Philosophy

[ParadoxicalZen he/him]

16 hours ago, Zathoth said:

Last time I got the entire forum after me XD

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Morality is an opinion, no more real than lets say your opinions on a certain film. A murder is of course tragic, but the tragedy is in our heads. The knife entered the flesh and the vital functions stopped, that's it. I think we are right to stop it from happening if it pleases us, but I don't think our pleasures go above the killers by any divine, god given laws (and even deities have opinions, they may be slightly more informed than us, but in general it doesn't make them more right). It is all in our heads, all illusions, necessary illusions, maybe, but illusions.

I do think that murder is wrong, I just don't think wrong and right are hard coded into the laws of physics.

 

Pretty much agree

[marsoupial they/them]

What is existence? Are we just consciousnesses trapped inside human shells of flesh and earth?

[Eccentric Hero he/him]

4 hours ago, bleeder said:

What is existence? Are we just consciousnesses trapped inside human shells of flesh and earth?

I guess. That consciousness is probably what people call the soul.

I once read an paper by some Muslim guy. In it, he said that the soul only leaves your body when you sleep. He compared it to a string, in that it can roam but is still ties to your body. I now realize that that sounds very similar to something said in Secret History.

 

Also, I well get back to the previous posts that were in reply to me. I'll do it when I'm not feeling so storming lazy.

Edited September 30, 2016 by Eccentric Hero

[Zathoth]

I have been reading Thomas Ligotti and you havent gotten your daily dose of nihilism so

We are not even consciousness stuck in shells of flesh, we are slabs of meat, full of electricity and chemicals which create delusions of sapience.

[Darkness Ascendant he/him]

8 hours ago, Eccentric Hero said:

I once read an paper by some Muslim guy. In it, he said that the soul only leaves your body when you sleep. He compared it to a string, in that it can roam but is still ties to your body. I now realize that that sounds very similar to something said in Secret History.

Read "Laws of Magic". Interesting (similar) ideas on death.

And about the paper, I just thought of this

Think of your soul as a coil of rope, and it's coiled up inside us. Building on our Islamic beliefs, when the soul leaves the body when you sleep, perhaps our dreams are twisted forms of our memories, which coalesce as the coil unravels and leaves the body, alternatively, dreams could be the product of our soul's nightime wanderings. We believe that God has the power to give that final tug on your soul and have you die, so before we sleep, we recite duas (prayers) of forgiveness and mercy, and we say goodbye to everyone as if we were leaving forever. Upon waking, we say

 

الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ الَّذِي أَحْيَانَا بَعْدَ مَا أَمَاتَنَا وَإِلَيْهِ النُّشُورُ

"All praise be to Allah, who gave us life after killing us (sleep is a form of death) and to Him will we be raised and returned". (Bukhari, Muslim)

 

"O Allah, I seek refuge in You from the narrowing of this world and the narrowness of the Day of Qiyamat".
Thereafter begin the Salat.

(Mishkat, Abu Dawood)

The first one explains itself, but the last one is in reference to the Day of Judgement (Qiyamat=Judgement) and that, everyday, our existence narrows, and our deaths, the end of the world and the day of judgement.

[Eccentric Hero he/him]

8 hours ago, Darkness Ascendant said:

Think of your soul as a coil of rope, and it's coiled up inside us. Building on our Islamic beliefs, when the soul leaves the body when you sleep, perhaps our dreams are twisted forms of our memories, which coalesce as the coil unravels and leaves the body, alternatively, dreams could be the product of our soul's nightime wanderings. We believe that God has the power to give that final tug on your soul and have you die, so before we sleep, we recite duas (prayers) of forgiveness and mercy, and we say goodbye to everyone as if we were leaving forever. Upon waking, we say

I think what I read was very similar, with the theorizing about what causes the dreams. I only mentioned a part of it.

Also, Secret History spoilers

Spoiler

When we die, does our souls get cut off from our physical body like a kite string. It sounds so similar to the rope analogy.

