Avoiding the pits of extreme skepticism

So you find no requirement to presuppose "self" but you said "mind and body" (in the sense that only buddist monks can explain) are presupposed in your perspective? Is this correct?

If I was a buddist monk, would you just expect me to understand your terms and implied mysterious components with no further input? What if I decided to mess with you and say "don't know what you're talking about"?

Lol, sorry I'm just curious as to why think "self" has so many implications that "mind and body" apparently don't, even though you say you can only understand them through specifically focused meditation. I smell inconsistency. Perhaps something can be learned by poking around in this.

 

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I think it was clarified as a misunderstanding.

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Funny that I told you the same thing in different words and you complained about not being able to communicate with me and started labelling me.

And another is to dive into them head first, knock down the inane using only a functional brain a reasonable attitude, and determine what aspects of a philsophy are impacted directly by it... to understand what limits skepticism brings to any conversation. I think gustav said something that was right on about this. Something about regression.

I know it doesn't, I told you it wouldn't.

It's not that I'm "into it" but that I have to have a conversation with someone to try to understand them, to allow them their subjectivity.

Well it might for you, but I do it for me to try to understand you. I don't ask that you keep track of all of it any more than you normally would. I just ask you some questions, and wait to see what happens.

We all use words and stuff. It's something at least. Part of what I'm doing is seeing if you use words in the same way I do, or what. Think of it as calibration. At first there's a lot of calculating and perhaps unnecessary complications, but it smooths out over time as things are tweaked in and such.

Does that mean it's not worth it?

 

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It's not that I think it's not worth communicating if we reasonably expect to have clashes.
But getting into communication and knowing we'll probably clash, I'll tend to hold myself back.

Well, you're not a Buddhist monk, as far as I know. And even if you were - you are not my teacher so some conversations and attitudes are not possible between us.

Surely so. Years of study and meditation make some things very clear.


But alas - a man has to know his limitations, and I've reached mine here.
I apologize if I can't take this any further.

 

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thats ok
leave before i go theravada on your ass

/chuckle

 

wes

thoughts on the nazi, heidegger?

The first of these is Heidegger’s insight that, in the course of over two thousand years of history, philosophy has attended to all the beings that can be found in the world (including the “world” itself), but has forgotten to ask what “being” itself is. This is Heidegger’s “question of being,” and it is Heidegger’s fundamental concern throughout his work from the beginning of his career until its end. Martin_Heidegger

 

This sounds like it might have been interesting. Can someone summarize just what the current situation here is? If anyone cares that is. Are we still trying to talk about "extreme skepticism"?

Thanks.

 

Unrequested I will leap in. I hit Being and Time many times a good twenty years ago and felt at last that someone needed to slap this guy and others like him and get them to say it like a person, whatever it was. Dasein seems a nice idea - the being for whom being is in question. Anyway Heidigger seems like one of the reasons I often think women are wiser. How many of them have slogged through such an oblique text?

What brings Heidigger up for you here, Gustav?

 

Thanks for asking. I was planning to sum up some of the main points, but didn't really know when. I'll take your post as a cue for that -

The OP asked:

The suggested solutions so far seem to be, in no particular order and with my additions/completions (authors, please feel free to correct me here):


1. Decisively avoid extreme skepticism on principle, due to consideration for the quality of life.

2. Maintain a moderate skepticism and avoid extremes because extremes are usually not good.

3. Investigate extreme skepticism. Realize it actually contains many assumptions that were awarded the status of certainty. Investigate those assumptions, see where they hold and where they don't. Keep those that hold, discard those that don't.

4. Analyze the secondary gains of maintaing extreme skepticism. Morally re-evaluate those secondary gains.

5. Adopt Descartes' Cogito as the basis of all reasoning.

6. Pay better attention to whatever it is that you are doing at the time and seek to reach your goal. Extreme skepticism tends to sneak up on the idle.

7. Do not blindly rely on the powers of your reason, as they can be insufficient to spare you from getting into trouble. Instead, pursue what you know or predict will make you happy.

8. Work out your worries and problems, don't let them fester.

9. When extreme skepticism has nestled into your mind, focus on your feelings and emotions and work with them, not with the extremely skeptical thoughts.

