read, though not without its shortcomings.
  • The Internet is destroying democracy
    Aren't we moving towards a 'Democracy' where the people are so ignorant that election results are meaningless with respect to real issues? Instead the winners will be those who can best whip up fear among the gullible and pretend they will fix its causes. — Tim3003

    Democracy was threatened even earlier, with the advent of radio. A booming voice spouting propaganda could be broadcast across an entire continent, in support of whatever rich group was funding the speech. The fascist movements of the 20th century would not have been able to achieve the degree of control they did had it not been for instant communication and high-speed transportation networks. Technology provides the perfect means of domination.

    Nowadays in pseudo-democratic countries like the US, citizens routinely go through a ritualistic election of politicians who represent the interests of groups of rich people, and who are paid to convince everyone else that these interests are also their own. People literally elect others to take on responsibilities they do not and likely cannot take on themselves. That is the nature of a highly technicized society; any attempt to isolate the good from the bad is just daydreaming. You want technology that keeps you well-fed and well-entertained? Then you have to accept that you won't have any real freedom. That's just how it goes :roll:
  • Currently Reading
    On Disobedience, Erich Fromm
    The Present Age, Søren Kierkegaard
  • Rittenhouse verdict
    Rittenhouse was 17, lived in another state, and came to Kenosha with a gun knowing that things were gonna get ugly. — Mr Bee

    I'm not sure if anyone can really make any absolute statement about Rittenhouse's state of mind at the time, but just suppositions based on his behavior. But here is the sense I got: from videos of him earlier of the night of the killings, one can see that he had a swaggery, self-important personality that is common in boys his age who are anxious to prove themselves and want to be a hero. He wanted to become a cop and he probably just couldn't wait to get out there with a gun and intimidate people, so he went LARPing across town, where there was a riot and he could be a badass. Things got ugly, reality shattered his stupid fantasy, then he killed people and almost got himself killed. He's a stupid kid with delusions of grandeur who got himself into a bad situation, and is now celebrated as a national hero by the right because it technically was self-defense, and the left just can't deal with it.

    I have mixed feelings about this point. R shouldn't have involved himself in this situation, as it was not in his own community. If it was, however... (?) — Michael Zwingli

    I don't think there's any reason to limit personal action to your own community. If there is some cause that you deeply believe in, and you think it is important to involve yourself in this cause, then it doesn't matter if that involvement happens in your backyard or halfway across the world.

    Rittenhouse is a stupid asshole, but in all fairness he has a right to participate in things that he believes in. As I see it, the problem isn't that Rittenhouse got acquitted, but that not everyone would have gotten the same treatment, i.e. black people. If Rittenhouse had been black, he probably would have been shot in the street that night by the cops, or if he reached the courtroom, would have gotten convicted.
  • Happiness in the face of philosophical pessimism?
    ↪Nicholas Mihaila
    :up:

    Lots of things here I agree with.

    Leopardi has a nice response to some of the issues you raise, I quote him here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/599109

    What you believe and what you feel are two separate things that are often in conflict.

    The most effective way to deal with the absurdity of reality, that I have found, is to shrug my shoulders, and make sure I get enough sleep. Stay calm and lucid.
  • What gives life value?
    What gives life value? — TiredThinker

    Nothing. What makes God real? The fact that people believe that God is real?
  • What are odds that in the near future there will be a conflict with China?
    There are always proxies. — James Riley

    :up:

    Cold War #2...
  • Currently Reading
    Obedience To Authority, Stanley Milgram.
  • The WFH as an emerging social class
    It also seems likely that corporate surveillance will rise, as companies will wish to monitor their employees, in order to "make sure" they are actually "working". There may be incidents in which employees are fired because a program, which has been installed on their work computer by corporate IT, detected that they did not click their mouse button a sufficient average number of times in one minute.
  • Is technological ascendancy an impossibility for human kind?
    Technological ascendancy also solves all of the problems that we face, hunger, needing to go to work, illness etc. in other words people live in utopic world where all major problems are solved and handled by technology with minimum effort. — SpaceDweller

    These problems are, in many cases, introduced or exacerbated by technology, and can only be solved with further development of technology; technology is indispensable to the solution of technological problems...the disease provides the cure...

    A technological utopia is a programmed society, a well-oiled machine, with all of its members obeying the imperative of efficiency, maximum production. The threat of an AI, if it isn't just a silly sci fi trope, comes precisely from the AIs recognition of the inefficiency of human nature; humans are too unpredictable, too emotional; they experience exhaustion and can think for themselves. The automated society reduces the job of humans to that of maintenance, and if that too can be automated, then there is no need for humans.

    If premise 1 is true then given the human nature it is necessary that escalation of war (caused by people) is inevitable either leading to an end of human kind or making enslavement even harder to resist.
    Otherwise, if control over the AI is lost, human kind gets either destroyed or dictated by the AI sooner or later.
    For the premise 1 to be false, non controlled counter measures on a global scale must be implemented to prevent such scenarios, which is very unlikely given the fact we have nukes but no effective countermeasures. (again thirst toward rule and security prevails, offense over defense)     — SpaceDweller

    War becomes more prevalent as technological maturity develops, for two reasons:

    1. Technology erodes the distinction between offense and defense (re: "pre-emptive war")
    2. Technology reduces the psychological trauma of killing (drone warfare -> "video games")

    It is the nature of reforms that they only offer a temporary curtail of a historical pattern. Sooner or later they get overturned or ignored. Only a revolutionary shock can abort a historical pattern; reforms are just society's way of slowly adjusting itself to demands placed on it by a pattern.

    The farcity of nuclear non-aggression agreements comes from the fact that the threat has not actually been removed, the plug has not been pulled. A piece of paper is not going to stop the nukes. Sooner or later the nukes are going to get dropped.

    If premise 2 is true then technological ascendancy is impossible, because it's more likely we'll just die out due to lack of resources. — SpaceDweller

    A technological solution to all human problems will never happen, because it would be more expedient to simply remove humans from the equation of efficiency, or modify them so they no longer have these problems. Regardless of the resistance to genetic modification, eventually the floodgates will rupture; humans will become designed, like a poodle.
  • Is technological ascendancy an impossibility for human kind?
    Stephen Hawking said that "philosophy is dead".

    On the contrary, Stephen Hawking is dead, and philosophy is very much so alive.
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