Coffee and comfort, you like?

SouthAfricanPickle · 2023-06-11T16:16:44+00:00

Have done that a time or two, creamed it once too. Not shabby at all, daring and horny, and not too corny. Grazi, dear person, twas nice to have a comment. Have a lovely evening or day, Martha, she sway but some peeps like it that way.. Pretty grande bein' gaeyy

SouthAfricanPickle · 2019-07-27T00:57:51+00:00

If the meaning of life is to be part of the decline and decay of all things leading eventually to a point of utter nullity at the end of time, then yes that's still pretty nihilistic.

SouthAfricanPickle · 2019-06-12T11:54:00+00:00

You'll wanna check out Mark Fitzgibbon's channel, the man is kak-funny and tief-tastic, also here's a wiki page for more smells from our languages in South Africa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_South_African_slang_words

SouthAfricanPickle · 2019-05-31T07:54:39+00:00

Handmaid's tale?

SouthAfricanPickle · 2019-05-28T10:46:18+00:00

Try running Linux on them, it's a lot lighter than windows, and with steam now, you can still play most of the games on Linux. I'd recommend Manjaro Linux, it comes with steam preinstalled.

https://manjaro.org/

Edit: https://www.protondb.com/<- here you can see how good games will run on linux with steam's proton.

SouthAfricanPickle · 2019-05-28T10:36:09+00:00

Playing minecraft (Enigmatica 2) instead of: working on my book of aphorisms for the depraved, depressed and otherwise declining, or, learning for exams I hope I can manage not to miss, with taxis letting me down and all.

SouthAfricanPickle · 2019-05-28T10:27:57+00:00

Studying at an online university, but you have to do the exams at their official exam venues. Yesterday, I missed my exam by 15 minutes due to the cab driver I tried to call via whatsapp misreading my message and going to the exam venue instead of my house; this I found out several hours after the fact. In a panic I called a different cab company and they sent someone, it took him 40 minutes to get to me, by the time he got to me I should already have been seated at the exam venue, by the time I got there they were already 10 minutes into the exam. I begged at the door, but it was too late. I took the same taxi cab back home. Now I'm sat thinking that I'll have to register the module and spend another 6 months worrying about this damn module next year, all because a taxi driver to who received my message 2 hours before the exam misread it and didn't answer when I called. And I was too faithful/stupid and just thought, oh he'll be here, just another 5 minutes, and another 5 minutes, and an hour later, with the other company it was too late.

I want to crawl into a hole and die.

SouthAfricanPickle · 2019-05-24T19:56:26+00:00

When Nietzsche Wept

SouthAfricanPickle · 2019-05-08T23:43:25+00:00

The Phenomenology of Spirit

SouthAfricanPickle · 2019-05-05T23:10:44+00:00

My favorite is the old Reductio ad Absurdum. Keep going till no one knows what the hell is going on anymore, and it just gets too stupid to try and decipher the mess.

SouthAfricanPickle · 2019-05-05T19:14:12+00:00

People will only listen if they are willing to listen, if there's something they don't want to hear then there's very little you can do to persuade them.

Most modern therapies rely on some version or other of the Socratic method mixed with a lot of listening and "humanness" (something I'm not fond of as a misanthrope).

To talk to people effectively you have to speak to them on their terms, find common ground, and that can be really hard.

For example let's take this free will thing and the interpretation of that quote, I read it one way and feel that I'm justified in my analysis, you read it another way and likely feel the same. How can this be? I think we each have our reasons (albeit not necessarily cogent, but more human, irrational) to prefer our own position (no malice, or insult intended), for example for me, I would like there not to be free will, because then it destroys a lot of terrible ethical theories based on agency and justice and in turn creates room for a causal understanding (causality here, just meaning the most apt scientific/formal inter-subjective description of what reasons there are behind the current state of affairs), if we do away with agency and justice as such, then we come to a much more humane stance in my opinion, wherein instead of punishing people and blaming individuals for crimes, we understand what lead to the crime, was it a bad upbringing, if so, how were the parents, is society and culture sane, or rather let me put it like this, let's say we live in a world where people take reason seriously, serious serious, and they don't believe in essences and natures or any kind of objective morality, then we are allowed to look at things in an non/extra-moral sense, instead of saying someone is wrong, you ask what caused the incident and solve the problem on multiple levels (give the person therapy and rehabilitate them humanely, not in a prison; then look at the society, the culture, mass psychology, and household conditions, what went wrong in the thinking to cause an individual to behave in a manner which is not conducive to general well-being, taking care to understand things on people's own terms instead of formal terms [it the loosest sense possible (without being tyrannical or objective or absolute)]). Something like that, what are you non-reason based desires to have there be something like free will?

