Metaphysics v. YOUR THINKING! A deathmatch sheepfuxoring fantasy top ten six pack PHILOSOPHY pomopomopomo pub quiz (now safe for work)!

I learned it from flowers, lovers, advertising agencies, and interior decorators, not just pornographers. I respect them all.

Regards.

If it's not too late I'd like to add something to Question 8 of the pub quiz:

8. Do you find yourself using the word 'timeless' when you praise things? Do you use the word 'freedom' without saying what it's freedom from?

reality is something i consider very difficult to DEFINE being as it as an omnipotent abstract...thingy. however i admit that i am often 'avoiding' reality or choosing to ignore it in favour of more comforting self-defined 'truths' prompted largely by fear of death ergo i'm not really thinking or talking about recent terrible events in Iraq and other places beyond the obvious 'oh it's awful what are we to do?'

2. Do you think that 'If my life as I live it was all there is, I'd top myself right now!'?

no i find it relatively easy to think of reality including that which is not just around ME but around and withing everything else. to the extent even that my life is too insignificant to bother taking (ha), yet at the same time to precious to waste.

3. Do you notice yourself downgrading your environment because it's not really where your concerns are?

yes, i ignore it and don't engage with it enough perhaps - but then, i DO work in Hoxton...

4. Is your body going to seed because you're off in some other world, for instance a computer world or a TV world?

absolutely. it's a shame.

5. Do you subscribe to the core beliefs of Marxism, Christianity, or Platonism?

a little, but you have to be flexible - very few truths are entirely rigid (hence metaphysics i suppose)

6. When was the Golden Age, and when will utopia come?

the former is whenever you decide, the latter i rather naively believe may still be a fixed realisable objective

7. Do you accept personal authorship of your own parallel worlds, or know the names of the people who designed them? Or do you call them 'objective'?

i'll get back to you

8. Do you find yourself using the word 'timeless' when you praise things?

yes but i suppose i mean 'timeless to me' - something i could appreciate beyond my own lifetime ('i'll never get tired of this')

9. What would a world in which people wholly accepted the present as 'all there is' be like? Better, or worse?

the same, but different

10. How will these questions change if physicists discover the Higgs Boson or 'god particle'? (Beware, trick que-whoooooooooooosh OMG, where am I?

people still get lost all the time so i doubt things will change that much

In 7 I think you're mixing up authorship with ownership. They're not the same thing.

I'm saying that the danger comes when people believe worlds of the mind have the same kind of reality, or a superior reality, to the world we know, see and experience.

You must think I'm dangerous, but I don't know who to. I'm probably closest to a Berkeley-type idealist, I guess. Anyway, I think conceptual universes have as much claim to reality as this one.

http://models.com/life_style/night/nightcrawler/images2000/off_duty_models/devon_sm.jpg

It's a backwards NYY baseball cap, or at least the idea of one.

Well, this is covered by Question 10, I think. There are scenarios (like the discovery of the Higgs Boson) in which observation of physical reality could confirm metaphysical reality. But it's rather difficult to imagine.

In fact, I'm not sure ultimately we can escape metaphysics, since even the anti-metaphysics of someone like Wittgenstein ends up in some sort of metaphysics. "You can't use language to get outside language" doesn't say that there is nothing outside language, only nothing that we can know.

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/subject_by_subject/story.aspx?path=/subject%20by%20subject/commentary/

He divides people into "diachronics" (those who think of themselves as a self with a narrative, ie metaphysicians) and "episodics" (those with no sense of themselves as a narrative, ie anti-metaphysicians).

I do agree with you on this. You hit it with a hammer here, it pops up there. I've found that the best way to deal with it is to smash it up into little pieces and scatter it around a bit. I call this 'micro-metaphysics' and -- surprise surprise -- I see it best exemplified by Japan, where people find something a little sacred, a little otherly, a little magic, in every little thing they do.

I've used the term 'random access' to describe what he's calling 'episodics'. I have the impression that my life is 'random access' -- it happens non-sequentially in a whole lot of different locations. But I consider that a perfectly coherent narrative, and one I've been the conscious author of.

Interesting. And yet even 'micro-metaphysics' contains its own 'macro-metaphysics', in its overarching assumption that metaphysics is bad, is the wrong way to experience the world, and therefore we'll try to minimise it as much as possible. It's a contradiction - metaphysics is wrong but I can't live without it. Then again, maybe the state of contradiction is the only possible state to be in. That's my metaphysical statement for the day.

