I respect that anon's anger at laziness but why would I give two shits that I get 'remembered' in history? I'm already adverse to people remembering me while I'm alive, let alone while I'm dead, and I wouldn't frankly give a shit about this rock after I die, or the people and culture on it.
I really don't get fetishism about being super important in human history, or spending your entire life in a haze trying to get put into a history book somehow. I think it'd be better to spend that time working in smaller circles and trying to improve lives that way, or not bothering with even that and focusing on your own life, unles you really care about being some history head that'll get made fun of for his funny, outdated interests by worthless teenagers in a few hundred years.

>>26514
What's nay philosophy?

>>26514
Bullshit. That anon forgets the other side of the coin. The universe doesn't care if you're lazy, and it also doesn't care if you're not. It's also impossible to be "remembered forever".

>>26514
>ever read nay philosophy?
Nay, I haven't

>>26514
I've read Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Saint Augustine, Abelard, Berkeley, Hume, Descartes, Kant, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Michelstaedter, Heidegger, Sartre, Marcuse, Sloterdijk, and others I can't even remember now. I doubt I could truly understand more than a 5% of all I read, and probably remember less than a 1%.
You need fertile land for a good harvest, even if you have the best seeds to plant they will be useless if you are into the middle of the desert. The desert means being fucking stupid.

Said that, I like to apply Plato and idealism to my apreciation of 2D, so I can justify it's actually not derivative of 3D but the other way around.

Most of the useful parts of philosophy have been subsumed into math/science. It feels like most of what remains in modern philosophy today is just arguing semantics or definitions.

Oh my God I'm sure the successful gogetter businessmen who work hard on making powerpoints and spreadsheets day in day out are very critical workers and history will remember them.

>>26525
Other business humanoids might remember them if they did really well, or really fucked up.

If the whole point is simply to be remembered there's easier ways that don't require that much effort. Recent history have proved even two dumb depressed kids could figure how to do that, with astonishing success. You couldn't even say they are remembered in a particular bad way considering the number of admirers and imitators.

>>26525
The classic ancient example of inmortality in history was Achilles. Ours is Steve Jobs. We don't care about moral examples, heroic deeds and beauty. But worse than that, we also don't care about who invents, innovates , creates. We only care about who makes the better business for himself, more money and better marketing.
Maybe that's why we idolize mass killers in the other hand, something's not right and we know it.

>>26526
Not without looking them up. Nobody knows the guy that founded Coca Cola off the top of his head, and it's one of the biggest corporations around. Bezos, Gates, Jobs, and the rest will all be forgotten a generation after their death.
If you want everyone to remember you, you need to either forge a new country, significantly extend an existing country or start a religion. If people being able to look up your name easily is good enough, the most expedient way would probably be to get chisel your name half a meter deep into a granite mountainside somewhere. Future archeologists will stumble across it at some point.
Then again, what's the point of being remembered? There's nothing that makes a life goal of being remembered more worthwhile than a lifegoal of collecting a million empty cans of beer. Once you're dead, you either cease to exist and are therefore incapable of caring, in oblivion/heaven/hell for eternity and therefore don't care because it doesn't affect you, get reborn without memories, in which case you're again incapable of caring, or reborn with memories, in which case you don't care because you've had ten thousand names already.

As for philosophy, I've read Evola and Neoplatonists for the most part. Stoics too, but they seem lacking in my opinion.

Plato is garbage. All philosophy before Kant is an exercise in exploiting the imprecise nature of language as well as tedious and empty rambling on concepts such as being, essence substance and so on. They all imagined that by investigating the concepts in themselves, by the use of pure reason, would reveal the objective nature of reality, despite the fact that all the schools of philosophy disagreed with each other. They were all using their own "pure reason" to arrive at different conclusions and so revealed that there was no objective knowledge to be gained by this process, only arbitrary personal preference.

For thousands of years the only solution to this impasse was skepticism or spiritual faith. Skepticism is unsatisfactory to most because it is the desire of reason to know, and this thirst cannot be quenched easily, whereas spiritual faith relies on personal feeling and intuition which can appear to be entirely arbitrary to those who do not share the same enthusiasm.

Luckily Kant-Sama broke this deadlock by proving it is impossible to acquire any objective knowledge using pure reason but we can have knowledge of things as they appear to us. The grip of the old method of philosophy was finally broken, and the flowering of new, sophisticated methods and perspectives was now possible. It's just a shame that so many thousands of years were wasted with the old, uncritical method.

>>26698
I agree with all of this except that philosophy before that point was all useless. Not all of philosophy aimed at explaining reality. Plenty of it was more about how people should live and debate with each other. Stoicism and cynicism are two examples.