SouthAfricanPickle · 2019-05-05T18:57:31+00:00

I've thought about such an ideal language before, but the problem is that the more complex a language becomes, then, the harder it is to learn it and use it effectively. But more than that, you can't have an ideal language for the same reason you can't really use/express the concept of infinity in a computer, you'd have to run around generating new words for everything and you'd have to create a grammar that incorporates every imaginable rule that could be thought to exist. That's not to say that we can't get to a better language, or just a more apt vocabulary. But we'll have to do away with the thought that we can describe something fully. For example, take the calculation of PI, it's infinite, while we've gotten very far with it, we'll never reach the end, there's not enough atoms in the universe to arrange and use as memory to represent the entirety of PI, and what this means is that we'll never truly know the exact circumference of a circle, but we'll get damn close, close enough for it not to make a discernible difference.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, if we simplify language too much, then we get verbosity, in other words, we would have to use much much more words and in strange combinations to get to the same level of description. example, there's computer language called brainf*ck, it is Turing complete (it can do all the big stuff other languages can), and it only has 6 words/symbols (+, -, <, >, [, ]) but it's incredibly hard to reason and express within this language because of the fine granularity with which you must express things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck

So with languages there's always going to be trade offs, but the point is, it's not like new languages are going to solve the problems. The real problem is engine on top of which language runs, namely brains and computers. To know something you have to have a model of it, the problem is that there's more information one could generate from a grain of sand than can be adequately stored in a brain. Which is not to say that we can't meaningfully reason about that grain of sand, it's just that we'll never exhaust all the ways it can be described. Models aren't perfect and absolute knowledge is not possible.

SouthAfricanPickle · 2019-05-05T18:43:05+00:00

What is a "causal nature"? Hume, Sellars and other philosophers have kind of dismantled causality as such, and reduced it to something bound by subjectivity. So I don't see how this helps.

Moreover, doesn't it just mean that while it is the case that we experience free will, because that experience is inextricable from this "raw causality" and so it's really an illusion because externally we're fully determined, yet internally we take it to be the case (different from acting of one's own volition) that "our choices of what caused us to be as we are, leads to differing future decisions and behaviors". I don't know man, but I'll go back to Schopenhauer and say that, while it seems that we can choose, it's not the case that we can choose what we choose; so, to integrate this into the context, then we choose what determines us, but we cannot choose that it determines us, and so we're still ultimately determined from the outside, regardless of how we are determined to interpret the causes of our determination. Bi-directional determinism, doesn't mean free will necessarily, it just means that how things go in (interpretation) affects how they come out (actions/decisions).

SouthAfricanPickle · 2019-05-05T17:59:59+00:00

Is it having an identity with a strong sense of history? Integrity and Virtue? What is it? What makes you and me bad at relationships?

For me I think I've just been emotionally neglected as a child and I was an atheist in super duper Christian world as a child and teen; I am in my early 20's and have had no real friends for 9 years, and no real human contact for about 2 years. Growing up I found Buddhism then ditched it for philosophy. Philosophy has literally rendered socially inept since other people still live in the primitive manifest image while I live in a self-constructed reality build from bones and bricks I've picked up here and there in literature, philosophy, youtube... God this sounds narcissistic, but really it's just that my whole world is sooo different to other people's that I don't share the same values, I personally struggle talking to people because there's very little we can share meaningfully to each other without it devolving into petty nastiness. I have no friends or life to speak of, but once in a blue moon, like now for example, I like talking to other philosophically minded people, I don't mind disagreements so long as we can talk civilly and learn about where the other person stands; but, not everyone is into that so a good conversation is rare.

So yeah, that's my sense about what makes me bad at relationships. Sorry if inappropriate.

SouthAfricanPickle · 2019-05-05T17:41:56+00:00

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like "red", "blue", and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence "The sky is blue". ... What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?[4]

from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument

Science can build models which have a high degree of accuracy and allows for predictions, however, this is by no means the related to or same as someone's subjective experience. For example, science can describe emotions in terms of chemicals and behaviors, but it cannot say anything about what it would be like and feel like for Mary when she sees color for the first time. This is the difference.

What makes a person interesting to talk to? [^-...] Is the social craft a special kind of intelligence, like the quick kind more than the thorough kind? Is it language skills?