'...the US is already part way to being a theocracy in the sense I mean, one in which the meaning of reading, and of reality itself, is being redefined. In a recent profile of Bush in the New York Times, Ron Suskind recalls: "In the summer of 2002, a senior adviser to Bush told me that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community', which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality'. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works any more,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.'"'

Phillip Pullman, Index on Censorship, as extracted by The Guardian

-- Momus (nic...) (webmail), November 17th, 2004. (link)

Ah, I misread. Shall think further.

2. Do you think that 'If my life as I live it was all there is, I'd top myself right now!'?No. I like my life.

3. Do you notice yourself downgrading your environment because it's not really where your concerns are? I do, yes. Although I mock Radiohead for that 'I don't belong here' sentiment they're always promoting, I share it a lot. But my ideal, the one I'm working towards, is belonging, and accepting.

4. Is your body going to seed because you're off in some other world, for instance a computer world or a TV world? My legs feel as if they're trying to decide to just walk off and leave me. 'He doesn't seem to need us any more, so what the fuck?'

5. Do you subscribe to the core beliefs of Marxism, Christianity, or Platonism?
They're all there. I've rebelled against Christianity and Platonism, less so against Marxism. But whether I reject them or not, they've all left tire tracks through me.

6. When was the Golden Age, and when will utopia come?
The Golden Age and Utopia are both permanent courts of session.

7. Do you accept personal authorship of your own parallel worlds, or know the names of the people who designed them? Or do you call them 'objective'?
I accept authorship for them, or know who authored them, and don't call them objective. I try to make them more like scaffolding than buildings -- quick to assemble and quick to take down.

8. Do you find yourself using the word 'timeless' when you praise things?
No, although it might have slipped past the censors occasionally.

9. What would a world in which people wholly accepted the present as 'all there is' be like? Better, or worse?
It would depend on the quality of the environment they were in. I think if that happened in a degraded environment, it would be a recipe for hell on earth. If it happened in one that people had cared for and nurtured, it could be paradise on earth.

10. How will these questions change if physicists discover the Higgs Boson or 'god particle'? (Beware, trick que-whoooooooooooosh OMG, where am I?
That's a trick que-whooooooooooosh OMG, where am I?

Imagine a spinning canvas that you try to paint a self portrait on. You can claim authorship, but the result would (in fact could) not be what was expected.

I think it's everywhere... I haven't managed to escape it yet. Elsewhere is included in everywhere I suppose.

2. Do you think that 'If my life as I live it was all there is, I'd top myself right now!'?

I find that ecstasy, taken in sufficient quantities, can bring about all the effects of happiness.

3. Do you notice yourself downgrading your environment because it's not really where your concerns are?

I love my environment in the way an abused child loves his abusive parent.

4. Is your body going to seed because you're off in some other world, for instance a computer world or a TV world?

I certainly hope so.

5. Do you subscribe to the core beliefs of Marxism, Christianity, or Platonism?

As with the National Geographic, I've subscribed to all three for a brief period, and I enjoyed the pictures more that the articles.

6. When was the Golden Age, and when will utopia come?

The past and the future.

7. Do you accept personal authorship of your own parallel worlds, or know the names of the people who designed them? Or do you call them 'objective'?

I don't own parallel worlds, just an extremely broad one.

8. Do you find yourself using the word 'timeless' when you praise things?

I generally only praise things internally. Art is like charity in that respect. And I would never be so silly as to employ that adjective, except perhaps in reference to "Rent" by PSB.

9. What would a world in which people wholly accepted the present as 'all there is' be like? Better, or worse?

It would be a world without context. Whether that would be better or worse is a meaningless question.

10. How will these questions change if physicists discover the Higgs Boson or 'god particle'?

More than the answers?

My allegiances are with the non-transcendental Nietzsche and the feet-firmly-planted-on-the-ground American Pragmatists. The innate and the eternal are problems of language, not of the world.

For the most part, I dislike Christianity, Platonism, and Marxism; however, I pick and choose: I like the "love your brother" stuff of Jesus, and the "help out the poor and the weak" message. I like the eternal optimism of Marx ("equality for all!"). There's not much I like about Plato... perhaps his intellectual curiosity... nah. I like his early version of Socrates, but I'm not a Plato fan.

I want people to be concerned with the here-and-now, ESPECIALLY if their life sucks. Fuck dreams of invisible superheroes gallivanting in outer space, and fuck Ghosts-of-Our-Present-Selves living on luxurious clouds and fucking virgins. Fuck the Unstoppable Progress of History - as if History was a person with a brain and a direction! The problems are corporeal, without teleology, and everything else is a sham.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

b-but you're always bigging up Ealing!

