Do you want to make it to 75?

[teamsaint]

Thankfully, we now know that it is the middle aged ( remind me when that is ?) that are the main problem.


( Pretty certain that is white English Middle aged ,but that is just an assumption, as we aren't explicitly singled out).

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/08/antisemitism-islamophobia-middle-aged-prince-harry

We can all presumably look forward to more wisdom from the Prince, and his Guardian journo fellow travellers

[Serial_Apologist]

I have an idea his world-view supports the “never ending” idea.

Not my philosophy.

I have a theory that we all come back as subatomic waveicles, scattered throughout the cosmos, with collective consciousness proper to the species, and that (as some mystics believe, I believe) the human consciousness is but a suborder of an intelligent totality, a ground of being that some have limited to their idea of God. I'd be happy, floating free to be either a particle or wave befitting the Quantum idea.

We have no idea of "knowing" this, because our notions of knowing are notional, whereas compared to our limited conceptual ways of apprehending reality the way the intelligence operates is as an interconnnected web working at infinite parameters of possibility.

[vinteuil]

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... I am far from sure that your subatomic waveicles will have much meaningful connection with the personal identity that was Serial Apologist. In what sense will your waveicles be distinguishable from MY waveicles?



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[Serial_Apologist]

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... I am far from sure that your subatomic waveicles will have much meaningful connection with the personal identity that was Serial Apologist. In what sense will your waveicles be distinguishable from MY waveicles?



.

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Well the less the better, really, as far as I can see. Any point of view will always, of course, like identity, be of passing significance, mediated by the selectivity of memory and the limitations of language-based practicalities predicated on social protocols and imperatives emphasising separation, hierarchisation and division under our current system, which just reinforces what all this individualism that places identity over commonality is about!

[vinteuil]

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... all I'm sayin', Serial, is that Serial will no longer be Serial. You will be indistinguishable from vinteuil, Pol Pot, and Margaret Thatcher...


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[Serial_Apologist]

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... all I'm sayin', Serial, is that Serial will no longer be Serial. You will be indistinguishable from vinteuil, Pol Pot, and Margaret Thatcher...


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Oh they'll be redeemed as well, once back in the realm of the primordial, I'm sorry to say! Maybe that is what the New Testament-based Christians really mean by God's forgiveness in eternity, rather than how they interpreted Jesus's unfortunately cryptic way of expressing himself!

[vinteuil]

Oh they 'll be redeemed as well, once back in the realm of the primordial, I'm sorry to say! !

... ah, but in what way will 'they' in any meaningful sense be 'they' at that stage?

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[Serial_Apologist]

... ah, but what will 'they' in any meaningful sense be 'they' at that stage?

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NO!! That's precisely IT!!! (Satori - sudden realisation, etc etc. Eighthobstruction could put it so much better than this person in this dimension right now)

[vinteuil]

NO!! That's precisely IT!!! (Satori - sudden realisation, etc etc. Eighthobstruction could put it so much better than this person in this dimension right now)

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... I think you need a strong dose of this - to cut thro' all that mystic haze :

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Identity-and-Spatio-Temporal-Continuity/dp/B001FS7OC8

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https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reasons-Persons-Oxford-Paperbacks-Parfit/dp/019824908X

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wiggins

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Parfit

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[Serial_Apologist]

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... I think you need a strong dose of this - to cut thro' all that mystic haze :

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Identity-and-Spatio-Temporal-Continuity/dp/B001FS7OC8

.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reasons-Persons-Oxford-Paperbacks-Parfit/dp/019824908X