10. As a principle, adopt the stance that anything else is better than endlessly mulling things over in your mind.

11. Refrain from attempting to resolve a complex issue in a simplistic manner.

12. Talk to other people who have the same problem as you.

13. Educate yourself further on the issue that you are extremely skeptical about.

14. Become a nihilist.

15. Become an extreme relativist.

16. Become professional about using the Scientific Method.

17. Become Buddhist.

18. Practice care and compassion.

19. Find something to distract yourself, like a girlfriend.

20. Become closed-minded.

21. Stay away from people and books that make you think more than you can safely handle.



I apologize if I left out any suggestion, feel free to add or correct.

The OP asked to also provide the criteria according to which those alternatives are better than extreme skepticism, but this hasn't been stated for each suggestion, so the evaluation of those suggestions is up to the reader.

 

You forgot "shop at wal-mart".

 

Ok. I'm not sure why it needs to be so complicated. What is extreme skepticism? When presented with a new idea or phenomenon, a rational skeptic will measure it against what is already known about related phenomena. But more importantly, has any compelling evidence for the idea or phenomenon been presented?

And doesen't it vary with circumstance?

In many matters that have little bearing on life as usual, mild skepticism is usually fine. If someone tells me that they saw a wolf running down their street, I will be mildly skeptical. It's entirly possible. Not likely, but possible.

However, if someone tells me I need to stop burning fossil fuel or the earth will overheat and become uninhabitable, I'm going to be extremely skeptical without some rock-solid evidence.

 

I believe in this context it means "unending question" most specifically in the philosophical context, but perhaps implied to any context.

Personally I think that undending questions are required until a starting point is chosen as assumed to be true.

 

But don't we in fact have momentum already before we start unending questions?
I am curious about where this momentum gets stopped and then the phenomenon of asking unending questions comes in, especially in the paralytic way it can with an ES.
I don't think it can happen without trauma of some kind, or, if it is aimed at others, some intent to freeze these others.

 

So basically, we're asking here what leads to extreme skepticism, what are the causes of extreme skepticism?

I would list as possible -but not necessary- causes of extreme skepticism, in no particular order:

1. deep unhappiness
2. lack of education
3. tendency toward being indirect
4. poor concentration
5. isolation
6. a poor regard for one's own happiness
7. direct social conditioning where extreme skepticism is held to have intrinsic value
8. idleness
9. blind reliance on the powers of human reason
10. unresolved trauma, problems or worries
11. debilitating external pressure where a person can neither flee, nor fight to win
12. being accustumed to being extremely skeptical
13. insufficient cognitive and physical skills and other means to solve problems
14. intense conflict of interests with others


In each individual case of extreme skepticism, several causes can be at work.

 

Excellent!

I think it would be interesting to see how similar some of the techniques of ES doubt are similar to interrogation and mental torture techniques. With these latter people can often be persuaded to confess to crimes they did not commit, to having beliefs they never had, to having desires and thoughts they never had and even to killing themselves.

Just to make a leap: I think this is why I have always been wary of socrates.

 

baumgarten

 

explain all assumptions
i cannot even see relevance

 

We'd have to get married.

That I can work on.

Wes said.

This seemed cart before the horse to me. By momentum I mean that we are in motion. We have axioms and are already living by them. To me his quote implied a kind of disattachment or transcendece or lack of being already caught up in things and beliefs and assumptions (or intuition) that we must extricate ourselves from via questioning. I think it is often quite the opposite: we extricate ourselves from life (in ES) and from certain assumptions and faulty intuition by questioning and exploration. In the case of ES I think there is some sort of traumatic element that has damaged us. To see a less dramatic version of that, Greenberg's most recent post does this rather well, I think.

 

I think the underlying question being posed here most recently is

Where/when does the self begin?
At what point can we really begin speaking about the self?

 

That might be so - or not. It could be that what you are saying above is in fact a retrospective statement, a statement made with the benefit of hindsight; but which doesn't necessarily accurately describe what actually happened at the time in the past.

A retrospective statement like yours above certainly serves some purposes, and does so well; here, it claims that a choice has been made. This can give a person holding the above statement confidence about the past, a sense of free will, and thereby also confidence about the future.

 

The question posed some time ago on this thread that has yet to be answered was, What IS extreme skepticism? No one has defined it, yet you're all bleating about it.