2. Do you think that 'If my life as I live it was all there is, I'd top myself right now!'?
Vehemently not! As a little kid somebody asked me what I thought heaven would be. I said it would be just like earth, and you'd continue living without any knowledge that you'd died, and somehow everything would work out and you'd get to be the oldest man in the world. Absurd and naive, but pretty indicative of my current mindholdings.

3. Do you notice yourself downgrading your environment because it's not really where your concerns are?
From time to time - this is natural, innit? But largely - no. I'm a process person more than an end-results person, and my being at X trumps any of my ambitions.

4. Is your body going to seed because you're off in some other world, for instance a computer world or a TV world?
Nope. Though I've stopped going to the gym in the past two weeks.

5. Do you subscribe to the core beliefs of Marxism, Christianity, or Platonism?
I'm something of a latent Marxist, more specifically a latent Adornian. But I can't concentrate on the intentionality of illusory-perpetuation by the culture industry so the net effect is an inherent distrust of any interests larger than individual.

6. When was the Golden Age, and when will utopia come?
Ni...ni...

7. Do you accept personal authorship of your own parallel worlds, or know the names of the people who designed them? Or do you call them 'objective'?
I understand I have some control over parallel worlds and own my agency in this "objective" one to the degree I have conceptual space left over from reifying the social order within which I find myself, but I also understand that what I imagine to be my will is merely an aspect of the entirety of my cognitive aparatus, and even that will is contingent to forces over which I have no control. -- lysander spooner upthread.

8. Do you find yourself using the word 'timeless' when you praise things?
I'm a bigger fan of HOT SHIT!

9. What would a world in which people wholly accepted the present as 'all there is' be like? Better, or worse?
Much, much, better.

10. How will these questions change if physicists discover the Higgs Boson or 'god particle'? (Beware, trick que-whoooooooooooosh OMG, where am I?
Won't. Zealots will continue in their zealotry, athiests will refuse to believe, effectively everything will remain the same.

I like it on more than a physical level, it's a part of me. It's hard to explain.

a) 'What others have associated with something absent and intangible I associate with something present and tangible, ie your lips.'

b) 'Your kiss is much, much larger than heaven.'

c) 'There is only one way to access heaven, and that is metaphorically, through your kiss.'

d) 'Insofar as there is immortality for we mortal humans, it is through sexual reproduction. Let us, in consequence of this, hump like dogs in heat.'

To be Clintonian for a moment, it depends on what your definition of "is" is. In a post-Einsteinian cosmos, "elsewhere" must refer simultaneously to space and time. Since "now" is an infinitesimally thin slice of time, by any practical measure it can be said to be non-existent. Therefore "reality" as we know it does not exist.

2. Do you think that 'If my life as I live it was all there is, I'd top myself right now!'?

Frequently

3. Do you notice yourself downgrading your environment because it's not really where your concerns are?

Yes

4. Is your body going to seed because you're off in some other world, for instance a computer world or a TV world?

Yes

5. Do you subscribe to the core beliefs of Marxism, Christianity, or Platonism?

No

6. When was the Golden Age, and when will utopia come?

Golden Age = childhood
utopia = retirement

7. Do you accept personal authorship of your own parallel worlds, or know the names of the people who designed them? Or do you call them 'objective'?

I accept the blame but am willing to share the credit for any and all parallel worlds I subscribe to.

8. Do you find yourself using the word 'timeless' when you praise things?

No

9. What would a world in which people wholly accepted the present as 'all there is' be like? Better, or worse?

There is no present. See answer to question 1 above.

10. How will these questions change if physicists discover the Higgs Boson or 'god particle'? (Beware, trick que-whoooooooooooosh OMG, where am I?

The what boson?

2. Do you think that 'If my life as I live it was all there is, I'd top myself right now!'?
Certainly not. I've never felt that there's an afterlife, or an uberlife or anything.

3. Do you notice yourself downgrading your environment because it's not really where your concerns are?
Not really, unless my concerns are about other (real) things. On a related note, it's quite possible to care about things that don't directly seem to be "physical" (as opposed to "meta"-physical), like people's rights not to be tortured, or whether it's advisable to destroy the environment, and yet be a scientific materialist. Caring, and human rights, and moral responsibility and so on exist because we exist rather than on some higher plane of existence. They're part - in fact an imperative for - living in a society or society of societies in a shared biosphere, if self-destruction is to be avoided.

