B.A. in Philosophy by University of Sao Paulo (USP), Brazil, and technical analyst at a Brazilian railway lab.
alexgieg
Karma: 546
Ditto, or more precisely, no one from my graduation class has any interest in paying for one, so we all got our certificates by mail. I suppose it helps that most everyone was 30+, and the major was Philosophy, neither of which predisposes one to care much about such things, much less when put together.
Looking at the pain scale, I guess I’m somewhat atypical. On the pleasurable experiences I had, I’d order them such:
0.0: College graduation (I haven’t really felt it as anything special)
0.2: Alcohol consumption (but I haven’t gotten really drunk)
1.0 to 3.0: Male orgasm (kinda meh most of the time, sometimes good)
2.0: Tongue orgasm from a skilled kisser
4.0 to 6.0: Female orgasm (the first one is 4.0, successive ones being more and more intense until it plateaus at 6.0 on the 8th orgasm or so)
(Yes, I’ve had the last one despite being 100% a cis-male. Let’s attribute it to “the magics” and leave it at that.)
And on the pain scale, the worst tooth ache I’ve ever had was way stronger that when my gallbladder was almost rupturing, so I think it’d go like this:
1.0: ear infection
1.0 to 3.0: tooth ache, lower back pain
2.5: gallbladder going kaput
3.0: the most impacting death in family
4.0: heartbreak
That depends. Several metaphysical systems develop ontologies, with concepts such as “objects” and “properties”. Couple that with the subfield of Applied Metaphysics, which informs other areas of knowledge by providing systematic means to deal with those foundations. So it’s no surprise that one such application, several steps down the line, was the development of object-oriented programming with its “objects possessing properties” ordered in “ontologies” via inheritance, interfaces and the like.
Thanks! And done! :-)
I’ve tried adding spoiler tags, but it isn’t working. According the FAQ for Markdown it’s three colons and the word “spoiler” at the beginning, followed by three colons at the end, but no luck. Any suggestion?
I think that was the one, yes. It’s been years and I forgot the name.
I’ll add the tags, thanks!
There’s a Naruto fanfic (much better than the actual manga, mind) with this trope, except the author adds a cool extra at the end. In that, it turns out one with looping power only goes back to the same point in time because
they haven’t learned how to set a new, so to speak, “save point”. This mechanic became clear to the characters after they had decades of experience in child bodies, so that they began to carefully plan the world they wanted to have, and exhaustively time looped until they managed to set things perfectly aligned for the next stage of their plan, at which point they “saved”, and went for it.
Those aren’t metaphysical. Metaphysics is a well defined philosophical research field.
To complement @Dagon’s comment, another difficulty is that Skepticism itself is also a philosophical model, which can be taken either as merely epistemological, or as a metaphysical model unto itself, so the initial 1:1 model actually giving Skepticism a 50% prior vs. all other models. And then we have some relatively weird models such as Nominalism, which is metaphysically skeptical except for affirming, atop a sea of complete no-rules free-formness, the absolute will of an absolute god who decides everything just because.
Fun detail: my Philosophy major followed a method called “monographic structuralism” that consists in learning each philosopher’s system as if we were devout followers of theirs (for the class duration). The idea was that before opining on this or that philosophical problem it was worth knowing that philosopher’s arguments and reasoning as well as they themselves did. So one studied philosopher A enough to argue perfectly for his ideas, finding them perfectly self-consistent from beginning to end and from top to bottom; then studied philosopher B similarly; then philosopher C, ditto; and so on and so forth, which invariably led one to learn two philosophers who said the exact opposite of each other while still being perfectly self-consistent—at which point one threw their hands up and concluded the issue to be strictly undecidable. In the end most students, or at least those who stuck with the major long enough, became philosophical skeptics. :-)
This was extremely informative! Thank you!
A few points I’d like to comment on:
“So eager were poor farmers for dirty, dangerous factory jobs (...)”
