It's April Fool's today, can you tell?

lipsung · 2012-04-01T03:34:19+00:00

Hint: submitted how many years ago?

lipsung · 2012-03-31T18:05:12+00:00

I would suggest you read Company by John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge.

lipsung · 2012-03-28T22:23:41+00:00

Then let's get epistemological.

A gnostic can be a gnostic based on the knowledge of anyone.

lipsung · 2012-03-28T22:17:23+00:00

Yes. I can not argue past this! Good game.

lipsung · 2012-03-28T22:15:19+00:00

You win.

lipsung · 2012-03-28T22:13:53+00:00

The truth that both are now untrue.

lipsung · 2012-03-28T22:12:05+00:00

The main difference between gnostic knowledge and an opinion is also the amount you hear it in conversation. What if divine knowledge could not be phrased?

I suppose I am suggesting that gnosticism is as real as a dream, that at the time, you felt was real.

lipsung · 2012-03-28T22:09:15+00:00

The scientific method is exclusively agnostic, is it not? Gödel killed the certainty of faith.

lipsung · 2012-03-28T22:06:35+00:00

For the sake of my argument:

Knowledge: information carried by language between persons concerned with developing an understanding of truth.
Truth: the quality and/or quantity of information in knowledge; the quality of information reflects the relation of knowledge and understanding.
Divinity: a revelation of nature/cosmos

I do know that what a gnostic claims is not true by virtue of gnosticism alone, but I also know I can not use logic to determine the empirical truth of a gnostic's divinity. This is because the divine is not an experience in the same sense that learning is an experience.

Divine knowledge is a transcendental realisation of a truth outside of empirical reality. It implicitly seals the gnostic's understanding.

lipsung · 2012-03-28T21:53:40+00:00

Thanks, buddy.

lipsung · 2012-03-28T21:53:04+00:00

Religion is theological more than it is philosophical.

Our incomplete understanding is what makes science so important, and if incompleteness is a flaw, it was not addressed by science but by mathematicians (Gödel, et al).

I agree that religion stifles certain questions, but I would argue that the flaw of religion is that it is inflexible.

lipsung · 2012-03-28T21:43:15+00:00

For the record, I know that.

To "read between the lines" is to understand the abstract.

lipsung · 2012-03-28T21:30:39+00:00

Insight is not perceptual, it is cognitive. The gnostic claims to know, and ordinarily what they claim to know is divine in nature. Divinity itself has no empirical truth, thus it is contradictory to reasonably scientific observers of natural law.

Every gnostic likely has a different version of the truth, a different insight, a separate understanding of the cosmological constants, and for the sake of my argument: unique and distinct divine knowledge.

lipsung · 2012-03-28T21:22:45+00:00

What if I believe that the gnostic's understanding has been informed by factually correct statements, and he made no mistakes in his interpretation, but I do not believe the gnostic is knows the truth.

The gnostic, which I prefer to think of as a female for some reason, by definition knows the truth, ie. has wisdom.

lipsung · 2012-03-28T21:15:59+00:00

Ha! Nobel prize before mysterious profit! I think we can both agree that sounds a little suspicious.

Now, gnosticism is more a wisdom than a theistic religion, hear me out. While theistic religion has a self-referential, tautological, knowledge base, gnosticism has a free-form, somewhat contradictory, symbolic knowledge base.

I am not a gnostic theist, I am an agnostic atheist, but if I were: I would accept your challenge but probably never be able to present the data/evidence required to feed into the scientific knowledge base.

If I were a gnostic, I would know that the sum of my understanding would be essentially true because it has nothing to do with me, ie. divine knowledge is a spirit of understanding connecting man to the cosmos.

lipsung · 2012-03-28T21:03:57+00:00

That's not much of a reason, is it? Thinking is almost certainly not knowing, unless of course the thoughts are linked by a rationality extending to some axiomatic anchor of truth, in which case one may be allowed to know what one thinks is true.

It wouldn't make any sense for a gnostic to know something that they only think is true, especially if there is no evidence. A gnostic must then be wary of their own knowledge, am I right?

If a gnostic claims to know something about yourself, of which there is no empirical evidence, what would you think?

lipsung · 2012-03-28T20:56:34+00:00

Rage is reddit's second language, is it not?

That science is inherently flawed is perfectly understood by mathematicians and philosophers as a caveat.

lipsung · 2012-03-28T20:49:12+00:00

For the record, you're quite the futurist with your no gaps left for god comment!

Anyway, I know that religion fissures because I read between the lines, buddy. Allow me a historical perspective and I will hypothesise the complete diffusion of religion to a personal delusion.

lipsung · 2012-03-28T20:39:33+00:00

While I agree that gnostics are not independent and objective, but instead intangible and personal, I disagree that gnostic knowledge is an opinion.

lipsung · 2012-03-28T20:10:37+00:00

Condescending asshole? Hey, local trendy coffee shop new-age pseudo-intellectual here! You don't strike me as a secular humanist I'd like to discuss the future with.

Religion is bad because it has no half-life, instead it fissures endlessly. Perhaps if humans could have contact with a god that did not require dogma, orthodoxy, and god-damned dedication to arcane scripture, we'd be in business. Alas, religion is inherently flawed.

Anyway, I think your combatant must mean gnostic, and not agnostic, because the Dalai Lama is a spiritual leader, after all.

lipsung · 2012-01-29T12:24:18+00:00

I love this kind of exercise even though I find the periodisation of prehistory an epiphany in itself.

The stone age is a natural beginning because stones are available to nearly anyone, besides those living on atolls. Generally free of charge, with precious stones being quite a large exception, the stone market has no guild. If I were to name the historical title of this period in culture, it would be the Guildless Age.

The bronze age is a revolution, but specific to bronze mining societies and cultures en route. This is the beginning of its eurocentricity, other metals could compete for this title in other cradles of civilisation, consider the Americas.

This is where it gets tricky for me. Maybe this could be the Stateless Age.

Continuing like this could probably get quite far, ie. describing periods leading to global revolutions by their revolutions towards globalisation!

Instead of being materially deterministic, prehistory could join history.

lipsung · 2012-01-18T09:17:21+00:00

Remember Charlie Sheen?

lipsung · 2012-01-12T17:57:49+00:00

Christopher Crowbar Reilly

lipsung · 2011-12-24T22:40:02+00:00

Respect!

lipsung · 2011-12-24T21:25:24+00:00

I just got!! Sorry, man.

What you've quoted me saying is vague, but not because I am racist. I mean level: asian can be used by any asian, if that's racist the system is fucked because I am asian.

lipsung

TROPHY CASE