Philosophy Thread

[Torco]

We call things yellow because the color of an object affects how we think about it and interact with it. Maybe the purpose of dividing things into good and evil is to change how we think about them and interact with them, and thus defining evil is vitally important. Or at least, classification itself is vitally important. You could argue that good vs evil isn’t the best dichotomy…

i don't think so: colour is not some inherent property of objects, it's just that some ways to reflect or emit light give us the sensation of yellow, but that's as much to do with the structure of our eyes and minds and bodies as it is with the materiality of the thing-in-itself, much less the thing-in-iself being infused with some property of "yellowness", not to talk of yellowness being a thing what actually exists: almost everything is like this: beer is "good" (in the sense that it's fun to drink blabla) because it has alcohol *and* because our bodies are such that when we have alcohol in our gut it goes to the blood and then causes this and that psychotropic effect, not because it participates in some trasncendental "goodness" or "funness": for a different kind of animal, or even a person who has changed their body enough, beer, the same beer that gets me drunk, may be as psychotropic as tap water.

so my thought is that sure, let's catalogue things that are good for us and bad for us for any given 'us' and for any given circumstance and accident that affects our interaction with each thing, but let's not delude ourselves that we're finding some transcendental 'goodness'

[lsd]

words are the maximum transcendence we can achieve,
and yes they are the result of our perception,
because perception is our only possible apprehension of the world...

[TBPO]

words are the maximum transcendence we can achieve,
and yes they are the result of our perception,
because perception is our only possible apprehension of the world...

Your opinion is as true as opinion that words limit our worldview or opinion that we can gain serious knowledge with reason or faith.

[lsd]

I don't see any contradiction in that...
maximum transcendence also implies maximum limitation,
and I include faith and reason in world perceptions...

but this is very personal, it's not about proselytizing...
it's just my way of conlanging...

[eldin raigmore]

reality …(snipped to save space)…

No. Some people think entirely in pictures, not words.

Citation please???

Maybe Eldin's thinking about people like Temple Grandin?

Exactly, @Khemehekis!

(Also @HolyHandGrenade.)

[WizardOfWar]

I'm a optimist and slightly a stoic

[Man in Space]

The distinction between the common perceptions of a religion and an ideology is often simply that a religion includes a theist cosmology.

The point remains that many people deny they believe in something simply because they ridicule the religious, while failing to realize they have their own religion-like beliefs. For my purposes I reckon ideologies as religion.

Since we’re on the subject of philosophy, everybody—short of divine intervention—is trash, at least in one way or another. Me, you, my Babcia, the Dalai Lama…everyone walking this earth.

[HolyHandGrenade!]

The point remains that many people deny they believe in something simply because they ridicule the religious, while failing to realize they have their own religion-like beliefs. For my purposes I reckon ideologies as religion.

I agree. I also see a similar thing with how the term ideological has become a dirty word. A lot of people will call themselves non-ideological, or attack something by calling it ideological. But ideology is not a bad thing; it is merely an extension of morality.

Since we’re on the subject of philosophy, everybody—short of divine intervention—is trash, at least in one way or another. Me, you, my Babcia, the Dalai Lama…everyone walking this earth.

Can you explain this more? Are you talking about mortal insignificance or moral imperfection? Is this coming from a Christian or other religious view?

[Khemehekis]

Is this coming from a Christian or other religious view?

Man in Space is a Ltheran, so it's probably coming from a Christian view.

[HolyHandGrenade!]

Is this coming from a Christian or other religious view?

Man in Space is a Ltheran, so it's probably coming from a Christian view.

Ok that clears it up.

[Khemehekis]

reality …(snipped to save space)…

No. Some people think entirely in pictures, not words.

Citation please???

Maybe Eldin's thinking about people like Temple Grandin?

Exactly, @Khemehekis!

(Also @HolyHandGrenade.)

And at the other end of the spectrum is aphantasia. Aphantastics think entirely in words, not in pictures.

[Man in Space]

Is this coming from a Christian or other religious view?

Man in Space is a Ltheran, so it's probably coming from a Christian view.