4. Is your body going to seed because you're off in some other world, for instance a computer world or a TV world?
I'm trying not to let it. But if it were, that wouldn't imply that one's "too metaphysical" or something - unless one were to actually believe in that other world (especially if it's the X-Files). Uh.

5. Do you subscribe to the core beliefs of Marxism, Christianity, or Platonism?
No. I once thought I could be a Marxist, but no I don't think so. Call me a non-dogmatic green-leftist...

6. When was the Golden Age, and when will utopia come?
There was never a Golden Age. Lionising our childhood is a difficult thing, because one's so dependent during childhood. Your childhood bliss came at the expense of your poor slavedriven parents. And our childhood bliss was generally driven by our childhood ignorance. The trouble was, as we realised more about how the real world works - oops, here come the tears!
So will utopia come when we all grow up? I don't have that much faith in human nature, but it's a nice thought. It'd be nice to think that the more knowledge we amass about the world, the more in tune with it we'll get, and the more in tune with each other. But that's not how it works. I believe strongly in the need to continue the scientific program, to continue the gradual whittling away at the edges of what we don't know, the gradual focussing and nuancing of what we do know.
But it's fair to say that the program of creating the utopian society won't just be an inevitable by-product of that other program, although just as science's shadow, industry/technology, makes big bad things easier, it can also make an enlightened, sharing society of equals more attainable (inasmuch as it's possible)...

7. Do you accept personal authorship of your own parallel worlds, or know the names of the people who designed them? Or do you call them 'objective'?
Pardon?
Oh all right, well those which aren't designed by others (such as Philip Pullman or some committee or evolutionary process) I accept personal authorship for. But the're just conceptions, and radically incomplete and probably inconsistent at that. Relativity notwithstanding, there's only one "objective" world. (Relativity calls into question the concept of "simultaneity", but when two observers (subjects) share the same relativistic frame of reference, this isn't a problem.)

8. Do you find yourself using the word 'timeless' when you praise things?
I doubt it. If so, it would only be metaphorically. But I'm very wary of using the word "infinite" even metaphorically to describe things in the real world, so I doubt it.

9. What would a world in which people wholly accepted the present as 'all there is' be like? Better, or worse?
Depends how literally they took it. The present? I think that you can be doggedly non-metaphysical but still accept that some parts of history (remembered and learnt) are most likely mostly the case, and there are shades of believability. Living only for the present would be, as someone else mentioned upstream, living without a context. That strikes me as a dangerous thing. Take it to its extreme, and it would mean ignoring things you saw just a second ago. Take it to even a considerably lesser extreme, and you still couldn't rely on science or the lessons of culture and history.

Accepting the material world as described to the best of its ability by science as "all there is" is a trickier question. I've tried to outline why I don't think this sort of materialism implies that other sort of materialism, a philosophy of life in which nothing matters other than amassing material wealth. If such a materialist of the latter sort really believed that suffering, love, culture et al didn't matter because they didn't exist, why would even material wealth matter? Why would having when others have not matter to them, that is?
Oops, I'm ranting. Over.

10. How will these questions change if physicists discover the Higgs Boson or 'god particle'? (Beware, trick que-whoooooooooooosh OMG, where am I?
The questions? Well unifying physics is a holy grail of sorts, but it won't inevitably mean all the other questions are answered. There'll still be more for science to unravel and demystify. The Higgs Boson won't necessarily convince people of the truth of Darwinism, nor will it stop people who yearn for "something more" from yearning - and nor will it bring about the Republic of Heaven on Earth.
Shame, though.

It may be, but it is also here.

2. Do you think that 'If my life as I live it was all there is, I'd top myself right now!'?

I don't know how to interpret this question. You mean did I live a full life. Yeah, I did.

3. Do you notice yourself downgrading your environment because it's not really where your concerns are?

What environment? My house? The earth? Are you asking me if I recycle?
I'm very particular about my surroundings at home.

4. Is your body going to seed because you're off in some other world, for instance a computer world or a TV world?

It's going to seed because of health problems, lack of health insurance, and lack of time and money to work out four hours a day. It's all quite material.

5. Do you subscribe to the core beliefs of Marxism, Christianity, or Platonism?

Yes.

6. When was the Golden Age, and when will utopia come?

No such thing.

7. Do you accept personal authorship of your own parallel worlds, or know the names of the people who designed them? Or do you call them 'objective'?