There’s an underlying question on why those farmers were that poor and such dire need for those factory jobs. One reason I’ve seen given was in Hillaire Belloc’s 1912 book The Servile State, one of the first books of the Distributist school of economics. According him, the end of the feudal system in England, and its turning into a modern nation-state, involved among other things the closing off and appropriation, by nobles as a reward from the kingdom, of the former common farmlands they farmed on, as well as the confiscation of the lands owned by the Catholic Church, which for all practical purposes also served as common farmlands. This resulted in a huge mass of landless farmers with no access to land, or only very diminished access, who in turn decades later became the proletarians for the newly developing industries. If that’s accurate, then it may be the case that the Industrial Revolution wouldn’t have happened had all those poor not have existed, since the very first industries wouldn’t have been attractive compared to condition non-forcibly-starved farmers had.
“By making wage labour attractive enough to draw in millions of free workers, higher wages made forced labor less necessary, and because impoverished serfs and slaves—unlike the increasingly prosperous wage labourers—could rarely buy the manufactured goods being churned out by factories, forced labour increasingly struck business interests as an obstacle to growth (especially when it was competitors who were using it).”
This is a common narrative about how chattel slavery came to an end, to the point it even sounds like common sense by now, but I haven’t actually seen strong evidence for this interpretation. Maybe this evidence exists and it’s just a matter of someone pointing it out for me, but so far I know three points of divergence about this narrative:
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Force labor ended once before. During the Middle Age, as its complex farming hierarchies and belief-systems developed in the millennia following the fall of the Roman Empire, saw the descendants of the former Roman villas-turned fiefdoms’ slaves slooowly gaining more and more customary legal rights in their process of becoming serfs, rights feudal lords rarely refused them lest doing so hit their reputations hard. By the Late Middle Age this process had made serfs, while technically still property most everywhere, in practice free, with some places having outright forbidden literal slavery altogether by as early as the 12th century.
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This was quite clearly recognized as such by the Catholic Church, who, once the new nation-states began their Great Navigations, and started the once mostly abandoned process of enslavement all over again, began to periodically issue papal bulls heavily condemning enslavers, the earliest of which in the 16th century. Not that the Church had effective power on the matter, all they could do was to tell enslaver they were going to Hell, a threat enslavers clearly give little attention to, but this at the very least shows that, culturally at least, there was a strong anti-enslavement cultural force in place amidst all that European agrarian ethos, and one that kept advancing in parallel and despite nation-states renewed push for slavery.
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This cultural force finally cascaded when, in the late-18th century, religious-based political abolitionist associations began developing and lobbying for the end of slavery and, in a mere 50 years, turned England from a heavy promoter of slavery into a country who spend huge amounts of money and military resources to hunt enslavers worldwide.
Notice that, while point 3 overlaps with the Industrial Revolution, the causality here would seem to me to be the opposite of how it’s usually depicted, that is, with abolitionism having helped to advance industrialization as an unintended side effect of its ideals cascading into practice, and not the other way around. Which, evidently, doesn’t prevent the usual narrative from being valid in other places, that is, countries in which slavery was still well accepted finding themselves forced, first militarily, then technologically, and finally economically, to adapt or perish. But the former case seems to me to have been the more prevalent, in the West at least, what with the Civil War in the US, and enlightened royals voluntarily giving up their crowns to end slavery on moral grounds.
Over millennia, such societies either had their tricks independently discovered or copies by others, or then outright went warpath to subjugate over societies to their rule – and, of course, preach their values, which (given human adaptability) they held sincerely, and with no idea that they thought differently from their distant ancestors.
I think at least some recognized quite clearly they thought differently. I don’t remember where I got this information, I think it was on Karen Armstrong’s Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, but I distinctly remember reading about how when Muhammad was young he was sent by his uncle to live among nomads for a few years, as it was considered part of the proper education of the young back then precisely because nomads were seen as the preservers of the old ways, keepers of strict adherence to proper moral values and work ethics, thus excellent examples to a young, impressionable mind compared to the lazy, inferior moral developed in the sedentary lifestyle of farms and villages (yes, laboring 12+ hours a day under backbreaking conditions was considered sedentary).