.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wiggins

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Parfit

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I don't disagree with any of those people! But once the logocentrist positions have all been given the run-through, what are we left with? The way the heart beats itself without me telling it to; how the brain thinks thoughts all of itself without need for a self, identity, ego or soul of any kind getting in the way... these are all aspects of a natural order that proceeds best either when uninterfered with - as in the case of sexuality, which traditionally in the West we suppressed as supposedly part of our bestial endowment, even when "we" didn't go along with Evolution - or understood in its web of interactions before intervening. The Taoists (from whom Zen took some of its philosophy) used an image of a spider's web hung with dewdrops, each one of which reflects all the others, to get across to children this idea of "Shi shi wu ai", or between thing and thing no obstruction, as a basis for healthy mind and living. All very hazy and mystical, for sure, but all religions have some version of an idea that the world as we know it is through our conceptualisations, which as the semiologists and poststructuralists have shown are all relative ways of understanding - none of which can understand in the instantaneous way someone falls in love the moment they look into another's eyes, marvels at a sunset or nature's awakening in the form of spring or a baby coming into the world, or merely exchanges smiles with strangers while walking through a wood. Which is one reason we (most of us) respond to music - whether it articulates (or seeks to ) the complexity of modern life as an expression of capitalism's unnecessary waste and disorder or the human capacity for pattern-building and recognition. Life would be pretty bleak, and probably not worth living, if it could only be "caught" in the web of conceptualisation ("maya") and not experienced, and lived directly. Of course this is why the West is so messed up with its will to succeed and dominate, including dominating nature, the supposed self with its underlying selfishness which capitalism craves then condemns when the system goes into overload, and subject peoples, whom it has dragooned into this unsustainable ultimately destructive way of thinking and seeing themselves.

[Beresford]

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... I think you need a strong dose of this - to cut thro' all that mystic haze :

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Identity-and-Spatio-Temporal-Continuity/dp/B001FS7OC8

.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reasons-Persons-Oxford-Paperbacks-Parfit/dp/019824908X

.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wiggins

.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Parfit

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Derek_Parfit (a new name to me) - I admire his phrase: "But music is also the lost battlefield and graveyard of most general aesthetic theories"

[Serial_Apologist]

Derek_Parfit (a new name to me) - I admire his phrase: "But music is also the lost battlefield and graveyard of most general aesthetic theories"

While agreeing with his general conclusions about a good life, I have to wonder if a reason for something, as defined by him, (or am I missing something?) can be considered as separate from its cause. There seems to be a lot of semantic and conceptual questionability invoked in much of what he seems to be saying. Having reasons for anything seems to be being conflated with there being explanations, or otherwise: eg "you must have a [logical] reason for doing or thinking that, otherwise there would be no point in thinking or doing it" confusing objective with premise; but explanations cannot always be adduced by resort to causality along the lines of "my reason's as good as anybody's" unless one appeals to simple unilinear mathematical deductions, because in a world made complex by virtue of our ways of thinking and communicating, to be comprehensive the understandings comprised will need multidimensional sourcing. And because we have as yet no Higgs Boson theoretical or Ofcom equivalent sufficiently transparent to bring the necessary disciplines together, that sourcing has at least to start by taking on board the ways in which language, its structure and nuances, mediates reality. It is our idea(s) of ourselves, I would say, that comprise our identity - not the mere fact of our specific existence rather than another(s). Hence RD Laing's parable about the 65-year old retiree who, now that he is liberated, and suddenly "fails" to identify any longer, as he has previously done "unconsciously", with the roles society has thrust upon him since childhood and throughout his employed life, is regarded as either mad or entering second childhood by his nearest and dearest. The question then becomes the one investigated by Wittgenstein after "Tractatus" when he concludes that language is functional and approximative, manifests archetypes in how it is structured to convey a world divided into opposites that are made to seem as absolutes rather than relativities, and exfoliates in various language games such as metaphor. Where these language games or conventions lock step with life we become a successful self- and overall life-sustaining species; as it is, words are used in ways more analogous with Orwell's "newspeak" than for the purposes of clarification and guidance for which they are designed.

[muzzer]

I have DP’s magnum opus On What Matters and hope my life is long enough to digest it. A mere 51 but counting, obviously. 75 by jiminy. It’s not just the lack of time left that’s worrying, it’s the achieving important stuff and retaining enough marbles for the journey. Joking aside, this forum should be held out as an example of the sort of engagement, opinions aside of course, that society needs to embrace. Inclusive, diverse, open to challenge and knowledgable. An ongoing thank you to all.

[Serial_Apologist]

I have DP’s magnum opus On What Matters and hope my life is long enough to digest it. A mere 51 but counting, obviously. 75 by jiminy. It’s not just the lack of time left that’s worrying, it’s the achieving important stuff and retaining enough marbles for the journey. Joking aside, this forum should be held out as an example of the sort of engagement, opinions aside of course, that society needs to embrace. Inclusive, diverse, open to challenge and knowledgable. An ongoing thank you to all.

You are more than welcome, muzzer - opinions aside of course!

[Richard Tarleton]

Michael Caine, who on being asked what it was like to be 80 replied "Better than the alternative", is 86 today.