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The random philosophy thought thread

Nomendei

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I asked myself a philosophical question about a situation that occurs in an children TV show.
First let me get you in context: Nox (the antagonist of the show) desires to take all of the Wakfu from the world, or at least enough of it, to power the Eliacube, a small cube of incredible power that appears to speak to him, and go back in time to save his family from death. Because he is trying to go back in time, he is ruthless in the pursuit of his goal and takes many lives in his quest to gather Wakfu (life force/energy), as he believes that when he goes back in time, all that he has done will be undone.
Who is the true “villain” of the show? He or the people trying to stop him?
He has destroyed a huge percent of the vegetation, committed a genocide, even killed a main character. Suppose the heroes stop him, preventing him to go back in time and erase everything he has done, would this make them the one responsible for their deaths? Of course, there is the butterfly effect, and not every single one of the victims would resuscitate, but at least the nature would be back to normal and no one would be complaining about the death of anyone, since they are no longer part of the universe’s existence. What do you think?
 

Abcdenfp

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So I am reading up on Pythagorean's and the cult & premise of their belief .. apparently Pythagoras died because he refused to step on a field of fava beans as he believed they were souls re incarnated.. and I started to think about silence of the lambs and the quote with the liver and fava beans and thought.. coincident on the writers side "perhaps" but if it was intentional doesn't that make the scene even more chilling...
this post is both random with a sprinkle of philosophy .. your welcome
 

Tengri

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“Lines and colors made with earth on earth may hold knowledge in them. All knowledge is local, all truth is partial...No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole."

This quote from one of Ursula K le Guin's short stories has rattled around in my head since I first read it. Having recently reread some of her short stories in memoriam, it struck me just the same, and despite her somewhat self-assured absolutist tone, there's a lot of wisdom inherent in it. Many of her anecdotes, insights, philosophical musings scattered throughout her writings are laced with her own very human experiences and thoughtful observations, so much so that it's difficult to read her stories without them feeling like an unguarded personal confession at times: lessons for perceptive readers to learn from. This is a technical no-no from a writer's perspective, but in her case she personified her heroines, injected a kind of molten core of self-conflict, suffering, emotional strength into their characters (and wrote complicated male characters that can be emulated) that feel alive, literally jumping off the page as extensions of the author's psyche.

In learning theory, experience plays the greatest role in crystallizing self-knowledge from an instinctual basis, within the cloud of group interaction, and in the more protracted internal push-pull of developing personhood over time. In the case of le Guin's idea of 'local knowledge,' my point here centers more around the social function of learning and how it is essential as a counterbalast to individualized learning i.e. experiential, hands-on, personal background and history because it reaffirms reality or sheds light on or banishes misconceptions. Hegel's concept of the Lord and the Bondsman comes to mind as a handy analogy: the developing person and the public persona, or in other terms, the waking self and the unconscious. Tying this back into le Guin's statement, individual self-knowledge is as dependent on behavioral, cognitive, and social learning of Self - in this case, the agglutination of everything that makes a personality - as group cohesion is on shared individual perspectives: the foray of partial truths in group context is neither more true or untruth, simply gathered knowledge. The opposite, a group or idealism imposed on its members is totalitarian - the Lord on its Bondsman, delusion. More self-assured absolutism aside, her insight is a clarion lesson on the virtues of rigorous self-questioning, how accepting the unconscious mind or, in the context of these forums, the blending of your shadow with your archetype is the point of the individuation process - especially when you're sure of something! Frankfurt's On Bullshit comes to mind: “Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial—notoriously less stable and less inherent than the nature of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.”
 
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When you pick up a book you've never read before, flip it to a random page, read a sentence out of context, and then dismiss the entirety of that book based on the sentence read.

I wonder if there's a word for that?
 

Julius_Van_Der_Beak

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When you pick up a book you've never read before, flip it to a random page, read a sentence out of context, and then dismiss the entirety of that book based on the sentence read.

I wonder if there's a word for that?


I can't think of a single word, but:

If the person who recommended the book to me holds views that suggest that my reading of the sentence was accurate, I'd call it using good judgement when determining what to invest my time in.
 

Maou

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Life is practically s very complicated version of pinball.
 
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I can't think of a single word, but:

If the person who recommended the book to me holds views that suggest that my reading of the sentence was accurate, I'd call it using good judgement when determining what to invest my time in.

In my post, there were no recommendations being made. It’s more akin to going to a bookstore. Interactions with any book is purely your free choice. 😊 I wouldn’t choose to pick up Mein Kampf and then get mad upon discovering it’s contents. That’s dumb. I don’t enter strip clubs and complain that the women are topless, or sue McDonald’s for serving their coffee too hot, either. It’s assumed that we know the cost of consumption. Similar to the idea of self-ownership.
 

Tengri

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hocuth-pocuth-made-with-momus-new-harry-potter-leaked-32010260.png

Mispronunciation of magic spells and the fascinating implications of said results. Puns said, and dunned. Even with lifelong experience in magery, and eventual mental recitation of spells that comes with imagination manifestation, to what extent do words of power (Egyptian heka) need be literal forms of speech, imagined then incanted concepts, or as Ursula K le Guin wrote, "the true naming of a thing," the inherent nature of an object put to words. Much like Hegel's Essence vs Being vs Notion, the power of a word exist as Being (language, categories of reflection, a drawn curtain) or Notion (a non-rational hunch of understanding) or Essence ("the truth of Being" or knowing "what being is in and for itself") such that the slight mispronunciation of Diagon Alley lands you diagonally upside a mixed thought, misspoken word, and a fixed place.
 
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I wonder what the relationship between “knowing someone” in the Biblical sense and the question of God’s existence is.

To “know someone” Biblically means to have a sexual intimacy with that person, but I find it interesting that sexual intimacy leads to “knowing” someone.

In the same way, knowing God means to have an intimacy with Him throughout our lives. I wonder if the two are related?

And if that’s the case, materialists/denialists who lack intimacy with God would have no knowledge of Him. With no knowledge of God comes no evidence of God.

“That’s not evidence”

And they wouldn’t be lying from their view as they have no experience of God. In the same way, Photographs of your loved ones wouldn’t be the evidence of (Storge) love. The evidence of (Storge) love would be in our daily lived experience of them.
 

The Cat

Just a Cat who hangs out at the Crossroads
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Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.
 

Sacrophagus

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To “know someone” Biblically means to have a sexual intimacy with that person, but I find it interesting that sexual intimacy leads to “knowing” someone.

"I wanna get to know you biblically." is my new pick up line. So many women I wanna get to know.
 
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If "race" doesn't exist biologically and is only a social construct of the Victorian era, what the heck is "racism?"

Perhaps, "Tribalism" is the more accurate historically correct descriptor which I will begin using.
 

Maou

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Pain is the dimension in which all of individuality takes form.
 
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