Now, while foragers and nomads aren’t the same category of wandering people, it’d seem to me that there was an awareness of the cultural differences between those who lived from the land and those who didn’t, in at least a roughly similar way to how those living in, and fully inserted into, modern, huge metropolitan areas nowadays are aware of the cultural differences between themselves and those living in the country.
(...) was the centralisation-vs-decentralisation tradeoff really so simple in the farming era that “godlike kings everywhere” was the only effective answer?
Perhaps it was seen as such by those involved. One interesting reference point is given in the Bible.
1 Samuel 8 narrates how at one point the Hebrews, envying their surrounding countries having kings, decided they wanted one too, so they demanded prophet Samuel to crown one. Samuel disliked this, prayed to God, and God told him to warn their fellow countrymen of all the very-bad-things that having a kingdom would result in (verses 11-18):
“This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”
This suggests the system of government that existed before didn’t do those things. That system, called Judging, isn’t well known, but I remember reading a historian once explaining it was very decentralized. If I remember right, political power was intermittent and an all-or-nothing proposition, as some families had generational military duties that included, but only in war times, absolute power for the purposes of defense against external aggression. In times of peace, in contrast, those families had no power, having to tend to their lands and produce their won food or whatever by themselves, similar to everyone else. It therefore worked more as a loose, decentralized federation of micro-states that used militias for self-defense than as a big, integrated, centralized government with a permanente military force.
And yet, if there’s any truth left in the story after centuries of retellings until it was put into paper, the people saw their neighbors centralization and really wanted a piece of that for themselves. Alas the text doesn’t dwell on their reasons for that, but if I were to venture a guess it’d be that they saw their neighbors as having effective, deployable armies as threatening, and saw centralization as a means to more effectively defend themselves despite the listed drawbacks.
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I have the impression you’re confounding the terms “freedom” and “democracy”, themselves quite broad. The contents of your post suggest what you’re seeking is to live in a country that are representative liberal democracies, and whose electoral process results in specific representativeness quotients, as well as in other specific features. But that doesn’t exactly overlap with any specific notion of “freedom”, such as that of “true freedom”, unless you also were to provide a specific definition of both.
I imagine you’re going to find a better response if you were to taboo the words “democracy”, “freedom”, and “true freedom”, so as to restate what you’re seeking in more objective, concrete terms.
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About this:
People reproduce at an exponential rate. The amount of food we can create is finite. Population growth will eventually outstrip production. Humanity will starve unless population control is implemented by governments.
The calculation and the predictions were correct until the 1960′s, including very gloomy views that wars around food would begin happening by the 1980′s. What changed things was the Green Revolution. Weren’t for this technological breakthrough no one could actually have predicted, and right now we might be looking back at 40 years of wars, plenty more dictatorships and authoritarian regimes all around, some going for multiple wars against their neighbors, others with long running one child policies of their own.
So, in addition to the points you made, I’d add that many times uncertainty comes from “unknown unknowns” such as not knowing what technologies will be developed, while at other times it comes from hoping certain technologies will be developed, betting on them, but then those failing to materialize.
Is it worth acting when you’re comparing a 0.051% chance of doing good to a 0.049% chance of doing harm?
I’d say Chesterton’s Fence provides a reasonable heuristics for such cases.
You’re welcome. There’s a stronger continuity if you look at pre-modern Catholicism and Orthodoxy, but yes, Christianity changed a lot over time.
By the way, something that may help you locate your own personal moment in your relation towards the religious teachings you received are in light of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, Kohlberg’s theory of stages of moral development, and Fowler’s theory of stages of faith development, as these helped me understand my own. They build one atop the other in this same sequence, Fowler’s depending on Kolhberg’s, which in turn depends on Piaget’s, so it’s important to read the 3 links in the order provided.