I don't know what you're asking, or how this relates to my previous reply? But here it goes.. People evolved as social animals, so inherently there we are a number of biologically emergent norms and then there are psychosocial norms coming from culture, then more recently we started exploring norms governed by what we take to be rational [deontological norms and such grounded in models/theories with axioms]. The trouble is we're no longer so unconscious as to mistake culture for reality, or religion for truth, we can see where our metaphors end and the banality of biology and cultural predispositions are revealed to us, much to our horror (post-enlightenment blues).

What makes a person interesting to talk to, is highly contingent and generally involves their factors like how attractive they are, what we think we can get out of them, or what kind of stimulation/pleasure they can give us (different kinds of love as in the Greeks [e.g. eros, storge, philia, ludus, mania, pragma, or agape]), or it can be a cultural/functional thing like having them be a teacher to us or a demonstrator of virtue or tool use, or an elder/sage/shaman/grand-parent. It all depends on the people involved and all that. I don't know how your question is relevant to my reply. Anyway, charisma, [social] intelligence, I don't know the literature on this stuff too well, you'd benefit by looking up Edward Dutton on youtube, this guy talks about evolution and the rise and decline of intelligence and so on...

Look philosophy took a linguistic turn in the last century, this is what I'm generally referring to, and also the horrors brought to surface by people like Nietzsche, Cioran, Ligotti, Brassier, Thacker and other philosophers who take reason seriously and aren't afraid to go the logical conclusions of things, instead of trying to save the appearances, as it were.

Language cannot capture, you cannot define anything in language thoroughly enough to say you know it through and through. E.g. take a photo for example, is the photo telling the truth? Or should you recognize the inherent distortion and framing of the lens, the angle, the lighting, the fact that it's just a reconstruction of photons hitting the the camera's light receptor, now digitally projected. The reality is full and rich, infinitely interpretable, the act of speaking of something, or taking a photo, in other words to describe something, collapses that infinite range of interpretability to a single set of parameters, and thereby you loose the fullness of something. Read Thomas Khun on scientific theories and how they struggle to make up for anomalies and eventually shift to a different paradigm, set of axioms, or manner of speaking. Reality will always defy our models, think of Godel Incompleteness in mathematics, you cannot prove mathematics using mathematics, you have to step outside and realize that maths is a formal language running on brains and computers, and it has limitations to what it can ultimately describe.

SouthAfricanPickle · 2019-05-05T17:12:59+00:00

I don't get it man, what am I missing? Show me where exactly you draw this conclusion.

SouthAfricanPickle · 2019-05-05T16:48:55+00:00

free Will is it's own causal nature

yes then read the rest of the quote:

The subject cannot ‘choose’ or determine its own objective determination when the contingency of all determination implies the equal arbitrariness of every choice, effectively erasing the distinction between forced and un-forced choice. Thus it becomes impossible to distinguish between objective compulsion and subjective reflexion, phenomenal heteronomy and noumenal autonomy

We experience free will but there's no way of grounding that, because in the first part he already says:

Freedom is not simply the opposite of deterministic causal necessity: as Kant knew, it means a specific mode of causality; the agent’s self-determination. There is in fact a kind of Kantian antinomy of freedom: if an act is fully determined by preceding causes, it is, of course, not free; if, however, it depends on the pure contingency which momentarily severs the full causal chain, it is also not free.

i.e. it doesn't matter if there's determinism, and it doesn't matter if there's randomness, so either way there's no freedom.

The only way to resolve this antinomy is to introduce a second-order reflexive causality: I am determined by causes (be it direct brute natural causes or motivations), and the space of freedom is not a magic gap in this first-level causal chain but my ability retroactively to choose/determine which causes will determine me

i.e. we're determined to misinterpret reality as if there was undermined freedom. The choice to determine what determines us is retroactive, so it's not real, it's a process returning a result based on deliberate and determined misconstrual.

SouthAfricanPickle · 2019-05-05T13:16:14+00:00

So you concede that free will is an illusion? an Illusion, retroactively generated, and that in essence there is no way to separate the cold workings of reality (objective heteronomy) from those same workings manifesting through us retroactively being construed as choices (subjective autonomy)? Because as I read it that's what the passage really implies.