What parallel worlds? This is word salad. Define your terms, man!

8. Do you find yourself using the word 'timeless' when you praise things?

No.
9. What would a world in which people wholly accepted the present as 'all there is' be like? Better, or worse?

10. How will these questions change if physicists discover the Higgs Boson or 'god particle'? (Beware, trick que-whoooooooooooosh OMG, where am I?

Who the fuck is Higgs and why do I care about a primal particle?

It may be, but it is also here.

2. Do you think that 'If my life as I live it was all there is, I'd top myself right now!'?

I don't know how to interpret this question. You mean did I live a full life. Yeah, I did.

3. Do you notice yourself downgrading your environment because it's not really where your concerns are?

What environment? My house? The earth? Are you asking me if I recycle?
I'm very particular about my surroundings at home.

4. Is your body going to seed because you're off in some other world, for instance a computer world or a TV world?

It's going to seed because of health problems, lack of health insurance, and lack of time and money to work out four hours a day. It's all quite material.

5. Do you subscribe to the core beliefs of Marxism, Christianity, or Platonism?

Yes.

6. When was the Golden Age, and when will utopia come?

No such thing.

7. Do you accept personal authorship of your own parallel worlds, or know the names of the people who designed them? Or do you call them 'objective'?

What parallel worlds? This is word salad. Define your terms, man!

8. Do you find yourself using the word 'timeless' when you praise things?

No.
9. What would a world in which people wholly accepted the present as 'all there is' be like? Better, or worse?

Neither. It would be impossible because a future would be pointless. We would live in an eternal present.

10. How will these questions change if physicists discover the Higgs Boson or 'god particle'? (Beware, trick que-whoooooooooooosh OMG, where am I?

Who the fuck is Higgs and why do I care about a primal particle?

2. Do you think that 'If my life as I live it was all there is, I'd top myself right now!'? Definitely not. #1 Life can be enjoyable and I have a certain amount of agency as far as that goes #2 If this is all there is, then I might as well enjoy myself

3. Do you notice yourself downgrading your environment because it's not really where your concerns are? Question is a little vague, but I'll answer two ways. #1 No, I keep my environment ordered in order to remove obstacles to my connection with my real concerns #2 Yes, my current environment is unimportant in relation to my real concerns.

4. Is your body going to seed because you're off in some other world, for instance a computer world or a TV world? No. I'm no jock, but I believe in optimizing my body as again, it removes obstacles to my real concerns and perhaps extends the time I will be able to have with them.

5. Do you subscribe to the core beliefs of Marxism, Christianity, or Platonism? Consciously, I subscribe to the way Marx ordered the world, although I have little faith in Marxist vision and action. I accept that unconsciously, I am deeply affected by Christianity (especially Christian forgiveness), however I have virtually no conscious religious thoughts. I respect Platonism as a shot in the dark and appreciate how it's the basis for later, more relevant philosophy (I reject it's basic ideas).

6. When was the Golden Age, and when will utopia come? There are different answers for this. Personally, they're related to relationships with women in my life. The Golden Age being the time I spent with someone when I was 18-19, and utopia being that time in the future where I am married and am raising children with someone. Culturally, there are many golden ages depending on my mood - utopia will never be, because no one will know that they're in it. However, the beings of the future in Houellebecq's 'Atomised'/'The Elementary Particles' live in the most appealing utopia I've ever read (I won't go into it, as it gives things away).

7. Do you accept personal authorship of your own parallel worlds, or know the names of the people who designed them? Or do you call them 'objective'? I'm not sure what this question is asking. What constitutes *my* "parallel worlds"? Why do I automatically have them? How would someone else construct them?

8. Do you find yourself using the word 'timeless' when you praise things? Definitely not - it's an impossibility of course - all things will eventually be lost - I'm thinking of 'Dune' here where timeless concepts from our time are only faintly and incorrectly remembered in the year 10,181. but I like Tim's comment upthread.

9. What would a world in which people wholly accepted the present as 'all there is' be like? Better, or worse? Much worse, either because of mourning or because immediate self-interest would cause anarchy.
10. How will these questions change if physicists discover the Higgs Boson or 'god particle'? (Beware, trick que-whoooooooooooosh OMG, where am I? I don't see how these questions would change at all. Proving the existence of this particle seems to have no practical application (and a decidedly metaphysical bent).

Am I getting credit for this?

It's not very historically or philosophically accurate to ascribe this statement to Marxism, is it? It's Rousseau... I thought you had to go via Hegel to get to Red Square.