There is an element of submission, but originally it meant submission of the will to the knowledge of those who know better even when what they say goes counter your base interests.
For example, going back to praus/taming/meekness, one reference Jesus use is that of his “yoke” being easy and with a light load. Yoke is a U-shaped bar used to fix two draft animals together, so they can pull loads together. One way animal trainers used back then (and maybe still use today) to train an animal in a new job is to fix his neck on one side of a yoke, and on the other a very experienced animal. This way the learned animal, doing his well practiced routine, leads the untrained one to learn them much faster. So the idea here is that, by emulating the elders, the novice gets “there” much faster, and with much less difficulty, than he would by doing things on his own. Which, considering this is in context of iron age societies, in which an established practice remained as the state-of-the-art for generations at a time, in general tended to be true.
Nowadays things change at such a fast pace that this isn’t the case anymore, so there’s a clear mismatch between what the intended purposes of such a saying was meant to convey, that is, that one should listen to those who know better, and what one derives from the saying in a modern context, which depending on circumstances ends up frequently being the opposite.
It’s worth noting that Paul teaches the exact same thing in a much more straightforward way, for now still understandable verbatim, when he said it’s good to learn about everything to then prudentially chose what to actually use from all one learned. A huge number of Christians definitely don’t do that, preferring instead to practice the misinterpreted version of the “yoke” metaphor.
The English work “meek” is a problematic translation of the original Greek “praus”. Praus refers to a wild animal who’s been tamed, the connotation being that such a person hasn’t lost the virtue of strength of their wild nature, but added to it the virtue of civilized interaction, similar to how a tamed animal learns to do things their wild counterparts would never do.
This links to several other similar notions spread through the New Testament. For example, when Jesus:
a) Tells his disciples to be “harmless as doves” but “wise as serpents”;
b) When he orders them to first go around and learn to preach without carrying weapons, thus having to resort to fleeing when threatened, and then, after they managed to do that, instructs them to arm themselves with swords, the implication being that now they have the experience needed to know when violence can be dispensed with, and when it cannot;
c) Or when he teaches them to give the other face, which also is quite misunderstood modernly. Back then when a person of higher social standing wanted to deeply offend someone from a lower social standing, they slapped them with the back of their hands. By showing such a person “the other face” they couldn’t use that movement, and were forced to slap you with the palm of their hand, a gesture reserved to challenging someone of their same social standing, which most wouldn’t dare do.
In short, such expressions have a connotation of deliberately restraining one’s own savagery, but not letting it go, so that others may know that, while you’re fine and good and helpful, you aren’t weak, and aren’t to be trifled with. A connotation that more often than not is lost in translation.
Regarding 1 and 3, good points, and I agree.
On 2, when I say formalizable, I mean in terms of giving the original arguments a symbolic formal treatment, that is, converting them into formal logical statements. Much of non-analytic philosophy has to do with criticizing this kind of procedure. For an example among many, check this recent one from a Neo-Thomistic perspective (I refer to this one because it’s fresh on my mind, I read it a few days ago).
On 4, maybe a practical alternative would be to substitute vaguer but broader relations, such as “agrees”, “partially agrees”, “disagrees”, “purports to encompass”, “purports to replace”, “opposes”, “strawmans” etc., to the more restricted notions of truth values. This would allow for a mindmap-style set of multidirectional relations and clusterings.
My comments:
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That’s actually not the case. Analytic Philosophy is preeminent in the US and, to some extent, the UK. Everywhere else it’s a topic that one learns among others, and usually in a secondary and subsidiary manner. For example, I majored in Philosophy in 2009. My university’s Philosophy department, which happens to be the most important in my country and therefore the source of that vast majority of Philosophy undergraduates and graduates who then go on to influence other Philosophy departments, was founded by Continental philosophers, and remains almost entirely focused on that, with a major French sub-department, a secondary German one, some professors focusing in Classic and (continental style) English philosophers. In the Analytic tradition there was exactly one professor, whose area of research was Philosophy of Science.