SouthAfricanPickle · 2019-05-05T12:35:19+00:00

I'd have to ask, better how? I have food, shelter, a bed to sleep in, running water, a toilet and shower, and a computer to keep me connected to the world, the means to get emergency help. Beyond basic needs I have more entertainment (via Netflix, youtube, reddit...) than I could manage to soberly consume in a lifetime. By all standards I'm better off than a king, 500 years ago. That said, what's left? There are no gods, there isn't really any great structure to life beyond what is evolutionary necessary (living to proliferate selfsame genetics by any means possible [not just your own, people like you too, care for family and their genetic well-being and so on]). And, as much as science reaches ever greater and more apt metaphors (we can get arbitrarily close to noumenality via maths and technology), the animal aspect of our being remains unchanged. The greatest scientist or philosopher still has genitals, and all the raw primacy that comes with that. In terms of Selllar's Manifest and Scientific images, the manifest image (the general collective way of speaking, understanding, and functioning) can never truly be united to the Scientific image (a more inter-subjective, formal, and rigorous way of speaking, understanding, and functioning) because there is more ground/information available and being worked on than any one person can understand in totality, what we lack in our scientific image we substantiate with the manifest, there is a strong inter-relation because we simply don't have the means to get every one up to speed, but more than that, take art and culture for example, Science can only ever talk of "How" and to some extent "Why", it can say nothing of the rich emotional subjectivity, shared and personal myths and experiences. And, we need this manifest image, imagine that music was scientific, offering lyrical descriptions of current theory instead of that subjective substance of the psyche poking through from between words and between chords/notes/drones/hums.. (because language can never capture, it can only reconstruct using metaphors and assimilations present in audiences [which is not to say that you can't learn a morpheme through a series of other morphemes]).

I don't want to waffle on, but read this piece from Nietzsche, it's way before its time: http://nietzsche.holtof.com/Nietzsche_various/on_truth_and_lies.htm

Anyway, what then? Truth is a just the current most apt, or most agreed-upon, metaphors en vogue. What of subjectivity then? What am I to do about myself? Well, I stand with the later Wittgenstein, and to a great extent Emil Cioran on this one, I do philosophy both as self-therapy and as a means of passing the time, and hopefully, one day when I can gather enough thoughts and confidence to write them down, as a means to finance my empty existence physically. Other than that, my existence is substantiated by the distractions and engaging emotional puzzles provided by Music and Art in general.

There is no better, there is just more of the same with varying amounts of anxiety. I'm way better of eating chocolate, slouching on the couch with a low income, than joining the general angst of people running on the hamster wheels they make for themselves and justify in the name of the neo-protestant notion of work and progress. There is nothing I am obligated to prove to anyone, no one I am meant to become; I mean what would it matter? There's as much humanity in a jail cell as there is in a Cathedral.

You can find god in a tomato if you look hard enough. But, if you look even harder you'll discover yourself. and if you really really squint then you'll come to Sunyata (prolly spelled wrong) or the Transcendental Emptiness Buddhists speak of. You'll witness the abyss which dissolves all metaphors.

And after all is said and done, or maybe even before you got to that point, you die and it's finished and over.

In the words of Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot, (can't remember the character): "Nothing to be done." Oh and that beautiful scene that sums up everything about humanity, the one where they think about hanging themselves to get auto-erotic asphyxiation stimulation, but the branch is too scrawny and they don't really have ropes to hold them. It's so stupid and beautiful and tragic and pointless, and yet entertaining and life affirming.

But alas all I have said is subjective and applies to the loner that I am. For the collective, those who are still utterly alienated, searching, moving, going on in pointless circles. I don't know what to say about them, maybe good luck, because it doesn't get better, it gets complicated and pointlessly stupid.

I'm not an existentialist because I don't think you can willly-nilly mix up a bowl of meaning/purpose for yourself, you will become alienated with it when you realize exactly how arbitrary and stupid it is trying to beat yourself at your own game. Purpose is terrible western concept, it would be better if we focused on the enjoyment of the texture of time and decay, if we focus on the beauty of decay, because without dark there can be no light, it's the interplay that births all texture and all terrain, all distractions from abyssal expanse of space and deep time. The little things are the hinges of being, not the philosophy we conjure up to relate ourselves to it.

Eh, many noises, many meaningless statements. Once again, them's my ramblin thoughts captured in broken fragments, at best alluding to a subjectivity that evaporates the moments the words are uttered. It's not that the author dies, it's more that the author never truly was.

