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The good life and man's relation to society

SolitaryWalker

Tenured roisterer
Joined
Apr 23, 2007
Messages
3,504
MBTI Type
INTP
Enneagram
5w6
Instinctual Variant
so/sx
I am not interested and nor would I know how to obtain "happiness". Emotion is fleeting. I prefer to just exist comfortably. With little drama or major complications.

That is synonymous with acquisition of happiness.
 

ygolo

My termites win
Joined
Aug 6, 2007
Messages
5,988
Bluewing, although I seek equanimity for one my own goals, I have found that I went about it the wrong way.

I intellectualized, and unknowingly supressed and repressed my feelings and "inconsistent" natures too.

This calm is not true calm. It is forced, and temporary. Often, it is better to release, an allow your fickle nature to come forth, since then it won't fester and build-up beneath the surface.

In short, when it comes to impulses and inconsistencies..."whatever you resist, persists." You are playing the "don't think about ___" game.

I do, however, think that the following are unwise choices:
1) participating in melodrama (which do not include play-acting or put-ons for fun),
2) and amplifying ill-feelings, addictions, and other things you find undesirable.

IOW, "whatever you feed grows."

So, to me, the trick is to achieve eqanimity and calm, in an active and productive state, in a manner that is true and uninhibited.

This is no easy task, and many Eastern Religions call this state being "enlightened."
 
Joined
May 27, 2008
Messages
1,026
MBTI Type
ENTP
I think what Bluewing is doing is exactly what good psychology, which developed from good philosophy, is all about... taking what little we know, making some assumptions (which are NECESSARY, because we aren't capable of starting from self-evident truths), and then trying to develop testable conclusions therefrom.

What, if any, assumptions are necessary to speak of "truth"?

What does it mean for something to be necessary? Is necessity relative, or does the concept of truth place restrictions on the concept of necessity? Is the concept of truth compatible with any set of assumptions, and, if so, can truth be opposed to truth?

Truth, in my opinion (obviously), can only be gestured towards, even if it is a coherent concept. So far, all I could offer is that truth is a value we place on our words based on their (the words') relationship with our experience. I cannot presume to know if something is eternally true unless we speak of it... meaning, one can say, assuming a realist universe, that 'it's always been true, regardless of our position on it, that throwing an apple up into the air whilst we stand on the earth's surface, ceteris paribus, will result in the apple falling back to the ground." But it's only true once we mention it. An unexplored situation has no truth-value, as I see it. In other words, it's useless to talk about truths about situations we haven't begun to investigate.

Necessity is the idea that "something or some set of circumstances" would have been exactly as they are no matter what the context was... using possible-worlds language... Necessity obtains when x situation would be the case in all possible worlds without exception.

What I was saying about the necessity of having assumptions... I feel it's necessary for us to make assumptions, no matter what, because it doesn't seem possible that we can begin from an absolutely unassailable set of assumptions. Everything can be questioned. I can't dip my toe in the lake at the very outermost droplet of water: it's an impossible task. I just have to wade in somewhere, wherever. I can never be completely sure of where I've begun.

I don't think of truth and necessity as synonymous. Maybe highly-overlapping. But truth can be contingent and necessity is by analytic definition not-contingent.

Truth can certainly be opposed to truth... if one speaks of different concepts of truth... for instance, the massive debates on Coherence versus Correspondence versus Pragmatism.

Then we get to Convention (T), Tarki's semantic notion of truth:

We have any given formal language, L1, and a metalanguage M1 which is used to assess statements from L1.

So, in M1 I would say:

The statement "x is y" is true iff x is y.

The entire sentence is in M1 and "x is y" is in L1.

But it leaves the question completely open about what the word 'true' is doing here.

These are big questions owl... ready for a "Truth" thread? ;)
 
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