Ok that clears it up.

It’s a major reason why I so vehemently oppose cancel culture, which is essentially the freeware version of murder—you cancel someone, you’re encouraging employers not to hire or pay them, breadmakers not to feed them, residences not to shelter them…without these things a man cannot continue to live.

[lsd]

reality …(snipped to save space)…

No. Some people think entirely in pictures, not words.

Citation please???

Maybe Eldin's thinking about people like Temple Grandin?

Exactly, @Khemehekis!
(Also @HolyHandGrenade.)

And at the other end of the spectrum is aphantasia. Aphantastics think entirely in words, not in pictures.

we function by association,
most of the time unconsciously,
and in this case without resorting to language...

yet when it comes to complex reasoning,
language is the most efficient to combine these associations...

however, people who have different configurations
mobilize other means,
I think most often in a less efficient way,
but for some in a more efficient way
(unless the majority is so superior that they escape our perception...)

Man in Space is a Ltheran, so it's probably coming from a Christian view.

It’s a major reason why I so vehemently oppose cancel culture, which is essentially the freeware version of murder—you cancel someone, you’re encouraging employers not to hire or pay them, breadmakers not to feed them, residences not to shelter them…without these things a man cannot continue to live.

no need for religion or philosophy to reject
the Orwellian means of the proponents of contemporary wooden language,
but a little ideology is necessary to adopt them...

[eldin raigmore]

And at the other end of the spectrum is aphantasia. Aphantastics think entirely in words, not in pictures.

I’ve heard of them! And might there not be other types as well ?

[Khemehekis]

And at the other end of the spectrum is aphantasia. Aphantastics think entirely in words, not in pictures.

I’ve heard of them! And might there not be other types as well ?

There's a spectrum of visualization skills from one extreme (aphantasia) to the other. I took an online test after reading an article on aphantasia on the Web a few years ago, and discovered that while I was not aphantastic, my visualization abilities were pretty close to aphantasia.

I like to think of myself as a synaesthetic thinker. I think in the tastes of words and objects, and all the symbolic connections by brain makes in my body's sensations. When I think of a broken circuit/path type thing, for instance, I get a zing in my upper spine.

Some people with ASD can actually rotate an object in their mind and see how it looks. They can picture the skeletons of a dinosaur moving and imagine how the dinosaur walked just by looking at each bone and the angles at which they're connected, for instance. Nikola Tesla (an obsessive-compulsive) could visualize things much like Temple Grandin.

[HolyHandGrenade!]

Some people with ASD can actually rotate an object in their mind and see how it looks. They can picture the skeletons of a dinosaur moving and imagine how the dinosaur walked just by looking at each bone and the angles at which they're connected, for instance. Nikola Tesla (an obsessive-compulsive) could visualize things much like Temple Grandin.

OCD is not on the autism spectrum and I don’t think mental visualization is necessarily associated with it. And is it not normal to be able to rotate objects in the mind? I can picture a dinosaur skeleton moving, but not with any accuracy to how it would have moved. Also, I find synesthesia fascinating and if it’s not weird maybe you could tell me more about that?

[Flavia]

I am quite high on the aphantastic spectrum, I can't visualise anything more complicated than a single hue or gradient.

[eldin raigmore]

….
Some people …. can actually rotate an object in their mind and see how it looks. They can picture the skeletons of a dinosaur moving and imagine how the dinosaur walked just by looking at each bone and the angles at which they're connected, for instance.
….

Although I think I can visualize three-dimensional objects and three- dimensional motions, I’m definitely not that good.

For instance;
If the object has a 3D hollow space inside it, with no path from inside that hollow to outside the object, it takes me a lot of work to visualize that. The more such holes it has, the harder it is for me to visualize it.

On the other hand, I seem to have less trouble visualizing the rotation of a 3D object which has more than one “hole” in it that could be seen through at some angle. It takes work, but not as much.

….


Of course that’s all hearsay, coming from me. A professional with all the equipment they’d need, might find different.

[HolyHandGrenade!]