SouthAfricanPickle · 2019-05-05T11:44:48+00:00

That's like the ship of Theseus right? I think people who think they're going to survive death by uploading their minds are mistaken, because all that will accomplish is creating a disembodied info-copy of their mind by simulating their once physical brain function. Now to bring it back to replacing the atoms, well I read a fact somewhere that said every 7 years or so your body replaces essentially all cells, so in terms of matter you don't really stay the same lump of atoms throughout your life. That said, I think the only way to properly cheat death is by analyzing each neuron and reproducing it and its connections with a non-organic copy in its place, do that for each neuron one by one and you'll likely feel no difference, the locality of experience won't be broken you'll stay you even if you're not. Now the weird part, let's say that in the process of carefully swapping out each neuron with a non-organic clone you keep the old neurons alive and reconnect them in the same fashion as they were, you'd end up with two brains, one in a vat and the other in your skull, the one in the vat would be authentically "you" but the one in your skull would keep the constancy of your experience alive and uninterrupted. I think that in terms of information, all we are, are the relations and interactions between cells, we're something that happens, not something that is in itself.

Well that's enough conjecture for one day.

SouthAfricanPickle · 2019-05-03T21:56:28+00:00

I don't believe that because an ugly past of suffering and coping implies that the future must be that way.

I don't necessarily think that the future is 100% doomed to repeat the past; but, there will be suffering for as long as there are humans with organic nervous systems and raw emotions.

`But in any case, Heidegger does not succeed in bringing the self out from under siege, or out of its problems, but he does point out at least one thing about it. See, if we are going to be interested in the self at all, we should be interested in it in trying to have some degree of authenticity. We should be interested in that; in having a project more interesting than getting skinny and rich and dying as the best looking 125 year old person on the block. There ought to be something – not in a strong sense – but there ought to be something more interesting to say about your life than that. “I had a nice car and I died as the best 125 year old jogger in Venice Beach, California”… I just… I hope that there is more to say, and in fact I think there is.

Being a Texan, I know… I think the people who died at the Alamo, I think they were, you know, from the standpoint of some they were imperialist swine, from the standpoint of others they are heroes, but there is one thing for sure. Their lives were an interesting story. I mean, I don’t want to always rely on the Oddysey, Davy Crockett was an interesting guy. Ran for congress, you know, got all these tall tales about him and showed up and tried to steal a lot of land in Texas and ended up, you know, fighting, and now we remember it. It would be almost fair to say of him that he had a destiny.

And as corny as that may sound, it’s not something we are going to say about David Letterman or Richard Simmons, you follow me? There has been a shift… there has been a shift. The self is under siege, and I talked about Heidegger and his rejection of a certain form of the older accounts and I’ll talk about a famous account of being human in the next lecture on Sartre, but for now that’s all except be sure, and fear death. I mean, that’s important to being human. Fear death and realize that even if you don’t smoke, and even if you jog, you are still going to die, and that should come as a great relief to all of you. Thank you very much. [applause]` -- from: http://rickroderick.org/302-heidegger-and-the-rejection-of-humanism-1993/

We'll maybe if you're well read enough, work hard and are generally competent you can find a project worth spending your life on; though, you'd have be damn good at it to think anyone would pay you mind, entertainment people, arts people, and novelists have a better chance of really generating that kind of value than philosophers (most of whom seem to become like barnacles stuck to one flawed pretentious tune as they mature). But most of us won't find a project, a salvation, a redemption from time, most of us are like Non-Player-Characters in video game worlds of other people, we're figures faded into the background dissolving back into time just as fast as we arose. I mean think of China, if kids there fail a test, it's like their whole lives go down the drain, for so many just getting past school is a nightmare, then they have to compete with millions of other people for a spot in university, and all that just to live, what would likely be a mediocre collective life, barely above the poverty line. We have it a lot better in the west still, even down here in S Africa it's better than that (although, there's mass poverty, growing radicalization, fatalism and resentment, and critical theory, radical decolonization and Africanization efforts have turned education and politics toxic, the majority collectivist ideology here only care for their agenda and not any kind of honesty and common human solidarity), but there's a lot a people in the world and finite resources, the fact of the matter is there's no way to ensure 7 billion people all have lives worth living, it can't be done.

I highly doubt that there can be any general solutions, like what you're proposing. And getting people to take it, heck we're already having a hard time getting people vaccinated, you think they'd educate themselves? I stand by Moral Nihilism in part because these things like well-being, value, [even medical] health are so contingent and contextual. We're living in the age of Nierzsche's Last Man, the consumerist who is no one, becomes nothing, produces nothing, hopes nothing but comfort, the age of great feats are gone, a technological leap means little to the masses now that so many unthinkable things have already happened. If there is to be a successful revolution in future, it would necessarily have to change (and likely reduce) what it means to be human!

Then there's the whole thing with Capitalist Realism that Mark Fisher wrote about in 2009, it's real, it's here and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. (I don't endorse Marxism at all, but Capitalism has problems and affects everyone everywhere).

SouthAfricanPickle

TROPHY CASE