Avoiding the pits of extreme skepticism
- Thread starter greenberg
- Start date
lemme try a....genesis of the gustav...
awareness/experience - within this primordial and initial state lies a notion that the experience is not the root/identity of self. the self identification is directed towards that which does the experiencing. something is required to impart meaning and coherency to that which is experienced. that is the gustav
yet, there appears to be something that is responsible for the above assignations and roles. that would be...me. i could regress further but the distinctions become less viable.
so i stop. and rest
awareness/experience - within this primordial and initial state lies a notion that the experience is not the root/identity of self. the self identification is directed towards that which does the experiencing. something is required to impart meaning and coherency to that which is experienced. that is the gustav
yet, there appears to be something that is responsible for the above assignations and roles. that would be...me. i could regress further but the distinctions become less viable.
so i stop. and rest
Grantywanty
Registered Senior Member
I, personally, am concerned about the implied vantage point. Are there many mirrors in your home?
Please read a whole post before replying.
The things said will then immediately become far less reprehensible and they will more likely make sense - in contrast to breaking up a post into small parts and addressing each one of them regardless of the rest of the post.
If a person has a goal, they are capable of some evaluation as to what leads to it and what doesn't. It's a matter of degree how well they are capable of this evaluation.
Mommy and daddy and auntie and uncle called you Gustav, and they said "Good Gustav", "Bad Gustav", "Gustav is a boy", "Gustav is my son", "Gustav is a dilligent child", "Gustav doesn't like carrots", "Gustav goes to kindergarden", "Gustav is a smart darling" and so on.
Other people made all these remarks about you, and based on these remarks your sense of "who you" are developed.
Add to this the awareness of your own body and what it can do, and you get what we usually call "indetity".
Identity is a matter of conditioning, both by the environment (ie. people, other beings and landscape) as well as by the givens of one's own body.
If you would be raised by wolves or apes, your sense of self would be a lot different, but you would still have a sense of self.
- This is my theory and I'm saying all this of course by assuming that humans don't have a fully developed soul/character they would be born with.
Conditioning precedes it.
Please refrain from condescension, it's a shitty thing to do. I told you early on I post the way I do for a reason, mostly that I can't help it - but secondly because if you answer questions that might appear to be stupid to you, I can understand where you're coming from. Instead of indulging fair questions, you try to tell me how to post? I think that's quite crappy.
Conditioning of what?
Has it ever occured to you that your very philosophy of objectivism has something to do with what you're saying above?
I'm sure I come off as condescending to you. But that was not my intention.
It is usually difficult to communicate with objectivists anyway.
Social conditioning. That which happens when we're born and raised within a family/society.
That reply was meant for Gustav, and I think he knows I'm referring to "conditioning" in the Buddhist use of the term.
It hasn't occured to me that I have a very philosophy of objectivism.
Never is eh? Perhaps you forgot I'd already mentioned it.
And it would suck to talk about things that are difficult to communicate about, so you come here and discuss "pits of extreme skepticism" to avoid such complications? We were having a nice conversation as far as I'm concerned, so if you'd so kindly avoid telling me how to post. It's insulting that you presume I didn't read the whole post. I did you see, but to understand your mind better... in hopes of understanding what you mean rather than what you say, I do what I do.
I apologize for being somewhat snarky, but I find this tangent rather unproductive and pretty annoying. I haven't pressed you to post to the style of my liking or decided to tell you what you are with a nice little label like "asshole" or "objectivist", so I'd ask that you allow me my crutch, though I certainly don't insist that you indulge it.
But you may have noticed we were asking basically the same question, so I felt since you hadn't aswered when I asked, I'd take the opportunity to seek clarification.
Since I still don't feel it's been answered, I'll use this stem to plant another question that seeks the same answer. In the term "conditioning", what is being conditioned?
I meant that it is precisely a philosophy of objectivism that leads to particular problems in communication and interaction between humans.
I'll give you another example of such objectivism, but from a different philosophy/religion.
A Christian calls me a "child of God", and he insists in calling me so. I tell him I am not a "child of God" and do not wish to be called that way, but he laughs at me and keeps insiting "of course you are!" As if I don't exist for him.
He ascribes to me a subjectivity, yes, one that he deems to be objectively true and valuable - but only on his terms, with complete disregard for my terms.
My subjectivity is being allowed for, but on his terms, and of course for him, this makes perfect sense. I don't like it though, I feel I am being dismissed or taken for granted.
Such an objectivism, despite its claims that other people objectively exist as subjects, is still a form of solipsism, because it understands other people specifically on its own terms, regardless of how others wish to be understood.
I think earlier on, this is what Grantywanty had a problem with in your approach, and I jumped it to bring this to the foreground.
Never underestimate the power of meta-thinking and insight. Most things that I learn in such discussions have little to do with what is directly being talked about, but instead it is the meta-thinking and meta-communicative aspects that yield the most useful information.
One way to avoid the pits of extreme skepticism is definitely to avoid discussing stuff, but in order to not become jaded over this, one has to have good reasons to refrain from discussion. So I'm working on figuring out what those good reasons might be. (The OP is asking for alternatives and for criteria why those alternatives are better than ES.)
I didn't presume that you didn't read the whole post.
I could see that you read the post by bits and replied to those bits individually. Had you read the whole post first, and made your individual replies based on that, the situation would be different. Or it wasn't so.
I had already noticed this tendency of yours to break things down into small portions, and asked you in an earlier post to read through to the question at the end before replying, in order to prevent unnecessary tangents.
Or perhaps you do read the whole post first, and make your individual replies based on that. But it doesn't always look like that.
Or perhaps you are more into the conversational aspect of these discussions than I am.
I think this is an approach that can actually complicate things insanely.
I think it would work totally fine if people would be very much alike, or if objective reality would be obvious to everyone. But as it is, they only seem to have some touching points, but that's it. So it seems feasible to focus only on those and work from there.
Unfortunately, we'll probably have many more clashes if we continue communicating.
The mind and the body.
Edit: But I don't think it is feasible to get into this any further here if all the participants don't have understanding of the Buddhist teachings this is referring to.
so?
impart and share this knowledge
i shall squat at feet and listen to the sermon
/eager
Thanks, but I am not qualified to do that. It is also quite an amount of information, some of it requires meditation practice in order to understand it properly.
I've reached my limit here.