Now that I think about it, I think I have excellent mental visualization. I guess that’s part of why I did well in geometry.

[Khemehekis]

Some people with ASD can actually rotate an object in their mind and see how it looks. They can picture the skeletons of a dinosaur moving and imagine how the dinosaur walked just by looking at each bone and the angles at which they're connected, for instance. Nikola Tesla (an obsessive-compulsive) could visualize things much like Temple Grandin.

OCD is not on the autism spectrum and I don’t think mental visualization is necessarily associated with it. And is it not normal to be able to rotate objects in the mind? I can picture a dinosaur skeleton moving, but not with any accuracy to how it would have moved. Also, I find synesthesia fascinating and if it’s not weird maybe you could tell me more about that?

I know OCD is not part of the autism spectrum. I have OCD myself (and, according to the Conlanger Stereotype Poll thread, you have OCD too, I learned!) I just mentioned that to give the context about Tesla's own form of neurodivergence. The Wikipedia article [[Visual thinking]] used to mention that about Tesla, years ago. Even though I share a mental disorder with Tesla, I'm no good at thinking in pictures myself.

As for the dinosaur skeleton moving, one Aspie blogger says on his blog:

My interest in Paleontology from an early age, beyond the typical kid's interest in dinosaurs, is in large part based on that fact that I can very easily see how these extinct creatures "worked" just by looking at the bxnes.

My synaesthesia (spoiler):

Spoiler:

As for my synaesthesia, there's synergy with my OCD, so I get the sensation I'm swallowing words when I hear or read them, and swallowing objects when I see them, and I even synaesthetically taste words ("doodle" tastes like macaroni while Donald Trump's surname tastes like sautéed mushrooms, for instance) and objects (sunglasses taste like lemon drops). The "gross" words, like "whxxps" (which tastes like whipped cream and makes me slam my forehead like Homer Simpson and go, "D'OH!") or "scxxt over" or "drxp" or "ice xxxxx", and gross objects (like pajamdras or Spider-man or plastic silverware) make me have to do a ritual I call purging to get them back out of me after I've seen/heard them and thus "swallowed" them. I scrape my nails across my groin while chanting a vaccinated form of the word, or the object's name (so "whxxps" becomes "whadoloops" and "ice xxxxx" becomes "adolice cradoleam" and plastic froks become "fadorork"), and then I move the nails of both hands up, over my abdomen, chest, throat, and out my mouth, and they're out of me. I normally have to unbutton my pants for this to work, and now I always do it in a restroom or my own bedroom, although when I was younger I did it in public. I was diagnosed with OCD when I was 9, and reading about OCD often gives me, "Yes! It's just like that!" moments, but a few years back I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Patricia Zurita-Oña, or "Dr. Z", as she is popularly called, an expert on OCD, and she told me the symptoms I described to her did not sound like OCD because I had compulsions but not the accompanying obsessive chains of thought (of the "I'm going to be doomed because THIS will happen!" variety). Dr. Z says I probably have something called thought disorder, instead.

This has a number of side effects. For one, I have a lot of false positives when trying to figure out if a word I overheard was a purge word ("what's" or "looks" can sound like "whxxps", for instance), so I'm often asking people, "Did you say the WH-word?" or "Did I hear an I-word?", which can become trying after a while. For two, after I hear a purge word or see a purge-inducing object, I can't swallow until all my purging has been taken care of. This means I've had to turn off my autonomic swallowing, and saliva builds up in my mouth, so I need to spit a lot. It also means I often go long hours at a time without eating or drinking anything, which can cause frequent burping and I often even have to delay swallowing my Risperdal or Pristiq. For three, I have to do a lot of closing my eyes to avoid seeing things that will make me purge, which makes me getting a driver's license out of the question, and makes it hard for me to find my way around stores or even people's houses. I often have to close my eyes when talking with someone because there are spiders or cobwebs or plastic silverware in the room, or someone in view is in her/his pajamdras, and I wear sunglasses all the time because I don't want my interlocutor to know that I have my eyes closed while I'm talking to her/him.