>>26698
>Kant-Sama broke this deadlock by proving it is impossible to acquire any objective knowledge using pure reason but we can have knowledge of things as they appear to us.
Kant has the world's stupidest opinion. What is there to gain by prefacing all your beliefs with "oh, but that's not true really"?
"Truth is relative" inherently becomes untrue whenever I choose not to believe it.

>>26701
>prefacing all your beliefs with "oh, but that's not true really"
There is no really, you still don't get it. The preface is "according to observation". If you disagree with something, you need to back it up.

Post edited on 16th Aug 2021, 3:40pm

>>26702
>There is no really, you still don't get it.
The statement "There is no truth" cannot be true, because if it was true there would be truth.
I'm sorry.

>>26703
He's not saying that there is no truth but that what is true has to be filtered through our consciousness and thus any expression of truth that we make is subjective. Of course, this perspective does have some traction with the vulgar relativists who believe that there is no truth but I don't think philosophical ideas should be degraded merely because the ignorant make a mockery of them.

>>26698
>it is impossible to acquire any objective knowledge using pure reason but we can have knowledge of things as they appear to us
that relies upon the assumption that your senses work, and the assumption that your brain works. in other words, you believe in the truth, you cannot know it.

>>26758
This probably goes back to that age-old philosophical debate: yes, it's true that on a pedantic level since everything we perceive is mediated by our senses, it's impossible to get a truly objective perspective of the world. But at the same time that doesn't mean you have to basically throw out everything: if you think of our individual senses as noisy, imperfect measurements then by aggregating across both space (multiple people observing the same thing) and time (continuity) as well as controlling for the correlation between our individual senses thereby providing redundancy, you can "minimize" the subjectivity and establish things to a high degree of certainty – such that there would need to be a grand conspiracy on the part of the universe to trick not only all of your senses but that of all those around you, those before you/after you, and orchestrate things in such a way that the illusion maintained perfectly under manipulation by inanimate things.

Now maybe that is indeed the case: some eastern religions have the term maya which seems to refer to some sort of illusory nature of the universe as perceived by our conscious (although honestly I've never really come across a concrete, non-handwavy explanation of this, and not sure if it is indeed applicable here).

>>26762
Actually reading more about that eastern philosophy thing, there's that common theme where people gain the innate feeling that all material objects around us and living things themselves are just manifestations of some grand "unified" consciousness. The same experience is also noted by people who take some psychedelic drugs or undergo near-death experiences.

This is interesting because they they all seem to share essentially the same experience so there's certainly element of "truth" to this, but the question is at what level is this truth reified – is it just borne out of the common psychology/functioning of the mind, or is this indeed the substratum of our existence as the eastern religions profess?

Of course I don't know (although I'm a bit skeptical of the latter considering we've never seen any evidence of this "grand consciousness" affecting non-living things, nor any evidence that living things who are aware of this "grand consciousness" actually gain intuition beyond their material senses). Assuming the former, I read an interesting hypothesis that the reason these experiences are common is because our sense of self is a result of some higher-order function of the brain integrating our senses, and the psychedelics which disrupt brain function end up effectively adding enough noise into the system to prevent that process from functioning. Hence the so-called "ego dissolution" accompanied by trippy geometric patterns. It's interesting that experienced meditators also effectively do the same thing, but probably by the other direction where you gain enough control over the subconscious mind that you can ignore incoming stimuli and/or avoid acting on the outputs of the integrated senses and similarly break that loop.

>>26829
>our sense of self is a result of some higher-order function of the brain integrating our senses
Yeah, and babies lack a sense of self when they're born.

I've been enjoying the writings of Emil Cioran, with his kind of pessimism breeds optimism. It's nothing new to say that the suffering that comes with living is natural, but his writing style makes it very entertaining with some very quotable ideas. I also want to get around to Schopenhauer when I can.

I tried reading Plato but it was literally gay so I stopped. I read Nietzsche and was really not impressed by it, it was all fairly simple or wrong, there was a lot of ego stroking involved in it. Marcus Aurelius was fairly obvious as well, I don't think there was much wrong about it but it was mostly common sense.

There's a philosophy board up at leftychan, but it's pretty slow. Aside from 4chan, what anonboards are good places to discuss philosophy?

>>26940
>leftychan
Fuck you.

>>26874
Related, but I recently read "The Messiah" by Peter Zappfe and quite liked it. I'm tired of all these philosophers who end up bullshitting around with semantics and never end up stating anything tangible. Zappfe's short essay eloquently formalizes a lot of vague ideas I had floating around in my mind; the mere observation that life is suffering is by itself not really worthy of being written down – what I like about Zappfe is that he views the issue as fundamentally rooted in our (over)evolved intellect.
Those very same faculties of reasoning, modeling, pattern-matching, and introspection that made us fit as top predators are the ones that give rise to anxiety, melancholia, and suffering at an emotional level as we experience it. Or in other words, the price we paid for this over-evolved consciousness was dealing with an emotional burden that we then suppress via various defense mechanisms to avoid confronting.