 

[Orlion Blight he/him]

I am reviving this thread to encourage me in my studies! Personal studies, ones where I don't get grades, I'm doing it for fun! I'll start out with some notations on the concept of "truth".

An important thing to consider when you are trying to define truth is to determine what can be true (or what can have a truth value). This gives rise to some interesting results.

Consider: let's say that only statements can have a truth value. We can then posit that a statement is true in so far as it agrees with facts. "The cat is on the mat" can be verified by looking at the fact of whether the cat is indeed on the map. The interesting thing in this case is that the statement "The cat is on the mat" can be true, but the fact of the cat being on the mat has no truth value (it's neither true or false) because it is the measurement by which we would determine if a statement is true!

In other words, by my example, a statement can be true in so far as it agrees with facts. Facts can not be true or false, they are simply facts. 

[Ammanas]

3 hours ago, TheOrlionThatComesBefore said:

I am reviving this thread to encourage me in my studies! Personal studies, ones where I don't get grades, I'm doing it for fun! I'll start out with some notations on the concept of "truth".

An important thing to consider when you are trying to define truth is to determine what can be true (or what can have a truth value). This gives rise to some interesting results.

Consider: let's say that only statements can have a truth value. We can then posit that a statement is true in so far as it agrees with facts. "The cat is on the mat" can be verified by looking at the fact of whether the cat is indeed on the map. The interesting thing in this case is that the statement "The cat is on the mat" can be true, but the fact of the cat being on the mat has no truth value (it's neither true or false) because it is the measurement by which we would determine if a statement is true!

In other words, by my example, a statement can be true in so far as it agrees with facts. Facts can not be true or false, they are simply facts. 

So I am not much on philosophy, so excuse me if I sound ignorant, but I believe that basically all truth is determined by the individual. What is true for one can be different for another. Your example about the cat on the map is a matter of perspective; look at it upside down and the mat is on the cat; you could also argue semantics such as "what does it mean to be on?". Whenever someone says something is true I always laugh a little to myself...yes it is true according to you.

Edited September 7, 2017 by Ammanas

[Silverblade5 he/him]

1 hour ago, Ammanas said:

So I am not much on philosophy, so excuse me if I sound ignorant, but I believe that basically all truth is determined by the individual. What is true for one can be different for another. Your example about the cat on the map is a matter of perspective; look at it upside down and the mat is on the cat; you could also argue semantics such as "what does it mean to be on?". Whenever someone says something is true I always laugh a little to myself...yes it is true according to you.

In my experience, the only thing affected by perspective is opinion.  

[Ammanas]

3 minutes ago, Silverblade5 said:

In my experience, the only thing affected by perspective is opinion.  

I guess what I am saying is that your "truth" is actually your opinion. Although you may feel differently.

Edited September 7, 2017 by Ammanas

[Darkness Ascendant he/him]

I like the idea of Truth and Reality, where each individual person experiences truth in their own way. The sky is proven by science to be blue (or is it?!), but to a colour-blind person it may be green. The truth to them is that the sky is green, even if it is blue in reality. A good example is Moore's Puzzle.

Copypastaed cos I'm lazy.

Suppose you are sitting in a windowless room. It begins to rain outside. You have not heard a weather report, so you don’t know that it’s raining. So you don’t believe that it’s raining. Thus your friend McGillicuddy, who knows your situation, can say truly of you, “It’s raining, but MacIntosh doesn’t believe it is.” But if you, MacIntosh, were to say exactly the same thing to McGillicuddy—“It’s raining, but I don’t believe it is”—your friend would rightly think you’d lost your mind. Why, then, is the second sentence absurd? As G.E. Moore put it, “Why is it absurd for me to say something true about myself?”
The problem Moore identified turned out to be profound. It helped to stimulate Wittgenstein’s later work on the nature of knowledge and certainty, and it even helped to give birth (in the 1950s) to a new field of philosophically inspired language study, pragmatics.