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Formalization, of any kind, is mostly an Analytic approach. When one formalizes a Continental philosophy, it cease being the original philosophy and becomes an Analytic interpretation of that Continental philosophy, so not the original anymore. And there’s a remarkable loss of content in such a translation.
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They have “experiences” and “perceptions”. Husserl’s project, for instance, was to re-fund Philosophy in the manner of a science by insisting that the objects (in the proper Kantian meaning of the word) philosophers work upon be first described precisely so that, when two philosophers discuss about them, they’re talking about precisely the same thing, so as to avoid divergences due to ambiguities in regards to the objects themselves. Phenomenology then, as Husserl understood it, was to focus on developing a full description of phenomena (perceived objects), to only afterwards philosophize about them. Phenomena, therefore, don’t have opposites, since they’re raw “objectively shared subjetive perceptual descriptions”, never concepts. Heidegger was a student under Husserl, so much of his work consists in describing phenomena. And those who then followed both did the same, with so many different emphasis and methods, and mutual criticisms went more about aspects other phenomenologists didn’t notice in this or that described phenomena.
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I’ll give an example of how hard that can be. In Buddhist logic there are five truth categories: true, false, true-and-false, neither-true-nor-false, and unitive. In Jain logic, there are seven: true, false, undefined, true-and-false, true-and-undefined, false-and-undefined, true-false-and-undefined. Philosophy Web, as I understand it at least, would focus strongly on opposite categories, that is, this is true therefore those are false, which are seen similarly from the others’ perspectives, so other truth-categories get sidelined. And that’s without entering the topic of the many different Western dialectical methods, such as Hegel’s, who has historically-bound time-dependent truth-variability linked to the overcoming of oppositions.
I don’t mean to imply it wouldn’t be a useful project though. I’m just pointing out its actual scope in practice will be narrower than your original proposal suggests.
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It seems to me this would work for Analytic Philosophy, but not for other philosophical traditions. For instance:
a. Continental Philosophy has, since Heidegger (or, arguably, Husserl) taken a turn away from conceptual definitions towards phenomenological descriptions, so anything concept-based is subject, as a whole, to all manners of phenomenological criticisms;
b. Classic Philosophy frequently isn’t formalizable, with its nuclear terms overlapping in a very interdependent manner, the same applying to some Modern ones. Splitting them into separate concepts doesn’t quite work;
c. And Eastern Philosophies have a strong tendency to operate apophatically, that is, through negation rather than affirmation of concepts, so that every nuclear term comprises a set of negations, resulting in a kind of mix of “a” and “b”, with inverted signals.
In short, a Philosophy Web, as proposed, would be a specific kind of meta-philosophical effort, and since every meta-philosophy is itself a philosophy, thus subject to being marked as an item among others in alternative meta-philosophical taxonomies, as well as of being refutable from opposite methodologies, it wouldn’t be able to encompass more than a specific subset of philosophical thinking.
The tongue is very sensitive. A very skilled kisser knows how to intensely stimulate the top of their partner’s tongue with theirs while French kissing, to the point one or both of them get a very specific kind of orgasm different from any other. In my case I got spasms while washed in endorphins, which took several minutes to subside. :-)
No, I mean actual female orgasm. I can provide exactly zero evidence for this, which on LW is a particularly huge no-no, but if mentioning a little bit of mystic experiences isn’t too much of a problem I can say there are Tantra masters out there who can induce some pretty interesting experiences on suitable students, one of which is, on male-bodied ones, those of having a full set of phantom limb representatives of female genitalia complete with the mental experience of female orgasms (as well as of male genitalia on female-bodied students). This is linked to advanced Karmamudrā techniques.