I'm just going to post some quotes from his essay since it explains everything far better than I can

>A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.
>The beast knew fear as well, in thunderstorms and on the lion’s claw. But man became fearful of life itself – indeed, of his very being. Life – that was for the beast to feel the play of power, it was heat and games and strife and hunger, and then at last to bow before the law of course. In the beast, suffering is self-confined, in man, it knocks holes into a fear of the world and a despair of life.
>The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by overevolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns. The mutations must be considered blind, they work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment. In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.

The crux of his essay – and what I found was the main takeaway – was the examination of the mechanisms by which people avoid confronting this issue.

>Why, then, has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living – because cognition gives them more than they can carry? Cultural history, as well as observation of ourselves and others, allow the following answer: Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.
Which naturally reminds me of the studies that show a high correlation between autism or adhd and depression; if adhd and mild autism can be thought of as resulting from a failure in the brain's signal filtering or suppression mechanisms (indeed, sensitivity to stimuli and being overwhelmed by them is a common symptom of both), then the observed correlation becomes natural.

>The human being saves itself and carries on. It performs, to extend a settled phrase, a more or less self-conscious repression of its damaging surplus of consciousness. This process is virtually constant during our waking and active hours, and is a requirement of social adaptability and of everything commonly referred to as healthy and normal living. Psychiatry even works on the assumption that the ‘healthy’ and viable is at one with the highest in personal terms. Depression, ‘fear of life,’ refusal of nourishment and so on are invariably taken as signs of a pathological state and treated thereafter.
Which again accords with studies that "depressed" people make more rational choices. The end result is something that probably every anon on here known: the life of so-called "normal" life is one clothed in ignorance, a self-delusion created to maintain the facade life.

Zapffe noted 4 broad patterns of suppression by which this delusion is upheld:

Isolation
Described as "arbitrary rejection of disturbing and destructive thoughts or feelings" – basically tuning a blind eye towards things.

>In our daily social life, isolation manifests itself through universal, unwritten agreements to conceal our existential condition from one another. This concealment begins with children, in order to save them from being rendered senseless by the life they have just begun, to preserve their illusions until they are strong enough to lose them. In return, children are forbidden to embarrass their parents by untimely allusions to sex, shit, and death
Here I'm also reminded of some types of meditation where you basically meditate on complete emptiness of thought. Isn't that the above technique taken to the extreme? Viewed in this light, sure it might work for its purpose of staving off existential dread or melancholia arising from suffering therein, but at its core it loses its magic when seen as just another type of suppression mechanism; why would one be better than the other?

Anchoring

>Attachment can be seen as an attempt to establish fixed points in, or a wall around, the shifting chaos of consciousness. Usually this is an unconscious process, but sometimes it is quite conscious, as for example in an attempt to set some sort of goal for oneself, some reason to live. Generally useful attachments are looked upon with sympathy, and those who give their all for their attachments (their company, or a project) are set up as role models for the rest of us.
>Any culture is a great, rounded system of anchorings, built on foundational firmaments, the basic cultural ideas. The average person makes do with the collective firmaments, the personality is building for himself, the person of character has finished his construction, more or less grounded on the inherited collective main firmaments: (God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the law of life, the people, the future). The closer to main firmaments a certain carrying element is, the more perilous it is to touch. Here a direct protection is normally established by means of penal codes and threats of prosecution (inquisition, censorship, the Conservative approach to life).

This entire section on anchorings is the one that he devotes most of the third section in his essay to, and it's worth a read. In particular for these snide observations
>We love the anchorings for saving us, but also hate them for limiting our sense of freedom. Whenever we feel strong enough, we thus take pleasure in going together to bury an expired value in style. Material objects take on a symbolic import here (the Radical approach to life). When a human being has eliminated those of his anchorings that are visible to himself, only the unconscious ones staying put, then he will call himself a liberated personality

Distraction

>A very popular mode of protection is distraction. One limits attention to the critical bounds by constantly enthralling it with impressions. This is typical even in childhood; without distraction, the child is also insufferable to itself. “Mom, what am I to do.”
So basically what you expect: entertainment, hobbies, etc. Later on he even explicitly states "(entertainment, sport, radio – ‘the rhythm of the times’)" as an example of these distractions.

>When all distractive options are expended, spleen sets in, ranging from mild indifference to fatal depression. Women, in general less cognition-prone and hence more secure in their living than men, preferably use distraction
This also has this excellent viewpoint which parallels with what I've seen on written on /so/ a few times.
>When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of ‘saving’ the suicidal is based on a hairraising misapprehension of the nature of existence

Sublimation

This is probably the most interesting one and not one that I had conceived of before, but in retrospect I can see how it fits.
>The fourth remedy against panic, sublimation, is a matter of transformation rather than repression. Through stylistic or artistic gifts can the very pain of living at times be converted into valuable experiences. Positive impulses engage the evil and put it to their own ends, fastening onto its pictorial, dramatic, heroic, lyric or even comic aspects.

Here I'm reminded of the somewhat well-known statistic that those with high levels of creative talents also have a bent towards melancholia. And indeed Zappfe notes that this fourth kind is the rarest, which makes sense: in order for this to work, you have to have someone with the right latent talents, in whom all other suppression mechanisms have failed, and who is successfully able to convert that existential pain into some creative output.

I also like this hilarious footnote highlighting the authors self-awareness
>This article, in fact, is a classic example of sublimation. Despite his perilous subject, the present writer is not suffering at all; he is merely filling pieces of paper with words, and will probably get paid for the manuscript
which reminded me of the refrain in Chomei's Hōjōki essay.

There's also a final section in his essay where he critiques the anarcho-primitivist approach as something that doesn't solve the fundamental issue. This post has gotten long enough though, so maybe I'll write down my notes on that later.

Post edited on 13th Feb 2022, 8:59pm

>>27112
This is very interesting in so many levels, and I couldn't cover them all.
The biological fatalism makes me think of Kiss Maerth talking about the morbidly obese human brain and the disastrous consequences of that degeneracy for all beings. The horn metaphor is brilliant.

>Which again accords with studies that "depressed" people make more rational choices.
Do you know which ones? When I'm peak depressed I often have this feeling of seeing clearer than ever, feeling more logical than ever, perceiving reality for what it is, more focused, all that while in atrocious mental suffering. It's an scary idea, the happy are the delusional, the depressed are just less distracted and can see true reality. I try to see the comforting part on this and think it's, at least, a general human condition, since it touches a very personal matter.

>>27114
I'm glad someone got something out of my post! And yeah I was also pretty impressed by that fitting metaphor – this is one of the few philosophical works that was a pleasure to read, filled with some nice gems and food for thought. I'll do a follow up with his views on technology which I thought was interesting to compare with those of anarcho-primitivists like Kacyzinski.

>Do you know which ones?
Look into the "depressive realism" hypothesis, although like all social science studies you'd probably be better off just trusting your insticts on this one given their notorious reproducability issues. (There's also probably different types of "depression" in the first place. I assume the one that Zapffe is referrring to is that of a chronic, dull weariness – not necessarily borne out of a painful environment but rather by a slow realization of the absurdness of it all).

In the same vein there's also some related thoughts that depression should be considered as an altered state of consciousness unto itself (i.e. a global alteration in the means by which sensory inputs are perceived). I think we might get a more concrete picture of all this in the upcoming decades or so when there is increased research into the exact nature by which psychadelics affect conciousness (i.e. not from a localized biochemistry point of view but a more functional systems perspective), since many of the same psychadelics supposedly have transformative effects on depressed people.

It's also interesting to think about how one might square the various annecdotes about psychadelics "opening your mind to the true nature of the universe" with Zapffe's writings – they can both be true if both result from different states of conscioussness, but which is the "correct" one? Offhand I'm inclined to say that it's the latter just because the state of mind induced by psychadelics seems opposite to that of the rational mind (in that people hallucinate forms that don't exist, and are generally less coherent for that time). The fact that some people also undergo ego disollution (lose their sense of self) as talked about in >>26829 to me indicates that it effectively suppresses some of the highest levels of cognitive modeling (perhaps similar to the state you go into in very deep meditation).

I read everything Schopenhauer wrote (because he explicitly tells you to and there was by no means a lot of it) and Kant's Critique (because again I had to). Never read Hegel (yet) but I just wish the guy could have gone 10 pages without some jab at him. World is full of them. I haven't read Marx's older stuff like the Grundrisse, only Capital I-III and I don't really see how Hegel is pertinent to Marx. You don't need to know anything about Hegel to read Capital. But it seems his modern relevance derives from Marx. I'll get around to reading him when I get some amphetamines or something. I had to do that for Kant. I feel tired all the time otherwise and can't be bothered reading dense shit.

>>27115
Some other things I recently learned which you might find interesting:
* Sleep deprivation seems to alleviate depression, although it returns once again when they rest [1]
* Depression leads to longer period of REM sleep (and less deep sleep). There are also some research that REM sleep is critical for modulating emotions.

Those sort of match with my experience where I paradoxically feel most energetic when sleeping at 4am and waking at 11am (as opposed to a usual schedule of sleeping at 1am and waking at 11am). It should also be noted here that at least in my experience the phrase "alleviate depression" should be very narrowly defined, not as having no melancholic thoughts at all (those are always a constant, and in the Zappfian sense inherent/inevitable), it's having the energy to override the feeling of listlessness/weariness and temporarily divert yourself by e.g. watching anime.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_therapy